Thank you all who reached out, it really was awesome.
Was super easy, even my Nvidia cards driver was basically automated. Haven’t played anything yet but I’m sure I’ll be fine.
I opened up the command thingy a couple of times just to get some settings how I wanted them, but could have gotten by without it.
The biggest stumbling block for me personally was getting the thumb drive in order, then the hardware to boot from it. First you gotta use a thing called Rufus to format the drive correctly, not sure how or why, but you do.
And then I couldn’t get my laptop to load bios no matter what key/s I mashed at restart, but searching " advanced startup options" in settings brought me to a menu to reboot from my (now correctly formatted) USB drive.
The rest drove itself. Still some stuff to figure out with it but it’s doable. Very polished and user friendly.Thank you all again so much!
Again: Hallelujah, another soul saved!
So now it’s basically down to this: Keep using it for whatever you would normally do in windows. And if you’re having issues, try to sort it out.
And then one day you’ll suddenly realize how long it’s been without Windows, and that you don’t really see a reason for going back any time soon.
I went for it, kept what I wanted on an external hard drive and nuked the rest. No ragrets
Welcome to freedom and perfect mental health.
The best part will be never having to download an exe or msi file to get stuff to work. Just look for the software you want, install, have at it.
I’m sorry, it just brings me so much joy when I read stories like this one.
JFC dude, seriously?
LOL Because Googling a website, clicking the download button, and clicking “next” on the installer is so much harder than compiling from source code or trying to figure out how to install one of the 34 different Linux filetypes…
Most people just use a package manager the vast vast majority of time. People don’t typically compile from source or figure out different file types.
I did have to compile Wifi dongle driver, since I moved and didn’t have cable in my work room. That was annoying as hell.
At first I thought I missed a driver in kernel compilation, but then my SO had the same issue in Mint. Luckily I was prepared.
But yeah, I have more sanity with Gentoo than I ever did with Windows. The other commenter probably hasn’t used Linux or something.
That’s great if the package manager has the software you’re looking for. Which is 50/50 in my experience.
Makes me wonder what the heck it is that is not what you want/need 50% of the time. Must be a pretty peculiar set of software.
Well, it all comes down to distro when it comes to package selections and availability.
I can say though that in the last year or so I have found 100% of the software I needed in the repositories and that includes at least a dozen proprietary applications ( including some that require registration and / or licensing such as Burp Suite Pro and JetBrains Rider ).
Everything I have installed came to me in the same package format ( or was automatically converted to it by the package management tooling - all the same to me ). A single command updates everything.
That is without resorting to Flatpak which I am sure provides a pretty good selection to other distros as well ( at the cost of a second package format ).
1 script, 36 package apps plus 31 FlatPaks installed in one command. Any other thing I need or want, it’s just there via CLI or any program installer such as Discover.
Having said that, and being positive that over 90% of any Linux Distro users would be dumbfounded by reading your comment, I choose to assume you’re just trolling and let you be moving forward. Have fun googling crap in Windows.
Right. If anyone has a different experience than you, they must be trolling… 🙄
Correct.