Community Linux

[LEANIJA]

Here's a thread for all things Linux!
There is, of course, also a Gaming-specific Linux thread (and this thread)


What is Linux?

Linux is an umbrella term for a collection of operating systems. Linux proper is the kernel (core) of these systems, while system tools and desktop environments are provided by other projects, like GNU, KDE, GNOME and many others.

Linux was written originally in 1991 as an "Unix clone" (or rather, a Minix clone, with Minix being a Unix clone itself). Since then, development has been led by Linus Thorvalds.

There are several Linux versions, called distributions. The major ones are: Debian and its derviatives Ubuntu and Linux Mint; OpenSUSE; Fedora and its derivate Bazzite; Arch Linux and its derivatives Manjaro and SteamOS (and Android is also based on Linux). Each distro has several derivatives. Furthermore, there are a few desktop environments that each come with a suite of applications. There's KDE Plasma, the GNOME desktop, Xfce, and more. You could of course, run Linux just in a terminal, like Unix, its ancestor, used to be in the 1970s. In fact, there are some people who swear by the terminal.


Speaking of Unix: what is Unix?

You can't really talk about Linux without talking about Unix. But before Unix there was CTSS (Compatible Time-Sharing System), released in 1961, and Multics, a project to supersede CTSS (started in 1964). Bell Labs was involved in the Multics project, but withdrew from it in 1969 - and made Unix instead (its main author was Ken Thompson, with major contributions from Dennis Ritchie, who also wrote the C programming language). From Unix came BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution, 1978), and from it came open-source Unix versions like FreeBSD, but also Darwin (the base for MacOS, which is also a Unix). Nowadays, there are several Unix versions (for example, IBMs AIX, HP-UX, Oracle Solaris), like there are many Linux versions. It's no longer one single system, but a specification of standards.

Here's a cool video where the folks from Bell Labs introduce Unix, from 1982. And here's an interview with Ken Thompson, conducted by Brian Kerninghan (who also wrote a very informative book on the history of Bell Labs and Unix).


But what distro should I choose?

It depends what you want from your system, and how much effort you are willing to put in. The simplest Linux versions are probably Ubuntu and Linux Mint. You'll gonna wanna check if your hardware is fully supported by Linux (drivers are usually included in the kernel, so the distro matters less here). For example, AMD GPUs work better than NVIDIA cards. You should make sure if any software you absolutely need is supported. If it isn't, you can check if you can run it via WINE or commercial implementations like Crossover. There might also be an open-source alternative available that could suit your needs. Note that not all software is supported on all distros. But there is a universal package format, Flatpak, which should (at some point) make this problem a thing of the past.


But what if my specific software doesn't run?

You could always dual-boot. This is quite easily possible with Windows (or, if you are on an Intel Mac, MacOS). You can also run many Linux distros as a live environment straight from a bootable USB drive to test out what its capable of and what it supports.


How do I get started?

After you decided which distro to go with, maybe after watching a video on Youtube that showcases the currently "best" distros, you might want to check out desktop environments. GNOME and KDE are the currently major ones, but there a plenty of options, and new ones are always being developed. You can also install more than one DE, but since there is functionality overlap, this can lead to issues.
You will also need to decide whether to install alongside your existing OS, or wipe the disk and use Linux as your sole OS. Most major distros have good installers that will guide you well. Some distros are more complicated in that regard, like Arch or Gentoo. You could also completely build Linux and everything from scratch, it is, after all, free and open source.

If you have a Steam Deck, you can use it in Desktop mode to test out things. It runs on KDE Plasma; and its an immutable system which you cannot break. Speaking of immutable, if you are afraid of breaking things, you could consider things like Fedora Silverblue.


What's next?

If you never used Linux before, it might take some getting used it at first. KDE Plasma is probably the most Windows-like experience, whilst GNOME is closer to MacOS. But both can be configured and tailored to your needs (KDE out of the box, GNOME with shell extensions) If you run into troubles, usually distros provide community forums, and Arch-based systems have the Arch Wiki as a knowledge database that you can consult.
Installing things on Linux is also a bit different than Windows or MacOS, you usually have a package manager from your distro, or things like KDE Discover. Or you could always use the command line (for example, "sudo pacman -Syu" will update your apps on an Arch-based distro).


I broke my install, can you help me?

Probably not me personally. I solve my own computer problems by searching online ("computer problem + linux + reddit") and I'm by no means an expert (I can't code, either). But I'm not the only Linux user here, so it can't hurt to ask.
And: always remember to backup your stuff before installing a new OS!


I wanna know more about Linux!

There's many YouTube channels and websites dedicated to Linux news that you can take a look at!
Here's a few — please note I dont endorse anything they might be saying; I dont generally follow them; I just collected them for the sake of this thread:
LearnLinuxTV • Michael Tunnell • The Linux Experiment • GamingOnLinux • Phoronix • Its FOSS News • OMG Linux


I wanna contribute!

If you want to contribute, Linux projects always need help (you could also donate to projects). I linked a few ones throughout this text.


Lastly, whats your Linux story?

Coming from the DOS/Windows world (and also using MacOS for work), I started using Linux sporadically in the early 2000s, with things like SUSE. I was never very successful in using it long enough until Ubuntu came out and made things real easy. I've been using Linux ever since, on and off; often as a secondary system (especially when Windows 7 was around, which was good Windows version).
After GNOME 3 came out and radically changed how it looked and worked, I mostly used Linux Mint (which kept the GNOME 2 interface around with a fork of the old codebase). Then, around 2021, when Valve announced the Steam Deck, they recommended Manjaro Linux to test out Proton; and I used that ever since (with KDE Plasma). I also have Arch Linux installed on a laptop just because I wanted to test it. Additionally, I use MacOS and have several KDE applications installed on it. In fact, I'm typing this using Kate on my Macbook. Just because it was silly enough to type a thread about Linux ... not actually on Linux. I considered typing it with ed (the original Unix editor), but that is too esoteric even for me.

Anyway, let's use this to talk everything and anything Linux! And please note that this is not the ultimate guide to Linux. Like I said, I'm by no means an expert, and I guarantee you, I have forgotten things to mention. And I'm very biased towards Manjaro and KDE, and it surely shows.

 

[Parsnip]

It's very small but that blob is holding a penguin.

 

[Le Pertti]

Thanks LEANIJA !

Funny story, long time ago I have my old computer to my mom, but I didn’t have windows so I just installed Linux on it and she managed just fine with that for years! Through she mostly played games and surfed the net.

 

[Nebulys]

Finally got one foot in the door with Linux earlier this year after toying with the idea for a long time.

I’m still using macOS as a daily driver for my personal tasks, but my gaming HTPC (5800X3D and 9070 XT) and gaming desktop PC (5800X and 7800 XT) are now on Linux, so I’m 100% Windows-free on my owned devices.

I so far run Bazzite on everything as my focus is gaming, but I’m thinking of using my desktop PC as a bit of a trial run for CachyOS and seeing how I get on with that.

I like that drivers get updated more quickly, and that it’s Arch, so if I like it I’ll pop it on the HTPC.

In the future I’ll probably look at getting a PC laptop like a Framework, and using that as my daily driver personal work machine.

 

[LEANIJA]

It's very small but that blob is holding a penguin.

aw its cute! I was thinking, I shouldve touched upon "Who is the penguin?" also, so here's a link to it Wikipedia article on Tux.

Thanks LEANIJA !

Funny story, long time ago I have my old computer to my mom, but I didn’t have windows so I just installed Linux on it and she managed just fine with that for years! Through she mostly played games and surfed the net.

Yeah, I had my father equipped with Linux for a while (before he bought an iMac, and later again a Windows machine), and it worked for his usage cases without many problems, surfing, writing, document scanning and archiving, listening to music. I feel if you set up the system in a way that makes it clear where your apps are; and if you instruct the user how not-to-break things (and handle updates yourself, maybe), not much can go wrong. Although in our case, my father always wanted to solve issues he had by himself instead of asking me for assistance, and occasionally broke things that way – but that was also the case on MacOS and Windows. For casual users, its probably best to hide advanced options, and give them limited user privileges (and regular sessions for recurring issues)

Finally got one foot in the door with Linux earlier this year after toying with the idea for a long time.

I’m still using macOS as a daily driver for my personal tasks, but my gaming HTPC (5800X3D and 9070 XT) and gaming desktop PC (5800X and 7800 XT) are now on Linux, so I’m 100% Windows-free on my owned devices.

I so far run Bazzite on everything as my focus is gaming, but I’m thinking of using my desktop PC as a bit of a trial run for CachyOS and seeing how I get on with that.

I like that drivers get updated more quickly, and that it’s Arch, so if I like it I’ll pop it on the HTPC.

In the future I’ll probably look at getting a PC laptop like a Framework, and using that as my daily driver personal work machine.

Nice! While its always good to try out distros, there's also nothing wrong with sticking with one if it fulfills your needs. And even if a distro is gaming-focused, its still Linux, so one can use it for anything else if they wish.

 

[lashman]

 

[Nebulys]

PewDiePie has started something.

If all you play is single player games, the case for keeping Windows is vanishingly small in 2025.

 

[lashman]

If all you play is single player games, the case for keeping Windows is vanishingly small in 2025.

yeah, pretty much this!

i sooooo wish i could actually attempt to move to linux, but like half of the stuff i use for work just doesn't function there (and i'm not even talking about adobe shit)

 

[Nebulys]

Would be interesting to see WINE/Proton improve compatibility with pro apps next.

Maybe if software creators see their apps being used on Linux they will do native ports.

I feel like gaming is one of the choke points that kept people off Linux and that’s essentially busted for single player titles now.

Wouldn’t surprise me if we start to see efforts to move the needle with other choke points too.

 

[lashman]

Wouldn’t surprise me if we start to see efforts to move the needle with other choke points too.

i can only hope

 

[Álvaro de Campos]

I know this is a gaming forum but genuinely my favorite part of Linux is being able to self-host my own services. I knew when PewDiePie uploaded his Linux video that he was going to go down the same rabbit hole I did; it is inevitable.
Technologies like Docker/Podman/Quadlets are truly something. I can easily write a yaml file that's less than 20 lines and have a new service up and running in less than 5 minutes on an immutable and atomic distro. Any updates/upgrades are painless and never break anything. I love Universal Blue (and Bazzite).

Right now, I'm using Glance (GitHub - glanceapp/glance: A self-hosted dashboard that puts all your feeds in one place) as a home page, Navidrome for music (GitHub - navidrome/navidrome: Your Personal Streaming Service) and Audiobookshelf for books/light novels/audiobooks (GitHub - advplyr/audiobookshelf: Self-hosted audiobook and podcast server). Anyone on my network can access the Glance page and then click through to whatever service they want. In the future I'm hoping to open up Navidrome through Cloudflare so I can listen to my music on the go or share with friends. Will probably set up a Jellyfin or something at some point too, I personally don't watch/download a lot of shows or movies.

Also, on a slight tangent, I highly recommend trying out Colemak-DH for anyone doing a lot of typing, it feels so much better compared to QWERTY. It should be a default option on Linux but for anyone on Windows you can change your keyboard to regular Colemak (which is fine) or use GitHub - DreymaR/BigBagKbdTrixPKL: "DreymaR's Big Bag of Keyboard Tricks" for Windows with EPKL which has a really nice overlay and the ability to turn your Caps Lock key into a modal, giving you VIM-like navigation keys on the fly.

As for gaming, I've only had issues with more modern games. Just the other day I wanted to try out the EVE Frontier open beta but the (new) installer errored out instantly. Everything old works fine, and on ancient NVIDIA hardware, too; as expected of a 4 trillion-dollar company!

 

[LEANIJA]

snip

this is a generic Linux thread, you can talk about anything Linux (and Unix) - related here, not just gaming.

Self-hosting things is something Im interested too, because I switch between my Linux PC and Macbook and would like a lazy person solution for having my files easily accessible on all machine). But since I am lazy in some regards, I havent done anything yet. I looked into setting up my old laptop as a home server of sorts, but didnt do anything yet. I thought maybe slap Ubuntu server on it or something might be an idea, but I'll look into the projects you linked.

Oh and when it comes to gaming my only real problems would be with games I dont play anyway - multiplayer AAA games that have anticheat not enabled for Linux (where devs could easily enable it but dont -- or go out of their way to disable it, like Apex Legends). Most other games work just fine

 

[Álvaro de Campos]

I switch between my Linux PC and Macbook and would like a lazy person solution for having my files easily accessible on all machine).

I use Syncthing for that. The downside is you'll have the files duplicated on all devices, unlike a typical cloud solution that would have you access the files directly on the host device. The upside is if one of your machines has some kind of failure or accident the other machine will still have those files as a backup, so it's better for files you use often on both machines and wouldn't want to lose. I use it for non-Steam games, ROMs, (altogether ~330GB of files I don't want to go through the trouble of finding and downloading again) and when I want to temporarily transfer files from one to another.
For a more cloud-like solution I haven't really looked into it much, but Nextcloud seems good enough.

 

[Nebulys]

Syncthing is the way for sure.

I don’t think there’s a viable privacy respecting cloud that works on both Mac and Linux.

Proton Drive will get a Linux version before the heat death of the universe, but when is anyone’s guess.

 

[Parsnip]

I also use syncthing, for duplicating the photos from my phone onto my pc.

 

[LEANIJA]

I use Syncthing for that. The downside is you'll have the files duplicated on all devices, unlike a typical cloud solution that would have you access the files directly on the host device. The upside is if one of your machines has some kind of failure or accident the other machine will still have those files as a backup, so it's better for files you use often on both machines and wouldn't want to lose. I use it for non-Steam games, ROMs, (altogether ~330GB of files I don't want to go through the trouble of finding and downloading again) and when I want to temporarily transfer files from one to another.
For a more cloud-like solution I haven't really looked into it much, but Nextcloud seems good enough.

thanks for the tip! duplicating isnt the best solution for my usecase, my Macbook has a small storage space. I know it can be expanded, but I lack the tools and expertise to do that.

Although if it works with external storage, that I could do (I often use the Macbook docked (with the, ahem, Steam Deck Dock – which I also use for my work laptop)...I'll have to investigate.

 

[BardsTales]

Thanks for the thread!

Kubuntu mini-review
I've only used Linux Mint the past years, but I was trying different distros to get an old wonky laptop to work, and thought the new KDE in Kubuntu looked nice, so I thought I'd try it on my laptop. Kubuntu is basically Ubuntu with the KDE desktop environment as default. The last time I tried KDE was 18 years ago, on the SuSe linux distro.

For the most part things worked well: installing is very fast, the wifi worked without issues, and I could easily find all the software I needed. Mostly I was impressed with the new KDE. It's fancy but not annoyingly slow or in my way. Some things took a while to figure out but the good part about KDE is how much you can configure. I was annoyed at too many notifications, so I just turned most of them off. The software and updates manager, Discover, was easy to use. So full marks for KDE, the desktop environment.

The Ubuntu part however... The worst part is definitely snaps. Snaps and flatpaks are a way of making things easier for package managers, but at the cost of getting software that uses much more resources and aren't that well connected with the rest of the system. Snaps are terrible. Some examples:

• Firefox is a snap by default, and every time my pointer moves over the firefox window it changes color and size. An update fixed this, and another update broke it again. Snaps also don't show up as an application in the system monitor overview, so it's hard to tell how much ram it's actually using, but it's a lot. I restart firefox once in a while, just like on windows, to clear out the ram.
• In general, updating software is much better on linux than on windows. There is one central software manager, you press update, all your applications update and that's it. Usually you don't have to restart your computer. Snaps are out of this system unfortunately, as I discovered when a popup appeared and told me to close firefox to update it to the newest version, or else it would do that itself in 13 days. What is this... windows? Yes every snap updates individually like that on Kubuntu, it's so much worse than it used to be.

Using Software
I had a native GIMP image editor package and it's great. It launches much faster than on Windows. I'm also using KolourPaint which is basically like Ms paint, a simple editor for fast simple fixes, except this one does not try to sell me any AI slop features, 10/10. The fact that Linux comes with a built-in software manager also means something extra fun: you can just go browsing through the software and find some hidden diamonds. Like Blanket, a small app that can play soothing sounds like rain, storms, waves, birds, trains... or KStars, a desktop planetarium that you can use standalone or sync with a telescope. You can see the sky as it looks on earth, zoom in on stars and nebula, see which planets are visible at night and where (Mars, Jupiter, or Venus are often visible) and much more that I don't understand yet fun. There's also some built-in games like Super Tux 2, a Mario Bros clone but with penguins, very fun to play actually.

I tried some steam games and they all worked, either native linux versions or through proton. But then I got the biggest disappointment: Kubuntu crashed because it was out of memory. I've never had this happen in 25+ years of using Linux. In general, Linux uses a swap file in case there's memory issues, and if there would still be trouble, a kernel process kills software that becomes a problem. But it crashed when out of memory, several times. Now I have only had that happen when I used Steam, which is a snap I think (i would look it up but the package manager crashed lol) with a Windows game running through proton. This is an unforgivable error honestly, and one I never expected on linux. Is it because of running a snap/proton/windows game?

Back in the day, I configured my own swap partition, which was typically at the same size or twice the size of your ram, but now I just went with the default install. Which should work out of the box, but I haven't looked around the net for the precise issue or how to fix this.

Conclusion
The new KDE is great but Kubuntu is half ok, half horrible. Get rid of the snaps and some bugs and this would be a 9/10 distro.

I've been using Linux Mint for years now which is based on Ubuntu and I will say that Mint is basically what Ubuntu should have been. Easy to use, no hassle, mostly works out of the box, and some good ethical/strategic choices. They got rid of snaps and use default linux packages but you can install flatpaks if you want. Also, just in case Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, gets worse and goes the microsoft-enshittification way, Mint also maintains a version of Linux Mint based on Debian. The disadvantage is that it is slightly slower in updating so very new systems may need to pick faster updating distros.

 

[LEANIJA]

Thank you BardsTales for the writeup! Much more detailed than I could write!

I dont know what Canonical was thinking with snaps, but them doing their own weird thing isnt new; they also had the Unity interface around the time when GNOME 3 came out (although I have to say, I liked Unity more than GNOME 3, but I liked almost anything more than GNOME 3); and I think there were a few times when they did some weird or offputting things. But in general one cant deny the Ubuntu-systems are fairly easy to get into. At the same time, I agree with you, absolutely. about Linux Mint.

Also thank you for the application recommendations. I have used KStars before, I think (or some other similar software). I always enjoy them! And the Blanket app sounds amazing