Hello, apparently hanging out in Lemmy inadvertently makes you thinking about using Linux. I am planning to install Linux Mint cinnamon on an older laptop, which I want to bring to LAN Parties. From what I read I can just format my C:\ windows disk, install Linux via bootable drive and from what I understand, proton is basically included when installing steam after setting up my new Linux OS? Thanks for your comments:)
Welcome to the club!
Just want to mention that "C:" is a Windows-specific convention for identifying hard disks. Linux doesn’t have quite any concept of a “C:\ drive.” You’ll of course still have your OS installed on the same disk that today Windows calls "C:", but on Linux it’ll be (and I’m oversimplifying a little bit here) “/”.
I’m a little bit jealous because I can’t start learning such things for the first time like you will be soon. Ha!
My advice: don’t feel like you have to learn it all at once. Don’t feel bad about just accepting the defaults that the installer suggests where you don’t know what to do otherwise. If the command line intimidates you (we were all there once) use the gui tools exclusively as much as you like. Some day you might start to feel limited sticking with gui tools. (Or maybe for your particular purposes, the guis will always be perfect.) Until you do start to feel like you want to learn more about such things for your own sake, don’t let anyone tell you you’re doing it wrong by using the easy way.
(This from someone who does basically everything from the terminal. Lol!)
And don’t be too afraid to break things. Breaking things is arguably the best way to learn. And do feel free to reach out to friendly communities for help when you need it. It’s likely that if something has gone wrong (which is pretty unlikely with Mint), you’ll need to do some terminal stuff to fix it, but people can help you out with that if you ask. :)
Godspeed!
Hee hee, some may agree with you. jumped into Gentoo very early and hasn’t stopped breaking things yet. Sometimes for fun, sometimes 'cause some distro maintainer type did something horrible .
I definitely support “Just try things, see what breaks, then learn to fix it” as a learning method. Not necessarily for everycritter and not necessarily as a sole learning method but certainly it can be many fun and very productive, sometimes in ways that other methods would not be.
For sure. I think there’s a happy medium for those who might not go for the Gentoo approach. (I’m a veteran of Gentoo as well, by the way. :) )
The extreme opposite of that is probably fearing to touch anything once the system is up and running. There are certainly Windows users like that. IT folks have one or two in their families who regularly try to rope them into doing free tech support. (“Sorry, Aunt Debbie, but I haven’t touched any version of Windows since XP. No, Aunt Debbie, I don’t ‘build computers’ for my job. That’s a different department. No, Aunt Debbie, I don’t know how to recover deleted emails in Hotmail. I’ve never used Hotmail.”) I wouldn’t want folks to fall into a habit of being afraid of their Linux system.
And of course, the Gentoo or LFS approach is way too far on the other end of the spectrum for some.
But I definitely wasn’t advocating that OP take the “break all the things and learn how to recompile your Kernel to enable debugging with GDB so you can figure out why such-and-such USB device isn’t working correctly.” (Unless of course OP wants to do that. In which case, knock yourself out, OP!)
I used OpenSUSE before Gentoo. I’m glad I did. It got me some basic bearings in the Linux ecosystem in a gentle way that didn’t make me want to give up and reinstall Windows. I switched to Gentoo basically when I started to realize how limiting relying on the OpenSUSE guis for installing and configuring things was. (I could tell there was a hidden layer of stuff going on behind those guis. And shying away from the deep lore was keeping me from doing things I could otherwise do.)
But even if I thought a particular person had a strong likelihood of taking the Gentoo approach at some point, I’d probably recommend something like Mint until they themselves wanted to dig deeper. And if that never happened, that’s fine too.
And, let’s be honest. There’s a chance that Mint could break as well even if OP isn’t doing reckless things solely for the sake of learning. (I’d say the same about Windows for that matter.) At that point, OP’s options are 1) figure out how to fix it and fix it or 2) wipe evrything and reinstall from scratch. Either way, something will have been learned in the process.
So, to OP, don’t feel pressured to do all the deep lore stuff unless/until you find yourself wanting to. But also you might be better off if you aren’t so scared to try to do things that you don’t try to customize your system for your needs in even very simple ways.
And again, good luck!