8mo ago

Windows is hell, i need to do something

Yo linux team, i would love some advice.

I’m pretty mad at windows, 11 keeps getting worse and worse and I pretty done with Bill’s fetishes about bing and ai. Who knows where’s cortana right now…

Anyway, I heard about this new company called Linux and I’m open to try new stuff. I’m a simple guy and just need some basic stuff:

graphic stuff: affinity, canva, corel, gimp etc.. (no adobe anymore, please don’t ask.)
3d modelling and render: blender, rhino, cinema, keyshot
video editing: davinci
some little coding in Dart/flutter (i use VS code, I don’t know if this is good or bad)
a working file explorer (can’t believe i have to say this)
NO FUCKIN ADS
NO MF STUPID ASS DISGUSTING ADVERTISING

The tricky part is the laptop, a zenbook duo pro (i9-10/rtx2060), with double touch screens.

I tried ubuntu several years ago but since it wasn’t ready for my use i never went into different distros and their differences. Now unfortunately, ready or not, I need to switch.

Edit: the linux-company thing is just for triggering people, sorry I didn’t know it was this effective.

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266 comments

Linux is not a company lol I hope that was a joke. Also Linux is not new.
Now to the software: it will likely run everywhere. Davinci resolve is a bit picky but also fine.
You have quite some Windows-only software. Check https://alternative-to.net or try running it through WINE with Bottles
To the Distro: this is complex. Many people will recommend Linux Mint and it is easy to use but very restricted. I dont think it is great really.
There are many many parallel efforts, so on Linux Distributions (Linux + packages + desktop + ...) you can get very different software.
For a painfree experience running Windows software and Davinci Resolve I recommend to try Bazzite
It is very different from others:
it updates automatically in the background. But completely different from Windows. Updates always work and are efficient and stable. No 10 times rebooting
updates finish and you can reboot any time to apply it. Literally a week later, nobody cares
the reboot takes just as long as any other reboot, no downtime
The system is way better and more stable than "traditional" ones. This is quite complex but lets say while on Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora etc. you will have an indivudual system, with individual packages and in the end some strange errors only happening on your setup, with Bazzite you will have exactly 1:1 the system that the developers create.
It is based on Fedora Atomic Desktops which are pretty great. But for your use case I dont recommend them.
I recommend the Bazzite Desktop version with the KDE Plasma desktop. This will be Windows-like in a very good way, but incredibly more efficient, faster and also more powerful. Like a Filemanager with tabs and extensions, that is not written in whatever bloat Microsoft uses (their Win11 stuff is so slow...).
To sum it up, on Linux you have to decide:
What Desktop environment?
I recommend KDE Plasma a lot
GNOME is also good but veery opinionated and minimalist
I dont recommend others like Linux Mint's Cinnamon yet, as they dont support modern standards (Wayland)
What Distribution family?
Debian, Fedora, Arch, OpenSUSE
they are all a bit different but basically doing the same
Ubuntu stems from Debian and became popular as "the beginner Linux" but they do very controversial stuff nobody else does (like the Snap store) and have tons of bugs. I used it a lot with bad experiences and dont recommend.
Linux Mint and others also use Ubuntu or Debian under the hood
Arch is very manual and difficult for new users, dont use it
OpenSUSE does whatever they do, not recommended
Fedora is pretty modern in their software, has a nice community and a big variety of options. They are not allowed to ship restricted media codecs for stuff like h264 video though
uBlue (Bazzite, Bluefin, Aurora) is a project using Fedoras versions and adding nice stuff to it, making them usable out of the box. This is their goal, and they do it really well.
- Wow, thank you for all the info in details! I need to start testing some of distros I guess and see how it goes (sounds fun too). UBlue project looks very very interesting.
  
  Ublue also has Asus-specific variants which I assume probably has some compatibility fixes added in that would have to be installed manually in most other distros.
  Since you use VS Code I'd strongly recommend the developer variants of ublue, which are only available for Aurora and Bluefin, as it gives you a preinstalled VS Code which will be a better experience than trying to install it after the fact. (if you go to the download page for them, answer "yes" to "are you a developer?")
  For minimum learning curve, use Aurora over Bluefin as the UI is more familiar. Also, make sure you pick the Nvidia option for the GPU question.
  
  True, but Aurora/Bluefin dont have WINE preinstalled.
  I wouldnt run WINE stuff on the system, but that is likely less complicated, as using Bottles means you cannot really use a Windows program to edit stuff on your system by default.
  
  I started using Linux 2 years ago or something. Linux Mint, Kubuntu, MX Linux (wtf Distrowatch), Manjaro, KDE Neon, Fedora KDE...
  broke all. On Fedora Kinoite since then, switched to uBlue Kinoite, no complaints.
  Currently using secureblue but many things I disagree with, planning a fork.
  
  The good thing is that most distributions have live images that you can basically put on a USB stick and run without installing anything. It won't give you quite the same experience as an installed instance but will at least let you play around with things (especially Gnome or KDE etc.)
- I would stay away from Fedora based anything if you want stability. Linux Mint is is as flexible as you make it.
  
  Fedora has 2 versions supported, the current release and the old release. It is pretty modern in packages, but this is normally not a problem at all.
  I never used the old release but that would give more stability. On the atomic variants this means though that you dont get automatic updates, as using latest will auto update when upstream sets the new version as latest.

266 comments