2d ago

Swapping from Win10 on laptop

I have an old laptop that I use as a Minecraft server as well as running RPG campaigns during game night. I'm getting tired of Windows 10 and I'm looking for a good replacement. I don't have a lot of experience with Linux lately, the last time I did anything with it was maybe 10 years or so ago and I used Ubuntu, which I've read here is maybe not a good choice any longer. Stats of laptop are below. Recommendations are appreciated, thanks.

Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4800MQ CPU @ 2.70GHz 2.70 GHz Installed RAM 16.0 GB (15.8 GB usable) Graphics Card NVIDIA Quadro K2100M (2 GB), Intel(R) HD Graphics 4600 (113 MB)

39 comments

Linux Mint is a good beginner distro if you come from Windows.

Fedora (Gnome or KDE version) is what I recommend to people looking for the stock experience and a large community. I generally point people away from anything Ubuntu because of the Snap fiasco.
- +1 for fedora kde
  I've tried dozens of distros this year. Kept arch for my personal use and fedora for shared. Fedora was the easiest to setup with everything working as they should out of the "box".
  unless you use a touchscreen, don't install gnome
  @ImminentOrbit@lemmy.world
  
  Gnome is different and at first I was lost, but after figuring out the basics is amazingly well integrated and just works as expected. KDE is super configurable but always feels a little off in a hard to describe way, like little quirks or lags or other papercuts.
- Or the current Debian testing, which will become stable soon. If you have experience with a Ubuntu from 10 years ago, you might know about apt already. If not, the package manager is already integrated into gnome-software. Additionally you can easily enable Flathub for flatpak and install packages using gnome-software afterwards.
  And yes, I would avoid Ubuntu on the desktop because of snap and other weird choices for defaults.
  On the server however my experiences with Ubuntu 20.04 and 22.04 were not bad. But if it were my choice I would go Debian stable for servers.
  If you want to do less maintenance, Fedora has good defaults and will have major updates twice a year. But, if you don't want to get custom to new things on your machine that often, Debian is my recommendation.
  Only if you have too much time, try Gentoo. I've used it for more than 15 years on the desktop besides Debian on Raspberries.
- I'm a Fedora user but I prefer to point new people to Ubuntu over fedora. The snap v flatpak debate is irrelevant to new users compared to fedora not shipping proprietary gpu drivers out of the box which causes so many problems for nvidia users. Kernel updates often end up braking their gpu driver.
  
  It's relevant for a few reasons with regard to new users:
  Snap is SLOW
  Snap takes up a massive amount of space
  Switching somebody with 256GB of storage to Ubuntu and pointing them to the Gonna software store to install whatever they want is just asking for confusion and problems.
  What happened to all my disk space?
  Why does it take 8 seconds for a browser to start?
  These are new users who expect things to operate as they've known them to operate coming from Windows or MacOS. Ubuntu is just problematic to that point of view.
  I've switched hundreds of desktop users in the past few years, and the above expectations and experience is what made me switch to Fedora.
  Ubuntu is problematic at current.

This is a good laptop, still plenty fast for Linux. However, given the choice, use the Intel graphics card for your 2D desktop rendering, not the nvidia one. The nvidia drivers don't support it anymore, and the nouveau driver is too slow imho (visibly slow when moving windows etc). You can use old nvidia drivers for it, but these might be crashy with the new kernels. The Intel drivers will be fresh though.

I do not want to over complicate things but there is some information that may help given that you have NVIDIA hardware.
Linux is going through a technology transition in its graphics technology from something called Xorg (x11) to something called Wayland.
Mostly you do not have to worry about this. Don’t let it distract you.
Everybody will be using Wayland in a year or two but right now today, it depends on the distro and desktop environment you choose. For example, current Ubuntu will default to GNOME on Wayland. Linux Mint defaults to Cinnamon in Xorg.
Until recently, NVIDIA has been buggy with Wayland. Specifically, NVIDIA needed something called “explicit sync”. This has now been added to newer NVIDIA drivers, Wayland compositors, Mesa, etc. So things work great now if you use the latest versions of things.
Again, you may not need to know any of these details. So, why am I bring it up?
Well, if you have an “up-to-date” distro, NVIDIA will likely work well. But if any of the required components are not available or older on the distro you use, you may have problems with NVIDIA. Only “may”. It may also work fine.
To avoid problems, you can use a very up-to-date distro like EndeavourOS. Or you can use a distro that will default to Xorg for now, like Linux Mint.
If you use a distro with older software versions, like Debian, or older software drivers, like OpenSUSE, or that lacks proprietary drivers, like Fedora, NVIDIA hardware can be a pain.
The reason people recommend AMD or Intel for Linux is because none of the above really matters on that hardware. They are more likely to “just work”.
Again, I hope I did not complicate things. I offer all this just so you can make sense of things if you run into trouble. You probably will not. And in a year or so, none of this will matter anymore even on NVIDIA. On many distros, it already doesn’t.

I personally generally recommend Mint as a good starting distro. It is widely used, which means lots of support readily found online. It also has some of the benefits of Ubuntu without having the Snap forced on users. It also generally works well on a wide range of systems including lower powered systems due to its selection of desktops.
Your laptop is decent and I'd personally be running a slick desktop on that, specifically KDE. But alot of that comes down to personal preferences, and Mint isn't the best KDE desktop as it's not a main desktop for it (although it is available).
However once you get to grips with the basics of Linux I think other distros offer better more focused benefits for different user groups. There are lots of choices such as Gaming focused distros, rolling release vs point release distros, slow long term projects like Debian vs bleeding edge focused projects, immutable systems etc.
I personally use OpenSuSE Tumbleweed because it's cutting edge, but well tested prior to updates, with a good set of system tools in YaST, and decently ready for gaming and desktop use. I also like that it is European. But that may not be a good fit for your specific use case. Leap, the OpenSuSE point release distro would be better - a nice KDE desktop with a reliable release schedule and a focus on stability over cutting edge.

That hardware will fly on Linux.
Given you use NVIDIA I might recommend Mint over Ubuntu.
- Happy cake day.
  
  Hey thanks. I had not noticed!

Ubuntu is still a great choice.

Ubuntu is still fine. some people are angry at canonical for "company things" but it's a well supported major distro.
- That's not entirely true. Snap is a good reason to avoid Ubuntu as you're not given the choice whether day to day apps like Firefox are a native app or snap app. You can only have snap versions. The lack of choice in having a slower less efficient version of apps forced on users without official alternatives is a good enough reason for people to recommend avoiding Ubuntu.
  That is regardless of all the commercial and proprietary concerns people have.
  That does not apply to Ubuntu based system like Mint where users are given choices and still benefit from other aspects of the Ubuntu ecosystem.
  
  I don't disagree that snaps aren't the best thing but Ubuntu does allow you to turn off auto updates now if you want and although it took a little extra setup, I also use the .deb version of Firefox right now. It works well. I'm running Kubuntu 24.04.
  For servers especially, Ubuntu can be a really good option. I've heard some people actually like snaps for servers because the auto update so its one less this to worry about. Yea you can setup a script to do that too but its a nice to have for some folks.
  All that said, its not for everyone, but for servers I think Ubuntu is a good option just for compatibility alone, not to mention the documentation, tutorials, etc.
  Thats just my opinion though.
  
  That's some pretty wild FUD right there.
  
  Uh huh. Ubuntu is fine.
- Putting "company things" in quotes like you don't believe people when they say Ubuntu has let them down...
  Ubuntu is fine for very beginners, but don't lie and say "it's fine", only to have any competent user discover very quickly that snaps take precedence over deb, snaps will be reenabled on minor release upgrades, even if you disabled them, ubuntu's built-in NVIDIA install support has become abysmal, ubuntu has recently made the choice to fall out of step with its own supported DEs with regard to xorg support, etc.
  
  Putting “company things” in quotes like you don’t believe people when they say Ubuntu has let them down…
  That's not true. I believe them. I just don't care.

What program are you using for your rpg campaigns?
Minecraft server is fairly universally supported.
- Mostly Obsidian, PDF viewers (currently Foxit), Firefox, and Dropbox and/or Google Drive.
  
  All of these can be run on any Linux distro. Dropbox is probably a better choice than Google Drive as Google drive doesn't have an official Linux app (but you can get it working beyond just using it in a Web browser if its a must).
  I'd go.with Linux Mint as it's well supported but any point release distro will serve your needs well. For example Fedora KDD or OpenSuSE Leap, Debian etc. I wouldn't recommend Ubuntu.

To be fair Ubuntu is still okay especially starting out, it's one of the more polished distros with a ton of online documentation when you need to search around and figure out how to do things. And no one says you have to stay with a distro, once you're comfortable with Linux it's easy enough to check out other distros.
That aside a lot of people have been recommending Mint for new users so that's definitely one you can check out if you want to try branching out now rather than later.
PS - Nvidia has a less than stellar reputation for their Linux drivers, you may want to consider reading up on that for whichever distro you choose. I have an Nvidia GPU (old non-Quadro class) running on Debian, works fine now but I did have a few false starts getting it going properly at first.

What software do you use for RPG campaigns? Is it just PDFs and word processors, or do you use a an online VTT? It should mostly be fine, but I figured I should ask.
Also, what are you doing in terms of the Minecraft Server? While I think most support Linux, there could (not certainly are) be weird caveats depending on the server.
- Minecraft server will be Java so should be no problem. I ran a vanilla MC server on Ubuntu for years. Even if OP is running a modded server, all the mods will be Java too so I can't see a problem.

OpenSUSE might be a good one but you could also experiment with archlinux in a VM learning it really helps in making you more comfortable with GNU/Linux in general. They have good guides and a good wiki.

I'm a big big fan of Debian. The installer can be a little intimidating for newbies but I think it's a great all-around "throw it at the wall" kinda Linux distro. Ubuntu is based on it so you'll find similarities between them.

You never see it mentioned, but PCLOS is a great Linux starter OS. It was started by Bill Reynolds, TexStar, and is tock solid. It is my go-to when installing Linux for new users because it is extremely stable, has a great community, and avoids anything bleeding edge.
www.distrowatch.com is a great place to get an overview of most Linux and BSD distros.

39 comments