I legitimately tried to switch to Linux a few days ago. Got virtual ox running, got one of the recommended noob distros (cinnamon?) and then got an error message that I cannot make sense of during install. Even googling it didn’t help
I’m not a computer guy, and I’m legitimately concerned that if I ask for help on the Linux forums I’ll be the punching bag of the week.
Nah you’re beautiful for trying. Puts you way ahead of people who complain and do nothing.
Anyone who makes you feel bad for not knowing how to use an OS you’ve never used before is a jerk and their opinion can be disregarded. Yeah for sure do a web search of your issue before asking on line, but you’re new, its normal to have lots of questions.
Anyway consider this your open invitation to DM with any Linux question you may have, the dumber the better. :)
Bazzite is the most stable and noob friendly distro I’ve tried. I’ve installed both Bazzite and Windows in the past year and the Bazzite install process was far easier.
I got bazzite for my gaming PC and now I just main it at home. Sure it doesn’t give you as much control as other distro, but that’s also means fewer opportunities to mess up your install.
Throwaway culture exists with software but without the waste that comes with physical things. If one distro doesn’t work, try a different one. It’s only bits. The only thing wasted is your time.
Also, even though people claim to be happy to answer your questions, I think there’s a strong likelihood that if you said what issue you had, nobody would be able to solve the problem due to how complex any modern operating system is, and due to not having direct access to the machine to troubleshoot. Seriously, they’re so big and complicated that they’re approximately black boxes. The easiest way for you to resolve the problem is to try something different until it works.
Do you have any external storage? You do not want an NTFS formatted drive for food backup if you’re going to switch; just recently, the NTFS support has finally improved, bit I still wouldn’t trust it. Exfat, or any other fat filesystem, should work fine.
But, my advice? Just backup everything important, and then just follow a tutorial for installing Linux (probably Mint Cinnamon, unless you game a lot - in which case you might give Bazzite a try).
Make sure you have a USB windows installer ready before; if you have to, you can just go back to windows that way.
As much as I hate to endorse an AI (and I’m going to get hella down voted for it)…it’s one of the few actual good uses for it…
You can ask plain questions, copy\paste error codes, and it will actually walk you through fixing problems like a non-judgy person would. ;-)
Perplexity is my go-to when I’m troubleshooting something I can’t figure out.
“How do I open and edit a word document in Linux?” Is a perfectly acceptable question to ask, things like that.used it when I was building this server to work through some concepts I wasn’t familiar with.
I had been using duck.ai for a while and found it to be a frustrating experience. Switched to free Claude and ended up with way better answers and a better experience overall. Still made a couple mistakes, but not nearly as many as duck. My only complaint is the limitation on the length of the sessions for the free version.
So far I’ve found it to be Pretty good… I do pay the $20/month “pro” membership but I’m pretty sure most months I cost them money. ;-)
What drew me to perplexity is that it will give you footnotes on basically every statement so you can go read the reference material it pulled from. Not foolproof, but lets you see if it’s quoting an idiot or not… ;-)
What I most use it for is debugging. You can just copy/paste trace files or logs into it and it will read the log like a book and tell you exactly what’s happening.
If you are trying to switch, a virtual machine is a bad way to start and it’s the hard way. What you really want is to use Rufus or something (easy Google) to make you a bootable USB and you just boot in and play around. It MAY require you to change boot order in BIOS if you plug it in and reboot and nothing happens, but that’s an easy fix
You want to ask for help. You only get “beat up” if it looks like you did nothing first and you are asking people to do it for you. Pretty much every place you go if you can say, “I want to do X, it doesn’t work so I tried Y and Z.” Nobody will say shit to you. Also, on Lemmy if you say you’re new, people like me and the other guy who replied will probably offer to just DM us directly (which for me you can).
Going to second dream_weasel’s suggestion. Don’t try to game in a VM. That is going the ultra-hard route while you are still unfamiliar with the OS.
My suggestion is to take a side/old computer you don’t use every day, format it, and install Linux on it. Completely blow away Windows on that machine. Then use it regularly until you get comfortable with it. You still have your main computer to lean on.
Once you are comfortable enough with it, flip the script. Put Linux on the main machine and Windows on the side/old machine. You will find yourself turning on the side/old machine less and less.
Dual booting is an option, but without two separate drives (or sometimes even with windows on a separate disk), windows update will just nuke your EFI partition and do its own thing.
It’s possible, but I probably wouldn’t recommend to a beginner, as bootloader issues are usually not fun to fix (had to do it a lot when I was dual-booting back in the day)
I think that will require you to do some passthrough for drives and hardware which may not be trivial. If you’re close to something working, stick to it. Otherwise I think that VM road is mostly pain. Caveat: I have not tried to do VM stuff in probably 10 years so it could be easier now.
You can also just search game name + distro name. Highly recommend looking at the newest results possible because A LOT of games now work on Linux thanks to steam and proton
I legitimately tried to switch to Linux a few days ago. Got virtual ox running, got one of the recommended noob distros (cinnamon?) and then got an error message that I cannot make sense of during install. Even googling it didn’t help
I’m not a computer guy, and I’m legitimately concerned that if I ask for help on the Linux forums I’ll be the punching bag of the week.
Nah you’re beautiful for trying. Puts you way ahead of people who complain and do nothing.
Anyone who makes you feel bad for not knowing how to use an OS you’ve never used before is a jerk and their opinion can be disregarded. Yeah for sure do a web search of your issue before asking on line, but you’re new, its normal to have lots of questions.
Anyway consider this your open invitation to DM with any Linux question you may have, the dumber the better. :)
Bazzite is the most stable and noob friendly distro I’ve tried. I’ve installed both Bazzite and Windows in the past year and the Bazzite install process was far easier.
https://bazzite.gg/
I got bazzite for my gaming PC and now I just main it at home. Sure it doesn’t give you as much control as other distro, but that’s also means fewer opportunities to mess up your install.
Cinnamon is a desktop not a distro. Fedora as much as I hate Red Hat is a pretty solid distro.
Throwaway culture exists with software but without the waste that comes with physical things. If one distro doesn’t work, try a different one. It’s only bits. The only thing wasted is your time.
Also, even though people claim to be happy to answer your questions, I think there’s a strong likelihood that if you said what issue you had, nobody would be able to solve the problem due to how complex any modern operating system is, and due to not having direct access to the machine to troubleshoot. Seriously, they’re so big and complicated that they’re approximately black boxes. The easiest way for you to resolve the problem is to try something different until it works.
PM me and I’ll help, no punching.
Just ask here! Lemmy is full of us Linux nerds!
Do you have any external storage? You do not want an NTFS formatted drive for food backup if you’re going to switch; just recently, the NTFS support has finally improved, bit I still wouldn’t trust it. Exfat, or any other fat filesystem, should work fine.
But, my advice? Just backup everything important, and then just follow a tutorial for installing Linux (probably Mint Cinnamon, unless you game a lot - in which case you might give Bazzite a try).
Make sure you have a USB windows installer ready before; if you have to, you can just go back to windows that way.
As much as I hate to endorse an AI (and I’m going to get hella down voted for it)…it’s one of the few actual good uses for it…
You can ask plain questions, copy\paste error codes, and it will actually walk you through fixing problems like a non-judgy person would. ;-)
Perplexity is my go-to when I’m troubleshooting something I can’t figure out.
“How do I open and edit a word document in Linux?” Is a perfectly acceptable question to ask, things like that.used it when I was building this server to work through some concepts I wasn’t familiar with.
I had been using duck.ai for a while and found it to be a frustrating experience. Switched to free Claude and ended up with way better answers and a better experience overall. Still made a couple mistakes, but not nearly as many as duck. My only complaint is the limitation on the length of the sessions for the free version.
How is perplexity in that dept?
So far I’ve found it to be Pretty good… I do pay the $20/month “pro” membership but I’m pretty sure most months I cost them money. ;-)
What drew me to perplexity is that it will give you footnotes on basically every statement so you can go read the reference material it pulled from. Not foolproof, but lets you see if it’s quoting an idiot or not… ;-)
What I most use it for is debugging. You can just copy/paste trace files or logs into it and it will read the log like a book and tell you exactly what’s happening.
That shit’s $20 per month? What the hell, that would be my third most expensive monthly payment behind rent and internet.
Get a small SSD that you can install Linux on and go from there. Starting with a virtual machine is definitely the hard way.
You’ve got two things going on:
Might try the boot USB route. I wanted to do a virtual box so I could easily test to see if my current games/programs work
Going to second dream_weasel’s suggestion. Don’t try to game in a VM. That is going the ultra-hard route while you are still unfamiliar with the OS.
My suggestion is to take a side/old computer you don’t use every day, format it, and install Linux on it. Completely blow away Windows on that machine. Then use it regularly until you get comfortable with it. You still have your main computer to lean on.
Once you are comfortable enough with it, flip the script. Put Linux on the main machine and Windows on the side/old machine. You will find yourself turning on the side/old machine less and less.
So I don’t really have an unused side/old computer that is operational. I’m an engineer, but not the computer kind.
Dual booting is an option, but without two separate drives (or sometimes even with windows on a separate disk), windows update will just nuke your EFI partition and do its own thing.
It’s possible, but I probably wouldn’t recommend to a beginner, as bootloader issues are usually not fun to fix (had to do it a lot when I was dual-booting back in the day)
Goodwill is your friend
I think that will require you to do some passthrough for drives and hardware which may not be trivial. If you’re close to something working, stick to it. Otherwise I think that VM road is mostly pain. Caveat: I have not tried to do VM stuff in probably 10 years so it could be easier now.
You can also just search game name + distro name. Highly recommend looking at the newest results possible because A LOT of games now work on Linux thanks to steam and proton
What was the specific issue?
Error code Somethingxsomethingsomethingsomething hexadecimal-like
Edit: Hx4d3cim4l