Didn’t help much in this instance, read below if you’re interested (and sorry for derailing thread). First PC problems were:
1.1 UK instead of US release for Windows → broken license
1.2 UEFI partition not recognized → Windows refused to install
1.3 Wipe a clean drive and do UEFI again from scratch → Windows partition works
1.4 Grub borked the Windows setup → Get a Windows recovery
1.5 Windows recovery borked Grub → Linux recovery
For the second one:
2.1 New Windows install thought it was a good idea to install a 50 MB EFI partition
2.2 Grub could not find suitable EFI partition (since less than 100 MB) → A new, secondary EFI was installed
2.3 The secondary EFI led to Grub not installing correctly
2.4 Try again with Linux, same result
2.5 Try again with non-Ubuntu rescue disc, same result
2.6 Reinstall Windows and make sure EFI is at least 100 MB
2.7 Reinstall Ubuntu - now it just works
The TLDR; Windows still doesn’t play nice with standards hence dual boot from same drive really sucks, just buy an extra drive and save yourself the hassle.
LibreOffice works great. There’s only very rare edge cases with spreadsheets that are either absolutely massive or where macros have been used as a (terrible) programming language, where you might actually need Microsoft Office. Otherwise, LibreOffice is better than Microsoft Office at most things these days.
As far as mine install went, i only needed 1 efi partittion and when grub had no windows path, used boot-repair from ubuntu, it finds windows boot manager and adds it into grub
I use LibreOffice on Linux, but I also have an Office 365 subscription for Windows, because this is not really true.
It was a couple of years ago but importing an Office Word document screwed up the table of contents, the reference footnotes and did some very funky things to the numbering in the headers and footers.
And of course if your workplace likes to use embedded document links and SharePoint that really doesn’t work with anything but real Office.
Use both Libre Office 7.1 and MSOffice 2019. All I can say is that LO has a lot of small papercut issues that make the experience just above unbearable. And this is for basic use with simple paragraphs, tables.
After using Latex and Markdown almost exclusively for several years, I cringe whenever I have to use Word nowadays. I guess I’m lucky enough to land jobs where I only need to touch a word processor on occasion.
When you are lucky enough to be able to collect all bugs and quirks from well-maintained and revision controlled markdown files, and those then get put together into a cohesive and professionally looking PDF with a Latex template in-between… <3
Given that PC setup I would recommend using Manjaro with either Gnome or Plasma desktops. XFCE’s compositor has never worked well with me leaving screen tearing.
But as others have stated, your mindset is formatted for windows use, unless you try and approach computing from a different perspective you probably won’t like the experience even with the added benefits.
I also have been interested in Linux lately as a lifelong Windows user. I have given a lot of consideration to what you have said here in the last couple of weeks. I have been trying to expand what my “idea” of a computer is, learning about how different OSes work differently fundamentally. I think the trick to it is to try and start slowly. I would not recommend ripping off any bandaids and just jumping into Linux as your main driver but get a cheap laptop and through some different distributions on there and start playing around it with every day. Send emails, looks at forums, do things you might normally do on your Windows PC there. This strategy has enabled me to start using Ubuntu, Fedora, Kali, and even tried setting up some “headless” servers using Ubuntu server. (Not ultimately successful, but I had fun with the experiment)
Anyway, I guess I’m just trying to say don’t give up if you start to hit some roadblocks @jennings92 .
This is a solid way to do it. Separate PC with linux only. My only suggestion is to pick a single distro and stick with it. Get good with one distro and then transition to others as you learn more.
Most people will tell you to start with ubuntu, and thats fine, but the reality is it mostly doesnt matter. Just pick one and stick with it.
Mint
Fedora
Manjaro
Those are my top 3 recommendations, but do what works for you. If Ubuntu tickles your fancy, go for it.
All three are honestly good picks, though I’d say Mint is Ubuntu with a fresh coat of paint and a few icky Canonicalisms scrubbed clean (like snaps). Ubuntu / Kubuntu / Mint / Pop!_OS are all the same foundation and there are more differences between Windows 7 and Windows 10 than between Ubuntu and Mint.
That said, for gaming, Ubuntu is possibly the least hassle since that’s the target OS for Steam - But any .deb platform is pretty solid, and it’s not that much harder for Manjaro or Fedora.
To be fair, I haven’t read anyone else’s comments, so I apologize if I give redundant information.
For questions 1 and 2:
RGB support in Linux is, in my limited experience with it, uncontrollable. The only thing is Corsair products can work with the open source CKB-Next. Intel Driver stuff is cmdline only to my knowledge. The community may have made a GUI wrapper for it though. I do not know how well Origin works on Linux, but you may be able to convert your EA library to Steam. I know EA did something to merge the two awhile back or something. I do not know what Samsung Magician is tbh.
For question 3: To my knowledge, Origin does not work well with Wine/Lutris. The Epic Games launcher and Blizzard client do however.
Also, for gaming, I highly recommend System76’s PopOS. You can grab the Nvidia ISO, if you have an Nvidia Card, to get the drivers you need by default. Unless Manjaro has changed something, they do not install Nvidia Drivers by default. They use Noveau like everyone else. In my opinion, Arch and Manjaro aren’t the best gaming disros. For me it was mostly always dependency issues. I love Arch for productivity the best to be honest, but I have a better time gaming on Ubuntu-based distros. It’s not because they are better at gaming, it’s because most gaming platforms (Steam) and games are tested specifically on Ubuntu. For me, Arch was dependency hell when it came to gaming. For example, once I decided to reinstall my root filesystem on Arch without reinstalling the whole OS (Linux is awesome like that) because I wanted to use LVM and encryption. Before then, I was able to play my Metro Exodus games perfectly. Afterwards, however, an unknown dependency issue kept them from launching for me. There are other examples of issues like this with Arch and Arch-based distros for gaming too, but this is the most recent issue that I can remember. Arch Linux is, honestly, my favorite distro. And I wish that I was better at playing games on it.
I would recommend fedora for noobs mainly because DNF is really simple and has self-explanatory commands to do things, like disabling a repo is simply: “dnf config-manager --set-disabled repo name”
That and the updates are frequent like windows 10, except they’re stable.
