Sounds like a good way to make use of old eMachines, at a large discount too.
Finally, the year of the Linux Desktop! (eMachine edition)
Sounds like a good way to make use of old eMachines, at a large discount too.
Finally, the year of the Linux Desktop! (eMachine edition)
What has kept me from trying Linux is my fear of not understanding what I’m doing all over again, and difficulty running all of my games. I’ve used Windows since the mid-90s and I’m very good/familiar with it. Diving headfirst into a new OS and feeling like an idiot again is not something I want, so I’ve been too afraid to make that jump. I also don’t know whether or not the difficulty running games thing is overblown.
Linux Mint is often recommended to the uninitiated and you can test it without installing it, using a live USB image. Boot up of off the USB drive, test it, turn it off, pop out the drive, tun it back on, you’re back to your old OS.
Whatever the linux flavor, the graphical part will most likely be called GNOME or KDE. They’re very user-friendly, you just need to explore a bit with your mouse.
Games have improved tremendously thanks to Valve and you can play most of them on linux via compatibility layers.
Games are now incredibly easy to run on Linux thanks to Proton. I haven’t tested my entire back catalog but I’ve yet to encounter an actual problem that required a fix since I switched to Linux for good earlier this year.
Anecdotal, but I remember the difficulty of running games as the reason I never fully committed in the past. I’ll never touch Windows again. I see the learning curve as a positive. I’m always excited to dive deeper into Linux.
Well, running pirated games in Linux does mean doing diagnostics of why a game won’t work - i.e. figure out the missing system DLLs and adding them with Winetricks - rather that having the fansy-pantsy install scripts in something like Steam or Lutris do it for you.
On the upside you can sandbox the pirated games in Linux.
For one of my games the official Steam copy wouldn’t run in Linux, yet a pirate version runs just fine.
In summary, if you’re doing the normal, expected thing, it’s generally fine (with but a few exceptions) and works out of the box because there are scripts configuring Wine/Proton with the right DLLs for that game, but if you do anything outside that, you do have to understand how to get Wine/Proton to output the appropriate log information, what to look for in it to figure out which DLLs you need, and how to add the right DLLs (and which version: built-in or native) to that Wine/Proton environment once you figured out that you need it.
I was like you and I took the plunge when W10 was given its death sentence. I watched a few tutorials on YouTube, picked a distro (Mint, it feels very familiar if you come from a windows environment) and after a few days of dual boot I got rid of Windows for good. Never looked back.
Initially there were some little hurdles with games, you can install Steam very easily (flatpaks are a godsend) but only a small selection of games are Linux-compatible by default. Then I heard about Proton, and with another flatpak installation boom all my Steam games worked, and damn well I have to add.
Then I heard about Lutris, and my Sims games that I thought I’d never get to play again now work.
Please don’t worry about not knowing what you’re doing, if you pick a distro like Mint you will not have to mess up with the terminal unless you choose to. Try running a distro on a virtual machine to see how it feels!
Dual boot. then if you can’t deal with linux anymore, you’ve lost nothing.
edit: or play around with a live cd. Both work equally well.
like others are saying: I installed a second NVMe SSD and put Linux Mint on it. This was a very simple task, and it automatically setup a boot window so when I start the computer it gives me the option to pick Windows or Linux. Linux Mint has a software center where I selected and installed Steam w/ Proton (again, super easy to setup, lots of online instructions) and my games work just fine. I keep Windows just because I dont want to lose my access to the OS, but Linux is now my main.
There are some that will have a familiar interface to you. I don’t have experience myself but since the Steam Deck came out gaming on Linux has been rapidly improving.
I have close to no problems with games that are compiled for Windows.
The only real problem is anti-cheats actively combating Linux/Wine/Proton: https://areweanticheatyet.com/
Anything else either works or does so after a few Wine/Proton updates.
I can’t speak to games, but I’ve found that when I used Ubuntu, it was pretty easy to figure out. I’m thinking other distros should be comparably simple.