So you would like to use linux

[Rabcor]

(read the comments, i continue the thread with comments because it's too long to fit into one post, this will be a long read so if you intend to sit through it, grab a cup of hot chocolate or tea, or even coffee and calmly read through it)

I recently started using linux myself, and using a new operating system so very different from what you're used to can be intimidating in so many ways. So let me help you with your distribution choice. Software you have to choose from as alternatives from windows, and warn you about some things. I will not go into why to choose linux, or why not to choose linux, just to avoid making walls of text that are already all over the internet.

First is the distribution choice, for those who don't know, linux is the name of the kernel which automatically comes bundled with bash (command-prompt like interface) and some other things, it's the core of your operating system which is linked directly to your bios and other hardware, everything goes through the kernel first. You don't need to understand that to use linux though, but you do need to understand that a distribution is not much more than a linux kernel bundled with specific combinations of software, The most mainstream distribution is called Ubuntu, it comes bundled with tons of software,and has Unity as its default window manager(user interface). i personally hate it because it comes with too much software for my taste and i never liked the recent versions of GNOME (the WM ubuntu used to have) much less Unity.

If you're an apple kind of person, i would recommend that you use Ubuntu as your first distribution. it's got the same goals as apple claims to have, that is user-friendliness and simplicity.

Regardless of skill level with computers, if you're a windows user i suggest you start with a distribution called linux Mint, althuogh i haven't used it's current default window manager (cinnamon) it's default from last version (14) called Mate is in 2nd place of my favorite window managers.

Now i've mentioned the 2 ideal distributions (in my personal opinion) for beginners to sneak a peek at linux. But this is only scratching the surface. For most people though that may be enough, as most people only just scratch the surface of windows to begin with, and theres not much depth to windows either to begin with, but if all you do is going on the internet, playing games from time to time and watching movies, scratching the surface is enough, you don't need to know your systems layout (program files, windows folder, etc) or anything like that, you don't need to configure options because you just don't care to begin with. so for average users, ubuntu or linux mint should be perfect, they're both very easy to install and if you need a guide, a little bit of googling should find you wiki entries about how to install whatever distribution you want to install, alternatives to linux mint or ubuntu could be opensuse(KDE window manager) Xubuntu(Ubuntu but with XFCE lightweight WM instead of Unity) or fedora(also known as beefy miracle, it comes with GNOME as default WM)

Distro choice is over now, i've told you enough of mainstream distros to make a choice of your own. don't let me choose for you. there are also specific distros, such as backtrack 5 for security experts or centOS for server hosting. theres even Sabayon for gaming. Slackware is also there to maximize performance and stabillity (is what they claim) and like i said, let me say it again, googling "install ->distro name here<-" will definetly find you a guide on how to install the linux distribution you chose, the distros i've mentioned so far are all easy to install, so you might not even need to (i know i never did) but its good to know.

If you have a problem, google has always been and will always be your best friend. And the forum community and your distributions wiki are fighting for being your second best friends, you love them both though so you can't choose.

next up is obstacles and things i'd like to warn you about

[Rabcor]

So, you've decided to use Linux and that's great. but heres a problem (valve is trying hard to fix this though, it's the most praiseworthy thing they've done in their lifetime as a company apart from making steam itself.) Linux does not support many games at all. In fact less than mac's OS X. and since most of the computer market revolves around gaming, companies such as nvidia or logitech don't bother making proper drivers for linux, they dedicate very little time and money to this, and thanks to that, you now have less games to play and most likely slightly less performance on your graphics card, which you may or may not notice. Many Linux users seem to naiively blame the companies for this and make them out as some bad-guy, but sadly this is just how business works. money and times goes into making more money, and the money is where the people are (which is currently windows above all else)

-The best solution to the lack of games and compatibility with some big software like adobe photoshop or 3ds max and the like is using virtualbox or similar virtual machine software, to set up a windows installation inside your linux machine (also when you're trying linux for the first time it may be a good idea to set it up in a virtual machine inside windows. This way you can at least use the stuff that only windows supports, but the performance hit may vary. The other solution is finding an open source alternative, such as Gimp instead of Photoshop.

Now that that one is behind us, software compatibility that is (with games, and big programs like photoshop) lets go into hardware, like you may have noticed i also mentioned logitech and nvidia not making proper drivers. Nvidia does make half-decent drivers for linux, just barely. AMD does also make drivers for linux, but not as beautiful as the Nvidia ones, they're dirty from what i've seen, but do offer more options to customize than the nvidia ones. Logitech however, doesn't make drivers at all for linux (no native support for logitech gaming keyboards) and creative doesn't either (no proper support for the creative soundblaster cards) but there is also a solution to this problem. there is for example a thing called g15daemon that is an opensource driver for the g-series keyboards i managed to make my g510 work just as well on linux as it does on windows (roughly) but it took me some work because the g15daemon development team stopped working on it long before the release of g510. and i had to edit much of the drivers myself to make it work. The kernel has open source drivers for the creative X-Fi chipset soundblaster cards, it works, but nowhere near as well as the official drivers. and their latest line of cards which i can't recall what's called.. Recon i think, i think that one doesn't have any proper driver support, at least not last time i checked.

-Basically what this means is that the latest and greatest hardware apart from graphics cards, processors, ram and hard drives are most likely not gonna work as well in linux as they will on windows, but they will still work to some degree. and if you're a programmer you can actually just make it work by making drivers for it or editing existing ones, if it matters that much for you (that's the beauty of open source) like i did with my G510.

Bash/Terminal/Console is scary at first. unlike windows where the command prompt is only a relic of decades past, in linux it's still a vital part of the system. You're going to do most of your administrative tasks in a CLI(Command Line Interface) mostly known as bash(born again shell, theres also sh which is just old shell) If you're a novice user, you actually can get away with not using the CLI at all. But if you do that you've got nothing better than your windows or mac OS, apart from the fact that it's free, and almost everything that works on it is free.

-You're going to have to accept that the CLI is a part of your computer now, you will eventually learn to enjoy it, the trick is just to try not to fear it. it's always comfy to have a GUI in the background to look at, but once you get used to the terminal, you're not gonna get scared next time you sit in front of a computer where you've got a white screen and all you can do is type in stuff. It's healthy for you to learn to use bash as a computer user, remember that early computers were only this shell i talked about, almost no one but scientists used computers back when they were a recent invention. Look at them now. It may be a bit retro to use a CLI, but once you get used to it you're going to start hating to use your mouse to do anything apart from gaming eventually. You're going to love it once you learn to use it, i can promise this, but this stuff takes time so don't be impatient, don't get frustrated if you make mistakes and most importantly, use google. Tab is the best key in the world when you're in terminal mode (it auto-completes stuff for you, know how you write "fa" in google chrome and then press enter and end up on facebook? yeah its not too different, but you usually need to write more of the word than 2 letters.) and you can always press Ctrl+C to cancel whatever is happening (panic button) and heres something interesting, you can switch to a new terminal by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1-7, F7 is usually where your GUI resides, but an interesting fact is that you can log in as a different user in each terminal, and start up another GUI, so you can have pretty much 7 users running at the same time, just like the old computers where there were always many people using one big computer, linux can do that.

The community unfortunately isn't always going to be nice to you.

-it's a depressing truth, you thought the gaming community was mean? well guess what, the linux community (at least a portion of it) is loaded with elitist bastards who think they're boss just because they're using a cool operating system, and they're software devel0pers or l33t hackz0rs or whatever. They don't always treat noobs too nicely, especially in the more "hardcore" distributions (like Arch-Linux or Gentoo, i bet you're pretty safe with ubuntu and mint and fedora and the like, those distributions are just made in a way so that anyone can use it, but arch and gentoo are complicated distributions where you will start with nothing more than a CLI, and you will have to install almost everything by yourself. it's what they call "minimalist" distributions.) There are nice people everywhere, and if you've played League of Legends you're going to see that there are ragers who call people noobs and talk ♥♥♥♥ to them just because they think others aren't as good as themselves (usually they're wrong. you too.). This is something i hope will improve in the future. But please don't misunderstand this, i don't mean everyones gonna treat you badly beacuse you have no clue what you're doing. There are in fact tons of nice people in the community but as we know, "one rotten apple spoils the surrounding ones" they're just hiding in the shadows of the elitists. But elitist or not, these people will in fact help you if you're patient with them after asking a question, the problem is that many of them don't seem to know how to be patient with others, but we're all human and this is true everywhere. Just ignore the negative tone in some of the replies you get because as elitist as they may be, they're not going to directly assault you with verbal abuse or anything like that, they'll just mock your lack of skills a little, learn to ignore that and you'll be fine. (Don't ever talk back, it makes you just as bad as them, and remember that this is also true everywhere, in games too. Learn to be the better person in online chat. The linux community is an excellent place to train that skill.)

Final warning i'll give you is that lets say you're dual booting linux alongside windows. You're not going to be using linux.you may install it but when you're done installing it and setting it up, you're done. you'll go back to windows in a heartbeat. this is both because linux is more trouble for you (Because you're already familiar with windows (or if you're that kind of person, OS X from apple)) and because of the first 2 things i told you about. (Software and Hardware compatibility) If you really want to use linux, you're gonna have to force yourself to use linux for everything linux is capable of doing, but only use windows for things linux can't do (like playing incompatible games, or using incompatible software, like 3ds max) playing music, watching movies, going to read your email should only be done in linux, to prevent yourself from doing such things in windows simply remove the features from windows (you can disable windows media player, and internet explorer, and you can just not install stuff that isn't video game or incompatible software) those are extreme measures, but if you really really want to do this with dedication, that is pretty much what you must do. If you come from a mac background switching to linux will be way easier since mac doesn't support that many games to begin with.

[Rabcor]

Next up is software choices

Lets start with video:

If you're a VLC kind of person, VLC works on linux too.

If you're a Media Player Classic/K-Lite kind of person like me and everyone else who quality matters to, that one is sadly windows exclusive.
There is however a media player called Mplayer2 which is what i use in linux, you'll want to get "smplayer2" to get mplayer2 with a user interface (mplayer2 doesn't

come with a UI by default) it's been said that it's gl3 rendering is almost capable of matching up to madvr's quality, (almost but not quite) it also supported 10bit

encoding natively before k-lite did. It's not as good as k-lite, but its close enough, and definetly a lot better than VLC.

Audio:
There are hordes of audio players available for linux, quite unlike windows and OS X. But sadly enough to be truthful i haven't had very good experiences with most of

them, amarok is popular but i had it crash on me a few times, there is the itunes like Banshee as-well, but i've always liked to just arrenge my music on my hard drive

rather than in a programs library (i'm just physical like that) so i use the (still under development) minimalistic DeaDBeef player, it's clean, raw and it plays my

music. rather than a library it has playlist support (playlists similar to tabs in web browsers) and none of those fancy features that the other players have, its best

quality is that i don't have to wait for it to start up. It's hard to help you choose a music player because there are so many, and so many different opinions. many use

VLC. Another player i personally liked is Exaile, which is also rather plain looking like deadbeef.

Web Browser:
If you're a firefox kind of person, firefox runs flawlessly on linux.
If you're a google chrome kind of person like me, Chromium is what you want, Chromium is fairly literally, Google Chrome's (older) twin brother. google chrome's code is

quite literally roughly the same as chromiums code. they look and feel the same and have pretty much all the same features (including gmail account saved bookmarks and

stuff) so you wont feel any difference at all from google chrome when using chromium. they feel identical to me.

Torrent Client:
There are many to choose from but sadly utorrent is not one of them, i use Deluge, it feels the most nice out of all i've tried. many have liked Ktorrent (comes with

KDE) and some prefer the console based Rtorrent and Transmission.

E-Mail Clients:
Claws Mail, Thunderbird and Evolution are your primary choices here, i view my mail in my browser.

Network Manager:
To see your connection status. connect to the internet and whatnot, i recommend Wicd. many distributions come bundled with NetworkManager however, if you already have a

network manager on your linux system that came with your distro, just stick with it rather than installing wicd alongside it, or replacing it, it might become much more

trouble than it's worth.

Image Viewer: (Editor could be Gimp)
My favorite is Gpicview, because i feel it so closely resembles windows's image viewer. it's a part of LXDE(wm) but luckily has very few dependencies so it's viable to

download for anything, Picasa is very liked by many, and it works with linux. there are many other alternatives, and don't worry, your distro probably wont come without

an image viewer, and if it does one will definetly come with your window manager (which i'll assume isn't installed if you don't have an image viewer) the only

exceptions are minimalist, expert window managers which you won't be using any time soon (look up xmonad and awesome)

Compressor/Zipper/Winrar:
Peazip, or 7zip (with p7zip for a graphical frontend) theres also file roller and kde's ark.

Office Packs:
LibreOffice is the best choice here, but you can try OpenOffice if you want.

Programming Editors: Like Notepad++
Gedit is a good choice, it's similar enough to np++, but the commercial(not free) Sublime is highly praised for being the best text editor of it's kind.

Games(just for luls): You can also check steam's linux section if you want something more... recent than these games.
Emulators: DOSBox, ScummVM, PSX, PCSX2, Dolphin, epsxe
MMO: Runescape, Dofus, Heroes of Newerth, Planeshift, Spiral Knights
FPS/Shooters: Valve's Stuff, Nexuiz, Warsow, Doom 3, Quake series, Wolfenstein Enemy Territory, Duke Nukem 3D, Arx Fatalis, Prey, Unreal Tournament 2004
Other: Gish, Rune(THE best viking game ever. Multiplayer is godlike fun.)
RPG: OpenMW (open source TES 3: morrowind), Tes: Arena(dosbox), Tes 2: Daggerfall(dosbox), GemRB (attempt to reimplement old bioware games like Icewind Dale and baldurs

gate)

It's usually easier to install stuff in linux, it is done through a so called package manager, my favorite is called pacman, but you're most likely gonna want to stick

to whatever comes with the distribution of your choice. This package manager will basically search for you/help you search through an online list of programs, and you

can just click the one you want and select "install" and you're pretty much done (way more convenient than windows in some ways, but in others it's not, for example you

have little choice in the matter of what hard drive, or where to install stuff, but that is ok since you usually want to install programs on your C drive anyways. and

there are ways to control where to install stuff but it just gets a bit more complicated i believe, i've never done that. But with steam you can of course have your

games library wherever you want like in windows.) This favorite package manager of mine, Pacman is command-line based, meaning i don't have a menu or user interface for

it, i just type into a console (like command prompt) "pacman -Su chromium" and it downloads and installs chromium for me in a flash, sometimes faster than i can even

start doing anything else. In case you get a package manager like that, you're gonna want to read up on your distro's wiki about it, or use the manual. to find a manual

for almost any program you've installed, you can type in "man ->program name here<-" remember that linux is case sensitive (A and a is not the same letter) in most

cases though you'll have a UI which you can click your way through.

[Rabcor]

Now with the basics behind us on how to start, you're pretty much ready to try linux, go now! you're gonna have lots of fun!

But if like me you got bored of how "basic"/boring windows is or how you just wanted something new, how you wanted to take your level of control over your computer a

bit higher. You're going to want to try one of those minimalist distributions. This is recommended for Super Users/Administators/Enthusiasts and the like. people who

really like to know the ins and outs about how their system works, the people that want to learn, not just to use linux, but to manipulate it to their own will as they

please, to understand it's structure (window's structure is the stuff in the windows folder + program files + user folder pretty much, and of course the boot partition

and stuff. That stuff gets incredibly much more complicated in linux)

The choices i'd go for are Arch Linux and Gentoo. Mind you that installing Arch Linux as your first distro is like diving into the deepest end of the pool when you

don't know how to swim, and installing gentoo is like trying to swim in stormy waters of an ocean without knowing how to swim (but with a lifering) you just might

survive till the storm settles, even then however you wont see land or a ship to save you anywhere, you're gonna have to swim quite a lot for a first timer.

The story with me personally (shortest version) is that i started with gentoo, intending to go to the deepest end of the pool but got.. that other thing instead. but i

made it, i made it work practically like i wanted it to, but i just still couldn't quite control it, the thing has too much advanced customization that you MUST do. you

MUST configure the kernel (that i pulled off) you MUST configure your C/C++ compiler(i think it's called GCC) and your package manager is going to compile all programs

from source with that GCC. Which means it will take you forever to install anything, even just a web browser... The better your processor the faster you can do it, but

don't think any i7 is gonna save you the trouble. Gentoo is ONLY i will repeat that, i really mean Only for the people who know exactly what they want, by name, and how

it's supposed to look, and how it's supposed to feel. Until then arch-linux is your best choice. you might end up sticking with arch-linux forever just because it's

less trouble (this might happen with me very easily, arch-linux is so comfy, its the perfect distribution for me in my opinion, start with nearly nothing, but easily

install anything i desire)

The installation for arch and gentoo is different from the other distributions i mentioned, you install them through a CLI (which is one of the reasons why not to start

with it, since as i said CLI is going to be intimidating for any first timer.) Arch might at some point implement a GUI installer, but they don't see any reason to

since you need to be able to use the CLI to be able to use Arch anyways, and gentoo has no intention of ever making a gui installer i think. Gentoo resembles an

operating system called BSD much closer than any other linux distribution, and coincidentally that is the same BSD as mac's OS X is based on. BSD is unix based, and

Linux is unix like, or a unix wannabe (it was made by people who never used unix before)

Knock yourself out with these distributions if you think you can handle it, but do take my advice to start with Arch rather than gentoo, even if you want to learn

kernel hacking, editing compiler options and useflags in gcc, compiling everything from source, etc, save it for later. start with arch linux or you'll find that you

took a bite too big for you to chew.

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I'll end this here with 2 other software choices, the reason i didn't put it with the others is because they're much more important. One is your window manager choice.

the window manager in windows is called "explorer" it handles making your desktop appear, it allows you to use the start/taskbar, it allows you to have desktop icons,

etc. The other is the file manager, coincidentally it just so happens that the explorer is also the file manager in windows, the file manager simply allows you to open

folders and browse through them with your mouse, click files in a window, etc.

go to your "my documents" folder for a second. Now you're in the explorer's built-in file manager. you can see a bunch of folders and files with icons and names,

description of when they were last modified, size, type, etc on your left side you can see all sorts of icons known as a favorites menu, to access like your music

folder, desktop or documents, on the top you see an "url bar" similar to what you have in your web browser, in fact for linux there are file managers (one is konqueror)

who support both web browsing and file managing (bad idea in my opinion though) you'll see it says "->Libraries->Documents->" if you click it you can see it changes to

an url just like in a web browser, and you can edit it. theres even a refresh button. you can also see a search-bar which is a really convenient feature to have in a

file-manager.

Now you should have a pretty rough idea of what file managers and window managers are. at least good enough to know what it is you're choosing (the core elements of

your GUI) lucky for you, you're probably only going to have to choose a window manager because most of them come with a file manager, but some in fact do not.

Lets start with Window Managers: Google is your best friend, google these things to see how they look.

KDE
Gnome and Unity
XFCE
LXDE

the above 4 are the most mainstream window managers (i counted unity with gnome since it's just an abomination born from gnome in my personal opinion, but don't let my

dislike of it cloud your judgement.)

Cinnamon
Mate

Enlightenment (e16 and e17) e17 is my favorite window manager, my setup looks like this, it was my first e17 desktop and took me like 15 minutes to set up.

http://www.enlightenment.org/ss/e-515c71829ed907.78750301.png
But enlightenment i will warn you is made for advanced users, it looks badass as all hell, but it's probably not for you if you're not using a minimalist linux distro

(like Arch Linux.)

The minimalists (experts only) window managers i'd choose from are
Blackbox
Fluxbox
Awesome
Xmonad
those guys don't always come with a file-manager, and they pretty much don't come with anything else, xmonad for example doesn't come with anything, it's literally

about 1200 lines of code (the program itself in its entirety) and you're supposed to write ther rest of it as you please. that's not for just anyone so this is what i

mean by experts only.

Now file managers
Dolphin is good, it comes with KDE.
Thunar is always a favorite, it comes with XFCE, it doesn't look pretty but i like it.
Xfe is supposed to be a microsoft explorer-like file manager, but i didn't like it.
Konqueror is the old file manager for KDE that supports both web browsing and file managment.
Nautilus is the heavyweight default file manager from Gnome.
Nemo is cinnamon's default file manager and is considered a good alternative to nautilus.


Hope you read it all, and enjoyed it as much as i did writing it. I didn't go into many details but this should be enough information to get anybody started with linux.

If you have any questions related to this stuff go ahead and ask and i or other linux users which are bound to be lurking will gladly answer.

Thanks for reading, and remember that there are alternatives to everything i mentioned. And i can be wrong about some things too. What if in your opinion VLC has better quality than Smplayer? what if you prefer Kaffaine over any other media player? what if your favorite window manager or linux distribution wasn't mentioned here? you're gonna have to find these things out yourself, but now at least you can start looking somewhere.

[hof]

Awesome WM ftw. I remember when elitist Linux users could actually back up their attitudes (which, in reality, were usually justified because most people are too damn lazy to... RTFM). Nowadays, most elitist Linux users that you come across only think they're elite because they managed to install something other than Ubuntu. Thank you for your contribution.

[Rabcor]

Well, their attitudes are indeed still being justified because most people are too lazy to read the manual, but it's just an excuse to act superior.

New linux users (and this does not only apply only to linux) may not even understand "the manual" to begin with, they may not even find it in the first place! for example when i was starting i was pretty much blindly following commands that i was reading in the gentoo handbook because i just didn't understand much else of it.

And if it's bothering them so much that people are too lazy to read the manual, they should rather than acting high and mighty give a link to the manual and say "everything you need is in that link, now read, and ask again once you've read it all if you still haven't succeeded by then". Don't you agree?

Another thing that seems to bother them is when people post in forums about something that's already been discussed. Of course one should avoid doing such a thing, but its unreasonable to expect everyone to do that successfully, not everyone is good at searching and if you don't use the exact right keyword, you're not going to find the thread about the same thing as the one you're about to make. It's common that people forget to search at all and will usually only look at the first page of the forum for a thread with the answer to their question. I've never seen people make a problem out of this on any forum other than linux forums. In other forums people usually either ignore the fact that this has been discussed, or kindly point towards the thread in which it has been discussed instead of just saying "there are millions of threads about this already, go find one" or scolding the OP for it one way or another.

But like i said in my original posts, the trick is not to let such things get to your head when they happen. Just find another way and always stay calm, and of course not everyone acts that mean to you.