For those making the switch to Linux for the first time, especially Mint, one of my favorite YouTube hosts is currently filming/releasing a series where he does the same.

Check it out: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXHMZDvOn5sU4nw1wdWGXQf5-Fj0k2N7n

You love to see it. I also switched my home machines cold turkey from win10 to Linux Mint last month!

I have been using it at work for a long time, but just didn’t do enough on my home desktop PCs for it to be worth fiddling with them and setting servers and stuff back up. But now that I made the switch, I am actually using my PC more at home because it’s smoother and more fun to use now!

The main one is an i7-9700k (8c/8t) with 32 gigs of ram and a GTX 1080. It has such a long life left ahead of it. Heck the other machine is a 2500k (4c/4t) with 16GB from like 2011 and it’s excellent for desktop use or non-demanding games.

I see myself sticking with Mint with Debian & Ubuntu upstream for the foreseeable future. But I do wonder several years from now SteamOS will push many of us to use something with Arch upstream if not just SteamOS itself.

Congrats. I think Mint will treat you well.

Congrats. I made the switch to Ubuntu in 2016, you are spoiled these days with Proton. I want to concur with the advice to learn the terminal. You dont need it yet, but you will eventually. It'd be wise to do some research on your package manager too. You're on Mint, so it should be apt.

Also, word of advice for future OS swapping if you- say- wanna try a new distro someday. Find yourself an external drive for your files like music and documents. Its better to not need to rebuild your library in the first place if you can, and its safelyoff the OS drive if something goes wrong. I got a cheap Mybook backup drive, 4TB for 90 bucks, and formatted it.

I'm sorry to tell you that you are also a nerd now that you've installed linux

I like your background looks good. I've been using Linux on my laptop for a long time, newer distros and softwares have come a long way since when I started, but I'm unfortunately still rocking Windows on my main art station until Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC runs out of security updates.

Maybe longer if I just unplug it from the internet.

Gabba gabba we accept you, one of us! One of us!

Welcome to the club! One bit of advice: Be not afraid of the terminal. Learn to use it, it's a powerful tool and very useful. I recommend going to youtube and following along with a "bash basics" or "linux terminal basics" type video or two as if it were a class, it'll help familiarize you with some of the more commonly used tools to navigate your system and stuff.

Nice hope to do the same when windows 10 goes end of life.

My display support HDR400, But I don't see much difference between Windows 10 and Arch Linux.

Yeah I changed a bit back but I went to new hardware. Ill be accessing the windows likely for months until I get my lazy ass in gear.

I dunno if this is the best approach to compeletely cut off your windows access? what if you need it for some unexpected critical reason? Would be a ball ache installing it again. I main Linux but I've kept my old windows install on it's own drive. I barely use it but very very occasionally I have (and it has just been for gaming but I got the game working in Linux in the end). It's Win 10 and I have no intention of "up"grading it to Win11.

I do actually have Win 11 set up to run in a KVM virtual machine from within Linux (I bought a Win11 key cheaply just for convenience with the activation nonsense tbh). I made the VM partly because I wanted to see how well it'd work as I like tinkering (it works fine, little bit laggy but does the job) and also to give me some easy access to the full MS Office suite in-case I want them and can't be arsed to go to my work device. I barely ever use it (2 times so far, both just to use full Powerpoint of web powerpoint). If you have your Win 10 license you could potentially do the something similar to avoid a total block should you ever need to access windows for something and wine doesn't cut it?

Linux gaming and selecting a non wayland distro seems an unusual choice. If gaming is your main usage, something with wayland and especially gamescope would be better. Beside that, welcome to the other side!

Hey Congratulations! I just started my linux journey a couple years ago too, just the same way you did without any duelbooting! I'll share one thing I found out recently: apparently neofetch was abandoned by it's developer, and now is no longer maintained. instead, a lot of people suggest using fastfetch! it works the same except its faster and still maintained! otherwise I hope you continue to enjoy your linux journey, welcome to team penguin!