Switching to Linux

[Supervegito]

How easy is it to switch to Linux ?

People generally say that the learning curve is quite steep.

 

Also, people say that it is a very light OS compared to something like windows or Mac so will I get better performance in terms of

1. Gaming

2. Productivity tasks (editing)

3. General daily use

 

Is it any safer as compared to windows considering the fact that most computers on earth are windows so hackers tend to focus on hacking windows ?

 

Is it better than windows when it comes to privacy ?

 

Lastly

 

How can I make my own Linux distro ?

[Votivee]

If you want to game, I'd stay away from Linux unless you only have a handful of games you want to play and you know that they work well with it. Game developers can be very hit-or-miss when it comes to Linux support.

 

If you have a semi-decent system then you should make a Linux VM since it sounds like you haven't played around with it yet. This can be accomplished with Oracle Virtual Box, Hyper-V (Windows Pro Required), or VMware. If you have >=8GB of ram you'll be fine. There are literally hundreds of Youtube tutorials on how to set one up. 

[LeapFrogMasterRace]

I can speak on the first part. Gaming will be limited to OpenGL unless you use whine to get DirectX there is still steam and League of Legends but... It depends on what games you play and how big of a gamer you are. 

[RobbinM]

With ^^^^

Try it first in a VM.

Privacy will be better yes.

And "How can I make my own Linux distro?" Don't. Just install the one you like the most.

[PeachyUwUSenpai]

26 minutes ago, Supervegito said:

How easy is it to switch to Linux ?

People generally say that the learning curve is quite steep.

 

Also, people say that it is a very light OS compared to something like windows or Mac so will I get better performance in terms of

1. Gaming

2. Productivity tasks (editing)

3. General daily use

 

Is it any safer as compared to windows considering the fact that most computers on earth are windows so hackers tend to focus on hacking windows ?

 

Is it better than windows when it comes to privacy ?

 

Lastly

 

How can I make my own Linux distro ?

it is light so it does tend to run faster but the issue is game compatibility if you want to play modern and new games like apex legends don't expect to or any other new games 
its fine if the games you play are native to linux but trying to game on linux raises the difficulty a lot unless you just use steam proton 

2 productivity tasks

if by editing you mean video editing you'll have to learn kaiden live and you can use adobe on it since there's no linux adobe 
 

3. linux shines in daily use as long as by daily use you mean web browsing it works on most websites perfectly fine though you can have some drm or flash issues but for stuff like youtube and general surfing its great and light 

its safer than windows as long as you don't do anything that makes it less secure like having a ssh with a password that has no firewall between you and the internet
 

it is better for privacy depending on the distro its different levels of better but most of them you can disable telemetry and auto updates.

 

id recomend not making your own linux distro if your interested take a look at http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ but id recommend you get used to linux first on something like mint ubuntu or elementary os. then if you want you can make a vm and test out arch and then once your comfortable with then you can try gentoo. gentoo your essentially building the kernel and the os configuring al all the partitions manually and picking system components the issue is its a really deep learning curve i've lost literal months of time just working on my gentoo install. but yeah distros are better since they handle the repos and the updates and security patches 

either way good luck with linux 

[wasab]

4 hours ago, Supervegito said:

How easy is it to switch to Linux ?

People generally say that the learning curve is quite steep.

 

Also, people say that it is a very light OS compared to something like windows or Mac so will I get better performance in terms of

1. Gaming

2. Productivity tasks (editing)

3. General daily use

 

Is it any safer as compared to windows considering the fact that most computers on earth are windows so hackers tend to focus on hacking windows ?

 

Is it better than windows when it comes to privacy ?

 

Lastly

 

How can I make my own Linux distro ?

1) okay if you use steam. Very good if you are tech savvy enough to configure and use wine. 

 

2) editing is okay if you are willing to forgo some professional features found in Adobe premier or Photoshop. Open source alternatives like kdenlive lack a feature or two. Davinci resolve works on Linux if you want to pay money for a commercial video editor. Gimp is good enough for most tasks. Office suit includes libre office but I personally use Google docs. In my career of writing essays and making spreadsheet, I have yet to find a need to use some feature found in Microsoft office but lacks in docs. 

 

 

3) superb for browsing the internet, file storage, running programs etc. 

 

Yeah, Linux do not get malwares, for the consumers distros anyways but I don't know how many hackers, malware's, and exploits are out there to attack Linux servers hosting countless websites.

 

Generally for Linux you just need to install a firewall if you are in a shared wireless local network with people who you don't trust much. Otherwise you don't need firewall or antivirus at all. You can just rely on your routers firewall to guard against remote attacks and the fact Linux desktops have miserably smaller share of malwares out in the wild than its already miserably small market share. 

 

Making your own desktop distros require strong knowledge of the Linux as well as programming skills if you are to make your own system components. To be honest, I bet you can just take minimum install distro like arch Linux, pick what components you want to install, remove all mentions of Arch, and then call it your own custom distro. 

 

 

[wasab]

4 hours ago, Alaradia said:

it is light so it does tend to run faster but the issue is game compatibility if you want to play modern and new games like apex legends don't expect to or any other new games 

 

Bloody hell. Wine compatibility has nothing to do with if the game is new or not. I have games from 2001 which literally refused to run on  the newest WINE and ones released this year that run right out of the box without any tinkering at all. It is about how close developers follow and code their games in the standard windows APIs. The closer they are, the more of the games can be translated to native POSIX system calls which the Wine engineers had reimplemented by reversing engineering the windows APIs. 

 

Wine is not an emulator. It is a compatibility layer. It works in the same way as running a windows XP service pack to sort out compatibility issue when running old windows software's from the XP era on the newest edition of windows 10. 

 

If a game/applications uses stupidly old dlls and what nots that not even modern day windows supports anymore, why would you expect them to be supported when running through WINE? 

[captain_aggravated]

3 hours ago, Supervegito said:

snip

Switching to Linux is as easy or as hard as you make it.  I inadvertently made the transition easy on myself because I bought a Raspberry Pi to use for ham radio, and I learned Linux as a hobby project.  It came in handy when Windows 8.1 happened to me.  Or, you can decide that you're gonna nuke every computer in the house and go without until you've got Gentoo up and running. 

 

Linux CAN be very lightweight.  It can also be a big fat bastard like me.  For example, Cinnamon aims to be full-featured and polished, while LXDE stands for "lightweight x desktop environment."  Generally speaking, it will be lighter than Windows.  As for whether you'll get better performance in applications because the OS itself is lighter, well, probably not.  Games in particular aren't quite as well optimized for a Linux system usually, so if there's a compatibility layer like WINE or Vulkan, there's more total code running your game.  That, and graphics drivers for Linux have like a millionth of the budget, so.

 

However, Linux doesn't often decide to run heavy tasks in the background on its own the way Windows does.  A Windows box will all but slam to a halt the instant it decides to run an update.  That's just not the case in Linux.

 

Linux is a little safer than Windows by a combination of factors:  There are indeed fewer viruses being written for it.  Don't count on this, because security by obscurity is not security.  There are three main engineering characteristics that make Linux safer:  It's open source, so anyone can examine the code for vulnerabilities.  There's a user permissions system...you know how Windows started asking you to do things "as administrator" around 2007 or so?  That's always been baked into Linux.  Finally, there's the standard repos.  Installing software from known and trusted repositories with security built-in makes you a lot less likely to get digital AIDS than running just whatever random .exe you find.  THE USER CAN ROYALLY FUCK THIS UP!  You can run Linux in profoundly unsafe ways.  In the words of Bryan Lunduke, "I'm gonna run everything as root and see what happens."

 

As for personal privacy and security, we can cover basically any level of paranoia. Most folks who go "Microsoft is collecting my user data?  That's not very nice!" will be satisfied by basically any mainline distro.  If you're really concerned with privacy, there are distros specifically for that.  Purism builds (almost good) security-focused laptops that have things like hardware kill switches for the radios, mic and camera.  They maintain a security-focused Debian fork called PureOS that does things like use duckduckgo by default and comes with a password manager pre-installed.  Even farther down the rabbit hole is Tails.  Tails is designed to run from a USB stick, leave no trace on any computer it's run on, ships with Tor and a bunch of encryption stuff, and by default it doesn't maintain any changes you made or files you saved when powered off.  It's intended for "if the government catches me with this, they'll execute my family" sort of scenarios.  THE USER CAN ROYALLY FUCK THIS UP!  Boot up Linux, feeling nice and safe that no one's recording your data, log into Facebook...

 

As for creating your own distro, it's again as easy or as hard as you want it to be.  Someone looked at the Linux world before Arch existed and said "You know what?  I wanna make Arch."  Whole new distribution model, code base, package management, it's too much for one person, that took a community to do.  On the other end of the spectrum is Hannah Montana Linux, which is just Kubuntu with pink eye, probably took one guy part of an afternoon.  But, probably get to where you're answering rather than asking "is Linux more secure" before thinking about distributing your own version.

[Sauron]

8 hours ago, Supervegito said:

How easy is it to switch to Linux ?

As easy as installing a distro!

8 hours ago, Supervegito said:

People generally say that the learning curve is quite steep.

It depends on what you want to do. Generally if you have problems with your installation a google search will get you through it, just remember that the terminal is your friend and you shouldn't fear it.

8 hours ago, Supervegito said:

Also, people say that it is a very light OS compared to something like windows or Mac so will I get better performance in terms of

1. Gaming

2. Productivity tasks (editing)

3. General daily use

Linux distros are often lighter than Windows, however usually this doesn't result in a higher performance in intensive tasks like games or (video?) editing. On the other hand, sometimes programs open faster and you can have a few more things open before your pc starts to choke due to ram constraints.

8 hours ago, Supervegito said:

Is it any safer as compared to windows considering the fact that most computers on earth are windows so hackers tend to focus on hacking windows?

Yes, it is safer to some degree - not just because malware doesn't usually target it, but also because software is downloaded through official sources and you don't need to search the web for suspicious executables.

8 hours ago, Supervegito said:

Is it better than windows when it comes to privacy?

Yes, though only as far as the operating system is concerned - if you use Linux but are constantly posting on facebook you'll still be giving up a lot of your privacy.

8 hours ago, Supervegito said:

How can I make my own Linux distro?

It depends on what you consider to be a distro. If it's just your own customized version of distro x, then it's as easy as installing it and customizing it. In my opinion, a distro needs to have 1) a custom installer and 2) its own repositories to be considered a separate distribution; for instance, I wouldn't consider Antergos a distribution because it's just an installer for Arch Linux and uses the same repositories. Making a customized installer isn't too hard, the problem is hosting repositories, building packages from source to match your libraries and constantly checking for intercompatibility within your system.

 

I wouldn't bother; 99.99% of everything you may want to change about X distro can be changed or is available in another distro. If you're passionate about customizing everything, a distribution like Arch or Gentoo may be up your alley (though they do expect you to be moderately experienced).

[D-J97]

I think everyone else has answered the questions efficiently, if you want to build your own system make a start with arch Linux, that'll give you an idea of what you're in for, but don't do that cos it'll put you off of Linux trying to install arch for your first distro, pick something easy like Ubuntu or Linux mint, or even manjaro, a lot of people forget about that last one but it's as user friendly as the rest, based on arch so the documentation is second to none, rolling release so you won't have to reinstall when a new version comes out, and I think it's a fantastic starting distro

[A10-FTW]

On 3/14/2019 at 12:21 AM, Supervegito said:

How easy is it to switch to Linux ?

People generally say that the learning curve is quite steep.

 

Also, people say that it is a very light OS compared to something like windows or Mac so will I get better performance in terms of

1. Gaming

2. Productivity tasks (editing)

3. General daily use

 

Is it any safer as compared to windows considering the fact that most computers on earth are windows so hackers tend to focus on hacking windows ?

 

Is it better than windows when it comes to privacy ?

 

Lastly

 

How can I make my own Linux distro ?

for me, the best distro to "jump" from Windows 7 is Linux MINT 19.1

 

they work the same, and in many ways m19.1 is better than w7 (for me at least) 

 

one cool program you can also download, Pinta = Paint