Windows 10 nearing EOL and getting my handheld emulation device has got me thinking a lot about OS's lately, particularly the wide world of Linux distros. Windows has always been the default in my life. I've owned a Macbook once and have always used iPhones, but for desktops and laptops it's always been Windows besides that. I have a lot of nostalgia for Windows, and it's served me well as a casual user. I don't know how to program and know only the bare basics of networking, so my knowledge level has never caused me to need to use Windows at a higher level than it's basic functions. Because of this, I've always looked at Linux as something only developers use, something that developers who have completely mastered Windows move onto. Of course this is a silly way to look at it, but lately I've decided to really look into it and do more research.
Of all the reasons I could list here on why I think it's time to move on from Windows, one of the main reasons for me really is just gaming in general. On a powerful enough PC, the resources Windows use really shouldn't be of much concern. However, my wife's laptop is pretty underpowered, and I have lots of reason to believe that Windows 11 is zapping more juice than is reasonable for such a low-end machine as hers. It came with Windows 11, yet it doesn't work good with the hardware in the laptop. It really should have to be this way, does it?
And her specs aren't even the most abysmally underpowered they can be. It's got a Ryzen 3700U with a Vega 10 iGPU, 8GB DDR4 RAM, and a 512GB SSD, people play on computers with even worse specs than this. It's not powerful by any means whatsoever, but Windows shouldn't stutter and run at 30FPS whenever she's just on the desktop. I've done lots of things to try to increase it's speed: reinstalls, disable tons of unnecessary features, cleaned her SSD, ran programs like Razer Cortex that claim to free up RAM, so many other things, yet it's still not working very well.
All of this being said, I'm really starting to consider the reality of me installing a Linux distro for the first time on her laptop. She doesn't have much important stuff on there, and the stuff she does have we can easily backup, so everything is pointing to why I should do it. After looking around a lot at different distros, if I were to go through with this, I would choose
Linux Mint XFCE Edition (link to Linux Mint website). I've read lots of great reviews for it, not the absolute most beginner friendly distro but better than a lot of others, and the XFCE desktop environment claims to be extremely lightweight on resources. My main thinking is to run a new OS that uses as little resources as possible so it can free some up for gaming. Not that I'm expecting a massive 20+ FPS increase or anything, but this is undoubtedly help in a lot of ways. I can install Open Office in place of MS Office, get a lightweight browser on there, and make it run generally faster than Windows 11 I'm sure.
Again, I have never done this before, so I'm a complete noob. Well actually, in middle school a 4chan thread convinced me to switch to Ubuntu, which they were definitely on to something, but I had no idea what I was doing and just switched back to Win 7. This time I will do it right, take it slow, read a lot on it, and make sure that I am doing it right. How hard can it really be though, not very I bet. I'm still considering if I will do it or not but will definitely report back here if I do.
I think I will do that first before thinking about changing my desktop. The reason why is because I can extend Win 10 security for an extra year for free. It requires you to have to use the Windows Backup app, but may be worth it for another year of my favorite OS. Windows 11 is just very unappealing to me for a large number of reasons...
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