Most of us have probably noticed the meltdown some people had do to the lack of Linux support for GOG 2.0.

Comment after comment about how the OS that is less than 4% of GOG user base is being so tragically ignored.

However I'm willing to listen to these peoples advice. So I ask this to any Linux enthusiasts on the Forum. How am I supposed to get into using Linux as my primary OS?

I have been trying to get into it on several occasions and every time I came across hostility on Linux forums, where I was seen more as a intruder rather than potential new user.

I'm being serious now. Please provide me with guidance to get under the Pinguin banner.

Absurdly. You can live test it either in a virtual environment, or as I prefer, laid to actual hardware with a live USB.

There's but a few questions one might have for someone such as you.

What distributions have you tried? Are you aware of such concepts as desktop enviroments? What concepts do you have trouble grasping?

Sidenote: I'm using Fedora 30, running KDE Plasma 5.


Addendum: To your question as to, "How am I supposed to get into using Linux as my primary OS?"
I accidentally ate the intramfs headers for my drives. So, that was the end of my Window Walk. But recovering was a cinch, as was switching over to UEFI.

Well, I wrote a beginner's guide for Linux Mint right here on these forums which should be more than enough to get you started :) There are also quite a few Linux users on these forums who can provide help if needed.

It was like 2 years ago and like I said I did not get far enough to get ahold of the lingo. All I remember is that I was Downloading "Ubuntu" and that's about it.

Surprisingly, a lot of things have changed in two years.

Also, I wouldn't suggest Ubuntu as a starter anymore.

Linux is Linux is Linux. Here's a weird metaphor I use to try and explain this out. Linux is a bowl. At the foundation of things, you can change a lot of aspects, but it's still going to be a vessel. Your choice of distro is the flavor of ice cream. I prefer blackberry, you might like pistachio, and Adamhm may enjoy mint. BSD and other things are probably frozen yogurt or something. It still comes from a cow, but it isn't the same.

Things like Gnome, KDE, Cinnamon, those are all just toppings. Much like ice cream, you can enjoy your time in Linux without any toppings at all. But a lot of us like a bit of extra flavor for familiarity.

With that metaphor aside, while I was familiarizing myself with Linux, I would often refer to the ArchWiki to cross reference concepts, issues, and such. As while the package format might change, a lot of the programs are very similar.

Not as easy as its most staunch supporters want you to believe.

A few years ago, I tried to setup Linux as my main OS.
After finding a fitting distro, and installing all the stuff that had to be installed to make it a halfway decent windows replacement, I encountered massive hardware problems.

Meaning, three fourths of the peripheral hardware that I was using at that time, wasn't Linux compatible.

Like you, I was under the impression, under Linux there are no real problems...after all, that's what Linux users always claim...so I decided to search help online.

I quickly found a blacklist with hardware that simply wouldn't get recognized under the penguin - and of course, my stuff was on that list.

I couldn't believe that, so I searched on.

Asking on linux-forums, I - like you - made the experience, that the "ever helpful and embracing" community was - in parts, at least - very toxic to noobs asking noob questions.

I finally found some nice, experienced, linux user who confirmed, that that black list was accurate, and that I would have to replace my hardware with newer stuff, if I wanted to use it under Linux.

I then re-installed windows and never looked back.

Linux may be nice for some - but definitely not for all.
I am glad that we don't have to jump through hoops, nowadays, to get our games and hardware running.

Obviously, others miss the days of himem.sys and setting up boot discs, etc.,...well, those enjoy Linux.

So,the only question is: what category are you in?

OTOH on my current system (AMD Ryzen 1700, ASRock X370 Gaming K4, AMD RX 480, Filco Majestouch 2 PS/2 keyboard, Logitech G203 mouse, Steam controller) it's pretty much simply a case of "install and update" and everything "just works"(tm)... it really depends on what hardware you have.

Unfortunately some hardware manufacturers are hostile to Linux and won't even provide the technical information that would allow the community to create open source drivers for their hardware. It's really not fair to blame Linux for such hardware being poorly supported; would you say that Windows is terrible and hard to use just because some manufacturer didn't make any Windows drivers for a particular bit of hardware?

So here is another question, since the hardware problem came up.

What are the most common problems that new Linux users might run into?

Having the wrong hardware seams to be a rather need to know thing.

But Linux users always claim that everything runs under their system "OoB".

And back then, it definitely didn't. If you nowadays have no problem - great for you.

Back then lot of other people also had no problem with their hardware - as long as it was supported.

Regarding the second part: my hardware ran just fine when I started my Linux experiment - under win 7 / 8 / 8.1.
The same hardware still runs nowadays under windows 10.

I don't know if it's common or if it was just me, but I got myself a small piece of hell for not setting up the disks correctly. Read up a small bit on partitioning just to avoid having a bad time. Being new at Linux and not knowing how to allocate more disk space to home, I had to re-install everything just right after having it set up.

That could have been easily avoided if I hadn't come in with the mindset that it works like windows, OS on C: and storage on D: and so on.

I'm a complete noob so take my words with a grain of salt, but that's something I wish I knew that's really fresh in mind for me.

Staring at an installer with no second device to refer to. Sad as it may be to say, but some Linux installers just aren't friendly at all.

Post install, getting a bad impression from a terrible desktop environment like Gnome or Unity; which goes too far into the idea of a "padded cell". See, the thing is, you can just install another and dump the one given to you at start.

Third, being afraid of the Termina/Command line. Unlike the DOS prompt, bash is actually quite elegant and swift, which makes it the preferred way to do many tasks, since you can actively monitor them.

What did it for me was installing Gentoo in the early/mid 2000s and accidentally wiping my Windows disk while at it. Re-installing Windows seemed like such a pain in the ass that I never did it. No regrets.

If your hardware is very recent then you might need to update the kernel to get the latest drivers. If the hardware only has proprietary drivers then you'll need to install those separately - often there will be separate packages provided via the system repositories for these (typically using the Driver Manager to install them on Mint), or from the manufacturer themselves.

The most commonly unsupported hardware tends to be gimmicky things like customisations on laptops for RGB/hotkeys/etc where the manufacturer couldn't be bothered to make drivers for anything but Windows and information about how they're controlled is unavailable. This kind of thing is also somewhat frequent with certain "gaming" brands of desktop peripherals, although there is more effort put into reverse-engineering those due to how much more common they are. Support is getting better over time due to this & as the Linux market grows enough for more manufacturers to pay attention to it.

Certain brands of wifi controller also have problems - IIRC Broadcom are pretty bad and only provide proprietary drivers for their hardware. Realtek provide open source drivers but in my experience they tend to be a bit crap to begin with (they're ok once they've had plenty of time to iron out the bugs though). Intel wifi chipsets have been universally great in all systems, at worst only requiring only a kernel update to work properly.

Also, Nvidia graphics cards require their proprietary drivers to work well since they do little to support the open driver developers.

Check out my guide for more information :)

Everything really *does* work "out of the box" on my system. I'm not going to claim this is the case on every system though - in particular hardware requiring proprietary drivers and very recent hardware requiring system updates (and of course hardware produced by anti-Linux manufacturers) - but aside from that I tend to avoid gimmicky hardware and certainly since I switched to Linux I've made good Linux support a requirement for all new hardware I buy.

Because the manufacturer provides Windows drivers for it. It's entirely the manufacturer's fault that Linux drivers are not available for their hardware; they could make their own or they could provide the technical documentation to allow others to do so, but for whatever reason they elected not to.

Out of curiosity, what peripherals were you having trouble with exactly?

I'm hardly an enthusiast, but I keep a live USB boot of Linux around and regularly fire it up.

With Linux Mint I've found it easy to use out of the box for running some games, browsing the web etc, and the cmmand line stuff isnt terrible to start using for basic things. Might be worth looking at going this route to dip your toes in and figure out whats working for you and where confusion lays.