linuxmemes

You can just use a graphical file manager in Linux like you might have been used to in Windows. When I open mine I see my windows partition and my USB drive listed on the left side.

I know Mint has one that I use all the time, but I’m not familiar with what’s in Ubuntu out of the box.

There may be an easier way to access the external drive, It depends on what you are bar is for difficult. Are we talking about a NAS or an external USB drive?

What's your current method for connecting to it?

Lutris is a thing

Official Linux support is silly honestly. It will always be janky.

Windows just works with wine and proton most of the time.

At least Sober's working.

¿Por Qué No Los Dos?

I don't think they are going to support Mac. If you want to play Valorant you need to have Windows on bare metal. The company ships mandatory malware and there is nothing you can do.

Try downloading and installing Tiny11.

If you have the budget Siemens NX CAD CAM FEA runs on Linux (Redhat and SUSE, also works on OpenSUSE). However the GUI version is NX 12 or prior releases, newer versions are headless...maybe that will change with Linux Desktop gaining percentage steadily

Whatever version of Windows that allows group policy changes will let you turn off all the annoying stuff, that'd probably be your best bet for now.

I'm currently using Ardour on Arch with some packages from the pro-audio group, but I wouldn't exactly call my setup "professional"

The future is now old man!

If your system supports windows 11 then dual boot for the games you want windows support for.

Then you have a bare metal option for those games and you can run whatever distro you want along side it.

i heard good things about Bazzite abd Ubuntu/Pop OS with nvidia support

pop!os reportedly packs in and handles the proprietary nvidia drivers for you, which can be a pain to handle yourself. i haven't tried it nor do i have nvidia but i see it highly recommended a lot.

I switched to Linux Mint several months ago. Thanks to Proton, All my Steam games that I bought for Windows run great. (I'm using an nVidia RTX 3060). And any older games like "Deus Ex" or "Giants: Citizen Kabuto" run under Wine, using the default settings.

That was my thoughts, too. So, now I'm running Mint on my gaming PC and the one hooked up in my living room for streaming. I tried Kubuntu, and liked it, but KDE Wayland was giving me issues. Installing a different desktop environment just introduced more problems, so I went with a different distro with the DE I wanted, which was Mint with Cinnamon. Now, life is good.

First step: Decide on the so-called desktop environment. A shortlist is provided below. For a new user, this should be decisive when choosing between beginner-friendly distros.

Before going over to the next (and final) step, we need to set the stage for our contenders:

• Versions of Linux Mint. Linux Mint has (rightfully so) become the face of Linux for beginners. Stand out feature would be how crazy popular it is; it's a joy to look up your problem through a search engine and find solutions for it.
• Images of uBlue. Where Linux Mint tries to smooth the rough edges of the "traditional Linux model" as nicely as possible, uBlue's images can be referred to as revolutionary by comparison. The model strikes some (re)semblance to what you might know from your phone or chromebook. These images aren't even close to reaching their full potential, but have already garnered/amassed a wide audience for how they (at least attempt to) solve some of Desktop Linux' long-standing issues. Note that finding solutions for your problems might not be as straightforward. However, documentation is decent and they've been very helpful on Discord.

Final step: Pick the distro corresponding to your preferred desktop environment. The list found below (ordered alphabetically) isn't trying to be exhaustive on desktop environments.

• Cinnamon; Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition. This is their flagship and probably what people mean when referring to Linux Mint.
• GNOME; Bazzite's GNOME. If you don't intend to game, then consider Bluefin instead.
• KDE Plasma; Bazzite's KDE Plasma. If you don't intend to game, then consider Aurora instead.
• MATE; Linux Mint MATE Edition.
• Xfce; Linux Mint Xfce Edition.

Such a decisive question. I wouldn't say there's necessarily a "best". Mint is an EXCELLENT choice. So too would be Fedora (Fedora KDE edition I'd recommend for most) or OpenSuSe Tumbleweed.

Just pick what looks decent to you and give it a shot.

I switched from Win10 to Mint, and am quite happy. You can get a lot of stuff done through GUI, so you can put off learning how to use the terminal a little. If you are worried about using it, I can recommend using ChatGPT. Helped me troubleshoot a lot of issues and learning a few tricks.