Mastodawn

I desperately want to switch to Linux but I'm terrified of breaking my computer still. I'm sitting on a GTX 980 and Windows 10 (computer is old and I'm very poor).

EDIT: To clarify, I have used a bootable USB stick before to test Linux Mint. It gave me a good impression but was kinda laggy (10 year old USB ports aren't very fast).

Anyone out there willing to poke me in the right direction?

I am dependent on Discord for friends and Microsoft Teams (no matter how much I hate it) for many job search reasons. #linux #windows

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Zelphir Kaltstahl 1d ago

@jaeder

(1) Discord runs on GNU/Linux. It is an app based on Electron, which is a cross-platform framework/thing.

(2) MS Teams you can use inside Chromium, which you can easily install on GNU/Linux distributions.

(3) For your graphics card (I think GTX 980 is one?) you should check the driver situation online. Worst case is that you have use proprietary Nvidia drivers, but that's still easily possible.

In what way are you terrified to break your computer specifically?

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Jaeder 1d ago

@zelphirkaltstahl

For your question: I just cannot afford a new one. So it's like... alright, so i did a Mint installation on a USB just to test the general user experience and get a feel for it. But I've never tried installing on my PC as is.

1) Great.

2) Alright, that sounds... like it could take some time (just extremely cautious and trying to not overestimate my fluency in Linuxing) but is doable.

3) Mm... yeah, so it'd work but it'd be better to switch to an AMD card from what I understand. But it'd work. At least.

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Zelphir Kaltstahl

@jaeder I don't think you have to fear anything in terms of hardware damage. In my experience computers work longer when not running Windows and when running GNU/Linux. At most what issues I had were some part simply not working, because of drivers not being available, but then that's not hardware damage.