Moving from Windows 10 to Linux for the first time

Moving from Windows 10 to Linux for the first time. 

Hi guys I wanted to share with you my experience from making a dual boot system to test out Linux and compare it with Windows 10. 

First of all the reasons I wanted to move to Linux: 

– I have been using Windows for years now, ever since Windows 3.11 and even MS-DOS and wanted to try something else. 

– The stability and security Linux has to offer compared to Windows systems (virusses, crashes you name it) – Wanted to see how gaming works and looks like on Linux, since I’m a big gamer. 

– The fact every big updates Windows 10 gives, I seem to run into massive problems. 1 time my LAN somehow not working, I could use PING command in Prompt, but not do anything else internet related. One day all settings didn’t work after an update, no matter what I clicked. And one day explorer.exe kept crashing overand over (no fix, no start menu, nothing. Meaning I had to reinstall Windows 10 after almost every big update. The worst part is Windows messing up your drivers every update. 

Upgrading my machine: 

I had an old Antec Nine Hundred case (a dust machine) and old 10 year old 1000 Watt Power Supply. The rest of the hardware was still quite new. So first what I wanted was a dust free and most of all silent case and a full modular silent Power Supply. Also the casing needed to have many bays for harddrives, since I love using different drives for different purposes: 

1 SSD drive for Windows 10 around 140 GB 

1 SSD drive for Linux + games 

around 1 TB 1 Normal harddisk 

1TB for storage (software, movies, series, documents) 1 Normal harddisk 2TB for gaming on Windows 

I found the following case and supply:
Fractal Design Define R5
Corsair RM1000x

Building the machine was a walk in the park, the casing had alot of clicking systems instead of screws, making life alot easier. The manuals that came it also were very clear explaining step by step how to build your own pc. So thumbs up for Fractal making the first manual in my life that I actually read.

On to installing Linux:

First thing I did was looking for what version of Linux people would advice being the best for beginners. So I downloaded both Ubuntu and Linux Mint and made bootable USB sticks with it using Rufus https://rufus.akeo.ie/ . 

Then I booted them both testing them out first. Personally I prefer Linux Mint, because it had more of a Windows like feeling. Not too hard to use. Also Linux mint had more programs pre installed than the Ubuntu version had that I used. 

First thing I did then was booting the system and running UEFI bios, making sure it would first run from USB drive and then the new SSD I bought for Linux.   

After Linux mint was booted the installation was a bit hard, because I had to configure all partitions myself, because quick install would overwrite another disk. So I was first looking for a guide on how to best partition to make Linux work.  

Step 1:  Choose Something else when installing 

Step 2: Select the right drive, it will say the name of the drive most of the time, mine was called Samsung 1 TB. 

Step 3: First create a root partition around 60 GB, it is the Ext4 file system mount point / I made it around 60,000 MB, even tho 30,000 can also be enough. 

Step 4: Create a SWAP file. I read somewhere best is twice your RAM memory, so I made it 32,000 mb, since I have 16 gigs of RAM. 

Step 5: Create a /home partition, same way you did the root partition, put all left over disk space in that. Since all programs, games etc. will be automaticly placed there, even Steam and all it’s games. 

Step 6: Choose install now selecting the right harddisk after partitioning.
 

After around 30 minutes Linux was ready to run. 

After that I had to make sure Linux boot would make a boot menu so I could select Linux or Windows when booting the pc.  

To do that open a terminal window and type: “sudo update-grub” without the “ symbols. After that when you boot your pc you should see a boot menu showing Linux, Memtest and Windows 10. If you don’t do this step, Windows won’t show being bootable. 

Finally I had a multi boot system! All by looking for online guides, youtube channels etc. 

Problems, problems and more problems:

Linux was installed and all was running smooth. However when I booted Windows 10 some problems occured. Linux and Windows multi booting would keep changing my time settings for some odd reason, also my sound didn’t work. So I looked up google, but could find 0 answers. So I deceided to go to some Tech forum and ask if somebody knew. Luckily I got an answer in like 5 minutes or so.

The sound problem was easy to fix! Only thing I needed to do was newer drivers, somehow a multi boot system disabled the older drivers. So I installed them and all worked well after. 

The time problem was more complicated. Old BIOS had the time setting on the BIOS itself, but somehow UEFI takes the time the OS is telling them. Windows uses Local time and Linux uses UTC time. It was wiser to set Windows to UTC than setting Linux to local. Also setting Windows 10 to UTC was quite simple. 

Steps to set UTC in Windows 10: 

– press start button – type Regedit – go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation 

– create a new key named: RealTimeIsUniversal 

– make sure it’s set to “Dword” with a value of 1

Or make a .reg file using notepad with the following code and run it”:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation] “RealTimeIsUniversal”=dword:00000001
 
Now all my problems were fixed and both OS ran smooth.

Gaming on Linux.

Now having Linux I definitly wanted to try out gaming, so first of all I downloaded a few free linux shooters, which ran really smooth no problem. Then I installed Steam (Linux version) and some of my games. This is where the fun started. All games looked as if they were made in a 8-bit age, or ran with large frame drops non stop. The problem seemed to be my videocard. I have an AMD R9 290 and from which I heard AMD doesn’t go well with gaming on Linux. Also AMD on Linux uses open source drivers (not made by AMD), so it doesn’t have 100% support with newer games. I tryed installing the official drivers, but only thing happening after that was Linux crashing and not booting anymore, saying stuff about Xserver is corrupt (which is your visual desktop etc.). I tryed many guides online and still till this day can’t figure out how to install official drivers or if they even work at all with newer games. I read somewhere people say you need Nvidea for gaming on Linux instead of AMD. That games then run smoother etc. with the official drivers. So some day I will check if that is true, but for now I can’t afford a new GPU.

1 game strangely enough did work great. Namely Savage Lands. A sandbox survival game. Graphics instantly were smooth just like on Windows and on max settings. So maybe not all games are ported well to Linux/AMD? Just wondering.
 
Anyways this was my story for now and I hoped you like reading it. English isn’t my native langauge so sorry for errors typing this text.

Also would love to know if any of you guys are experienced with Linux and gaming or multi boot systems. Any advice to a newbie like me are welcome :D

I hope to write more stuff in the future and not only about computers.