Random Thoughts

[emjay]

Cool, looks like it's going to have to be Linux Mint then; that's the distro my dad uses, so I do have a little bit of familiarity with it... it certainly looks very polished, and is often heralded as a great stepping stone from Windows to Linux.

Yeah, I understand how it's going to be more work; my dad for instance spends most of his time either configuring things or looking up how to do things, but he still loves Linux with a passion... he/we just accept that things rarely work perfectly straight out of the box in it.

Yeah, I think I will be going the dual boot route, so that common libraries thing looks very interesting, and something I'll need to research. Thanks for all your advice.... I'll be bookmarking/noting it for future reference

A word of warning if you have an Nvidia 40xx video card. The Linux Kernal may not yet be updated to drive it. In that case, you can use the motherboard's on board video until you can get the proper Nvidia Linux driver installed. It's fairly easy and pretty straightforward, even if you have to compile from source as I did. There are loads of tutorials for it. Mint should have a place in the settings where you can select to use proprietary drivers but, YMMV.

ETA:
The latest Steam OS (in all honesty it's a fork, but compatibility is there) is now available here. It's an Arch Linux fork, but being developed for Steam, by Valve, (then translated for desktops/laptops) it will probably run steam games better than a Debian system. When I get time, I have a spare SSD partition to give it a spin on.

Thanks for the head's up. I've just checked and it's not that graphics card. It's a gaming laptop rather than a custom built PC, so not the latest and greatest graphics card, if that's what that is.

And yeah, deal, you can be the guinea pig on Steam OS I think I'd best stick with Linux Mint to start with, if nothing else so my dad can help me set it up. I'm not as tech savvy as I used to be... I guess that's a result of the complacency that using Windows breeds