Hi all - newbie in the making. 64 bit beast in need of a Linux dist.
 

Hi fellow Linux users,
I've recently acquired (as a gift to moving out of my mums house from my brother) a 64 bit beast. Well, it's a beast to me. I'm looking forward to getting a Linux distribution for it to suit my gaming / wireless networking needs.
Any suggestions for which distribution to get into ?
I'm sure people have their own preferred distribution for whatever reason. Please share your thoughts.

b80ven
\m/

While there are plenty of decent FOSS game titles (IMO), the vast majority of AAA games are found on Windows and consoles. However, you can use something like Wine (which is, put simply, a compatibility layer allowing Windows applications to run in a *nix environment) to run some of your Windows games on Linux.

EDIT: Also, I'd recommend doing a bit of research about your existing wireless NIC(s) and/or new ones you may plan to buy, as you may need to make sure that there's driver support (ideally already in-kernel, this way you won't need to hassle with finding a driver source tarball online and compiling it from scratch, or using ndiswrapper) for the WNIC(s) you plan to use.

Otherwise, welcome to LQ. Looking forward to your participation. :)

If you are new to Linux I would recommend one of the distributions more aimed to beginners.
I recommend Linux Mint for that, it comes with all needed media-codecs and a driver install program (you need a wired connection for installing the drivers from the net). It also may be that the drivers for the wireless adapter are already installed, that depends on the used chipset.

Regarding gaming, you can use any recent distro for gaming. Keep in mind that you have eventually to install drivers for your video card to get 3D working.
Also keep in mind that Windows games will not run natively on Linux, you will have to use Wine to get them running, and there will be no guarantee that they work.
But as always, if you have questions/problem you can always ask here. Of course after going the usual way (Google and the manuals).

I'm a pretty heavy gamer and I found Linux Mint to be the most painless distro for my 64 bit Toshiba Satellite A305. Ubuntu and Fedora were both okay, but even with Propietary drivers my frames per second on both of those distros were half of what I achieved in Mint. I'm using Crunchbang now with equal FPS to Linux Mint, but it took me nearly 5x longer to aquire and troubleshoot Wine.

If there's one thing I've picked up in the last few months I've been trying different distros (I'm still an infant in the world of open-source), it really depends on the specific hardware you've got to determine how quickly things will get up and running.

Your best bet, as TobiSGD said, is just to pick some of the most common distros and test drive them for a while. The less mainstream you venture, the more trouble you'll have getting things to "just work".

Moved: This thread is more suitable in Linux-General and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

for gaming
install windows 7 64 bit

unless there are ALL linux games

for a "new to Linux" user look at Ubuntu or Mint
Or even OpenSUSE 11.4
( though SUSE is " the dark side of the force " ) - we do have good cookies .

most distros will be fine EXCEPT for Red hat RHEL or Fedora or cent

Fedora is a ? i Do not recommend it to people who DO NOT want to learn the insides of a OS and how to fix it .

It's very possible (assuming you've got the hardware) to run recent windows games in Wine. I'm playing Starcraft 2, Rift, The Witcher, Wow and some Steam games in Wine on my computer. Other Linux games you might want to look into are Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Hero's of Newerth.

A good intro distribution is Mint or Ubuntu. I've heard good things about OpenSuse but never tried it. Slackware is my distro of choice, it can be easy, you just have to be willing to read the manual :)

Welcome to the forums.

Live cd's are great ways to test distros.


I would use my choice of windows for advanced games and put on a free virtual machine to run any number of linux distros. No real reason in my mind to dual boot.

To use 3D in Linux. That doesn't work well in VMs.

Unless you found a distro you like and want to use it as your main OS.

True, 3D is still being worked on each release. Dunno exactly how many people need it but it is available for the major VM's at maybe 90% speeds.

Sure, one can live with linux as the main OS. If they need Windows you have to then dual boot. (OP is worried and should be) Or VM the windows. In that case, he'd have to buy a new copy of W7 since the OEM is tied to hardware.


I try to discourage people (newbie) from dual boots. Not only have I messed up systems but plenty of forums have newbie posts on this disaster waiting to happen.

At one time installers were cryptic or simply had major mistakes in them. Dunno how many times I have borked systems in the past. I think Mandrake 7 was the last time for me but I still see plenty of other people bork their systems.

A VM is a safe and easy way to learn and use linux.

The thing about virtual machines IMO is that it's a disadvantage to learning, because everything's almost always guaranteed to work out-of-box. If you're dual-booting or installing it as the sole operating system, you get a much better idea of how it cooperates with your actual, physical hardware. Virtualization programs like VirtualBox and VMware provide "virtual hardware" to the VMs which sort of act like "hooks" to the real hardware, which are controlled by the hypervisor (so the VM never has any real direct hardware access).

I don't know where you got that number from, but that is definitely not true. Virtualbox is not even able to run Unity because of lack of functions. And if you get 3D software to work the performance isn't even anywhere near 30%. Personal experiences, I tried to run 3D software in virtualized Windows and Linux systems.

Of course there can be problems when installing a dual boot system, but I think that recommending VMs as the only good way (No real reasons to dual boot) is not the right thing, especially not if the OP is asking for a distro to play games on.

Just my opinion.

Unity/Compiz run just fine in VMs here (with VirtualBox)… :-\

Expanding on my post above, I'll say this: VMs are okay for testing/trying out general (i.e. non-hardware-dependent) functionality, but for testing hardware compatibility, they fail miserably.

I stand corrected on that, last time I tried it didn't work.
But the overall 3D performance is poor, nonetheless.