Linux

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A little over a year ago, I had a 5-year-old daily-driver Windows laptop that I knew wouldn't get Windows 11, so I put Mint on my 15-year-old desktop machine to see if I could live that life. I had tried dual-booting Ubuntu a couple of times over the previous decade or so, but always just booted into Windows after the novelty wore off. While I expected it to run Linux better than Windows, I was still bracing myself for a terribly slow experience. I was startled to discover that my 15-year-old desktop computer, which had essentially been sitting cold for over five years because it ran Windows 7 like molasses and wasn't eligible for Windows 10, not only ran Linux Mint better than Windows 7, but also ran Windows 10 in VirtualBox better than Windows 7 on baremetal. It was a little slow and laggy, definitely not gaming ready, but perfectly usable.

Then I discovered that, when I went back to my Windows laptop, I missed the way Linux worked and all of the customizability. And I discovered that Valve's work to make the Steam Deck a viable gaming console was making Steam gaming on Linux a quite pleasant experience. So earlier this year, when I bought a new laptop (trying to beat the tariffs), I decided to get a Framework without Windows preinstalled. I put Mint on it, too, and only rarely needed to boot into VirtualBox a couple of times for work stuff (mostly opening Adobe files). So last week, I turned Windows on for the last time on my old laptop, pulled the last couple of files off of it, marveled at how old Windows looked, and installed Mint on that one too.

My house went from 100% Windows to 0% Windows over the course of the past year, due entirely to Microsoft's own-goal of killing off their most popular and reliable product. And I couldn't be happier.

Problems and challenges? I haven't run into a single one that wasn't already a problem before I installed Linux. Maybe it just hasn't been long enough, or maybe sticking with a "normie" distro has insulated me from the worst of it, but I haven't had a single driver issue (on the contrary, the Bluetooth module that never worked on my old laptop under Windows works perfectly now), and I've been able to find an open-source alternative to basically every Windows-only application I want or need. My wife's old Chromebook, which had been basically useless for anything but web browsing before we replaced it, is still basically useless for anything but web browsing even on Lubuntu (it was too puny even for Mint). But no problems due to Linux or due to not having Windows outside of a VM. No hours spent debugging broken drivers. It's all been super smooth.

Oh, I guess one thing is that I know Powershell a whole lot better than Bash. That's been a little bit of a learning curve.

(Semi) Recent convert here from Win11 to Bazzite - Didn't switch due to Win10 EOL but because Windows Recall kept fucking re-enabling itself every time windows updated and it was pissing me off.

I miss playing some games that require kernal level anti-cheat, but that's a small price to pay for me.

The biggest hurdle I have and kind of still have is the difference in package managers and stuff like that. There appimages which I've sorta got my head around, gear lever helps. Then there are .deb files of some programs, some come as .tar.gz or .rpm files.

That's ignoring flatpaks, snaps and other packages like that - I do wish there was a more uniform structure to these that is better explained, often software download pages will list some distros like Ubuntu, Arch & Fedora but miss out many like Bazzite which is fine if you know Bazzite is based on Fedora but if you don't then you're already stuck at that point.

Plus most pieces of software that have instructions for Fedora ask you to use dnf to download stuff, and if you try that in Bazzite it throws a fit and simultaneously tells you that rpm-ostree should be used but also don't use rpm-ostree for things unless you absolutely have to.

I love Bazzite, I'm never going back, but it can be frustrating for sure if you're unfamiliar with things.

knock knock

Have you heard the good news about our lord and saviour, Linus Torvalds?

I started baby steps when Steam stopped supporting Windows7. I built my main gaming PC to dual boot W10 & Ubuntu maybe 3 years ago? And that just worked so-so honestly. Felt like everytime I went to play co-op games w my friends, whatever game we picked that weekend didn't work correctly in Linux. But because I had Win10 right there, I also never forced myself to learn anything either. Biggest thing I could find was the problems seemed to be related to the Nvidia drivers, but never could quite figure out how to update them.

Recently I doubled down with a new PC, and this time it's Ubuntu only. Made an effort to find native Linux apps where possible, learned a few terminal commands, forced myself to also learn Bottles (play Windows games), and bought a Radeon video card instead of Nvidia. Learning curve for what I wanted wasn't nearly as high as I feared. If anything, I think it's pushing me to consider distro shopping, as I'm starting to understand why folks don't like snaps. Looks like Mint will be my next stop.

Biggest challenge so far is there's a few apps I use that just don't have a great Linux equivalent. AutoHotKey is the biggest one, but I see there's some new options here I didn't try yet. https://lemmy.zip/post/47337622 I have not dicked around with my 3D printer software yet, but I'm sure that will be a hurdle.

I switched recently because of it. A friend of mine made a workshop for anyone who is interested, to learn how to switch to Linux or Dual Boot. It was the final push for me to switch and loving it so far :)

Start of this year I transitioned to Arch Linux. Only regret is Battlefield 6 and I don't really care about that cause Arc Raiders is coming this week lol. Every other game has worked out of the box. Although actually RoboCop didn't work for me which was surprising but I think that's a temporary hitch.

I made a sheet for step for step instructions for my friends, hoping some of them convert soon with my help.

Yep. Me and my parents. I'd tried a few distros in the last but always by as issues. Tried arch BTW but I didnt knlw what I was doing.

Thoght about fedora but I'd have to support family so shared to be on the same distro and its not very windows like.

Moved to mibt and bingo. Very much like windows, hardly need to use the termianl, everything just works.

I want to use a PC not sit in the terminal foxing things. That said, I'm slowly getting into the deeper side of linux.

Parents have 0 issues with mint. Even printers just plug and play.

Moved my father-in-law from Windows 10 to Mint.

Biggest problem was all his 'documents', which were office365 web links rather than 'actual documents'. Linux presents them as the urls that they really are. They open just fine, though, and can be exported as real local docs for libreoffice etc.

Security and privacy were the main selling points for him. He'd done some reading and thought that Mint was among the best choices for a newstart that just want everything to work; no interests in playing games or anything. I agreed that was the most solid choice. I use Arch btw myself, but wouldn't recommend that for beginners.

My big gaming rig is running great on Fedora. My smaller gaming box running xubuntu had its nvidia drivers borked by a “phased” driver rollout. Overall, I think you gotta pay attention to the terminal when updating things. Maybe it’s just xubuntu being shit lol. Unfortunately, the game I play works best on Debian for now.

I got an older laptop and set up a Mint dual-boot, just because there are a few things I need Windows for, but I'm on Linux 99% of the time.

I did find in the past that a dual-boot didn't work well on an old Lenovo I owned, so I picked Acer this time, and it works really well. I just don't want to have to worry about my privacy all the time, so Linux + my Proton VPN helps ease my anxiety.

I switched to Endeavor OS a few months ago for my gaming PC. Working great so far. I’m using Linux a lot at work, so the transition has been smooth for me.

Also helped a relative to switch to Linux Mint by their own request. It was a welcome surprise. They really didn’t want to switch to Windows 11.

I want to be on Linux but honestly my PC is probably going to stay win10 forever.

When I eventually buy a new one it will be on fedora.

My main desktop / gaming PC just runs so many services and hosts media, loads of ntfs drives. I just cannot be assed right now.

Setting up new services in docker to make the config more portable in the future... Honestly probably wont take that long but you know how it is

I'm in process.

Yup. My desktop was the last computer I had running windows 10.

A couple years ago, I installed debian on an old laptop that I'm using as a home server now, and that was my first contact with Linux since 2010 or so. It was an experiment that got from "I'm just trying stuff" to "I use this every day".

Then I got a steam deck, and I saw that gaming on Linux was a thing now. Gaming is one of the things I need my PC for, since I don't have consoles, so that was important for me.

Then I got an old laptop from my sibling and I decided to install Arch to learn a bit more. Another experiment that got out of hand, until that laptop became my daily driver. I spent less and less time in front of my desktop.

This year, with Win10 going out of support, and having no interest in Win11 after having used Linux a bunch, I decided that was it. I did slack for a bit, because I had a lot of files that I needed to review and backup (or delete).
Because of unrelated stuff with my server -I had to empty my external hard drive to reformat it from NTFS to ext4-, I used the opportunity to do the hard work, and when that was over, installing Arch was a breeze.

That was a couple months ago, and I'm still customizing the PC, because life got in the way, and I'm doing things differently to my laptop (using niri instead of hyprland, using btrfs instead of ext4 -which I did wrong and I have to fix to be able to do snapshots-).

But yeah, I'm having fun and I don't miss windows. There's some software that I need sometimes, like the 8bitdo firmware updater and things like that, but it's mostly minor stuff. I did use FL Studio before and I heard it doesn't work great on Linux, but I haven't made music for the past 4 years, and if I want to and can't make it work I can always use Reaper or something :)

I switched from windows 10 to Kubuntu a few months ago, and I've loved the freedom so far! Gaming has mostly been a non-issue, except for the 1 or 2 that won't work due to anticheat nonsense. I have a debloated windows instance that I keep on a separate drive, and I've booted that POS maybe 2 times so far.

I got curious and tried Linux Mint and OpenSUSE, but ended back with Kubuntu because I prefer KDE Plasma and im most familiar with Ubuntu.

Be careful though, once you fall into the rabbit hole you'll start doing things like run your own music server (like navidrome), and hosting your own photo storage server (I've tried both Immich and Photoprism).

Yes. I've been dabbling in Linux on and off for 10 years. Finally made the full transition and said fuck my gaming PC, it got swapped to Linux too, if games don't work I just won't play them, I'll get over it. Now my only windows device is my work laptop

I've always been interested in Linux, and for my home server it's been my OS for the last decade, but for the workstation I found myself dual-booting. With the advent of atomic distributions such as Fedora Kinoite, Universal Blue, Fedora CoreOS etc using the concept of OS images through OSTree / bootc, combined with containerization through flatpak and podman is a great step forward stability and reproducibility.

My desktop has been switched to Aurora (Universal Blue) for more than a year and I couldn't be happier.

Grew up om mac os, switched to windows about 10 years ago. Switched to Linux this summer.

The first distro that stuck was Manjaro... But the instability became too much of a pita and a risk. Found Garuda Moca amd I'm very happy with the experience. Mostly used for gaming.

I'm never going back to the windows side of my dual boot & should probably reclaim the space. Damn malware hyjacks my bios and trys to start & grab updates every once & a while.

Spouse is working on a private cloud server & once its up I will walk backwards out of the corop data theif hell I inhabit now with both birds blazing.

A few friends installes it and work gold with it. I also am tasked with installing Linux for my mother where I will use Linux Mint.

My computer was crashing constantly, never figured out what it was but I switched over to Linux Mint to see if it was something to do with the software and hardware having an issue since I couldn't find a hardware only issue.

I liked the environment but was still having crashes. So I upgraded MoBo, GPU, CPU, RAM, PSU, HDD and installed Mint again. It didn't work out because Mint didn't have driver support for my newer GPU so I changed over to Nobara and it is very good.

Yup. Switched to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I bought a new NVMe to install Linux on, and a USB enclosure to stick the Windows NVMe in, so I can run Autodesk Fusion and VCarve occasionally. (It boots fine off of USB.)

I write code and browse the web, mostly. Linux is fine for that. I wish more commercial software supported Linux.

I haven't run a single game on it, or even installed Steam, because I have a Steam deck. But I guess you could say I game Linux, too.

I almost did today. Ran into a setback but will try again soon.

So far the biggest issues I've faced are League of Legends and funky network driver issues. One of those I can work at, the other not so much.

Just recently, less than a day ago, helped my dad install dual boot Mint ( cinnamon, yay :| ) on his laptop. Now I gotta move my windows partition onto the SSD I bought and had help installing so I can install mint on my desktop. Just in case he needs help with a problem and I can better diagnose potential problems/solutions. I'd rather switch to what I've got on my laptop ( MX w/ Plasma ) but someone has to be able to effectively play IT.

Had a relative switch to Linux recently. Lenovo IdeaPad computer running windows 10. The stuff was getting insanely slow and battery life was reduced ton the point that it was being a pain to use. Backed all the documents and data on a local instance of dufs running on home server and installed Linux Mint on it. Had minor issues regarding WiFi and Bluetooth. Solved the wifi one but bluetooth is still a bit unstable sometimes. Came back 1 week later and the user is delighted. Says that everything works 3 times faster than on windows and that battery lasts 3 times longer. They also went on themselves to look for open source alternatives to windows apps they were using and installed them. That's a win !