Linux

Personal laptop is on Linux and working fine since I got it last year. Windows gaming machine is the next candidate for a move over this year.

Bazzite. It's fine. I miss some games with anti-cheat.

Started on Bazzite and got irritated with how hard it was to do things the way I expected because it’s immutable. Now I’m using Kubuntu and I’m having a decent time since I’ve worked through the setup for what I want. Audio sink for virtual surround works okay, gaming isn’t that big of a fight with Steam and Lutris, most of my work applications are there, I have a windows vm for the odd thing here and there. I’d like noise cancellation like Krisp. I’ve found a few instances where documentation sucks and I have made unsupported things work by simply installing a package, such as my remote access software for work. It stays officially supported but that’s in a specific context that is not the norm. Installing default-jre makes it work like it does on windows. A lot of the forums and Linux oriented communities seem elitist about some specific flavor they like and if you don’t inherently know how to do some obscure procedure when asking for help you get snooty responses, but that’s not a bad as it was when I first tried Linux out.

Good.

*fixed my trashed Ubuntu partition, trying mint

it's solid dude 🤙

I started daily driving a year ago with Fedora Silverblue (Atomic) which uses GNOME because people said Atomic distros are friendlier to beginners, and Fedora already had a good reputation for working fairly well out the box. The only issue I had was a Bluetooth issue, and you can rollback to previous kernel versions to wait until a fix is made. If I was just a browse the internet and play games on Steam kind of person, I think I would have loved it. But I did try to tinker and do things that were far to difficult to figure out how to change on an Atomic distro, especially since I couldn't find instructions or documentation for my distro, so I moved to regular Fedora KDE after a few months and I absolutely love it.

No annoying pop-ups, no stalking, no weird shit being enabled by default, just an OS that does what YOU want it to do. I am comfortable with using the terminal due to taking a Linux course, but I feel that you could do a lot without having to use it. Plus, most sites and github projects give you basic installation guides anyway. The only two issues I have had were Bluetooth and my touchpad not working. The solution for these two issues were simple, but I couldn't find the information for literal months. I solved the Bluetooth issue by doing a power reset, apparently you have to do that when you get a kernel update. The touchpad issue was it disabled itself in the system settings one day. That's literally it. My computer hasn't blown up, my mic and camera always work, I have found FOSS alternatives for almost everything, I don't game much on laptop but I've gotten old Japanese 32-bit games to work on Lutris, etc.

Maybe I'll distro-hop in the future, but it's only for the pure curiousity and fun, not out of necessity or broken tech. In fact, Linux just makes tech fun. It makes my laptop feel brand new, and makes me go "Wow. I love using technology."

The only reason I still have my Windows partition is because my college uses Lockdown Browser for online tests, and I don't want to fuck up a no-retakes test or do testing in person. Once I graduate, I'm probably nuking that partition, I feel like barfing every time I boot into it.

Installed Pop!_os maybe a year ago. It's been fine.

I couldn't quite figure out how to make the bg3 mod tools play nice. There's probably some proton prefix stuff I'd have to do and I gave up before getting too deep.

I bet the next time I want to play a game with mods it's going to be a bit of a headache.

Other than that, it's fine. I ran mint for about a year before this, with an interlude of windows 11 that came with the desktop.

I switched about a year ago to fedora cinnamon. Less frustration than windows, even though cinnamon kinda sucks compared to KDE that I switched to immediately after the first time I tried it (should have tried it months sooner, literally only took a few mins to install and check out).

While I wouldn't say that there were zero problems, I did notice that I spend less time troubleshooting or searching for how to change something on Linux than I did on windows by the end. Also, going from empty disk to gaming involved fewer steps, at least with an AMD gpu.

I work in IT and run a number of Linux servers and desktops, but my main gaming computer hasn't run Linux since about 2021. Around mid-2021 I got tired of not playing certain games due to lack of Linux compatibility and realized my Windows skills were slipping so I switched it over to Windows 10

September of 2025 I installed a new SSD into my desktop and installed Bazzite (I have a bad habit of breaking my Linux desktops through too much tinkering, so they accumulate configuration quirks that I can work around but become more and more of headache. I describe it as being like a mechanics car to non-technical users, it works perfectly but you can't use third gear, you have to cycle the heat before the AC goes and you use the screwdriver in the glove compartment to change the radio station) so immutable seemed like a really safe bet, plus its already preconfigured 80% of the way to how I like things which is closer than other distros

I fully expected to find some key game that I play a lot or software that I rely on wouldn't work under wine/proton, but everything just kept working perfectly so it's stuck for over a quarter of a year already. Also I've had less problems with KDE than I've previously had when running KDE 5+ years ago, so definitely some improvements there

It's been a complete mish mash of greatness and tragedies. Not a week goes by without me having a bit of both. Only time I've had to boot back into windows was for a bios update that I couldn't get to work through Linux, but I've also had to make a few sacrifices and accept that I can't have everything good in life on Linux. But the opposite is also true, you can't have everything good on Windows, so I'm content for now.

I've been liking it! So far, I've tried Mint, Zorin, Bazzite, Endeavour and Cachy. All were pretty nice, but I think Cachy is my favorite so far, even if my main machine is running Bazzite atm (I just didn't have the time to swap the distro yet).

There's actually a lot of features that are much cooler than anything I ever did on Win10 (I probably could have used them there too, but I didn't). Like KDEConnect! It's super convenient! And doing stuff like running Android Apps via Waydroid (I ran Revanced that way for a while because I'm just not used to watching Youtube in a browser).
I'm also starting to get used to installing things via the software center instead of just googling "Software X download" and clicking on the first .exe file I find (yup, I'm aware of the security implications of that, I just uninstalled the Microsoft store from my Win10 very early on so I never really had a dedicated software store... and was too dumb for things like UnigetUI)

The performance for games has also been crazy good. My laptop couldn't run Sekiro on Win10, now it runs completely fine on high graphical settings. Even Cyberpunk works somehow! I didn't think that my 2018 Laptop had this much life left :0

I moved to Linux Mint last year, and while I expected it to be easier for me because I had prior exposure to linux in general, it's been smoother than I expected! I feel like I'm in charge of my machine again.

One frustration I had was with one or two programs which I wanted to run which have been just incompatible with any version of wine/proton I could try it with, I'll have to get a windows VM or something for these rare cases, but hope I won't have to use it in the future

I’ve been on Kubuntu since November. Since I use my main PC as a media PC, it took some setup. I’ve had a few hard crashes, particularly when playing final fantasy XIV and using the native discord client, but it’s fine. Rebooting is fast, and I’ve got all my tools setup just fine with the game and I couldn’t be happier! I don’t feel held back by Linux like I did with windows. I can make my own quick tools. The biggest problem was getting a switcher script for my mouse profiles, but it’s just a simple startup script that runs a command on window focus changes.

I haven’t had to boot back into windows once yet!

I swapped over early last year, so I'm getting close to passing your one year qualifier, but I'd say it's been fantastic.

My main concern was stability and gaming. I'm on pure Arch and it's been completely stable. I haven't done any deep configuration except for trying to make my yubikey my sudo password and I did not do that well so I had to roll that change back. So in my opinion, nearly anyone can set up Arch if they have a good guide, treat it like a normal computer, and keep it working for at least a year without almost any issue.

Gaming has also been nearly perfect. There's been a handful of games I couldn't play for one reason or another. Battlefield had anti-cheat issues, but tbh I would only have gotten it to play with a friend and I'm happy to not give that company money. Robocop was the most recent game that was struggling despite being platinum. I'll try again later and I assume it'll be better. I think the only other one I can remember is the Marathon Beta, which is a bummer but again I'm okay if they decide to never turn on the Linux support (because I think their anti-cheat is Linux compatible they just haven't done the work yet) because I don't think Bungie deserves my money.

So ya, id recommend Linux for nearly anyone.

I migrated to Ubuntu from Windows 10 when it became end-of-life last year. I had a major head start beforehand because my work allowed me to dabble in Linux for a good 2 years beforehand, though! It's been great! Pretty much everything that you "can't do" on Windows has some sort of open source alternative. Can't have Microsoft Office on Linux? Download Libreoffice for free! Can't have Adobe Creative Cloud? Just download Krita and Kdenlive for free! Can't have Microsoft Edge? What on earth do you want it for?? You don't really need to use the terminal for most things, but it can make a lot of things much easier and quicker if/when you do get your head round it.

The only notable weak point is a few specific online videogames. Valve Anti Cheat really doesn't play well with Linux (which is really dumb because Valve are so well known for supporting Linux). I've managed to get Left 4 Dead 2 playing online using "Steam Runtime 1.0 (scout)" but I haven't found anything that works for Team Fortress 2. That being said, most other online games like Bloons TD6 and Worms WMD work perfectly natively, 90% of games released last year were natively Linux compatible, and the CEO of GOG said they'd like to support Linux more too, so even this is an improving situation!

Installed Linux Mint on my old personal laptop (Dell XPS 9560) and unfortunately ran into some issues that made me switch back to Windows. I really want to make it work

It seems to have revealed either a hardware bug or failing hardware in the NVMe drive.

First problem was log spam that filled up the partition:

2025-12-29T12:15:46.439880-05:00 redacted kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1d.0: AER: Correctable error message received from 0000:04:00.0
2025-12-29T12:15:46.439934-05:00 redacted kernel: nvme 0000:04:00.0: PCIe Bus Error: severity=Correctable, type=Physical Layer, (Receiver ID)
2025-12-29T12:15:46.439936-05:00 redacted kernel: nvme 0000:04:00.0:   device [126f:2262] error status/mask=00000001/0000e000
2025-12-29T12:15:46.439938-05:00 redacted kernel: nvme 0000:04:00.0:    [ 0] RxErr                  (First)
2025-12-29T12:15:46.439939-05:00 redacted kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1d.0: AER: Multiple Correctable error message received from 0000:04:00.0
2025-12-29T12:15:46.439940-05:00 redacted kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1d.0: PCIe Bus Error: severity=Correctable, type=Data Link Layer, (Transmitter ID)
2025-12-29T12:15:46.439941-05:00 redacted kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1d.0:   device [8086:a118] error status/mask=00001000/00000000
2025-12-29T12:15:46.439943-05:00 redacted kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1d.0:    [12] Timeout               
2025-12-29T12:15:46.439944-05:00 redacted kernel: nvme 0000:04:00.0: PCIe Bus Error: severity=Correctable, type=Physical Layer, (Receiver ID)
2025-12-29T12:15:46.439945-05:00 redacted kernel: nvme 0000:04:00.0:   device [126f:2262] error status/mask=00000001/0000e000
2025-12-29T12:15:46.439946-05:00 redacted kernel: nvme 0000:04:00.0:    [ 0] RxErr                  (First)

Some forum posts I found (example) suggested that this was a hardware bug and I could set pcie_aspm=off in grub to work around it. This stopped the log spam and everything seemed to be working fine.

Later while I was doing some programming, everything froze for a while. When it came back, the partition was set to readonly. It wouldn't boot on restart and loaded up busybox instead. I was able to set it to writable, but it happened again soon after.

I decided to switch back to Windows where there doesn't seem to be any issues.

I really want to make it work. If it's failing hardware then I have no choice but to replace the drive, but if it's just a bug then I want to find a fix without buying new hardware. That would kind of defeat the point for me and I don't want to spend the money.

I would appreciate any help. I booted into Mint again to grab the logs and I really want to keep using it.

Well I use Arch, btw..... So pretty good

Mint since May. Preferring to work from home these days not to have to deal with Winslop 11 on my work laptop.

Been on Linux desktop since 2003, never looked back.

Don't get me wrong, Linux has its bugs here and there, like all software, but the difference is night and day.

FREEDOM! I can do whatever the fuck I want with my computer without "nope, can't do this, that requires complicated APIs and development, that requires more paid licenses to do on your own goddamn computer"

I've built so much stuff over the years, it's like a giant Lego box to me

Zorin is great. I had one nagging hardware issue with an old, strangely important USB device. But after tons of digging, I found some ancient drivers on the Wayback Machine that actually worked. I couldn't believe it.

Zero complaints now!

I’ve switched from win 10 to mint for an old i9900k and 1080 to run Helldivers 2 and it worked so well I put it on my newest rig to replace it (9800x3d RX 9070xt) with little to no problems. It does take a little while to get things tailored to how you want. The bios clock keeps being off (but OC settings remain) so maybe the battery is dying already. Been putting off replacing it since it’ll require a bit of disassembly.

I then tried Bazzite on the i9900k and ran into a couple problems. Multiple monitors pose issues with the mouse not staying on the game and requires an applet or app to keep it contained (no issues with Mint). HD2 runs the same performance but it stutters every second or two, making it unplayable. I’ll have to see if I can troubleshoot some more or try a different distro.

Bazzite. Fucking love it. Have had to spend some googling and learning and troubleshooting. But it's incredible how much shit just works. Definitely recommend getting comfortable with terminals, shell scripts, etc. You can do some cool shit.

I love ffmpeg.

I've been using Bazzite for months and I love it. It's different but I've been able to figure things out. Zero show stoppers for me and no real problems.

Is great. No notes.