Linux

Pretty damn awesome and loving every minute of not having to use Windows

Running Ubuntu for 2 weeks now. Everything is a struggle, but I end up figuring it out usually. Using mostly FOSS. Not much I can't do without windows, but I fail to really see a reason to run this over windows.

https://lemmy.ca/comment/21276696

I just put an old SSD and Linux on my decade old laptop, and it's like a whole new computer

ofc, it was probably mostly the hard drive that was the problem to begin with, seeing as it took 10 minutes to boot up and log in, and another five before it would open a web or file browser...

Made the jump to Linux about a month ago. Too much bloat on Win11. With the forthcoming AI bullshit I decided to take the leap and see how much I liked it. I installed mint on an old laptop. I had to test it out and was surprised at how easy it was decided to dual boot my main gaming PC because there are still some games that require anti-cheat that I can’t play on Linux. But Once they figure out how to do that, I’ll be a complete convert. It’s amazing how much faster and smoother. My PC is running fedora.

I was using Windows 10 LTSC for a bit before Home/Pro editions reached EoL. My past experiences with Linux were all such a significant addition of frustration; I couldn't justify switching to Linux.

After a string of back-to-back hardware failures, I'm back to using a 10+ year old desktop I built. Ended up trying trying Fedora 42 with KDE and suddenly had none of the issues I had with past Linux attempts. My three biggest complaints before about Linux had been random Bluetooth device incompatibility, Nvidia support being trash, and most Steam games requiring extra commands and constant troubleshooting to get running decently.

I feel like a lot of those issues were from me starting with Arch derivatives on niche laptop hardware that was already beginning to fail. My experience with Fedora has been fantastic. My biggest problems now have been: -KDE discover store is really inconsistent with its packages. I would not expect the average Windows "user"(bought a PC and that's what it came with) to bother understanding the difference between a flatpak and a native package, and would get really annoyed when stuff is out of date or mis-configured out of the box. I had a better experience using a GUI in Arch with the AUR to install software, ironically enough. -There are a few things, ie Nvidia drivers, non-free codecs, non flatpak Steam, that have inconsistent community documentation on how to install them. These become immediately bad first impressions on people switching from Windows, and I think its important that they are clear to install properly as possible.

Other than that, Fedora is stable and runs great. I'm using a Nvidia GPU and have no issues with it(this time, at least...). A lot of my software was already open source, but I run a few Windows applications, besides Steam games, with Wine; rarely do I have to do any extra configuration. KDE Plasma as a desktop environment has given me the customization and control out of the box that I have been missing from Windows for over a decade, while Fedora has some sane defaults for it that make it accessible to Windows users expecting something a bit more familiar.

There's always a weird quirk here and there, but I have had my fair share of troubleshooting on Windows before as well. I feel like Linux as a home PC OS is mature enough that people who don't do much on the PC anyway could find their way around it, while it's still going to be an annoying learning curve for people who see end user software as a hobby. Entirely usable though.

Obligatory I don't play games with anti cheat and I don't use streaming services with DRM. I have a few games with Denuvo, and haven't had any problems arise that needed me to switch Proton versions that end up triggering install lock outs.

Great. Only issue so far has been a specific VPN for work which does not have a Linux installer and no drag and drop replacement for Snagit. But that's just work stuff, everything on the private side works flawlessly for me.

I switched to Fedora. I'm overall happy with the switch and the learning experience, but it could have gone smoother. I'm not the most tech savvy and don't have a ton of time to dedicate to tinkering. Getting the Nvidia driver running correctly was a hassle. Currently I have Windows 10 and Fedora partitioned on my nvme and I'm fighting with partition managers to reallocate space around. Yesterday I installed a new SATA SSD with the ultimate goal of migrating Windows there and keeping Fedora on the nvme.

I'm going to stick with it because I like the experience and the community, but once I get everything to a workable state I don't see myself distro hopping.

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.

Fantastic! Just switched my main PC to Cachy OS the other day from Linux Mint (previously W10) because I started to find it too restrictive. Tried out Hyprland for a bit and it was a lot of fun but I don't have the time to fully customise everything, so went to Plasma. I'm saving Hyprland for when I retire.

My laptop is still running Mint Cinnamon (dual boot W11) but I'm contemplating on another OS that's more friendly to Unity and Unreal game development. Any suggestions? I keep getting burst compiler errors in Unity, even on the latest LTS.

Pretty good. But I've been dabbling in Linux for the past decade or so and already had a Linux based home server. But in the past year I finally swapped all of my non-work computers over to linux. If games won't run, I won't play them.

I'm running CachyOS on my desktop workstation, laptop, and my handheld Lenovo legion go. Unraid on my server.

Edit: the only issue I had with the CachyOS installs so far is my remote desktop solution, which admittedly I don't even use often. VNC is ok. I liked NoMachine for a while but it messed up my graphics drivers or something weird. I don't remember the specifics, I just flat out nuked it from my machines. I need to try rustdesk

It's been amazing. My RAM is singing praises with how much better the OS is at handling memory.

Good.

About a year ago, I installed kubuntu on a laptop that couldn't officially support windows 11. So far, I've only had minor annoyances.

I had a program that wouldn't work when I first switched, despite being supported. I installed MakeMKV from the built-in repository, and it wouldn't detect my optical drive. I installed from a separate repo, and it still wouldn't work. I compiled it from source, and I don't think it even launched anymore. Then one day, while randomly flailing, some combination of uninstalling, reinstalling, and random commands I found online made it work for no reason I could discern. I haven't had a problem with it since.

If my optical drive can't read a disc, the eject button doesn't work. I have to either reboot or use the terminal to eject the disc.

Every once in a while, something (presumably Firefox) locks up the entire system. Mouse won't move, keyboard is unresponsive, the works. It's a decade-old laptop, but it had a decent processor for the time, and I upgraded the RAM, so that shouldn't really be happening as often as it does.

It's been great overall, after about one full year now. The only major complaints are keyboard-related. Between my work-supplied macbook that runs macOS, my old macbook that runs GNOME, and my desktop that runs KDE, keeping my muscle memory in tune with keybinds and shortcuts and window management is a headache. Maybe sometimes I'm thrown off by some command line tool not being available on Mac or Linux or it's named differently.

tried cachyos. a game froze. restarted the machine. doesnt boot up anymore. found 2 post about it. no solution. i might try pop and nobara next weekend, but i dont see myself dailydrive linux in the next 10 years.

not goin well.

Been with EndeavourOS on all my devices for the past year and it's pure bliss.

Buddy of mine decided to switch to Debian like a month ago, I warned him it’s Linux but “raw” and warned him of outdated packages an such, he said no worries. Proceeds to AI his way through literally everything, broke numerous packages by going to Trixie Backports for newer drivers and has now installed windows on a spare 500Gb HDD so he can play Fortnite with a chick he met on tinder.

Want to take bets on how long his Debian install lasts?

I've come over from macOS over the past year or ao, and I'm mostly enjoying it. Though it's not quite so critical for me to completely replicate my setup because I do still use my Macbook for stuff.

General purpose computing for work is now handled via a machine running Kubuntu, and broadly speaking I don't miss macOS at all. There are some things that are more awkward (lack of lossless Apple Music without needing WinBoat or Waydroid), and music library software as a whole is nowhere near as...clean...as just using iTunes/Music. As far as I've found so far, that is.

I am having trouble with my radio broadcasting setup though. The way it works on my Mac is I use Mixxx pushed through OBS. I do have a physical mixing board, but it's more for live DJing, so only have faders for the first two tracks. Which is fine because I have an app on my iPad that gives me a bunch of virtual MIDI controls. I'm damned if I can get a Linux equivalent of that to work. In theory my iPad app do it, but in practice I can't get Mixxx to see it. I've tried a few MIDI apps on an old Ssumg tab I have, but have had varying levels of success; none of them good enough for broadcast. It's not massively important though, so I'll keep chipping away until I'm happy with a solution.

Having access to actual, real life, modern gaming is NIIIIIICE though! My computer is my wife's old PC, so it's rocking an Nvidia 1060. Not exactly cutting edge, I know, but it's adequate for the games I want to play. And Proton is SO MUCH NICER to use than Whisky on macOS. For a start, it actually works most of the time. Coming from nearly 20 years of Mac ownership, being able to just play a game without having to jump through hoops is WONDERFUL.

All in all, I'm happy to be finally getting to grips with how Linux can work for me, and don't really mind some of the limitations. I'd rather have friction for free than a seamless experience at the hands of the likes of Apple and Google. Besides which, it's fun trying to figure out how to fix something I might have broken, or how to better optimise something.

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

On and off linux user since ages past. Not the most linux guru type. I'm fine with opening the terminal and doing things as needed, but I still have to look up half the command, for example.

Anyway... windows / m$ finally just pissed me off so much I switched entirely to CachyOS / KDE for my daily driver. I tried a few distros with limited success before settling into that one. I wanted something that would have fairly fresh updates and be easy to setup for gaming. CachyOS really was a pretty seamless experience. Their "just make gaming work" button just made gaming work (I'm still on nvidia for the time being unfortunately).

There is one hiccup that is a common problem with all linux distros I have used for one reason or another. Wake from sleep is a thorn in linux's side. The s3 deep sleep issue hasn't been a problem on cachy as far as I can tell... but there is an feature of nvidia where it tries to save the vram components on sleep and then reinitialize them on wake using a daemon or a service... but sometimes this crashes (as far as I can tell) on sleep... so it goes to sleep... and the system wakes up fine.. but it will never actually reactivate the screen.. and it waits for video to kick in... so it's essentially locking the system and I have to force reboot. It isn't every single time, and the lastest patch of the driver seems to have made it less frequent, but I still don't leave anything open I'm afraid of losing when I put the system to sleep because of it. If that could be fixed, it would be basically running perfectly.

I've basically gotten all my apps back up and running (with one windows only app that I don't use regularly so it's fine). Gaming has been great. I can't think of much that I play that hasn't worked by just clicking "play" in steam or heroic... and when they don't work... it's almost always just a quick trip to protondb to figure out which proton version I need to use and then it's fine.

Actually I have found one other weird bug where discord sometimes keeps running, but won't allow me to type at all. I can see incoming text, and close the app normally so it isn't crashed, but I can't type or paste into it until I restart it. It's some kind of weird error with electron from what I understand but I haven't done a deep dive to fix it yet.

So after fulling switching to linux and helping a couple other people also switch for daily driver, I would say we're at the point where linux is ready for the "average user". We've been creeping up on that for a while, but there's been a lot of improvements to QoL in the last couple years that make it a feasible prospect for most people at this point. Some distros like linuxmint I feel like you could install and just use without every needing the terminal or having much of anything missing from "non-techie normal user" standpoint.

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.

Been using bazzite. It’s fine took some getting used to for a few things. Annoying that you can’t really use most posted solutions because immutable so, eh. Too lazy to swap to something else.

Biggest issues were mostly that, having to find a flatpack/appimg solution. Having to figure out DLL installs on proton tricks, setting my default mic in proton tricks, etc.

Getting an SNES emulator that works with archipelago was annoying but eventually got that working.

Can’t figure out syncing my Iphone music tho, so that is annoying.

I'll enjoy it for like a month and then something awful will happen and I'll say well this is pretty terrible. This month my PC just stopped waking up from sleep. No response from keyboard, mouse inputs. Tried various different devices to wake the PC up, nada. Only returns on reboot. Arch btw

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 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

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.

Been on Mint for a bit over a year. Only slight annoyances. My tax guy couldn't open the password protected .zip files I made. My printer has two trays, can only seem to print from the photo one. And getting the drivers installed for my TP-Link wifi adapter was a little bit of a pain. Other than that, everything has been great. It looks good, runs good, Games good. No issues with my NVidia card.

Is great. No notes.

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!

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

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.

It’s been okay. I’ve swapped from zorin to fedora to Ubuntu and have some ups and downs. A few windows apps. Have to use I’ve been mostly able to get going in bottle with moderate success. I use autodesk fusion and I lament no Linux version and freecad is not my jam but I have a Mac still for that.