Linux

I migrated to linux 15 years ago. Focusing mostly on Fedora and Debian. Happy field any setup or config questions that anyone might have.

What I've seen in the past 3 years especially is how well supoorted most x86 systems and Chromebooks have become with modern installers, coreboot and mrchromebox.

If it wasn't for Microsoft Access I would be full timing Linux.

I had most of my machines on Linux except my main gaming rig.

I switched it to Bazzite and it worked okay but I was running into unexplainable performance issues (40 fps max in games where I was getting 100+).

I tried making some posts on it, but never got anywhere. Eventually switched to EndeavourOS and it’s been working like a charm since day 1 for the past few months.

Now pretty much all my games run great and some even better than Windows. So nice not having any more M$ interruptions throughout the day and having total control over the look and feel.

Been using Kubuntu LTS for about 7 months now. Started with 25.04, but could not get Orca Slicer for 3d printing to run. After some experimenting with distros, ended up going back but to the 24.04 version. Orca runs under X11, but not for me using Wayland. I really like Kubuntu's ability to customize the desktop, add widgets. Every game I've wanted to play works well through Steam. The only reason I keep Win10 Pro on an external ssd is to run Solid Edge CAD software occasionally. The game server I run is still on Win10 Pro as well, since trying to install game mods under Linux is a headache that I don't need.

I switched to Nobara in June 2025. Had everything working pretty quickly. Biggest downside for me was with my mouse. I use a g600 and while logitechs software sucks, I could atleast get it to swap profiles when I swap apps. Piper works okay, I just need to set time aside to figure out a solution for me. I did have some issues with Nobara's updater, which led me to swap to CachyOS. Worked almost flawlessly out of the box, had to do some minor tinkering. Now that I've figured it out though, I don't think I could ever go back to Nobara. I love the aur too much.

Great until a recent update, now my games run at 0.001 frame a second.

I am somehow managing to crash Firefox/LibreWolf on a daily basis now when using sites that load lots and lots of graphics in one page. I always knew infinite scroll was a BS mechanism.

I'm technically a little over a year. Didn't boot Windows once and eventually wiped the drive it was on maybe 4 months in.

I have a persistent issue with my PC not waking up from Sleep (maybe 70% of times it goes to sleep, it requires a hardware power off and a second restart after booting or else the network and mouse don't work), and despite dozens of searches, carefully reading systemd journals, and one two-week period where I thought a setting change had fixed it, it's still here, and I usually just shut my PC down instead of gambling and wasting time.

Proton has mostly been excellent, aside from a few Battle.net updates that caused extremely strange issues which ultimately required a bleeding edge Proton build to fix.

Oh and there have been a couple of times I've looked up issues with specific applications, only to find out it's a well known problem that the maintainer refuses to take responsibility for despite being aware of and active, but other users supply several options for workarounds.

I'm a Linux sysadmin, we use RHEL at work. So my experience is skewed.

Been gaming on Windows since the 90s. But I've had a Linux homelab since the mid-2000s. To be honest, I've never had an issue with gaming on Windows. I switched from Windows 7 to 8.1 when it first released because Windows 8 had direct ISO mounting. I switched to Windows 10 right when it released and the odd hiccup has happened, I've never had files go missing, settings revert, or performance drops due to updates. I updated to Windows 11 right when it released and been having the same experience, zero issues. Idk, I always build my PCs myself and I put a fresh copy of Windows on it, never used anything pre-installed or pre-made.

I've owned a Steam Deck since its launch and I think over time my experience with gaming on Linux has changed due to proton. I've tried switching in the past, but nothing ever *clicked and I just went back to Windows.

However, since the rise of AI, Microsoft locking Windows down, and wanting to "own" my PC, I switched to Linux on my main laptop and also switched on a secondary gaming desktop I have, just to have a test bed environment. So far it's been solid, but I currently utilize Moonlight and Apollo to stream from my windows gaming PC to my Beelink mini PC because I moved my gaming PC to the garage due to heat/noise.

So I'm in-between deciding on switching my Beelink to Linux and still use moonlight or just switch my main gaming PC over to Linux as well. I need to test Apollo/Moonlight on the entirely Linux clients I have. I do heavy modding for some games like Fallout and the TaleofTwoWastelands mod, so I need to test this on my Linux gaming PC...

As for a distro. I use RHEL at work, so I'm familiar with Fedora. I use Proxmox/Debian for my homelab(and Ubuntu containers). So I'm familiar with that side as well. I've tried Fedora, Kubuntu, Mint, Manjaro, Endeavor...but I always ran into a weird issue or something didn't feel "right" with the PC after a while. And I always see a bunch of YouTubers and people saying "XYZ distro is the best" but then another "new" distro comes out, so just tons of "flavor of the month" happening.

But recently I put CachyOS on my laptop and secondary PC and it's been surprisingly solid. Everything just seems to "work". I heard about Cachy over a year ago, but again, "flavor of the month" so I ignored it. But looking into it more and tried it out on my laptop, I was surprised with how much a Arch distro was "easy" to setup and use out of the box.

So gaming on Linux has been pretty similar to Windows. There's the odd issue with proton and CPU overhead I've experienced, but Cachy has helped a lot with Nvidia GPUs and I like that it isn't a "gaming" distro but a distro that is flexible.

I think the main "issue" with Windows to Linux is that people try to make Linux into Windows. Linux isn't a direct replacement to Windows, but it's a very solid operating system that is beyond flexible. I would say buy a second drive, install Linux on that and try it out, if you like it then take the plunge. If you don't, well wipe it and go back to Windows.

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

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

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.

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’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!

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.

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.

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