Linux

I switched this year from windows: overall really well. Although, I work in a couple apps (R Studio, Unity) that are just not friendly with Linux (neither are terrible but neither are as smooth as alternatives). And had some compatibility issues with certain gamepads.

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.

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.

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

I've been using Linux since 2008... It's been fine. I do not miss windows. I get to deal with enough of windows bullshit at work.

I want to make this happen. Last block for me is editing documents on my iPhone. I haven’t found a LibreOffice-compatible mobile suite that is solid yet. Latest try was Collabra Office but the navigation within-document just seems buggy and weirdly idiosyncratic. Am i missing something there or can anyone recommend an alternative?

its nice. just that it runs out of ram when using multiple apps compared to on windows, but i couldnt care less if thats a sacrifice i have to make to escape big tech.

I switched full-time last year. Went from windows 11 to fedora kde.

The switch took a bit of getting used to, and getting to know the innards of the distro (broke my sound typing pulse-audio related commands then discovering that fedora uses pipewire, this kind of stuff...)

But I'm kinda cheating since I've been using linux on all my other machines since windows 8 (had a hunch about imminent enshitification, windows 10 didn't contradict it and windows 11... ha!).

I've been using windows since the 9x days, windows 11 became unbearably shitty, despite my incredibly unbloated version (originaly a windows 7 install that got "upgraded" to 10 then 11), with unwanted features getting disabled as soon as they appeared. I had a windows 11 with a local account and no one-drive and they still disapointed me! (the last straw was copilot)

Now running linux full time is a real pleasure, some stuff break here and there but nothing unfixable (usually just downgrading the faulty package until it is fixed just works), games just work most of the time, the KDE desktop is the windows one but not shitty, from an alternate reality where desktop widgets took off, and where you are allowed to customise stuff. (had to wait years on windows 11 to finally get back the "display the window's title on the taskbar" option as I'm used to since 95)

The only thing I'm missing though : system-wide autoscroll bound to the mousewheel.