this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2026
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cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/34247715

Curious on the experiences of those recently migrating to Linux from Windows 10, Intel-based MacOS, etc. How is it being on Linux? Anything surprise or frustrate you?

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[–] Wispy2891@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

Way better than expected. Even if I was already using Linux on servers since decades, on desktop I preferred Windows. But my laptop was with 8gb soldered RAM and Windows 11 is basically unusable with that amount. I wanted to switch.

But my past experience was bad, too often stuff was broken. Used Ubuntu in 2016, couldn't stand it => revert to win10, tried Manjaro in 2019, one day I fucked with some AUR and it could not boot => revert to win10. I left thinking that Linux on the desktop is not ready.

Then last summer the constant updates on my windows laptop made it unusable. It simply doesn't leave enough memory to use a web browser with more than a couple tabs.

At the same time at work a windows 11 update introduced a very annoying bug: after standby, windows would switch the resolution of displayport monitors to 800*600 and destroy my window layout, with everything moved to the top left corner. I had to use a tiling window manager like glazewm as a temporary fix until Microsoft fixed the bug (still annoying waiting for a couple seconds to have the windows rearranged when the monitor went to standby) and I fell into the rabbit hole of tiling managers. I watched videos where some YouTubers showed how l33t is cachyos with hyprland with their magic dotfiles and I fell for the meme.

For the first few weeks it was awesome, then of course hyprland deprecates syntax without warnings and I started to get errors after the first update. Also the concept of using someone else's dotfiles is wrong as they're highly opinionated. They should do videos about how to make your Linux experience similar to theirs, not "clone this configuration as a black box", because then you would have no idea how to fix problems when the updates come. But it seems like their priority is getting stars on their GitHub, rather than actually helping people. "Just blindly run this script as sudo" is a wrong concept, IMHO.

Then when hyprland changed syntax AGAIN without warning, I was fed up, didn't want to spend hours to debug the problem so I spent hours to reinstall another distro. I read that Linus is using fedora with plain gnome and some frippery extensions because "it just works" and... OMG. It just works! I'm shocked how good vanilla GNOME has become since the last time I tried it in 2019! It's now fully usable even for a noob! And I like those extensions too. Modern but classic. Easy but powerful. And the apps in the GNOME circle are so polished. I was shocked to see pika backup, user friendly but not dumbed down.

[–] ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online 2 points 2 months ago

Pretty damn good. Most of my issues are really minor. I feel a lot more secure and a lot less surveilled. Not perfect, but much better.

[–] Syltti@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

Running PikaOS (Niri) on a RYZEN 5800x3D and RTX 3080. No real issues to speak of aside of a few issues with some games. I still have another system with Windows 10 running android emulation (LD Player) for idle games other main games. VR... is on the back burner for now (used Windows 11 on another drive for that).

All in all, happy.

[–] NorthoftheBorder@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Doing okay. Switched from MacOS to Linux - Ubuntu and Tuxedo in the past four months. They are great for home use but I am not 100% ready to use them as my work computers. Yet. But hopefully soon. Gaming is great using Tuxedo, although it was a little difficult to install software on the KDE system as I had no real idea what I was doing :)

[–] kiol@discuss.online 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Something I've found useful is adding flatpak support to the KDE Discover store.

To install Flatpak support in KDE Discover, you need to install the Flatpak backend package. For Ubuntu-based distributions, you can run sudo apt install plasma-discover-backend-flatpak. After installation, restart your system and add the Flathub repository using flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
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[–] Naho_Zako@piefed.zip 1 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] frog@lemmus.org 1 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] Comtief@piefed.social 1 points 2 months ago

great, everything works, after some tinkering

[–] luluberlue@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] Lets_Disco@retrolemmy.com 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I moved a couple months back fully and have tried quite a few distros (before I figured out the hardware issue I was having on my Acer laptop). I have mostly used Pop OS (pre-Cosmic) and now Nobara is my daily driver.

Nobara is fantastic, it suits my use case perfectly and has everything ready to go essentially. The set up was very smooth and maintenance is a breeze. I did try Cachy too (when i still had my annoying hardware fault) and would love to try it again at some stage but I'm settled on Nobara and feel like the Fedora base is the perfect platform for learning more Linux in depth.

I was initially in love with Gnome and hated KDE for how it tried to copy Windows with the bottom left menu - I wanted something fresher. But i have used it more and customised it so its less like Windows and I adore KDE now as well.

I still use Windows on a separate laptop for work and its hilarious how shit Windows 11 is now, especially in comparison to using such a beautiful desktop environment on my personal laptop. So many things are broken and I just hate the fact that its almost entirely spyware, being filled with vibe coded ai shite and they still try and serve you ads when searching for stuff.

Fuck Microslop! Will never buy another Windows machine.

[–] SacralPlexus@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

Built a new PC last January and started fresh with Win11 on one drive and Nobara on another. I was able to play all of the games I wanted on Nobara just fine. After a month or two I had a problem develop where I was unable to update because it would start giving errors and the update process wouldn’t complete.

I decided to try out Bazzite and have been with it ever since. I very very rarely boot into Windows. I highly recommend giving it a shot!

[–] El_Scapacabra@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Went from win11 to Bazzite a little while ago and the experience has been pure bliss. I even set up a printer and I swear to God it only took 2 tries and it worked. That never would have gone so smoothly on Windows.

But the best of all? No more OneDrive!

[–] jhdeval@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

Funny you say that i was playing agame in windows and my wife asked me to print sometging. So i went to print it and windows said fuck you. Linux on the other set it up before i even looked for it

[–] DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 months ago (7 children)

I want people on Nvidia hardware. None of this AMD shit. I already know AMD works great on Linux

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[–] Blaster_M@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I've run Debian and Ubuntu servers for many years. I currently run Fedora on my laptop, and dual boot my desktop with Fedora and Win11 as I slowly plan out and implement my Linux translation. My one big holdup is the VR support still lacking, which I hope gets fixed by the Steam Frame's release.

[–] YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today 1 points 2 months ago

My laptop got bazzite. I still have a Windows partition for a couple things. But it defaults to bazzite.

[–] Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

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

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