this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2026
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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?

OQB @kiol@discuss.online

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[–] andioop@programming.dev 9 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I'm happy! It Just Works. Windows 11 -> Linux.

  • I have had ONE WiFi problem that was my computer's fault the whole year; as opposed to half the times I open the computer.
  • One video game didn't Just Work, I had to tinker, but I got it working smoothly with mods.
  • A bit of trouble with flash drives initially because they were not formatted to something compatible with Linux. Once I learned that I managed to shuffle data around and format it to be compatible with MacOS, Linux, and my Windows VM. But Linux actually saved me and let me get an old flash drive working that did not work at all. Love reformatting on my distro, it's easier and more visual than when I tried to do it on Mac or Windows.
[–] ArsonButCute@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 3 days ago (2 children)

For the future regarding Flash drives. The different filesystems used by Mac and Windows (APFS and NTFS) can be used on Linux.

APFS support is sometimes built in, but if not can be installed by following the guide here(github). Note that this will require building from source, which can be scary if you haven't done it before, but is pretty easy if a bit tedious. This repo in particular has a good guide.

For NTFS support, you can install the read-only ntfs package, or the read-write ntfs-3g package. This utilizes the FUSE so you'll need the 'fuse' tools as well.

For the older Apple HFS+ filesystem you'll need hfsprogs. This is available from the AUR on Arch based distros, or in the Bookworm repo for Debian distros. For other distributions you may need to compile from source which you can find from the Debian package page.

[–] RamRabbit@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

I default to exFAT for flash drives. Every OS can use it out of the box, so it is the obvious choice.

[–] ArsonButCute@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 days ago

This is the logical choice on newly formatted drives regarding interoperability, but you really should use f2fs or another Copy on Write filesystem for your flash drives if it's an option.

[–] andioop@programming.dev 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Hey thank you for the good information; I starred your comment! This is the stuff I like seeing on programming.dev.

And I have built from source before—but considering how un-knowledgeable I feel compared to the average poster here, probably a good thing you included that reassurance that it's not so hard, since I feel just barely technical enough to be able to build from source. It's also friendly to drive-by readers at my level of expertise/knowledge or lower who have not built from source yet.