Linux

The sense of ownership and control the Linux experience offers is something I've never felt with Windows.

This is why Mint is what I always recommend to people who are switching over for the first time. Congrats and welcome.

I got 35+ years into Windows. I'm the guy they get to "fix" stuff in PROD. I fight Windows all day. I'm not doing that at home anymore.

Linux Mint is terrific, also recommend it to new Linux users. I just want things easy, clean, and fast. Also, fuck Microsoft.

Debian + KDE

Plus now I have the benefit of no preinstalled spyware or bloatware

Now you get to choose the bloatware and spyware yourself! /s

My brother recently texted me asking for advice about installing Mint on an old laptop. He is the one that got me into computers as a kid, and he has worked at Microsoft for maybe 25 years. It made me so happy lol.

welcome home! <3

You'll probably be installing programs and changing a lot of settings over the next few weeks. Make sure you use TimeShift (pre-installed on Mint) to make system snapshots. (It works like System Restore on Windows. You can even run it from your Linux Live flash drive if you mess up something so badly that you can't boot from the hard drive).

LibreOffice comes pre-installed and you can use Thunderbird for email. And if you used Steam to play games on Windows, you're in for a nice surprise. Steam has a native Linux client and it uses Proton / Wine to let you play your Windows games on Linux. It's handled everything I've thrown at except for a couple of older games.

Welcome to the club :D I did the same thing last summer and also switched to Mint and never looked back. So basically Im a fellow newbie. It was the best decision as everything just works minus the windows shenanigans.

Even gaming is almost perfect (apart from the occasional tinkering here and there) its more than great. All my games work great, some better than under win.

Im even in the middle of building my new gaming PC exclusively for Linux in mind.

As I have to use win 11 for work (work laptop) I can see switching was the right decision as every update makes it more annoying and bloated.

Welcome to stability. You are in control. sudo responsibly.

Linux works great generally. My wife and I have been using for 20 years since we dumped windows.

The deal is that Linux is great for FOSS but limited for commercial apps. One generally needs to deside based on apps they run. Hardware is similar.

Welcome! Be sure if to reach out to the community if you have any issues or questions. We love to help!

Welcome to the team.
I hope you brought your bouncing shoes because as soon as you'll get comfortable, you'll start hopping a lot

Welcome to the dark side, we have cookies

Having said that, just as a suggestion, take a look at KDE. It feels a bit more windows like, is extremely customizable and as such can be made to work exactly how you want it

The only thing I had to work around was downloading the deb build of Discord Canary to enable audio output in Discord streams since it was only recently added to Discord's dev/beta build (Canary).

Keep in mind Linux is all about FOSS, if the software you use doesn’t have all the features you want look around for alternatives.

I encountered this same issue when installing Discord and opted to use Vencord instead.

Welcome! We are happy to have you. Remember, RTFM. ;)

Hell yeah!

Congrats! I'm excited to see your upcoming posts on distro hopping.

The secret of Linux is, if all your hardware works, it's actually easier to use for casual users. Most people nowadays use computers for web browsing and maybe playing media and light office tasks. A Linux Mint setup will have everything you need for that either preinstalled or ready to get fun the software store. If you don't need anything else, then it gets it of your way and just works. No viruses, little danger of malware, no crud to uninstall, no Microsoft account, no nagging apps, no ads, no attempts to upsell to paid cloud services or Pro, and no AI.

The problem arises when you want to go beyond that, and there's no obvious path ahead,v then people not used to the Linux way of doing things may run into trouble. But 90% of users, if someone sets it up for them, will do fine.

Glad to hear you're on Linux, living a more sovereign life and having an easy time with it. Mint does indeed work very well for me too. I put Mint XFCE on a ~2015 laptop that Windows was bloating down to dysfunctional. Now it works reasonably well.

You'll hear other people say Linux works well until it doesn't. Well so does Windows. It has many issues too that people tend to not mention. Don't get discouraged by those people. Most of the time Linux is totally fine for normal users, it's people trying to do abnormal things that then causes issues.

really the only annoying thing about linux nowadays is finding out the name of the software

I've just made the Switch to Linux for my gaming PC. I'm running Bazzite right now and it mostly worked. I had some trouble with my Bluetooth controller and speakers but they started working after I switched over to desktop mode and then restarted.

A lot of the troubles I'm having are mainly because it's an atomic distro instead of a normal one but that's on me. I figured an atomic distro would make it less likely I would accidentally break something.

Next stop will be your privacy journey which would completely break your chains towards Discord which gave you trouble.

Welcome to a world outside of enshittification!

Cinnamon is a dope desktop manager, too, good choices all around.

Congrats! There’s probably a few things not perfect that you haven’t noticed yet-but ya, despite what the trolls say, Linux pretty much just works these days. Oftentimes better than windows.

Sometimes you’ll run into a program that is windows only and that’s a pain. The first thing I do is try to find a linux alternative-sometimes you can sometimes you can’t (stuff designed to interface with your hardware can be a pain sometimes - controllers, rgb lights, fan speeds, motherboard stuff). Bottles works great for running windows programs. And if all else fails a windows vm.

Yeah I have a Ser5 as a living room PC, wiped windows and have Nobara running on it. Linux is great - browse the web, play games, stream videos, and all with interfaces that actually work on a TV. I don't miss Windows at all.

welcoms man

Good on you! It's a pretty good time to be transiting to linux. I transitioned a few years ago, and there were a lot of things that sucked back then, that just aren't an issue anymore.

While I love Elgato hardware from a design/price standpoint, it's a shame it doesn't all work on Linux. I had my Wave XLR for a year or so, but replaced it with a Scarlett Solo so I could use it on Linux.

Yeah I used to use Ubuntu as a Linux desktop a few years ago. I just came back to install Fedora on my desktop and the whole process was super easy. Even for gaming, Nvidia drivers, Steam with proton, etc. all set up with zero command line interaction, troubleshooting or even looking up guides or anything. It was intuitive and works.

Literally the hardest part was I couldn't find my USB stick and ended up improvising with an old SD card as installation media.

The compatibility for gaming on Linux today is generally really good. The whole experience is really polished.

From what i remember my experience was the same when i started my journey with PopOS. Ofcourse it probably did help that i was already an amd user when i was still using windows, i already hated nvidia years before switching lol. I went down the rabbithole and now i'm on Void linux. Also used arch and NixOS in the past. I love being able to setup these minimal distros to my liking, and after that it just works and gets out of the way.

Cool! Out of curiosity, what was the trigger and/or motivation to make the switch?

As someone who uses RHEL for work every time I have to set something up on a windows system I groan. It really boils down to the app, some are very easy to use but it seems anything that involves OS config, the registry and permissions becomes a royal pita. Linux isn't 100% pain free (looking at you package conflicts) and SSL config sucks on all OS's but the majority of the time it presents smaller hurdles because I can dig into any part I need to.

Related to the Discord Canary comment, Vesktop is a third-party Discord client that's properly supported Wayland for quite some time now. I've been using it ever since swapping to Linux full-time to make sure streaming works correctly.

Some Elgato hardware is supported by OBS, FYI. IIRC the HD60+ or S+ or something.