Linux

So painfully, boringly good.

Day-to-day, it just works, I don't have to fight it. It doesn't do anything I don't want it to do. I don't miss office, everything is clean and snappy.

I have managed to play almost every game thrown at it (Bazzite) - the only one that didn't work was an older DX7 title. DOS games just work - they took more effort than this under Win9x.

I have got a couple of minor issues but all fixable.:

• I encountered a issue where it wouldn't wake from sleep - fixed by selecting a different color profile in the display settings.
• I managed to break something in fstsb trying to setup a persistent network drive. Very easy to roll back, I'm 100% sold on immutable until I need something more customisable
• Recently my Bluetooth kb/mouse would drop off when the PC went idle, wouldn't reconnect/wake up until power cycling the PC. Fixed by disabling BT hibernation/sleep

Having said that, last week I had to install Win11 on the kids laptop to be ready for school - I hadn't installed 11 outside of a controlled Corp environment with solid group policy control since the early days. God-damn Win11 is a dumpster fire! The install UI looks nice but the noise is turned up to 11, popup, wizards, setup this, setup that, backup, OneDrive, give us all your information and sign away any privacy.

Regardless of any minor issues I bump into on the way, I am never going back!

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.

I switched about a year ago to fedora cinnamon. Less frustration than windows, even though cinnamon kinda sucks compared to KDE that I switched to immediately after the first time I tried it (should have tried it months sooner, literally only took a few mins to install and check out).

While I wouldn't say that there were zero problems, I did notice that I spend less time troubleshooting or searching for how to change something on Linux than I did on windows by the end. Also, going from empty disk to gaming involved fewer steps, at least with an AMD gpu.

I switched from windows 10 to pop!_os on my thinkpad p15s almost a year ago. My biggest surprise was thinking I would still need windows for anything when I haven't needed to think about it since.

The most frustrating part is that I'm requires to use windows 11 for work and it just feels so broken. But in all seriousness the biggest issues I've had were a couple driver issues that were easily fixed from the debug.

Honestly my biggest regret was not switching sooner. The learning curve really wasn't bad. Just read the forums and docs. I run it on everything now. I game with it, I run a small homelab with it, I'm productive with it. I dont think there is anything I would miss. Everything works as well if not even better.

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

Pretty damn awesome and loving every minute of not having to use Windows

Mostly really good, I feel like I've traded a lot of major problems that I can't do anything about for a few tiny problems that I can actually solve

Been with EndeavourOS on all my devices for the past year and it's pure bliss.

tried cachyos. a game froze. restarted the machine. doesnt boot up anymore. found 2 post about it. no solution. i might try pop and nobara next weekend, but i dont see myself dailydrive linux in the next 10 years.

not goin well.

It's been GREAT! All my torrenting related stuff works better than it did on windows 10. I am slowing loading old 2000's windows PC games on my Mint installation and so far it's been working well.

My computers are MUCH faster on linux and updates take 20 seconds instead of 15 minutes.

It's amazing! Full customization beyond what I'm used to and it all just runs my hardware perfectly.

My only issue is getting VR to work nicely with my specific setup but I imagine when steam frame comes out there will be a lot of VR specific updates to Linux drivers.

My steam wrapped for 2023 is fully windows, 2024 has about 40% windows 60% Linux, purely from the moment I switched halfway through the year, and 2025 is fully Linux.

I regret nothing.

Caveats:

• I built a new computer in early 2025, knew I'd be making Linux, went AMD 7900xtx. Worked right out the box flawlessly.
• I started out self hosting stuff and got somewhat comfortable with Linux in those instances, so when I eventually threw endeavouros into my laptop, it all just worked for me. I had a couple of "laptop won't boot because its battery died mid update" events, which is about a couple more than there ever should've been, but it wasn't too hard to recover the laptop every time, with help from chatgpt
• switched to Bazzite for my new desktop and work framework 13 laptop, but hold endeavouros in my heart with great affection, because it is awesome and Linux is awesome no matter what flavour you pick (restrictions apply, research what you're getting into when picking a distro, and compare a bit but don't overstress)
• Linux may or may not radicalize you heavily. The liberating feeling sometimes might make you mad that you put up with all that Apple/Microsoft/Adobe bullshit for all those years. Self-hosting intensifies radicalization. Don't come blaming me when you find yourself in a shadow war with the Mossad over your email server getting shadowbanned throughout the Chilean Patagonia due to attempting to create an ex-engineers' farming commune and a regional meshcore network there.

I started with PopOS in September (?), ultimately replacing Windows on every PC in the house. It's been going well. I've had to troubleshoot a few things, the biggest of which being a boot failure, but that turned out to be hardware related, not Linux's fault. Feeling like I own my computer again is great.

Since then, I've gotten into self-hosting and now have a NAS, a Debian Jellyfin server, and a ton of storage space. Right now I'm just backing up basic stuff for the family, as well as streaming movies/shows/music within the house. I've ripped so many old DVDs and CDs in the past few months...

Next steps will probably be: books, audiobooks, and archiving family photos/videos in a way that is easier to browse than just files on a hard drive. I will likely de-google eventually.

In short, I'm having fun and should've done this a long time 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.

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.

It's been amazing. My RAM is singing praises with how much better the OS is at handling memory.

I was using Windows 10 LTSC for a bit before Home/Pro editions reached EoL. My past experiences with Linux were all such a significant addition of frustration; I couldn't justify switching to Linux.

After a string of back-to-back hardware failures, I'm back to using a 10+ year old desktop I built. Ended up trying trying Fedora 42 with KDE and suddenly had none of the issues I had with past Linux attempts. My three biggest complaints before about Linux had been random Bluetooth device incompatibility, Nvidia support being trash, and most Steam games requiring extra commands and constant troubleshooting to get running decently.

I feel like a lot of those issues were from me starting with Arch derivatives on niche laptop hardware that was already beginning to fail. My experience with Fedora has been fantastic. My biggest problems now have been: -KDE discover store is really inconsistent with its packages. I would not expect the average Windows "user"(bought a PC and that's what it came with) to bother understanding the difference between a flatpak and a native package, and would get really annoyed when stuff is out of date or mis-configured out of the box. I had a better experience using a GUI in Arch with the AUR to install software, ironically enough. -There are a few things, ie Nvidia drivers, non-free codecs, non flatpak Steam, that have inconsistent community documentation on how to install them. These become immediately bad first impressions on people switching from Windows, and I think its important that they are clear to install properly as possible.

Other than that, Fedora is stable and runs great. I'm using a Nvidia GPU and have no issues with it(this time, at least...). A lot of my software was already open source, but I run a few Windows applications, besides Steam games, with Wine; rarely do I have to do any extra configuration. KDE Plasma as a desktop environment has given me the customization and control out of the box that I have been missing from Windows for over a decade, while Fedora has some sane defaults for it that make it accessible to Windows users expecting something a bit more familiar.

There's always a weird quirk here and there, but I have had my fair share of troubleshooting on Windows before as well. I feel like Linux as a home PC OS is mature enough that people who don't do much on the PC anyway could find their way around it, while it's still going to be an annoying learning curve for people who see end user software as a hobby. Entirely usable though.

Obligatory I don't play games with anti cheat and I don't use streaming services with DRM. I have a few games with Denuvo, and haven't had any problems arise that needed me to switch Proton versions that end up triggering install lock outs.

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

https://lemmy.ca/comment/21276696

I just put an old SSD and Linux on my decade old laptop, and it's like a whole new computer

ofc, it was probably mostly the hard drive that was the problem to begin with, seeing as it took 10 minutes to boot up and log in, and another five before it would open a web or file browser...

Great, using arch (btw) as my daily for school and its perfect!

Made the jump to Linux about a month ago. Too much bloat on Win11. With the forthcoming AI bullshit I decided to take the leap and see how much I liked it. I installed mint on an old laptop. I had to test it out and was surprised at how easy it was decided to dual boot my main gaming PC because there are still some games that require anti-cheat that I can’t play on Linux. But Once they figure out how to do that, I’ll be a complete convert. It’s amazing how much faster and smoother. My PC is running fedora.

I have been on Linux for almost 9 months now and I miss nothing about windows. I tried a bunch of distributions, starting with Fedora, but now I have settled on an Arch based distribution and am happily running Manjaro.

Fantastic! Just switched my main PC to Cachy OS the other day from Linux Mint (previously W10) because I started to find it too restrictive. Tried out Hyprland for a bit and it was a lot of fun but I don't have the time to fully customise everything, so went to Plasma. I'm saving Hyprland for when I retire.

My laptop is still running Mint Cinnamon (dual boot W11) but I'm contemplating on another OS that's more friendly to Unity and Unreal game development. Any suggestions? I keep getting burst compiler errors in Unity, even on the latest LTS.

I'm perfectly happy using Mint. I'll explore more distros eventually but I miss nothing about Windows

Going real well. My gaming PC (5800X3D/7900XTX/32GB) is running LMDE6 and so far none of my games have complained; Steam+Proton is great.

I also have a laptop (i7-10750H/1650Ti/16GB) running LMDE7, and that's been my portable gaming machine for a while. Doesn't play nice with RPCS3, but honestly that's not a dealbreaker.

Buddy of mine decided to switch to Debian like a month ago, I warned him it’s Linux but “raw” and warned him of outdated packages an such, he said no worries. Proceeds to AI his way through literally everything, broke numerous packages by going to Trixie Backports for newer drivers and has now installed windows on a spare 500Gb HDD so he can play Fortnite with a chick he met on tinder.

Want to take bets on how long his Debian install lasts?

Great. Only issue so far has been a specific VPN for work which does not have a Linux installer and no drag and drop replacement for Snagit. But that's just work stuff, everything on the private side works flawlessly for me.

*fixed my trashed Ubuntu partition, trying mint

it's solid dude 🤙

Nothing eventful. It's just a straightforward OS.

Everything is fantastic. Switched my laptop (a surface go 2 lol) to Mint, then my desktop to Arch, mini PC to Batocera and built a server that I put OpenMediaVault on.

So far, I have notes (Flatnotes), RSS (FreshRSS), ebooks (Kavita) and recipes (RecipeSage) self hosted as well as media (Kodi) and qBittorrent. Despite being responsible for server admin it's been quite painless overall.

I switched from Windows to Mint at the tail end of September, and I’ve only had minimal issues. I backed up everything I cared about and just nuked Windows in one go, since it wasn’t compatible with 11 and I don’t want security problems. I expected my Nvidia graphics card to cause huge issues, but it literally just worked.

I did have an issue getting my Steam games to run, but it was fixed by figuring out how to change the compatibility settings on Steam (the incredibly complicated operation of right clicking on the game title).

I’ve been taking classes as well, and using Libre Office has met basically 100% of my needs. I did have some issues with converting to .docx when images were involved (resulting in images going on walkabout), but I consider that 50% a Windows problem.

Been on Mint for a bit over a year. Only slight annoyances. My tax guy couldn't open the password protected .zip files I made. My printer has two trays, can only seem to print from the photo one. And getting the drivers installed for my TP-Link wifi adapter was a little bit of a pain. Other than that, everything has been great. It looks good, runs good, Games good. No issues with my NVidia card.

Switched from Window 10 to Linux Mint about 3 weeks ago so I'd have something familiar to work with.

Honesty, so far Mint works just like Windows should have worked. I'm surprised at how much stuff has been made automatic and easy for a lifelong windows user. Some specific games have a performance issues, Alt+Tab to switch apps doesn't work if you are in a full screen application.

I would encourage anyone on Windows to buy a small drive (I used a 500 GB SSD I got for like 40 bucks) load a Linux distro on it and give it a shot. You probably won't be back on Windows.

Pretty good. But I've been dabbling in Linux for the past decade or so and already had a Linux based home server. But in the past year I finally swapped all of my non-work computers over to linux. If games won't run, I won't play them.

I'm running CachyOS on my desktop workstation, laptop, and my handheld Lenovo legion go. Unraid on my server.

Edit: the only issue I had with the CachyOS installs so far is my remote desktop solution, which admittedly I don't even use often. VNC is ok. I liked NoMachine for a while but it messed up my graphics drivers or something weird. I don't remember the specifics, I just flat out nuked it from my machines. I need to try rustdesk

I'll enjoy it for like a month and then something awful will happen and I'll say well this is pretty terrible. This month my PC just stopped waking up from sleep. No response from keyboard, mouse inputs. Tried various different devices to wake the PC up, nada. Only returns on reboot. Arch btw

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.

It’s been okay. I’ve swapped from zorin to fedora to Ubuntu and have some ups and downs. A few windows apps. Have to use I’ve been mostly able to get going in bottle with moderate success. I use autodesk fusion and I lament no Linux version and freecad is not my jam but I have a Mac still for that.

Love it. I use Arch... btw... And while I will gladly admit, my setup isn't exactly easy, it's quite beautiful.

What I personally like the best about it is a tiling Windows manager. Instead of placing Windows one on top of the other, it places them split side by side. On a big ass monitor, it looks something like this: