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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Switched to arch 1 year ago or so. At first I customized my experience a lot and really enjoyed it. Now I have a stable experience, just game and do some dev work on and off. Really like it.
Switched over almost a year ago, aside from a few hiccups, it’s been awesome. Gaming has been smooth, setup jellyfin, and have been developing my media library. I love to tinker around and what not, and it’s been a fun experience (especially when you figure out that one issue thats been vexing you for some time).
I’m rocking Bazzite and the only time I wanted Windows was when I got stuck on a boss in Silksong and wanted to use CheatEngine.
Switched to Bazzite coming up on 4 years ago, and haven’t looked back
I posted this before, but it feels like going back to the best days of PC ownership. It’s fast, I’m in control, everything I want works and I honestly don’t think about my OS very much.
I chose bazzite since I love gaming, but of course it’s just a competent OS overall with which I also do my private office tasks.
Booting up my PC finally feels like a joy again.
Like most people I use Windows 11 at work and the contrast is enormous.
I switched to Nobara a couple months ago. My computer is a lot snappier. Overall its great. Some minor difficulties but no show stoppers.
Signal desktop gives me an error that it is keeping credentials in plaintext which is fucked, I tried to get it to not do that but havnt been able to figure out how. (there are tutorials for ubuntu/gnome, but I havnt figured out how to translate those to fedora/kde…
I just started using crow-translate which is amazing, but keep getting a screenshot error message. Something with wayland maybe? again when I search there is a lot of shit about ubuntu/gnome but that doesnt really help.
I haven’t missed Windows one bit. There were a few things that were tricky to get right int he beginning and also I had to get used to using some other software for some of the things I used on windows but honestly it’s been worth it.
I switched to Bazzite and I’m really liking it.
I have had a few issues with old SDR software that didn’t work.
All in all, I’m very happy with the change and have absolutely no plan to return.
I need them to decide on Wayland or x and make the damn switch. I’m tired of switching servers for apps.
I’ve switched systems some 15? years ago. But my mum did it recently, so I asked her this question. (Disclaimer: she isn’t the one managing her machine. Guess who does it.)
She claims it’s basically the same thing. She was surprised her start menu got different some days ago (when I updated her Mint), but it was the good type of surprise, like, “ah, it shows my profile pic now!”. Then she rambled about things that disappear from her email, but that is not an OS issue, it’s PEBKAC (she’s extremely disorganised). And… that’s it.
I think it was two years or so for me now, but honestly, it’s going great. I’ve got alternatives for the windows only apps I used to use, and my games run smoothly.
Every time I have to use a windows computer for some reason, I’m reminded of why I stopped using that OS…
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.
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
ntfspackage, or the read-writentfs-3gpackage. 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.
slow clap
Most of the games I play don’t work on wine (Teknoparrot), and multiple machines I have are either missing or have broken essential drivers for built-in peripherals like wiki/BT, fingerprint readers etc. So… I had to go back.
One of my laptops has a 10+ year old unfixed kernel bug for the bluetooth not working… and the wifi only uploads at 1mbps under Linux, but works fine on Windows.
I’m sure people that don’t happen to have random hardware/software incompatibilities are enjoying linux, but there’s also still lots of people that can’t switch.
Some of those issues are addressable, even though they definitely suck, depending on how badly someone wants to swap to Linux. I have a PC I connect to my TV, and while it’s built in wifi doesn’t work on linux, I was able to buy a PCI wifi card and put it in, which works. You can do similar for Bluetooth. Currently I just use it over Ethernet. For laptops, it’s a pain but there are USB wifi/bluetooth devices you can get. Fingerprint readers are tougher, I believe, but I feel less critical. Either way, use what works best for you!
Overall I’m damn happy. I’m surprised by how many basic things are faster, just opening and deleting files is fast. For some reason, something as simple as emptying the Recycle Bin in Windows is slow as hell; and I didn’t realize how bad it was until daily-ing Mint.
Me and several of my friends have switched recently, with others showing interest or partly switching already.
