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?
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!
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
That’s how I feel as well, and it’s nice not to have random background processes randomly slowing the system down. I really like that if shit doesn’t work or I don’t like it I can just try a different distro. I started out on Bazzite, but it didn’t play well with my hardware. Now I’m on Pop! running Plasma desktop, everything works, and I’ve got it heavily customized.
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.
Also swapped to Pop!_OS, a bit over a month back. It was definitely an adjustment, and I think I did something wrong during or following the initial installation that was killing my download speed (sub-10 mbps) and overall slowed my PC that I couldn’t troubleshoot after a week of looking online, but a clean reinstall fixed it and it’s been smooth since.
Still getting used to various things, like how not all companies have official linux support so sometimes you have to rely on other users uploading software on github (or available directly on the pop store) to configure devices or there just isn’t anything available and it won’t run in something like bottles, using the terminal for any number of things, or how terrible the pre-installed file explorer is (I’ve been using Dolphin instead), etc.
I haven’t had any issues with any Steam games or the couple that I tried from GOG using the Heroic launcher, aside from some applications consistently launching in the incorrect window size (solved by using shift + super + arrow keys). Protondb showed 98% or so of my Steam library running fine without much if any modification.
I have a fairly decent gaming PC — why I decided to try PopOS first, based on online recommendations and some folks on discord — and as far as I can tell, performance has not noticeably changed since the earlier-mentioned reinstall.
I’m happy with how it’s been going the last few weeks, and it’s not like I never had ongoing debilitating issues with Windows. Further down the line, I might try out some other distros, but I’m content with how it’s going now.
I also swapped from google services to Proton (not related to the steam compatibility service) and a couple others, along with replacing android OS on my Pixel with GrapheneOS, which has been going well, but that’s not linux-specific.
That’s awesome! I’ve also had pretty good luck with gaming. The one thing I haven’t figured out how to fix yet is streaming to discord. If a game is running through the proton layer, discord doesn’t identify the game (I think the application gets called steamapp+random numbers), and I’m not sure how to direct it to it. Other than that, just some minor tweaking here or there.
Im on a similar self hosting journey. What do think you’ll use for de googled phone photos and videos? Im not sure where to even start looking.
I’ve set-up Immich recently, moved 400gb photos from Google Takeout, works flawlessly so far.
Thanks, I was hoping someone else with more experience than us would chime in. Ill check it out.
I have around 5 year of experience self hosting.
There are tons of photo and video alternatives.
One of the first was piwigo, but I don’t know what they are up to now. Photoprism brought a bunch of new interest into the space, but is a bit hindered by their pricing model.
The three frontrunners nowadays are: Immich, Photoprism, and Ente.
Immich: easy and very practical google photos recreation (and surpassing in some ways)
Ente: A self-hosted or externally hosted, easy version. More of an ecosystem with Ente Auth authenticator app like Aegis with cloud sync.
Photoprism: much more geared to photographers, tons of organizational and sorting tools and geared towards using metadata of different cameras and such. Limited for me as they don’t have multi-user support unless you pay 6€/month. I would consider that an essential feature to put in their 2€/month and move advanced geocoding to 6€/month.
Immich on the other hand has a 1 time optional (you really should) $100 fee or $25 per account
They are 3 great options.
I don’t know yet either. I’m only at the “idea” phase for that one and not quite ready to move on it yet. It seems like such a common need that there must be a few open source projects out there, I assume.
I’ve briefly considered putting videos in their own category in Jellyfin, just for simplicity’s sake. Not sure if it handles photos too or if I would even want to try that though.
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.
Pretty damn awesome and loving every minute of not having to use Windows
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.
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 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.
Once Manjaro inevitably shits itself, think of EndeavourOS! It’s the perfect fully Arch-native, simple to set up and use distro.
Manjaro is so nice for daily driving. I switched to CachyOs maybe… Two years ago? And despite having some hiccups, I’d rather have it a million times over Windows.
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.
I’m perfectly happy using Mint. I’ll explore more distros eventually but I miss nothing about Windows
I started using Mint a few months ago, and this is basically my experience as well. On the occasion that I have to use a Windows PC, such as for work, I am just reminded of how awful it is.
Mint+KDE on my daily driver, works great, no complaints after over a year. Plus fun desktop effects!
Just a question: why use KDE on Mint instead of KDE Debian?
Cause I started with Mint and didn’t feel a need to fix what wasnt broke
I use KDE Debian on my desktop server
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.
I’ve tried nobara and I do like it. However for a beginner to Linux, I’d recommend popos or Linux mint.
I feel like a lot of the more gaming oriented distros tend to be less stable and can present obstacles later down the line. Just my personal experience.
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.
with help from chatgpt
🤦♂️ 🤦♂️ 🤦♂️ 🤦♂️ 🤦♂️ 🤦♂️ 🤦♂️ 🤦♂️
Can we not? Please? FFS.
Cry more
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.
It’s been amazing. My RAM is singing praises with how much better the OS is at handling memory.
