Have you or someone close to you converted to Linux recently (with Windows 10's end of support)?
I'd like to hear people's journeys and motivations from people who switched over the last few months, and if there were particular challenges that were faced.
My wife wanted Linux on her tablet. She read online that Gnome was the preferred DE on touchscreens. I warned her that I personally dislike Gnome, but it's not like I'm going to throw a minimal window manager at her, so I told her that's fine and she should try it out.
Since I'm her tech support, I installed Garuda, a distro I already use. She played around with it, then asked if she could have desktop icons. It was stupid that she had to press a whole extra button just to see her "home screen", she said. So I installed the desktop icons gnome extension, but it lacks basic features like either right click or drag, or maybe both. I can't recall at the moment.
Then the onscreen keyboard wouldn't appear automatically when using certain programs like Brave. And using the stylus to press the OSK would close it entirely. The stylus was really fidgety and oversensitive, too. I have zero touchscreen experience on Linux, so I was disappointed with gnome's lack of GUI controls to fix these kinds of things.
She started to complain that Linux is too hard, then signed up for the 1 year extended Windows 10 support on her old laptop.
So I reinstalled Garuda with KDE this time, told her I tried something new, and she's been happy with it so far. Turns out my wife just hates Gnome. And she expressed this hate completely unprompted.
That's right, my love; fuck Gnome.
I've never been more proud.
I think GNOME 3 was intended to be nicer for touchscreens but it's not my favourite either.
My daily driver is MATE - the spiritual continuation of GNOME 2.
My daughter is very Linux curious but she's not going to want to learn anything about it. She just wants to play games and chat with friends. I'll probably switch her when I upgrade and pass my current computer down.
If you know the games she plays, you could test installing them separately ahead of time, so that there would be minimal difference when that switchover happens.
It's mostly The Sims with mods along with whatever meme games she's hearing about on YouTube. There's no concern about rootkit anti-cheat or anything, and so far my experience has been almost anything on Steam will run in Linux without having to do anything. She'll run into performance issues with her current hardware before she hits any games that aren't compatible.
Yes! Two folks swapped to nix, one to mint.
Getting VR to work has been a journey on nix. Everything on mint has gone smoothly afaik.
Windows 10 EOL (and moving) both roughly lined up, so we all decided to get away from big tech. The nix os was new, interesting, and feels very powerful when things work. Mint was a known safe choice.
Thank you for sharing! VR has been a well reported pain point, but interesting to hear that Linux Mint handled it well now. I don't own a VR headset -- which one do you have that played nice with Mint, if you don't mind me asking? In case I ever feel like getting my own.
I switched maybe like two years ago now. I only had issues on one game but a bit later it just worked not sure what changed. I know EA stuff doesn't work so haven't really messed around with that. I check protonDB a lot to see game compatibility.
The biggest issue for me was getting a handle on a photo workflow for myself after switching and leaving lightroom/adobe behind. I use darkroom now which I'm still learning but I have a basic workflow down pretty well.
I built up a PC for my cousin for gaming and put bazzite on there, she hasn't really noticed anything being her first personal PC so thats pretty good, I've gone from popOS, to arch to bazzite
Bazzite with gnome is mostly painless. I have been using that on my desktop for about a year now, I have fedora with kde on my laptop and its also pretty good.
I went to Linux Mint and it's been painless. All my games I want to play run on it (through Steam).
My son is getting my old computer as a hand me down and I put Mint on it, too. I've installed Sober on it so he can play Roblox. I don't know how it'll go but we'll see...
Sober... Roblox
It works great for my family! Only annoyance is having to run flatpak update often.
Yea, roblox and fortnite are the two hold backs for me switching my kids PCs since the anti cheat doesn't apparently work on Linux. I hadn't heard of Sober though. Hope it works out!
I helped switch my 88 years old grandma to Mint a few months back when her laptop started to run painfully slow. I don't think she understands that I changed her OS but she is happy with "whatever I did to her laptop", now her laptop runs much faster and 0 problems so far for her needs, very simple needs but she actually uses it a lot!
For like a good chunk of people, all you need from a computer the news, online videos, one social media, email, banking, simple writing and printing. Linux does fine and some distros actually do better than Windows at the basics.
I switched to Mint in March. I have to use W11 for work and I thoroughly hate it. I did not want all the ads and AI stuff that come pre-packaged. I also did not want to upgrade my pc - I have an arbitrary rule that I'm only allowed new hardware every 10 years, so I have another 2 years left until I can upgrade.
So I used all my anger and pettiness, went on youtube to see how difficult it'd be to install Linux. The first video I found was Zorin vs Mint, and I thought Mint was a good fit for an absolute noob like myself. I really did not want to faff with learning commands and stuff so I was very pleasantly surprised with flatpaks and whatnot. Overall I'd say it was a very good experience, I'm just annoyed I've not done it earlier.
How do desktop functions perform on Linux Mint compared to Windows on your current machine, qualitatively speaking? I've kept my parents' 13 year old laptop alive with Linux, a replacement battery and SSD, so 2 more years should be no problem unless your needs drastically change.
You'll find there are dozens of ways to "install" an app on Linux, in varying degrees of portability, ease of install and ease of upgrade.
It's an absolute joy, although I am a little annoyed at the random freezes I sometimes get, like when everything stops responding with no rhyme or reason. At least when Windows crashes, it crashes good and just reboots. But Mint needs a hard reset. Other than that, I managed to get all my games to play thanks to Lutris so I couldn't be happier! I've had some tiny tweaks to make, for example my sound got crackly after some update, but thankfully there are tons and tons of troubleshooting that basically take your hand and guide you through what you need to do to sort issues. I'm immensely grateful for all those forums.
Your mention of a laptop reminds me I also installed Mint on my 16 year old lappy, it's quite slow but it actually works with all the OG hardware (bar a new battery)!
Me. But not just me. When my children grow older, they too will now have a Linux OS on their computers not Microsoft. Microsoft has lost more than just me!
I switched from W11 when Copilot Vision was scheduled for a forced install. Choose Debian KDE because my servers are all Debian-based already, and I wanted boring and stable. For the most part, it's been smooth sailing. There's a touchpad issue sometimes that requires reloading the mouse module, and updating my Dell dock requires loading a Windows boot disk to run the installer from that environment. That's about it for problems. Using apt and flatpak to manage updates for all my software has been great. I do not miss downloading and clicking through installer wizards all the time.
I'm jealous of those that converted to Linux from Windows 10.
I didn't migrate until Windows 2000.
One from my friend. He has tried Linux before but switched back due to issues. When this Win10's EOL came up I floated trying it again. Which he then did that weekend. It worked great for the most part. One game had install issues, but worked after we resolved them, another Proton game had full screen problems with no monitor output when the "Adaptive Refresh Rate" setting was enabled in the OS settings.
That software-hardware interface problem wasn't documented anywhere, so it was just a lot of fiddling with all the settings one-by-one and trying various things to get it working to no avail until he got there.
Anyone have suggestions for parental controls on linux? Mainly, to block logins after bedtime, or to limit time on the system.
Haven't tested these myself, but after a brief search, timekpr and little-brother are packages I found you could try, related to session time management.
Yup, installed Linux Mint for my 60+yo mother. She hardly uses her laptop and does not need anything advanced. We set it up, installation went very smooth (obviously), set up her browser so she can use it like she's used to, and we figured out how to use the printer. Thankfully it was no hassle at all, it just connected via USB and interacted very well with the printing and scanning software that came with Mint. She was already using firefox and libreoffice, so that was no hassle either. So far so good!
I have converted a few friends and family in the last few months. Mostly to Bazzite, but one opted for Fedora. Both good choices, and everyone seems very happy with what they chose.
Glad it has worked out. Over the years I've been free tech support for my close friends and family whom I've installed Linux for (I'm fine with it because it had been my hobby, passion, and suggestion for them). I hope you've not been inundated with support requests.
I switched when they announced Windows was going to start watching everything you do. So it can help you better... of course.
I started with Bazzite and didn't really understand immutability. I had just heard it was good for gaming. I bricked my installation trying to get write access to the folder where login screen images are stored because that part happens to be immutable.
I switched to Garuda because it is also gamer focused and the system folders aren't on lockdown. Both were super easy and have worked great.
I'm still learning what it means to be on Arch, but that's an interesting journey, so I don't mind.
Bazzite gets thrown around a lot as a beginner distro nowadays, haven’t tried it myself. Its immutable quality sounded to me like it was designed to be hard for beginners to break, so I guess you should give yourself an award for that.
Hope it keeps going well, you'll naturally get it as you use it and deal with the odd curveball.
That's really the gist of it. For the 96% who just need a working computer and aren't messing with system files, immutable is perfect. You really can't break it unless you try.
I’ve been doing my work in Linux for a while now. I’ve started trying out Bazzite for gaming. It’s been quite nice, but not without issues.
Started like three mints ago b/c fed up with windows. Got 2nd SSD and set up dual boot with Bazzite. Initially this was just to fuck around but i switched to Bazzite as main distro within two days. It just works. Won me over when Darksouls was immediately displaying the Playstation glyphs when I plugged in the Dualshock 4.
Even modding was relatively easy. Things are well documented now and; and I shame to admit, ChatGPT is surprisingly not the shittiest at helping me with my issues (specific example setting up Darksouls Remastered Gadget to run with the Seamless Coop mod which required some custom code shenanigans... For which the vibe code was serviceable!)
Haven't booted my windows partition for a month ish now. Probably won't for a long time.
I think it says something about Linux adoption rate amongst gaming users, that popular modding tools like r2modman have native Linux versions. And it's great for me to hear "It just works" from new users since my bar is set at a weird spot, having seen things progress over 9 years.
... it's been a journey. TLDR: Wayland is super broken, NVIDIA makes it worse, Ubuntu doesn't come with the right drivers out of box, UI inconsistency is everywhere (only Mac gets it right, at the cost of everything else) but major feature upgrades in most regular stuff.
I switched to Debian +Plasma X11, which makes most things work out of the box, but KiCAD crashes Plasma and logs you out of you open a large enough file. If I use Wayland, all of the windows open in a giant pile in the center my screen and OrcaSlicer segfaults when opening a webkit embed. Also no 3d views.
NVIDIA breaks all the rendering stuff, so no 3d model previews in your icons :( and the install defaults to unsafe mode on high refresh screens for Kubuntu, which cuts off the top half of your screen. Print previews are broken on Kate (NVIDIA)
Older Unity Engine can't run controller input natively on linux, so you still play games under proton.
Login screen wallpaper and Wallpaper waking up from sleep and "wallpaper" are three different wallpapers on Debian/Plasma.
Plasma Desktop is not considered an active window so creating a new file and pressing enter doesn't open it, but rather selects a foreground window, But if no window exists, it will open the file.
Now, the better stuff:
Printer drivers work out of box on basically everything I've tested and adding printers is plug and play unlike Windows. Printers on? You're done!
Separated home and root partitions, I nuked my install 4 times and didn't need to copy over my data. (Auto partition doesn't give round numbers to the partitions and this irritates me why 61.73.gb root partitions why not 62???)
Snapshot backups - I no longer care if I accidentally need some older file I deleted, if I ran a backup recently, it's there. Restic
Updates: I can reinstall and uninstall without rebooting - takes 2 minutes max. (Downloading is the bigger portion of it)
Faster boot times, way better keyboard input support, more customizable, integrated file management zip/rar support (very cool) Files open faster, dark mode everywhere, I can compile C firmware about 6-8 times faster without windows scanning my code every time. Although, is antivirus a thing on Linux?
They fixed rounded corners!!! Firefox still likes to be special and ignore window decorations, not sure what's up with that.
No Copilot and no "my computer fans suddenly spun up for no reason whatsoever", although I miss task manager, I have htop now,
TLDR: Wayland is super broken, NVIDIA makes it worse,
Wait, what? I'm using NVIDIA and Plasma 6.5 without issues.
Ubuntu
Ohhhhhhh
I suggest Btop as task manager.
Thanks for this writeup. CAD is one of the several professional workflows that I really wish could work better on Linux, but it is hard to compete against software that costs thousands per year per license.
Although, is antivirus a thing on Linux?
So generally Linux has relied on having open and auditable code to avoid exploitation of bugs and ones found can be easily discovered, reported and mitigated. The variety of configurations makes it much less appealing for hackers as an attack surface. So for the average user the biggest danger to breaking your device is yourself (but very occasionally the package manager messes something up too). ClamAV is one antivirus application Linux has...
But depending on what threats you want to mitigate here is what else you can look into:
Made the move gradually - first the private computers of my family,then my company. Very happy with how it went, especially in terms of staff adoption. We still retain some dual boot windows machines,sadly,as some things currently still can't be done in the Linux world (CAD is the one thing, some very specific Office document things we sadly get dictated by a client the other one.)
Impressive that you were able to pull off the migration for a corporate usecase.
It's not that hard actually, at least tech-wise. Our ERP always has been web based and so is our project management (Redmine). The biggest "installable" Apps are QGIS(always worked on Linux), some LaTex Apps and the Affinity suite (which works through bottles)
Officewise Softmaker is close enough to MS Office that even someone with little experience computerwise has no issues.
Combine that with a Proxmox+FreeIPA+Opsi stack in the background and you're set.Fedora 42 Plasma is used as a client OS with benefits from us only having 2 different client models hardware wise.
"Politic" wise I have the huge advantage that I am the sole owner of the company, that my staff is young and willing to innovate as this is basically our job (we do consulting for healthcare) and that we are somewhat small and work home-office full time.
The major challenge was to make people to actually try Linux. Plasma helped her enormously,because, let's face it, it's beautiful. That gave Linux a lot of godwil and after two days it was usually a "I never thought it would be that easy" or "that works as smooth as Win7/10 once did for me and MS destroyed that".
Now some of my employees have privately changed to Linux as well.
My advice is when you recommend Linux, do it for a specific reason, not a general philosophical one (it does not motivate them like you), and do not move up generationally. Older people generally have more elaborate workflows and unlearning then may not be worth it for them.
My advice is, when you're recommending Linux be very sure that you're ready to be the 1st level support from then on. Personally I'm too old for that shit. People are ignorant and unhappy for so many self chosen reasons, their personal computer desktop is just another one and I just can't fix the world.
Eugh yeah this is a big reason why I manage which inboxes people have access to
I believe that the main reason for recommending Linux, in my opinion, is because it is open source code that can be audited. And the second reason is so that the EU can have greater digital and technological sovereignty.
Thanks. I figured Microsoft trying to force people off Windows 10 might be a bigger reason than ever to get people to switch than philosophical ones. I wanted to see if that was true for people on Lemmy or if there were other reasons, hence I made this post.
I think the hardest to get on Linux is those in the middle with a very specific piece of hardware or software that needs to work in a certain way. Kind of like the bell curve meme, total computer beginners and total computer experts can embrace linux the easiest.
Its 100 percent like that. The middle users like me have the most issues.
Gamer/music maker/old random software/nas setups/networking/racing wheel peripherals, people who do this stuff it takes way more time investment.
If you just use a browser. The os doesn't matter
I'm partway / procrastinating a transition from win10 to Linux Mint. My 12yo hardware wasn't going to support win11, I'm sure I'm not alone in that.
Bought a new SSD, spent a couple of hours with the case open reconfiguring hardware and then testing which of the existing drives had which partitions on them. Install went better than expected, only minor issue with no sound (tweaked setting somewhere obvious and it started working), but getting Google Drive up and running was a pain, mainly because the Online Account feature wasn't working until I thought to reboot and try again.
Next up on my list is to pop back into windows to collect a bunch of settings for things I forgot to write down before, then I'll be finishing configuration and will reconnect old data drives back up and see how we go from there. I saw somewhere that the kernal is having issues with mounting NTFS drives, so expecting another learning curve there.
I've dabbled with Linux a few times in the past, so it's not completely unfamiliar to me, although never as a daily driver machine before. I'm just taking my time, and researching issues as they come up. I'm too old now to consider this a fun exercise , but I'm pretty happy with how things are going so far.
Dunno what I was worried about. Hooking up the old data drives one by one and copying over my old date ... just worked.
A few more programs to.set up, and I need to sort out my backup strategy, but yeah, happy I'm almost done.
Yep, me and SO.
I was into linux like 15 years ago. Liked it, but wasn't smart enough to get it working and win 7 was still bearable. Called it quits after MS kept somehow getting worse.
Convinced SO to change over and everytbing works fine for them so far! It took a little tinkering but no complaints.
I did about 2 years ago. Dislike Microsoft decision to go against the user choice and all the bad updates and trying to make things worse. I went to Fedora after being on kubuntu for a while. I just needed something with kde 6 so wayland could work good.
So far I have not really found a good way to convice family. Instead they stay on familiar Windows 10. Will see if I have better luck after W10 ESU runs out.
I find it pretty easy to convince non-tech older people to use Linux. It also helps just denying them tech support if they don’t use Linux 😁
✋
A little over a year ago, I had a 5-year-old daily-driver Windows laptop that I knew wouldn't get Windows 11, so I put Mint on my 15-year-old desktop machine to see if I could live that life. I had tried dual-booting Ubuntu a couple of times over the previous decade or so, but always just booted into Windows after the novelty wore off. While I expected it to run Linux better than Windows, I was still bracing myself for a terribly slow experience. I was startled to discover that my 15-year-old desktop computer, which had essentially been sitting cold for over five years because it ran Windows 7 like molasses and wasn't eligible for Windows 10, not only ran Linux Mint better than Windows 7, but also ran Windows 10 in VirtualBox better than Windows 7 on baremetal. It was a little slow and laggy, definitely not gaming ready, but perfectly usable.
Then I discovered that, when I went back to my Windows laptop, I missed the way Linux worked and all of the customizability. And I discovered that Valve's work to make the Steam Deck a viable gaming console was making Steam gaming on Linux a quite pleasant experience. So earlier this year, when I bought a new laptop (trying to beat the tariffs), I decided to get a Framework without Windows preinstalled. I put Mint on it, too, and only rarely needed to boot into VirtualBox a couple of times for work stuff (mostly opening Adobe files). So last week, I turned Windows on for the last time on my old laptop, pulled the last couple of files off of it, marveled at how old Windows looked, and installed Mint on that one too.
My house went from 100% Windows to 0% Windows over the course of the past year, due entirely to Microsoft's own-goal of killing off their most popular and reliable product. And I couldn't be happier.
Problems and challenges? I haven't run into a single one that wasn't already a problem before I installed Linux. Maybe it just hasn't been long enough, or maybe sticking with a "normie" distro has insulated me from the worst of it, but I haven't had a single driver issue (on the contrary, the Bluetooth module that never worked on my old laptop under Windows works perfectly now), and I've been able to find an open-source alternative to basically every Windows-only application I want or need. My wife's old Chromebook, which had been basically useless for anything but web browsing before we replaced it, is still basically useless for anything but web browsing even on Lubuntu (it was too puny even for Mint). But no problems due to Linux or due to not having Windows outside of a VM. No hours spent debugging broken drivers. It's all been super smooth.
Oh, I guess one thing is that I know Powershell a whole lot better than Bash. That's been a little bit of a learning curve.
If you like Powershell you could always look into Python
"Like" might be too strong a word, lol. But thanks, I've heard great things.
Ah! I take it back, there has been one other thing. For one of my pairs of Bluetooth headphones, on one of my computers, Blueman intermittently won't show the correct sink (not sync) codec options, and no amount of disconnecting/reconnecting will fix it, meaning that they only work in VoIP headset mode (so, lower quality). I bought these headphones after I switched to Linux, and they've only ever been connected to the one machine, so I don't know if the problem is with the headphones, with Mint, with the hardware, or with Blueman. I have to tear down the Bluetooth stack and rebuild it, which sounds a lot worse than it is (actually it takes like two terminal commands and four seconds), but annoyingly that means it also disconnects every other Bluetooth device I have connected.
It's a minor annoyance, but it's an annoyance. Still, I'll take it over dealing with Windows' terrible audio interface any day.
Yes. I left a USB stick with a Linux installer on the table when they tried to upgrade to Windows 11. The upgrade failed and they instead upgraded to Linux without even needing to ask for help :>
I had a PC I used for games and stuff that had Windows, switched it to Linux. Don't want Windows 11 and it didn't support my computer anyway.
Converting someone to... are you mistaking it with a sect?
Let's be real it is a sect.
It was a sect until someone forked it, now it's a cult
With the power of Free and Open Source, I grant thee eternal computing liberation!
Sure! I'd been playing with regular Gnome Ubuntu for a long while. Never really liked Gnome, figured if I had to use it some day I would just deal.
But then, on reddit of all places, I read about KDE, and Kubuntu. I looked at the screenshots and holy hell, it kinda looks like Windows!!
Now.. like, I'm not some sort of windows fangirl here, it's just, they layout with the task bar, start menu, all that jazz makes a whole buncha sense to me. And to see that there was a version of Ubuntu that had that kinda interface fast tracked me into installing it.
I like using Ubuntu too because it seems pretty straight forward and approachable to someone like me, who isn't super great with computers in general, and who certainly doesn't want to spend a bunch of time tinkering with every setting and what not. But I also value my privacy and not funneling money to billionaires...
So now I'm running Kubuntu, and while it's been great, I am running into issues with some of my games I want to play on Steam and using Lutris. So now I'm back to having to tweak shit, and I'm not too happy about it.
I do know of Bazzite, so I may wipe my Kubuntu install to try it. I just, I don't want to be in the same boat again, and go through all of that.
I am also planning on getting a SteamDeck when my bonus from work comes through after the new year, so this may all be moot, as I am hoping to do my Steam/GOG gaming on that.
Edit: I should specify, my laptop has a GTX 1050ti and I guess Nvidia is the bane of linux or something, and is most likely the cause of most of my issues playing games.
Thanks for sharing your experience. So now that you've tried it, is KDE familiar enough to you? (I did put my parents' now 13 year old PC on KDE for similar reasons).
Good news is that KDE is the front-end interface that is packaged with many distributions (including Bazzite) so you won't lose the basic look and feel if you decide to move.
It is! I've really been enjoying the KDE experience with Kubuntu!
Initially I tried downloading a few "retro" windows xp/2000 look a like themes, but something got messed up and it wouldn't let me log in? Something with the SDDM. Luckily I had just installed Kubuntu fresh earlier that day, so I hadn't set anything up, so it was easy enough to just reinstall everything, and I've just been sticking with the built in themes and not really messing with anything else lol.
I did see that with Bazzite, which is why I think I'll try it out. I just don't want to go through the whole process, only to end up with the same issues I have now due to, apparently, having a Nvidia GPU in my laptop. I know no one can tell me if I will or won't, and I just have to try it, but that's about my only hesitation.
I'm just finishing off switching now. My media server and laptop have been on Xubuntu and Mint respectively for the last few years, but my main PC was stuck on Windows 10 while I got some stuff finished. It's now on Mint while I confirm that everything's transferred over properly.
While I do prefer Linux, it's been quite frustrating so far. The big stuff has been pretty smooth, but I've had a few silly little issues that have made things harder than they should be.
My Bluetooth headphones wouldn't stay connected until I removed them and added them back, and I couldn't print until I deleted an outdated certificate. MusicBrainz Picard wouldn't move and rename files correctly until after an unrelated reboot. I couldn't write to a drive mounted through fstab because none of the guides I found said that you had to do anything different for an NTFS drive, even though some of them were aimed at people switching from Windows.
At the moment, every time I add a podcast to Clementine, it downloads every episode, and I can't see any way to change it.
Nothing major, but I'm going to pull all of my hair out by the time I'm done 😫
NTFS is rough to deal with indeed. Right now getting niche hardware to work is one of Linux's barriers to adaptation. If the device's data streams are documented well, it can be technically possible to create homemade device drivers, but you'll have no hair left to pull before you even begin.
Took the plunge this week. My secondary hard drive now has Mint and I've got it working so when I boot up I select which os/drive to start up. The plan is to use Mint primarily for awhile and get used to it.
Definitely a bit less intuitive, and many things are still needing to be done through the consol instead of the GUI which is annoying. Haven't had success migrating my Firefox profile without creating an account. Haven't figured out how to get the "dual" monitor setup to work the way a I want either. Feels like a bit of a downgrade but I'm hoping once I get past the initial setup pains it'll be smooth sailing.
Thanks for sharing and congrats on making the jump! In my experience, when I broke Linux, most of the time it's because I wanted to try something new, and only occasionally an updated software breaks something, but it generally only takes a bit of effort to pinpoint the culprit. Especially on Mint, once you have things working they'll work as they are, and any issue you may encounter will be easy to resolve after you figure it out the first time.
On Windows it was the inverse... Microsoft often wanted to try something new on me.
(Semi) Recent convert here from Win11 to Bazzite - Didn't switch due to Win10 EOL but because Windows Recall kept fucking re-enabling itself every time windows updated and it was pissing me off.
I miss playing some games that require kernal level anti-cheat, but that's a small price to pay for me.
The biggest hurdle I have and kind of still have is the difference in package managers and stuff like that. There appimages which I've sorta got my head around, gear lever helps. Then there are .deb files of some programs, some come as .tar.gz or .rpm files.
That's ignoring flatpaks, snaps and other packages like that - I do wish there was a more uniform structure to these that is better explained, often software download pages will list some distros like Ubuntu, Arch & Fedora but miss out many like Bazzite which is fine if you know Bazzite is based on Fedora but if you don't then you're already stuck at that point.
Plus most pieces of software that have instructions for Fedora ask you to use dnf to download stuff, and if you try that in Bazzite it throws a fit and simultaneously tells you that rpm-ostree should be used but also don't use rpm-ostree for things unless you absolutely have to.
I love Bazzite, I'm never going back, but it can be frustrating for sure if you're unfamiliar with things.
My friends girlfriend had a Win 10 laptop that "technically" wasn't supported to upgrade to 11 (It was) but she wasn't keen on moving to 11 as she didn't like the look of it (panel, etc).
So they both asked me for alternatives and I gave some options and we settled on Fedora KDE. She loves it. Especially when I showed her how she can really customize the look of it and for fun I showed her the Chicago95 stuff that someone did and she was like "wait, can I do that?"
She always loved the Windows XP look as that was essentially her childhood. So with a bit of work we got Plasma to look like Windows XP and she absolutely loves it. says it makes her feel like a kid again when she was really into pc tech stuff and now using linux has sparked that interest again. She's now watching Veronica Explains and Bread videos on youtube about linux shes learned a few terminal commands, how to do DNF (which she loves) to download programs, etc.
And because of her watching Bread youtube videos she's now asking me about switching to Arch. Her boyfriend is also making the switch too on his desktop. So I think next weekend I'm going to help them set up Arch or CachyOS on both their machines.
Kinda, not fully committed yet cause as "out of the box" as bazzite is, I still have some things I prefer my windows partition for. Oddly enough, the most recent thing was formatting a god damned flash drive! Like it really doesn't need to be as complicated as the devs made it to be!
I know you aren't here looking for suggestions but give gparted a try. It has a nice GUI and if you are used to disk management in windows, the only major difference in finding your way around is selecting the physical drive via a dropdown, instead of seeing all the physical disks at once.
Heck yeah! Love suggestions whether requested or not! Thanks homie.
I have a friend who was trying out endeavor with kde. He uses a trackball mouse, and configuring the acceleration curve has been a nightmare for him. Apparently it's the wayland compositor's job to expose the ability to configure libinput, and only certain ones do it (KDE being one of them), but configuration isn't as straight forward as in windows.
He was more able to configure it when using X11, but kept hitting a bug when using a custom acceleration curve where the cursor would shoot to the top left of the screen (I think it triggered when moving the cursor while clicking).
I haven't looked into it much myself, but it sounds like it has been one of those unfortunate sticking points for him right out of the gate.
Swapped to CachyOS
Pros:
Cons:
I suggest you don't write to you ntfs drive. Copy them all to linux filesystems.
Yeah that would be preferred but the NTFS drive is 16TB of backups and media.
I got an older laptop and set up a Mint dual-boot, just because there are a few things I need Windows for, but I'm on Linux 99% of the time.
I did find in the past that a dual-boot didn't work well on an old Lenovo I owned, so I picked Acer this time, and it works really well. I just don't want to have to worry about my privacy all the time, so Linux + my Proton VPN helps ease my anxiety.
knock knock
Have you heard the good news about our lord and saviour, Linus Torvalds?
Moved my father-in-law from Windows 10 to Mint.
Biggest problem was all his 'documents', which were office365 web links rather than 'actual documents'. Linux presents them as the urls that they really are. They open just fine, though, and can be exported as real local docs for libreoffice etc.
Security and privacy were the main selling points for him. He'd done some reading and thought that Mint was among the best choices for a newstart that just want everything to work; no interests in playing games or anything. I agreed that was the most solid choice. I use Arch btw myself, but wouldn't recommend that for beginners.
Start of this year I transitioned to Arch Linux. Only regret is Battlefield 6 and I don't really care about that cause Arc Raiders is coming this week lol. Every other game has worked out of the box. Although actually RoboCop didn't work for me which was surprising but I think that's a temporary hitch.
I made a sheet for step for step instructions for my friends, hoping some of them convert soon with my help.
I had zero interest in Arc, I watched a brief video a year or so ago and not much else.
I grabbed the playtest for the server slam last weekend and I have to say that I'm pretty excited for the release. It looks amazing, it runs super smoothly and they've gone a long way towards polishing and updating the game systems so it is fun to play and dying doesn't feel as punishing or unfair. (though, those flying rocket UAVs are the spawn of satan)
Ya, I totally get you. I had no idea what it was, got into the tech test 2 based off a YouTube suggestion. Played for a weekend and was immediately hooked. The games got some clear magic. This Server Slam had my friends foaming too, even the ones that weren't normally into PVP style games and now we're taking Friday off to play :D
I hope Embark finds a lot of success with Arc Raiders because I could totally see it being a 10 year game if it's well supported after launch.
Yep. Me and my parents. I'd tried a few distros in the last but always by as issues. Tried arch BTW but I didnt knlw what I was doing.
Thoght about fedora but I'd have to support family so shared to be on the same distro and its not very windows like.
Moved to mibt and bingo. Very much like windows, hardly need to use the termianl, everything just works.
I want to use a PC not sit in the terminal foxing things. That said, I'm slowly getting into the deeper side of linux.
Parents have 0 issues with mint. Even printers just plug and play.
I switched recently because of it. A friend of mine made a workshop for anyone who is interested, to learn how to switch to Linux or Dual Boot. It was the final push for me to switch and loving it so far :)
Glad to hear from someone on the receiving side of recommendations to switch, and that it is going well for you.
Had a relative switch to Linux recently. Lenovo IdeaPad computer running windows 10. The stuff was getting insanely slow and battery life was reduced ton the point that it was being a pain to use. Backed all the documents and data on a local instance of dufs running on home server and installed Linux Mint on it. Had minor issues regarding WiFi and Bluetooth. Solved the wifi one but bluetooth is still a bit unstable sometimes. Came back 1 week later and the user is delighted. Says that everything works 3 times faster than on windows and that battery lasts 3 times longer. They also went on themselves to look for open source alternatives to windows apps they were using and installed them. That's a win !
I started baby steps when Steam stopped supporting Windows7. I built my main gaming PC to dual boot W10 & Ubuntu maybe 3 years ago? And that just worked so-so honestly. Felt like everytime I went to play co-op games w my friends, whatever game we picked that weekend didn't work correctly in Linux. But because I had Win10 right there, I also never forced myself to learn anything either. Biggest thing I could find was the problems seemed to be related to the Nvidia drivers, but never could quite figure out how to update them.
Recently I doubled down with a new PC, and this time it's Ubuntu only. Made an effort to find native Linux apps where possible, learned a few terminal commands, forced myself to also learn Bottles (play Windows games), and bought a Radeon video card instead of Nvidia. Learning curve for what I wanted wasn't nearly as high as I feared. If anything, I think it's pushing me to consider distro shopping, as I'm starting to understand why folks don't like snaps. Looks like Mint will be my next stop.
Biggest challenge so far is there's a few apps I use that just don't have a great Linux equivalent. AutoHotKey is the biggest one, but I see there's some new options here I didn't try yet. https://lemmy.zip/post/47337622 I have not dicked around with my 3D printer software yet, but I'm sure that will be a hurdle.
My big gaming rig is running great on Fedora. My smaller gaming box running xubuntu had its nvidia drivers borked by a “phased” driver rollout. Overall, I think you gotta pay attention to the terminal when updating things. Maybe it’s just xubuntu being shit lol. Unfortunately, the game I play works best on Debian for now.
I switched to Endeavor OS a few months ago for my gaming PC. Working great so far. I’m using Linux a lot at work, so the transition has been smooth for me.
Also helped a relative to switch to Linux Mint by their own request. It was a welcome surprise. They really didn’t want to switch to Windows 11.
Just recently, less than a day ago, helped my dad install dual boot Mint ( cinnamon, yay :| ) on his laptop. Now I gotta move my windows partition onto the SSD I bought and had help installing so I can install mint on my desktop. Just in case he needs help with a problem and I can better diagnose potential problems/solutions. I'd rather switch to what I've got on my laptop ( MX w/ Plasma ) but someone has to be able to effectively play IT.
My computer was crashing constantly, never figured out what it was but I switched over to Linux Mint to see if it was something to do with the software and hardware having an issue since I couldn't find a hardware only issue.
I liked the environment but was still having crashes. So I upgraded MoBo, GPU, CPU, RAM, PSU, HDD and installed Mint again. It didn't work out because Mint didn't have driver support for my newer GPU so I changed over to Nobara and it is very good.
Sounds like a Personal Computer of Theseus. Nobara is great, it's a one person project dedicated towards making gaming and streaming easy.
Recently started testing Linux:
-laptop: Switched an old X1 Carbon to Linux, but had a lot of problem with the WiFi card (Intel Wireless 7265). It's supposed to be Linux compatible, but it simply doesn't work. After a few days of distro hoping I settled for Kubuntu + a WiFi USB adapter(details here if you're furious: https://sh.itjust.works/post/47717768)
I'm still hoping a future update will make the WiFi card work and that I'll be able to remove the USB WiFi adapter. And I'm wondering if 8GB of RAM is enough for KDE (Mozilla regulatory freeze).
-For my gaming rig, I went dual boot with Bazzite and I'll be upgrading W10 to 11 for the software not Linux compatible.
My main problem (and disappointment) is that my Logitech G915 keyboard and JBL quantum headset cannot use their specific software on Bazzite/Linux. The basic stuff works, but all the keyboard (macro keys,...) And headset (spatial sound control, two sources live mixing,...) Handy advanced features doesn't.
Just helped someone yesterday, though they had Windows 11 already. They ended up with Pop!_OS, probably inspired by me having Pop!_OS (I did not make decisions here, only helped). Now we need to work out why Pop!_OS acting like the laptop can't do Wi-Fi
I have some programs that require Windows (still running 10 with ESU) but my Mint partition is now my daily driver.
My wife is the last one in the family to switch to Linux. I started with Linux on PCs (I only used Windows 95 back then in a dual-boot config for gaming only, but did work on Linux back then already), my daughter and my so use Linux for University, and now my wife is the last one to convert over the Win11 fuckup.
I just changed over my work laptop to Ubuntu with the gracious help of a tech-savvy friend. It works like a charm although I haven’t tried to print anything yet. Proton VPN needed installing using the terminal, but it was all ‘cut and paste’ from the Proton website. Tuxedo mini-PC is in the mail and hoping to convert a 2013 MacBook Pro to Mint in the future. So, it is going well.
So far the biggest issues I've faced are League of Legends and funky network driver issues. One of those I can work at, the other not so much.
I used to play League several years ago, and even before Vanguard anticheat, updates would break my ability to play through wine every few months, enough that I gave up.
Yup. My desktop was the last computer I had running windows 10.
A couple years ago, I installed debian on an old laptop that I'm using as a home server now, and that was my first contact with Linux since 2010 or so. It was an experiment that got from "I'm just trying stuff" to "I use this every day".
Then I got a steam deck, and I saw that gaming on Linux was a thing now. Gaming is one of the things I need my PC for, since I don't have consoles, so that was important for me.
Then I got an old laptop from my sibling and I decided to install Arch to learn a bit more. Another experiment that got out of hand, until that laptop became my daily driver. I spent less and less time in front of my desktop.
This year, with Win10 going out of support, and having no interest in Win11 after having used Linux a bunch, I decided that was it. I did slack for a bit, because I had a lot of files that I needed to review and backup (or delete).
Because of unrelated stuff with my server -I had to empty my external hard drive to reformat it from NTFS to ext4-, I used the opportunity to do the hard work, and when that was over, installing Arch was a breeze.
That was a couple months ago, and I'm still customizing the PC, because life got in the way, and I'm doing things differently to my laptop (using niri instead of hyprland, using btrfs instead of ext4 -which I did wrong and I have to fix to be able to do snapshots-).
But yeah, I'm having fun and I don't miss windows. There's some software that I need sometimes, like the 8bitdo firmware updater and things like that, but it's mostly minor stuff. I did use FL Studio before and I heard it doesn't work great on Linux, but I haven't made music for the past 4 years, and if I want to and can't make it work I can always use Reaper or something :)
I switched from windows 10 to Kubuntu a few months ago, and I've loved the freedom so far! Gaming has mostly been a non-issue, except for the 1 or 2 that won't work due to anticheat nonsense. I have a debloated windows instance that I keep on a separate drive, and I've booted that POS maybe 2 times so far.
I got curious and tried Linux Mint and OpenSUSE, but ended back with Kubuntu because I prefer KDE Plasma and im most familiar with Ubuntu.
Be careful though, once you fall into the rabbit hole you'll start doing things like run your own music server (like navidrome), and hosting your own photo storage server (I've tried both Immich and Photoprism).
Yes. I've been dabbling in Linux on and off for 10 years. Finally made the full transition and said fuck my gaming PC, it got swapped to Linux too, if games don't work I just won't play them, I'll get over it. Now my only windows device is my work laptop
Grew up om mac os, switched to windows about 10 years ago. Switched to Linux this summer.
The first distro that stuck was Manjaro... But the instability became too much of a pita and a risk. Found Garuda Moca amd I'm very happy with the experience. Mostly used for gaming.
I'm never going back to the windows side of my dual boot & should probably reclaim the space. Damn malware hyjacks my bios and trys to start & grab updates every once & a while.
Spouse is working on a private cloud server & once its up I will walk backwards out of the corop data theif hell I inhabit now with both birds blazing.
I've always been interested in Linux, and for my home server it's been my OS for the last decade, but for the workstation I found myself dual-booting. With the advent of atomic distributions such as Fedora Kinoite, Universal Blue, Fedora CoreOS etc using the concept of OS images through OSTree / bootc, combined with containerization through flatpak and podman is a great step forward stability and reproducibility.
My desktop has been switched to Aurora (Universal Blue) for more than a year and I couldn't be happier.
A few friends installes it and work gold with it. I also am tasked with installing Linux for my mother where I will use Linux Mint.
Yup. Switched to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I bought a new NVMe to install Linux on, and a USB enclosure to stick the Windows NVMe in, so I can run Autodesk Fusion and VCarve occasionally. (It boots fine off of USB.)
I write code and browse the web, mostly. Linux is fine for that. I wish more commercial software supported Linux.
I haven't run a single game on it, or even installed Steam, because I have a Steam deck. But I guess you could say I game Linux, too.
Hey the Steam deck counts. That's one more Linux device for prospective game developers to target.
CAD is still one area needing development, for sure.
I want to be on Linux but honestly my PC is probably going to stay win10 forever.
When I eventually buy a new one it will be on fedora.
My main desktop / gaming PC just runs so many services and hosts media, loads of ntfs drives. I just cannot be assed right now.
Setting up new services in docker to make the config more portable in the future... Honestly probably wont take that long but you know how it is
I almost did today. Ran into a setback but will try again soon.
Feel free to take your time, Microsoft's the only one setting deadlines here.
Posting to !linux4noobs@programming.dev could potentially help if your setback is technical in nature, and not like life stuff.
Thank you. I may have to post some dumb questions there soon
I'm in process.
Yes I have 1 convert and 1 on the edge. The convert said Windows is behind and wanted to use Linux. Probably to be cool and stuff. He's learning the ropes of Arch on Cachyos for now
I installed Fedora last Friday and I have no regrets. Win11 was never an option for me, my laptop is "too old" and I have no desire to touch that horror in any
~10 years ago I had a Win7/Ubuntu dual boot laptop, but I dropped Ubuntu when I upgraded to SSD and needed all the space I could get. Ubuntu was OK, but there was something with the UI that just didn't click with me. I meant to try other distros but never found the time, so I just stuck with Win10 until now.
I have several legacy software that I need, so I went with dual boot again. If I can get them to run smoothly on Fedora, I'll do a complete clean install.
The only challenge in installing Fedora was Windows' crappy partition manager, which would not let me minimize C: for more than 54MB. I did every trick I knew and learned a few new ones, nothing helped. Then I just flashed Gparted to a USB stick and it worked instantly.
After that everything went smoothly, with the exception that Fedora didn't recognize my Bluetooth device at all. I'll dig into that single issue tomorrow, I'm fairly certain that a fix can be found easily.
Yeah I did. Didn't do it before purely out of not wanting to do the transitional work. But now that Microsoft's bullshittery made me angry enough to do it, I am loving it. Just Debian with xfxe4. It works, it's interesting and I learn new things about CLI and stuff. Also it doesn't feel like I have to fight my os just to have a little privacy and peace of mind. I love the: "everything is a file" thing. It just makes changing settings much more accessible. Still struggling with some things. I still do not understand the logic of the file organization system, but I think this will get better over time. Thanks to all the Debian developers and Foss developers in general. You are the true heroes.
The only logical addition to the post title is "If so, you may be entitled to compensation."
Customer Testimonials: "My cousin Rick switched to Linux and now he never stops talking about Arch and flatpacks and kernel panics. BS&D Associates got us $30,000,000 in damages!"