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Migrated from Windows to Linux. Decided to share list of answers/statements I was looking for before did it (and could not find).

Finally migrated from Windows to Linux. For anyone wondering, what is the state of Linux as your primary OS for home PC\laptop in 2023.

I've finalised my Archlinux installation yesterday, I dropped of Linux more than 10 years ago and experience in 2023 in comparison is awesome and beyond even wildest dreams back then:

  • For average user looking for more out of the box experience I would suggest something Arch based (people in comments suggest EndeavourOS, please do your research). Archlinux installation took me quite some time
  • Almost everything works out of the box, by just installing corresponding package
  • KDE Plasma environment is fast and beautiful
  • Pipewire audio server (Jack\Pulseaudio replacement) works great
  • Wayland window server is not there yet, especially if you have Nvidia with proprietary drivers and want to use VR. Waking up, session restoration and other scenarios have issues. Use X11.
  • Wine is great!
  • Music making - Bitwig Studio DAW has linux native version, yabridge allow you to use windows VSTs, which are easily installed via wine
  • Gaming works out of the box with Steam for majority of titles, some games have native linux version. Performance is great. In worst case windows game might loose 5-15% in performance. Was not case for my titles
  • Gaming outside steam is fine too. Use Wine, Lutris, Proton
  • VR is a mixed bag. Not everything is there (Desktop view, sound control and mirroring, camera, motions smooth, lighthouses do not wake up os go to sleep. I use my phone to turn them on/off). But if its not the problem for you, quite some titles work. Tried: native HF Alyx, Lab, windows: Beat Saber and Boneworks. For me it's a surprise, I did not count on it. Performance is great.

So overall my experience is great. Eventually I'm going to get rid of WIndows on other computers and laptops at howe. I can finally wave goodbye to Windows, with lots of ads and bloatware. Alway glad to help with answers regarding installation while my memory and history logs are fresh. ^^

171 comments

  • I agree with most of your statements, though not with all of them.

    I'd say use X11, only if you're on nvidia and you've got 1 monitor or monitors with the same resolution and refresh rates and are ok with having to disable the X11 compositor and having no animations while playing games... You also have to be ok with tearing while gaming too... It's a lot, and the next version of plasma, plasma 6 is supposed to fix all the jankiness with kde on wayland, as afaik GNOME on wayland is stable on nvidia, I'm on AMD so I can't confirm though...

    EndeavorOS is great, though I'd also suggest trying out nobara (or fedora if you're not gaming... or recording).

    I'm really surprised that you managed to get VR working at all, didn't know that worked at all on linux.

    • I'm curious what you mean by "no animations while playing games"?

      I like Wayland and use it on my laptop. But I also have Nvidia on my PC and while it's janky at places, I don't get all the problems you describe (at least on i3 for me)

      I use multiple monitors with different refresh rates and don't really have any major issue. It syncs with the highest one. I indeed don't use a compositor because it's distracting and also turn off all the composition pipe line stuff. The result of turning off the latter is less latency and a teeny tiny bit of tearing in the lower 3rd when scrolling web pages but that's it.

      Games can run utilize gsync when in-game vsync is enabled so long as you disable the second monitor with xrandr.

    • I have Nvidia and 1 monitor, so did not run into mentioned issues. Wayland on KDE did not work well for me, also https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers have some blockers for me. Gnome on Wayland as far as I understood does not work with DRM, so no chance to run VR. Also though I used Gnome before it does not appeal to me today. Plasma on the other hand was exactly what I was looking for, plus it's actively maintained and updated. Looking forward to see Plasma 6.

      When it comes to VR - I was very surprised, it was something I did not expect to work at all. My setup for reference: I have Nvidia proprietary drivers, SteamVR Beta and Valve Index. I had problems with sound (cracking, quality and etc), but using sof-firmware helped to choose proper output channel on Nvidia GPU via Pro profile and it just started working.

      • Gnome before it does not appeal to me today. Plasma on the other hand was exactly what I was looking for, plus it's actively maintained and updated.

        Very confused by this statement, are you implying Gnome isn't actively maintained and updated or am I missing something?

  • Wait until you find out that your BIOS and Firmware are also proprietary! Gotta get rid of those, but Coreboot/Heads is a real rabbithole and needs lots of work to be usable.

  • There are quite some comments and to clarify all misunderstanding regarding Arch vs something else or any other debates in this thread, I would like to add this comment.

    I do not recommend Arch based distro over Debian based or anything else. Topic is about using Linux at its current state, I assume that most of distros will be more or less similar when it comes to statements of the post. In my case it was Archlinux distro, because I had prior experience and it's philosophy is appealing to me. Like rolling release, configure yourself, install only necessary for you things and etc.

    I do not recommend to use Arch itself for a new user. I hope from the post it was clear, that new user should not care much about mentioned topics, like Pipewire vs Pulseaudio or Wayland VS X. One can use more high order distros or even different base, like Linux Mint. Which I also used long time ago and was quite happy about.

    I do not say that KDE is better or worse than Gnome or whatever. For me it's just a preference, like possibility to have more control over UI and looks and to avoid some blockers, like DRM on Wayland. You can have them all on your machine, beauty of Linux.

    And please do your own research on the topic and do take everything with grain of salt. There are a lots of great distros, desktop environments and other things. And there are tons of good and bad advices, navigating through which sometimes is not so easy.

    And I would like to underline that there are not so many up to date objectivly better things when it comes to software, pick what you need and like.

    • I too recently made the switch from Windows to Linux. I wonder what people mean by a "new user"? My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20, followed by a C64 and later an Amiga 500. The OS on the Amiga was somewhat like Linux (at least from memory). I tried Linux a few times in the past 30 years or so. Once because I was curious I ordered a CD (do not remember which distro that was), then 20 years ago because of work (I think that was Ubuntu) and a few years ago (maybe 4-5) because I had an old laptop that couldn't run Windows any more. Since it was just an old laptop I only used to watch movies/series on, I distro-hopped a bit on it. Of all the ones I tried, Manjaro was the fastest and the one that gave me no problems with hardware working out-of-the-box. Mind you, none of these experiences with Linux were very intensive. And while I am a programmer and I learned at school how computers work (this was in the 80s), I consider myself a noob when it comes to Linux. Does that make me a "new user"?

      Recently I was planning on building a new PC and contemplated going from Windows 10 to 11, but the whole software market has been irking me for a while now. Everything (not just software and OS mind you) seems to be switching more and more to a subscription model, which just feels wrong to me. Not to mention the ever-increasing breach of privacy by the big companies. As such, before building my new computer, I tried a few distros on my old PC. First I tried all the flavours of Ubuntu and decided fairly quickly that KDE is my desktop environment. Gnome is just too restrictive for my taste and the others feel too much like Windows (just a personal opinion, obviously). In terms of actual distro, I noticed all the Ubuntu flavours gave me problems after using them a few days, so that one was crossed off the list. While doing my "research" I quickly came to the conclusion I prefer a rolling release over a regular release cycle. Partly because some of my (new) hardware is/was not part of the kernel yet, but also because I do not want to do a major update every (x) year. But rolling does come with a higher chance of breaking things. This is why I went with Manjaro. The 2 weeks (or so) of holding back updates -which others seem to see as a problem- I see as an advantage.

      I have only been using it for a month now, so far so good. Still learning and getting lost a lot in how it all works. So far I am happy with my choice, we will see how I feel in a year ;) I already made some silly mistakes, like I wanted my /home directory on a separate drive and stupidly thought I needed a 1TB drive for Root as well... lol. Now got this big empty space on one of my drives not sure what to use for. The choice between X11 and Wayland is a touch one, but I stay with X for now. I do have one question though: What is pipewire and should I switch to that?

      • Nice write up. Hope we both will be fine with our installations =)

        Regarding "new user" - that's true, e.g. average person has much steeper learning curve than software dev, DIY enthusiast playing with Arduino or gamer who has his own server for favorite game in the cloud and etc. They might be all "new" to Linux as desktop OS, but not on the same start line.

        Though looking at EndeavourOS and recalling my experience with Mint and Ubuntu, it might be possible to have windows like (when it comes to easy to use) installation\configuration and experience out of the box.

  • Glad to hear. Few remarks that I hope will help. I'll start with Wine to clarify it's a clutch. Sure it's a useful one but IMHO the beauty of Linux is that you are in control, you have more agency. Wine per se is great because it gives you more options. Unfortunately most of the time Wine is used to run what is not available in Linux and that is usually not open source. Consequently you bring with you little black boxes, spaces where you lose again control. The deeper problem IMHO is that you assume there are no alternatives. In truth in most cases there are numerous alternatives, they just aren't clones because having more freedom to explore means they can be genuinely new solutions with interfaces that are thus unfamiliar. So... yes enjoy Wine but I'd suggest to take just a bit of time to search and try open source alternatives. This lead me to an example. I work in VR so when you mentioned desktop view I thought it was interesting. Yes you don't have whatever M$ is proposing (honestly used it years ago with WMR but can't even recall it) but you have "simple" things like ALVR (I even use SteamVR on Steam Deck) and IMHO deeper explorations like XRdesktop https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xrdesktop/xrdesktop that allow you to manipulate actual windows in space, not "just" on a 2D plane. Anyway enjoy the discovery it's a worthwhile adventure. I work and play, VR or not, on Linux for years now, it's literally liberating!

  • For average user looking for more out of the box experience I would suggest something Arch based (people in comments suggest EndeavourOS, please do your research). Archlinux installation took me quite some time

    A simple install of Debian + GNOME install (with all the defaults, easier to install than Windows) will provide you with a useful store that can even load flatpaks... and there's nothing that easy an practical on the KDE land.

    Almost everything works out of the box, by just installing corresponding package

    ^No extra package required

    Wine is great!

    No it isn't. It is a piece of shit that does a garbage of a job to get Windows application to "run". It doesn't run old/basic applications well nor does it run useful modern applications such as MS Office without constant glitches and hours of hacking around

    TL:DR; the Linux experience might be great but it isn't for everyone and anyone. If you need to do your job and not constantly be dealing with small annoyances that will curb your productivity it isn't, most likely, for you.

    • I use Linux at work because Windows has too many "annoyances that will curb [my] productivity". I can understand that it is not for everybody though.

      • Yeah, sure. Thing is: it isn't for:

        • Regular folks that need MS Office cause it won't run it properly and if you've to collaborate with others Open/Libre/OnlyOffice won't cut it;
        • Regular folks that just installed a password manager (KeePassXC) and a browser (Firefox/Ungoogled) via flatpak only to find out that the KeePassXC app can't communicate with the browser extension because people are "beating around the bush" on GitHub instead of fixing the issue;
        • Regular folks who want a simple Virtual Machine and have to go thought cumbersome installation procedures like this one just to reach the end and have error messages saying virtualization isn't enable when, in fact, it is... or trying to use GNOME Boxes and have a sub-par virtualization experience;
        • Designers because Adobe apps won't run properly without having a dedicated GPU, passthrough and a some hacky way to get the image back into your main system that will cause noticeable delays;
        • Gamers because of the reasons above + as the OP said a 5-15% hit in performance;
        • People that run old software / games because not even those will run properly on Wine;
        • A lot of electrical engineers as typical toolsets ( Circuit Design Suite combines Multisim and Ultiboard), IDEs and whatnot are primarily designed for Windows. And again there are alternatives such as KiCad and EasyEDA for some jobs but they don't work great if you've to collaborate with others users of Multisim;
        • Labs that require data acquisition from specialized hardware because companies making that hardware won't make drivers and software for Linux;
        • Architects because AutoCAD isn't available (not even the limited web version works) and Libre/FreeCAD don't cut it if you've to collaborate with AutoCAD users;
        • Developers, because if you aren't a dip shit so up your ass that you only know how to use Docker and Github actions to deploy to some proprietary cloud solution you won't even be able to find a decently working FTP/SFTP/FTPS desktop client (similar WinSCP or Cyberduck). There a few, all worse than the other and they all fail even at basic stuff like dragging and dropping a file.

        Linux desktop is great, I love it but I don't sugar coat it nor I'm delusional like most people I see here.

        If you live in a bubble where you don't have to collaborate with anyone else and you can use native Linux apps things might work, you might have a decent workflow and get stuff done but once you've to collaborate with other who use Windows/Mac it's game over.

        When you get/install Windows you pay a minimal license and get things working out of the box without further issues. Getting software to run is easy all vendors support whatever you're trying to do and you get very high productivity from day zero. There are annoyances from time to time, sure, but they're way fewer and simpler to deal with than the hoops you've to go through to get a minimal and viable/productive desktop experience on Linux. And I'm even talking about all the situations where you've to collaborate with others and the "alternatives" aren't just up to it.

        It all comes down to a question of how much time (days?) you want spend fixing shit in one platform that will be working out of the box in another one for a minimal fee. If you buy a Windows license and spend the time you would've spent dealing with Linux compatibility issues doing your actual job you'll, most likely, get a better ROI.

    • They hated him because he spoke the truth. I can't even get "simple" distros like mint or popos to run on my work laptop because the keyboard will just not work on boot 19 out of 20 times and no amount of googling or chatgpt was able to fix this. It just won't work.

      On my gaming rig with an Nvidia card there were no fan controls and no VRR on wayland and x11 doesn't have proper multi monitor support. This sub is delusional, if they think that Linux is usable for the average Joe and I'm coming from an IT background and it's still too much of a hassle for me. I just want to get things done.

171 comments