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?
I went to Fedora in March of 2025. I never looked back. Definitely some frustration with video drivers and hardware issues (bad Samsung monitor), but nothing I haven’t been able to work around.
Most importantly, my computer runs great, my games run great, I have more control than ever, and I will never go back to Microslop. Their pivot to “AI EVERYTHING!!!” has been abhorrent, and I refuse to cooperate.
It’s going great. A bit of a learning curve at the start, but nothing difficult. I had a few minor issues along the way, but it’s all worth it, because I no longer get bothered by all the annoyances of Windows. My device is now managed, updated, etc by me instead of big tech that doesn’t serve my interests, feels much better.
Set up dual boot with Pop! OS to give it a try and overall my experience is pretty positive.
There are a few things that are bothering me. For example, any time the system wakes from sleep, Firefox can no longer load new pages. Anything that was open prior to sleep works until I attempt to open anything new in that tab, and any new tab just refuses to do anything at all
I also miss HDR when I’m gaming. I ran cyberpunk for about a week in Linux and was pleasantly surprised that it ran just fine. Then I had to hit into windows for something work related and launched the game there after I was done… HDR makes a huge impact with my monitor and I didn’t realize how much it did until it was gone.
KDE Plasma has HDR support. You can check if your monitor is supported by booting from a cutting edge KDE distro like Fedora KDE.
I have a dual boot PC with mint and the nvidia drivers crashed the GUI on boot. I haven’t resurrected mint yet.
My Surface Book 3 with kubuntu is great but I have to turn it off, sleep will burn up the battery.
Bought a new gaming PC with an AMD GPU and went straight for Bazzite almost a year ago. It was pretty damn painless and straightforward. Especially the only thing I use it for are singleplayer or indie multiplayer games. Almost everything worked out if the box.
A lot of sim racing stuff worked surprisingly well.
It was a pain to learn how to install Assetto Corsa with its mods, needs a specific version of proton with specific windows libraries installed, but once I figured that all out it runs great.
It was also a pain when I bought a Chinese handbrake for sim racing, but thanks to the Sim Racing On Linux discord, a member wrote a custom driver for it for me and another member that bought it. Unfortunately, I can’t exactly install custom kernel drivers on Bazzite, so I ended up switching to CachyOS and have been enjoying that so far. It was a bit of a pain to switch as it requires more tinkering, but I got to a place where it was running nicely fairly quickly.
Went with Linux Mint back in July, set up a dual boot in case I’d need Windows for anything. Figured something or other wouldn’t work through wine or some such. Never have booted back to Windows since.
I think the only issue I’ve had is that my 8BitDo controller won’t work via Bluetooth, but it works fine via USB. (Other Bluetooth devices have been fine, not that I have many.)
I’ve been dual booting Windows and Linux (Ubuntu) for a while, and sadly I’m back on Windows after a month and a half of exclusively using Linux. The reason? Ethernet. I need to assign a static IP to a dev board with Ethernet, and while it works fairly easily on Windows, it just doesn’t work on Linux, saying it’s unavailable in the nmcli output.
Of course, Windows is worse than before. It hasn’t fixed the bug where it never updates the system time, forcing me to manually press sync on every boot. And it hasn’t fixed the newer bug where my laptop display needs to go down to 768p to display 300Hz, making me to go down to 60Hz to use the full 1080p resolution. All the while Microsoft pushes things nobody wants.
Switched almost exactly one year ago. I have a win 10 dualboot for some things (mainly occasional lol/tft, and osu tournaments because for some reason that stutters under wine on my pc even though it runs perfectly fine on my laptop).
The nicest thing is not constantly being annoyed by my OS. I’m forced to use win 11 at work and my god I hate it. Whenever I boot into win 10 at home I also want to rip my hair out, granted it was a lot better on my previous install where I bothered to debloat it.
I’m not really a fan of how “hidden” program installs (at least through package managers) are, but it’s all in the same place and windows programs have been moving there anyway, putting everything in appdata, and to make it worse it’s often split up and there’s random registry entries. So I’m not really bothered by it.
I also have some minor issues with kde, like it deciding to regularly reorder search results (seriously I search for “disc” and always launch discord, but the top spot rotates between discord and discover, so I misclick whenever it changes). Also ever since plasma 6.5 my clipboard has been semi-broken, “copy to clipboard” buttons in the browser don’t work, and screenshots don’t automatically go into the clipboard either until I click the button for it. If anyone has a fix for either of those things I’d love to hear it.
I also didn’t know i needed a dropdown terminal until I had a dropdown terminal and now I can’t live without it.
It’s great. My only issue is my computer had issues with sleep mode. So, I just disabled it.
On Linux I would need to disable online only accounts, copilot, one drive, recall, bing search, edge, edge again, privacy settings, edge yet again…
Linux is great. Honestly it came a long way over the years.
After bouncing around a few distros, fedora was the one to make sleep mode work on my laptop
Does not work for me :( honestly though, I never used sleep mode anyway. So it may have been patched. But if my computer isn’t being used, it’s off.
It’s going well. I started selfhosting most of my services on a debian machine. TV doesnt have internet anymore, it’s hooked to a fedora mini pc that i use to play media. I’ve installed Asahi fedora on my M1 Pro macbook and it’s flawless.
Dont miss anything. The only thing that pisses me off is when i work on a document on nextcloud (using onlyoffice) it doesnt look nice on MS office. So for work stuff i have to sometimes log into ms office account and use their cloud to work on a presentation or something.
I also kind of have to keep the OSX installation for some photography stuff although when i have the time ill look for linux alternatives. Mainly i need something to edit fujifilm raw photos with
I switched to Fedora Workstation 41 a year agoish, and am currently running 43 KDE!
I really like being able to theme my desktop to my liking, esp with KDE, my current theme is using the Catppuccin Macchiato colours (with “Mauve” accent, i.e. purple) and window decorations (solely because they were the only one available with big, colourful buttons. The rest had tiny icons that were hard to differentiate) + a cool black hole splash screen I found that has a date too! I am using the Bibata Modern Ice cursor and Papirus icon pack.
I also like having loads of additional software to pick from. LibreOffice works really well on Linux, Lutris and Prism Launcher are great for the games I play, Okular is nice (though by now someone has told me it existed on Windows, damn!), and there are just some simple tasks where the Linux-native apps that are simply perfect (see KAlarm, Dolphin and Nautilus file managers both having actually useable search that doesn’t require a third-party app like Everything on Windows, Elisa music player)
I had no issues with software incompatibility, all of the ones I use either had a (better) Linux alternative or had native Linux support (like Steam, Firefox, OBS Studio). The only thing that I am unable to do on Linux is a) (Re)install Windows for friends and family (weird, I know, but the Installation Assistant is not compatible with Linux. Technically I think you can use CLI tools to write the ISO to flash drive, but I couldn’t get that to work. If I had the time I probably would been able to figure it out…) b) Access files from an iPhone, but that’s more an iPhone stupid problem than anything. I use an Android phone now, and I have full access to its file system just by plugging it in, and c) Playing Minecraft Bedrock (hmm, I wonder who owns Mojang and how they could benefit from this…) but I have set up a MC Java server with GeyserMC+Floodgate and now my little brother (who plays on an iPad) can play Minecraft with me, which is awesome! There’s a bit of lag due to the translation layer, but nothing major.
I would like to add more.
I really like being able to just install, update, and remove programs using the “dnf” and “flatpak” commands, it is super nice and simple! I have accidentally removed an audio driver once, but after reinstallation it worked again.
KDE Connect and Localsend are both super awesome, no more words need to be said
I got into self-hosting as well, setting up Radicale, Immich, Forgejo, Nextcloud, Vikunja, and the aforementioned Minecraft server. They work quite well for my use case.
Removing myself from Window’s incessant adverts and Microsoft’s tracking feels like a breath of fresh air
The printer just works
The fact that you can just change from GNOME to KDE Plasma to whatever else without reinstalling the OS is kind of insane to me. You can even install multiple at once and switch between them!
The OS actually lets you do the things you want to do (the power of sudo is in my hands!)
You’re able to install it without signing into an account and without an internet connection, as it should.
The fact that there are no incessant advertising and marketing and all this other crap for no cost! I applaud everyone who develops these super cool software, technologies, and operating systems, and if you can, donate to projects that help you a lot!
My only surprise is how easy it was.
Switched Jan of 2025. Already used 99% open source stuff on Windows, so the conversion was nearly painless.
I tried Debian at first, which didn’t support my bleeding edge new hardware. So I tried LMDE… which also (unsurprisingly) didn’t support new stuff either. It wasn’t until I landed on regular Linux Mint that things hit a good stride.
I still mourn the loss of Winamp though… :(
have you tried audacious?
winamp/wacup(better) runs fine on wine afaik
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.
This is my experience to a T. Picked Bazzite for gaming. It just works. Anyone worried about not being able to do the things you think you need Windows for need not worry. You can do all of that and more.
Like most people I use Windows 11 at work and the contrast is enormous.
Same
Open file explorer. Start a search. Open new tab in file explorer. Notice the folder path didn’t change. Observe that you permanently glitched the file explorer path bar until you close file explorer.
I hate using this buggy OS.
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.
It’s so stable. I’ve never reinstalled in a decade of use, except only due to hardware failure and when installing on new computers. Love Arch.
