I get the feeling that Lemmy has a relatively higher concentration of Linux users. I’m preparing to move over to Linux when I build my new computer. I already put Linux Mint Cinnamon edition on one of my old laptops and I like it quite a bit. I figure that since I’ve been wanting to switch over for years, I should just do it. The games were the thing holding me back, and Proton seems to have taken care of that(I don’t really play multiplayer games that require anticheat… I’m a singleplayer kind of girl).
For me, anyway, I want to switch because Windows has been creeping me out with its telemetry. Windows 11 looks lousy, and I’d have to jump through some hoops to get my old hardware on 11, anyway.
Current user. It’s been my primary OS since around 2001.
People have a lot of opinions. My TLDR is if you’re interested, try it out.
Last time I tried Linux was 23 or so years ago. I had no idea what I was doing or at that time knew how to figure it out. That being said, I want to use Linux but am apprehensive.
I see computers as tools. I think that tools should be intuitive and fairly easy to use. My brief experience with Linux left me feeling that it requires a fair amount of time dedicated to setup and upkeep. That’s time I would much rather spend on other endeavors.
Windows has gotten to a point where I don’t like using it. I will not switch to Apple products, full stop. But I won’t make Linux a full-time hobby.
What should I do, friends?
Try a live version(run from a thumb drive) or a virtual box environment. It’s come a long way in 20 years. I’d recommend an easier distribution to start like Ubuntu or mint. Note Ubuntu comes in gnome and kde interfaces. Kde is more start menu like to me.
Once I got everything working on my hardware, I was able to stop fussing with it. Privacy and lack of bloat was my reason to switch from windows.
You just gotta do what’s right for you. That might be windows, Mac, Linux, or something else.
From a thumb drive, you say? That sounds like a low commitment experiment I can get behind. I shall have to look into that more. Thanks!
Yep, boot from a thumb drive or if you’ve got the power for it run a vm in windows. When you’re ready for the half commit phase, dual boot. Then you can pick windows or Linux at startup.
I’ve never posted a question on a Linux forum, but I’ve searched and used lots. I currently run Linux mint and then put windows in a VM if I really need a windows app.
If you’re not a gamer (with caveats) and don’t have to use msoffice desktop apps you’ll likely be fine in Linux.
For gaming a lot of steam games are supported but not all so there’s some gap there.
Here is a hot take: I recommend staying with Windows 10.
I’ve been a FreeBSD porter, I’ve used Linux and BSD as primary desktop environments but gave up on Linux as a desktop and I don’t regret it. I used Mac for a while as well but never liked how it laid things out. It wasn’t intuitive.
The problem with Linux is twofold.
One, it’s not at all user-friendly. People will argue it’s gotten a lot better but there is a multitude of issues with Linux from drivers and new tech like Wayland causing problems. To the point where the last time I tried to install Fedora, it bricked before it even got to the live CD desktop because Nvidia, KDE, and Wayland are just broken for some reason, and people accept it. Even simple things in Fedora Gnome like changing my mouse movement to not have acceleration and control the mouse speed did not work via the settings GUI and I had to do some arcane commands from decades ago to get it to work. People call this user-friendly or say “Well you’re just holding Linux wrong.” I said exactly this on Reddit a few months back and got a response “What did you do to your Linux install that the mouse settings stopped working, I’ve never fucked up an install that bad!” which is exactly my next point.
Two, the Linux community is frankly, not ready for mass adoption. Linux is built from its users for its users and it turns out the average Linux user is frankly, a jerk who only thinks about their workflow and themselves. If you come to them with a problematic workflow they will blame the workflow instead of the tools that restrict the workflow. This is exactly what stops mainstream adoption. This is even the root issue of the above. People who try Linux don’t report bugs. While most people don’t report bugs, when people report bugs to open-source projects it’s met with pushback. You have to try hard to prove it’s actually a bug in the first place and you aren’t just “holding it wrong.” The entire Linux community and its mentality needs a huge overhaul and there are small pockets of Linux distros who have gotten better at this but overall the community on average is still the type to suggest “rm -rf /” to fix your drivers.
So Linux probably isn’t for you. I have the exact same desire to move away from Windows. I’ve simply just kept to Windows 10 and used the Windows 10 Debloater to remove the telemetry.
You raise a good point about the Linux community itself. A lot of the people I’ve seen have tended to be gatekeepy chuds. My girlfriend switched ahead of me, and she says she’s having difficulty finding Linux YouTubers that aren’t right-wing douches. I really hope Beehaw ends up with a vibrant Linux community… the be(e) nice ethos would cut out a lot of the worst issues with the Linux community.
I use both Linux and Windows, but run Linux inside of HyperV on Windows 10 or on Raspberry Pi projects. I use too many Microsoft-specific tools for work and play games that don’t have great Linux ports to use it as my primary OS right now.
I used Ubuntu for years as my primary OS to get more life out of a PC that would not run Vista/7 back in the day. I got another four years out of it. I would not recommend Linux for anyone who wants something that just “works” and is adverse to having to tinker and use the command line because something will happen. I installed an update once that screwed up my display driver on that machine and the fix involved a lot of manual fussing and research. I am a professional nerd and have the skills to do these things, but even I just want something to work without fussing with it all the time.
At the end of the day, a computer is a tool and you should use an OS that works for your needs. There is no moral high ground here.
I daily drive both windows and Linux mint. In my experience, it’s been getting a lot better but isn’t ready for non-technical users who just want something to work. I needed to disable the nipple button on my laptop cause it drifts hard and I had to resort to the terminal for that.
I’m liking mint a lot, but I would suggest having at the least have one windows machine that you can quickly access.
Been a full-time Linux user since 1999 — fed up with Windows … I guess it would have been 98? I found Red Hat Linux on CD at, I think, Office Depot. It was a dive into the deep end. I was having x-server problems at first, and a math professor buddy told me where to find the config file and how to fire up vi. I think I probably spent two days sorting out how to use vi. But I never looked back. Found ways early on of making sure I was compatible with colleagues and others and, of course, have needed to spin up Windows VMs over the years for things as silly as getting Adobe DRM content to display. But it’s all so easy, now, though I do see a lot of good advice here about being certain about compatibility, etc., if you’re on bleeding-edge hardware (given what you posted, I seriously doubt you’ll have any issues).
I’ve used Fedora as a daily driver for at least the last seven or eight years, Ubuntu before that. I’ve run Arch on a few things and always run Ubuntu on servers (just got used to it). Windows will very quickly become something you don’t miss at all.
Having said all that, I’ve never been a gamer of any kind, and I know that makes a big difference.
Been using Linux for over 10 years at this point. Haven’t considered going back to Windows. Even put my boomers on Fedora with GNOME without issue.
I tried once the last decade and it was a pretty bad user experience.
It’s improved a lot :)
You do run the risk of a driver issue giving you trouble, especially for brand new cards, but the kernel is so well-populated now that it’s unlikely to be anything other than plug-and-play 🎉
😆 No, I meant Windows. I gave it a brief shot after some trouble with Linux gaming, but the user experience was much worse.
I love Linux. I prefer it to windows, but windows is fine. Unfortunately, there are some programs I use that don’t work properly under linux, primarily Microsoft office, but also some games here and there. I’m sure that I could get those games working under linux, but it’s more work. I use linux at work, and windows at home at the moment, but I prefer linux and am very comfortable with both.
I personally really like Linux Mint myself. It got my old acer laptop to run again (the windows install became as big as the hard drive and literally wouldn’t boot) and I’ve been using it more and more on my home desktop, with a windows partition just in case. Just know that, while everything you want to do is possible, there WILL be some weird stuff you have to find work arounds for.
I use Linux on my personal PC and Steam Deck, Windows 10 on my work PC. If I could get away with using Linux at work, I would.
I switched to Linux 5 years ago or thereabouts and haven’t really looked back. I don’t really like multiplayer games so the odd title that doesn’t support anti-cheat on Linux is a non-issue for me. I distro hopped for a while, then settled on Manjaro for a couple of years. I’ve since moved to Arch, and have been using it for the past 2 years. At this point, I can’t see myself ever installing Windows on any device I own again.
Use the best tool for the job. I LOVE Linux, but as of right now it still has too many deal breakers to be my ONLY OS. I have to run it with Windows 11. That aside, my preferred distro is endeavourOS.
Main deal breakers right now include:
- Anti cheat support (this is getting better)
- Game compatibility (this is NEARLY solved but you still get the occasional game that crashes or doesn’t wanna work well)
- Variable refresh rate support on multi monitors (yes wayland exists for this, but…)
- Wayland support isn’t quite there. Implementations of it still have extra latency, using xwayland for games can have a performance hit, there’s still bugs (looking at you SDDM), etc. Once KDE 6 and wine wayland come out I expect this to be solved
- Multi monitor scaling still sucks. KDE does it the best and I still run into problems with blurry applications on my mixed resolution setup
Fact of the matter is, Windows has none of these issues, and the problems windows does have for me (customization, spying, etc) are a lot less major and easier to deal with then the issues I have on Linux.
I have considered Linux for personal use but honestly for now I’m too braindead to put in the effort since I’m not that interested in spending time fiddling around with the OS. There are some proprietary software keeping me on Windows and I’m too lazy to dual boot for a few programs. I’ve had exposure to Ubuntu in college and dabbled in OpenSUSE though and it was pretty nice.
I have to say though that I transitioned to a lot of (open source) programs that are also available on Linux because I’ve had pains before with typical annoying shenanigans with closed software (enshittification but make it programs instead of social media). Programming and Linux are also adjacent relevant skills to my wider field so maybe sometime in the next few months/years I may transition. Windows is kinda meh but not irritating enough to make me switch. I have a Raspberry Pi running Linux for Home Assistant for smart home stuff though!
Full time Linux user for about 6 years now. Both at work and at home.
If games is what’s holding you back, don’t worry about it so much. There are very few games that don’t run on Linux these days, like you said, because of anticheat, or just because the underlying company is horrible. Valorant comes to mind for games, Epic and EA for companies.
Some example of game i’ve been playing on Linux, with no issues: Cyberpunk, Elden Ring, Everspace 2, Dying Light, Sekiro, Warhammer 40k: Darktide, Guild Wars 2, Doom Eternal, Elite Dangerous, Valheim, Minecraft etc…
There’s more things working than not working these days.
That said, I would also be lying if I said there isn’t going to be a learning curve. It’s a little bit more work (especially for games not available on Steam), but it’s really not that bad, and the community is very helpful.
I use Linux wherever I can and after spending years trying different distros I’ve always come back to Mint. Although I enjoy tinkering with new user interfaces, spending time fixing problems instead of actually using the OS eventually got old. Once set up Mint works for years without a hiccup.
Microsoft’s telemetry, increasing invasiveness pushing ads, and general dumbing down of their OS so it’s usable for people who don’t know what to do when they reach the edge of the mouse pad has gotten ridiculous.
Microsoft’s intent to move Windows to the cloud should make more people question using it. Despite having to pay for Windows it seems Microsoft has decided that we’re what’s actually for sale, not the operating system.
I have a windows pc I use for work (and most gaming), but on my personal laptop I currently use Mint.
Ive been using linux since 2010, but since I am not a programmer and know only a few basic commands I have stuck to very user friendly distros like Mint, Ubuntu, Zorin etc.
My work pc runs windows 11 and its a shame its so brutal behind the scenes, it actually looks and runs very nicely. But I try to run OSOShutup! And other tools to reduce telemetry, (hopefully that helps a bit)
