Hi all,
I made this post about a year ago: https://lemmy.ca/post/31760258
At the time, I was going to switch a couple laptops over and if all went well, put Linux on my main rig.
I just wanted to provide an update on my own experiences, and wanted to see what other people’s experiences were like.
I put Mint on both my laptop’s, and enjoyed it. Familiar enough to Windows where I could mess around with things, but different enough that I could learn. After 7 or 8 months of rocking Mint, I finally put Bazzite on my main rig. I did during the work week, which on hindsight was a bad idea because I also run Windows on my main rig as my work requires Windows, but I accidentally deleted my Windows bootloader (lol). After an evening of panic, I was able to recover the bootloader, set Bazzite up with dual booting, and it’s been smooth sailing since.
I’m a pretty big gamer, play lots of games with a bunch of friends, and after about 3 months of using Bazzite, I have not run into a SINGLE issue that has prevented me from playing anything. I have been shocked at how smooth everything has been. In the morning, I boot into Windows, work for the day, and then when I’m done I just run boot-windows through Steam or reboot to get into Bazzite and then I’m gaming.
I have done a little bit of tinkering with audio to get my desk mic to work correctly, but it’s been great!
For others who have recently made the switch over, what was your experience like? Any issues? Any tips or helpful suggestions to share?
Cheers!
I slapped Mint onto an old Surface Pro 3 and it runs great. Only complaints are inconveniences, really (constant updates, no easy way to get the standard set of fonts on it to replace Word’s library effectively). But I’m enjoying it much more than the bloated Windows 10 that used to be on it.
no easy way to get the standard set of fonts on it to replace Word’s library
I haven’t looked in years, but Microsoft’s Core Fonts might cover at least some of those. Does Mint have the ttf-mscorefonts-installer package?
For months I pondered moving from Windows to Linux with my main worry being all the noise about my NVidia card. I finally bit the bullet and did a full wipe, no dual boot installed Kubuntu. I’ve had no problems at all. All my Steam games just work - even adding non-Steam games is easy enough. The biggest thing I have noticed is how much more responsive it is. Definitely worth it. Definitely should have done it years ago.
Could have tested installing to a pendrive, or other internal drive or other partition as dual boot, to test, first.
That was something I didn’t know about too, when I jumped with both feet 22 years ago.
I hear a lot about nvidia woes on Linux. I never had any issues in all those 22 years (most of which were with nvidia) across several machines.
Did a bunch of computers over the last year. Kids computers, personal, mini PCs, 2 HTPCs. Only real issue I’ve had was I had to switch to a DP to HDMI from a HDMI cable because one of the HTPCs wouldn’t do resolution or refresh rate higher than a 3rd grader’s chromebook. Once I swapped the cable it was fine. Most are Mint, 1 CachyOS, one Bazzite.
We play a ton of games and watch a ton of media and we’ve had no trouble at all with anything. None of us play games that want anti-cheat so that’s a big plus.
It’s wonderful what a bunch of skilled people following their passions can accomplish, isn’t it?
Thank goodness for Richard Matthew Stallman.
I switched to arch on my main rig at the beginning of the year. It was such a bad experience I switched back to windows and I am slowly ordering parts for a new PC that doesnt have Nvidia in it. I run linux on everything except my gaming PC and I was just being a big dumbass. For whatever reason I was trying to run i3 instead of a desktop environment and I started the whole thing by pulling ny laptop dot files down. I couldn’t get anything to launch. My focusrite did work out of the box tho. So I’m going to try again, but first I’m gonna finish my new build. Mainky because I’ll need to test out Sober to ensure they can still play Roblox.
If you want to go Arch Linux at, you might want to try CachyOS. It’s been my gaming PC OS for around one year and I’m really happy with the result.
yeah CachyOS is my go to if I want to use Arch. great distro. If i’m not on NixOS then I’m on Cachy.
I swapped over to Arch early this year. Very little issues, rather simple compared to the online stigma. Maybe it’s because I have up to date hardware, idk.
Made a guide for friends, one has swapped over and a couple others have voiced interest. It’s only a matter of time with the windows BS and as Linux continues to mature.
and as Linux continues to mature
That’s funny to the ear of those of us who have been using it for decades.
I mean I can imagine, but I think it’s fair to say there’s been significant gaming progress and user friendliness to happen over the the past <5 years. It was unthinkable to switch over a decade ago and now it’s practically no different than windows. To me that means a different bar for what maturity is i guess.
I mean I can imagine, but I think it’s fair to say there’s been significant gaming progress and user friendliness to happen over the the past <5 years. It was unthinkable to switch over a decade ago and now it’s practically no different than windows. To me that means a different bar for what maturity is i guess.
In my experience, it [(several distros)] was[/were] already easier than windows over 20 years ago. Easier, and better, by a long long long way [… many ways].
What’s changed for user friendliness in the past <5 years? ~ (I’m struggling to conceive of anything, and only coming up with stuff to confound new users, like some distros adopting wayland by default, despite it not yet being feature complete, and having a more complicated structure than X11, and like whatever GNOME are doing to inhibit user choice).
What made it unthinkable to you to switch over a decade ago?
I’m probably thinking of a bigger timeline, don’t recall the last time I tried to migrate but it was probably between 5 and 10 years.
Biggest improvement is Steam+Proton. Gaming in Linux was a huge PITA in the past and nowadays it just works automagically.
Wayland was a big deal to me since it supports some features I needed like per-screen scaling, using my 13’’ notebook on a desk without that gets really straining. I’m using KDE and I also think Linux GUIs have massively improved in usability.
Hardware support improved a lot, though there are still gaps like fingerprint readers which honestly still suck in Linux. But at least all the essential stuff works very well out of the box.
Docker standardizing deployments made it easier to use any OS you want for coding… which is probably a bigger win for MacOS to be honest. More cross-platform support for development tools (including .Net on Linux) also help since that avoids the need of dual-booting when your day job involves these.
I also think Linux GUIs have massively improved in usability
Though we have lost the cube being widely available. ;)
I swapped a laptop over maybe 5 years back at this point and bricked it within a week. I tried a total of 2 or 3 times and something always went wrong (this was Arch btw). I converted it to Mint maybe a year later and it was stable but I wasn’t convinced it was stable enough for my main computer.
I’m also pretty sure before that majority of games were not easily compatible like they are today.
Even as we speak Steam is not constantly resetting my keyboard as of some recent patch and I’m positive this wouldn’t happen on windows. Like Linux is great, it’s come a long way, and I would say it’s mature enough for most of friends to pop over without issue - but there are still clearly situations where I’m fighting the OS’s minority status or hodgepodge structure.
I love it, but claiming it was better than windows for the past 20 years is a bit of a bubble. You must not game, because 20 years ago it would have been worse - to name the one niche I care to point out right now.
I swapped a laptop over maybe 5 years back at this point and bricked it within a week. I tried a total of 2 or 3 times and something always went wrong (this was Arch btw).
LOL! Yeah. Arch will do that. XD
Which is fine if you like that. LOL.
Maybe try e.g. a devuan-stable based respin, if having your OS half-backflip and faceplant is not your preference. ;)
I’m also pretty sure before that majority of games were not easily compatible like they are today.
Ah, that’s maybe true.
When I gave up Windows, I basically ceased being “a gamer”[1] (at least for (most) windows games) ~ because it was free software philosophy that was the winner, and the games were proprietary licensed, and so I became much more productive. That’s probably what I was missing from the equation… for those unwilling to give up their addiction to the games they’ve been playing, it would have seemed non-viable, if something failed to run in wine or whatever. … Though, even then, most things would. Sometimes even better (especially since not having to run windows bloat ~ even, optionally, not even needing to run the rest of your desktop environment etc in linux, could make your game launch from init). I hear (after my prior reply) that wine (and so on) stuff is improving leaps and bounds in the recent years… games companies contributing to wine and such a lot more now.
The thing is though… Linux is fine, totally usable. Windows games on linux, is a peculiar steep ask, to judge it by. It’s like saying a bread maker sucks because it isnt a toaster. Y’know? We’re asking it to do things it’s not designed for. (Or rather, that those things are not designed for it~ and it’s going out of its way to accomodate). Linux native games run fine. :3 I stand by the point that Linux has been better than windows for decades. … How well does windows run the linux things? :P And can we check the source code to remove the malicious features and release forks without those malicious features to benefit everybody else too?
[1: I did still run d2lod in wine for about a decade after switching, no problemo.]
For others who have recently made the switch over, what was your experience like? Any issues? Any tips or helpful suggestions to share?
Switched from Win10 to Kubuntu a few months ago. Had a pretty easy transition, but I work in software development so I’m quite familiar with Linux as a server which helps.
I think it still needs too much fiddling with terminal + config files to be able to recommend it to less tech-savy family members, but that’s not a problem for my own usage. Went with the LTS version initially which was a mistake - almost all problems I had were solved my migrating to 25.10.
Biggest annoyance right now is the poor support for fingerprint readers. I got the hardware to work by installing drivers from Dell, but I’m banging my head here trying to get it working in both Login and Unlock screens - I get one functioning and the other breaks, would really appreciate some help with this. But even then it’s awkward and inconsistent as you can’t just put you finger on the reader like you do in Windows, you have to move mouse/press a key (in the unlock screen) or press enter in the password field (in the login screen) before it responds to the reader.
One very impressive thing was Steam+Proton - it works way better than I expected and got me more interested in a Steam Deck or similar device.
Overall I’m very happy with the migration and can’t see me going back to Windows for my personal PC - the annoyances are fairly minor compared to stuff like “oh, here’s Windows Defender eating a ton of resources once again”.
