I started with PopOS in September (?), ultimately replacing Windows on every PC in the house. It's been going well. I've had to troubleshoot a few things, the biggest of which being a boot failure, but that turned out to be hardware related, not Linux's fault. Feeling like I own my computer again is great.

Since then, I've gotten into self-hosting and now have a NAS, a Debian Jellyfin server, and a ton of storage space. Right now I'm just backing up basic stuff for the family, as well as streaming movies/shows/music within the house. I've ripped so many old DVDs and CDs in the past few months...

Next steps will probably be: books, audiobooks, and archiving family photos/videos in a way that is easier to browse than just files on a hard drive. I will likely de-google eventually.

In short, I'm having fun and should've done this a long time ago.

I have been on Linux for almost 9 months now and I miss nothing about windows. I tried a bunch of distributions, starting with Fedora, but now I have settled on an Arch based distribution and am happily running Manjaro.

I'm perfectly happy using Mint. I'll explore more distros eventually but I miss nothing about Windows

I switched from Windows to Mint at the tail end of September, and I’ve only had minimal issues. I backed up everything I cared about and just nuked Windows in one go, since it wasn’t compatible with 11 and I don’t want security problems. I expected my Nvidia graphics card to cause huge issues, but it literally just worked.

I did have an issue getting my Steam games to run, but it was fixed by figuring out how to change the compatibility settings on Steam (the incredibly complicated operation of right clicking on the game title).

I’ve been taking classes as well, and using Libre Office has met basically 100% of my needs. I did have some issues with converting to .docx when images were involved (resulting in images going on walkabout), but I consider that 50% a Windows problem.

Switched from Window 10 to Linux Mint about 3 weeks ago so I'd have something familiar to work with.

Honesty, so far Mint works just like Windows should have worked. I'm surprised at how much stuff has been made automatic and easy for a lifelong windows user. Some specific games have a performance issues, Alt+Tab to switch apps doesn't work if you are in a full screen application.

I would encourage anyone on Windows to buy a small drive (I used a 500 GB SSD I got for like 40 bucks) load a Linux distro on it and give it a shot. You probably won't be back on Windows.

I'm Loving Fedora! All hardware works flawlessly. Games play great.I couldn't be happier.

I switched from Windows 10 to Kubuntu some months ago and it's been pretty rough mostly. I've been having issues with but not limited to: multi-monitor setup, nvidia gpu, network dropping, game/software support, hardware support (headset working poorly, motherboard not reporting any sensors), poor performance in some cases...

Still better than spreading my cheeks and letting Microsoft fuck me in the ass though

Switched to Bazzite from windows 10 a few months ago since I read that it supports Nvidia cards well and I'm in no position to buy a new GPU. The only applications that I miss are the DAW that I used for music and Titanfall 2 as that's through the EA launcher and have yet to find a reliable way to make it run without it falling apart. My partner (Who is not tech savvy at all) is even starting to get used to it and dislikes when she occasionally uses the windows 11 laptop (been using it for said DAW)

Linux is great so far. It's been a bit of a trick learning the ins and outs, but now it's getting close to a year I've ironed out most of the kinks and have a stable functional computer.

My daily driver is a Mac laptop, so I wouldn’t say I’m fully switched. . But I did switch over my gaming PC to Bazzite and have zero regrets. I do, however, dual boot back into windows when the kid wants to play Fortnite.

Pretty good, running Kubuntu for a few months. Had some annoyances at first but they were all solved when I moved from LTS to 25.10.

So painfully, boringly good.

Day-to-day, it just works, I don't have to fight it. It doesn't do anything I don't want it to do. I don't miss office, everything is clean and snappy.

I have managed to play almost every game thrown at it (Bazzite) - the only one that didn't work was an older DX7 title. DOS games just work - they took more effort than this under Win9x.

I have got a couple of minor issues but all fixable.:

• I encountered a issue where it wouldn't wake from sleep - fixed by selecting a different color profile in the display settings.
• I managed to break something in fstsb trying to setup a persistent network drive. Very easy to roll back, I'm 100% sold on immutable until I need something more customisable
• Recently my Bluetooth kb/mouse would drop off when the PC went idle, wouldn't reconnect/wake up until power cycling the PC. Fixed by disabling BT hibernation/sleep

Having said that, last week I had to install Win11 on the kids laptop to be ready for school - I hadn't installed 11 outside of a controlled Corp environment with solid group policy control since the early days. God-damn Win11 is a dumpster fire! The install UI looks nice but the noise is turned up to 11, popup, wizards, setup this, setup that, backup, OneDrive, give us all your information and sign away any privacy.

Regardless of any minor issues I bump into on the way, I am never going back!

It's amazing! Full customization beyond what I'm used to and it all just runs my hardware perfectly.

My only issue is getting VR to work nicely with my specific setup but I imagine when steam frame comes out there will be a lot of VR specific updates to Linux drivers.

Switched to CachyOS on both my laptop and my gaming computer about three weeks ago. So far extremely happy with it, and positively surprised over the whole experience. Had dabbled a bit with Linux like 10 years ago, and from what I remember from back then, it was not ready for me, or at least much more difficult to set up and use. But now it is ready for daily driving, and I would think it is for the majority of casual computer users. Will not go back, and the next time my girlfriend asks me to "refresh" her constantly slowing laptop, she is in for a small surprise.

Everything is fantastic. Switched my laptop (a surface go 2 lol) to Mint, then my desktop to Arch, mini PC to Batocera and built a server that I put OpenMediaVault on.

So far, I have notes (Flatnotes), RSS (FreshRSS), ebooks (Kavita) and recipes (RecipeSage) self hosted as well as media (Kodi) and qBittorrent. Despite being responsible for server admin it's been quite painless overall.

Nothing eventful. It's just a straightforward OS.

Love it. I use Arch... btw... And while I will gladly admit, my setup isn't exactly easy, it's quite beautiful.

What I personally like the best about it is a tiling Windows manager. Instead of placing Windows one on top of the other, it places them split side by side. On a big ass monitor, it looks something like this:

Fedora has been rock solid. I kinda wish I didn’t have to download 300MB-1GB updates every day, but I’m glad there’s updates!

I really wish there was more cohesiveness among software, but I can’t complain when people are trying to help that along over time.

I’ve had zero issues with Wayland.

The Nobara updater is fairly unreliable, as is Discover on my plain Fedora machine. A system update will show up, but error out or hang for no reason. Updating via dnf in the terminal has had zero issues.

I really wish there was a clearer UI for choosing which source to download a given package/app from when there are multiple sources.

I kinda wish there were more UI designers working with engineers, because some of the UI I encounter is obviously built by engineers. It’s not a problem, but if I were less technologically inclined, I might’ve seen that as a barrier to committing to Linux.

Linux mint working awesome, I have been using linux on servers for decades but never really took the leap to desktop till last summer. Now Im 100% all in.

Im at the stage now where Im trying to optimize and speed up things like networking with samba, which out of the box is not a nice/smooth experience. Im not a huge fan of AI but it sure does it make finding answers to these linux optimization questions fast and easy. I think if not for AI, my journey would have taken a lot longer to get where I am.

been using Linux professionally for years (programmer). recently switched my gaming PC to Mint and haven't had any problems. everything just works.

caveat: i don't play any new triple A titles that require anti-cheat.

Mostly really good, I feel like I've traded a lot of major problems that I can't do anything about for a few tiny problems that I can actually solve

I have two friends who helped me switch from Win10 to Debian. A lot of things were rocky, and I'm not going to sugarcoat that. Linux is still a niche system with a high barrier of entry. That said, now I got it to a point where I'm happy with what I got. I could always do more stuff if I wanted too, but I am content with what I have.

My programs and games for Windows run with Wine Staging and I don't need any launchers to manage them. I'm even more comfortable messing with the terminal.

Basically Linux is like a Bethesda game. You need to download mods and mess with them a bit to be happy with your system.

I went back and forth for years, with many distributions and many machines. This summer I took the final step with Linux Mint, never used before, this time around without dual boot, without second backup computer, nothing. Motivated only by the ethical things. In the long run I had problems, some of them quite unpleasant. So I switched to LMDE and it's much better, only minor issues.

It's been GREAT! All my torrenting related stuff works better than it did on windows 10. I am slowing loading old 2000's windows PC games on my Mint installation and so far it's been working well.

My computers are MUCH faster on linux and updates take 20 seconds instead of 15 minutes.

Win10 -> Linux Mint, with a short stopover in Ubuntu.

First I ran it dual boot. When I decided to dump Windows completely, I made one big mistake. I didn't understand how Linux designates drives very well, and I ended up formatting one of my drives I didn't mean to.

I don't feel like Mint is lacking, so I haven't bothered checking out other distros. I just wanted something that works, and Mint works fine for me.

The only Windows feature I miss is the big preview in file explorer.

I highly recommend Learn Linux TV on YouTube.

I've copied and pasted a bunch of stuff into the terminal without really understanding what I'm doing so ... yeah going great. I think.

Going real well. My gaming PC (5800X3D/7900XTX/32GB) is running LMDE6 and so far none of my games have complained; Steam+Proton is great.

I also have a laptop (i7-10750H/1650Ti/16GB) running LMDE7, and that's been my portable gaming machine for a while. Doesn't play nice with RPCS3, but honestly that's not a dealbreaker.

Great, using arch (btw) as my daily for school and its perfect!

Made Fedora KDE my only home OS last year. I'm experienced with Linux but did not have to pull out arcane knowledge at all for setting it up. I.e it has been very smooth. The rough edges have been:

• Slightly worse audio
• GIFs on Reddit RES don't always play well
• Will have to find a web browser based tax software instead of what I'm used to
• Remapping a key (print screen to right click) has not been easy
• I miss some features of notepad++ that are missing from Kate.
• I miss Irfanview image viewer

I settled on Mint and now want to hop to CachyOS. I'm not sure I'm a fan of Cinnamon; setting up the panel (aka taskbar) on multiple monitors was an absolute nightmare and I ended up just giving up. There were other hiccups getting things set up here and there, but that's the Linux life, baby.

I dual boot Windows because I need it for a few professional applications, but I swapped it to Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC, have a local account, ran the ChrisTitus WinUtil to debloat and remove telemetry, and completely blocked all Microsoft-owned domains using NextDNS. It's stable, does what I need, and Microsoft doesn't need to know every time I turn my computer on.

Not strictly Linux but relevant to ditching Microsoft, I'm currently in the process of moving my projects off Github and into Codeburg for public repos and into Keybase (fully E2EE) for private repos. Fuck Microsoft's AI data-scraping bullshit.

Bonus, I also recently completely degoogled, and installed GrapheneOS on my phone. It is awesome, and was absurdly easy to set up.

Been mostly smooth sailing with EndeavourOS, a couple of games anticheat hindered me from playing and some issues with disks because I can't be arsed to move my files around to switch the fs. And a strange issue with where my monitor flickers if it has a static image while VRR is active, so some loading screens in games are a pain to look at. Overall pleased :)

perfectly happy.

before, my windows machine was a weird amalgamation of developer machine and gaming rig.

I was already developing in Linux with WSL because fuck microslop's absolutely shitty developer environment.

now I've completely separated the two uses for my computer.

I use bazzite for gaming, since I don't really want to change anything.

I use cachyos for development because it's pretty easy to configure and is arch based.

I picked both of those distros because I didn't feel like trying so hard to get my Nvidia GPU to play nice.

Just recently switched my Dad to bazzite so he can play games without windows eating up all of his RAM

It's been amazing. My RAM is singing praises with how much better the OS is at handling memory.

I went to CachyOS recently. It isn't my first swap, having tried Manjaro previously, but circumstances kept me from staying before. This time, I'm doing most of what I need in Linux and only swapping to a Windows dual boot for a few odd things, like Adobe for e-sign for work (they only accept that).

I think the only other frustration is work admins don't let me use non-outlook for email or an alternative to one drive, but for personal use I see no reason to use Windows.

Also, and the strangest thing, the MMO I play with friends runs differently on Linux. It's hard to explain, but the game has fairly bad net code that's somehow resolved with Wine. So, what used to be a half second to a full second delay on things like attacks going off, it's instant now. For better or worse, given it leaves less room for error, lol.

Oh also I'm enamored of KDE Plasma. So pretty and smooth, with themes I actually like. It's much better than Windows UI by every metric I can think of.

Its fine if you're not doing stuff that requires windows. My partner is running Mint, and I've got a HomeAssistant box, but I can't ditch Windows completely because I can't get Wilcom and DesignSpace to run in Wine, and I need those to make my machines work.

I really do love it. Fedora has been great. Daily tasks and tools seem good. Games!? Amazing! steam has really really impressed me. Everything works for the most part but I am trying my best to figure out how to move on from Adobe (ps, illustrator, premier, after effects, lightroom) for graphics and other music production software (Ableton/ Audition/MPC). There are a few programs that I'm trying to replace but it's a struggle. I'm open to suggestions but peoples snarky comments to "Just use..." are not helpful unless they understand the capabilities of each program in the first place. Telling me to replace Ableton live with Reaper doesn't help. Maybe Reaper can replace Audition but Ableton live has different tools and capabilities. A lot of people offer Wine as a suggestion and it works for some things. I don't mind fiddling a bit but after few hours of trying to adjust settings to get things to work I boot back to Win or use a mac just to get it done. I'm willing to learn some new programs but it's a struggle for specialized design, art, media programs. All that said I am open to suggestions for programs.

One that seems to be lacking surprisingly is a really nice local music player like musicbee/foobar2000? Maybe it's the rise in "streaming music" but Clementine and others don't seem even close to musicbee.

I switched from windows 10 to pop!_os on my thinkpad p15s almost a year ago. My biggest surprise was thinking I would still need windows for anything when I haven't needed to think about it since.

The most frustrating part is that I'm requires to use windows 11 for work and it just feels so broken. But in all seriousness the biggest issues I've had were a couple driver issues that were easily fixed from the debug.

Honestly my biggest regret was not switching sooner. The learning curve really wasn't bad. Just read the forums and docs. I run it on everything now. I game with it, I run a small homelab with it, I'm productive with it. I dont think there is anything I would miss. Everything works as well if not even better.

My steam wrapped for 2023 is fully windows, 2024 has about 40% windows 60% Linux, purely from the moment I switched halfway through the year, and 2025 is fully Linux.

I regret nothing.

Caveats:

• I built a new computer in early 2025, knew I'd be making Linux, went AMD 7900xtx. Worked right out the box flawlessly.
• I started out self hosting stuff and got somewhat comfortable with Linux in those instances, so when I eventually threw endeavouros into my laptop, it all just worked for me. I had a couple of "laptop won't boot because its battery died mid update" events, which is about a couple more than there ever should've been, but it wasn't too hard to recover the laptop every time, with help from chatgpt
• switched to Bazzite for my new desktop and work framework 13 laptop, but hold endeavouros in my heart with great affection, because it is awesome and Linux is awesome no matter what flavour you pick (restrictions apply, research what you're getting into when picking a distro, and compare a bit but don't overstress)
• Linux may or may not radicalize you heavily. The liberating feeling sometimes might make you mad that you put up with all that Apple/Microsoft/Adobe bullshit for all those years. Self-hosting intensifies radicalization. Don't come blaming me when you find yourself in a shadow war with the Mossad over your email server getting shadowbanned throughout the Chilean Patagonia due to attempting to create an ex-engineers' farming commune and a regional meshcore network there.

Great. Only issue so far has been a specific VPN for work which does not have a Linux installer and no drag and drop replacement for Snagit. But that's just work stuff, everything on the private side works flawlessly for me.

I've been using Bazzite for months and I love it. It's different but I've been able to figure things out. Zero show stoppers for me and no real problems.

Pretty damn awesome and loving every minute of not having to use Windows

I was using Windows 10 LTSC for a bit before Home/Pro editions reached EoL. My past experiences with Linux were all such a significant addition of frustration; I couldn't justify switching to Linux.

After a string of back-to-back hardware failures, I'm back to using a 10+ year old desktop I built. Ended up trying trying Fedora 42 with KDE and suddenly had none of the issues I had with past Linux attempts. My three biggest complaints before about Linux had been random Bluetooth device incompatibility, Nvidia support being trash, and most Steam games requiring extra commands and constant troubleshooting to get running decently.

I feel like a lot of those issues were from me starting with Arch derivatives on niche laptop hardware that was already beginning to fail. My experience with Fedora has been fantastic. My biggest problems now have been: -KDE discover store is really inconsistent with its packages. I would not expect the average Windows "user"(bought a PC and that's what it came with) to bother understanding the difference between a flatpak and a native package, and would get really annoyed when stuff is out of date or mis-configured out of the box. I had a better experience using a GUI in Arch with the AUR to install software, ironically enough. -There are a few things, ie Nvidia drivers, non-free codecs, non flatpak Steam, that have inconsistent community documentation on how to install them. These become immediately bad first impressions on people switching from Windows, and I think its important that they are clear to install properly as possible.

Other than that, Fedora is stable and runs great. I'm using a Nvidia GPU and have no issues with it(this time, at least...). A lot of my software was already open source, but I run a few Windows applications, besides Steam games, with Wine; rarely do I have to do any extra configuration. KDE Plasma as a desktop environment has given me the customization and control out of the box that I have been missing from Windows for over a decade, while Fedora has some sane defaults for it that make it accessible to Windows users expecting something a bit more familiar.

There's always a weird quirk here and there, but I have had my fair share of troubleshooting on Windows before as well. I feel like Linux as a home PC OS is mature enough that people who don't do much on the PC anyway could find their way around it, while it's still going to be an annoying learning curve for people who see end user software as a hobby. Entirely usable though.

Obligatory I don't play games with anti cheat and I don't use streaming services with DRM. I have a few games with Denuvo, and haven't had any problems arise that needed me to switch Proton versions that end up triggering install lock outs.

Made the jump to Linux about a month ago. Too much bloat on Win11. With the forthcoming AI bullshit I decided to take the leap and see how much I liked it. I installed mint on an old laptop. I had to test it out and was surprised at how easy it was decided to dual boot my main gaming PC because there are still some games that require anti-cheat that I can’t play on Linux. But Once they figure out how to do that, I’ll be a complete convert. It’s amazing how much faster and smoother. My PC is running fedora.

Fantastic! Just switched my main PC to Cachy OS the other day from Linux Mint (previously W10) because I started to find it too restrictive. Tried out Hyprland for a bit and it was a lot of fun but I don't have the time to fully customise everything, so went to Plasma. I'm saving Hyprland for when I retire.

My laptop is still running Mint Cinnamon (dual boot W11) but I'm contemplating on another OS that's more friendly to Unity and Unreal game development. Any suggestions? I keep getting burst compiler errors in Unity, even on the latest LTS.

I switched to Fedora. I'm overall happy with the switch and the learning experience, but it could have gone smoother. I'm not the most tech savvy and don't have a ton of time to dedicate to tinkering. Getting the Nvidia driver running correctly was a hassle. Currently I have Windows 10 and Fedora partitioned on my nvme and I'm fighting with partition managers to reallocate space around. Yesterday I installed a new SATA SSD with the ultimate goal of migrating Windows there and keeping Fedora on the nvme.

I'm going to stick with it because I like the experience and the community, but once I get everything to a workable state I don't see myself distro hopping.

https://lemmy.ca/comment/21276696

I just put an old SSD and Linux on my decade old laptop, and it's like a whole new computer

ofc, it was probably mostly the hard drive that was the problem to begin with, seeing as it took 10 minutes to boot up and log in, and another five before it would open a web or file browser...

Running Ubuntu for 2 weeks now. Everything is a struggle, but I end up figuring it out usually. Using mostly FOSS. Not much I can't do without windows, but I fail to really see a reason to run this over windows.

Been on Mint for a bit over a year. Only slight annoyances. My tax guy couldn't open the password protected .zip files I made. My printer has two trays, can only seem to print from the photo one. And getting the drivers installed for my TP-Link wifi adapter was a little bit of a pain. Other than that, everything has been great. It looks good, runs good, Games good. No issues with my NVidia card.

Pretty good. But I've been dabbling in Linux for the past decade or so and already had a Linux based home server. But in the past year I finally swapped all of my non-work computers over to linux. If games won't run, I won't play them.

I'm running CachyOS on my desktop workstation, laptop, and my handheld Lenovo legion go. Unraid on my server.

Edit: the only issue I had with the CachyOS installs so far is my remote desktop solution, which admittedly I don't even use often. VNC is ok. I liked NoMachine for a while but it messed up my graphics drivers or something weird. I don't remember the specifics, I just flat out nuked it from my machines. I need to try rustdesk

Is great. No notes.

About a year ago, I installed kubuntu on a laptop that couldn't officially support windows 11. So far, I've only had minor annoyances.

I had a program that wouldn't work when I first switched, despite being supported. I installed MakeMKV from the built-in repository, and it wouldn't detect my optical drive. I installed from a separate repo, and it still wouldn't work. I compiled it from source, and I don't think it even launched anymore. Then one day, while randomly flailing, some combination of uninstalling, reinstalling, and random commands I found online made it work for no reason I could discern. I haven't had a problem with it since.

If my optical drive can't read a disc, the eject button doesn't work. I have to either reboot or use the terminal to eject the disc.

Every once in a while, something (presumably Firefox) locks up the entire system. Mouse won't move, keyboard is unresponsive, the works. It's a decade-old laptop, but it had a decent processor for the time, and I upgraded the RAM, so that shouldn't really be happening as often as it does.

It's been great overall, after about one full year now. The only major complaints are keyboard-related. Between my work-supplied macbook that runs macOS, my old macbook that runs GNOME, and my desktop that runs KDE, keeping my muscle memory in tune with keybinds and shortcuts and window management is a headache. Maybe sometimes I'm thrown off by some command line tool not being available on Mac or Linux or it's named differently.

Started on Bazzite and got irritated with how hard it was to do things the way I expected because it’s immutable. Now I’m using Kubuntu and I’m having a decent time since I’ve worked through the setup for what I want. Audio sink for virtual surround works okay, gaming isn’t that big of a fight with Steam and Lutris, most of my work applications are there, I have a windows vm for the odd thing here and there. I’d like noise cancellation like Krisp. I’ve found a few instances where documentation sucks and I have made unsupported things work by simply installing a package, such as my remote access software for work. It stays officially supported but that’s in a specific context that is not the norm. Installing default-jre makes it work like it does on windows. A lot of the forums and Linux oriented communities seem elitist about some specific flavor they like and if you don’t inherently know how to do some obscure procedure when asking for help you get snooty responses, but that’s not a bad as it was when I first tried Linux out.

Good.

Been on Linux only for a couple years now. My biggest complaint is how terrible the trackpad experience is. The upside is I have a pretty keyboard centric workflow (tiling window manager), so I dont have to use the trackpad too much, but wgeb I do its not a great experience.

Fwiw arch (BTW), with hyprland on a framework 13.

I’ve switched from win 10 to mint for an old i9900k and 1080 to run Helldivers 2 and it worked so well I put it on my newest rig to replace it (9800x3d RX 9070xt) with little to no problems. It does take a little while to get things tailored to how you want. The bios clock keeps being off (but OC settings remain) so maybe the battery is dying already. Been putting off replacing it since it’ll require a bit of disassembly.

I then tried Bazzite on the i9900k and ran into a couple problems. Multiple monitors pose issues with the mouse not staying on the game and requires an applet or app to keep it contained (no issues with Mint). HD2 runs the same performance but it stutters every second or two, making it unplayable. I’ll have to see if I can troubleshoot some more or try a different distro.

I'll enjoy it for like a month and then something awful will happen and I'll say well this is pretty terrible. This month my PC just stopped waking up from sleep. No response from keyboard, mouse inputs. Tried various different devices to wake the PC up, nada. Only returns on reboot. Arch btw

Been using bazzite. It’s fine took some getting used to for a few things. Annoying that you can’t really use most posted solutions because immutable so, eh. Too lazy to swap to something else.

Biggest issues were mostly that, having to find a flatpack/appimg solution. Having to figure out DLL installs on proton tricks, setting my default mic in proton tricks, etc.

Getting an SNES emulator that works with archipelago was annoying but eventually got that working.

Can’t figure out syncing my Iphone music tho, so that is annoying.

I migrated to linux 15 years ago. Focusing mostly on Fedora and Debian. Happy field any setup or config questions that anyone might have.

What I've seen in the past 3 years especially is how well supoorted most x86 systems and Chromebooks have become with modern installers, coreboot and mrchromebox.

On and off linux user since ages past. Not the most linux guru type. I'm fine with opening the terminal and doing things as needed, but I still have to look up half the command, for example.

Anyway... windows / m$ finally just pissed me off so much I switched entirely to CachyOS / KDE for my daily driver. I tried a few distros with limited success before settling into that one. I wanted something that would have fairly fresh updates and be easy to setup for gaming. CachyOS really was a pretty seamless experience. Their "just make gaming work" button just made gaming work (I'm still on nvidia for the time being unfortunately).

There is one hiccup that is a common problem with all linux distros I have used for one reason or another. Wake from sleep is a thorn in linux's side. The s3 deep sleep issue hasn't been a problem on cachy as far as I can tell... but there is an feature of nvidia where it tries to save the vram components on sleep and then reinitialize them on wake using a daemon or a service... but sometimes this crashes (as far as I can tell) on sleep... so it goes to sleep... and the system wakes up fine.. but it will never actually reactivate the screen.. and it waits for video to kick in... so it's essentially locking the system and I have to force reboot. It isn't every single time, and the lastest patch of the driver seems to have made it less frequent, but I still don't leave anything open I'm afraid of losing when I put the system to sleep because of it. If that could be fixed, it would be basically running perfectly.

I've basically gotten all my apps back up and running (with one windows only app that I don't use regularly so it's fine). Gaming has been great. I can't think of much that I play that hasn't worked by just clicking "play" in steam or heroic... and when they don't work... it's almost always just a quick trip to protondb to figure out which proton version I need to use and then it's fine.

Actually I have found one other weird bug where discord sometimes keeps running, but won't allow me to type at all. I can see incoming text, and close the app normally so it isn't crashed, but I can't type or paste into it until I restart it. It's some kind of weird error with electron from what I understand but I haven't done a deep dive to fix it yet.

So after fulling switching to linux and helping a couple other people also switch for daily driver, I would say we're at the point where linux is ready for the "average user". We've been creeping up on that for a while, but there's been a lot of improvements to QoL in the last couple years that make it a feasible prospect for most people at this point. Some distros like linuxmint I feel like you could install and just use without every needing the terminal or having much of anything missing from "non-techie normal user" standpoint.

I've come over from macOS over the past year or ao, and I'm mostly enjoying it. Though it's not quite so critical for me to completely replicate my setup because I do still use my Macbook for stuff.

General purpose computing for work is now handled via a machine running Kubuntu, and broadly speaking I don't miss macOS at all. There are some things that are more awkward (lack of lossless Apple Music without needing WinBoat or Waydroid), and music library software as a whole is nowhere near as...clean...as just using iTunes/Music. As far as I've found so far, that is.

I am having trouble with my radio broadcasting setup though. The way it works on my Mac is I use Mixxx pushed through OBS. I do have a physical mixing board, but it's more for live DJing, so only have faders for the first two tracks. Which is fine because I have an app on my iPad that gives me a bunch of virtual MIDI controls. I'm damned if I can get a Linux equivalent of that to work. In theory my iPad app do it, but in practice I can't get Mixxx to see it. I've tried a few MIDI apps on an old Ssumg tab I have, but have had varying levels of success; none of them good enough for broadcast. It's not massively important though, so I'll keep chipping away until I'm happy with a solution.

Having access to actual, real life, modern gaming is NIIIIIICE though! My computer is my wife's old PC, so it's rocking an Nvidia 1060. Not exactly cutting edge, I know, but it's adequate for the games I want to play. And Proton is SO MUCH NICER to use than Whisky on macOS. For a start, it actually works most of the time. Coming from nearly 20 years of Mac ownership, being able to just play a game without having to jump through hoops is WONDERFUL.

All in all, I'm happy to be finally getting to grips with how Linux can work for me, and don't really mind some of the limitations. I'd rather have friction for free than a seamless experience at the hands of the likes of Apple and Google. Besides which, it's fun trying to figure out how to fix something I might have broken, or how to better optimise something.

I am somehow managing to crash Firefox/LibreWolf on a daily basis now when using sites that load lots and lots of graphics in one page. I always knew infinite scroll was a BS mechanism.

Bazzite. Fucking love it. Have had to spend some googling and learning and troubleshooting. But it's incredible how much shit just works. Definitely recommend getting comfortable with terminals, shell scripts, etc. You can do some cool shit.

I love ffmpeg.

Well I use Arch, btw..... So pretty good

Zorin is great. I had one nagging hardware issue with an old, strangely important USB device. But after tons of digging, I found some ancient drivers on the Wayback Machine that actually worked. I couldn't believe it.

Zero complaints now!

I'm technically a little over a year. Didn't boot Windows once and eventually wiped the drive it was on maybe 4 months in.

I have a persistent issue with my PC not waking up from Sleep (maybe 70% of times it goes to sleep, it requires a hardware power off and a second restart after booting or else the network and mouse don't work), and despite dozens of searches, carefully reading systemd journals, and one two-week period where I thought a setting change had fixed it, it's still here, and I usually just shut my PC down instead of gambling and wasting time.

Proton has mostly been excellent, aside from a few Battle.net updates that caused extremely strange issues which ultimately required a bleeding edge Proton build to fix.

Oh and there have been a couple of times I've looked up issues with specific applications, only to find out it's a well known problem that the maintainer refuses to take responsibility for despite being aware of and active, but other users supply several options for workarounds.

I've been liking it! So far, I've tried Mint, Zorin, Bazzite, Endeavour and Cachy. All were pretty nice, but I think Cachy is my favorite so far, even if my main machine is running Bazzite atm (I just didn't have the time to swap the distro yet).

There's actually a lot of features that are much cooler than anything I ever did on Win10 (I probably could have used them there too, but I didn't). Like KDEConnect! It's super convenient! And doing stuff like running Android Apps via Waydroid (I ran Revanced that way for a while because I'm just not used to watching Youtube in a browser).
I'm also starting to get used to installing things via the software center instead of just googling "Software X download" and clicking on the first .exe file I find (yup, I'm aware of the security implications of that, I just uninstalled the Microsoft store from my Win10 very early on so I never really had a dedicated software store... and was too dumb for things like UnigetUI)

The performance for games has also been crazy good. My laptop couldn't run Sekiro on Win10, now it runs completely fine on high graphical settings. Even Cyberpunk works somehow! I didn't think that my 2018 Laptop had this much life left :0

I moved to Linux Mint last year, and while I expected it to be easier for me because I had prior exposure to linux in general, it's been smoother than I expected! I feel like I'm in charge of my machine again.

One frustration I had was with one or two programs which I wanted to run which have been just incompatible with any version of wine/proton I could try it with, I'll have to get a windows VM or something for these rare cases, but hope I won't have to use it in the future

Personal laptop is on Linux and working fine since I got it last year. Windows gaming machine is the next candidate for a move over this year.

It’s been okay. I’ve swapped from zorin to fedora to Ubuntu and have some ups and downs. A few windows apps. Have to use I’ve been mostly able to get going in bottle with moderate success. I use autodesk fusion and I lament no Linux version and freecad is not my jam but I have a Mac still for that.

Buddy of mine decided to switch to Debian like a month ago, I warned him it’s Linux but “raw” and warned him of outdated packages an such, he said no worries. Proceeds to AI his way through literally everything, broke numerous packages by going to Trixie Backports for newer drivers and has now installed windows on a spare 500Gb HDD so he can play Fortnite with a chick he met on tinder.

Want to take bets on how long his Debian install lasts?

Been with EndeavourOS on all my devices for the past year and it's pure bliss.

tried cachyos. a game froze. restarted the machine. doesnt boot up anymore. found 2 post about it. no solution. i might try pop and nobara next weekend, but i dont see myself dailydrive linux in the next 10 years.

not goin well.

Great until a recent update, now my games run at 0.001 frame a second.

Pretty damn good. Most of my issues are really minor. I feel a lot more secure and a lot less surveilled. Not perfect, but much better.

I'm a Linux sysadmin, we use RHEL at work. So my experience is skewed.

Been gaming on Windows since the 90s. But I've had a Linux homelab since the mid-2000s. To be honest, I've never had an issue with gaming on Windows. I switched from Windows 7 to 8.1 when it first released because Windows 8 had direct ISO mounting. I switched to Windows 10 right when it released and the odd hiccup has happened, I've never had files go missing, settings revert, or performance drops due to updates. I updated to Windows 11 right when it released and been having the same experience, zero issues. Idk, I always build my PCs myself and I put a fresh copy of Windows on it, never used anything pre-installed or pre-made.

I've owned a Steam Deck since its launch and I think over time my experience with gaming on Linux has changed due to proton. I've tried switching in the past, but nothing ever *clicked and I just went back to Windows.

However, since the rise of AI, Microsoft locking Windows down, and wanting to "own" my PC, I switched to Linux on my main laptop and also switched on a secondary gaming desktop I have, just to have a test bed environment. So far it's been solid, but I currently utilize Moonlight and Apollo to stream from my windows gaming PC to my Beelink mini PC because I moved my gaming PC to the garage due to heat/noise.

So I'm in-between deciding on switching my Beelink to Linux and still use moonlight or just switch my main gaming PC over to Linux as well. I need to test Apollo/Moonlight on the entirely Linux clients I have. I do heavy modding for some games like Fallout and the TaleofTwoWastelands mod, so I need to test this on my Linux gaming PC...

As for a distro. I use RHEL at work, so I'm familiar with Fedora. I use Proxmox/Debian for my homelab(and Ubuntu containers). So I'm familiar with that side as well. I've tried Fedora, Kubuntu, Mint, Manjaro, Endeavor...but I always ran into a weird issue or something didn't feel "right" with the PC after a while. And I always see a bunch of YouTubers and people saying "XYZ distro is the best" but then another "new" distro comes out, so just tons of "flavor of the month" happening.

But recently I put CachyOS on my laptop and secondary PC and it's been surprisingly solid. Everything just seems to "work". I heard about Cachy over a year ago, but again, "flavor of the month" so I ignored it. But looking into it more and tried it out on my laptop, I was surprised with how much a Arch distro was "easy" to setup and use out of the box.

So gaming on Linux has been pretty similar to Windows. There's the odd issue with proton and CPU overhead I've experienced, but Cachy has helped a lot with Nvidia GPUs and I like that it isn't a "gaming" distro but a distro that is flexible.

I think the main "issue" with Windows to Linux is that people try to make Linux into Windows. Linux isn't a direct replacement to Windows, but it's a very solid operating system that is beyond flexible. I would say buy a second drive, install Linux on that and try it out, if you like it then take the plunge. If you don't, well wipe it and go back to Windows.

Way better than expected. Even if I was already using Linux on servers since decades, on desktop I preferred Windows. But my laptop was with 8gb soldered RAM and Windows 11 is basically unusable with that amount. I wanted to switch.

But my past experience was bad, too often stuff was broken. Used Ubuntu in 2016, couldn't stand it => revert to win10, tried Manjaro in 2019, one day I fucked with some AUR and it could not boot => revert to win10. I left thinking that Linux on the desktop is not ready.

Then last summer the constant updates on my windows laptop made it unusable. It simply doesn't leave enough memory to use a web browser with more than a couple tabs.

At the same time at work a windows 11 update introduced a very annoying bug: after standby, windows would switch the resolution of displayport monitors to 800*600 and destroy my window layout, with everything moved to the top left corner. I had to use a tiling window manager like glazewm as a temporary fix until Microsoft fixed the bug (still annoying waiting for a couple seconds to have the windows rearranged when the monitor went to standby) and I fell into the rabbit hole of tiling managers. I watched videos where some YouTubers showed how l33t is cachyos with hyprland with their magic dotfiles and I fell for the meme.

For the first few weeks it was awesome, then of course hyprland deprecates syntax without warnings and I started to get errors after the first update. Also the concept of using someone else's dotfiles is wrong as they're highly opinionated. They should do videos about how to make your Linux experience similar to theirs, not "clone this configuration as a black box", because then you would have no idea how to fix problems when the updates come. But it seems like their priority is getting stars on their GitHub, rather than actually helping people. "Just blindly run this script as sudo" is a wrong concept, IMHO.

Then when hyprland changed syntax AGAIN without warning, I was fed up, didn't want to spend hours to debug the problem so I spent hours to reinstall another distro. I read that Linus is using fedora with plain gnome and some frippery extensions because "it just works" and... OMG. It just works! I'm shocked how good vanilla GNOME has become since the last time I tried it in 2019! It's now fully usable even for a noob! And I like those extensions too. Modern but classic. Easy but powerful. And the apps in the GNOME circle are so polished. I was shocked to see pika backup, user friendly but not dumbed down.

Bazzite. It's fine. I miss some games with anti-cheat.

I had most of my machines on Linux except my main gaming rig.

I switched it to Bazzite and it worked okay but I was running into unexplainable performance issues (40 fps max in games where I was getting 100+).

I tried making some posts on it, but never got anywhere. Eventually switched to EndeavourOS and it’s been working like a charm since day 1 for the past few months.

Now pretty much all my games run great and some even better than Windows. So nice not having any more M$ interruptions throughout the day and having total control over the look and feel.

Been using Kubuntu LTS for about 7 months now. Started with 25.04, but could not get Orca Slicer for 3d printing to run. After some experimenting with distros, ended up going back but to the 24.04 version. Orca runs under X11, but not for me using Wayland. I really like Kubuntu's ability to customize the desktop, add widgets. Every game I've wanted to play works well through Steam. The only reason I keep Win10 Pro on an external ssd is to run Solid Edge CAD software occasionally. The game server I run is still on Win10 Pro as well, since trying to install game mods under Linux is a headache that I don't need.

Installed Pop!_os maybe a year ago. It's been fine.

I couldn't quite figure out how to make the bg3 mod tools play nice. There's probably some proton prefix stuff I'd have to do and I gave up before getting too deep.

I bet the next time I want to play a game with mods it's going to be a bit of a headache.

Other than that, it's fine. I ran mint for about a year before this, with an interlude of windows 11 that came with the desktop.

If it wasn't for Microsoft Access I would be full timing Linux.

It's been a complete mish mash of greatness and tragedies. Not a week goes by without me having a bit of both. Only time I've had to boot back into windows was for a bios update that I couldn't get to work through Linux, but I've also had to make a few sacrifices and accept that I can't have everything good in life on Linux. But the opposite is also true, you can't have everything good on Windows, so I'm content for now.

I switched to Nobara in June 2025. Had everything working pretty quickly. Biggest downside for me was with my mouse. I use a g600 and while logitechs software sucks, I could atleast get it to swap profiles when I swap apps. Piper works okay, I just need to set time aside to figure out a solution for me. I did have some issues with Nobara's updater, which led me to swap to CachyOS. Worked almost flawlessly out of the box, had to do some minor tinkering. Now that I've figured it out though, I don't think I could ever go back to Nobara. I love the aur too much.

I’ve been on Kubuntu since November. Since I use my main PC as a media PC, it took some setup. I’ve had a few hard crashes, particularly when playing final fantasy XIV and using the native discord client, but it’s fine. Rebooting is fast, and I’ve got all my tools setup just fine with the game and I couldn’t be happier! I don’t feel held back by Linux like I did with windows. I can make my own quick tools. The biggest problem was getting a switcher script for my mouse profiles, but it’s just a simple startup script that runs a command on window focus changes.

I haven’t had to boot back into windows once yet!

I swapped over early last year, so I'm getting close to passing your one year qualifier, but I'd say it's been fantastic.

My main concern was stability and gaming. I'm on pure Arch and it's been completely stable. I haven't done any deep configuration except for trying to make my yubikey my sudo password and I did not do that well so I had to roll that change back. So in my opinion, nearly anyone can set up Arch if they have a good guide, treat it like a normal computer, and keep it working for at least a year without almost any issue.

Gaming has also been nearly perfect. There's been a handful of games I couldn't play for one reason or another. Battlefield had anti-cheat issues, but tbh I would only have gotten it to play with a friend and I'm happy to not give that company money. Robocop was the most recent game that was struggling despite being platinum. I'll try again later and I assume it'll be better. I think the only other one I can remember is the Marathon Beta, which is a bummer but again I'm okay if they decide to never turn on the Linux support (because I think their anti-cheat is Linux compatible they just haven't done the work yet) because I don't think Bungie deserves my money.

So ya, id recommend Linux for nearly anyone.

Installed Linux Mint on my old personal laptop (Dell XPS 9560) and unfortunately ran into some issues that made me switch back to Windows. I really want to make it work

It seems to have revealed either a hardware bug or failing hardware in the NVMe drive.

First problem was log spam that filled up the partition:

::: spoiler spoiler

2025-12-29T12:15:46.439880-05:00 redacted kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1d.0: AER: Correctable error message received from 0000:04:00.0
2025-12-29T12:15:46.439934-05:00 redacted kernel: nvme 0000:04:00.0: PCIe Bus Error: severity=Correctable, type=Physical Layer, (Receiver ID)
2025-12-29T12:15:46.439936-05:00 redacted kernel: nvme 0000:04:00.0:   device [126f:2262] error status/mask=00000001/0000e000
2025-12-29T12:15:46.439938-05:00 redacted kernel: nvme 0000:04:00.0:    [ 0] RxErr                  (First)
2025-12-29T12:15:46.439939-05:00 redacted kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1d.0: AER: Multiple Correctable error message received from 0000:04:00.0
2025-12-29T12:15:46.439940-05:00 redacted kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1d.0: PCIe Bus Error: severity=Correctable, type=Data Link Layer, (Transmitter ID)
2025-12-29T12:15:46.439941-05:00 redacted kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1d.0:   device [8086:a118] error status/mask=00001000/00000000
2025-12-29T12:15:46.439943-05:00 redacted kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1d.0:    [12] Timeout               
2025-12-29T12:15:46.439944-05:00 redacted kernel: nvme 0000:04:00.0: PCIe Bus Error: severity=Correctable, type=Physical Layer, (Receiver ID)
2025-12-29T12:15:46.439945-05:00 redacted kernel: nvme 0000:04:00.0:   device [126f:2262] error status/mask=00000001/0000e000
2025-12-29T12:15:46.439946-05:00 redacted kernel: nvme 0000:04:00.0:    [ 0] RxErr                  (First)

:::

Some forum posts I found (example) suggested that this was a hardware bug and I could set pcie_aspm=off in grub to work around it. This stopped the log spam and everything seemed to be working fine.

Later while I was doing some programming, everything froze for a while. When it came back, the partition was set to readonly. It wouldn't boot on restart and loaded up busybox instead. I was able to set it to writable, but it happened again soon after.

I decided to switch back to Windows where there doesn't seem to be any issues.

I really want to make it work. If it's failing hardware then I have no choice but to replace the drive, but if it's just a bug then I want to find a fix without buying new hardware. That would kind of defeat the point for me and I don't want to spend the money.

I would appreciate any help. I booted into Mint again to grab the logs and I really want to keep using it.

I migrated to Ubuntu from Windows 10 when it became end-of-life last year. I had a major head start beforehand because my work allowed me to dabble in Linux for a good 2 years beforehand, though! It's been great! Pretty much everything that you "can't do" on Windows has some sort of open source alternative. Can't have Microsoft Office on Linux? Download Libreoffice for free! Can't have Adobe Creative Cloud? Just download Krita and Kdenlive for free! Can't have Microsoft Edge? What on earth do you want it for?? You don't really need to use the terminal for most things, but it can make a lot of things much easier and quicker if/when you do get your head round it.

The only notable weak point is a few specific online videogames. Valve Anti Cheat really doesn't play well with Linux (which is really dumb because Valve are so well known for supporting Linux). I've managed to get Left 4 Dead 2 playing online using "Steam Runtime 1.0 (scout)" but I haven't found anything that works for Team Fortress 2. That being said, most other online games like Bloons TD6 and Worms WMD work perfectly natively, 90% of games released last year were natively Linux compatible, and the CEO of GOG said they'd like to support Linux more too, so even this is an improving situation!

Been on Linux desktop since 2003, never looked back.

Don't get me wrong, Linux has its bugs here and there, like all software, but the difference is night and day.

FREEDOM! I can do whatever the fuck I want with my computer without "nope, can't do this, that requires complicated APIs and development, that requires more paid licenses to do on your own goddamn computer"

I've built so much stuff over the years, it's like a giant Lego box to me

Mint since May. Preferring to work from home these days not to have to deal with Winslop 11 on my work laptop.

I work in IT and run a number of Linux servers and desktops, but my main gaming computer hasn't run Linux since about 2021. Around mid-2021 I got tired of not playing certain games due to lack of Linux compatibility and realized my Windows skills were slipping so I switched it over to Windows 10

September of 2025 I installed a new SSD into my desktop and installed Bazzite (I have a bad habit of breaking my Linux desktops through too much tinkering, so they accumulate configuration quirks that I can work around but become more and more of headache. I describe it as being like a mechanics car to non-technical users, it works perfectly but you can't use third gear, you have to cycle the heat before the AC goes and you use the screwdriver in the glove compartment to change the radio station) so immutable seemed like a really safe bet, plus its already preconfigured 80% of the way to how I like things which is closer than other distros

I fully expected to find some key game that I play a lot or software that I rely on wouldn't work under wine/proton, but everything just kept working perfectly so it's stuck for over a quarter of a year already. Also I've had less problems with KDE than I've previously had when running KDE 5+ years ago, so definitely some improvements there

Running PikaOS (Niri) on a RYZEN 5800x3D and RTX 3080. No real issues to speak of aside of a few issues with some games. I still have another system with Windows 10 running android emulation (LD Player) for idle games other main games. VR... is on the back burner for now (used Windows 11 on another drive for that).

All in all, happy.

My laptop got bazzite. I still have a Windows partition for a couple things. But it defaults to bazzite.

I switched about a year ago to fedora cinnamon. Less frustration than windows, even though cinnamon kinda sucks compared to KDE that I switched to immediately after the first time I tried it (should have tried it months sooner, literally only took a few mins to install and check out).

While I wouldn't say that there were zero problems, I did notice that I spend less time troubleshooting or searching for how to change something on Linux than I did on windows by the end. Also, going from empty disk to gaming involved fewer steps, at least with an AMD gpu.

Doing okay. Switched from MacOS to Linux - Ubuntu and Tuxedo in the past four months. They are great for home use but I am not 100% ready to use them as my work computers. Yet. But hopefully soon. Gaming is great using Tuxedo, although it was a little difficult to install software on the KDE system as I had no real idea what I was doing :)

I want to make this happen. Last block for me is editing documents on my iPhone. I haven’t found a LibreOffice-compatible mobile suite that is solid yet. Latest try was Collabra Office but the navigation within-document just seems buggy and weirdly idiosyncratic. Am i missing something there or can anyone recommend an alternative?

I want people on Nvidia hardware. None of this AMD shit. I already know AMD works great on Linux

I switched this year from windows: overall really well. Although, I work in a couple apps (R Studio, Unity) that are just not friendly with Linux (neither are terrible but neither are as smooth as alternatives). And had some compatibility issues with certain gamepads.

I've run Debian and Ubuntu servers for many years. I currently run Fedora on my laptop, and dual boot my desktop with Fedora and Win11 as I slowly plan out and implement my Linux translation. My one big holdup is the VR support still lacking, which I hope gets fixed by the Steam Frame's release.

I switched full-time last year. Went from windows 11 to fedora kde.

The switch took a bit of getting used to, and getting to know the innards of the distro (broke my sound typing pulse-audio related commands then discovering that fedora uses pipewire, this kind of stuff...)

But I'm kinda cheating since I've been using linux on all my other machines since windows 8 (had a hunch about imminent enshitification, windows 10 didn't contradict it and windows 11... ha!).

I've been using windows since the 9x days, windows 11 became unbearably shitty, despite my incredibly unbloated version (originaly a windows 7 install that got "upgraded" to 10 then 11), with unwanted features getting disabled as soon as they appeared. I had a windows 11 with a local account and no one-drive and they still disapointed me! (the last straw was copilot)

Now running linux full time is a real pleasure, some stuff break here and there but nothing unfixable (usually just downgrading the faulty package until it is fixed just works), games just work most of the time, the KDE desktop is the windows one but not shitty, from an alternate reality where desktop widgets took off, and where you are allowed to customise stuff. (had to wait years on windows 11 to finally get back the "display the window's title on the taskbar" option as I'm used to since 95)

The only thing I'm missing though : system-wide autoscroll bound to the mousewheel.

Built a new PC last January and started fresh with Win11 on one drive and Nobara on another. I was able to play all of the games I wanted on Nobara just fine. After a month or two I had a problem develop where I was unable to update because it would start giving errors and the update process wouldn’t complete.

I decided to try out Bazzite and have been with it ever since. I very very rarely boot into Windows. I highly recommend giving it a shot!

There is really not much missing. And while I had some issues here and there, like suspend not working. Or games not starting, with the terminal almost all could be fixed. Feels like I control my pc and not microslop. I did have to give up my LoL addiction, since vanguard doesn't work on Linux. Could be a plus tho. Also the custom themes are so cool, I recommend the sweet theme and candy icons for a modern look.

I moved a couple months back fully and have tried quite a few distros (before I figured out the hardware issue I was having on my Acer laptop). I have mostly used Pop OS (pre-Cosmic) and now Nobara is my daily driver.

Nobara is fantastic, it suits my use case perfectly and has everything ready to go essentially. The set up was very smooth and maintenance is a breeze. I did try Cachy too (when i still had my annoying hardware fault) and would love to try it again at some stage but I'm settled on Nobara and feel like the Fedora base is the perfect platform for learning more Linux in depth.

I was initially in love with Gnome and hated KDE for how it tried to copy Windows with the bottom left menu - I wanted something fresher. But i have used it more and customised it so its less like Windows and I adore KDE now as well.

I still use Windows on a separate laptop for work and its hilarious how shit Windows 11 is now, especially in comparison to using such a beautiful desktop environment on my personal laptop. So many things are broken and I just hate the fact that its almost entirely spyware, being filled with vibe coded ai shite and they still try and serve you ads when searching for stuff.

Fuck Microslop! Will never buy another Windows machine.

I've been using Linux since 2008... It's been fine. I do not miss windows. I get to deal with enough of windows bullshit at work.

I started daily driving a year ago with Fedora Silverblue (Atomic) which uses GNOME because people said Atomic distros are friendlier to beginners, and Fedora already had a good reputation for working fairly well out the box. The only issue I had was a Bluetooth issue, and you can rollback to previous kernel versions to wait until a fix is made. If I was just a browse the internet and play games on Steam kind of person, I think I would have loved it. But I did try to tinker and do things that were far to difficult to figure out how to change on an Atomic distro, especially since I couldn't find instructions or documentation for my distro, so I moved to regular Fedora KDE after a few months and I absolutely love it.

No annoying pop-ups, no stalking, no weird shit being enabled by default, just an OS that does what YOU want it to do. I am comfortable with using the terminal due to taking a Linux course, but I feel that you could do a lot without having to use it. Plus, most sites and github projects give you basic installation guides anyway. The only two issues I have had were Bluetooth and my touchpad not working. The solution for these two issues were simple, but I couldn't find the information for literal months. I solved the Bluetooth issue by doing a power reset, apparently you have to do that when you get a kernel update. The touchpad issue was it disabled itself in the system settings one day. That's literally it. My computer hasn't blown up, my mic and camera always work, I have found FOSS alternatives for almost everything, I don't game much on laptop but I've gotten old Japanese 32-bit games to work on Lutris, etc.

Maybe I'll distro-hop in the future, but it's only for the pure curiousity and fun, not out of necessity or broken tech. In fact, Linux just makes tech fun. It makes my laptop feel brand new, and makes me go "Wow. I love using technology."

The only reason I still have my Windows partition is because my college uses Lockdown Browser for online tests, and I don't want to fuck up a no-retakes test or do testing in person. Once I graduate, I'm probably nuking that partition, I feel like barfing every time I boot into it.

great, everything works, after some tinkering

its nice. just that it runs out of ram when using multiple apps compared to on windows, but i couldnt care less if thats a sacrifice i have to make to escape big tech.

I switch to linux back around 1999 from HP-UX.

Every game needs a stupid command argument, things are broken, and everything is incompatible, but its largely been awesome.