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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have a T500 on Mint that I don’t use as much atm, due to being on an M1 MacBook Air. My ideal future setup, though, is a desktop with Linux and another PC for windows for software I can’t get on it, so there’s no issue for dual-boot partitions that I’ve increasingly seen being a thing with Windows.
I’ve been using linux for years ( and before that solaris and sunos and … ). My lab computers are running linux exclusively. For people coming from windows wanting to check it out, I’d suggest installing VirtualBox on your windows pc, from https://www.virtualbox.org/, and then installing linux to that ( for instance, download the install image of some linux, is like ubuntu, so the file would be from https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop, and give the to virtualbox for the client install ). For a lot of linux uses this windows+linux arrangement can be optimal, since you can still play windows games, or other tightly OS bound windows apps, but if you fullscreen virtualbox its almost identical to just having linux installed directly.
My Linux journey is meandering and has a less than satisfying arc, but now I feel like typing it out for all of you. You’re welcome.
I grew up using a Macintosh and started using Microsoft on Windows 97. We were a a multi-computer household at that point, (thanks, Dad!) but I still preferred my Mac for the next decade or so. I was much more in-tune with Unix at that point, but I went to the darkside for a few years for school and eventually found myself ready to build my own PC in 2011.
One of my buddies at the time was super in to trying new Linux distros and would always show them off to me, so he convinced me to try Ubuntu on it. I decided to dual-boot since it would primarily be a gaming PC. I was default Ubuntu and needed a command to be Windows and that worked great for awhile. But as I started using Windows more and more, I eventually reached a point where deleting the Ubuntu partition made more sense. Keeping up with both wasn’t helping me out.
Now, it’s fully Windows 10 and will not be updating past that, but I’m also using a Steam Deck, so at least I get some Unix that way!
I certainly won’t be going back to a Mac, but I am considering a full Linux boot for my next build. That’s a couple years out still. My baby was built to last, and after a couple upgraded GPUs and harddrives, she still hasn’t disappointed me. I’m definitely more of a GUI user than a command line user though. I can navigate a command line, but it’s a constant game of looking stuff up.
No matter, it’s super exciting to see Linux rising up the ranks in terms of the amount of games that will work! I’m very excited to see how the community grows from this.
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 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.
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)
I am currently using Linux Mint! I love it, especially as someone who can’t afford fancy things like 70 dollar games or expensive software. I’m enjoying going through recommendation lists to see what I can use in lieu of Windows softwares.
Initially, the gaming was also what made me avoid doing it, but… I can’t play triple AAA games on my laptop anyway because I don’t have a GPU, lmao. The only game I play regularly is on my phone and can be single player.
I don’t play MMO like I did as a teen, so there’s no point in worrying about that either. I have some visual novels I might not be able to play right now, but I play games at such a slow rate that I can just put them on my backlog for when they do work.
Currently, I’m playing through my backlog of older games like Trails in the Sky which work decently. Emulation also works great on it!
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 don’t currently use the computer much, but I have Windows 10 and Linux set up for dual boot on my old desktop and primarily use Linux there. My kid uses Windows for playing games and sometimes I do, too, but I don’t game much these days.
My laptop has Windows 11, but they keep filling it with all kinds of advertising and I absolutely hate advertising. I am very tempted to replace it entirely with Linux.
I’ve toyed around with different distros several years back and at this point I’ve settled on Ubuntu simply because any time I search for answers to problems that crop up, the results are primarily geared for Ubuntu users and being middle aged, I lack the patience to dig deeper to learn how to fix something on a less popular distro. Having something with longer term support is nice for me, too, because I’ve been stuck with horribly slow DSL internet living out in a rural area, so downloading updates all the time is not trivial for me either. For a little bit I thought I wanted to be bleeding edge and then I realized it was pretty impractical and unnecessary for my situation.
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.
