Linux

The only logical addition to the post title is "If so, you may be entitled to compensation."

Customer Testimonials: "My cousin Rick switched to Linux and now he never stops talking about Arch and flatpacks and kernel panics. BS&D Associates got us $30,000,000 in damages!"

My daughter is very Linux curious but she's not going to want to learn anything about it. She just wants to play games and chat with friends. I'll probably switch her when I upgrade and pass my current computer down.

My wife wanted Linux on her tablet. She read online that Gnome was the preferred DE on touchscreens. I warned her that I personally dislike Gnome, but it's not like I'm going to throw a minimal window manager at her, so I told her that's fine and she should try it out.

Since I'm her tech support, I installed Garuda, a distro I already use. She played around with it, then asked if she could have desktop icons. It was stupid that she had to press a whole extra button just to see her "home screen", she said. So I installed the desktop icons gnome extension, but it lacks basic features like either right click or drag, or maybe both. I can't recall at the moment.

Then the onscreen keyboard wouldn't appear automatically when using certain programs like Brave. And using the stylus to press the OSK would close it entirely. The stylus was really fidgety and oversensitive, too. I have zero touchscreen experience on Linux, so I was disappointed with gnome's lack of GUI controls to fix these kinds of things.

She started to complain that Linux is too hard, then signed up for the 1 year extended Windows 10 support on her old laptop.

So I reinstalled Garuda with KDE this time, told her I tried something new, and she's been happy with it so far. Turns out my wife just hates Gnome. And she expressed this hate completely unprompted.

That's right, my love; fuck Gnome.

I've never been more proud.

Yes! Two folks swapped to nix, one to mint.

Getting VR to work has been a journey on nix. Everything on mint has gone smoothly afaik.

Windows 10 EOL (and moving) both roughly lined up, so we all decided to get away from big tech. The nix os was new, interesting, and feels very powerful when things work. Mint was a known safe choice.

I switched maybe like two years ago now. I only had issues on one game but a bit later it just worked not sure what changed. I know EA stuff doesn't work so haven't really messed around with that. I check protonDB a lot to see game compatibility.

The biggest issue for me was getting a handle on a photo workflow for myself after switching and leaving lightroom/adobe behind. I use darkroom now which I'm still learning but I have a basic workflow down pretty well.

I built up a PC for my cousin for gaming and put bazzite on there, she hasn't really noticed anything being her first personal PC so thats pretty good, I've gone from popOS, to arch to bazzite

I helped switch my 88 years old grandma to Mint a few months back when her laptop started to run painfully slow. I don't think she understands that I changed her OS but she is happy with "whatever I did to her laptop", now her laptop runs much faster and 0 problems so far for her needs, very simple needs but she actually uses it a lot!

I went to Linux Mint and it's been painless. All my games I want to play run on it (through Steam).

My son is getting my old computer as a hand me down and I put Mint on it, too. I've installed Sober on it so he can play Roblox. I don't know how it'll go but we'll see...

I switched to Mint in March. I have to use W11 for work and I thoroughly hate it. I did not want all the ads and AI stuff that come pre-packaged. I also did not want to upgrade my pc - I have an arbitrary rule that I'm only allowed new hardware every 10 years, so I have another 2 years left until I can upgrade.

So I used all my anger and pettiness, went on youtube to see how difficult it'd be to install Linux. The first video I found was Zorin vs Mint, and I thought Mint was a good fit for an absolute noob like myself. I really did not want to faff with learning commands and stuff so I was very pleasantly surprised with flatpaks and whatnot. Overall I'd say it was a very good experience, I'm just annoyed I've not done it earlier.

Me. But not just me. When my children grow older, they too will now have a Linux OS on their computers not Microsoft. Microsoft has lost more than just me!

I switched from W11 when Copilot Vision was scheduled for a forced install. Choose Debian KDE because my servers are all Debian-based already, and I wanted boring and stable. For the most part, it's been smooth sailing. There's a touchpad issue sometimes that requires reloading the mouse module, and updating my Dell dock requires loading a Windows boot disk to run the installer from that environment. That's about it for problems. Using apt and flatpak to manage updates for all my software has been great. I do not miss downloading and clicking through installer wizards all the time.

One from my friend. He has tried Linux before but switched back due to issues. When this Win10's EOL came up I floated trying it again. Which he then did that weekend. It worked great for the most part. One game had install issues, but worked after we resolved them, another Proton game had full screen problems with no monitor output when the "Adaptive Refresh Rate" setting was enabled in the OS settings.

That software-hardware interface problem wasn't documented anywhere, so it was just a lot of fiddling with all the settings one-by-one and trying various things to get it working to no avail until he got there.

I'm jealous of those that converted to Linux from Windows 10.

I didn't migrate until Windows 2000.

Started like three mints ago b/c fed up with windows. Got 2nd SSD and set up dual boot with Bazzite. Initially this was just to fuck around but i switched to Bazzite as main distro within two days. It just works. Won me over when Darksouls was immediately displaying the Playstation glyphs when I plugged in the Dualshock 4.

Even modding was relatively easy. Things are well documented now and; and I shame to admit, ChatGPT is surprisingly not the shittiest at helping me with my issues (specific example setting up Darksouls Remastered Gadget to run with the Seamless Coop mod which required some custom code shenanigans... For which the vibe code was serviceable!)

Haven't booted my windows partition for a month ish now. Probably won't for a long time.

I’ve been doing my work in Linux for a while now. I’ve started trying out Bazzite for gaming. It’s been quite nice, but not without issues.

... it's been a journey. TLDR: Wayland is super broken, NVIDIA makes it worse, Ubuntu doesn't come with the right drivers out of box, UI inconsistency is everywhere (only Mac gets it right, at the cost of everything else) but major feature upgrades in most regular stuff.

I switched to Debian +Plasma X11, which makes most things work out of the box, but KiCAD crashes Plasma and logs you out of you open a large enough file. If I use Wayland, all of the windows open in a giant pile in the center my screen and OrcaSlicer segfaults when opening a webkit embed. Also no 3d views.

NVIDIA breaks all the rendering stuff, so no 3d model previews in your icons :( and the install defaults to unsafe mode on high refresh screens for Kubuntu, which cuts off the top half of your screen. Print previews are broken on Kate (NVIDIA)

Older Unity Engine can't run controller input natively on linux, so you still play games under proton.

Login screen wallpaper and Wallpaper waking up from sleep and "wallpaper" are three different wallpapers on Debian/Plasma.

Plasma Desktop is not considered an active window so creating a new file and pressing enter doesn't open it, but rather selects a foreground window, But if no window exists, it will open the file.

Now, the better stuff:

Printer drivers work out of box on basically everything I've tested and adding printers is plug and play unlike Windows. Printers on? You're done!

Separated home and root partitions, I nuked my install 4 times and didn't need to copy over my data. (Auto partition doesn't give round numbers to the partitions and this irritates me why 61.73.gb root partitions why not 62???)

Snapshot backups - I no longer care if I accidentally need some older file I deleted, if I ran a backup recently, it's there. Restic

Updates: I can reinstall and uninstall without rebooting - takes 2 minutes max. (Downloading is the bigger portion of it)

Faster boot times, way better keyboard input support, more customizable, integrated file management zip/rar support (very cool) Files open faster, dark mode everywhere, I can compile C firmware about 6-8 times faster without windows scanning my code every time. Although, is antivirus a thing on Linux?

They fixed rounded corners!!! Firefox still likes to be special and ignore window decorations, not sure what's up with that.

No Copilot and no "my computer fans suddenly spun up for no reason whatsoever", although I miss task manager, I have htop now,

Yup, installed Linux Mint for my 60+yo mother. She hardly uses her laptop and does not need anything advanced. We set it up, installation went very smooth (obviously), set up her browser so she can use it like she's used to, and we figured out how to use the printer. Thankfully it was no hassle at all, it just connected via USB and interacted very well with the printing and scanning software that came with Mint. She was already using firefox and libreoffice, so that was no hassle either. So far so good!

Made the move gradually - first the private computers of my family,then my company. Very happy with how it went, especially in terms of staff adoption. We still retain some dual boot windows machines,sadly,as some things currently still can't be done in the Linux world (CAD is the one thing, some very specific Office document things we sadly get dictated by a client the other one.)

I have converted a few friends and family in the last few months. Mostly to Bazzite, but one opted for Fedora. Both good choices, and everyone seems very happy with what they chose.

I switched when they announced Windows was going to start watching everything you do. So it can help you better... of course.

I started with Bazzite and didn't really understand immutability. I had just heard it was good for gaming. I bricked my installation trying to get write access to the folder where login screen images are stored because that part happens to be immutable.

I switched to Garuda because it is also gamer focused and the system folders aren't on lockdown. Both were super easy and have worked great.

I'm still learning what it means to be on Arch, but that's an interesting journey, so I don't mind.

Anyone have suggestions for parental controls on linux? Mainly, to block logins after bedtime, or to limit time on the system.

I did about 2 years ago. Dislike Microsoft decision to go against the user choice and all the bad updates and trying to make things worse. I went to Fedora after being on kubuntu for a while. I just needed something with kde 6 so wayland could work good.

So far I have not really found a good way to convice family. Instead they stay on familiar Windows 10. Will see if I have better luck after W10 ESU runs out.

I had a PC I used for games and stuff that had Windows, switched it to Linux. Don't want Windows 11 and it didn't support my computer anyway.

I'm partway / procrastinating a transition from win10 to Linux Mint. My 12yo hardware wasn't going to support win11, I'm sure I'm not alone in that.

Bought a new SSD, spent a couple of hours with the case open reconfiguring hardware and then testing which of the existing drives had which partitions on them. Install went better than expected, only minor issue with no sound (tweaked setting somewhere obvious and it started working), but getting Google Drive up and running was a pain, mainly because the Online Account feature wasn't working until I thought to reboot and try again.

Next up on my list is to pop back into windows to collect a bunch of settings for things I forgot to write down before, then I'll be finishing configuration and will reconnect old data drives back up and see how we go from there. I saw somewhere that the kernal is having issues with mounting NTFS drives, so expecting another learning curve there.

I've dabbled with Linux a few times in the past, so it's not completely unfamiliar to me, although never as a daily driver machine before. I'm just taking my time, and researching issues as they come up. I'm too old now to consider this a fun exercise , but I'm pretty happy with how things are going so far.

Yep, me and SO.

I was into linux like 15 years ago. Liked it, but wasn't smart enough to get it working and win 7 was still bearable. Called it quits after MS kept somehow getting worse.

Convinced SO to change over and everytbing works fine for them so far! It took a little tinkering but no complaints.

Sure! I'd been playing with regular Gnome Ubuntu for a long while. Never really liked Gnome, figured if I had to use it some day I would just deal.

But then, on reddit of all places, I read about KDE, and Kubuntu. I looked at the screenshots and holy hell, it kinda looks like Windows!!

Now.. like, I'm not some sort of windows fangirl here, it's just, they layout with the task bar, start menu, all that jazz makes a whole buncha sense to me. And to see that there was a version of Ubuntu that had that kinda interface fast tracked me into installing it.

I like using Ubuntu too because it seems pretty straight forward and approachable to someone like me, who isn't super great with computers in general, and who certainly doesn't want to spend a bunch of time tinkering with every setting and what not. But I also value my privacy and not funneling money to billionaires...

So now I'm running Kubuntu, and while it's been great, I am running into issues with some of my games I want to play on Steam and using Lutris. So now I'm back to having to tweak shit, and I'm not too happy about it.

I do know of Bazzite, so I may wipe my Kubuntu install to try it. I just, I don't want to be in the same boat again, and go through all of that.

I am also planning on getting a SteamDeck when my bonus from work comes through after the new year, so this may all be moot, as I am hoping to do my Steam/GOG gaming on that.

Edit: I should specify, my laptop has a GTX 1050ti and I guess Nvidia is the bane of linux or something, and is most likely the cause of most of my issues playing games.

Kinda, not fully committed yet cause as "out of the box" as bazzite is, I still have some things I prefer my windows partition for. Oddly enough, the most recent thing was formatting a god damned flash drive! Like it really doesn't need to be as complicated as the devs made it to be!

Swapped to CachyOS

Pros:

• Super easy OS install
• Good tool for installing steam
• Most games play fine but knew this already from my steam deck

Cons:

• Struggled to find how to setup services like Jellfin, SABnzbd, etc. Not as simple as just installing them on windows, but not bad once I figured out how services work.
• Heavily modded games like Total War Warhammer 3 were a pain since the modding tools are designed for Windows. Got them working, but stability was worse.
• No Virtual Desktop for my Quest 3. I’ve heard I can get VR working on it, but only for games.
• Getting write access on my existing NTFS drive was a pain. Read access worked, by I had to change ownership from root on all files to allow changes.

My friends girlfriend had a Win 10 laptop that "technically" wasn't supported to upgrade to 11 (It was) but she wasn't keen on moving to 11 as she didn't like the look of it (panel, etc).

So they both asked me for alternatives and I gave some options and we settled on Fedora KDE. She loves it. Especially when I showed her how she can really customize the look of it and for fun I showed her the Chicago95 stuff that someone did and she was like "wait, can I do that?"

She always loved the Windows XP look as that was essentially her childhood. So with a bit of work we got Plasma to look like Windows XP and she absolutely loves it. says it makes her feel like a kid again when she was really into pc tech stuff and now using linux has sparked that interest again. She's now watching Veronica Explains and Bread videos on youtube about linux shes learned a few terminal commands, how to do DNF (which she loves) to download programs, etc.

And because of her watching Bread youtube videos she's now asking me about switching to Arch. Her boyfriend is also making the switch too on his desktop. So I think next weekend I'm going to help them set up Arch or CachyOS on both their machines.

Converting someone to... are you mistaking it with a sect?

Took the plunge this week. My secondary hard drive now has Mint and I've got it working so when I boot up I select which os/drive to start up. The plan is to use Mint primarily for awhile and get used to it.

Definitely a bit less intuitive, and many things are still needing to be done through the consol instead of the GUI which is annoying. Haven't had success migrating my Firefox profile without creating an account. Haven't figured out how to get the "dual" monitor setup to work the way a I want either. Feels like a bit of a downgrade but I'm hoping once I get past the initial setup pains it'll be smooth sailing.

I have a friend who was trying out endeavor with kde. He uses a trackball mouse, and configuring the acceleration curve has been a nightmare for him. Apparently it's the wayland compositor's job to expose the ability to configure libinput, and only certain ones do it (KDE being one of them), but configuration isn't as straight forward as in windows.

He was more able to configure it when using X11, but kept hitting a bug when using a custom acceleration curve where the cursor would shoot to the top left of the screen (I think it triggered when moving the cursor while clicking).

I haven't looked into it much myself, but it sounds like it has been one of those unfortunate sticking points for him right out of the gate.

I'm just finishing off switching now. My media server and laptop have been on Xubuntu and Mint respectively for the last few years, but my main PC was stuck on Windows 10 while I got some stuff finished. It's now on Mint while I confirm that everything's transferred over properly.

While I do prefer Linux, it's been quite frustrating so far. The big stuff has been pretty smooth, but I've had a few silly little issues that have made things harder than they should be.

My Bluetooth headphones wouldn't stay connected until I removed them and added them back, and I couldn't print until I deleted an outdated certificate. MusicBrainz Picard wouldn't move and rename files correctly until after an unrelated reboot. I couldn't write to a drive mounted through fstab because none of the guides I found said that you had to do anything different for an NTFS drive, even though some of them were aimed at people switching from Windows.

At the moment, every time I add a podcast to Clementine, it downloads every episode, and I can't see any way to change it.

Nothing major, but I'm going to pull all of my hair out by the time I'm done 😫

Yes. I left a USB stick with a Linux installer on the table when they tried to upgrade to Windows 11. The upgrade failed and they instead upgraded to Linux without even needing to ask for help :>

✋

A little over a year ago, I had a 5-year-old daily-driver Windows laptop that I knew wouldn't get Windows 11, so I put Mint on my 15-year-old desktop machine to see if I could live that life. I had tried dual-booting Ubuntu a couple of times over the previous decade or so, but always just booted into Windows after the novelty wore off. While I expected it to run Linux better than Windows, I was still bracing myself for a terribly slow experience. I was startled to discover that my 15-year-old desktop computer, which had essentially been sitting cold for over five years because it ran Windows 7 like molasses and wasn't eligible for Windows 10, not only ran Linux Mint better than Windows 7, but also ran Windows 10 in VirtualBox better than Windows 7 on baremetal. It was a little slow and laggy, definitely not gaming ready, but perfectly usable.

Then I discovered that, when I went back to my Windows laptop, I missed the way Linux worked and all of the customizability. And I discovered that Valve's work to make the Steam Deck a viable gaming console was making Steam gaming on Linux a quite pleasant experience. So earlier this year, when I bought a new laptop (trying to beat the tariffs), I decided to get a Framework without Windows preinstalled. I put Mint on it, too, and only rarely needed to boot into VirtualBox a couple of times for work stuff (mostly opening Adobe files). So last week, I turned Windows on for the last time on my old laptop, pulled the last couple of files off of it, marveled at how old Windows looked, and installed Mint on that one too.

My house went from 100% Windows to 0% Windows over the course of the past year, due entirely to Microsoft's own-goal of killing off their most popular and reliable product. And I couldn't be happier.

Problems and challenges? I haven't run into a single one that wasn't already a problem before I installed Linux. Maybe it just hasn't been long enough, or maybe sticking with a "normie" distro has insulated me from the worst of it, but I haven't had a single driver issue (on the contrary, the Bluetooth module that never worked on my old laptop under Windows works perfectly now), and I've been able to find an open-source alternative to basically every Windows-only application I want or need. My wife's old Chromebook, which had been basically useless for anything but web browsing before we replaced it, is still basically useless for anything but web browsing even on Lubuntu (it was too puny even for Mint). But no problems due to Linux or due to not having Windows outside of a VM. No hours spent debugging broken drivers. It's all been super smooth.

Oh, I guess one thing is that I know Powershell a whole lot better than Bash. That's been a little bit of a learning curve.