I’d like to hear people’s journeys and motivations from people who switched over the last few months, and if there were particular challenges that were faced.
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 :>
Yup. Switched to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I bought a new NVMe to install Linux on, and a USB enclosure to stick the Windows NVMe in, so I can run Autodesk Fusion and VCarve occasionally. (It boots fine off of USB.)
I write code and browse the web, mostly. Linux is fine for that. I wish more commercial software supported Linux.
I haven’t run a single game on it, or even installed Steam, because I have a Steam deck. But I guess you could say I game Linux, too.
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.
Go with Bazzite. It just works, she can’t break it, and as long as she reboots from time to time, it’ll always be up to date. And she won’t have to learn anything to use it.
This is a great suggestion. Especially the not breaking it part.
The only other suggestion is to figure out whether KDE or Gnome desktop environment is right for her. Former more Windows-like, latter more Mac-like. And then just make sure to grab that version of Bazzite.
If you know the games she plays, you could test installing them separately ahead of time, so that there would be minimal difference when that switchover happens.
It’s mostly The Sims with mods along with whatever meme games she’s hearing about on YouTube. There’s no concern about rootkit anti-cheat or anything, and so far my experience has been almost anything on Steam will run in Linux without having to do anything. She’ll run into performance issues with her current hardware before she hits any games what aren’t compatible.
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.
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 switched maybe lime 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
Bazzite with gnome is mostly painless. I have been using that on my desktop for about a year now, I have fedora with kde on my laptop and its also pretty good.
In case you didn’t know, there’s Aurora OS which is immutable fedora with KDE plasma, very much like bazzite or any of the uBlue spins. I have been using it on a laptop for a while now and I am extremely happy with it.
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.
Bazzite gets thrown around a lot as a beginner distro nowadays, haven’t tried it myself. Its immutable quality sounded to me like it was designed to be hard for beginners to break, so I guess you should give yourself an award for that.
Hope it keeps going well, you’ll naturally get it as you use it and deal with the odd curveball.
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.
Glad it has worked out. Over the years I’ve been free tech support for my close friends and family whom I’ve installed Linux for (I’m fine with it because it had been my hobby, passion, and suggestion for them). I hope you’ve not been inundated with support requests.
I almost did today. Ran into a setback but will try again soon.
Feel free to take your time, Microsoft’s the only one setting deadlines here.
Posting to [email protected] could potentially help if your setback is technical in nature, and not like life stuff.
Thank you. I may have to post some dumb questions there soon
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 😫
NTFS is rough to deal with indeed. Right now getting niche hardware to work is one of Linux’s barriers to adaptation. If the device’s data streams are documented well, it can be technically possible to create homemade device drivers, but you’ll have no hair left to pull before you even begin.
So far the biggest issues I’ve faced are League of Legends and funky network driver issues. One of those I can work at, the other not so much.
My computer was crashing constantly, never figured out what it was but I switched over to Linux Mint to see if it was something to do with the software and hardware having an issue since I couldn’t find a hardware only issue.
I liked the environment but was still having crashes. So I upgraded MoBo, GPU, CPU, RAM, PSU, HDD and installed Mint again. It didn’t work out because Mint didn’t have driver support for my newer GPU so I changed over to Nobara and it is very good.
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!”
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.
Dunno what I was worried about. Hooking up the old data drives one by one and copying over my old date … just worked.
A few more programs to.set up, and I need to sort out my backup strategy, but yeah, happy I’m almost done.
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.
Thanks for sharing your experience. So now that you’ve tried it, is KDE familiar enough to you? (I did put my parents’ now 13 year old PC on KDE for similar reasons).
Good news is that KDE is the front-end interface that is packaged with many distributions (including Bazzite) so you won’t lose the basic look and feel if you decide to move.
It is! I’ve really been enjoying the KDE experience with Kubuntu!
Initially I tried downloading a few “retro” windows xp/2000 look a like themes, but something got messed up and it wouldn’t let me log in? Something with the SDDM. Luckily I had just installed Kubuntu fresh earlier that day, so I hadn’t set anything up, so it was easy enough to just reinstall everything, and I’ve just been sticking with the built in themes and not really messing with anything else lol.
I did see that with Bazzite, which is why I think I’ll try it out. I just don’t want to go through the whole process, only to end up with the same issues I have now due to, apparently, having a Nvidia GPU in my laptop. I know no one can tell me if I will or won’t, and I just have to try it, but that’s about my only hesitation.
I prefer KDE Plasma, too. Fortunately, just about every desktop distro has it available even if GNOME or something else is the default. Find out what package to install. (On Debian-based distros, it’s probably kde-plasma-desktop.) Install it, log out, and look for a session selector on the login screen. Change it to Plasma before logging in again.
If the same game problems reappear when you’re on a different distro, you might want to describe them in detail on a Linux gaming forum. Someone there might be familiar with how to fix them.
Welcome to the neighborhood!
