Curious on the experiences of those recently migrating to Linux from Windows 10, Intel-based MacOS, etc. How is it being on Linux? Anything surprise or frustrate you?
I was using Linux when I was in school from 2000-2008. Used Linux for a while during the Windows Vista period then switched to Windows 7 and eventually Windows 10. But I always had a dual-boot scenario on my PC. Now with Win 11, I didn’t want that malware on my system. Plus now Steam and Proton can allow me to play my games like it was nothing so I went full Linux. Never been happier. Kubuntu is working awesome for me. Though I might switch to Endeavour OS at some point. I’m not sure yet. I’m so used to Debian, I don’t know if I want to learn a whole new software management system.
I’m happy! It Just Works. Windows 11 -> Linux.
- I have had ONE WiFi problem that was my computer’s fault the whole year; as opposed to half the times I open the computer.
- One video game didn’t Just Work, I had to tinker, but I got it working smoothly with mods.
- A bit of trouble with flash drives initially because they were not formatted to something compatible with Linux. Once I learned that I managed to shuffle data around and format it to be compatible with MacOS, Linux, and my Windows VM. But Linux actually saved me and let me get an old flash drive working that did not work at all. Love reformatting on my distro, it’s easier and more visual than when I tried to do it on Mac or Windows.
For the future regarding Flash drives. The different filesystems used by Mac and Windows (APFS and NTFS) can be used on Linux.
APFS support is sometimes built in, but if not can be installed by following the guide here(github). Note that this will require building from source, which can be scary if you haven’t done it before, but is pretty easy if a bit tedious. This repo in particular has a good guide.
For NTFS support, you can install the read-only
ntfspackage, or the read-writentfs-3gpackage. This utilizes the FUSE so you’ll need the ‘fuse’ tools as well.For the older Apple HFS+ filesystem you’ll need
hfsprogs. This is available from the AUR on Arch based distros, or in the Bookworm repo for Debian distros. For other distributions you may need to compile from source which you can find from the Debian package page.I default to exFAT for flash drives. Every OS can use it out of the box, so it is the obvious choice.
This is the logical choice on newly formatted drives regarding interoperability, but you really should use f2fs or another Copy on Write filesystem for your flash drives if it’s an option.
Hey thank you for the good information; I starred your comment! This is the stuff I like seeing on programming.dev.
And I have built from source before—but considering how un-knowledgeable I feel compared to the average poster here, probably a good thing you included that reassurance that it’s not so hard, since I feel just barely technical enough to be able to build from source. It’s also friendly to drive-by readers at my level of expertise/knowledge or lower who have not built from source yet.
Switched to Mint a few months ago on my Desktop. I discovered a few issues during my time with it such as waking itself from suspend mode or the headphone jack in my front header not getting picked up, but both issues were fixed with just a bit of searching.
Overall it’s a great feeling to be able to just do what I want with my computer and not worry about big corpa messing with me, even if I do expect that things may need to be patched up here and there.
Switched over almost a year ago, aside from a few hiccups, it’s been awesome. Gaming has been smooth, setup jellyfin, and have been developing my media library. I love to tinker around and what not, and it’s been a fun experience (especially when you figure out that one issue thats been vexing you for some time).
I’ve switched systems some 15? years ago. But my mum did it recently, so I asked her this question. (Disclaimer: she isn’t the one managing her machine. Guess who does it.)
She claims it’s basically the same thing. She was surprised her start menu got different some days ago (when I updated her Mint), but it was the good type of surprise, like, “ah, it shows my profile pic now!”. Then she rambled about things that disappear from her email, but that is not an OS issue, it’s PEBKAC (she’s extremely disorganised). And… that’s it.
This is something I would love to do for people on a professional basis… I’m laying the groundwork for it right now (side hustle and fallback cushion for if the American 3rd party contract ends, esp. before 2029).
FOSS transitions and tech help, senior target demo, but basically anyone, even solo/small businesses… saving money, and sanity!
I set up a dual boot Win10/Linux system so I would have the option to use windows when I needed. I have not booted into windows for a while now. The only thing I was using it for was to play some older games I could not figure out how to get running in Wine. I may have to use it for tax software if I can’t find something that runs under Linux though.
Set up dual boot with Pop! OS to give it a try and overall my experience is pretty positive.
There are a few things that are bothering me. For example, any time the system wakes from sleep, Firefox can no longer load new pages. Anything that was open prior to sleep works until I attempt to open anything new in that tab, and any new tab just refuses to do anything at all
I also miss HDR when I’m gaming. I ran cyberpunk for about a week in Linux and was pleasantly surprised that it ran just fine. Then I had to hit into windows for something work related and launched the game there after I was done… HDR makes a huge impact with my monitor and I didn’t realize how much it did until it was gone.
I was never one for HDR so I never even paid attention when I bought my monitor, switched to Bazzite and was surprised KDE supports HDR.
Firefox is still an issue on Bazzite, but PopOS came with some really weird sleep issues where it would sometimes even require a good kernel kill. That may have been something with having installed for an Nvidia card and changing to AMD.
KDE Plasma has HDR support. You can check if your monitor is supported by booting from a cutting edge KDE distro like Fedora KDE.
It isn’t super smooth to configure yet, but it should be possible to use HDR. Have you tried that?
I use Mint and so does my wife.
Two laptops that Win11 doesn’t want to support, but we need them both and we don’t have the budget to replace them. No problems on mine, but the wife’s HP has some issues with closing the lid and I haven’t found a good solution to that yet.
Sleep doesn’t work because on wakeup the wifi and bluetooth are both dead; bluetooth doesn’t matter but the wifi’s needed for the internet and the only way to get it back up is to reboot the machine because it insists there’s a hardware failure and refuses to accept that there isn’t. I’ve even tried modprobe-ing the network stack but it has to be a full system restart (warm restart, not power cycle).
Hibernate threatens something nasty, can’t remember what offhand but I’m not even considering it.
I don’t want a lid shut to mean shutdown because shutting the lid shouldn’t mean losing work. So I’m left with the only remaining option that shutting the lid does nothing, and the LT stays on, but then if she puts something on top of the LT as she’s prone to do, some stuff can end up in a weird state, like taskbar icons following the mouse around even though they haven’t been clicked on, and there’s no way to stop them doing that without rebooting. I’m not sure how that happens; my hypothesis is that the keyboard and/or trackpad get activated, but no amount of me pressing on the lid in various places reproduces the problem.
Other than that she’s had no problem adapting to Linux Mint. Everything’s where she expects it. I’ve had to do some command-line jiggerypokery for various bits and bobs but a bit of DDG-ing finds that easily enough.
I’m rocking Bazzite and the only time I wanted Windows was when I got stuck on a boss in Silksong and wanted to use CheatEngine.
Cheat Engine is a thing on Linux!
Game Conqueror is bundled for a lot of distros but PINCE is my favorite.
I couldn’t get Game Conqueror working on Bazzite. PINCE worked, but I couldn’t use any existing CE configs, and saving my own didn’t work the next time I loaded the game either. That could maybe just be a Silksong thing but I’ve never had that issue before.
Not a dealbreaker for Linux, but it was the one time I remember thinking “this is a lot easier on Windows”
I had the same issue with PINCE not restoring the correct memory addresses on start.
Although I think I’m doing something wrong and the memory in modern games is just dynamic so the correct location can’t be found with just the memory addresses. Haven’t looked if it is possible yet but I assume you need some pattern matching to find the right address, not sure if PINCE can do that yet.
Although I think I’m doing something wrong and the memory in modern games is just dynamic so the correct location can’t be found with just the memory addresses.
OK that’s the same thing I was suspecting. I noticed the memory addresses had similar names, but there was no way to search for partial addresses or anything.
i love it, things have been just working lately. it feels like every day something is gonna give but thats just windows trauma
It’s going great. A bit of a learning curve at the start, but nothing difficult. I had a few minor issues along the way, but it’s all worth it, because I no longer get bothered by all the annoyances of Windows. My device is now managed, updated, etc by me instead of big tech that doesn’t serve my interests, feels much better.
I have a dual boot PC with mint and the nvidia drivers crashed the GUI on boot. I haven’t resurrected mint yet.
My Surface Book 3 with kubuntu is great but I have to turn it off, sleep will burn up the battery.
My only surprise is how easy it was.
I need them to decide on Wayland or x and make the damn switch. I’m tired of switching servers for apps.
They did. It’s Wayland. Everything should work in Wayland now. It’s the default for everything, even xfce (4.20+), and x compatibility is handled by xwayland.
I’ve been running Ubuntu lts waiting on a new one, so it’s a me problem as usual. Getting new hardware soon, I’ll play with some big boy distros
You can jump to 25.10 for the short-term release, and there’s a preview available for 26.04 (officially releases in April), both of which have Wayland by default in Plasma and I believe Gnome.
Though I would strongly recommend you try Debian, version 13 (Trixie) includes Plasma 6 and of course Wayland by default.
It’s a bright future.I don’t remember why but I was trying to stay on Ubuntu lts on this computer. Honestly I need to just wipe the drive and start over.
It was probably from before Debian included the non-free firmware in the installation media, so you had to scramble to put those on a floppy disk or something, all while your system was out of commission.
🤣 I missed floppy’s but I remember those days
I miss Zip Disks. Those things were so cool and so outclassed by perpendicular progress.
Bought a new gaming PC with an AMD GPU and went straight for Bazzite almost a year ago. It was pretty damn painless and straightforward. Especially the only thing I use it for are singleplayer or indie multiplayer games. Almost everything worked out if the box.
A lot of sim racing stuff worked surprisingly well.
It was a pain to learn how to install Assetto Corsa with its mods, needs a specific version of proton with specific windows libraries installed, but once I figured that all out it runs great.
It was also a pain when I bought a Chinese handbrake for sim racing, but thanks to the Sim Racing On Linux discord, a member wrote a custom driver for it for me and another member that bought it. Unfortunately, I can’t exactly install custom kernel drivers on Bazzite, so I ended up switching to CachyOS and have been enjoying that so far. It was a bit of a pain to switch as it requires more tinkering, but I got to a place where it was running nicely fairly quickly.
