A community for everything relating to the GNU/Linux operating system (except the memes!)
Also, check out:
Original icon base courtesy of lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP
I switched to Endeavor OS a few months ago for my gaming PC. Working great so far. I’m using Linux a lot at work, so the transition has been smooth for me.
Also helped a relative to switch to Linux Mint by their own request. It was a welcome surprise. They really didn’t want to switch to Windows 11.
I'm in process.
A few friends installes it and work gold with it. I also am tasked with installing Linux for my mother where I will use Linux Mint.
I've always been interested in Linux, and for my home server it's been my OS for the last decade, but for the workstation I found myself dual-booting. With the advent of atomic distributions such as Fedora Kinoite, Universal Blue, Fedora CoreOS etc using the concept of OS images through OSTree / bootc, combined with containerization through flatpak and podman is a great step forward stability and reproducibility.
My desktop has been switched to Aurora (Universal Blue) for more than a year and I couldn't be happier.
Grew up om mac os, switched to windows about 10 years ago. Switched to Linux this summer.
The first distro that stuck was Manjaro... But the instability became too much of a pita and a risk. Found Garuda Moca amd I'm very happy with the experience. Mostly used for gaming.
I'm never going back to the windows side of my dual boot & should probably reclaim the space. Damn malware hyjacks my bios and trys to start & grab updates every once & a while.
Spouse is working on a private cloud server & once its up I will walk backwards out of the corop data theif hell I inhabit now with both birds blazing.
I installed Fedora last Friday and I have no regrets. Win11 was never an option for me, my laptop is "too old" and I have no desire to touch that horror in any
~10 years ago I had a Win7/Ubuntu dual boot laptop, but I dropped Ubuntu when I upgraded to SSD and needed all the space I could get. Ubuntu was OK, but there was something with the UI that just didn't click with me. I meant to try other distros but never found the time, so I just stuck with Win10 until now.
I have several legacy software that I need, so I went with dual boot again. If I can get them to run smoothly on Fedora, I'll do a complete clean install.
The only challenge in installing Fedora was Windows' crappy partition manager, which would not let me minimize C: for more than 54MB. I did every trick I knew and learned a few new ones, nothing helped. Then I just flashed Gparted to a USB stick and it worked instantly.
After that everything went smoothly, with the exception that Fedora didn't recognize my Bluetooth device at all. I'll dig into that single issue tomorrow, I'm fairly certain that a fix can be found easily.
Have you considered a Windows vm? That's how i run that single program that i can't get working on Linux. Yeah it's slow AF on my system, but it's not used often.
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.
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.
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
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 did not, but I started on fedora silverblue and rebased to bazzite because the bazzite installer wasn't working for me a year ago. I think all in all, I prefer gnome even as a wondows expat.
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 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.
How do desktop functions perform on Linux Mint compared to Windows on your current machine, qualitatively speaking? I've kept my parents' 13 year old laptop alive with Linux, a replacement battery and SSD, so 2 more years should be no problem unless your needs drastically change.
You'll find there are dozens of ways to "install" an app on Linux, in varying degrees of portability, ease of install and ease of upgrade.
It's an absolute joy, although I am a little annoyed at the random freezes I sometimes get, like when everything stops responding with no rhyme or reason. At least when Windows crashes, it crashes good and just reboots. But Mint needs a hard reset. Other than that, I managed to get all my games to play thanks to Lutris so I couldn't be happier! I've had some tiny tweaks to make, for example my sound got crackly after some update, but thankfully there are tons and tons of troubleshooting that basically take your hand and guide you through what you need to do to sort issues. I'm immensely grateful for all those forums.
Your mention of a laptop reminds me I also installed Mint on my 16 year old lappy, it's quite slow but it actually works with all the OG hardware (bar a new battery)!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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 think it says something about Linux adoption rate amongst gaming users, that popular modding tools like r2modman have native Linux versions. And it's great for me to hear "It just works" from new users since my bar is set at a weird spot, having seen things progress over 9 years.
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.
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 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 find it pretty easy to convince non-tech older people to use Linux. It also helps just denying them tech support if they don’t use Linux 😁
Converting someone to... are you mistaking it with a sect?
Let's be real it is a sect.
It was a sect until someone forked it, now it's a cult
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.