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 posted this before, but it feels like going back to the best days of PC ownership. It’s fast, I’m in control, everything I want works and I honestly don’t think about my OS very much.
I chose bazzite since I love gaming, but of course it’s just a competent OS overall with which I also do my private office tasks.
Booting up my PC finally feels like a joy again.
Like most people I use Windows 11 at work and the contrast is enormous.
This is my experience to a T. Picked Bazzite for gaming. It just works. Anyone worried about not being able to do the things you think you need Windows for need not worry. You can do all of that and more.
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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 think it was two years or so for me now, but honestly, it’s going great. I’ve got alternatives for the windows only apps I used to use, and my games run smoothly.
Every time I have to use a windows computer for some reason, I’m reminded of why I stopped using that OS…
Most of the games I play don’t work on wine (Teknoparrot), and multiple machines I have are either missing or have broken essential drivers for built-in peripherals like wifi/BT, fingerprint readers etc. So… I had to go back.
One of my laptops has a 10+ year old unfixed kernel bug for the bluetooth not working… and the wifi only uploads at 1mbps under Linux, but works fine on Windows.
I’m sure people that don’t happen to have random hardware/software incompatibilities are enjoying linux, but there’s also still lots of people that can’t switch.
Some of those issues are addressable, even though they definitely suck, depending on how badly someone wants to swap to Linux. I have a PC I connect to my TV, and while it’s built in wifi doesn’t work on linux, I was able to buy a PCI wifi card and put it in, which works. You can do similar for Bluetooth. Currently I just use it over Ethernet. For laptops, it’s a pain but there are USB wifi/bluetooth devices you can get. Fingerprint readers are tougher, I believe, but I feel less critical. Either way, use what works best for you!
My only surprise is how easy it was.
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 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.
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.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.
I’ve been dual booting Windows and Linux (Ubuntu) for a while, and sadly I’m back on Windows after a month and a half of exclusively using Linux. The reason? Ethernet. I need to assign a static IP to a dev board with Ethernet, and while it works fairly easily on Windows, it just doesn’t work on Linux, saying it’s unavailable in the nmcli output.
Of course, Windows is worse than before. It hasn’t fixed the bug where it never updates the system time, forcing me to manually press sync on every boot. And it hasn’t fixed the newer bug where my laptop display needs to go down to 768p to display 300Hz, making me to go down to 60Hz to use the full 1080p resolution. All the while Microsoft pushes things nobody wants.
Was about 2 years ago, but going great. I chose Mint at the time, occasionally eye other distros but I can’t be arsed to switch my perfectly fine desktop. It’ll just be longer before I get HDR support nbd. I installed openSUSE on my old work Thinkpad to try KDE. It’s fine but so far not really better, just different.
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 switched to Nobara a couple months ago. My computer is a lot snappier. Overall its great. Some minor difficulties but no show stoppers.
Signal desktop gives me an error that it is keeping credentials in plaintext which is fucked, I tried to get it to not do that but havnt been able to figure out how. (there are tutorials for ubuntu/gnome, but I havnt figured out how to translate those to fedora/kde…
I just started using crow-translate which is amazing, but keep getting a screenshot error message. Something with wayland maybe? again when I search there is a lot of shit about ubuntu/gnome but that doesnt really help.
It’s going well. I started selfhosting most of my services on a debian machine. TV doesnt have internet anymore, it’s hooked to a fedora mini pc that i use to play media. I’ve installed Asahi fedora on my M1 Pro macbook and it’s flawless.
Dont miss anything. The only thing that pisses me off is when i work on a document on nextcloud (using onlyoffice) it doesnt look nice on MS office. So for work stuff i have to sometimes log into ms office account and use their cloud to work on a presentation or something.
I also kind of have to keep the OSX installation for some photography stuff although when i have the time ill look for linux alternatives. Mainly i need something to edit fujifilm raw photos with
I think gimp and Photopea might be worth looking into, though I don’t have experience with those myself.
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After bouncing around a few distros, fedora was the one to make sleep mode work on my laptop
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Switched to Bazzite coming up on 4 years ago, and haven’t looked back
