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.
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.
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.
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.
Bazzite should work with your nvidia and everything else. And from the way you described yourself, you may like Bazzite’s immutability better, since it’s much harder to break than kubuntu is. Just make sure you get the KDE version. I also installed it on my steamdeck and love it.
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!
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.
Had a relative switch to Linux recently. Lenovo IdeaPad computer running windows 10. The stuff was getting insanely slow and battery life was reduced ton the point that it was being a pain to use. Backed all the documents and data on a local instance of dufs running on home server and installed Linux Mint on it. Had minor issues regarding WiFi and Bluetooth. Solved the wifi one but bluetooth is still a bit unstable sometimes. Came back 1 week later and the user is delighted. Says that everything works 3 times faster than on windows and that battery lasts 3 times longer. They also went on themselves to look for open source alternatives to windows apps they were using and installed them. That’s a win !
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.
I think GNOME 3 was intended to be nicer for touchscreens but it’s not my favourite either.
My daily driver is MATE - the spiritual continuation of GNOME 2.
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.
Moved my father-in-law from Windows 10 to Mint.
Biggest problem was all his ‘documents’, which were office365 web links rather than ‘actual documents’. Linux presents them as the urls that they really are. They open just fine, though, and can be exported as real local docs for libreoffice etc.
Security and privacy were the main selling points for him. He’d done some reading and thought that Mint was among the best choices for a newstart that just want everything to work; no interests in playing games or anything. I agreed that was the most solid choice. I use Arch btw myself, but wouldn’t recommend that for beginners.
My wife is the last one in the family to switch to Linux. I started with Linux on PCs (I only used Windows 95 back then in a dual-boot config for gaming only, but did work on Linux back then already), my daughter and my so use Linux for University, and now my wife is the last one to convert over the Win11 fuckup.
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.
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.
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.
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…
Sober… Roblox
It works great for my family! Only annoyance is having to run
flatpak updateoften.Yea, roblox and fortnite are the two hold backs for me switching my kids PCs since the anti cheat doesn’t apparently work on Linux. I hadn’t heard of Sober though. Hope it works out!
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 :>
I have some programs that require Windows (still running 10 with ESU) but my Mint partition is now my daily driver.
✋
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.
If you like Powershell you could always look into Python
“Like” might be too strong a word, lol. But thanks, I’ve heard great things.
Ah! I take it back, there has been one other thing. For one of my pairs of Bluetooth headphones, on one of my computers, Blueman intermittently won’t show the correct sink (not sync) codec options, and no amount of disconnecting/reconnecting will fix it, meaning that they only work in VoIP headset mode (so, lower quality). I bought these headphones after I switched to Linux, and they’ve only ever been connected to the one machine, so I don’t know if the problem is with the headphones, with Mint, with the hardware, or with Blueman. I have to tear down the Bluetooth stack and rebuild it, which sounds a lot worse than it is (actually it takes like two terminal commands and four seconds), but annoyingly that means it also disconnects every other Bluetooth device I have connected.
It’s a minor annoyance, but it’s an annoyance. Still, I’ll take it over dealing with Windows’ terrible audio interface any day.
