It bears repeating, so: fuck Microsoft and Windows.

Microsoft, a sponsor of the new White House ball room.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c891yxgj44ko

Good luck. I jumped ship 10 years ago, you get used to it to the point Windows starts feeling weird.

Don't hesistate to reach out when you're stuck

I'm really enjoying the learning curve with Linux because it's a valuable skill to master. On the other hand, every time I've had to "go under the hood" with Windows, it's been to keep it from doing something awful to me.

I remember someone on Discord server I used to be on kept telling people to "use Linux" which back then, I thought it was some scary OS for people who's tech savvy and wrote him off to be annoying. It was few years when I have my own laptop as early birthday present that I find Windows 10 annoying and remembered Linux exist so I run up a virtual machine and watch so many videos on YouTube about it. Then, I made USB-Boot and installed Linux Mint.

Far from perfect but I feel so much more comfortable using Linux over Windows, feels so much more smoother

I've been on Mint for 2 years now. So far the only roadblock I've hit is my obsolete audio interface not talking to it, and that's not Mint's fault. Everything else was a seamless transition for me. I will admit that I'm not super enthusiastic about GIMP though. Welcome to the club.

I miss Windows 95.

That ui was so damn clean. There was basically zero bloat and everything had a place.

A computer was a tool and only did what you wanted it to. Nothing more, nothing less.

Welcome brother or sister or nb thing inbetween! This is the way!

Anecdotally, I was tinkering with it earlier this year and finally stopped being lazy and flipped my main PC over. After I talked about it enough in my friend chat, three more friends followed suit and a fourth is going to soon. It's not just the end of supporting Windows 10, it's all of the repeated bugs, glitches, and AI garbage Microsoft has been pushing everywhere so aggressively. People who would likely only rate themselves as "mildly" tech savvy are sick of it and willing to make a move, I feel.

I'm ok with that. You hit a point where a community sustains, and is good. Lemmy is a great example of that. Often, when it grows past that, it can become.. unsavory.

Of

Depends on what you feel lost about, if it is the basics in general then I would suggest you start of and read about the basics here https://labex.io/linuxjourney they write about the very basics in a very simple way. I think they did a good job, they start of with what Linux is, what distros are to commands from the most basics as how to navigate in the terminal to more advanced combinations. They also have vms where you can try out the commands if you haven't switched yet.

If it is a cheat sheet as in commands then i would say it is better to make your own of the commands you care about but you can start of by using other ppls list like this one https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/linux-unix/linux-commands-cheat-sheet/ but it can be overwhelming for you so use the linuxjouney first. Also it is very important to learn how to look up how to use the arguments in the terminal with man or -h to make it faster and less painful to use.

If you are lost about programs then there are a lot of good GitHub pages that links to useful programs and cli tools, you just need to search for awesome Linux list

Examples:

https://github.com/luong-komorebi/Awesome-Linux-Software You can use their web pages version too https://luong-komorebi.github.io/Awesome-Linux-Software/ https://githublists.com/lists/awesome-lists/awesome-bash

Here is one for distros https://github.com/kolioaris/awesome-linux-distros

Here is an example for customizing https://github.com/fosslife/awesome-ricing

When looking for programs is it very important that you know what distro you are on, what desktop environment (like kde, gnome, xfce) and what window composition you use (usually Wayland or x11, x11 is older and is more compatible).

So in short start of at https://labex.io/linuxjourney

Then look up distros here https://github.com/kolioaris/awesome-linux-distros

For new ppl do I think Ubuntu based is best because almost everything has a Ubuntu version, when you feel ready can you test out other distros. I haven't tried bazzite, I started of many years ago on debian (a few random ones like arch and mint) and then pop os for many years and now cachyos, I liked my journey but that doesn't mean it is correct for others.

I would suggest to have all of your data you care about on a separate disk or have automatic backup of it so you can break your os without care. And if you start customizing would I suggest setting up a GitHub repo and commit your changes everytime you like what you see so it is easy to go back if you regret something.

I hoped this helped on your journey, I didn't want to overwhelm you so I hope I kept it simple enough :D

I do free infinite troubleshooting on matrix, I have over 15 years of experience

Just ask people here, people just love anyone who switches over to Linux and want to learn about it. Because we actually love this operating system. Its so good.

When my kid started using Linux, once he knew how to start programs and install things, we went through where the files are on the file system and how to get there in a terminal. I think thats a good starting point so you understand the foundation of the system.

And then go though a basic Linux command line tutorial to learn about the common tools for listing files, filtering results, renaming and deleting files etc.

You can do that stuff in a graphical file manager too but you dont really get that understanding of how things work until you do it in the terminal.

Any specific things you are getting stuck on?

For all their faults, LLMs are pretty damn good at basic trouble shooting of Linux. Ideally prepare context for them with installation details. Use CLI client, recommend opencode CLI, plan agent is good to inspect the commands it will plan to run and let's you inspect and think through what it is doing. Can also ask for clarifications along the way.

It's not perfect but very good.