I started with PopOS in September (?), ultimately replacing Windows on every PC in the house. It's been going well. I've had to troubleshoot a few things, the biggest of which being a boot failure, but that turned out to be hardware related, not Linux's fault. Feeling like I own my computer again is great.

Since then, I've gotten into self-hosting and now have a NAS, a Debian Jellyfin server, and a ton of storage space. Right now I'm just backing up basic stuff for the family, as well as streaming movies/shows/music within the house. I've ripped so many old DVDs and CDs in the past few months...

Next steps will probably be: books, audiobooks, and archiving family photos/videos in a way that is easier to browse than just files on a hard drive. I will likely de-google eventually.

In short, I'm having fun and should've done this a long time ago.

I have been on Linux for almost 9 months now and I miss nothing about windows. I tried a bunch of distributions, starting with Fedora, but now I have settled on an Arch based distribution and am happily running Manjaro.

I'm perfectly happy using Mint. I'll explore more distros eventually but I miss nothing about Windows

I switched from Windows to Mint at the tail end of September, and I’ve only had minimal issues. I backed up everything I cared about and just nuked Windows in one go, since it wasn’t compatible with 11 and I don’t want security problems. I expected my Nvidia graphics card to cause huge issues, but it literally just worked.

I did have an issue getting my Steam games to run, but it was fixed by figuring out how to change the compatibility settings on Steam (the incredibly complicated operation of right clicking on the game title).

I’ve been taking classes as well, and using Libre Office has met basically 100% of my needs. I did have some issues with converting to .docx when images were involved (resulting in images going on walkabout), but I consider that 50% a Windows problem.

Switched from Window 10 to Linux Mint about 3 weeks ago so I'd have something familiar to work with.

Honesty, so far Mint works just like Windows should have worked. I'm surprised at how much stuff has been made automatic and easy for a lifelong windows user. Some specific games have a performance issues, Alt+Tab to switch apps doesn't work if you are in a full screen application.

I would encourage anyone on Windows to buy a small drive (I used a 500 GB SSD I got for like 40 bucks) load a Linux distro on it and give it a shot. You probably won't be back on Windows.

I'm Loving Fedora! All hardware works flawlessly. Games play great.I couldn't be happier.

I switched from Windows 10 to Kubuntu some months ago and it's been pretty rough mostly. I've been having issues with but not limited to: multi-monitor setup, nvidia gpu, network dropping, game/software support, hardware support (headset working poorly, motherboard not reporting any sensors), poor performance in some cases...

Still better than spreading my cheeks and letting Microsoft fuck me in the ass though

Switched to Bazzite from windows 10 a few months ago since I read that it supports Nvidia cards well and I'm in no position to buy a new GPU. The only applications that I miss are the DAW that I used for music and Titanfall 2 as that's through the EA launcher and have yet to find a reliable way to make it run without it falling apart. My partner (Who is not tech savvy at all) is even starting to get used to it and dislikes when she occasionally uses the windows 11 laptop (been using it for said DAW)

Linux is great so far. It's been a bit of a trick learning the ins and outs, but now it's getting close to a year I've ironed out most of the kinks and have a stable functional computer.

My daily driver is a Mac laptop, so I wouldn’t say I’m fully switched. . But I did switch over my gaming PC to Bazzite and have zero regrets. I do, however, dual boot back into windows when the kid wants to play Fortnite.

So painfully, boringly good.

Day-to-day, it just works, I don't have to fight it. It doesn't do anything I don't want it to do. I don't miss office, everything is clean and snappy.

I have managed to play almost every game thrown at it (Bazzite) - the only one that didn't work was an older DX7 title. DOS games just work - they took more effort than this under Win9x.

I have got a couple of minor issues but all fixable.:

• I encountered a issue where it wouldn't wake from sleep - fixed by selecting a different color profile in the display settings.
• I managed to break something in fstsb trying to setup a persistent network drive. Very easy to roll back, I'm 100% sold on immutable until I need something more customisable
• Recently my Bluetooth kb/mouse would drop off when the PC went idle, wouldn't reconnect/wake up until power cycling the PC. Fixed by disabling BT hibernation/sleep

Having said that, last week I had to install Win11 on the kids laptop to be ready for school - I hadn't installed 11 outside of a controlled Corp environment with solid group policy control since the early days. God-damn Win11 is a dumpster fire! The install UI looks nice but the noise is turned up to 11, popup, wizards, setup this, setup that, backup, OneDrive, give us all your information and sign away any privacy.

Regardless of any minor issues I bump into on the way, I am never going back!

It's amazing! Full customization beyond what I'm used to and it all just runs my hardware perfectly.

My only issue is getting VR to work nicely with my specific setup but I imagine when steam frame comes out there will be a lot of VR specific updates to Linux drivers.

Pretty good, running Kubuntu for a few months. Had some annoyances at first but they were all solved when I moved from LTS to 25.10.

Mostly really good, I feel like I've traded a lot of major problems that I can't do anything about for a few tiny problems that I can actually solve

Nothing eventful. It's just a straightforward OS.

I have two friends who helped me switch from Win10 to Debian. A lot of things were rocky, and I'm not going to sugarcoat that. Linux is still a niche system with a high barrier of entry. That said, now I got it to a point where I'm happy with what I got. I could always do more stuff if I wanted too, but I am content with what I have.

My programs and games for Windows run with Wine Staging and I don't need any launchers to manage them. I'm even more comfortable messing with the terminal.

Basically Linux is like a Bethesda game. You need to download mods and mess with them a bit to be happy with your system.

been using Linux professionally for years (programmer). recently switched my gaming PC to Mint and haven't had any problems. everything just works.

caveat: i don't play any new triple A titles that require anti-cheat.

Switched to CachyOS on both my laptop and my gaming computer about three weeks ago. So far extremely happy with it, and positively surprised over the whole experience. Had dabbled a bit with Linux like 10 years ago, and from what I remember from back then, it was not ready for me, or at least much more difficult to set up and use. But now it is ready for daily driving, and I would think it is for the majority of casual computer users. Will not go back, and the next time my girlfriend asks me to "refresh" her constantly slowing laptop, she is in for a small surprise.

I went back and forth for years, with many distributions and many machines. This summer I took the final step with Linux Mint, never used before, this time around without dual boot, without second backup computer, nothing. Motivated only by the ethical things. In the long run I had problems, some of them quite unpleasant. So I switched to LMDE and it's much better, only minor issues.

Everything is fantastic. Switched my laptop (a surface go 2 lol) to Mint, then my desktop to Arch, mini PC to Batocera and built a server that I put OpenMediaVault on.

So far, I have notes (Flatnotes), RSS (FreshRSS), ebooks (Kavita) and recipes (RecipeSage) self hosted as well as media (Kodi) and qBittorrent. Despite being responsible for server admin it's been quite painless overall.

Fedora has been rock solid. I kinda wish I didn’t have to download 300MB-1GB updates every day, but I’m glad there’s updates!

I really wish there was more cohesiveness among software, but I can’t complain when people are trying to help that along over time.

I’ve had zero issues with Wayland.

The Nobara updater is fairly unreliable, as is Discover on my plain Fedora machine. A system update will show up, but error out or hang for no reason. Updating via dnf in the terminal has had zero issues.

I really wish there was a clearer UI for choosing which source to download a given package/app from when there are multiple sources.

I kinda wish there were more UI designers working with engineers, because some of the UI I encounter is obviously built by engineers. It’s not a problem, but if I were less technologically inclined, I might’ve seen that as a barrier to committing to Linux.

It's been GREAT! All my torrenting related stuff works better than it did on windows 10. I am slowing loading old 2000's windows PC games on my Mint installation and so far it's been working well.

My computers are MUCH faster on linux and updates take 20 seconds instead of 15 minutes.

I've copied and pasted a bunch of stuff into the terminal without really understanding what I'm doing so ... yeah going great. I think.

Going real well. My gaming PC (5800X3D/7900XTX/32GB) is running LMDE6 and so far none of my games have complained; Steam+Proton is great.

I also have a laptop (i7-10750H/1650Ti/16GB) running LMDE7, and that's been my portable gaming machine for a while. Doesn't play nice with RPCS3, but honestly that's not a dealbreaker.

I settled on Mint and now want to hop to CachyOS. I'm not sure I'm a fan of Cinnamon; setting up the panel (aka taskbar) on multiple monitors was an absolute nightmare and I ended up just giving up. There were other hiccups getting things set up here and there, but that's the Linux life, baby.

I dual boot Windows because I need it for a few professional applications, but I swapped it to Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC, have a local account, ran the ChrisTitus WinUtil to debloat and remove telemetry, and completely blocked all Microsoft-owned domains using NextDNS. It's stable, does what I need, and Microsoft doesn't need to know every time I turn my computer on.

Not strictly Linux but relevant to ditching Microsoft, I'm currently in the process of moving my projects off Github and into Codeburg for public repos and into Keybase (fully E2EE) for private repos. Fuck Microsoft's AI data-scraping bullshit.

Bonus, I also recently completely degoogled, and installed GrapheneOS on my phone. It is awesome, and was absurdly easy to set up.

perfectly happy.

before, my windows machine was a weird amalgamation of developer machine and gaming rig.

I was already developing in Linux with WSL because fuck microslop's absolutely shitty developer environment.

now I've completely separated the two uses for my computer.

I use bazzite for gaming, since I don't really want to change anything.

I use cachyos for development because it's pretty easy to configure and is arch based.

I picked both of those distros because I didn't feel like trying so hard to get my Nvidia GPU to play nice.

Just recently switched my Dad to bazzite so he can play games without windows eating up all of his RAM

Made Fedora KDE my only home OS last year. I'm experienced with Linux but did not have to pull out arcane knowledge at all for setting it up. I.e it has been very smooth. The rough edges have been:

• Slightly worse audio
• GIFs on Reddit RES don't always play well
• Will have to find a web browser based tax software instead of what I'm used to
• Remapping a key (print screen to right click) has not been easy
• I miss some features of notepad++ that are missing from Kate.
• I miss Irfanview image viewer

My steam wrapped for 2023 is fully windows, 2024 has about 40% windows 60% Linux, purely from the moment I switched halfway through the year, and 2025 is fully Linux.

I regret nothing.

Caveats:

• I built a new computer in early 2025, knew I'd be making Linux, went AMD 7900xtx. Worked right out the box flawlessly.
• I started out self hosting stuff and got somewhat comfortable with Linux in those instances, so when I eventually threw endeavouros into my laptop, it all just worked for me. I had a couple of "laptop won't boot because its battery died mid update" events, which is about a couple more than there ever should've been, but it wasn't too hard to recover the laptop every time, with help from chatgpt
• switched to Bazzite for my new desktop and work framework 13 laptop, but hold endeavouros in my heart with great affection, because it is awesome and Linux is awesome no matter what flavour you pick (restrictions apply, research what you're getting into when picking a distro, and compare a bit but don't overstress)
• Linux may or may not radicalize you heavily. The liberating feeling sometimes might make you mad that you put up with all that Apple/Microsoft/Adobe bullshit for all those years. Self-hosting intensifies radicalization. Don't come blaming me when you find yourself in a shadow war with the Mossad over your email server getting shadowbanned throughout the Chilean Patagonia due to attempting to create an ex-engineers' farming commune and a regional meshcore network there.

Win10 -> Linux Mint, with a short stopover in Ubuntu.

First I ran it dual boot. When I decided to dump Windows completely, I made one big mistake. I didn't understand how Linux designates drives very well, and I ended up formatting one of my drives I didn't mean to.

I don't feel like Mint is lacking, so I haven't bothered checking out other distros. I just wanted something that works, and Mint works fine for me.

The only Windows feature I miss is the big preview in file explorer.

I highly recommend Learn Linux TV on YouTube.

It's been amazing. My RAM is singing praises with how much better the OS is at handling memory.

I went to CachyOS recently. It isn't my first swap, having tried Manjaro previously, but circumstances kept me from staying before. This time, I'm doing most of what I need in Linux and only swapping to a Windows dual boot for a few odd things, like Adobe for e-sign for work (they only accept that).

I think the only other frustration is work admins don't let me use non-outlook for email or an alternative to one drive, but for personal use I see no reason to use Windows.

Also, and the strangest thing, the MMO I play with friends runs differently on Linux. It's hard to explain, but the game has fairly bad net code that's somehow resolved with Wine. So, what used to be a half second to a full second delay on things like attacks going off, it's instant now. For better or worse, given it leaves less room for error, lol.

Oh also I'm enamored of KDE Plasma. So pretty and smooth, with themes I actually like. It's much better than Windows UI by every metric I can think of.

Its fine if you're not doing stuff that requires windows. My partner is running Mint, and I've got a HomeAssistant box, but I can't ditch Windows completely because I can't get Wilcom and DesignSpace to run in Wine, and I need those to make my machines work.

I really do love it. Fedora has been great. Daily tasks and tools seem good. Games!? Amazing! steam has really really impressed me. Everything works for the most part but I am trying my best to figure out how to move on from Adobe (ps, illustrator, premier, after effects, lightroom) for graphics and other music production software (Ableton/ Audition/MPC). There are a few programs that I'm trying to replace but it's a struggle. I'm open to suggestions but peoples snarky comments to "Just use..." are not helpful unless they understand the capabilities of each program in the first place. Telling me to replace Ableton live with Reaper doesn't help. Maybe Reaper can replace Audition but Ableton live has different tools and capabilities. A lot of people offer Wine as a suggestion and it works for some things. I don't mind fiddling a bit but after few hours of trying to adjust settings to get things to work I boot back to Win or use a mac just to get it done. I'm willing to learn some new programs but it's a struggle for specialized design, art, media programs. All that said I am open to suggestions for programs.

One that seems to be lacking surprisingly is a really nice local music player like musicbee/foobar2000? Maybe it's the rise in "streaming music" but Clementine and others don't seem even close to musicbee.

Been mostly smooth sailing with EndeavourOS, a couple of games anticheat hindered me from playing and some issues with disks because I can't be arsed to move my files around to switch the fs. And a strange issue with where my monitor flickers if it has a static image while VRR is active, so some loading screens in games are a pain to look at. Overall pleased :)

I switched from windows 10 to pop!_os on my thinkpad p15s almost a year ago. My biggest surprise was thinking I would still need windows for anything when I haven't needed to think about it since.

The most frustrating part is that I'm requires to use windows 11 for work and it just feels so broken. But in all seriousness the biggest issues I've had were a couple driver issues that were easily fixed from the debug.

Honestly my biggest regret was not switching sooner. The learning curve really wasn't bad. Just read the forums and docs. I run it on everything now. I game with it, I run a small homelab with it, I'm productive with it. I dont think there is anything I would miss. Everything works as well if not even better.

Love it. I use Arch... btw... And while I will gladly admit, my setup isn't exactly easy, it's quite beautiful.

What I personally like the best about it is a tiling Windows manager. Instead of placing Windows one on top of the other, it places them split side by side. On a big ass monitor, it looks something like this:

Linux mint working awesome, I have been using linux on servers for decades but never really took the leap to desktop till last summer. Now Im 100% all in.

Im at the stage now where Im trying to optimize and speed up things like networking with samba, which out of the box is not a nice/smooth experience. Im not a huge fan of AI but it sure does it make finding answers to these linux optimization questions fast and easy. I think if not for AI, my journey would have taken a lot longer to get where I am.

https://lemmy.ca/comment/21276696

I just put an old SSD and Linux on my decade old laptop, and it's like a whole new computer

ofc, it was probably mostly the hard drive that was the problem to begin with, seeing as it took 10 minutes to boot up and log in, and another five before it would open a web or file browser...

I switched to Fedora. I'm overall happy with the switch and the learning experience, but it could have gone smoother. I'm not the most tech savvy and don't have a ton of time to dedicate to tinkering. Getting the Nvidia driver running correctly was a hassle. Currently I have Windows 10 and Fedora partitioned on my nvme and I'm fighting with partition managers to reallocate space around. Yesterday I installed a new SATA SSD with the ultimate goal of migrating Windows there and keeping Fedora on the nvme.

I'm going to stick with it because I like the experience and the community, but once I get everything to a workable state I don't see myself distro hopping.

I’ve switched from win 10 to mint for an old i9900k and 1080 to run Helldivers 2 and it worked so well I put it on my newest rig to replace it (9800x3d RX 9070xt) with little to no problems. It does take a little while to get things tailored to how you want. The bios clock keeps being off (but OC settings remain) so maybe the battery is dying already. Been putting off replacing it since it’ll require a bit of disassembly.

I then tried Bazzite on the i9900k and ran into a couple problems. Multiple monitors pose issues with the mouse not staying on the game and requires an applet or app to keep it contained (no issues with Mint). HD2 runs the same performance but it stutters every second or two, making it unplayable. I’ll have to see if I can troubleshoot some more or try a different distro.

Running Ubuntu for 2 weeks now. Everything is a struggle, but I end up figuring it out usually. Using mostly FOSS. Not much I can't do without windows, but I fail to really see a reason to run this over windows.

Started on Bazzite and got irritated with how hard it was to do things the way I expected because it’s immutable. Now I’m using Kubuntu and I’m having a decent time since I’ve worked through the setup for what I want. Audio sink for virtual surround works okay, gaming isn’t that big of a fight with Steam and Lutris, most of my work applications are there, I have a windows vm for the odd thing here and there. I’d like noise cancellation like Krisp. I’ve found a few instances where documentation sucks and I have made unsupported things work by simply installing a package, such as my remote access software for work. It stays officially supported but that’s in a specific context that is not the norm. Installing default-jre makes it work like it does on windows. A lot of the forums and Linux oriented communities seem elitist about some specific flavor they like and if you don’t inherently know how to do some obscure procedure when asking for help you get snooty responses, but that’s not a bad as it was when I first tried Linux out.