Yep, me and SO.

I was into linux like 15 years ago. Liked it, but wasn’t smart enough to get it working and win 7 was still bearable. Called it quits after MS kept somehow getting worse.

Convinced SO to change over and everytbing works fine for them so far! It took a little tinkering but no complaints.

Yep. Me and my parents. I’d tried a few distros in the last but always by as issues. Tried arch BTW but I didnt knlw what I was doing.

Thoght about fedora but I’d have to support family so shared to be on the same distro and its not very windows like.

Moved to mibt and bingo. Very much like windows, hardly need to use the termianl, everything just works.

I want to use a PC not sit in the terminal foxing things. That said, I’m slowly getting into the deeper side of linux.

Parents have 0 issues with mint. Even printers just plug and play.

Yup. My desktop was the last computer I had running windows 10.

A couple years ago, I installed debian on an old laptop that I’m using as a home server now, and that was my first contact with Linux since 2010 or so. It was an experiment that got from “I’m just trying stuff” to “I use this every day”.

Then I got a steam deck, and I saw that gaming on Linux was a thing now. Gaming is one of the things I need my PC for, since I don’t have consoles, so that was important for me.

Then I got an old laptop from my sibling and I decided to install Arch to learn a bit more. Another experiment that got out of hand, until that laptop became my daily driver. I spent less and less time in front of my desktop.

This year, with Win10 going out of support, and having no interest in Win11 after having used Linux a bunch, I decided that was it. I did slack for a bit, because I had a lot of files that I needed to review and backup (or delete).
Because of unrelated stuff with my server -I had to empty my external hard drive to reformat it from NTFS to ext4-, I used the opportunity to do the hard work, and when that was over, installing Arch was a breeze.

That was a couple months ago, and I’m still customizing the PC, because life got in the way, and I’m doing things differently to my laptop (using niri instead of hyprland, using btrfs instead of ext4 -which I did wrong and I have to fix to be able to do snapshots-).

But yeah, I’m having fun and I don’t miss windows. There’s some software that I need sometimes, like the 8bitdo firmware updater and things like that, but it’s mostly minor stuff. I did use FL Studio before and I heard it doesn’t work great on Linux, but I haven’t made music for the past 4 years, and if I want to and can’t make it work I can always use Reaper or something :)

I just changed over my work laptop to Ubuntu with the gracious help of a tech-savvy friend. It works like a charm although I haven’t tried to print anything yet. Proton VPN needed installing using the terminal, but it was all ‘cut and paste’ from the Proton website. Tuxedo mini-PC is in the mail and hoping to convert a 2013 MacBook Pro to Mint in the future. So, it is going well.

Just helped someone yesterday, though they had Windows 11 already. They ended up with Pop!_OS, probably inspired by me having Pop!_OS (I did not make decisions here, only helped). Now we need to work out why Pop!_OS acting like the laptop can’t do Wi-Fi

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.

… it’s been a journey. TLDR: Wayland is super broken, NVIDIA makes it worse, Ubuntu doesn’t come with the right drivers out of box, UI inconsistency is everywhere (only Mac gets it right, at the cost of everything else) but major feature upgrades in most regular stuff.

I switched to Debian +Plasma X11, which makes most things work out of the box, but KiCAD crashes Plasma and logs you out of you open a large enough file. If I use Wayland, all of the windows open in a giant pile in the center my screen and OrcaSlicer segfaults when opening a webkit embed. Also no 3d views.

NVIDIA breaks all the rendering stuff, so no 3d model previews in your icons :( and the install defaults to unsafe mode on high refresh screens for Kubuntu, which cuts off the top half of your screen. Print previews are broken on Kate (NVIDIA)

Older Unity Engine can’t run controller input natively on linux, so you still play games under proton.

Login screen wallpaper and Wallpaper waking up from sleep and “wallpaper” are three different wallpapers on Debian/Plasma.

Plasma Desktop is not considered an active window so creating a new file and pressing enter doesn’t open it, but rather selects a foreground window, But if no window exists, it will open the file.

Now, the better stuff:

Printer drivers work out of box on basically everything I’ve tested and adding printers is plug and play unlike Windows. Printers on? You’re done!

Separated home and root partitions, I nuked my install 4 times and didn’t need to copy over my data. (Auto partition doesn’t give round numbers to the partitions and this irritates me why 61.73.gb root partitions why not 62???)

Snapshot backups - I no longer care if I accidentally need some older file I deleted, if I ran a backup recently, it’s there. Restic

Updates: I can reinstall and uninstall without rebooting - takes 2 minutes max. (Downloading is the bigger portion of it)

Faster boot times, way better keyboard input support, more customizable, integrated file management zip/rar support (very cool) Files open faster, dark mode everywhere, I can compile C firmware about 6-8 times faster without windows scanning my code every time. Although, is antivirus a thing on Linux?

They fixed rounded corners!!! Firefox still likes to be special and ignore window decorations, not sure what’s up with that.

No Copilot and no “my computer fans suddenly spun up for no reason whatsoever”, although I miss task manager, I have htop now,

Swapped to CachyOS

Pros:

• Super easy OS install
• Good tool for installing steam
• Most games play fine but knew this already from my steam deck

Cons:

• Struggled to find how to setup services like Jellfin, SABnzbd, etc. Not as simple as just installing them on windows, but not bad once I figured out how services work.
• Heavily modded games like Total War Warhammer 3 were a pain since the modding tools are designed for Windows. Got them working, but stability was worse.
• No Virtual Desktop for my Quest 3. I’ve heard I can get VR working on it, but only for games.
• Getting write access on my existing NTFS drive was a pain. Read access worked, by I had to change ownership from root on all files to allow changes.

My advice is when you recommend Linux, do it for a specific reason, not a general philosophical one (it does not motivate them like you), and do not move up generationally. Older people generally have more elaborate workflows and unlearning then may not be worth it for them.

✋

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.

Kinda, not fully committed yet cause as “out of the box” as bazzite is, I still have some things I prefer my windows partition for. Oddly enough, the most recent thing was formatting a god damned flash drive! Like it really doesn’t need to be as complicated as the devs made it to be!

Made the move gradually - first the private computers of my family,then my company. Very happy with how it went, especially in terms of staff adoption. We still retain some dual boot windows machines,sadly,as some things currently still can’t be done in the Linux world (CAD is the one thing, some very specific Office document things we sadly get dictated by a client the other one.)

I’m in process.

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.

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…