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.

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.

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’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 😫

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.

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 switched when they announced Windows was going to start watching everything you do. So it can help you better… of course.

I started with Bazzite and didn’t really understand immutability. I had just heard it was good for gaming. I bricked my installation trying to get write access to the folder where login screen images are stored because that part happens to be immutable.

I switched to Garuda because it is also gamer focused and the system folders aren’t on lockdown. Both were super easy and have worked great.

I’m still learning what it means to be on Arch, but that’s an interesting journey, so I don’t mind.

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…

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.

Just recently, less than a day ago, helped my dad install dual boot Mint ( cinnamon, yay :| ) on his laptop. Now I gotta move my windows partition onto the SSD I bought and had help installing so I can install mint on my desktop. Just in case he needs help with a problem and I can better diagnose potential problems/solutions. I’d rather switch to what I’ve got on my laptop ( MX w/ Plasma ) but someone has to be able to effectively play IT.

I switched from windows 10 to Kubuntu a few months ago, and I’ve loved the freedom so far! Gaming has mostly been a non-issue, except for the 1 or 2 that won’t work due to anticheat nonsense. I have a debloated windows instance that I keep on a separate drive, and I’ve booted that POS maybe 2 times so far.

I got curious and tried Linux Mint and OpenSUSE, but ended back with Kubuntu because I prefer KDE Plasma and im most familiar with Ubuntu.

Be careful though, once you fall into the rabbit hole you’ll start doing things like run your own music server (like navidrome), and hosting your own photo storage server (I’ve tried both Immich and Photoprism).

… 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,

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.

I’m in process.