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.
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.
Yes! Two folks swapped to nix, one to mint.
Getting VR to work has been a journey on nix. Everything on mint has gone smoothly afaik.
Windows 10 EOL (and moving) both roughly lined up, so we all decided to get away from big tech. The nix os was new, interesting, and feels very powerful when things work. Mint was a known safe choice.
Thank you for sharing! VR has been a well reported pain point, but interesting to hear that Linux Mint handled it well now. I don’t own a VR headset – which one do you have that played nice with Mint, if you don’t mind me asking? In case I ever feel like getting my own.
Ah, apologies for my terrible wording. The mint machine hasn’t tried VR for any substantial amount, while those using VR are on nixos.
Though I think there was one night where we had a quest 2 running on mint, using wivrn and xriser.
Me. But not just me. When my children grow older, they too will now have a Linux OS on their computers not Microsoft. Microsoft has lost more than just me!
… 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,
TLDR: Wayland is super broken, NVIDIA makes it worse,
Wait, what? I’m using NVIDIA and Plasma 6.5 without issues.
Ubuntu
Ohhhhhhh
I suggest Btop as task manager.
Thanks for this writeup. CAD is one of the several professional workflows that I really wish could work better on Linux, but it is hard to compete against software that costs thousands per year per license.
Although, is antivirus a thing on Linux?
So generally Linux has relied on having open and auditable code to avoid exploitation of bugs and ones found can be easily discovered, reported and mitigated. The variety of configurations makes it much less appealing for hackers as an attack surface. So for the average user the biggest danger to breaking your device is yourself (but very occasionally the package manager messes something up too). ClamAV is one antivirus application Linux has…
But depending on what threats you want to mitigate here is what else you can look into:
- Protection against random unwanted internet connections to your computer: UFW (firewall)
- Protection against anyone besides you remotely SSH-ing to your machine (SSH is often disabled by default): fail2ban, strongly encrypted keys
- Protection against physical access of your disk, and data and OS: LUKS (disk encryption)
- Protection against other computer users (or yourself by accident) messing with important parts of the system: SELinux (trusted environment). Most users don’t need this for their personal PC.
- Protection against code you got off github from nuking your computer: flatpak (containerized app), docker (containerized environment), firejail (sandbox environment).
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.
My advice is, when you’re recommending Linux be very sure that you’re ready to be the 1st level support from then on. Personally I’m too old for that shit. People are ignorant and unhappy for so many self chosen reasons, their personal computer desktop is just another one and I just can’t fix the world.
Eugh yeah this is a big reason why I manage which inboxes people have access to
I believe that the main reason for recommending Linux, in my opinion, is because it is open source code that can be audited. And the second reason is so that the EU can have greater digital and technological sovereignty.
I don’t think I will ever tell anyone to go penguin mode “for the EU”, but that is a novel idea.
Several countries in the European Union have already switched to penguin mode. 😎
Thanks. I figured Microsoft trying to force people off Windows 10 might be a bigger reason than ever to get people to switch than philosophical ones. I wanted to see if that was true for people on Lemmy or if there were other reasons, hence I made this post.
I think the hardest to get on Linux is those in the middle with a very specific piece of hardware or software that needs to work in a certain way. Kind of like the bell curve meme, total computer beginners and total computer experts can embrace linux the easiest.
Its 100 percent like that. The middle users like me have the most issues.
Gamer/music maker/old random software/nas setups/networking/racing wheel peripherals, people who do this stuff it takes way more time investment.
If you just use a browser. The os doesn’t matter
Anyone have suggestions for parental controls on linux? Mainly, to block logins after bedtime, or to limit time on the system.
Haven’t tested these myself, but after a brief search, timekpr and little-brother are packages I found you could try, related to session time management.
I switched to Mint in March. I have to use W11 for work and I thoroughly hate it. I did not want all the ads and AI stuff that come pre-packaged. I also did not want to upgrade my pc - I have an arbitrary rule that I’m only allowed new hardware every 10 years, so I have another 2 years left until I can upgrade.
So I used all my anger and pettiness, went on youtube to see how difficult it’d be to install Linux. The first video I found was Zorin vs Mint, and I thought Mint was a good fit for an absolute noob like myself. I really did not want to faff with learning commands and stuff so I was very pleasantly surprised with flatpaks and whatnot. Overall I’d say it was a very good experience, I’m just annoyed I’ve not done it earlier.
How do desktop functions perform on Linux Mint compared to Windows on your current machine, qualitatively speaking? I’ve kept my parents’ 13 year old laptop alive with Linux, a replacement battery and SSD, so 2 more years should be no problem unless your needs drastically change.
You’ll find there are dozens of ways to “install” an app on Linux, in varying degrees of portability, ease of install and ease of upgrade.
It’s an absolute joy, although I am a little annoyed at the random freezes I sometimes get, like when everything stops responding with no rhyme or reason. At least when Windows crashes, it crashes good and just reboots. But Mint needs a hard reset. Other than that, I managed to get all my games to play thanks to Lutris so I couldn’t be happier! I’ve had some tiny tweaks to make, for example my sound got crackly after some update, but thankfully there are tons and tons of troubleshooting that basically take your hand and guide you through what you need to do to sort issues. I’m immensely grateful for all those forums.
Your mention of a laptop reminds me I also installed Mint on my 16 year old lappy, it’s quite slow but it actually works with all the OG hardware (bar a new battery)!
Yup, installed Linux Mint for my 60+yo mother. She hardly uses her laptop and does not need anything advanced. We set it up, installation went very smooth (obviously), set up her browser so she can use it like she’s used to, and we figured out how to use the printer. Thankfully it was no hassle at all, it just connected via USB and interacted very well with the printing and scanning software that came with Mint. She was already using firefox and libreoffice, so that was no hassle either. So far so good!
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.
Bazzite gets thrown around a lot as a beginner distro nowadays, haven’t tried it myself. Its immutable quality sounded to me like it was designed to be hard for beginners to break, so I guess you should give yourself an award for that.
Hope it keeps going well, you’ll naturally get it as you use it and deal with the odd curveball.
I helped switch my 88 years old grandma to Mint a few months back when her laptop started to run painfully slow. I don’t think she understands that I changed her OS but she is happy with “whatever I did to her laptop”, now her laptop runs much faster and 0 problems so far for her needs, very simple needs but she actually uses it a lot!
For like a good chunk of people, all you need from a computer the news, online videos, one social media, email, banking, simple writing and printing. Linux does fine and some distros actually do better than Windows at the basics.
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.)
Impressive that you were able to pull off the migration for a corporate usecase.
It’s not that hard actually, at least tech-wise. Our ERP always has been web based and so is our project management (Redmine). The biggest “installable” Apps are QGIS(always worked on Linux), some LaTex Apps and the Affinity suite (which works through bottles)
Officewise Softmaker is close enough to MS Office that even someone with little experience computerwise has no issues.
Combine that with a Proxmox+FreeIPA+Opsi stack in the background and you’re set.Fedora 42 Plasma is used as a client OS with benefits from us only having 2 different client models hardware wise.
“Politic” wise I have the huge advantage that I am the sole owner of the company, that my staff is young and willing to innovate as this is basically our job (we do consulting for healthcare) and that we are somewhat small and work home-office full time.
The major challenge was to make people to actually try Linux. Plasma helped her enormously,because, let’s face it, it’s beautiful. That gave Linux a lot of godwil and after two days it was usually a “I never thought it would be that easy” or “that works as smooth as Win7/10 once did for me and MS destroyed that”.
Now some of my employees have privately changed to Linux as well.
✋
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.
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.
I have converted a few friends and family in the last few months. Mostly to Bazzite, but one opted for Fedora. Both good choices, and everyone seems very happy with what they chose.
Glad it has worked out. Over the years I’ve been free tech support for my close friends and family whom I’ve installed Linux for (I’m fine with it because it had been my hobby, passion, and suggestion for them). I hope you’ve not been inundated with support requests.
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.
(Semi) Recent convert here from Win11 to Bazzite - Didn’t switch due to Win10 EOL but because Windows Recall kept fucking re-enabling itself every time windows updated and it was pissing me off.
I miss playing some games that require kernal level anti-cheat, but that’s a small price to pay for me.
The biggest hurdle I have and kind of still have is the difference in package managers and stuff like that. There appimages which I’ve sorta got my head around, gear lever helps. Then there are .deb files of some programs, some come as .tar.gz or .rpm files.
That’s ignoring flatpaks, snaps and other packages like that - I do wish there was a more uniform structure to these that is better explained, often software download pages will list some distros like Ubuntu, Arch & Fedora but miss out many like Bazzite which is fine if you know Bazzite is based on Fedora but if you don’t then you’re already stuck at that point.
Plus most pieces of software that have instructions for Fedora ask you to use dnf to download stuff, and if you try that in Bazzite it throws a fit and simultaneously tells you that rpm-ostree should be used but also don’t use rpm-ostree for things unless you absolutely have to.
I love Bazzite, I’m never going back, but it can be frustrating for sure if you’re unfamiliar with things.
