I posted this before, but it feels like going back to the best days of PC ownership. It’s fast, I’m in control, everything I want works and I honestly don’t think about my OS very much.

I chose bazzite since I love gaming, but of course it’s just a competent OS overall with which I also do my private office tasks.

Booting up my PC finally feels like a joy again.

Like most people I use Windows 11 at work and the contrast is enormous.

I use Mint and so does my wife.

Two laptops that Win11 doesn’t want to support, but we need them both and we don’t have the budget to replace them. No problems on mine, but the wife’s HP has some issues with closing the lid and I haven’t found a good solution to that yet.

Sleep doesn’t work because on wakeup the wifi and bluetooth are both dead; bluetooth doesn’t matter but the wifi’s needed for the internet and the only way to get it back up is to reboot the machine because it insists there’s a hardware failure and refuses to accept that there isn’t. I’ve even tried modprobe-ing the network stack but it has to be a full system restart (warm restart, not power cycle).

Hibernate threatens something nasty, can’t remember what offhand but I’m not even considering it.

I don’t want a lid shut to mean shutdown because shutting the lid shouldn’t mean losing work. So I’m left with the only remaining option that shutting the lid does nothing, and the LT stays on, but then if she puts something on top of the LT as she’s prone to do, some stuff can end up in a weird state, like taskbar icons following the mouse around even though they haven’t been clicked on, and there’s no way to stop them doing that without rebooting. I’m not sure how that happens; my hypothesis is that the keyboard and/or trackpad get activated, but no amount of me pressing on the lid in various places reproduces the problem.

Other than that she’s had no problem adapting to Linux Mint. Everything’s where she expects it. I’ve had to do some command-line jiggerypokery for various bits and bobs but a bit of DDG-ing finds that easily enough.

I went to Fedora in March of 2025. I never looked back. Definitely some frustration with video drivers and hardware issues (bad Samsung monitor), but nothing I haven’t been able to work around.

Most importantly, my computer runs great, my games run great, I have more control than ever, and I will never go back to Microslop. Their pivot to “AI EVERYTHING!!!” has been abhorrent, and I refuse to cooperate.

Went with Linux Mint back in July, set up a dual boot in case I’d need Windows for anything. Figured something or other wouldn’t work through wine or some such. Never have booted back to Windows since.

I think the only issue I’ve had is that my 8BitDo controller won’t work via Bluetooth, but it works fine via USB. (Other Bluetooth devices have been fine, not that I have many.)

i love it, things have been just working lately. it feels like every day something is gonna give but thats just windows trauma

Overall I’m damn happy. I’m surprised by how many basic things are faster, just opening and deleting files is fast. For some reason, something as simple as emptying the Recycle Bin in Windows is slow as hell; and I didn’t realize how bad it was until daily-ing Mint.

Me and several of my friends have switched recently, with others showing interest or partly switching already.

Was about 2 years ago, but going great. I chose Mint at the time, occasionally eye other distros but I can’t be arsed to switch my perfectly fine desktop. It’ll just be longer before I get HDR support nbd. I installed openSUSE on my old work Thinkpad to try KDE. It’s fine but so far not really better, just different.

Been using Linux Mint since the summer. I went to create a letter on my newer Acer laptop on Windows 11 because the HP Beats wouldn’t go to Windows 11. Office 365 paywalled me. So I looked up Open and LibreOffice (going to try OnlyOffice soon) and got them both, completed the letter.

Then I thought… Windows is getting so crappy with this insult plus AI & ads… I wonder what Linux looks like these days? I had used it in the early 2000s, mostly Mandrake and Suse, as I recall, on KDE.

I was lucky I happened upon Distrosea, so I played with some there. I almost installed ZorinOS, but decided that dual booting Mint on the Beats laptop was better, because the Software Center has ratings and reviews.

There were a few hiccups with the flash drive, Secure Boot and all that. Ended up having to format the iso in Rufus before putting it on the flash drive with Ventoy, but it worked.

Granted, I don’t use my personal laptops that often, the last thing I want to do after being on my work laptop (which is Windows 11, but my coworker runs CachyOS and brings up work stuff in ThinkCast) is get on another laptop, especially where I work evenings.

Since then, I’ve wanted to put it (or smaller distros) on other older machines in the house for fun, but several of them have some issues… old Dell Dimension 2200 psu capacitors popped, so that was a no go… and the Dell Vostro tower we have is beeping at me, gotta have someone look at that… might be graphics card or mobo needs reseat.

Not needed windows once. Tho I do have to use it on the job

I think it was two years or so for me now, but honestly, it’s going great. I’ve got alternatives for the windows only apps I used to use, and my games run smoothly.

Every time I have to use a windows computer for some reason, I’m reminded of why I stopped using that OS…

I switched to Fedora Workstation 41 a year agoish, and am currently running 43 KDE!

I really like being able to theme my desktop to my liking, esp with KDE, my current theme is using the Catppuccin Macchiato colours (with “Mauve” accent, i.e. purple) and window decorations (solely because they were the only one available with big, colourful buttons. The rest had tiny icons that were hard to differentiate) + a cool black hole splash screen I found that has a date too! I am using the Bibata Modern Ice cursor and Papirus icon pack.

I also like having loads of additional software to pick from. LibreOffice works really well on Linux, Lutris and Prism Launcher are great for the games I play, Okular is nice (though by now someone has told me it existed on Windows, damn!), and there are just some simple tasks where the Linux-native apps that are simply perfect (see KAlarm, Dolphin and Nautilus file managers both having actually useable search that doesn’t require a third-party app like Everything on Windows, Elisa music player)

I had no issues with software incompatibility, all of the ones I use either had a (better) Linux alternative or had native Linux support (like Steam, Firefox, OBS Studio). The only thing that I am unable to do on Linux is a) (Re)install Windows for friends and family (weird, I know, but the Installation Assistant is not compatible with Linux. Technically I think you can use CLI tools to write the ISO to flash drive, but I couldn’t get that to work. If I had the time I probably would been able to figure it out…) b) Access files from an iPhone, but that’s more an iPhone stupid problem than anything. I use an Android phone now, and I have full access to its file system just by plugging it in, and c) Playing Minecraft Bedrock (hmm, I wonder who owns Mojang and how they could benefit from this…) but I have set up a MC Java server with GeyserMC+Floodgate and now my little brother (who plays on an iPad) can play Minecraft with me, which is awesome! There’s a bit of lag due to the translation layer, but nothing major.

I set up a dual boot Win10/Linux system so I would have the option to use windows when I needed. I have not booted into windows for a while now. The only thing I was using it for was to play some older games I could not figure out how to get running in Wine. I may have to use it for tax software if I can’t find something that runs under Linux though.

I’m happy! It Just Works. Windows 11 -> Linux.

• I have had ONE WiFi problem that was my computer’s fault the whole year; as opposed to half the times I open the computer.
• One video game didn’t Just Work, I had to tinker, but I got it working smoothly with mods.
• A bit of trouble with flash drives initially because they were not formatted to something compatible with Linux. Once I learned that I managed to shuffle data around and format it to be compatible with MacOS, Linux, and my Windows VM. But Linux actually saved me and let me get an old flash drive working that did not work at all. Love reformatting on my distro, it’s easier and more visual than when I tried to do it on Mac or Windows.

I’ve switched systems some 15? years ago. But my mum did it recently, so I asked her this question. (Disclaimer: she isn’t the one managing her machine. Guess who does it.)

She claims it’s basically the same thing. She was surprised her start menu got different some days ago (when I updated her Mint), but it was the good type of surprise, like, “ah, it shows my profile pic now!”. Then she rambled about things that disappear from her email, but that is not an OS issue, it’s PEBKAC (she’s extremely disorganised). And… that’s it.

Bought a new gaming PC with an AMD GPU and went straight for Bazzite almost a year ago. It was pretty damn painless and straightforward. Especially the only thing I use it for are singleplayer or indie multiplayer games. Almost everything worked out if the box.

A lot of sim racing stuff worked surprisingly well.

It was a pain to learn how to install Assetto Corsa with its mods, needs a specific version of proton with specific windows libraries installed, but once I figured that all out it runs great.

It was also a pain when I bought a Chinese handbrake for sim racing, but thanks to the Sim Racing On Linux discord, a member wrote a custom driver for it for me and another member that bought it. Unfortunately, I can’t exactly install custom kernel drivers on Bazzite, so I ended up switching to CachyOS and have been enjoying that so far. It was a bit of a pain to switch as it requires more tinkering, but I got to a place where it was running nicely fairly quickly.