RentlarHave you or someone close to you converted to Linux recently (with Windows 10's end of support)?
One from my friend. He has tried Linux before but switched back due to issues. When this Win10’s EOL came up I floated trying it again. Which he then did that weekend. It worked great for the most part. One game had install issues, but worked after we resolved them, another Proton game had full screen problems with no monitor output when the “Adaptive Refresh Rate” setting was enabled in the OS settings.
That software-hardware interface problem wasn’t documented anywhere, so it was just a lot of fiddling with all the settings one-by-one and trying various things to get it working to no avail until he got there.
My daughter is very Linux curious but she’s not going to want to learn anything about it. She just wants to play games and chat with friends. I’ll probably switch her when I upgrade and pass my current computer down.
If you know the games she plays, you could test installing them separately ahead of time, so that there would be minimal difference when that switchover happens.
It’s mostly The Sims with mods along with whatever meme games she’s hearing about on YouTube. There’s no concern about rootkit anti-cheat or anything, and so far my experience has been almost anything on Steam will run in Linux without having to do anything. She’ll run into performance issues with her current hardware before she hits any games that aren’t compatible.
TheMadCodgerGo with Bazzite. It just works, she can’t break it, and as long as she reboots from time to time, it’ll always be up to date. And she won’t have to learn anything to use it.
The only other suggestion is to figure out whether KDE or Gnome desktop environment is right for her. Former more Windows-like, latter more Mac-like. And then just make sure to grab that version of Bazzite.
Axel Antoni@Rentlar installed Zorin on my parents-in-law’s laptop in September. Fewer ”support calls” with them. Only had to put all the icons back on their desktop. How they managed to delete them remains a mystery.
They still think the new "Windows" is slightly odd but better than the old one. They are 86
They still think the new "Windows" is slightly odd but better than the old one. They are 86
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.
justdaveisfineSo far the biggest issues I’ve faced are League of Legends and funky network driver issues. One of those I can work at, the other not so much.
TipponI’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 😫
NTFS is rough to deal with indeed. Right now getting niche hardware to work is one of Linux’s barriers to adaptation. If the device’s data streams are documented well, it can be technically possible to create homemade device drivers, but you’ll have no hair left to pull before you even begin.
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.
That’s really the gist of it. For the 96% who just need a working computer and aren’t messing with system files, immutable is perfect. You really can’t break it unless you try.
I switched maybe lime two years ago now. I only had issues on one game but a bit later it just worked not sure what changed. I know ea stuff doesn’t work so haven’t really messed around with that. I check protonDB a lot to see game compatibility.
The biggest issue for me was getting a handle on a photo workflow for myself after switching and leaving lightroom/adobe behind. I use darkroom now which I’m still learning but I have a basic workflow down pretty well.
I built up a PC for my cousin for gaming and put bazzite on there, she hasn’t really noticed anything being her first personal PC so thats pretty good, I’ve gone from popOS, to arch to bazzite
Bazzite with gnome is mostly painless. I have been using that on my desktop for about a year now, I have fedora with kde on my laptop and its also pretty good.
adr1anIn case you didn’t know, there’s Aurora OS which is immutable fedora with KDE plasma, very much like bazzite or any of the uBlue spins. I have been using it on a laptop for a while now and I am extremely happy with it.
I did not, but I started on fedora silverblue and rebased to bazzite because the bazzite installer wasn’t working for me a year ago. I think all in all, I prefer gnome even as a wondows expat.
I have converted a few friends and family in the last few months. Mostly to Bazzite, but one opted for Fedora.
Feel free to take your time, Microsoft’s the only one setting deadlines here.
Posting to [email protected] could potentially help if your setback is technical in nature, and not like life stuff.
pentastarmSure! 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.
Thanks for sharing your experience. So now that you’ve tried it, is KDE familiar enough to you? (I did put my parents’ now 13 year old PC on KDE for similar reasons).
Good news is that KDE is the front-end interface that is packaged with many distributions (including Bazzite) so you won’t lose the basic look and feel if you decide to move.
It is! I’ve really been enjoying the KDE experience with Kubuntu!
Initially I tried downloading a few “retro” windows xp/2000 look a like themes, but something got messed up and it wouldn’t let me log in? Something with the SDDM. Luckily I had just installed Kubuntu fresh earlier that day, so I hadn’t set anything up, so it was easy enough to just reinstall everything, and I’ve just been sticking with the built in themes and not really messing with anything else lol.
I did see that with Bazzite, which is why I think I’ll try it out. I just don’t want to go through the whole process, only to end up with the same issues I have now due to, apparently, having a Nvidia GPU in my laptop. I know no one can tell me if I will or won’t, and I just have to try it, but that’s about my only hesitation.
I prefer KDE Plasma, too. Fortunately, just about every desktop distro has it available even if GNOME or something else is the default. Find out what package to install. (On Debian-based distros, it’s probably kde-plasma-desktop.) Install it, log out, and look for a session selector on the login screen. Change it to Plasma before logging in again.
If the same game problems reappear when you’re on a different distro, you might want to describe them in detail on a Linux gaming forum. Someone there might be familiar with how to fix them.
Welcome to the neighborhood!
Bazzite should work with your nvidia and everything else. And from the way you described yourself, you may like Bazzite’s immutability better, since it’s much harder to break than kubuntu is. Just make sure you get the KDE version. I also installed it on my steamdeck and love it.
I’m partway / procrastinating a transition from win10 to Linux Mint. My 12yo hardware wasn’t going to support win11, I’m sure I’m not alone in that.
Bought a new SSD, spent a couple of hours with the case open reconfiguring hardware and then testing which of the existing drives had which partitions on them. Install went better than expected, only minor issue with no sound (tweaked setting somewhere obvious and it started working), but getting Google Drive up and running was a pain, mainly because the Online Account feature wasn’t working until I thought to reboot and try again.
Next up on my list is to pop back into windows to collect a bunch of settings for things I forgot to write down before, then I’ll be finishing configuration and will reconnect old data drives back up and see how we go from there. I saw somewhere that the kernal is having issues with mounting NTFS drives, so expecting another learning curve there.
I’ve dabbled with Linux a few times in the past, so it’s not completely unfamiliar to me, although never as a daily driver machine before. I’m just taking my time, and researching issues as they come up. I’m too old now to consider this a fun exercise , but I’m pretty happy with how things are going so far.
🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 The only logical addition to the post title is “If so, you may be entitled to compensation.”
Customer Testimonials: “My cousin Rick switched to Linux and now he never stops talking about Arch and flatpacks and kernel panics. BS&D Associates got us $30,000,000 in damages!”
Started like three mints ago b/c fed up with windows. Got 2nd SSD and set up dual boot with Bazzite. Initially this was just to fuck around but i switched to Bazzite as main distro within two days. It just works. Won me over when Darksouls was immediately displaying the Playstation glyphs when I plugged in the Dualshock 4.
Even modding was relatively easy. Things are well documented now and; and I shame to admit, ChatGPT is surprisingly not the shittiest at helping me with my issues (specific example setting up Darksouls Remastered Gadget to run with the Seamless Coop mod which required some custom code shenanigans… For which the vibe code was serviceable!)
Haven’t booted my windows partition for a month ish now. Probably won’t for a long time.
mateltI 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)!
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.
Took the plunge this week. My secondary hard drive now has Mint and I’ve got it working so when I boot up I select which os/drive to start up. The plan is to use Mint primarily for awhile and get used to it.
Definitely a bit less intuitive, and many things are still needing to be done through the consol instead of the GUI which is annoying. Haven’t had success migrating my Firefox profile without creating an account. Haven’t figured out how to get the “dual” monitor setup to work the way a I want either. Feels like a bit of a downgrade but I’m hoping once I get past the initial setup pains it’ll be smooth sailing.
Thanks for sharing and congrats on making the jump! In my experience, when I broke Linux, most of the time it’s because I wanted to try something new, and only occasionally an updated software breaks something, but it generally only takes a bit of effort to pinpoint the culprit. Especially on Mint, once you have things working they’ll work as they are, and any issue you may encounter will be easy to resolve after you figure it out the first time.
On Windows it was the inverse… Microsoft often wanted to try something new on me.
Yes I have 1 convert and 1 on the edge. The convert said Windows is behind and wanted to use Linux. Probably to be cool and stuff. He’s learning the ropes of Arch on Cachyos for now
I did about 2 years ago. Dislike Microsoft decision to go against the user choice and all the bad updates and trying to make things worse. I went to Fedora after being on kubuntu for a while. I just needed something with kde 6 so wayland could work good.
So far I have not really found a good way to convice family. Instead they stay on familiar Windows 10. Will see if I have better luck after W10 ESU runs out.
MeldrikMe. 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!
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!
chickenRecently started testing Linux:
-laptop: Switched an old X1 Carbon to Linux, but had a lot of problem with the WiFi card (Intel Wireless 7265). It’s supposed to be Linux compatible, but it simply doesn’t work. After a few days of distro hoping I settled for Kubuntu + a WiFi USB adapter(details here if you’re furious: sh.itjust.works/post/47717768)
I’m still hoping a future update will make the WiFi card work and that I’ll be able to remove the USB WiFi adapter. And I’m wondering if 8GB of RAM is enough for KDE (Mozilla regulatory freeze).
-For my gaming rig, I went dual boot with Bazzite and I’ll be upgrading W10 to 11 for the software not Linux compatible.
My main problem (and disappointment) is that my Logitech G915 keyboard and JBL quantum headset cannot use their specific software on Bazzite/Linux. The basic stuff works, but all the keyboard (macro keys,…) And headset (spatial sound control, two sources live mixing,…) Handy advanced features doesn’t.
Beginner: New Ubuntu install - Wifi card issue - sh.itjust.works
Hello, I’ve been trying to do my first stride in Linux’s world by installing Ubuntu on my laptop (Lenovo X1 Carbon 3rd Gen) to replace W10 who was working well but is loosing support soon. Well the test result is… unclear. Ubuntu itself is fast and working rather well but… my Wifi card seem to have problem with Ubuntu. Before giving up and re-installing W10 I’m trying to find help to solve this issue. I created a full description of the issue on the Ubuntu forum, here: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/lenovo-x1-carbon-ubuntu-24-04-03-lts-no-wireless-connection-error-activation-of-network-connection-failed/69286 [https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/lenovo-x1-carbon-ubuntu-24-04-03-lts-no-wireless-connection-error-activation-of-network-connection-failed/69286] Any help would be very appreciated Edit: After trying the suggestion below to power down and remove the battery without any success, I’ll try to use a “windows to go” w10 USB drive to try to change the WiFi card power settings as suggested in some other answers.
No1Yeah I did. Didn’t do it before purely out of not wanting to do the transitional work. But now that Microsoft’s bullshittery made me angry enough to do it, I am loving it. Just Debian with xfxe4. It works, it’s interesting and I learn new things about CLI and stuff. Also it doesn’t feel like I have to fight my os just to have a little privacy and peace of mind.
I love the: “everything is a file” thing. It just makes changing settings much more accessible. Still struggling with some things. I still do not understand the logic of the file organization system, but I think this will get better over time.
Thanks to all the Debian developers and Foss developers in general. You are the true heroes.
I started baby steps when Steam stopped supporting Windows7. I built my main gaming PC to dual boot W10 & Ubuntu maybe 3 years ago? And that just worked so-so honestly. Felt like everytime I went to play co-op games w my friends, whatever game we picked that weekend didn’t work correctly in Linux. But because I had Win10 right there, I also never forced myself to learn anything either. Biggest thing I could find was the problems seemed to be related to the Nvidia drivers, but never could quite figure out how to update them.
Recently I doubled down with a new PC, and this time it’s Ubuntu only. Made an effort to find native Linux apps where possible, learned a few terminal commands, forced myself to also learn Bottles (play Windows games), and bought a Radeon video card instead of Nvidia. Learning curve for what I wanted wasn’t nearly as high as I feared. If anything, I think it’s pushing me to consider distro shopping, as I’m starting to understand why folks don’t like snaps. Looks like Mint will be my next stop.
Biggest challenge so far is there’s a few apps I use that just don’t have a great Linux equivalent. AutoHotKey is the biggest one, but I see there’s some new options here I didn’t try yet. lemmy.zip/post/47337622 I have not dicked around with my 3D printer software yet, but I’m sure that will be a hurdle.
AutoHotKey Alternative on Wayland - Lemmy.zip
The main barrier for me transitioning to Linux as my main OS is finding a suitable alternative to AutoHotKey (AHK) on windows. I use AHK for all kinds of automation but haven’t found a usable alternative in Wayland. Thought I’d check here to see if anyone has any suggestions?
addieMoved my father-in-law from Windows 10 to Mint.
Biggest problem was all his ‘documents’, which were office365 web links rather than ‘actual documents’. Linux presents them as the urls that they really are. They open just fine, though, and can be exported as real local docs for libreoffice etc.
Security and privacy were the main selling points for him. He’d done some reading and thought that Mint was among the best choices for a newstart that just want everything to work; no interests in playing games or anything. I agreed that was the most solid choice. I use Arch btw myself, but wouldn’t recommend that for beginners.
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.
SpicyWizardI helped switch my 88 years old grandma to Mint a few months back. I don’t think she understands that I changed her OS but she is happy with it so far, her laptop goes much faster and 0 problems so far for her needs, very simple needs but she actually uses it a lot!
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.