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I switched a few years ago. I've been using windows for over 30 years. They changed a bunch of random shit I had used in the past. I figured I'd give it a shot.
I never went back. I'm not a coder. I don't even like tech very much. I've been really happy with Ubuntu for years.
I wanted something that just worked. It has.
I installed Pop!_OS on a Thinkpad and made it my main work computer. It is the most boring computing experience ever. Nothing ever breaks. It just works.
It's been my daily driver for years now. The two computers os have literally never failed, no software issues other than some bugs I myself introduced.
The Steam Deck was the reason I changed. Used the Deck as my only PC for a couple of months and liked the experience so I changed.
I've had OpenSUSE on my PC for over a year now and really like it..... But I'll be honest, the move and troubleshooting problems for setup was a pain in the ass. But it's stable and steady since I've gotten over setup pains.
I hear you. I spent a while switching to OpenSUSE too because it seemed so easy, I've installed OSs plenty!
But I like to partition and stuff, and have a lot of drives from over the years. Oh, what filesystem? Well geeze that might as well be an epic RPG's "choose a name" screen!
Now it's easy: Their perfectly fine default of BTRFS because snapshots and I might try dedup, thank you very much. Lol but I still feel like I had to wade through way too much to reach that conclusion.
Once it's installed and configured though? Man, everything I throw at it is just fine. Love my Tumbleweed. Haven't looked back in like 4 years. :)
Removing Windows from your computer is like ridding your body of a terrible disease
Edit: A little bit of a cathartic rant to people who will understand lol. I love you all. <3
Echo chamber or not, I'm happy to finally be back on Lemmy and see some damn community positivity about Linux for a change. It isn't perfect but it's beautiful and it's worth it and it's ours.
It's a resistance instrument over ever-entitled, creeping corporate control over our lives, it's not "better Windows", it's just better.
I just got super bummed out reading a bunch of those bizarre "Normal people can't be bothered and it doesn't instantly just work with a single button push so it's too complicated and everyone will hate it forever." Tirades... You know the ones...
The kicker... That was after I stumbled from an unrelated link into /r/linux !!, when someone was asking how to help people not be "so scared" to try Linux.
Huge, angry posts about how it can't stand up to proprietary capital-ware, and asking users to click a button or type a word "is just too much." It's freaking sad.
I dunno if the reddit brigading just got super bad or they're all self-loathing over there. But it was weird. And bitter.
I'm happy with our operating-system punk movement, where we invite artists and gamers and coders and family members to learn something and have their computing experience back, since we can't go back to the 00's when computing was an activity and the Internet was a place.
The servile corporate wageslaves who disregard their rights and throw a fit whenever they need to troubleshoot something, can keep their bloated service-appliances and their self righteous corpo-simp attitudes, whilst loudly announcing "tHe DeSkToP iS dYiNg" and "aNdRoiD iS LiNuX." They can keep it.
Meanwhile we welcome the curious, and the seeking, and those wanting something more.
I don't care if we'll never get "critical mass adoption." Part of me hopes I never see Linux getting talked about in mainstream TV news or something, because that's when the grifters will descend like vultures and corporations and states will be wanting a piece of it.
But hey I'll gladly take the time to help someone discover it and enjoy it as much as possible so it can be even greater than it is today. I'll gladly release my work to be Linux compatible and donate to software that changes my life for the better every day.
I'll gladly troubleshoot a little, and be patient, and donate when I can, and report bugs, and share what I've learned. Because we're in this community together, and Open Source belongs to all of us, and you're doing a great job.
Yeah i still use reddit alongside lemmy as well, and i started noticing that the pcmasterrace subreddit had more and more post complaining about linux users. It got so annoying that i ended up leaving the subreddit. It was kinda ironic because they kept complaining about how linux users bring up the fact that they use linux, but it seemed to me like i saw more posts of people complaining about it instead of actual linux users talking about linux lol
I'm more of a proponent for running some Linux distro for my main OS and then virtualizing Windows if desired for things that are broken in WINE/Proton somehow but work fine in Windows, at this point.
I don't trust Windows enough to run it baremetal in a dual-boot anymore though, virtualization at least isolates it from the host where it counts, where in a dual-boot, even if it generally doesn't happen, there's still the looming threat of Windows screwing up the Linux install somehow, where that isn't a problem when virtualizing since, as I said, it's isolated where it counts, even if paravirtualization is a thing for storage drivers and networking and the like, and hardware passthrough is a thing for things like GPUs.
If there's any new Lemmy users here, coming from Reddit (feel like I'm opening a seance), and if you're wondering what else you might decide to change during this era of change -
Try Linux! It's easy now, and frankly just better :)
If ur new to Linux try mint. Dont try arch or gentoo or some other distro cos someone said it was cool. Take the basic Linux mint and get urself comfortable with it first.
Fedora is pretty nice too.
I came 1.5 years ago when reddit fucked up big. Read about Linux here a lot, but not engaged much with it. But since I can't make the switch to Windows 11 I tryed out Linux Mint two weeks ago. Haven't booted into Windows since then, but for one game i have to start using a mod Manager and that won't run in Linux. Every other game I play, even with mods, works just fine. It's fucking cool. And it's so damn nice that I can decide exactly how it looks and feels. So, thanks for that Lemmy.
if the best time to switch is always today then if i put it off till tomorrow it will be even better right?
no you would miss a day
There's still the odd game that's somehow broken in WINE that isn't broken by anticheat or DRM, but by just being crusty code, but those edge cases will do fine in a Windows VM /w a spare GPU being passed through to it.
Anything that uses kernel anticheat, so basically any modern multiplayer title, is platform-locked into a baremetal Windows install, but since I have no interest whatsoever in modern multiplayer titles and thus no interest in anything with a kernel anticheat, I can do just fine virtualizing Windows in that scenario while using a Linux host for everything else.
(which, Soulbringer, one of my previous edge-case titles, works great in Proton /w dxwrapper+DXVK, but Civ3's audio is still broken in Proton even if C3X fixes the graphics, so that's still being ran in a Windows VM, which I currently have Win11 LTSC running in a VM /w my Vega 56 being passed through to it for just that very purpose, while I'm using an RX 6600 for my host card)
As for apps like Maya, Blender is actually competitive with it nowadays.
As an addendum relating to modern multiplayer titles, those are the few titles where it would make more sense to play them on console instead of PC anyways since the way in which they're locked down goes against PC's main selling point: the fact that you actually own your system to a degree where the consoles are effectively locked into the PS, Xbox, or Nintendo walled garden.
Y'all, for real, I was on Windows for gaming. Gaming on Linux really does seem to "just work" now. I'm using CachyOS. It just works. The only tweak I had to do was to tell Helldivers 2 to use the vanilla version of Proton instead of Cachy's version. So literally if I was on a more traditional distribution I'd have to do less.
This year totally is the year of Linux, guys!
Trust me!
Don't need it to be the year of the Linux desktop for me to switch to use it myself.
Can anyone recommend a very beginner friendly Linux OS for someone who only knows what Linux is but doesn't have experience with it and has never used anything but windows? Even Apple's OS is confusing to me. But windows is trying to force this most recent terrible update every time we turn on the computer, and I've had enough.
(I told my husband about all the helpful comments and he sent me this, thinking that's what everyone was explaining to me. I told him no, I know Linux isn't an OS, I just didn't know the OS's are called distros. Cue the most confused face I've ever seen. He's usually more tech savvy than I am, so I got an ego boost explaining it to him. Thanks everyone!)
Mint, some people will criticize me for sugesting it but I belive it's the most user friendly distro that you can just search an error on google and get a solution instantly since it's so widespread. I was going to say Ubuntu but they have made some questionable decisions regarding ads.
I'm going to second Linux Mint, I installed it on my grandma's computers recently and she's had no complaints in the last 6 months.
Other than trying to get her Epson printer to work (which I only found out about this morning because she uses it so little) so I'm going to try to get it to work for her tomorrow.
I did mention that I'd happily buy her a new printer but she's insisting on keeping her current one. I'm praying I can get it working.
Why would anyone criticize Mint as a suggestion? It's easy to use and stable. I have been using it on my main pc for abut a year with barely any issues (i had more problems on windows). I have tried other distros: mutable, immutable, rolling etc but I always come back to Mint if I want things to just work.
P.S. I have used ubuntu professionally for about 7 years and while I don't always like it, it is still a solid choice.
Without a doubt, the most user-friendly distro is Linux Mint. Although, if you are a gamer, you might appreciate a distro like Bazzite more, since it comes with everything you will need for gaming pre-installed.
Stick with something popular. People like to argue about distros, but beyond their package manager and some settings, it's the same thing under the hood (not saying these difference are nothing, but still). For a beginner, or really for anyone just looking to use their system instead of tinkering with it endlessly, a popular, well supported distribution will do the job.
Ubuntu fits that bill, although they made some very weird decisions recently, so I'd suggest starting with Mint if you're new to this. Most everything should work out of the box if you have common hardware, and there's a decent community around in case something goes wrong.
I'd also advise jumping to anything too new, flashy, or promising stuff that should really, really not be distribution dependant. My position on things is that if there's a common tool that's available everywhere to do something, and some distributions decides to make "their own" which does the same thing but is very specific, that's just wasting time. Hence the disdain for raw ubuntu, among other.
As already said, Mint is the only sane choice for the common user. The only thing I'd add is to select the MintDE edition which is built off Debian instead of Ubuntu.
You won't notice any real difference between either variant but you should encounter fewer issues on the Debian version.
Mint is the way I went (13 months ago). Linux Mint Debian Edition in particular.
Sure it can't be uninstalled, but that's no big deal. Just go to Settings and turn it off.
Of course, software needs to update, so it might get turned back on occasionally. Just go turn it off again.
And all the other stuff you turn off. Every time.
Just switched from windows to arch with KDE Plasma on my laptop and I have been experiencing so much joy playing with all the wonderful FOSS I never even knew about
the best time to switch to linux is a few years ago.
the second best time is now.
Linux!? But I heard that's nerd stuff and I want to play all the latest video games!?
I'm still waiting for one of two things to happen:
Going to 100% Linux (currently dual boot for da gamez) within 24h hours from that happening
I'm on windows 10. And they were right that it was the last version of windows I'll ever need. I only change OS when I update my hardware. So next hw refresh, I'm going to Linux.
Can't recommend it enough! I've tried Linux distros in the past but always found that there were hardware issues or certain programs didn't work. Not to mention I essentially had to give up gaming. Linux was cool but I just couldn't use it as my daily driver.
I switched to Pop!_OS last month and I've been blown away. The install was simple and straightforward and the only hardware that required special config was my gaming mouse that needed "libratbag" and "piper" to remap the extra buttons and adjust the RGB.
Other than that, all the programs I normally use like Discord, Dropbox, Steam, and every game I've tested so far work flawlessly. I don't feel like I'm missing anything or had to give up something like I did before. I actually feel like I've upgraded since I'm loving the auto tiling window manager and multiple desktops that Pop!_OS has as options.
I'm at about 19 years since switching - MS reaffirms my decision for me each and every year.