What’s up, guys, gals, and non-binary pals? I switched from Windows 10 to Linux Mint back in December 2024, and I catalogued my experiences in these posts:
- Alright you nerds, I made the jump to Linux.
- Alright nerds, I installed Linux Mint on my MacBook Pro
Just wanted to let you nerds know that everything has been running flawlessly. I can play any game I have, and none of my productivity is blocked. Doesn’t matter whether it’s all my ROMs I archived, my Steam games, GOG games, whatever. Linux plays them, and performance is fantastic. I don’t play any anti-cheat games as the only one I do play periodically is Overwatch, and it runs perfect.
I can without a doubt now say that I will never go back to Windows. Should have switched years ago!
Build specs (the full list is in my first post linked above):
- CPU 9800x3d
- GPU RX 7900 XTX
Here are some issues I still can’t solve on Linux Mint:
- Can’t control my GPU fans
- Can’t control my case fans
- Can’t bind my case fans to ramp up with GPU load
I’ve tried CoreCTRL and so many other solutions I read online, and none of them work. Problem for another day! So all I’ve done for now is increase the count of intake fans I have and set it to a good speed to move plenty of air (but also set my exhaust fans higher to help counter and ensure proper positive pressure airflow. I have too many fans to get the ideal balance of neutral air flow). GPU runs with OEM fan speeds.
Edit: There’s a bug in pasting instance agnostic links, so I just added direct URLs to my instance posts.
I know, right?! That was the best part. It felt so liberating, as if I was transported back to the early 2000s when the OS was a tool, not an ad-infused spyware machine. The best thing is that I have control and - surprisingly - confidence. I was worried I’d only have control and over time I’d get confidence. But essentially, I had confidence day one.
I’m still a nascent Linux user, but using this OS is so refreshing. I love my PC so much.
This is exactly how I felt when I made the switch a couple of years back. Like this is what using a personal computer was always meant to feel like, and this is what Microsoft has taken from us.
I started using Linux most of the time in 1998 because my parents had installed RedHat 5.2 to dual boot with Windows and I didn’t like what Microsoft was doing back then, so I decided to use Linux whenever I’m not playing games. (And then moved on to SuSe 7 in 2001, then to Debian, and later, when Ubuntu was invented, moved to Ubuntu, and when Linux Mint came around, started using that one. (wait, no, actually I moved only when I got pissed off by Unity, which was horrible in its first forms!) Starting from Debian, things were already quite easy, although configuring the graphical environment, X, was super tedious…)
It’s a bit weird feeling reading about how people write about how bad Windows has gone, and not really having experience of it since Windows 7, that I did have for a while in between. That was probably in 2011 or so. Then I soon got a new computer and kind of forgot to install Windows on it, because things worked well enough anyway.
In any case, already when Ubuntu came out, I already felt that every time I had to resolve my friends’ issues on their Windows computers that it was a very good thing that I was running Linux at home, because it meant there was so much less hassle! It felt like “damn, if people only knew how well this works these days, they’d never want to use Windows. And then there would be more software as well!”