So painfully, boringly good.

Day-to-day, it just works, I don’t have to fight it. It doesn’t do anything I don’t want it to do. I don’t miss office, everything is clean and snappy.

I have managed to play almost every game thrown at it (Bazzite) - the only one that didn’t work was an older DX7 title. DOS games just work - they took more effort than this under Win9x.

I have got a couple of minor issues but all fixable.:

• I encountered a issue where it wouldn’t wake from sleep - fixed by selecting a different color profile in the display settings.
• I managed to break something in fstsb trying to setup a persistent network drive. Very easy to roll back, I’m 100% sold on immutable until I need something more customisable
• Recently my Bluetooth kb/mouse would drop off when the PC went idle, wouldn’t reconnect/wake up until power cycling the PC. Fixed by disabling BT hibernation/sleep

Having said that, last week I had to install Win11 on the kids laptop to be ready for school - I hadn’t installed 11 outside of a controlled Corp environment with solid group policy control since the early days. God-damn Win11 is a dumpster fire! The install UI looks nice but the noise is turned up to 11, popup, wizards, setup this, setup that, backup, OneDrive, give us all your information and sign away any privacy.

Regardless of any minor issues I bump into on the way, I am never going back!

Pretty damn good. Most of my issues are really minor. I feel a lot more secure and a lot less surveilled. Not perfect, but much better.

Been with EndeavourOS on all my devices for the past year and it’s pure bliss.

tried cachyos. a game froze. restarted the machine. doesnt boot up anymore. found 2 post about it. no solution. i might try pop and nobara next weekend, but i dont see myself dailydrive linux in the next 10 years.

not goin well.

Way better than expected. Even if I was already using Linux on servers since decades, on desktop I preferred Windows. But my laptop was with 8gb soldered RAM and Windows 11 is basically unusable with that amount. I wanted to switch.

But my past experience was bad, too often stuff was broken. Used Ubuntu in 2016, couldn’t stand it => revert to win10, tried Manjaro in 2019, one day I fucked with some AUR and it could not boot => revert to win10. I left thinking that Linux on the desktop is not ready.

Then last summer the constant updates on my windows laptop made it unusable. It simply doesn’t leave enough memory to use a web browser with more than a couple tabs.

At the same time at work a windows 11 update introduced a very annoying bug: after standby, windows would switch the resolution of displayport monitors to 800*600 and destroy my window layout, with everything moved to the top left corner. I had to use a tiling window manager like glazewm as a temporary fix until Microsoft fixed the bug (still annoying waiting for a couple seconds to have the windows rearranged when the monitor went to standby) and I fell into the rabbit hole of tiling managers. I watched videos where some YouTubers showed how l33t is cachyos with hyprland with their magic dotfiles and I fell for the meme.

For the first few weeks it was awesome, then of course hyprland deprecates syntax without warnings and I started to get errors after the first update. Also the concept of using someone else’s dotfiles is wrong as they’re highly opinionated. They should do videos about how to make your Linux experience similar to theirs, not “clone this configuration as a black box”, because then you would have no idea how to fix problems when the updates come. But it seems like their priority is getting stars on their GitHub, rather than actually helping people. “Just blindly run this script as sudo” is a wrong concept, IMHO.

Then when hyprland changed syntax AGAIN without warning, I was fed up, didn’t want to spend hours to debug the problem so I spent hours to reinstall another distro. I read that Linus is using fedora with plain gnome and some frippery extensions because “it just works” and… OMG. It just works! I’m shocked how good vanilla GNOME has become since the last time I tried it in 2019! It’s now fully usable even for a noob! And I like those extensions too. Modern but classic. Easy but powerful. And the apps in the GNOME circle are so polished. I was shocked to see pika backup, user friendly but not dumbed down.

Pretty damn awesome and loving every minute of not having to use Windows

I switched from windows 10 to pop!_os on my thinkpad p15s almost a year ago. My biggest surprise was thinking I would still need windows for anything when I haven’t needed to think about it since.

The most frustrating part is that I’m requires to use windows 11 for work and it just feels so broken. But in all seriousness the biggest issues I’ve had were a couple driver issues that were easily fixed from the debug.

Honestly my biggest regret was not switching sooner. The learning curve really wasn’t bad. Just read the forums and docs. I run it on everything now. I game with it, I run a small homelab with it, I’m productive with it. I dont think there is anything I would miss. Everything works as well if not even better.

Bazzite. It’s fine. I miss some games with anti-cheat.

I switched this year from windows: overall really well. Although, I work in a couple apps (R Studio, Unity) that are just not friendly with Linux (neither are terrible but neither are as smooth as alternatives). And had some compatibility issues with certain gamepads.

*fixed my trashed Ubuntu partition, trying mint

it’s solid dude 🤙

Mostly really good, I feel like I’ve traded a lot of major problems that I can’t do anything about for a few tiny problems that I can actually solve

My steam wrapped for 2023 is fully windows, 2024 has about 40% windows 60% Linux, purely from the moment I switched halfway through the year, and 2025 is fully Linux.

I regret nothing.

Caveats:

• I built a new computer in early 2025, knew I’d be making Linux, went AMD 7900xtx. Worked right out the box flawlessly.
• I started out self hosting stuff and got somewhat comfortable with Linux in those instances, so when I eventually threw endeavouros into my laptop, it all just worked for me. I had a couple of “laptop won’t boot because its battery died mid update” events, which is about a couple more than there ever should’ve been, but it wasn’t too hard to recover the laptop every time, with help from chatgpt
• switched to Bazzite for my new desktop and work framework 13 laptop, but hold endeavouros in my heart with great affection, because it is awesome and Linux is awesome no matter what flavour you pick (restrictions apply, research what you’re getting into when picking a distro, and compare a bit but don’t overstress)
• Linux may or may not radicalize you heavily. The liberating feeling sometimes might make you mad that you put up with all that Apple/Microsoft/Adobe bullshit for all those years. Self-hosting intensifies radicalization. Don’t come blaming me when you find yourself in a shadow war with the Mossad over your email server getting shadowbanned throughout the Chilean Patagonia due to attempting to create an ex-engineers’ farming commune and a regional meshcore network there.

I was using Windows 10 LTSC for a bit before Home/Pro editions reached EoL. My past experiences with Linux were all such a significant addition of frustration; I couldn’t justify switching to Linux.

After a string of back-to-back hardware failures, I’m back to using a 10+ year old desktop I built. Ended up trying trying Fedora 42 with KDE and suddenly had none of the issues I had with past Linux attempts. My three biggest complaints before about Linux had been random Bluetooth device incompatibility, Nvidia support being trash, and most Steam games requiring extra commands and constant troubleshooting to get running decently.

I feel like a lot of those issues were from me starting with Arch derivatives on niche laptop hardware that was already beginning to fail. My experience with Fedora has been fantastic. My biggest problems now have been: -KDE discover store is really inconsistent with its packages. I would not expect the average Windows “user”(bought a PC and that’s what it came with) to bother understanding the difference between a flatpak and a native package, and would get really annoyed when stuff is out of date or mis-configured out of the box. I had a better experience using a GUI in Arch with the AUR to install software, ironically enough. -There are a few things, ie Nvidia drivers, non-free codecs, non flatpak Steam, that have inconsistent community documentation on how to install them. These become immediately bad first impressions on people switching from Windows, and I think its important that they are clear to install properly as possible.

Other than that, Fedora is stable and runs great. I’m using a Nvidia GPU and have no issues with it(this time, at least…). A lot of my software was already open source, but I run a few Windows applications, besides Steam games, with Wine; rarely do I have to do any extra configuration. KDE Plasma as a desktop environment has given me the customization and control out of the box that I have been missing from Windows for over a decade, while Fedora has some sane defaults for it that make it accessible to Windows users expecting something a bit more familiar.

There’s always a weird quirk here and there, but I have had my fair share of troubleshooting on Windows before as well. I feel like Linux as a home PC OS is mature enough that people who don’t do much on the PC anyway could find their way around it, while it’s still going to be an annoying learning curve for people who see end user software as a hobby. Entirely usable though.

Obligatory I don’t play games with anti cheat and I don’t use streaming services with DRM. I have a few games with Denuvo, and haven’t had any problems arise that needed me to switch Proton versions that end up triggering install lock outs.

It’s been GREAT! All my torrenting related stuff works better than it did on windows 10. I am slowing loading old 2000’s windows PC games on my Mint installation and so far it’s been working well.

My computers are MUCH faster on linux and updates take 20 seconds instead of 15 minutes.

Buddy of mine decided to switch to Debian like a month ago, I warned him it’s Linux but “raw” and warned him of outdated packages an such, he said no worries. Proceeds to AI his way through literally everything, broke numerous packages by going to Trixie Backports for newer drivers and has now installed windows on a spare 500Gb HDD so he can play Fortnite with a chick he met on tinder.

Want to take bets on how long his Debian install lasts?