I only moved to it because it’s free (as in beer, not as in speech, but it is also free as in speech), but it turns out a lot of distros are just better than Windows and Mac OS now. When I switched from Windows 7 to Windows 10 it wasn’t quite there yet, but it’s fully transformed from the OS for nerds to the OS for anyone:
- Quicker and easier to install even without the “try before you buy” mode Ubuntu-based distros provide
- Loads faster
- Basically the same UI - you won’t need the command line unless you’re trying to make advanced changes
- Customisation of every element is nearly unlimited - you could easily change the start button to shrek’s face, for example
- Programs of all types are easier to find, install, and uninstall
- Programs generally load faster and run more smoothly
- Windows games generally run more smoothly and occasionally even at slightly higher framerates
- No ads or bloatware or background data collection getting in your way and sucking up your resources
- Can’t run modern Call of Duty games (unfortunately many older ones do work)
Anyone who can follow half a page of simple step by step instructions is qualified to install it (the most complex part is flashing an .iso to a usb (a program does it for you)), and everyone who has used a computer is qualified to use it. At its simplest, with distros like Mint and Pop!, for the casual user it’s the same experience as the mainstream OS’s - or rather the experience they expect before the system throws the inbuilt bloat at them. When you get more specialised, especially on gaming distributions like SteamOS or Bazzite, it’s a much better experience even for advanced users, as various utilities are preinstalled and preconfigured, minimising your time setting up. You can go up or downstream to find a distro with as much or as little as you need and then add as much or as little as you want to get your ideal computing experience.
There’s also Arch, which we will only be acknowledging.
I thought that switching to Linux would be as big a jump as when I moved from Mac to Windows, but moving to Mint, trying Ubuntu and Kubuntu, then settling on Bazzite has just been a series of small, shuffling steps. Recreating a similar setup to what I had in Windows has been as trivial as it was time consuming to do originally, while still providing the option for much finer tuning - On Bazzite I had to install a grand total of 4 programs to recreate my software setup because the included utilities covered so many things I’d had to find programs to do in Windows.
As far as I can tell there’s only one real downside, and it’s one that only really matters to advanced users: if you tell Linux to do something stupid or that would break the OS, where Windows will do its best to stop you and Mac will ask where you learnt those words, Linux will simply ask for the password and then gleefully snap it’s own neck. It doesn’t matter if you meant to or not, you will have to reinstall and reconfigure it.
But like I said at the start, that’s real easy, so it’s not much of a downside.
The less real downside is that some specific games and applications won’t work even with the translation layers, but you can always dual boot for that one thing.
You can switch because you hate corporations, or closed source software, or spending money, or for opsec, or because you’re a big fucking nerd (Arch btw), or any of the traditional reasons for using Linux, but the main reason to switch over is because it’s simply the superior product. The power of Windows and the simplicity of Mac OS, without sacrificing any of Linux’s extensive customisation. I don’t know how long ago it truly overtook the competition, but it definitely has done.
Just download Mint and give it a try - if you need something more specific you’ll know and can explore further, but for most people it has everything you’ll want ready to go.
Also if you don’t switch you’re a fucking liberal.
Also if you don’t switch you’re a fucking liberal.
Not switching from Windows to Linux, this is the 12th type of liberalism.The peoples os
Also penguins are super cool
Can’t run modern Call of Duty games (unfortunately many older ones do work)
Love that you list this as a plus side because it absolutely is
As far as I can tell there’s only one real downside, and it’s one that only really matters to advanced users: if you tell Linux to do something stupid[2] or that would break the OS, where Windows will do its best to stop you and Mac will ask where you learnt those words, Linux will simply ask for the password and then gleefully snap it’s own neck.
Well said.
I get this feeling. After I installed Linux for the first time I kind of got mad realising this could have been my computer experience after a lifetime of Windows.
It’s now at the point I saw the End of 10 campaign and am putting together a presentation on switching to Linux for my local repair cafe. I also signed up to be part of the marketing team for Libreoffice and I might do a presentation on it, as I see FOSS office software as the start of the Linux pipeline.
Basically the same UI - you won’t need the command line unless you’re trying to make advanced changes
Warning for anyone reading this is distro-based, for example if you run-
There’s also Arch, which we will only be acknowledging
Carry on then.
Yeah I heard that idea around a lot, that you wouldn’t need to use the command line except for really advanced things. I started using Ubuntu several years ago, and it didn’t take long until I couldn’t find certain apps I needed on the Snap store, so I had to use apt.
I think part of the problem is that we really shouldn’t need to be scared of using the terminal for simple things. It’s not any more difficult than learning how to do any other small new thing on the computer if all you have to do is copy and paste commands from a forum.
It’s not any more difficult than learning how to do any other small new thing on the computer if all you have to do is copy and paste commands from a forum.
This is exactly what I mean when I refer to advanced use. I have met the average user, and they give up before even reading the error message.
Real, I get hundreds of tickets a year that are resolved by me reading an error and the convenient error fixing solutions printed below the error.
Edit: Frankly, those users I don’t realistically see switching to Linux until it is thrust upon them. Most barely can use their current OS, and basically silo themselves into a specific workflow to get things done and they would have to start from scratch with a new OS, and Linux still has a large degree of difficulty at just doing a works in all cases workflow for every task they may need.
I made do with copy/pasting commands from forum posts for years.
i [re]tried linux last year and now am in the process of converting every system in the house to use it.
the #1 difference i would say, from a user perspective, between the windows environment and linux is that linux will stay precisely as you left it for literally countless aeons. you move the mouse, it wakes immediately from its nap as though you never left. it will have cataloged software updates and ask if you want to install them. it might need to reboot, depending on the update. but none of these things has to happen, and rebooting takes less than a minute if you pull the trigger on everything.
windows, on the other hand, if you leave it alone for 18 hours, will be frequently be unstable, insist you install some updates (or have performed them on your behalf because every nine seconds a critical security update is pushed out to patch 4 of 19 recently discovered security flaws from the last update) and randomly change several UI configurations and dependencies in the process that have nothing to do with the patch. if you leave it alone for a week with a tab on a webpage, it will have completely shit itself, need to reboot, and do a bunch of secret shit that requires it to take probably 10 minutes to do something basic like re-open that webpage see what that email said.
small warning that stuff that is generally decently established can be a complete headache to get working sometimes.
i convinced a friend who has an hdr tv as a monitor to install linux, and she wanted to get that working with a nvidia card. she was tearing her hair out and compiling drivers from a github by someone no longer alive into the kernel within a week because that was the only option available to get hdr working for her gpu.
Going from Windows user to recompiling the Linux kernel in under a week? That’s dedication.
Yeah I end up on a zoom call like once in a blue moon and when I tried to on my Ubuntu install I discovered that my microphone wouldn’t work. Worked on it for hours messing around with stuff I probably shouldn’t have been. I even asked Deepseek what to do (only time I’ve ever gone to AI for help) but to no avail. It’s almost certainly because I have cheap dated hardware that barely even works with Windows and not because of Ubuntu but I just do zoom calls on Windows now.
Zoom should work on your browser, in which case the issue should be with firefox not detecting your mic through whatever you use for audio.
No I couldn’t get the microphone to detect any input in Zoom, Firefox, or any other program. Like I said I think it’s more of a hardware/drivers problem because it’s a janky PC I built out of like the cheapest parts I could afford as a broke kid 8 years ago and a dirt cheap headset.
i only use North Korea’s premier linux distribution, RedStar OS
One of us! One of us!
I just had windows update a windows 10 install to windows 11 without my permission, so I nuked it and put bluefin linux on it and I have never had a better experience with linux before. The universal-blue project is wonderful and I would recommend it to anyone interested in linux.
Windows 11 took hours of tweaking, with two different tweakign tools, just to get it to not put ads and the AI panopticon in every corner of every default app, and even then you can never really tell if you were truly successful or not, or if it will all get reverted the next time windows updates. Fucking ridiculous.
If you have to stay on windows for whatever reason, move to an LTSC version.
Regarding the “Linux will snap its own neck” problem: there are programs that backup your configuration and installed programs and can roll back without affecting userspace files. Kind of like system restore on Windows.
I use Timeshift for this functionality. Once I ruined my install so badly that it couldn’t even get past boot, and I was able to restore to a backup using GRUB commands.
There’s also Arch, which we will only be acknowledging.
You are so real for this.
NixOS not even mentioned.
there are dozens of us!
Arch has an important place in the Linux ecosystem and that place is far, far upstream from regular users. Most people aren’t interested in making their OS a hobby in itself, and those that are are already using Arch.
Highly recommend leaning a bit of bash if you haven’t. Pipes are a life changer.
And learning how systemd works. I haven’t used it to make my own services yet but not knowing anything about systemd made debugging a problem I had caused in my computer really difficult.
I don’t want to learn about all the demons that live in my Linux distro satan
Daemons*
mostly true though Ubuntu is getting shady… it’s only a matter of time before it becomes the Microsoft of Linux
I think Canonical rejected my application because I said Microsoft was the bad guy in my cover letter
Also with WSL, Microsoft is now the Microsoft of Linux lol
Any corporation won’t like it if you say some other corporation is bad on your cover letter. You can never let slip that you might turn on them because of moral imperatives.
They specifically asked “who are our competitors” lol
Then you talk about their advantages and disadvantages in the market, not their moral standing?
Honestly it’s likely because I flubbed the leetcode question they hit me with. The whole process was kinda a pain too. I did basically just say that Canonical was the largest open source player in the field and their strengths lay with open source being more robust than the closed of Microsoft alternatives.
That does sound like what they would want to hear.
I started applying for Canonical a while back but their application was too much iirc… something about listing out what I did in college for projects, give examples of my leadership through my career, etc… nah not doing all that for some peon job pushing patches and upgrading hardware or whatever it was the job called for.
The benefits were pretty solid, but yeah the vibes were way off. There was supposed to be some sort of Myers Briggs test. I was being interviewed by the MAAS lead
That’s what Linux Mint Debian Edition is for.
(Don’t actually use it; it’s not really ready, it’s a loaded gun in case labeled “in case Canonical turns evil, break glass”)
awesome, I wasn’t aware they did that. Debian is better anyway :)
I’ve really wanted to try Linux ever since I got into customizing my PC, but the gaming aspect has held me back because I was always told it’s a toss up as to how well you’ll be able to play something. If I’m mainly playing on Steam, some Epic Launcher titles, and pirating shit, would it be pretty easy to get it working?
Easiest way to check is to use https://www.protondb.com/ and just look up your favorite games, but looking at maybe the last 6~ months of reviews since things that don’t work tend to start working relatively quickly with updates to Proton. The exceptions are multiplayer games that don’t enable Linux anticheat intentionally and stuff that is exclusive to Microsoft Gamepass, since those will just never work.
You can use Steam just fine, for Epic and other stores it’s usually recommended to use Heroic Launcher, and for pirated stuff I prefer Lutris, which lets you point at the .exe and choose whether to use Proton (for pirated games also on Steam) or Wine (for stuff from like GOG). You can link all these other launchers up to Steam so that you just launch all your games from there if you want.
This may not be the distro you end up using, but it’s still a good guide. https://docs.bazzite.gg/Gaming/Game_Launchers/
Thanks friend, I appreciate the response.
I do graphic design so I’ll do some research on if I can easily use my shit before I jump in
The big stopping block for games on Linux is the anticheat - some games, like CoD, have kernel level anticheat that Proton and Wine just can’t deal with, so online games are something of a coin flip, but easyanticheat works fine and they’re working on getting more anticheat developers on board. New games sometimes take a few days for people to get running, but every game launch seems to be a buggy shit show now so that may not be entirely Linux’s fault.
Check ProtonDB before buying, but the most I’ve had to do to get a game running in Steam is change which proton version it’s using. Pirating games has been slightly more involved, but boils down to just using Lutris.
some games, like CoD, have kernel level anticheat that Proton and Wine just can’t deal with
I think you mean “that Proton and Wine protection you from”
