I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

https://archive.is/CEsFK

Commercial OSes (both Windows and MacOS) now feel so insanely agenda driven, and the agenda no longer feels like anything close to making the user happy and productive. For Mac, it feels like Apple wants to leverage what came out of VisionOS and unify the look and feel of mobile and desktop--two things no one asked for. For Windows, it feels like ads for their partners and ensuring they don't fumble the ai/agent transition the way they did with mobile.

Linux is SUCH a breath of fresh air. No one wants it to be anything other than what you want it to be. Modern desktop Linux has a much improved out of the box experience with good support for all the hardware I've thrown at it. And Claude Code makes it very fast and trivial to personalize, adapt, automate, etc.

Linux is one of the last strong defenses for the idea that people should control the computers they own. On desktops and servers, root access is normal, and attempts to take it away do not work because software freedom is well established. On phones, that never happened. There is no real, mainstream “Linux for mobile,” and the result is a world of locked-down platforms where things like “sideloading” are treated as scary security risks instead of basic user rights. This makes it much easier for lawmakers to argue for removing root access on mobile devices, even though the same idea would be unrealistic on desktop systems.

A great deal of gratitude is owed to all the people who volunteer their free time to create the stable desktop environment we have free access to on Linux in 2026.

I've been a Linux admin for 25 years but up until a few months ago my personal computer has been windows (gaming desktop) or Mac (laptop).

I decided to give desktop Linux another shot and I'm glad I did. I was prepared for a lot of jankiness but figured I have enough experience to fix whatever needs fixing. Surprisingly, this has not been the case at all, the PC has been not only as stable as Windows or Mac but also performs better and is much more comfortable and intuitive to use. I never really want to "work on" my personal computer, I want it to just be there for me reliably. I've always had a soft spot for free software, but I just couldn't justify the effort until now.

So I guess this is my love letter to all the devs that have made the modern Linux desktop possible. Even compared to just a few years ago, the difference is immense. Keep up the good work.

I'm using Linux on the desktop for 15 years and I still sometimes cannot connect to Wifi.

This is because the list of network refreshes (and disappears) before I can find and click the correct Wifi:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/network-manager-applet/-/issu...

This completely breaks the Linux experience for anybody living in a reasonably populous area. The issue has 3 upvotes.

I also put a 400 $ bounty on it, if anybody wants to give it a shot. (Given that AI is supposed to replace 90% of programmers last year, making the Wifi list stay visible should be easy, right?)

This worked fine 10 years ago.

Most of my gripes are around some UI garbage behaviour like that. I have a file manager on one PC (I think it's the Ubuntu one where some "GUI in Snap" stuff breaks the GUI) breaks the file picker dialogue, so that when pasting a directory path in to navigate there, at the exact instant you press Enter, it autocompletes the first file so that that gets selected, leading you to upload a file you didn't want to upload.

That said, all of that feels like really high quality compared to when once per year I click the Wifi menu on some Windows and it take 20 seconds to appear at all.

>I picked CachyOS rather than a better-known distro like Ubuntu because it’s optimized for modern hardware,

>First challenge: My mouse buttons don’t work. I can move the cursor, but can’t click on anything.

Maybe should've picked Ubuntu? I suspect this is the Linus (tech tips, not Torvalds) strategy of picking up an obscure distro for content purposes. Can't really have an article if everything just works, right

For not much prior research, he sure has done a lot of prior research to even know about desktop environments or bootloaders compared to your average windows user. This article read like every other promising Linux is user friendly and easy, then proceeding with the author fixing issues the average user wouldn’t be able to even diagnose.

I think anyone technically savvy enough to follow the article is already aware Linux is a viable primary OS, the question is can you manage it without having to become a Linux nerd? I want to be able to tell normal people they can use Linux.

“Linux is so easy and great, my mouse didn’t even work and I have it unplugged to this day, and I can’t even play minecraft!” - I use every OS and have arch on my gaming pc (dual booted I’ll admit), but this is both one of the worst articles advocating for desktop Linux and one of the best at the same time, because it shows the harsh truth a lot of people experience and us Linux users don’t even want to admit exists.

> I picked CachyOS rather than a better-known distro like Ubuntu because it’s optimized for modern hardware

So this isn't a usual comparison, as the vast majority of users will choose Ubuntu, Fedora, or Mint. CachyOS is also a new distro, meaning it won't last long (most distributions, like small businesses, only last a few years). It's also Arch-based, meaning the user is going to get constant updates, which leads to problems. Finally, Cachy is optimized for speed and security, not hardware.

> First challenge: My mouse buttons don’t work. I can move the cursor, but can’t click on anything. I try plugging in a mouse (without unplugging the first one), same deal. Not a major issue; I can get around fine with just the keyboard

And this is where I stop reading

Back in the days of Unity I decided to make a full switch to Linux and it just worked. The UX was unfamiliar but it had a cohesiveness that made sense. I use macOS for the past 10 years as my main system (work stuff needs Mac-specific things) but switching to a decent Linux distro would honestly feel like an upgrade. Windows continues being a shitshow and I want nothing to do with it.

What I think could really push Linux desktop forward is if various PC gaming influencers started doing content on how to game on Linux. Given that it is not just viable now but actively sometimes better than on Windows it would make for good content AND show people an alternative. And soon as AAA games start being created for Linux first and run on Windows in some sort of compatibility or emulation mode that will really start turning the tides.

I've been using nothing but Linux on my desktop since 2013. Converted my parents around 2015. Rarely a complaint from them and I haven't even once considered switching back to Windows. My shiny new Macbook Air is collecting dust. Almost all of my gaming is done on a SteamDeck or a Linux desktop. The only applications that I can think of where Windows or Mac are still relevant would be CAD and Audio/Video production. And even those are use-cases where Linux has viable options. Actually, Video probably doesn't even belong here since one of the most popular video packages (DaVinci Resolve) has Linux support and there are multiple open source options like Kdenlive. For music, it's really hard to beat Apple's ecosystem: Mac and iOS have an incredible variety of affordable and really high quality audio applications, however, the gap is narrowing with lots of great music software on Linux as well. There are free software options for CAD and 3d Modeling (Blender, Freecad) but most of the popular CAD software is either Windows only or Windows/Mac. Some of this may be possible to get working under Wine but I haven't tried.

> My goal here is to see how far I can get using Linux as my main OS without spending a ton of time futzing with it

> First challenge: My mouse buttons don’t work. [...] Not a major issue; I can get around fine with just the keyboard.

> Then I remember that my root partition is only 100GB. I reboot back into the Cachy live image and use the Parted utility to increase it to 1TB, then make a second btrfs partition in the remaining space.

I don't think the goal was achieved here. For most people it still takes some dedication and a lot of computer knowledge to switch successfully.

But I expect things to continue to improve now that Valve has solved the single major blocker for a large chunk of people, that being running their back catalog of games. It's an amazing gift to the community that we should all be very thankful for.

I recently switched to linux from windows. The only reason I was sticking with windows was because hoyoverse refuses to support linux. I finally decided I need some break from them anyways and took the plunge.

First, I tried to install fedora atomic cosmic. It kind of worked but I could not get it to work with my dock + external monitors at all. Now that I am used to that setup, I can't go back.

Not wanting to spend time figuring it out, I just installed Ubuntu instead. Thankfully, that worked out though it's not perfect. Everytime I turn on my laptop, I need to spend 10-15 minutes turning the monitors on and off until ubuntu recognises them correctly and also sends dp output (it shows the monitor in settings and I can open windows on it but the monitor doesn't actually show anything; other times, it reads the monitor as something nvidia with the lowest resolution).

I tried to install genshin anyways on ubuntu. I couldn't get it to work via wine/lutris. Virtualbox doesn't support gpu passthrough so I tried using virt-manager. The setup was too hard and it didn't work anyways. I gave up on hoyo at this point and install steam instead.

Honestly, ubuntu is rough and Linux as a whole is very rough. But on the whole, I would still pick this over dealing with windows any longer.

I was watching the Lenovo CES keynote and couldn’t believe how hard they were selling Qira on Lenovo computers and Motorola phones. All the major players have platform specific Windows features that can’t possibly meet their success criteria in terms of ROI. Lenovo isn’t Apple or Google or Microsoft, and even the latter two have trouble selling fully integrated platform services on hardware.

All this time, money, dev energy, and marketing to keep trying to find a magical bean in their stalk and they still just won’t support open hardware and open source OSes with vigor.

Apple people tend to buy Apple products generation over generation, and none of the Windows hardware manufacturers are even close to having that rep. Even in this thread people are recommending Gen 1 Thinkpads, but Lenovo’s heart really isn’t in it across the board. Dell went simple with the revived XPS but the release versions don’t offer Linux in the BYO order flow.

And no, I don’t think Framework is good enough.

> The biggest issue I’ve had so far is Minecraft: Bedrock Edition. For some reason, Microsoft hasn’t prioritized making a Linux version of Bedrock. Java Edition works fine in Linux, but I play Minecraft with my kids, and they’re on Bedrock Edition on their iPads. There’s supposed to be a way to run the Android app with MCPE Launcher, but I couldn’t get it to work.

The launcher was somewhat pretty stable all along, until Microsoft enabled Google's Integrity Protection "DRM" into it. [0]

Fortunately, they have found a way to run it even with that added in after a couple of weeks later since they added that at Q3/4 last year.

> but I couldn’t get it to work.

From what I've seen, the game will crash when vibrant visuals (a built-in alternative rendering option with shaders-like experience in Minecraft Bedrock) volumetric fog is enabled. [1]

[0]: https://github.com/minecraft-linux/mcpelauncher-manifest/iss... [1]: https://github.com/minecraft-linux/mcpelauncher-manifest/iss...

There's no soul in major OSes these days - Windows is a big bloatware and macOS's aesthetics is the result of design for the sake of the design instead of any practical use. No wonder we're seeing this sentiment for an alternative growing.

My personal experience with using macOS (m1 2020-) Windows 10 (2018-2020) and Linux (for the last 16-17 years on off) -

If you want to do basic stuff like browsing streaming learning video calls etc, get a non Linux computer with decent specs with some headroom. These operating systems are for people who just want to use that ecosystem and not need to manage anything themselves. Battery life is exceptional. Most people I know need a one or two step process to do things (like backup photos contacts documents etc) and Apple google Microsoft offer you that. It’s not perfect but it’s easy to manage. People really have gotten used to someone managing it for them and these things do fine in that regard. It’s better than people having 5 hard drives with photos and misplacing them imo. I’ve had people in 2000s connect drives to my computers and find private pictures and contacts and files etc I need not be having access to. iCloud and Google Photos offer you that peace of mind. With 2FA you’d rather lose it all than fall into the wrong hands. People have all kinds of stuff on their phones and computers that should not leave their computers and accounts. Imagine having your kids classmates find your intimate pictures on some drive they used to copy something your kid gave them. All this has reduced with cloud managed services with activation locks and 2FA and password mangers built into them. Yes they can lock you out one day, but it’s better than people having access to it.

If you are serious about your personal computer, switch to Linux before you start hating those companies. You are not the target audience anymore and you shouldn’t be disappointed about it.

I use Linux for most things, macOS for streaming and surfing the web (private relay and 4k native works great on M1) and windows when I have to deal with others having windows only accounting software sometime.

Moved my Framework laptop to Bluefin and my gaming desktop to Bazzite early last year. Zero regrets, zero issues. I'm not new to Linux by any means, I've been dabbling since a kid. But in adulthood, I had given up on having Linux as my daily driver because I just wanted my main computers to work, I didn't want maintaining them to be a hobby. That's not been an issue with Bluefin or Bazzite. I'm sure it's not for a lot of modern Linuxes, but these ones I can vouch for at least!

Some of the key milestones for desktop Linux which I can remember:

* Office and PIM apps moved to web, no longer its a requirement.

* You can game on Linux out of the box, same performance or even better.

* Installation and hardware compatibility - it has improved a lot! Even Nvidia and Broadcom chips run easily with no tweaking of config editors.

* Old hardware still runs at same performance (mostly). If I need to upgrade its because I am doing something more like watching 4K movies, running LLMs locally or running MS teams! Not because my file browser or basic text editor is suddenly slow.

There are two major hurdles I see:

* Enterprise IT still prefers Windows or Mac because of MDM (managed devices).

* Niche tools like photo/video editing, CAD software are still Windows only (with Mac ports for some).

Regarding the Minecraft issue:

If a Minecraft Java server has the special Geyser plugin ( https://geysermc.org/ ), Minecraft Bedrock clients can connect to it, so you can stick to Minecraft Java on Linux and still play together with your kids who are on Minecraft Bedrock on their iPads.

I switched from Windows to Linux ~20 years ago because and never came back to Windows. First years I used Ubuntu and experimented with Xubuntu, Lubuntu etc. Later went to Fedora Linux with Gnome Desktop which is still my preferred Linux Distribution. Nice to see so many people thinking about free and open alternatives to big tech!

WSL and Windows Terminal has done a fantastic job at delaying my move to Linux as my primary desktop but Microsoft seems hellbent on ruining Windows.

I would gladly move to Linux from macOS if only I could get the same energy efficiency on the arm MacBooks.

For all who switched to Linux: which distro did you choose and why?

Fedora: wanted to have the newest kernel and updates due to new hardware - so far i am really satisfied; the only issue i have is that the printer does not work everytime… as a workaround i print with my iphone instead.

It's a catch 22.

The way to make Linux easy to use is basically just to pre-install it and ensure the hardware is compatible.

System 76 does this, and charges 3x as much as other OEMs.

At this point if I'm a consumer ohh Linux is 3x the price.

If you install Linux on a refurbished Thinkpad, most of the time you can get something very nice for 500$ or less.

I often dream, if I had money, of buying and refurbishing hundreds of laptops per year. Installing Linux and giving them out.

Would be better than cities handing out Chromebooks.

My experience:

I came from windows to MacOS so despite what folks bemoan about MacOS ... I still love it and it is problem free enough that I don't feel the need to do the lifting to go to Linux.

I think that's a common thing for those of who maybe haven't ridden MacOS for so long.

Windows for me is on a whole several levels of worse when I have to dive back into it. Windows feels like an OS POINTED AT ME rather than for me.

On the desktop. Laptop/mobile devices still significantly suffer under Linux compared to proprietary operating systems. The author even admits: "Tried getting Linux on my laptop over Christmas. Didn’t work." We have a lot more work remaining to claim any sort of victory.

The big challenge in linux (at least for me) is to connect and work with devices like printers or scanners. It is weird but when I connected my (now old) printer a decade ago its setup was easier and more stable. After several years and ubuntu upgrades at some point I wasn't managed to make it work at all.. And I had no luck with my scanner at all.. Luckily I don't need to use neither printer neither scanner these days but I still keep a laptop (also old) with win7 and all original drivers for such devices.

My Linux evenings usually appear 6 months down the road. It's the big updates that cause system breakdowns. This is like saying I got married in November and everything is going great. Far too early to know how far your patience will be tested before you leave.

Same! High five!

I picked manjaro because rolling updates + being more noob friendly than arch sounded good and gnome because i wanted something completely fresh than a windows layout i'm used to. Now i'm eyeing after hyprland as the next step but couldn't fimd guts to disrupt my workflow in order to get used to it

My mother in law asked for help with her computer. I went in dreading the whole windows mess - only to find somebody had set her up with Linux Mint - I was actually able to help her with her internet issue, and am so happy for that unsung hero.

I hadn't run desktop Linux in several years now. (I've run it server-side for decades.)

Out of the increasingly loud outpouring of support for desktop Linux over the past year, I went ahead and installed some distros to get back in on the action. I came to four conclusions:

1) You can play games on desktop Linux now other than Tux Racer. Cool!

2) There's less weird X11-wrangling. Thank god.

3) It's otherwise still pretty much the desktop Linux I've always known and felt mildly annoyed by.

4) The current versions of Windows and macOS have gotten to be so unbelievably annoying for no good reason that a mildly improved desktop Linux now actually seems far less annoying than the mainstream options do.

Good job, Microsoft and Apple, for giving us the year of retreating in disgust to the Linux desktop.

I've done the same, though I've used Linux in work and home for 22 years (I think 2004 was my first install).

At home I consistently gave up on Linux due to hardware and game compatibility issues.

A combination of buying a steam deck plus windows 11 pushed me back to Linux.

It is oddly peaceful using mint Linux. No adverts. No "like what you see" wall paper click bait. No news site click bait. No register with an online Microsoft account that doesn't have a no button. Just my computer.

The one annoying thing is, some games just don't play nice with wine / proton (for some reason I want to play soldier of fortune, even though I know it's not great). Others are a pain to set up. But mainly it is good enough. (I'm a gog.com junkie). So I may end up installing windows 11 lts. Though I did that with windows 10 and it was lacking some DLLs that some old games needed and was pretty much unfixable.

In case of small enterprises, what are the options for migrating to Ubuntu for all remote users?

How does one have an MDM solution? Most of the solutions out there are poor on Ubuntu or need lots of work to get things right. Can anyone provide a reference architecture/solution that allows them to be SOC2 compliant? But also not have high friction for developers and more importantly not have bigger overheads on process or investment?

Since it is paid, how is he going with hardware accelerated video decoding on YouTube, Netflix or Amazon Prime?

Which I never got to work properly on the laptop/netbook I owned until 2024.

I have old computers. Windows 10 is dead and Windows 11 will not install on old hardware. I put Debian 13 on my wife’s computer.

At first she found it really frustrating, but then reality set in: she didn’t really know Windows either. On Linux there is pretty broad capability to solve your own problem if you can get over fear of a terminal.

Her favorite game runs faster on Debian so that helps.

What's the best backup software on Linux? Something that works like Time Machine on macOS or Veeam on Windows. So one full backup then incremental ones at any given X hours/days and also browsable on file level for individual file restoring.

Proof that this is the year of Linux on the Desktop!

People interested in similar experiences should check out this podcast/series of videos where two Windows/Mac users try desktop Linux and report out on their experiences.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2888221/check-out-pcworlds-n...

I recently rebuilt my home rig with some hardware upgrades, including a motherboard and cpu upgrade.

I use a MacBook and spend a majority of my workday in Ubuntu Linux.

The absolute only reason I installed windows on the home machine is because gaming is still essentially nonexistent in the Linux sphere.

If a flavor of Linux can catch up and run everything that can be run on windows I’d happily switch. I imagine a good chunk of the windows market would as well.

I replaced windows with linux 30 years ago.

Then i replaced linux with mac os.

Cook, keep in mind that if you keep dumbing down Mac OS I can switch back to linux in 24 hours.

I have been primarily in the tiling window manager space for the past 5 years… that said I’ve been driving Cosmic on my NixOS workstation and I’m really impressed… it looks great, is simple, performs well and does tiling quite well. It’s not going to take me away from Niri, but it’s my goto suggestion now for any one getting into Linux.

Sadly. For streaming (pcpanel, streamdeck, avermedia cards) is bad :/ is the only reason I kept a win11 partition arround

I moved from 15 years of macOS to Linux (Omarchy in my case). I was mostly using the terminal and am therefore super happy with my choice now. I wrote more at https://www.ssp.sh/blog/macbook-to-arch-linux-omarchy/, in case of interest.

I ran Archlinux as my main driver on both PC and Laptop for more than a decade but after having the opportunity to use a Windows machine with WSL and eventually WSL2, I felt like I had access to the best of both worlds: a Linux terminal for development (bash + tmux + vim, now bash + zellij + neovim) without the hassle of updates breaking things every few months and a out-of-the-box native gaming experience.

But with the enshitification of Windows (first all the spam and ads on the Start menu, then Microsoft forcing you to have an account to be able to use the machine and the expensive license for Windows Professional if you want access to Hyper-V, which I did), I did some research, tried a few new distros (Manjaro, Bazzite and CachyOS) and settled for CachyOS (gaming support was the main driver, based on Archlinux was secondary).

I do everything I did on Windows and some more: all the terminal stuff plus browsing, CAD modeling, 3D printing / slicing, Office stuff... I miss nothing. No more double partition to boot into Windows when I want to game.

My RX 9070 XT runs smoothly with no driver issues whatsoever. I even have tested the waters running some LLMs with LM Studio and that also worked out of the box.

The only thing that has been a bit meh are Teams and Slack and I believe that has to do with the fact that I ran them in Firefox. Once I ran Slack on Chromium, noise canceling was again available.

2009 was the year of Linux on desktop for me. 17 years later, after going back and forth between macOS and Windows, it feels good to be back home.

One last note in my random ramble is that I do not have as much spare time as before, and I had heard this from other people back in the day whenever I'd say I ran Archlinux on my machines, so I am going to repeat what others have said to me: it's really nice to not have to worry about much, be able to sit down and get productive right away. To me, CachyOS and KDE have made that idea my actual experience and for that I am grateful.

I switched my main everyday machine to Ubuntu last May, no regrets, it's a superior experience day to day.

If only I could use recent Apple hardware with Linux :)

A year ago I was about to switch from Linux to Mac for that reason after 25 years using Linux (although I really don't like MacOS). But then Apple released their Glassy OS and so I just bought a used Lenovo for 300€ with 1 year warranty ...

I have been using Fedora comfortably as my main os on a framework for the last 18 months and I have had no issues. I do just think for all that I do, lab work, coding, and gaming. I also run debian on mnt pocket reform and tbh I think it is OSes' like Linux that allow devices like that to exist. Windows and Mac just aren't options.

> I picked CachyOS rather than a better-known distro like Ubuntu because it’s optimized for modern hardware, and I had heard that it’s easy to install and set up for gaming,

Uh what?? I can’t think of a more easy to use Linux one that’s most supported for everything then… Ubuntu..

I came back to Windows when Windows 10 came out and everything is going great too.

Everything just works. Snappy. Professional awesome native tools (Office, Affinity series, Directory Opus, Visual Studio, AutoHotkey,...)