Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

Past week I got to know about InputActions [0] so I installed Kubuntu 25.10 to test it, and it is very promising. Linux never had a proper mouse gesture support, and I won't go into details, but this was one of the three dealbreakers for me. The other one was a Windows-only app which ran so sluggishly on all previous tests I've made over the years, but with Wine 11 the app is just as good and fast as on Windows. Though I first need to populate the registry with an icon set. But now with AI this can be easily automated (letting it write a script I then run). The third is some custom electron-based launcher which is heavily Windows-customized, which I will need to migrate to Linux, but also this should be easy with AI.

For the first time I feel like there is a real path for me to switch to Linux, and it's about time!

[0] https://github.com/taj-ny/InputActions

It's still not quite there yet, for me. A lot of older games (which I'm a big fan of) won't run well or at all - and support for Nvidia is still not great.

If I could get within even 10% of the performance I get on Windows, and know I could safely choose to play some old 2000's game or something that just released just fine, I really wouldn't mind. But it feels like a roulette wheel and some important game I wanted to play just may not work, or may run terribly.

Yeah my 70 year old father purchased for the first time a Macbook after being a Windows user his entire life.

So happy to see so many new Linux users as a long time user and developer for the platform. I want to welcome anyone and PLEASE feel free to use AI to make awesome stuff or solve problems. The FOSS community is still adapting to the new influx of developers and tools, vibe coders, etc.

Be cautious with running commands or making package changes based on suggestions from AI tools. Ask clarifying questions and it may realize doing so would either break your system or be attempting to vastly modify it.

My advice is get Docker installed and do most of your stuff in there. If you mess up and expose a Postgres container it will get hacked, but not escape the container, whereas if you install Postgres as a system package and make that same mistake you will be fully owned.

> Adobe Suite: Runs via Winboat. Far from perfect (no video acceleration, laggy at times), but functional

That’s not acceptable to most professionals and one of the things holding me back on a Mac.

Adobe has so many different cross-platform layers that a solution like Proton may never be viable, practically speaking.

For Photoshop alone I remember reading that they still have some custom MacApp Pascal UI code, along with HTML/CSS/JS rendered by WebKit. And there used to be a flavor of Flash as well in mix, to name a few. Lightroom had its own custom Lua UI binding.

The only hope for fast and reliable Adobe-apps-on-Linux IMO is through a Windows VM with GPU pass-through and a focus on making that as easily and seamless as possible.

I'm an Apple guy through and through, but I am in Georgia Techs OMSCS program. For some of the classes, you need to use a VM that doesn't play nicely with Apple Silicon. So I went over to Microcenter and picked up a cheap PC with Windows. I loathe using it, even if I am in the VM the whole time. I'm amazed at the amount of ads that pop up and for a while, sound just didn't work. Like not with headphones or just out of the normal speakers until eventually a random update fixed it. I get not wanting to be in the Apple ecosystem, but at this point in time I don't know why you would want Windows and not go for Linux.

My wife was complaining about her Windows 11 laptop crashing. I tried everything and even did fresh installs. Still crashing (and honestly pretty slow). I gave up on Windows and installed Ubuntu and Chromium for her. She can instagram, facebook, save her memes, and its all fast. No crashes. She's a happy camper now. I think a lot of (even) non technical people would like Linux a lot more than they realize if they gave it a shot.

That is exactly why I ditched Microsoft for Mac thirty years ago. I’ve never looked back or regretted leaving MSFT during my "formative" years; in fact, I’m glad I did. That said, it’s great to see Linux stay the course and build a real alternative for PC users.

I’ve always wanted to try running Linux on one of my Macs, but I never seem to find the time to actually explore it. One of these days...

I finally installed Windows 11 last year so I could use Wifi 6E. Other than that, it is certainly a downgrade. With some debloating and ExplorerPatcher, its mostly the same as Windows 10 now, but I'm praying that an update wont brick my install. Thankfully the latest forced feature update didn't affect me.

At this point, the only thing holding me back is Adobe Lightroom. Which even that can technically run in a browser.

The only tools pinning me to Windows were photo editing apps (Capture One, Adobe), and some music apps (Reason, a whole bunch of other apps) that I barely used. Cut over to Debian about 4 years ago when my laptop started having thermal issues and Covid encouraged me to buy a tower desktop machine. Haven't looked back, it's been so much more productive. The strange and toxic-to-me design choices in the Win11 UI helped motivate the rapid transition.

The only thing that's caused any issue is power management, I'm fairly sure it's not optimal, but it's still better than Win11. That's purely down to lack of effort on my part, and basically setting it for max performance because it's not important to me for a desktop machine. Everything (and I mean everything - sound, video, wifi, bluetooth) else is 100% out of the box working on mid-range commodity hardware, albeit with excessive RAM for my needs. Some of it is a bit clumsy looking in places, but it did look weird on Windows too with some of the apps.

When I did have trouble, it was not like I could get support from Microsoft as the community forum is a joke, but with Linux at least I stand a fighting chance of working around any potential problems.

Is there anything on Windows I miss? No.

Is there anything on Mac that I miss? Yes, there's a few things that I like about MacOS (pre-glass) but I have a MacBook Air for those which is good for occasional use but not as a daily driver.

I switched my parents to linux during the gnome 2 days and have given them a consistent environment ever since (kept them on mate).

It is true, they could not do this themselves and sometimes my mom can test my patience, but this is the way if you can do it. (Hint: get a remote desktop with shared view working first :).

Really, the stronghold for windows is their office suite (other family require Word/Excel for work), enterprise domain integration (work to home pc familiarity), and, to a weaker extent, gaming. Gaming is why I still keep an install of windows on my pc.

At work, my employer is still running Microsoft products for the desktop environment. At home, assuming I'm using Microsoft products at all (rare), it's from inside the Chromium web browser on Linux or BSD.

I made the same switch but all linux always feels slightly jank. I think Macos is the best premium decoupling from Winblows, but that comes with its own ecosystem lock in. I use all three equally daily and it just drives me insane. Lots of games on Windows ONLY work on windows due to anti cheat. Ie BattleField 6.... MacOs Gaming is non existent and any attempt with say wine/parallels or whatever brings you back to windows.... Linux / PopOS / Cosmic is so close to being there but the gaming restrictions takes you back to Windows.. I tried the whole WSL2 but lots of apps need so much tuning to work properly.. Ie android studio needs to be specially configured to use the WSL2 paths and it gets broken fast.

I'll copy my comment on another article here:

2025 has had some of the biggest Linux hype in recent times:

- Windows 10 went EOL and triggered a wave of people moving to Linux to escape Windows 11

- DHH's adventures in Linux inspired a lot of people (including some popular coding streamers/YouTubers) to try Linux

- Pewdiepie made multiple videos about switching to Linux and selfhosting

- Bazzite reported serving 1 PB of downloads in one month

- Zorin reported 1M downloads of ZorinOS 18 in one month and crossed the 2M threshold in under 3 months

- I personally recall seeing a number of articles from various media outlets of writers trying Linux and being pretty impressed with how good it was

- And don't forget Valve announced the Steam Machine and Steam Frame, which will both run Linux and have a ton of hype around them

In fact, I think that we will look back in 5 or 10 years and point at 2025 as the turning point for Linux on the desktop.

I tried to make this shift, but managed to somehow brick Linux Mint, so now I'm back on Windows for now...

I was already not very impressed when I attempted to okay a video file, and VLC told me I didn't have the right codec installed, and I had to run a shell command to get the codec... I have to open a shell to watch a common video file?

But then while attempting to install some packages to install Steam (which I also needed shell commands for...), I updated some kernel package, as instructed, rebooted my machine, and now Mint just sits there doing nothing right after I get through the bootloader. Can't seem to run any commands to recover either.

Bricking Mint is annoying, but I was much more astonished that I saw so many people hold up Mint as this beacon of user friendly Linux distros, but to do even the most basic things, I had to start running commands on the shell. That is NOT user friendly. I'll probably try again soon, but I'm pretty disappointed in my first experience.

I used https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat on a family member's new Win11 install and it actually works reasonably snappy. I wouldn't be want to caught dead with it, but I couldn't convince this one to go for macOS.

I just hope that more people are forced into this! I understand that the transition, learning path can be daunting but once someone's head gets the mindset on a Unix OS there is basically no turning back.

I'll switch to emacs if things go on like this.

The two things I find unacceptable are no local accounts and non consensual reboots. The latter may need legislation. They don’t even notify you that it happened. They try to restart apps and put things back the way they were but you can still tell that your house was broken into by the missing data that wasn’t saved.

Without knowing anything internally about how microsoft builds:

Product driven development and too many managers with MBAs led to this problem.

I'm not against someone's preferences, but this looks like an anecdotal story. Windows, as much as it's hated here, still works fine for the vast majority of people. What's more, you have higher risk of having problems when running Linux.

They lost me at Vista lol

In all honesty, it was easy for me to switch to Linux because I was always more interested in the computer itself rather than what useful things I could do with it, so I actually never missed a particular application. I also was more interested in making a game run in Wine with maximum effort rather than actually playing it (I did play countless hours of World of Warcraft though...)

Give it a few more years and Linux will complete its inevitable evolution into Microsoft, same consolidation, same gatekeeping, just with better slogans and a smug sense of moral superiority.

There was a post here a while back saying that Microsoft will eventually switch to Linux instead of maintaining Windows. Given all the negativity around Windows this seems more and more likely (I haven’t used Windows myself for over 20 years so I have no idea what its like now. Last time I used it, it was XP)

I can't believe how many times I have to click "decline" now to install Windows 11.

Office 365? no thanks. How about a cheaper version? No thanks. Did you know you could use it for free. Okay. How about XBox. No! Am I forgetting one?

All that before I can even use the computer. Ridiculous.

I have always used Linux personally, only work made me use Windows and Mac (controlled endpoints) for the past 20 years. For 4 years I have my own company, 100% Linux.

I know that some things are not as nice on Linux (ie you need to do MS365 in a browser for example, and MS365 files from a NAS in OnlyOffice is not great, etc). But other than that, I just love living in Gnome. What more do you need that just a clean desktop with some tiling, some virtual desktops, a clock, battery indicator and windows with your stuff? I don't even know. I like that I can set up Linux in 10 min.

I recently set up a Windows 11 machine for a neighbor, it took so long! And it offered dozens of things I didn't want, to the point that I began feeling a bit nervous towards my neighbor (no you don't need that, no not that, no that's just tracking, no why would you want your desktop in the cloud?). Then when finished... it wasn't finished, I need printer drivers, an HP package with drivers and stuff for the BIOS etc etc etc. So much time.

Microsoft has always been crap. It's success is contributed to hostile business practices and familiarity not quality of product. IBM and Gates partnered to have an OS installed on its computers to gain customers. With no actual OS Gates bought 86-DOS from Tim Patterson and partnered with IBM. This created a direct competitor to Apple. Then Gates partnered with all other PC manufacturers to do the same. This paved way for Microsoft to dominate Apple because they weren't tied to any specific hardware. Then came Active Directory to solidify business use. The businesses rolled with it and users learned Windows which deepened home PC use. Every app "just worked" BECAUSE of the popularity and developers directly targeted it since most people used it, not because it was a good product. Their file system NTFS is crap. Their registry is a mess. Everything about Windows is just awful.

Windows UI has also gotten progressively more ugly, buggy and laggy. From a cursory glance, Win 11 looks a lot cleaner than Win 10/8/7, but just opening the Start Menu is a chore. Rather than fix the underlying issue, Microsoft started pre-rendering the File Explorer in memory to improve launch times. It might've started with letting go of their QA team, but the engineering culture there seems completely broken and clueless.

I'm currently running Fedora on my gaming laptop, and while I do suffer some loss in FPS, it is relatively close to Windows and seems to be getting better.

My CPU can run Windows 11 fine, but what I don't tolerate is full-screen ad pop-ups on my desktop.

When Win10 popped up an ad for Win11, I moved fully to Linux the next day.

I switched back in 2022 to Ubuntu 20. I barely knew JavaScript at the time. I had zero problems doing so. Maybe my use case is narrow enough--I just use it for dev work and web browsing--but it was the least daunting process ever. Everything worked out of the box basically. Learning bash and unix changed my life. I don't understand how one could complain about Linux unless they've never even tried it

That said, I threw NetBSD on a P4 tower and it took me half a day just to get a GUI and an internet connection. Was kind of fun,though.

I only need Windows for a few programs, mostly licensed EDA programs that [dumb] companies didn't manage to port to Linux. Most engineers who use EDA tools are into linux so having to run a few things on Windows is a pain. The 'A' in EDA stands for automation and Windows is not the OS for that. I installed a standalone WIN10, then enabled the TPM and installed WIN11. Seems pretty solid but I had to guard against MSFT repeatedly trying to lead me into servitude.

I really wish linux had a decent answer for DRM-protected VST plugins. Yes you can run stuff in WINE but I need to be able to use iLok and the bullshit DRM systems for about a dozen other publishers.

I am so glad that gaming on linux is viable. I wish my music production workflows were too.

One of the things I like most about CachyOS is that the configuration is all just in text files, one of the things I like least is that I am never quite sure whether to modify the systemd unit settings that are usually in /usr/lib somewhere, the app settings in /etc or the personal configs in ~/.config. For packages that I am unfamiliar with, I usually end up trying all three locations until I notice that my changes seem to stick.

The installer also completely broke the Windows partition that came with the workstation even though I was planning on dual booting, but oh well, no great loss there.

Other than that, there are some small conveniences and apps that I miss from MacOS (the mac calendar and mail apps are just so nice!) but the Niri window manager is just so amazing that at this point I don't think there's anything that could make me switch back.

My main machines have been running Linux for years now, but there are still some things that are really bothering me. For one, I think dealing with virtual machines are still somewhat painful on Linux. VM managers continue to be clunky (I believe KDE is working on a new one), and GPU acceleration, let alone partitioning, isn’t really a thing for Windows guests which is something that works out of the box on WSL. Another frustrating part is the lack of a proper alternative to Windows Hello that allows you to set up passkeys using TPMs.

For me I made the switch in 1998 when Windows Me was so terrible it was unusble. I went to CompUSA and found this cool box of cd roms with a lizard logo - suse linux and I was done with MS forever (except at work).

My main operating system is Linux since 2005 or so, or actually late 2004. I still use Win10 on my laptop, for various reasons; in part to test java code and ruby code on windows, in part due to elderly relatives.

Win11 really annoyed many users though. That's actually interesting, since Microsoft committed to it yet it gets harder for Microsoft to retain the people. Linux is unfortunately way too complex to really break the desktop system (and no, Wayland, GNOME, KDE, are not going to change any of that either), but if it were, Microsoft would probably have lost its de-facto monopoly already. Either way it is interesting how much people hate Win11. Microsoft really committed to driving down the cliff here.

For literally decades we've hoped that Linux will get like Windows in some crucial areas like sleep and hibernations support for laptops, supported first-party drivers, correct and reliable multi-monitor setups, games, etc. Never ever could I imagine that Linux parity, which I'd like to argue is closer than ever before, would be reached by Windows getting worse in exactly those areas we, the Linux freaks, got told to get Windows for -- sleep not working, graphics drivers bringing whole systems down, incoherent configuration etc. Only games got better and we have to thank Valve for that.

I'm not sure that "multi-compose" chrome bug is a windows-only thing though. I use chrome on Linux (slackware) with an nvidia card, and I get that issue all the time if I try to open more than one chrome WINDOW. Multiple tabs are ok, and SOMETIMES multiple windows are ok, but more often than not, I can only have one chrome window.

Just saw a video on YouTube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDwt9AiItqU - starts at 3:25) that talked about the windows experience in the present day and I totally forgot about booting up and magically having software appear I never asked for due to some partnerships Microsoft made. I've been on Mac for 16 years/iPhone for 10 years and have never looked back. The most annoying thing about Apple is when the OS updates and suddenly you have a different experience like liquid glass. But like all things I usually get used to it after about a week and most of the times I see the benefits (in this case, even more screen real estate).

Speaking of "Content Creation", I'd also like to add the Affinity Suite. I don't particularly like it after being bought by Canva, but it works almost flawlessly on Linux.

You can even download a ready-to-run AppImage (no need to tinker with Wine settings) from here: https://github.com/ryzendew/Linux-Affinity-Installer/release...

I just wish Affinity would release a native port, but in the meantime, this works really good.

The only thing keeping my secondary / gaming / file-server computer on Windows is Backblaze. The main obstacle to me switching from macOS to Linux is Office 365 (doesn't work on Wine).

Kind of interesting after using Manjaro recently, I had stayed away from Ubuntu for a while and started researching to see if it had gotten any better. I found a bunch of blog and reddit posts about how Linux sucks so bad and how much superior Windows and MacOS are.

Only to see this article today. lol

I guess at this point, whatever works for you and your situation is what you should use and ignore all the static. I use Linux for the majority of my dev work, but have the inability to move off Adobe products for the photo and video processing work I do. Something I've found that Linux doesn't compete very well with MS and Apple. I would love to finally get off of one or the other, but I have one foot in each because they both excel in different areas.

Well, Linux reached ~5% market share in 2025. Imagine the incremental market share they have. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1lpepvq/linux_breaks...

My only issue is that i am not a developer, I am heavily reliant on Excel, i know it inside and out and just not sure whether OpenOffice supports excel files. In the past it barely did.

I think Linux adoption will rapidly grow with the adoption of LLMs.

Esoteric errors are now resolvable with a simple query. Often with just a few cut and paste commands.

This improves the rough edges to a point that Linux is now a reasonable option for a larger cohort of previously unfeasible users.

I switched after running basic dev tools became genuinely unusable (randomly freezing for minutes, start menu just didn't work, crashes all the time) despite being on good, new hardware.

I never wanted to switch before because I just wanted an OS that worked, didn't require babysitting, and was compatible with apps. But clearly, Windows has dropped the ball on this.

I always like to chime in on these things that I've been a delighted Arch user for about a year now, for similar reasons. Took a lot of setup, but it's dialed now and just works. My computer belongs to me again for the first time in years.

I should really do more to evangelize. It's not ok to use an OS monopoly to degrade and squeeze your users' often primary career and creative tool to your own short term ends, making their lives worse and worse. And it's such a delight to get out from under.

Not sure the situation for normies currently, but for power users, definitely dual boot and give it a try.

My main reason for getting into Linux, forget the version or distribution maybe Slackware or RH at the time (later loved Debian the most) was that windows in that era was horribly unstable, BSOD etc