Been a full-time Linux user since 1999 — fed up with Windows … I guess it would have been 98? I found Red Hat Linux on CD at, I think, Office Depot. It was a dive into the deep end. I was having x-server problems at first, and a math professor buddy told me where to find the config file and how to fire up vi. I think I probably spent two days sorting out how to use vi. But I never looked back. Found ways early on of making sure I was compatible with colleagues and others and, of course, have needed to spin up Windows VMs over the years for things as silly as getting Adobe DRM content to display. But it’s all so easy, now, though I do see a lot of good advice here about being certain about compatibility, etc., if you’re on bleeding-edge hardware (given what you posted, I seriously doubt you’ll have any issues).

I’ve used Fedora as a daily driver for at least the last seven or eight years, Ubuntu before that. I’ve run Arch on a few things and always run Ubuntu on servers (just got used to it). Windows will very quickly become something you don’t miss at all.

Having said all that, I’ve never been a gamer of any kind, and I know that makes a big difference.

Been using Linux for over 10 years at this point. Haven’t considered going back to Windows. Even put my boomers on Fedora with GNOME without issue.

Full time Linux user for about 6 years now. Both at work and at home.

If games is what’s holding you back, don’t worry about it so much. There are very few games that don’t run on Linux these days, like you said, because of anticheat, or just because the underlying company is horrible. Valorant comes to mind for games, Epic and EA for companies.

Some example of game i’ve been playing on Linux, with no issues: Cyberpunk, Elden Ring, Everspace 2, Dying Light, Sekiro, Warhammer 40k: Darktide, Guild Wars 2, Doom Eternal, Elite Dangerous, Valheim, Minecraft etc…

There’s more things working than not working these days.

That said, I would also be lying if I said there isn’t going to be a learning curve. It’s a little bit more work (especially for games not available on Steam), but it’s really not that bad, and the community is very helpful.

Current user. It’s been my primary OS since around 2001.

People have a lot of opinions. My TLDR is if you’re interested, try it out.

Last time I tried Linux was 23 or so years ago. I had no idea what I was doing or at that time knew how to figure it out. That being said, I want to use Linux but am apprehensive.

I see computers as tools. I think that tools should be intuitive and fairly easy to use. My brief experience with Linux left me feeling that it requires a fair amount of time dedicated to setup and upkeep. That’s time I would much rather spend on other endeavors.

Windows has gotten to a point where I don’t like using it. I will not switch to Apple products, full stop. But I won’t make Linux a full-time hobby.

What should I do, friends?

I use Linux wherever I can and after spending years trying different distros I’ve always come back to Mint. Although I enjoy tinkering with new user interfaces, spending time fixing problems instead of actually using the OS eventually got old. Once set up Mint works for years without a hiccup.

Microsoft’s telemetry, increasing invasiveness pushing ads, and general dumbing down of their OS so it’s usable for people who don’t know what to do when they reach the edge of the mouse pad has gotten ridiculous.

Microsoft’s intent to move Windows to the cloud should make more people question using it. Despite having to pay for Windows it seems Microsoft has decided that we’re what’s actually for sale, not the operating system.

I’ve been using linux almost exclusively since somewhere around 2008 or so. The main thing is to ensure that you are still able to do what you want to do with your computer, regardless of the OS. You may have to seek out some alternatives to programs that you’re currently using, but there’s a pretty good chance that there’s something available. Check out the available software on the Mint install you currently have, and check out protondb to see if the games you’re interested in are compatible. I’d recommend creating a backup of your current system before you do anything just in case you need to revert back.

On a distro like Mint, I’ve never (or at least very rarely) run into any issues outside of NVIDIA drivers, and even that isn’t too bad given that it’s a slower-moving distro and Cinnamon isn’t using Wayland anyway. I put Mint on my parents’ computer since it ended up being easier for them than Windows was. That doesn’t mean that you won’t have any issues, but Mint is pretty easy to use, and they have a reasonably active forum for asking for help.

For what it’s worth, Windows 11 is pretty lousy. You get ads shoved everywhere they can shove them, and their telemetry is pretty invasive, imo. That’s not even mentioning their future plans where everyone gets pushed to their cloud services. If you have any questions, please ask and I’ll answer as best I can.

I have a T500 on Mint that I don’t use as much atm, due to being on an M1 MacBook Air. My ideal future setup, though, is a desktop with Linux and another PC for windows for software I can’t get on it, so there’s no issue for dual-boot partitions that I’ve increasingly seen being a thing with Windows.

I’ve been using linux for years ( and before that solaris and sunos and … ). My lab computers are running linux exclusively. For people coming from windows wanting to check it out, I’d suggest installing VirtualBox on your windows pc, from https://www.virtualbox.org/, and then installing linux to that ( for instance, download the install image of some linux, is like ubuntu, so the file would be from https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop, and give the to virtualbox for the client install ). For a lot of linux uses this windows+linux arrangement can be optimal, since you can still play windows games, or other tightly OS bound windows apps, but if you fullscreen virtualbox its almost identical to just having linux installed directly.

My Linux journey is meandering and has a less than satisfying arc, but now I feel like typing it out for all of you. You’re welcome.

I grew up using a Macintosh and started using Microsoft on Windows 97. We were a a multi-computer household at that point, (thanks, Dad!) but I still preferred my Mac for the next decade or so. I was much more in-tune with Unix at that point, but I went to the darkside for a few years for school and eventually found myself ready to build my own PC in 2011.

One of my buddies at the time was super in to trying new Linux distros and would always show them off to me, so he convinced me to try Ubuntu on it. I decided to dual-boot since it would primarily be a gaming PC. I was default Ubuntu and needed a command to be Windows and that worked great for awhile. But as I started using Windows more and more, I eventually reached a point where deleting the Ubuntu partition made more sense. Keeping up with both wasn’t helping me out.

Now, it’s fully Windows 10 and will not be updating past that, but I’m also using a Steam Deck, so at least I get some Unix that way!

I certainly won’t be going back to a Mac, but I am considering a full Linux boot for my next build. That’s a couple years out still. My baby was built to last, and after a couple upgraded GPUs and harddrives, she still hasn’t disappointed me. I’m definitely more of a GUI user than a command line user though. I can navigate a command line, but it’s a constant game of looking stuff up.

No matter, it’s super exciting to see Linux rising up the ranks in terms of the amount of games that will work! I’m very excited to see how the community grows from this.

I don’t currently use the computer much, but I have Windows 10 and Linux set up for dual boot on my old desktop and primarily use Linux there. My kid uses Windows for playing games and sometimes I do, too, but I don’t game much these days.

My laptop has Windows 11, but they keep filling it with all kinds of advertising and I absolutely hate advertising. I am very tempted to replace it entirely with Linux.

I’ve toyed around with different distros several years back and at this point I’ve settled on Ubuntu simply because any time I search for answers to problems that crop up, the results are primarily geared for Ubuntu users and being middle aged, I lack the patience to dig deeper to learn how to fix something on a less popular distro. Having something with longer term support is nice for me, too, because I’ve been stuck with horribly slow DSL internet living out in a rural area, so downloading updates all the time is not trivial for me either. For a little bit I thought I wanted to be bleeding edge and then I realized it was pretty impractical and unnecessary for my situation.

I used to use primarily linux on my desktop and laptop but haven’t in a long time. Back then it was because I couldn’t afford newer hardware and so linux (I used to use xfce and then later lxqt) performed great on older hardware. But now that I can afford it, I have been using Macs though I still dip into a headless linux VM for some development when the need arises.

I tried Linux Mint, and I absolutely hated it.

It (and apparently Linux as a whole) lacks basic accessibility features one can expect in Windows, like colorblind or grayscale filters.

The rate at which I ran into problems in trying to do basic things was maddening. I like tinkering with my PC, don’t get me wrong, but I need my computer to be reliable enough to count on when I need to get something done in a hurry, or when I’m having a bad brain day and really don’t want to fall into a miserable troubleshooting loop tk make my day even worse.

This problem was compounded by the fact that help forums were full of assholes, including assholes who try to trick newbies into deleting their whole OS and all their potentially vital or irreplaceable data as a “joke”. Not everyone was an asshole, but there were more than enough. And there weren’t enough helpful people to actually help solve problems in the way that you can google most Windows problems and immediately find an idea of what to try. And so many people obsessed with the philosphy of FOSS, over and above the utility of the PC, who are chomping at the bit to lecture others at any moment.

It also crashed more often than Windows ever did.

I hate the way app installation works. Just let me go to a website, download the thing I want and see its description and instructions as presented by its maker, and install it. It’s so much simpler and more intuitive in practice.

And Windows a) is much better for gaming, even now, b) has numerous apps I use for which there is no true Linux equivalent, and c) has a much better user interface, even when dealing with aspects of it that are new to me.

Windows powertools and group policy editor and so on give me more than enough control. I disabled the most annoying things, like the forced restarts for updates at inconvenient times, and the telemetry.

At the end of the day, Linux offers better privacy, this is inarguably. Philosphically, I really, really want it to succeed. But it’s built by and for a very specific type of nerd, without consideration for regular users in many ways (see the point about accessibilty settings especially), or at least not with as much as Windows offers. I want to believe this might get better in future, but it’s been years and years now, and still no colorblind mode in the most highly recommened distro for new users from Windows? That is not promising.

Better privacy and the occasional fun of tinkering with it just 100% is not worth all the tradeoffs compared to Windows, for me. I’d rather devote my tinkering time to making Windows private and blicking its telemetry rather than trying to get Linux to function. The reliability and versatility is just not there.

Switched from windows to Linux about 12 years ago for everyday computing, with a windows gaming partition for about 7. Now completely Linux for 5 years or so.

I’ve heard good things about Mint. I’m more of a Gnome fan, so I stick with Fedora or Pop!_OS. Currently on Pop and still loving it. If you wanted to try either fedora or pop, I would start with Pop since it has a better out of the box experience, especially if you run an nvidia card.

The only other advice I have for new users, is to prioritize Flatpak for apps over system packages (debs, rpms, etc…)

Here is a hot take: I recommend staying with Windows 10.

I’ve been a FreeBSD porter, I’ve used Linux and BSD as primary desktop environments but gave up on Linux as a desktop and I don’t regret it. I used Mac for a while as well but never liked how it laid things out. It wasn’t intuitive.

The problem with Linux is twofold.

One, it’s not at all user-friendly. People will argue it’s gotten a lot better but there is a multitude of issues with Linux from drivers and new tech like Wayland causing problems. To the point where the last time I tried to install Fedora, it bricked before it even got to the live CD desktop because Nvidia, KDE, and Wayland are just broken for some reason, and people accept it. Even simple things in Fedora Gnome like changing my mouse movement to not have acceleration and control the mouse speed did not work via the settings GUI and I had to do some arcane commands from decades ago to get it to work. People call this user-friendly or say “Well you’re just holding Linux wrong.” I said exactly this on Reddit a few months back and got a response “What did you do to your Linux install that the mouse settings stopped working, I’ve never fucked up an install that bad!” which is exactly my next point.

Two, the Linux community is frankly, not ready for mass adoption. Linux is built from its users for its users and it turns out the average Linux user is frankly, a jerk who only thinks about their workflow and themselves. If you come to them with a problematic workflow they will blame the workflow instead of the tools that restrict the workflow. This is exactly what stops mainstream adoption. This is even the root issue of the above. People who try Linux don’t report bugs. While most people don’t report bugs, when people report bugs to open-source projects it’s met with pushback. You have to try hard to prove it’s actually a bug in the first place and you aren’t just “holding it wrong.” The entire Linux community and its mentality needs a huge overhaul and there are small pockets of Linux distros who have gotten better at this but overall the community on average is still the type to suggest “rm -rf /” to fix your drivers.

So Linux probably isn’t for you. I have the exact same desire to move away from Windows. I’ve simply just kept to Windows 10 and used the Windows 10 Debloater to remove the telemetry.