I have had a long relationship with using Windows and Linux. First off, many years ago, Ubuntu. Before Snaps. It worked well, but compatibility with stuff is very limited. Good for a web browser PC, not good for the daily.

Lubuntu was my go to for a long time, LXDE was a very light desktop and the whole desktop would take 150-300MB of RAM, where Windows took 2-3GB, and even Ubuntu took 600-800 MB (which was a lot ten years ago).

I’d tried many distros - Slackware, Fedora, Mandriva, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, even used Manjaro for a few months, but at the time, the same problems were always present - limited support for anything. Nobody had working GPU drivers in the kernel - all were fb basic drivers that didn’t give you much if any hardware acceleration. Nvidia was proprietary. ATi was proprietary. Their drivers required specific kernels, and would break on anything else. Ditto Intel. Wireless drivers were almost nonexistent. Laptop power management was nonexistent. X Window System is a spaghetti monster.

I’d wanted to Linux for a long time, but these road blockers have always been a problem, and thus I kept running Windows, optimizing it to the 11’s to keep it running smooth.

Enter Valve.

Their real attempt to run games on Linux via Steam Deck, and all the supporting work they did to make that happen smoothly was a game changer. Now, AMD has an open source gpu driver built into the kernel, so does Intel. Nvidia also, but their open source driver needs to cook before it’s actually useful. KDE has a good desktop environment ecosystem now. Proton lets you run almost any game in Linux at native performance.

Early this year, I went all in on Fedora when PCVR Streaming became a working thing. Now we have flatpaks to eliminate the distro release problem. Now we have good drivers - so good wireless pcvr works better in Linux than in Windows on the same system. Linux kernel even has seen a huge upgrade in performance and reliability in part due to this shift, and especially the valve programmers that have made even the old amd graphics drivers work more reliably.

The big difference is, where Windows 11 takes 5-9 GB RAM at the desktop, a similar setup in Fedora (startup apps and stuff) takes 1-3. That’s a big memory budget savings if you’re pinched for RAM.

Now why Fedora KDE and not Arch, CachyOS, or another focused distro? Fedora combines the traditional setup with flatpaks, and they do put effort into making sure updates don’t set your PC on fire. Normal people can use it. It has all the features you’re looking for in regard to general use.

I make music and my music plugin library doesn’t like Linux. Also professional visual creative programs are not ported yet, and I don’t wanna use gimp etc.

I’m ready, but for creatives, it doesn’t seem to be there yet.

I didn’t always want to have to fix 2-3 things just so I can do 1 thing. Don’t get me wrong, I dislike Windows, but things just work and I rarely have issues.

I’m surprised those people exist

I was on & off with Linux for decades. It was usually some minor problem that would take a weekend to fix, often driver or audio-video related. And GRUB errors were an early end to many experiments.

But about 3 years ago, Windows started crashing and I couldn’t figure it out. After much troubleshooting, I finally installed Linux Mint and have had no real problems.

I’d also say AI, used with caution to troubleshoot, is a better tool than google search by a country mile.

After literally 5 or 6 hours of trying to get it to install, I was only on it for about an hour before I somehow borked it. Rather than spending even more time trying to unbork it, I just went back to my Windows disk image and carried on where I left off.

I want to switch, it sings to my autism like a fat-titted siren, but it’s still too arcane and way too sensitive to different hardware combinations. Windows, for all its faults, rarely gives me trouble simply running. I don’t need to research specific driver versions or avoid buying certain brands of GPU. I don’t need to edit the bootloader using a third-party pre-boot program just to get the OS to load beyond the logo (I had to do this on my last attempt to switch to Linux, and it was something I read on a random blog on page 3 of the search results, it wasn’t mentioned in the official documentation).

I don’t mind learning new things, it’s one of the things that excites me about switching to Linux, but the learning needs to be pleasant and easily-accessible. If I have to spend hours searching for a dude with a personal blog who guides me through editing systems files just so I can get to the desktop, something has gone awry. If the OS can work out-of-the-box with no h4x0r fiddling needed from me, then we can talk. Until then, I just don’t have enough will to live to spend on it.

used both for many years. after windows 11 telematics and the rise of proton/vulkan i finally made the full %100 switch last year. Part of an effort to completely remove FAAMG from my life. Also, for me at least there’s nothing like the feeling of solving your own issue and having the machine working as well or better than windows. Windows crashes all the time as well. remember the Blue-Screen Of Death? I had one laptop for years on windows that required dongles for bluetooth only to discover it had a latent bluetooth adapter AFTER i switched over to linux that was not even listed in the manual or parts list.

Knowing your not sending everything you own to some server in redmond washington, fuck microsoft. its a way of living, not having to rely on some corporation for everything, instead i rely on GNU…

combined with airgap methods, redundancies, ad hoc solutions and robust piracy method, linux os is just one part of a clandestine operation.

also debian, linux MX rn

check out distrowatch

Set up gentoo while in college. Switched major to IT, but stayed on gentoo for about 5 years.

Got out of college and was dual booting windows for gaming. Eventually got a job in IT that was managing a large Windows environment with some non-windows infrastructure.

Realized that the world runs on windows. Eventually lost interest in figuring out why things (audio, video, wifi) would stop working and having no community with a similar setup as mine. Got tired of evaluating random config files that didn’t have any cohesion with ther OS. Additionally, I started using enterprise hardware which had even better windows support than consumer-grade.

Then there’s the app support. I have software for my vehicles or stereos that only runs on windows for example. At another time was a DJ and the best software was on Windows.

I still test distro out occasionally but it’s dumb shit that keeps me from using it as a general purpose OS. I’ve tried popos and mint and find it usable but had problems with gpu drivers.

At the end of the day though, I just need a browser, and a few apps that only run on windows. Why would I dual boot and maintain 2 OS’s when I’m perfectly capable of dealing with only 1?

I’ve been on debian13 for over a year. On a laptop. It’s fine.

Last time, I upgraded my graphics card, and X had a conniption. I was on mint or Ubuntu. Before that, no WiFi drivers on for a dell laptop, definitely Ubuntu.