I’d like to hear people’s journeys and motivations from people who switched over the last few months, and if there were particular challenges that were faced.
My daughter is very Linux curious but she’s not going to want to learn anything about it. She just wants to play games and chat with friends. I’ll probably switch her when I upgrade and pass my current computer down.
Go with Bazzite. It just works, she can’t break it, and as long as she reboots from time to time, it’ll always be up to date. And she won’t have to learn anything to use it.
This is a great suggestion. Especially the not breaking it part.
The only other suggestion is to figure out whether KDE or Gnome desktop environment is right for her. Former more Windows-like, latter more Mac-like. And then just make sure to grab that version of Bazzite.
If you know the games she plays, you could test installing them separately ahead of time, so that there would be minimal difference when that switchover happens.
It’s mostly The Sims with mods along with whatever meme games she’s hearing about on YouTube. There’s no concern about rootkit anti-cheat or anything, and so far my experience has been almost anything on Steam will run in Linux without having to do anything. She’ll run into performance issues with her current hardware before she hits any games that aren’t compatible.
My wife wanted Linux on her tablet. She read online that Gnome was the preferred DE on touchscreens. I warned her that I personally dislike Gnome, but it’s not like I’m going to throw a minimal window manager at her, so I told her that’s fine and she should try it out.
Since I’m her tech support, I installed Garuda, a distro I already use. She played around with it, then asked if she could have desktop icons. It was stupid that she had to press a whole extra button just to see her “home screen”, she said. So I installed the desktop icons gnome extension, but it lacks basic features like either right click or drag, or maybe both. I can’t recall at the moment.
Then the onscreen keyboard wouldn’t appear automatically when using certain programs like Brave. And using the stylus to press the OSK would close it entirely. The stylus was really fidgety and oversensitive, too. I have zero touchscreen experience on Linux, so I was disappointed with gnome’s lack of GUI controls to fix these kinds of things.
She started to complain that Linux is too hard, then signed up for the 1 year extended Windows 10 support on her old laptop.
So I reinstalled Garuda with KDE this time, told her I tried something new, and she’s been happy with it so far. Turns out my wife just hates Gnome. And she expressed this hate completely unprompted.
That’s right, my love; fuck Gnome.
I’ve never been more proud.
I think GNOME 3 was intended to be nicer for touchscreens but it’s not my favourite either.
My daily driver is MATE - the spiritual continuation of GNOME 2.
Yes! Two folks swapped to nix, one to mint.
Getting VR to work has been a journey on nix. Everything on mint has gone smoothly afaik.
Windows 10 EOL (and moving) both roughly lined up, so we all decided to get away from big tech. The nix os was new, interesting, and feels very powerful when things work. Mint was a known safe choice.
Thank you for sharing! VR has been a well reported pain point, but interesting to hear that Linux Mint handled it well now. I don’t own a VR headset – which one do you have that played nice with Mint, if you don’t mind me asking? In case I ever feel like getting my own.
Ah, apologies for my terrible wording. The mint machine hasn’t tried VR for any substantial amount, while those using VR are on nixos.
Though I think there was one night where we had a quest 2 running on mint, using wivrn and xriser.
I switched maybe like two years ago now. I only had issues on one game but a bit later it just worked not sure what changed. I know EA stuff doesn’t work so haven’t really messed around with that. I check protonDB a lot to see game compatibility.
The biggest issue for me was getting a handle on a photo workflow for myself after switching and leaving lightroom/adobe behind. I use darkroom now which I’m still learning but I have a basic workflow down pretty well.
I built up a PC for my cousin for gaming and put bazzite on there, she hasn’t really noticed anything being her first personal PC so thats pretty good, I’ve gone from popOS, to arch to bazzite
Bazzite with gnome is mostly painless. I have been using that on my desktop for about a year now, I have fedora with kde on my laptop and its also pretty good.
In case you didn’t know, there’s Aurora OS which is immutable fedora with KDE plasma, very much like bazzite or any of the uBlue spins. I have been using it on a laptop for a while now and I am extremely happy with it.
I did not, but I started on fedora silverblue and rebased to bazzite because the bazzite installer wasn’t working for me a year ago. I think all in all, I prefer gnome even as a wondows expat.
I went to Linux Mint and it’s been painless. All my games I want to play run on it (through Steam).
My son is getting my old computer as a hand me down and I put Mint on it, too. I’ve installed Sober on it so he can play Roblox. I don’t know how it’ll go but we’ll see…
Yea, roblox and fortnite are the two hold backs for me switching my kids PCs since the anti cheat doesn’t apparently work on Linux. I hadn’t heard of Sober though. Hope it works out!
Sober… Roblox
It works great for my family! Only annoyance is having to run
flatpak updateoften.
I helped switch my 88 years old grandma to Mint a few months back when her laptop started to run painfully slow. I don’t think she understands that I changed her OS but she is happy with “whatever I did to her laptop”, now her laptop runs much faster and 0 problems so far for her needs, very simple needs but she actually uses it a lot!
For like a good chunk of people, all you need from a computer the news, online videos, one social media, email, banking, simple writing and printing. Linux does fine and some distros actually do better than Windows at the basics.
I switched to Mint in March. I have to use W11 for work and I thoroughly hate it. I did not want all the ads and AI stuff that come pre-packaged. I also did not want to upgrade my pc - I have an arbitrary rule that I’m only allowed new hardware every 10 years, so I have another 2 years left until I can upgrade.
So I used all my anger and pettiness, went on youtube to see how difficult it’d be to install Linux. The first video I found was Zorin vs Mint, and I thought Mint was a good fit for an absolute noob like myself. I really did not want to faff with learning commands and stuff so I was very pleasantly surprised with flatpaks and whatnot. Overall I’d say it was a very good experience, I’m just annoyed I’ve not done it earlier.
How do desktop functions perform on Linux Mint compared to Windows on your current machine, qualitatively speaking? I’ve kept my parents’ 13 year old laptop alive with Linux, a replacement battery and SSD, so 2 more years should be no problem unless your needs drastically change.
You’ll find there are dozens of ways to “install” an app on Linux, in varying degrees of portability, ease of install and ease of upgrade.
It’s an absolute joy, although I am a little annoyed at the random freezes I sometimes get, like when everything stops responding with no rhyme or reason. At least when Windows crashes, it crashes good and just reboots. But Mint needs a hard reset. Other than that, I managed to get all my games to play thanks to Lutris so I couldn’t be happier! I’ve had some tiny tweaks to make, for example my sound got crackly after some update, but thankfully there are tons and tons of troubleshooting that basically take your hand and guide you through what you need to do to sort issues. I’m immensely grateful for all those forums.
Your mention of a laptop reminds me I also installed Mint on my 16 year old lappy, it’s quite slow but it actually works with all the OG hardware (bar a new battery)!
Me. But not just me. When my children grow older, they too will now have a Linux OS on their computers not Microsoft. Microsoft has lost more than just me!
I’m jealous of those that converted to Linux from Windows 10.
I didn’t migrate until Windows 2000.
Started like three mints ago b/c fed up with windows. Got 2nd SSD and set up dual boot with Bazzite. Initially this was just to fuck around but i switched to Bazzite as main distro within two days. It just works. Won me over when Darksouls was immediately displaying the Playstation glyphs when I plugged in the Dualshock 4.
Even modding was relatively easy. Things are well documented now and; and I shame to admit, ChatGPT is surprisingly not the shittiest at helping me with my issues (specific example setting up Darksouls Remastered Gadget to run with the Seamless Coop mod which required some custom code shenanigans… For which the vibe code was serviceable!)
Haven’t booted my windows partition for a month ish now. Probably won’t for a long time.
I think it says something about Linux adoption rate amongst gaming users, that popular modding tools like r2modman have native Linux versions. And it’s great for me to hear “It just works” from new users since my bar is set at a weird spot, having seen things progress over 9 years.
My advice is when you recommend Linux, do it for a specific reason, not a general philosophical one (it does not motivate them like you), and do not move up generationally. Older people generally have more elaborate workflows and unlearning then may not be worth it for them.
My advice is, when you’re recommending Linux be very sure that you’re ready to be the 1st level support from then on. Personally I’m too old for that shit. People are ignorant and unhappy for so many self chosen reasons, their personal computer desktop is just another one and I just can’t fix the world.
Eugh yeah this is a big reason why I manage which inboxes people have access to
Thanks. I figured Microsoft trying to force people off Windows 10 might be a bigger reason than ever to get people to switch than philosophical ones. I wanted to see if that was true for people on Lemmy or if there were other reasons, hence I made this post.
I think the hardest to get on Linux is those in the middle with a very specific piece of hardware or software that needs to work in a certain way. Kind of like the bell curve meme, total computer beginners and total computer experts can embrace linux the easiest.
Its 100 percent like that. The middle users like me have the most issues.
Gamer/music maker/old random software/nas setups/networking/racing wheel peripherals, people who do this stuff it takes way more time investment.
If you just use a browser. The os doesn’t matter
I believe that the main reason for recommending Linux, in my opinion, is because it is open source code that can be audited. And the second reason is so that the EU can have greater digital and technological sovereignty.
I don’t think I will ever tell anyone to go penguin mode “for the EU”, but that is a novel idea.
Several countries in the European Union have already switched to penguin mode. 😎
I’ve been doing my work in Linux for a while now. I’ve started trying out Bazzite for gaming. It’s been quite nice, but not without issues.
I switched when they announced Windows was going to start watching everything you do. So it can help you better… of course.
I started with Bazzite and didn’t really understand immutability. I had just heard it was good for gaming. I bricked my installation trying to get write access to the folder where login screen images are stored because that part happens to be immutable.
I switched to Garuda because it is also gamer focused and the system folders aren’t on lockdown. Both were super easy and have worked great.
I’m still learning what it means to be on Arch, but that’s an interesting journey, so I don’t mind.
Bazzite gets thrown around a lot as a beginner distro nowadays, haven’t tried it myself. Its immutable quality sounded to me like it was designed to be hard for beginners to break, so I guess you should give yourself an award for that.
Hope it keeps going well, you’ll naturally get it as you use it and deal with the odd curveball.
That’s really the gist of it. For the 96% who just need a working computer and aren’t messing with system files, immutable is perfect. You really can’t break it unless you try.
Yup, installed Linux Mint for my 60+yo mother. She hardly uses her laptop and does not need anything advanced. We set it up, installation went very smooth (obviously), set up her browser so she can use it like she’s used to, and we figured out how to use the printer. Thankfully it was no hassle at all, it just connected via USB and interacted very well with the printing and scanning software that came with Mint. She was already using firefox and libreoffice, so that was no hassle either. So far so good!
Made the move gradually - first the private computers of my family,then my company. Very happy with how it went, especially in terms of staff adoption. We still retain some dual boot windows machines,sadly,as some things currently still can’t be done in the Linux world (CAD is the one thing, some very specific Office document things we sadly get dictated by a client the other one.)
Impressive that you were able to pull off the migration for a corporate usecase.
It’s not that hard actually, at least tech-wise. Our ERP always has been web based and so is our project management (Redmine). The biggest “installable” Apps are QGIS(always worked on Linux), some LaTex Apps and the Affinity suite (which works through bottles)
Officewise Softmaker is close enough to MS Office that even someone with little experience computerwise has no issues.
Combine that with a Proxmox+FreeIPA+Opsi stack in the background and you’re set.Fedora 42 Plasma is used as a client OS with benefits from us only having 2 different client models hardware wise.
“Politic” wise I have the huge advantage that I am the sole owner of the company, that my staff is young and willing to innovate as this is basically our job (we do consulting for healthcare) and that we are somewhat small and work home-office full time.
The major challenge was to make people to actually try Linux. Plasma helped her enormously,because, let’s face it, it’s beautiful. That gave Linux a lot of godwil and after two days it was usually a “I never thought it would be that easy” or “that works as smooth as Win7/10 once did for me and MS destroyed that”.
Now some of my employees have privately changed to Linux as well.
