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.
Anyone have suggestions for parental controls on linux? Mainly, to block logins after bedtime, or to limit time on the system.
knock knock
Have you heard the good news about our lord and saviour, Linus Torvalds?
(Semi) Recent convert here from Win11 to Bazzite - Didn’t switch due to Win10 EOL but because Windows Recall kept fucking re-enabling itself every time windows updated and it was pissing me off.
I miss playing some games that require kernal level anti-cheat, but that’s a small price to pay for me.
The biggest hurdle I have and kind of still have is the difference in package managers and stuff like that. There appimages which I’ve sorta got my head around, gear lever helps. Then there are .deb files of some programs, some come as .tar.gz or .rpm files.
That’s ignoring flatpaks, snaps and other packages like that - I do wish there was a more uniform structure to these that is better explained, often software download pages will list some distros like Ubuntu, Arch & Fedora but miss out many like Bazzite which is fine if you know Bazzite is based on Fedora but if you don’t then you’re already stuck at that point.
Plus most pieces of software that have instructions for Fedora ask you to use dnf to download stuff, and if you try that in Bazzite it throws a fit and simultaneously tells you that rpm-ostree should be used but also don’t use rpm-ostree for things unless you absolutely have to.
I love Bazzite, I’m never going back, but it can be frustrating for sure if you’re unfamiliar with things.
Had a relative switch to Linux recently. Lenovo IdeaPad computer running windows 10. The stuff was getting insanely slow and battery life was reduced ton the point that it was being a pain to use. Backed all the documents and data on a local instance of dufs running on home server and installed Linux Mint on it. Had minor issues regarding WiFi and Bluetooth. Solved the wifi one but bluetooth is still a bit unstable sometimes. Came back 1 week later and the user is delighted. Says that everything works 3 times faster than on windows and that battery lasts 3 times longer. They also went on themselves to look for open source alternatives to windows apps they were using and installed them. That’s a win !
Just recently, less than a day ago, helped my dad install dual boot Mint ( cinnamon, yay :| ) on his laptop. Now I gotta move my windows partition onto the SSD I bought and had help installing so I can install mint on my desktop. Just in case he needs help with a problem and I can better diagnose potential problems/solutions. I’d rather switch to what I’ve got on my laptop ( MX w/ Plasma ) but someone has to be able to effectively play IT.
I switched recently because of it. A friend of mine made a workshop for anyone who is interested, to learn how to switch to Linux or Dual Boot. It was the final push for me to switch and loving it so far :)
Kinda, not fully committed yet cause as “out of the box” as bazzite is, I still have some things I prefer my windows partition for. Oddly enough, the most recent thing was formatting a god damned flash drive! Like it really doesn’t need to be as complicated as the devs made it to be!
I know you aren’t here looking for suggestions but give gparted a try. It has a nice GUI and if you are used to disk management in windows, the only major difference in finding your way around is selecting the physical drive via a dropdown, instead of seeing all the physical disks at once.
Heck yeah! Love suggestions whether requested or not! Thanks homie.
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…
Sober… Roblox
It works great for my family! Only annoyance is having to run
flatpak updateoften.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!
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.
I have a friend who was trying out endeavor with kde. He uses a trackball mouse, and configuring the acceleration curve has been a nightmare for him. Apparently it’s the wayland compositor’s job to expose the ability to configure libinput, and only certain ones do it (KDE being one of them), but configuration isn’t as straight forward as in windows.
He was more able to configure it when using X11, but kept hitting a bug when using a custom acceleration curve where the cursor would shoot to the top left of the screen (I think it triggered when moving the cursor while clicking).
I haven’t looked into it much myself, but it sounds like it has been one of those unfortunate sticking points for him right out of the gate.
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.
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.
Yep, me and SO.
I was into linux like 15 years ago. Liked it, but wasn’t smart enough to get it working and win 7 was still bearable. Called it quits after MS kept somehow getting worse.
Convinced SO to change over and everytbing works fine for them so far! It took a little tinkering but no complaints.
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.
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 installed Fedora last Friday and I have no regrets. Win11 was never an option for me, my laptop is “too old” and I have no desire to touch that horror in any
~10 years ago I had a Win7/Ubuntu dual boot laptop, but I dropped Ubuntu when I upgraded to SSD and needed all the space I could get. Ubuntu was OK, but there was something with the UI that just didn’t click with me. I meant to try other distros but never found the time, so I just stuck with Win10 until now.
I have several legacy software that I need, so I went with dual boot again. If I can get them to run smoothly on Fedora, I’ll do a complete clean install.
The only challenge in installing Fedora was Windows’ crappy partition manager, which would not let me minimize C: for more than 54MB. I did every trick I knew and learned a few new ones, nothing helped. Then I just flashed Gparted to a USB stick and it worked instantly.
After that everything went smoothly, with the exception that Fedora didn’t recognize my Bluetooth device at all. I’ll dig into that single issue tomorrow, I’m fairly certain that a fix can be found easily.
Have you considered a Windows vm? That’s how i run that single program that i can’t get working on Linux. Yeah it’s slow AF on my system, but it’s not used often.
Yes, I mean to try running them with VM. The software I need are old and light, so there’s a good chance that my laptop can run them.
