Been using bazzite for about 6 weeks now. It was so easy to install and maintain. Sure, the computer have had a couple of hard freezes so I had to reboot but I regret nothing. Everything feels so fast and responsive. Making it look and behave as I want it to is super easy.

I use my computer for gaming, watching streams and have my kids watch cartoons every now and then on my second monitor while I play games. Everything just works. Was a bit worried about splitting the sound between different outputs but even that was easier than on windows.

Sure, there are things that isn’t perfect or needs some more thinking at times but those are my own projects and I like to thinker a bit too. If I didn’t want to tinker anything I would just go console gaming instead.

I’ve settled on a few distros depending on use case and I use linux for most of my PC related stuff. I do keep a Windows partition on almost every machine though. Just for the odd github project that only supports Windows, some games or if anything happened to my Linux partition and I need to use my machine in a hurry I could still boot into that. Don’t always have a bootstick with me.

I’m right there with you regarding desktop environments. Xfce is fine for older machines but I’ve found that Kanotix (debian based distro optimised for slow hardware and live sessions that has a kde version) runs well on pretty much anything.

Also fyi Kubuntu and KDE Neon are extremely similar under the hood but kde components tend to work better with the latter, especially using wayland. Just in case you run into trouble down the line.

Been using Linux Mint for a couple of months. I love it and I’m kicking myself for not making the switch years ago. It is exactly how an OS should be.

Some years ago, after a few failed attempts, I made the switch from Windows to Linux. I used Gentoo Linux on my computer for a few years. After that, I ended up switching to the Apple lands, and a couple of years ago back to Windows. Been thinking of switching back to Linux for a while, and thanks to the nonsense and sense that this year has brought, I am back to using Linux.

At first, I wanted to see how gaming is on Linux, and specifically on my machine. Figured the easiest way to do that is by installing Linux on an external SSD drive. I chose Linux Mint for that installation. Turns out, gaming is great on Linux nowadays. I haven’t had any issues with the few games I have played. I was chosen into a closed beta of a game, and even that game works perfectly - even though it isn’t even released yet. On Mint, I only had some audio problems outside of games.

I bought a new larger NVMe drive from Goodram IRDM (European manufacturer, btw) to install Linux on. I chose Artix, an Arch derivative, as my flavor of Linux. So far, I haven’t had any problems with it. Windows still resides on my old drive in case I happen to need it for something, but I haven’t used it after I installed Mint on that external drive.

Fully replaced windows for Linux now on gaming pc and dev laptop. Running mint on the game pc because I just want it to work, have arch on the laptop because it’s been hella fun to tinker with. Would NOT recommend arch if you just want a nice and simple pc experience 😅

Started playing with Linux in high school about 15 years ago and have gone further and further down the rabbit hole as both Linux has become soo much better and I have become so much better at using it. Been working with Linux full time for a few years now and Windows feels so foreign and difficult too me now.

Only reason I still have Windows 10 on my gaming PC still is that I game so little that I haven’t been gaming much in the last few years.

Glad to have you here!

Been happy for a few years using EndeavourOS, arch-based newbie-friendly gaming-ready distribution. Also ships kde by default so might be something you want to look at ;)

Took an arrow to the knee back in 2008 and I haven’t been back

I installed Mint in a cheap mini PC to self host, and have had problems with external USB storage drives.

They kept dismounting, until I realised you have to give them a permanent mount location (why?!).

And they kept losing power because Linux had a default setting that USB devices ‘auto suspend’ after some time. This took ages to diagnose, and command line stuff to fix 😔

Other than that it seems to be a solid distro.

Also - I think these distros should make it simpler to partition the SSD on install. I used to easily do that when building Windows PCs but it was not clear I was making the right choices with Mint, so I went with the default.

I started out with Linux Mint which I had trouble with when I kept getting notified that I had unnecessary files in my Boot folder. I deleted the wrong files and broke my first installation. Tried ZorinOS and loved it. I decided to try Ubuntu to see what all the hype was about and didn’t like how much Snaps were pushed on me. Went back to ZorinOS and I like everything as is out of the box. I don’t care much for the Windows App Support. VirtualBox is a life saver.

It’s going fine. Switched around 5 years ago, after using Apple products since the mid-80s. Switched to Mint, after trying a couple other distros. Mint ticks all the boxes for me ;)

I have no desire to move back to Apple. even though I do miss some features (Spotlight, for example) being fully in control of my computer and software is priceless. And so is my freedom to use my computer however I fancy without anyone having a word to say about that.

I still use an iPhone, though. Not much, but I do use it…

My switching started with dual booting Ubuntu and Windows but I quickly realised that I only wanted to use Ubuntu so then I removed windows from my laptop. Then I started looking around and tried Manjaro for a while and also had a short look at Mint but it was too close to windows for me.

Then I heard of immutable atomic distros and liked the concept so I used Vanilla OS, Fedora Silverblue and finally landed on Aeon which I currently use and am very happy with. I like that you have a stable clean base system and all the stuff you want to try out lives in containers and can easily be removed.

Recently I installed and tuned Arch with Hyprland on a second PC and also like that a lot but am unsure if I want to move away from atomic updates on my main laptop. I just really like that there is always at least one snapshot that you can boot into which works and you will robably never be locked out of your system entirely.

On my 26th year, and I’m beginning to get the hang of it.

Fedora KDE or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed KDE. I like the fact that OpenSUSE is not based in the USA, but I don’t like how it requires root to be an active user with a password (I prefer a disabled root account and sudo or similar kind of privilege escalation system like everyone else does).

VR support is still ultra jank.

Still haven’t gotten a reliable replacement to Parsec.

Nothing says pain like trying to convert a word doc or excel spreadsheet with formatting tables and the like into LibreOffice.

All the Space Engineers in Proton how-to docs are very old and out of date, and don’t work with the modern setups.

PikaOS (Debian unstable + gaming) with KDE is rocking my world right now. Linux has come so far. I’ve daily-driven Linux a few times and always fell off the train eventually, because I always felt like I ended up fighting it, but it’s never felt as good and reliable as it does now.