after a terrible time trying to work through a USB/motherboard/speaker/microphone combo issue, it’s been good. working on Bazzite as i have intel/nvidia gear and my pc primarily is for gaming. getting games to run has been as easy as it was on windows.

Switched to Mint a few months ago on my Desktop. I discovered a few issues during my time with it such as waking itself from suspend mode or the headphone jack in my front header not getting picked up, but both issues were fixed with just a bit of searching.

Overall it’s a great feeling to be able to just do what I want with my computer and not worry about big corpa messing with me, even if I do expect that things may need to be patched up here and there.

Been using Linux Mint since the summer. I went to create a letter on my newer Acer laptop on Windows 11 because the HP Beats wouldn’t go to Windows 11. Office 365 paywalled me. So I looked up Open and LibreOffice (going to try OnlyOffice soon) and got them both, completed the letter.

Then I thought… Windows is getting so crappy with this insult plus AI & ads… I wonder what Linux looks like these days? I had used it in the early 2000s, mostly Mandrake and Suse, as I recall, on KDE.

I was lucky I happened upon Distrosea, so I played with some there. I almost installed ZorinOS, but decided that dual booting Mint on the Beats laptop was better, because the Software Center has ratings and reviews.

There were a few hiccups with the flash drive, Secure Boot and all that. Ended up having to format the iso in Rufus before putting it on the flash drive with Ventoy, but it worked.

Granted, I don’t use my personal laptops that often, the last thing I want to do after being on my work laptop (which is Windows 11, but my coworker runs CachyOS and brings up work stuff in ThinkCast) is get on another laptop, especially where I work evenings.

Since then, I’ve wanted to put it (or smaller distros) on other older machines in the house for fun, but several of them have some issues… old Dell Dimension 2200 psu capacitors popped, so that was a no go… and the Dell Vostro tower we have is beeping at me, gotta have someone look at that… might be graphics card or mobo needs reseat.

I set up a dual boot Win10/Linux system so I would have the option to use windows when I needed. I have not booted into windows for a while now. The only thing I was using it for was to play some older games I could not figure out how to get running in Wine. I may have to use it for tax software if I can’t find something that runs under Linux though.

I use Mint and so does my wife.

Two laptops that Win11 doesn’t want to support, but we need them both and we don’t have the budget to replace them. No problems on mine, but the wife’s HP has some issues with closing the lid and I haven’t found a good solution to that yet.

Sleep doesn’t work because on wakeup the wifi and bluetooth are both dead; bluetooth doesn’t matter but the wifi’s needed for the internet and the only way to get it back up is to reboot the machine because it insists there’s a hardware failure and refuses to accept that there isn’t. I’ve even tried modprobe-ing the network stack but it has to be a full system restart (warm restart, not power cycle).

Hibernate threatens something nasty, can’t remember what offhand but I’m not even considering it.

I don’t want a lid shut to mean shutdown because shutting the lid shouldn’t mean losing work. So I’m left with the only remaining option that shutting the lid does nothing, and the LT stays on, but then if she puts something on top of the LT as she’s prone to do, some stuff can end up in a weird state, like taskbar icons following the mouse around even though they haven’t been clicked on, and there’s no way to stop them doing that without rebooting. I’m not sure how that happens; my hypothesis is that the keyboard and/or trackpad get activated, but no amount of me pressing on the lid in various places reproduces the problem.

Other than that she’s had no problem adapting to Linux Mint. Everything’s where she expects it. I’ve had to do some command-line jiggerypokery for various bits and bobs but a bit of DDG-ing finds that easily enough.

i love it, things have been just working lately. it feels like every day something is gonna give but thats just windows trauma

I posted this before, but it feels like going back to the best days of PC ownership. It’s fast, I’m in control, everything I want works and I honestly don’t think about my OS very much.

I chose bazzite since I love gaming, but of course it’s just a competent OS overall with which I also do my private office tasks.

Booting up my PC finally feels like a joy again.

Like most people I use Windows 11 at work and the contrast is enormous.

Not needed windows once. Tho I do have to use it on the job

I’ve switched systems some 15? years ago. But my mum did it recently, so I asked her this question. (Disclaimer: she isn’t the one managing her machine. Guess who does it.)

She claims it’s basically the same thing. She was surprised her start menu got different some days ago (when I updated her Mint), but it was the good type of surprise, like, “ah, it shows my profile pic now!”. Then she rambled about things that disappear from her email, but that is not an OS issue, it’s PEBKAC (she’s extremely disorganised). And… that’s it.

I’ve been dual booting Windows and Linux (Ubuntu) for a while, and sadly I’m back on Windows after a month and a half of exclusively using Linux. The reason? Ethernet. I need to assign a static IP to a dev board with Ethernet, and while it works fairly easily on Windows, it just doesn’t work on Linux, saying it’s unavailable in the nmcli output.

Of course, Windows is worse than before. It hasn’t fixed the bug where it never updates the system time, forcing me to manually press sync on every boot. And it hasn’t fixed the newer bug where my laptop display needs to go down to 768p to display 300Hz, making me to go down to 60Hz to use the full 1080p resolution. All the while Microsoft pushes things nobody wants.

My only surprise is how easy it was.

Went with Linux Mint back in July, set up a dual boot in case I’d need Windows for anything. Figured something or other wouldn’t work through wine or some such. Never have booted back to Windows since.

I think the only issue I’ve had is that my 8BitDo controller won’t work via Bluetooth, but it works fine via USB. (Other Bluetooth devices have been fine, not that I have many.)

I think it was two years or so for me now, but honestly, it’s going great. I’ve got alternatives for the windows only apps I used to use, and my games run smoothly.

Every time I have to use a windows computer for some reason, I’m reminded of why I stopped using that OS…

It’s great. My only issue is my computer had issues with sleep mode. So, I just disabled it.

On Linux I would need to disable online only accounts, copilot, one drive, recall, bing search, edge, edge again, privacy settings, edge yet again…

Linux is great. Honestly it came a long way over the years.

I went to Fedora in March of 2025. I never looked back. Definitely some frustration with video drivers and hardware issues (bad Samsung monitor), but nothing I haven’t been able to work around.

Most importantly, my computer runs great, my games run great, I have more control than ever, and I will never go back to Microslop. Their pivot to “AI EVERYTHING!!!” has been abhorrent, and I refuse to cooperate.