cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/34247715
Curious on the experiences of those recently migrating to Linux from Windows 10, Intel-based MacOS, etc. How is it being on Linux? Anything surprise or frustrate you?
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I’m Loving Fedora! All hardware works flawlessly. Games play great.I couldn’t be happier.
I think this is a perfect storm for microslop, everyone on earth right now has a friend who literally knows everything about linux, and that access to knowledge is making it easier than ever before for people to switch. Id be really scared right now if I was MS.
I started with PopOS in September (?), ultimately replacing Windows on every PC in the house. It’s been going well. I’ve had to troubleshoot a few things, the biggest of which being a boot failure, but that turned out to be hardware related, not Linux’s fault. Feeling like I own my computer again is great.
Since then, I’ve gotten into self-hosting and now have a NAS, a Debian Jellyfin server, and a ton of storage space. Right now I’m just backing up basic stuff for the family, as well as streaming movies/shows/music within the house. I’ve ripped so many old DVDs and CDs in the past few months…
Next steps will probably be: books, audiobooks, and archiving family photos/videos in a way that is easier to browse than just files on a hard drive. I will likely de-google eventually.
In short, I’m having fun and should’ve done this a long time ago.
Im on a similar self hosting journey. What do think you’ll use for de googled phone photos and videos? Im not sure where to even start looking.
I’ve set-up Immich recently, moved 400gb photos from Google Takeout, works flawlessly so far.
I switched from Windows to Mint at the tail end of September, and I’ve only had minimal issues. I backed up everything I cared about and just nuked Windows in one go, since it wasn’t compatible with 11 and I don’t want security problems. I expected my Nvidia graphics card to cause huge issues, but it literally just worked.
I did have an issue getting my Steam games to run, but it was fixed by figuring out how to change the compatibility settings on Steam (the incredibly complicated operation of right clicking on the game title).
I’ve been taking classes as well, and using Libre Office has met basically 100% of my needs. I did have some issues with converting to .docx when images were involved (resulting in images going on walkabout), but I consider that 50% a Windows problem.
Switched from Window 10 to Linux Mint about 3 weeks ago so I’d have something familiar to work with.
Honesty, so far Mint works just like Windows should have worked. I’m surprised at how much stuff has been made automatic and easy for a lifelong windows user. Some specific games have a performance issues, Alt+Tab to switch apps doesn’t work if you are in a full screen application.
I would encourage anyone on Windows to buy a small drive (I used a 500 GB SSD I got for like 40 bucks) load a Linux distro on it and give it a shot. You probably won’t be back on Windows.
great, everything works, after some tinkering
Switched to Bazzite from windows 10 a few months ago since I read that it supports Nvidia cards well and I’m in no position to buy a new GPU. The only applications that I miss are the DAW that I used for music and Titanfall 2 as that’s through the EA launcher and have yet to find a reliable way to make it run without it falling apart. My partner (Who is not tech savvy at all) is even starting to get used to it and dislikes when she occasionally uses the windows 11 laptop (been using it for said DAW)
I’m perfectly happy using Mint. I’ll explore more distros eventually but I miss nothing about Windows
I have been on Linux for almost 9 months now and I miss nothing about windows. I tried a bunch of distributions, starting with Fedora, but now I have settled on an Arch based distribution and am happily running Manjaro.
Its fine if you’re not doing stuff that requires windows. My partner is running Mint, and I’ve got a HomeAssistant box, but I can’t ditch Windows completely because I can’t get Wilcom and DesignSpace to run in Wine, and I need those to make my machines work.
What machines do you have if I may ask?
Wilcom, I suppose embroidery? I have a Janome MC500e and I’ve succesfully created stitchfiles with Inkscape+Inkstitch. MyEditor and 2stitch work via wine as well.
DesignSpace is cricut right? Maybe this site I stumbled on might help If all else fails, you could also try a vm with windows in lib-virt (virtmanager or Boxes), that way windows can be paused and always has a nice red X in the topright corner :-)
We’re running with the Barudan Beky at work. The problem is that we get EMB files from clients, and Inkstitch doesn’t support those.
That’s the only site I’ve found describing DesignSpace on wine, but it just crashes for me. I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong, or if my ancient i3 laptop is just shitty. The same machine ran DesignSpace okay with windows, but it might just be too old to handle an emulation layer ontop of it.
I settled on Mint and now want to hop to CachyOS. I’m not sure I’m a fan of Cinnamon; setting up the panel (aka taskbar) on multiple monitors was an absolute nightmare and I ended up just giving up. There were other hiccups getting things set up here and there, but that’s the Linux life, baby.
I dual boot Windows because I need it for a few professional applications, but I swapped it to Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC, have a local account, ran the ChrisTitus WinUtil to debloat and remove telemetry, and completely blocked all Microsoft-owned domains using NextDNS. It’s stable, does what I need, and Microsoft doesn’t need to know every time I turn my computer on.
Not strictly Linux but relevant to ditching Microsoft, I’m currently in the process of moving my projects off Github and into Codeburg for public repos and into Keybase (fully E2EE) for private repos. Fuck Microsoft’s AI data-scraping bullshit.
Bonus, I also recently completely degoogled, and installed GrapheneOS on my phone. It is awesome, and was absurdly easy to set up.
+1 for codeberg and github-alternatives. It is getting a bit scary how many projects seems to be caged in to github (and discord)
Linux mint working awesome, I have been using linux on servers for decades but never really took the leap to desktop till last summer. Now Im 100% all in.
Im at the stage now where Im trying to optimize and speed up things like networking with samba, which out of the box is not a nice/smooth experience. Im not a huge fan of AI but it sure does it make finding answers to these linux optimization questions fast and easy. I think if not for AI, my journey would have taken a lot longer to get where I am.
I also utilized AI in getting all my scripts and configs setup. It’s nice to be able to go back to the same chat and change a few new things or start new scripts with the same context window.
I’ve been on Kubuntu since November. Since I use my main PC as a media PC, it took some setup. I’ve had a few hard crashes, particularly when playing final fantasy XIV and using the native discord client, but it’s fine. Rebooting is fast, and I’ve got all my tools setup just fine with the game and I couldn’t be happier! I don’t feel held back by Linux like I did with windows. I can make my own quick tools. The biggest problem was getting a switcher script for my mouse profiles, but it’s just a simple startup script that runs a command on window focus changes.
I haven’t had to boot back into windows once yet!
I mostly use the discord browser application but I almost never stream or video chat - I switch to the native client the once or twice a year I need that. On my computer the browser app uses about 700MB of RAM (Firefox) and the native uses over 1GB. I’ve been on an optimization kick lately (VSCode->Theia->Helix) so I went looking and found Legcord which used around 500MB and then Discordo that used… 26MB?
I kind of like Discordo (TUI) but it’s definitely not for everybody and you definitely don’t get video/audio chat.
Anywho, just wanted to post about alternative clients since I’d recently researched them.
I am on discord at least 4 nights a week. I need my push to mute button, which can’t be mapped globally in the browser. I do video chat a lot and share my screen occasionally. Vencord is ok for streaming (crashes after 30-60 minutes every time), but it acts like the browser, so there’s no global shortcuts.
I’ll test out the other clients and see how they work!
So painfully, boringly good.
Day-to-day, it just works, I don’t have to fight it. It doesn’t do anything I don’t want it to do. I don’t miss office, everything is clean and snappy.
I have managed to play almost every game thrown at it (Bazzite) - the only one that didn’t work was an older DX7 title. DOS games just work - they took more effort than this under Win9x.
I have got a couple of minor issues but all fixable.:
- I encountered a issue where it wouldn’t wake from sleep - fixed by selecting a different color profile in the display settings.
- I managed to break something in fstsb trying to setup a persistent network drive. Very easy to roll back, I’m 100% sold on immutable until I need something more customisable
- Recently my Bluetooth kb/mouse would drop off when the PC went idle, wouldn’t reconnect/wake up until power cycling the PC. Fixed by disabling BT hibernation/sleep
Having said that, last week I had to install Win11 on the kids laptop to be ready for school - I hadn’t installed 11 outside of a controlled Corp environment with solid group policy control since the early days. God-damn Win11 is a dumpster fire! The install UI looks nice but the noise is turned up to 11, popup, wizards, setup this, setup that, backup, OneDrive, give us all your information and sign away any privacy.
Regardless of any minor issues I bump into on the way, I am never going back!
Installed Linux Mint on my old personal laptop (Dell XPS 9560) and unfortunately ran into some issues that made me switch back to Windows. I really want to make it work
It seems to have revealed either a hardware bug or failing hardware in the NVMe drive.
First problem was log spam that filled up the partition:
spoiler
2025-12-29T12:15:46.439880-05:00 redacted kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1d.0: AER: Correctable error message received from 0000:04:00.0 2025-12-29T12:15:46.439934-05:00 redacted kernel: nvme 0000:04:00.0: PCIe Bus Error: severity=Correctable, type=Physical Layer, (Receiver ID) 2025-12-29T12:15:46.439936-05:00 redacted kernel: nvme 0000:04:00.0: device [126f:2262] error status/mask=00000001/0000e000 2025-12-29T12:15:46.439938-05:00 redacted kernel: nvme 0000:04:00.0: [ 0] RxErr (First) 2025-12-29T12:15:46.439939-05:00 redacted kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1d.0: AER: Multiple Correctable error message received from 0000:04:00.0 2025-12-29T12:15:46.439940-05:00 redacted kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1d.0: PCIe Bus Error: severity=Correctable, type=Data Link Layer, (Transmitter ID) 2025-12-29T12:15:46.439941-05:00 redacted kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1d.0: device [8086:a118] error status/mask=00001000/00000000 2025-12-29T12:15:46.439943-05:00 redacted kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1d.0: [12] Timeout 2025-12-29T12:15:46.439944-05:00 redacted kernel: nvme 0000:04:00.0: PCIe Bus Error: severity=Correctable, type=Physical Layer, (Receiver ID) 2025-12-29T12:15:46.439945-05:00 redacted kernel: nvme 0000:04:00.0: device [126f:2262] error status/mask=00000001/0000e000 2025-12-29T12:15:46.439946-05:00 redacted kernel: nvme 0000:04:00.0: [ 0] RxErr (First)Some forum posts I found (example) suggested that this was a hardware bug and I could set
pcie_aspm=offin grub to work around it. This stopped the log spam and everything seemed to be working fine.Later while I was doing some programming, everything froze for a while. When it came back, the partition was set to readonly. It wouldn’t boot on restart and loaded up busybox instead. I was able to set it to writable, but it happened again soon after.
I decided to switch back to Windows where there doesn’t seem to be any issues.
I really want to make it work. If it’s failing hardware then I have no choice but to replace the drive, but if it’s just a bug then I want to find a fix without buying new hardware. That would kind of defeat the point for me and I don’t want to spend the money.
I would appreciate any help. I booted into Mint again to grab the logs and I really want to keep using it.
I’d wager a toe from my left foot that if you look in the Event Viewer on windows you will see similar looking errors (though not as descriptive, no doubt, it might say something like “corrected read error” or something obtuse instead), this is a hardware issue that linux tends to be more aggressive in handling. These errors are on the physical layer and data link layer, so it is likely a communication problem between the drive and the motherboard, but interestingly, they are corrected on retry, so the data the system is calling from the drive is fine even if it sometimes fails to get there in time. This screams electrical connection to me, either thermal expansion is making the contacts wonky (and they might not be seated perfectly), there is a flaw in the traces somewhere, or there is some power management issue affecting your PCIe bus. Can you try running it with one more kernel parameter? Under
pcie_aspm=offaddnvme_core.default_ps_max_latency_us=0and watch dmesg while running something heavy.Checked the logs in Windows, you’re right!
A corrected hardware error has occurredfrom PCI Express Root Port. I reseated the drive with no change.I should mention that this laptop has always had issues with what I assumed to be thermal throttling. It would play games fine for 10-15 minutes before becoming a slideshow. I eventually stopped trying.
I have set that option and I am currently downloading a GPU benchmark. Is that an appropriate test? What should I be looking for in dmesg?
A GPU bench might raise temps in a way that would cause the problem to recur, but I’m not sure you’d see anything without doing something to get data flowing to the drive at the same time, so maybe try running the GPU bench and at the same time run
sudo dd if=/dev/{your drive} of=/dev/null bs=1M status=progress(just pull data from the drive and write it to nowhere, but be careful about the of and if or you might overwrite your whole drive), and while those are going, runsudo dmesg -win another terminal and watch for the same error you were getting before. If you don’t get errors, the problem was probably just some power state problem that the kernel parameter fixed. But I have to tell you, unfortunately, that the presence of the error under windows is a bad sign that points to a hardware problem, so I don’t feel very hopeful. Independent of all the other suggestions, could you try runningsudo nvme smart-log /dev/{your drive}? That might give you some data.Thanks for the help. If it’s the hardware then it’s the hardware. I will try a few more things like booting from the drive in a different PC, but I may have to spend some money.
That seems like a solid next step to figure out if it is the drive or the board (or the whole thermal situation in the rig). Good luck and sorry about the bad news, thanks for humoring my troubleshooting compulsion
Finally got a chance to try out the drive in a different PC and the errors were not happening. Good news for the drive but bad news for the rest of the laptop and me narrowing it down.
Made Fedora KDE my only home OS last year. I’m experienced with Linux but did not have to pull out arcane knowledge at all for setting it up. I.e it has been very smooth. The rough edges have been:
- Slightly worse audio
- GIFs on Reddit RES don’t always play well
- Will have to find a web browser based tax software instead of what I’m used to
- Remapping a key (print screen to right click) has not been easy
- I miss some features of notepad++ that are missing from Kate.
- I miss Irfanview image viewer
wrt the tax software: the new wine 11 seems to be a major update, and could be worth a try beforw purchasing something else. I also like to use winegui with. Alternatively Bottles
