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?
Great. Only issue so far has been a specific VPN for work which does not have a Linux installer and no drag and drop replacement for Snagit. But that’s just work stuff, everything on the private side works flawlessly for me.
Great, using arch (btw) as my daily for school and its perfect!
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!
Been on Mint for a bit over a year. Only slight annoyances. My tax guy couldn’t open the password protected .zip files I made. My printer has two trays, can only seem to print from the photo one. And getting the drivers installed for my TP-Link wifi adapter was a little bit of a pain. Other than that, everything has been great. It looks good, runs good, Games good. No issues with my NVidia card.
I swapped over early last year, so I’m getting close to passing your one year qualifier, but I’d say it’s been fantastic.
My main concern was stability and gaming. I’m on pure Arch and it’s been completely stable. I haven’t done any deep configuration except for trying to make my yubikey my sudo password and I did not do that well so I had to roll that change back. So in my opinion, nearly anyone can set up Arch if they have a good guide, treat it like a normal computer, and keep it working for at least a year without almost any issue.
Gaming has also been nearly perfect. There’s been a handful of games I couldn’t play for one reason or another. Battlefield had anti-cheat issues, but tbh I would only have gotten it to play with a friend and I’m happy to not give that company money. Robocop was the most recent game that was struggling despite being platinum. I’ll try again later and I assume it’ll be better. I think the only other one I can remember is the Marathon Beta, which is a bummer but again I’m okay if they decide to never turn on the Linux support (because I think their anti-cheat is Linux compatible they just haven’t done the work yet) because I don’t think Bungie deserves my money.
So ya, id recommend Linux for nearly anyone.
Pretty good. But I’ve been dabbling in Linux for the past decade or so and already had a Linux based home server. But in the past year I finally swapped all of my non-work computers over to linux. If games won’t run, I won’t play them.
I’m running CachyOS on my desktop workstation, laptop, and my handheld Lenovo legion go. Unraid on my server.
Edit: the only issue I had with the CachyOS installs so far is my remote desktop solution, which admittedly I don’t even use often. VNC is ok. I liked NoMachine for a while but it messed up my graphics drivers or something weird. I don’t remember the specifics, I just flat out nuked it from my machines. I need to try rustdesk
I migrated to Ubuntu from Windows 10 when it became end-of-life last year. I had a major head start beforehand because my work allowed me to dabble in Linux for a good 2 years beforehand, though! It’s been great! Pretty much everything that you “can’t do” on Windows has some sort of open source alternative. Can’t have Microsoft Office on Linux? Download Libreoffice for free! Can’t have Adobe Creative Cloud? Just download Krita and Kdenlive for free! Can’t have Microsoft Edge? What on earth do you want it for?? You don’t really need to use the terminal for most things, but it can make a lot of things much easier and quicker if/when you do get your head round it.
The only notable weak point is a few specific online videogames. Valve Anti Cheat really doesn’t play well with Linux (which is really dumb because Valve are so well known for supporting Linux). I’ve managed to get Left 4 Dead 2 playing online using “Steam Runtime 1.0 (scout)” but I haven’t found anything that works for Team Fortress 2. That being said, most other online games like Bloons TD6 and Worms WMD work perfectly natively, 90% of games released last year were natively Linux compatible, and the CEO of GOG said they’d like to support Linux more too, so even this is an improving situation!
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.
It’s amazing! Full customization beyond what I’m used to and it all just runs my hardware perfectly.
My only issue is getting VR to work nicely with my specific setup but I imagine when steam frame comes out there will be a lot of VR specific updates to Linux drivers.
Personal laptop is on Linux and working fine since I got it last year. Windows gaming machine is the next candidate for a move over this year.
If I may make a suggestion to anyone who comes across this, you can move your desktop into a closet and run github.com/games-on-whales/wolf, then play your games on any device connected to your network. The kicker is that the games are containerized so more than one person can play the same game (or different game, it doesn’t matter) on the same GPU at the same time. It is truly a game changer.
Going real well. My gaming PC (5800X3D/7900XTX/32GB) is running LMDE6 and so far none of my games have complained; Steam+Proton is great.
I also have a laptop (i7-10750H/1650Ti/16GB) running LMDE7, and that’s been my portable gaming machine for a while. Doesn’t play nice with RPCS3, but honestly that’s not a dealbreaker.
Mint since May. Preferring to work from home these days not to have to deal with Winslop 11 on my work laptop.
Been on Linux desktop since 2003, never looked back.
Don’t get me wrong, Linux has its bugs here and there, like all software, but the difference is night and day.
FREEDOM! I can do whatever the fuck I want with my computer without “nope, can’t do this, that requires complicated APIs and development, that requires more paid licenses to do on your own goddamn computer”
I’ve built so much stuff over the years, it’s like a giant Lego box to me
About a year ago, I installed kubuntu on a laptop that couldn’t officially support windows 11. So far, I’ve only had minor annoyances.
I had a program that wouldn’t work when I first switched, despite being supported. I installed MakeMKV from the built-in repository, and it wouldn’t detect my optical drive. I installed from a separate repo, and it still wouldn’t work. I compiled it from source, and I don’t think it even launched anymore. Then one day, while randomly flailing, some combination of uninstalling, reinstalling, and random commands I found online made it work for no reason I could discern. I haven’t had a problem with it since.
If my optical drive can’t read a disc, the eject button doesn’t work. I have to either reboot or use the terminal to eject the disc.
Every once in a while, something (presumably Firefox) locks up the entire system. Mouse won’t move, keyboard is unresponsive, the works. It’s a decade-old laptop, but it had a decent processor for the time, and I upgraded the RAM, so that shouldn’t really be happening as often as it does.
I’ve been using Linux since 2008… It’s been fine. I do not miss windows. I get to deal with enough of windows bullshit at work.
