I’ve used linux for 20 years and was generally happy. I always used my main rig to play games, so I kept windows since my tries to switch to linux for gaming ended unsatisfying. Last October I decided to get rid of ms products and said goodbye to windows for good. Gaming on linux today works great. I am constantly amazed how great everything works and happy pretty much every time I turn on the PC. A big thank you to everyone involved in linux development!

What’s this? A software app store?

It’s ironic how on Linux, my distro’s app repository is always my first stop when looking for software, while on Mac or Windows it’s my last resort.

Commercialized app stores are full of spam, and Microsoft and Apple both decided that app store apps should not have the full capabilities of normal apps. It’s the exact opposite on Linux.

I broke nearly every distro, may have been KDEs fault.

Now on Fedora Kinoite 40 it works like a charm.

In a nutshell,

Zorin > Ubuntu > Debian > Arch, while (always) pestering google about trivial stuff, “How do I install something on Linux?” – “Oh look! A package manager! Which package manager is the best?” – “Distros have their specific packages? Cool!”, etc.

the experience was wonderful. I learned I lot about computer, found new forums and IRC servers. It brought a new world to me.

I am still a newbie though. I don’t know much about Linux just enough to make it work for me.

I use Linux servers on my job and I did a ton of research. I felt confident in moving from Windows to Linux and for the most part it went very well. Most distributions provide a live environment and the installer is extremely easy.

I had a ton of small little problems with Nvidia, Wayland, audio… I ended up fixing most of them, or at least apply some workarounds but it was a painful experience.

Gaming works really really really well, which I found surprising.

I guess it all depends on perspective.

I love that it’s free compared to those $10-20k licenses for similar systems.

I love that there are good package managers.

I love that it’s open source.

I hate that it’s GPLv2.

I hate how bloated the kernel is. I’d like it to fit into main memory.

I hate how it’s not POSIX-certified.

What’s this? A software app store? Swell! I no longer need to download stuff off from dodgy sites or numbingly installing everything manually!

In what year are you in? macOS and Windows both have App Stores. Windows has the built-in winget package manager, similar to apt that has open contributions on github and all the software in the world.

How was your experience with this Unix-like wonder? In a home user manner and/or a business use manner?

I use both Linux and Windows actively and macOS from time to time. Linux works really well it’s free and I love it and it is definitely great if your workflow is all browser-based and/or you don’t have to collaborate on a very specific industry with very proprietary tools as default that everyone expect to be used. If you’re in such industries and people expect to share complex MS Word, Excel, Adobe, Autodek etc. files then Linux isn’t for you, you’ll be in more compatibility pain than anyone should be in.

I started on Ubuntu if I recall correctly, then made the jump to Fedora at some point. I think Manjaro was in there too? That was my first exposure to KDE Plasma

At some point I installed Arch in a VM and then I was hooked. These days I daily drive Arch with Hyprland (apps and whatnot provided by Plasma)

AMD GPU just works, no fussing about, get straight to fragging on Xonotic and Counter Strike

Unless you have a monitor that requires HDMI 2.1 to get full resolution/refresh. Then it only works partially.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Linux, and I’ve been using it on my desktops/laptops for almost 30 years at this point.

But there are still issues to deal with on a regular basis, same as Windows or OSX.

Generally good, but fairly troublesome. I dualboot Pop_OS!, and the install was a nightmare. The live USB wouldn’t boot until I unplugged every USB device. Once it started, I could plug them back in. Then, when actually installing, the info about the various partitions I would need was apparently pretty out of date (recommend partition sizes were way off).

Once installed, though, it’s been really nice, albeit a fair bit more complicated. The only real issue I’ve had so far is that, in Unity games run through wine, video streamed in-game won’t play.

I’ve used Linux for decades but not for desktop usage. I work with Linux every day.

I recently purchased a high end workstation to act as a hypervisor for multiple desktop systems. The plan was to boot into a Linux system and then from there load up one of many desktop OS and work seamlessly within a VM. This has worked well on a Windows host with VMWare Workstation and allows me as a contractor to have separation of configuration between customers.

However I found Linux desktop to have too many glitches. From failed package installs, multiple monitor problems and some special keys being sent to both VM and host. I also found the user interface of some apps to be bad, which I can look past but with the other fundamental issues it added a bad taste to the experience. I really want it to work and I do go back every now and then to try again.

• What’s this? A software app store? Swell! I no longer need to download stuff off from dodgy sites or numbingly installing everything manually!

Ayyyy! Some recognition! Some people install linux and ask “where do I get apps from?”, you show them the “store” and they go “wow, that’s so complicated”. That’s when I question how they manage to survive in this digital world.

Keep on fraggin’!

Anti Commercial-AI license

Linux has been the biggest rabbit hole I’ve been in. There are too many distribution for me to choose one without testing as much as I can. It made me change what I wanted/needed. I went from “I don’t want to use CLI at all” to “man, GUI is too slow for that”.

I tried many Debian children and grand children distributions, Fedora based ones (Nobara, atomics bases,…), Opensuse, NixOS, Solus, arch based distributions…

Now, I’m on cachyOS, that seems to be the good balance I need (for now), between GUI/already configured and “I can do it the way I want”.

One year after starting using Linux, I’ve switched from a 3060ti to a 6700xt, just because it made hopping easier.

If you exclude me not being able to settle down on a distro, Linux is a funny experience to me. My needs are not that big, as I just play some games, have a light need of an office suite. I can do anything I used to to in windows, but without Microsoft and his friends looking above my shoulder.

I was entering my teens in the early 2000’s. My memory is terrible but my family got a pentium 3 desktop PC and I remember I had some versions of SuSE, Ubuntu and Mandrake (or was it Mandriva by then) on that PC at one time or another. My family never knew how to use it because it was different all the time. Heck I didn’t know how to use it.

When I built my first PC, a pentium 4, I dual booted windows and some flavour of Linux for a time, but I got into PC gaming so I only casually checked out new releases of Ubuntu over the years. Once Proton arrived though it was finally time to make the switch.

I’m not a developer, I made a pong clone with python once because I wanted to learn for the sake of it, but I support a few projects financially that I enjoy, I try to submit bug reports best I can. For the most part the community is great, and yes I use Arch btw.