I keep seeing a lot of people on Reddit saying they intend to (or asking how to) switch from Windows to Linux.
I made that switch myself back in February and I haven’t looked back; I was already a Linux user alongside Windows for a very long time, but I no longer have any active Windows machines now. I’m using Linux Mint Cinnamon and I think my OS usage was probably part of the reason the transition was fairly painless for me - I don’t play games to any significant extent (although I understand Linux gaming is pretty good these days); I’m not invested in Adobe or Autodesk products or other major suites that don’t work on Linux; the most important software I need to use (Davinci Resolve) is available in a Linux version.
I’m curious why people are asking about switching. I’ve mostly had access to Professional versions of Windows through my job, but has the home version gotten crappier lately? I know Microsoft is always trying to shove ads in or make things subscription based.
As long as all I really need is a browser and some standard apps, I’ve been fine on Linux. But I also want my computer to just work. At the moment, my non-work computer could probably be Linux but my vinyl-cutter software would be a hastle I bet. That’s enough for me not to bother switching. It’s always some dumb thing like that where I end up dual booting at first, and then I find myself just defaulting to Windows, and then I’m like “Why do I have two operating systems installed when one does everything the other one does?”
I might feel differently if I had to pay for Windows, though. I also don’t love supporting Microsoft but I do software for the government so I’ve sort of made my bed there.
One very important obstacle is that many applications that are important to me, including but not limited to Microsoft Office and tax prep and online filing software, are either not available on Linux in a fully compatible form or not available at all.
Also, I’ve been burned by Linux not once but twice due to a combination of unsupported devices due to lack of a compatible driver and its obscure Unix-like interfaces. I was drawn into it a second time by blind faith in the assertion that Linux had advanced so far that – in what might have been the words of Bullwinkle the Moose, “this time for sure!”. Nope. And never again.
And this is in spite of my hatred for what Windows has become.
Apparently Windows 11 is getting pretty aggressive on the ads and copilot stuff, as well as steering people harder than ever toward requiring a subscription to MS cloud services, just to get the OS to work. They recently announced that plans for the future of Windows as an ‘agentic OS’ where it becomes a platform for AI to do stuff on your behalf.
My main computer is Windows because I want the maximum likelihood of compatibility with applications and devices. However almost all of my professional work has been on Linux and Unix, and I’m much more comfortable doing software development on Linux than on Windows. So I have a Linux instance running in a virtual machine on my Windows box, and do most of my software development there. For my usage model, this setup is the best of both worlds.
Because I can’t resist thread shitting on this topic…
I’ve never used Windows as my daily operating system. I went from OS/2 to Linux in 1994, and been stuck on it ever since.
I did very recently get a handed down 13" M2 Mac Air, which I’ve been using as my carry around computer for meetings and waiting rooms. The BSDness of it all is taking a bit of getting used to.
Since things are simply going to get worse with MS pushing Win11 migration, Co-Pilot, and various other unwanted, expensive, and privacy-invading features, I would desperately like to switch from my current Win10 installations (7 home desktops and 5 home laptops) to Linux. Unlike many Windows users, I’ve been fluent in Linux for years. In fact I have a desktop and 3 laptops that run Linux for some specialized work I do for clients.
However, living entirely in Linux space (or Mac space) is just not practical for me based on the specialized programs and utilities I use. Running VMs is a possibility, but it still limits me quite a bit and adds some complexity I don’t really want. For example, I have external test devices and equipment tools that have only Windows (and/or MAC) drivers. Tools I use to manipulate media files and produce exhibits don’t have real equivalents in Linux. Again, I could probably run VMs and get 60% there, but it’s much easier and more practical to cling to Win10 at this point on at least most of my machines. And, honestly, I don’t really care about the security update issues at this time.
I’ve been using Linux for years, but It was Microsoft’s spying (through Recall) which forced me to toss Windows in the trash. I run only Linux now on my system.
If I’m ever required or forced to use any Windows’ only software, I just spin up my copy of Windows 11 running inside a Virtual Machine. This way I have a sandboxed version of Windows which cannot spy, nor even access, the regular daily computing on my Linux system.
Never been happier to throw out Windows, but I do not exactly recommend it to everyone. If you are a person who has difficulties learning new things, perhaps you will not have a good time relearning a new OS. However if you are someone who is annoyed by Microsoft and capable, motivated, and eager to learn? There is no downside to running Linux. You will get back your control and freedom.
A lot of the difficulty appears to be in the learning curve (from looking at the conversations I mentioned, that led me to start this thread) - and it’s weird; Windows has become such an established piece of the backdrop that people seem to forget they also had to learn to use Windows at some point in their life.
Maybe at school for a lot of people though, so its different trying to learn stuff later, outside of a specifically educational environment.
I think the greatest real obstacle is that if you want to use Linux, you’re probably going to need to install it yourself. You can buy hardware with Linux already installed and ready to go, but it’s rare, compared to buying hardware with Windows in that state.
As part of my system migration, I cloned my hard drive (so I would just be able to revert back if it all went wrong) - the disk cloning utility I used, spun up a copy of Windows Preinstallation Environment in which it ran the actual cloning process - and WinPE was a complete breath of fresh air - it is a very stripped-down configuration of Windows that can’t do a lot of the fancy stuff, but ultimately still an OS - it was responsive, uncluttered and reminded me a bit of how Windows used to be. Unfortunately WinPE can’t be used as an actual OS for various reasons. There’s also Windows Embedded (for thin client machines) that is similarly uncluttered and decent.
It hammered home to me that: Microsoft absolutely could allow users to have a simpler OS, free of bloat and clutter and upselling. It’s not like these things are baked so hard into Windows that they couldn’t unravel them, but obviously they don’t want to. I know it’s a bit of a tired thing to say, but at some point, Windows stopped being the product; the user is the product now.
I used Linux at work (both Redhat and SUSE*) since most of the projects I worked on were multi-platform (some were Linux only). Most of my development was on windows, but sometimes had to do stuff on Linux. I’m sorry Linux fans but debugging with GDB is a pain compared to Visual Studio (CGDB is a bit better) – things improved when I got Visual Studio Code working.
There are certain activities that were great, but I’m a GUI guy for most tasks – yes there are GUIs for Linux, and I had them, but still had to edit the /etc/whatever file for stuff.
I pushed off upgrading Windows 10 for a year, thinking about Linux. I should dual boot to get used to it.
Brian
* we used to support Solaris and AIX – I think I had to debug a Solaris only bug once.
I think my daughter just migrated? She’s coming over today, I’ll ask her. Her issue was that her perfectly adequate computer can’t run Windows 11.
I have not. My primary computer is a Mac. I haven’t updated it in a while, because no, i didn’t want Apple’s AI, either. But I’m mostly comfortable with the system.
My gaming computer, my travel computer, and my work computers are all Windows. I have no choice about the work computer, of course. The gaming computer is really more about having software that’s compatible with the Windows world than it is about gaming. (For instance, there are minor inconsistencies between the Mac and Windows versions of Excel, and sometimes those matter to me.) So yes, that needs to be Windows.
The travel computer could maybe become a Linux box. That’s an interesting thought. Windows has been getting more and more annoying in how files are stored (and how i can’t find my own files), especially if you don’t want everything out on the MS cloud (which i don’t). Perhaps I’m interested in this thread.
Are there any nice point and click interfaces to Linux these days? I’m not good at remembering magic words, and don’t want to move back to a command line interface. That was never a great fit for my brain, and will likely become an increasingly bad fit as i age.
I have seen a couple of instances where if you get the newest laptop/chipset/hardware that just arrived on the market not all the drivers are already included in old versions of Linux, so, for example, the sound on your laptop might not play correctly unless you take care to install the latest version of the Linux kernel, but I think it is quite wrong to claim that Linux does not “just work”.
Anyone seriously considering the switch from Linux to BSD?
There are and have been for many decades. Question is, which are the popular ones? What do you prefer (try some of them…) According to Wikipedia, a few of the dozens of popular interfaces are Plasma, GNOME, MATE, Cinnamon, LXDE, Pantheon, and Xfce.
To the extent that Microsoft is practicing enshittification, unless you work for Microsoft or are made to use Windows as part of your job, why would one be loyal to them at all? Fuck them.
At least Linux is free software and is actively (usefully) developed, including by corporations.
True, but I’m not sure that WinPE is the best example of that simplicity. Yes, in a sense it’s Windows stripped down to its bare essentials, but it’s a specialized pre-installation environment and not a general-purpose OS. For a number of years I played around with BartPE, which was a customized version of WinPE intended mainly to create rescue media, and I had versions of it with all kinds of useful utilities installed that could be booted off a CD. But adding applications to it required a script that was often quite elaborate because of the absence of a persistent registry. Everything had to be dynamically set up at runtime, and many apps were only partially functional.
I’ve said this many times before, but I think the best example of a good, fully-functional but not bloated OS that Microsoft ever produced was Windows XP, which brought the Windows NT kernel into the consumer space for the first time. After Win XP, all OS releases were pretty much just frills and bloat, and Win11 is the worst of all. Still, once configured, and if you just bypass the ads, it works well enough. I shudder to think what the future has in store, though, if Microsoft moves more to the model where they control more and more stuff through “the cloud”.
I have a friend (one of those long time Linux users), who hates the current implementations of the Wayland protocol so much that he swears that he’ll move to freeBSD just to continue using X11.
He gives Wayland a shot every few months and firmly concludes that it isn’t ready for the wide stream default adoption it has gained from all the distros (which is fair as there still are UI/UX bugs that the older X11 never had).
If Linux ran well on Apple’s modern hardware, I wouldn’t have to use Apple flavored BSD. It mostly is fine, because it’s pretty arbitrary if I have to run ifconfig or ip; I’ll figure it out.
It’s this kind of thing which really scares people away from Linux. The idea that they have to make decisions about stuff they don’t know or care about, and if they decide wrong somehow they’re on the wrong side of a holy war. Truth is, on a new install, it’s probably going to be Wayland, and it’s probably going to be fine, and they’d probably never even know about any X11 to Wayland transition if nobody brought it up.
As for X11 versus Wayland? I moved from Xfce on X11 to KDE on Wayland a few months ago, and it’s fine. I made KDE look like how my old desktop looked. It’s better in a few important areas, like scaling appropriately on my 4K screen (a Wayland thing) and handling libinput devices better (both a Wayland and KDE thing).
A year or so ago when I tried Wayland it crashed, so I moved back to X11, but no similar problems now.
Oh I understand. But all Linux users have different level of experience and expertise. Hearing my Old School friend’s stubbornness to adopt a Linux industry change doesn’t (or it shouldn’t) distract from a novice’s experience enjoying their own system. The same when I have a friend who edits the windows registry keys via PowerShell and who has opinionated viewpoints on the Legacy Windows Control Settings vs the slow rollout of the new settings isn’t a reason that I shouldn’t use Windows (as a novice).
I enjoy Wayland via KDE Plasma (a solid Desktop Environment), although I can see issues for those who hate Wayland buggy Window Positioning or its lack of Remote Desktop. This is just “shop talk” not aimed at novices, nor terribly important to their use cases.
My advice, just give Linux Mint a try. Judge based on your own experiences and not the musings of me retelling the crankiness of my old-hat Linux friend. Or don’t. Its also fine to stick with Windows; but you should probably do so armed with the experience of having tried a home desktop friendly version of Linux too.
