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?
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.
Thanks, I was hoping someone else with more experience than us would chime in. Ill check it out.
I have around 5 year of experience self hosting.
There are tons of photo and video alternatives.
One of the first was piwigo, but I don’t know what they are up to now. Photoprism brought a bunch of new interest into the space, but is a bit hindered by their pricing model.
The three frontrunners nowadays are: Immich, Photoprism, and Ente.
Immich: easy and very practical google photos recreation (and surpassing in some ways)
Ente: A self-hosted or externally hosted, easy version. More of an ecosystem with Ente Auth authenticator app like Aegis with cloud sync.
Photoprism: much more geared to photographers, tons of organizational and sorting tools and geared towards using metadata of different cameras and such. Limited for me as they don’t have multi-user support unless you pay 6€/month. I would consider that an essential feature to put in their 2€/month and move advanced geocoding to 6€/month.
Immich on the other hand has a 1 time optional (you really should) $100 fee or $25 per account
They are 3 great options.
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!
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.
Regarding alt tab, are you on multiple screens or just one?
One screen. It will bring up an application switch widget in the middle of the screen, and I can hold alt and hitting tab to cycle through options, but when I release alt-tab, it does not switch the application.
Yeah that’s weird. I tried to replicate it; it worked for a little while, then the game window just auto minimizes every time I try to alt tab it. I end up running my game in Windowed mode mainly so that I can see my task bar at the top and don’t experience problems that way.
I’m perfectly happy using Mint. I’ll explore more distros eventually but I miss nothing about Windows
I started using Mint a few months ago, and this is basically my experience as well. On the occasion that I have to use a Windows PC, such as for work, I am just reminded of how awful it is.
Mint+KDE on my daily driver, works great, no complaints after over a year. Plus fun desktop effects!
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.
Manjaro is so nice for daily driving. I switched to CachyOs maybe… Two years ago? And despite having some hiccups, I’d rather have it a million times over Windows.
Once Manjaro inevitably shits itself, think of EndeavourOS! It’s the perfect fully Arch-native, simple to set up and use distro.
I switched from windows 10 to pop!_os on my thinkpad p15s almost a year ago. My biggest surprise was thinking I would still need windows for anything when I haven’t needed to think about it since.
The most frustrating part is that I’m requires to use windows 11 for work and it just feels so broken. But in all seriousness the biggest issues I’ve had were a couple driver issues that were easily fixed from the debug.
Honestly my biggest regret was not switching sooner. The learning curve really wasn’t bad. Just read the forums and docs. I run it on everything now. I game with it, I run a small homelab with it, I’m productive with it. I dont think there is anything I would miss. Everything works as well if not even better.
Pretty damn awesome and loving every minute of not having to use Windows
My daily driver is a Mac laptop, so I wouldn’t say I’m fully switched. . But I did switch over my gaming PC to Bazzite and have zero regrets. I do, however, dual boot back into windows when the kid wants to play Fortnite.
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)
Ardour and Reaper are both excellent DAWs on Linux… But I do recognize they may not be what you used to use. Getting used to new complex software that is a lot like, but not quite what you used to use is hard.
I hadn’t heard of Ardour, thanks for the tip, will check it out. Been using MPC for so long I might as well learn something new honestly
I’ve copied and pasted a bunch of stuff into the terminal without really understanding what I’m doing so … yeah going great. I think.
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.
been using Linux professionally for years (programmer). recently switched my gaming PC to Mint and haven’t had any problems. everything just works.
caveat: i don’t play any new triple A titles that require anti-cheat.
Mostly really good, I feel like I’ve traded a lot of major problems that I can’t do anything about for a few tiny problems that I can actually solve
That’s how I feel as well, and it’s nice not to have random background processes randomly slowing the system down. I really like that if shit doesn’t work or I don’t like it I can just try a different distro. I started out on Bazzite, but it didn’t play well with my hardware. Now I’m on Pop! running Plasma desktop, everything works, and I’ve got it heavily customized.
It’s been GREAT! All my torrenting related stuff works better than it did on windows 10. I am slowing loading old 2000’s windows PC games on my Mint installation and so far it’s been working well.
My computers are MUCH faster on linux and updates take 20 seconds instead of 15 minutes.
