Migrated from Windows to Linux. Decided to share list of answers/statements I was looking for before did it (and could not find).

Finally migrated from Windows to Linux. For anyone wondering, what is the state of Linux as your primary OS for home PC\laptop in 2023.

I’ve finalised my Archlinux installation yesterday, I dropped of Linux more than 10 years ago and experience in 2023 in comparison is awesome and beyond even wildest dreams back then:

  • For average user looking for more out of the box experience I would suggest something Arch based (people in comments suggest EndeavourOS, please do your research). Archlinux installation took me quite some time
  • Almost everything works out of the box, by just installing corresponding package
  • KDE Plasma environment is fast and beautiful
  • Pipewire audio server (Jack\Pulseaudio replacement) works great
  • Wayland window server is not there yet, especially if you have Nvidia with proprietary drivers and want to use VR. Waking up, session restoration and other scenarios have issues. Use X11.
  • Wine is great!
  • Music making - Bitwig Studio DAW has linux native version, yabridge allow you to use windows VSTs, which are easily installed via wine
  • Gaming works out of the box with Steam for majority of titles, some games have native linux version. Performance is great. In worst case windows game might loose 5-15% in performance. Was not case for my titles
  • Gaming outside steam is fine too. Use Wine, Lutris, Proton
  • VR is a mixed bag. Not everything is there (Desktop view, sound control and mirroring, camera, motions smooth, lighthouses do not wake up os go to sleep. I use my phone to turn them on/off). But if its not the problem for you, quite some titles work. Tried: native HF Alyx, Lab, windows: Beat Saber and Boneworks. For me it’s a surprise, I did not count on it. Performance is great.

So overall my experience is great. Eventually I’m going to get rid of WIndows on other computers and laptops at howe. I can finally wave goodbye to Windows, with lots of ads and bloatware. Alway glad to help with answers regarding installation while my memory and history logs are fresh. ^^

utopiah,

Glad to hear. Few remarks that I hope will help. I’ll start with Wine to clarify it’s a clutch. Sure it’s a useful one but IMHO the beauty of Linux is that you are in control, you have more agency. Wine per se is great because it gives you more options. Unfortunately most of the time Wine is used to run what is not available in Linux and that is usually not open source. Consequently you bring with you little black boxes, spaces where you lose again control. The deeper problem IMHO is that you assume there are no alternatives. In truth in most cases there are numerous alternatives, they just aren’t clones because having more freedom to explore means they can be genuinely new solutions with interfaces that are thus unfamiliar. So… yes enjoy Wine but I’d suggest to take just a bit of time to search and try open source alternatives. This lead me to an example. I work in VR so when you mentioned desktop view I thought it was interesting. Yes you don’t have whatever M$ is proposing (honestly used it years ago with WMR but can’t even recall it) but you have “simple” things like ALVR (I even use SteamVR on Steam Deck) and IMHO deeper explorations like XRdesktop gitlab.freedesktop.org/xrdesktop/xrdesktop that allow you to manipulate actual windows in space, not “just” on a 2D plane. Anyway enjoy the discovery it’s a worthwhile adventure. I work and play, VR or not, on Linux for years now, it’s literally liberating!

Oikio,
@Oikio@lemmy.world avatar

There are quite some comments and to clarify all misunderstanding regarding Arch vs something else or any other debates in this thread, I would like to add this comment.

I do not recommend Arch based distro over Debian based or anything else. Topic is about using Linux at its current state, I assume that most of distros will be more or less similar when it comes to statements of the post. In my case it was Archlinux distro, because I had prior experience and it’s philosophy is appealing to me. Like rolling release, configure yourself, install only necessary for you things and etc.

I do not recommend to use Arch itself for a new user. I hope from the post it was clear, that new user should not care much about mentioned topics, like Pipewire vs Pulseaudio or Wayland VS X. One can use more high order distros or even different base, like Linux Mint. Which I also used long time ago and was quite happy about.

I do not say that KDE is better or worse than Gnome or whatever. For me it’s just a preference, like possibility to have more control over UI and looks and to avoid some blockers, like DRM on Wayland. You can have them all on your machine, beauty of Linux.

And please do your own research on the topic and do take everything with grain of salt. There are a lots of great distros, desktop environments and other things. And there are tons of good and bad advices, navigating through which sometimes is not so easy.

And I would like to underline that there are not so many up to date objectivly better things when it comes to software, pick what you need and like.

orac,

I too recently made the switch from Windows to Linux. I wonder what people mean by a “new user”? My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20, followed by a C64 and later an Amiga 500. The OS on the Amiga was somewhat like Linux (at least from memory). I tried Linux a few times in the past 30 years or so. Once because I was curious I ordered a CD (do not remember which distro that was), then 20 years ago because of work (I think that was Ubuntu) and a few years ago (maybe 4-5) because I had an old laptop that couldn’t run Windows any more. Since it was just an old laptop I only used to watch movies/series on, I distro-hopped a bit on it. Of all the ones I tried, Manjaro was the fastest and the one that gave me no problems with hardware working out-of-the-box. Mind you, none of these experiences with Linux were very intensive. And while I am a programmer and I learned at school how computers work (this was in the 80s), I consider myself a noob when it comes to Linux. Does that make me a “new user”?

Recently I was planning on building a new PC and contemplated going from Windows 10 to 11, but the whole software market has been irking me for a while now. Everything (not just software and OS mind you) seems to be switching more and more to a subscription model, which just feels wrong to me. Not to mention the ever-increasing breach of privacy by the big companies. As such, before building my new computer, I tried a few distros on my old PC. First I tried all the flavours of Ubuntu and decided fairly quickly that KDE is my desktop environment. Gnome is just too restrictive for my taste and the others feel too much like Windows (just a personal opinion, obviously). In terms of actual distro, I noticed all the Ubuntu flavours gave me problems after using them a few days, so that one was crossed off the list. While doing my “research” I quickly came to the conclusion I prefer a rolling release over a regular release cycle. Partly because some of my (new) hardware is/was not part of the kernel yet, but also because I do not want to do a major update every (x) year. But rolling does come with a higher chance of breaking things. This is why I went with Manjaro. The 2 weeks (or so) of holding back updates -which others seem to see as a problem- I see as an advantage.

I have only been using it for a month now, so far so good. Still learning and getting lost a lot in how it all works. So far I am happy with my choice, we will see how I feel in a year ;) I already made some silly mistakes, like I wanted my /home directory on a separate drive and stupidly thought I needed a 1TB drive for Root as well… lol. Now got this big empty space on one of my drives not sure what to use for. The choice between X11 and Wayland is a touch one, but I stay with X for now. I do have one question though: What is pipewire and should I switch to that?

Oikio,
@Oikio@lemmy.world avatar

Nice write up. Hope we both will be fine with our installations =)

Regarding “new user” - that’s true, e.g. average person has much steeper learning curve than software dev, DIY enthusiast playing with Arduino or gamer who has his own server for favorite game in the cloud and etc. They might be all “new” to Linux as desktop OS, but not on the same start line.

Though looking at EndeavourOS and recalling my experience with Mint and Ubuntu, it might be possible to have windows like (when it comes to easy to use) installation\configuration and experience out of the box.

Fredol,

Your suggestion for arch-based distros isn’t the best. Tumbleweed is a more friendly alternative for those who want rolling.

timicin,

I always thought that arch was more difficult to get started w due to my experience with it from 2003/2004; it was MUCH more difficult to install and use than red hat or Debian at the time because both only required an installation cd and the ability to click on “ok”

It’s nice to know it’s gotten better, but I’m an old fart now and you’ll have to pry Debian out of my cold dead hands before I’ll consider anything else. Lol

possiblylinux127,

Please stop recommending Arch…

nameisnotimportant,
@nameisnotimportant@lemmy.ml avatar

What’s so wrong with it?

possiblylinux127,

Its unstable. I don’t have any issues with you using it (it would be concerning if I did), there are better alternatives

nameisnotimportant,
@nameisnotimportant@lemmy.ml avatar

We both agree that everyone should have its own distro, I’m on Pop_OS most of the time, but I used Manjaro for a while and I didn’t notice many instabilities… but well I’m a very average user!

MartinXYZ,

For gaming, I would add Heroic Games Launcher for Epic Games ang GoG titles. Otherwise a great summary. Welcome back to Linux! I made the switch a couple of years ago and have not had Windows installed on any of my computers since.

MOUCHE_A_MERDE,

Arch, KDE, Wayland, pipewire… Not the most easy for a first jump but lot of goods choices 👍

Sarcasmo220,

Welcome back to Linux!

Oikio,
@Oikio@lemmy.world avatar

(＾＾)ｂ

mjhelto,

I recently found an Android app on F-Droid called “Linux Command Library” and for the first time I’m not as intimidated to try Linux for my main driver/gaming rig. Previously, I had always fucked my installs up by facing an issue I wanted to fix, and using any info online to do so, even if I had no idea what the command was actually doing. Almost always I end up fucking everything up and needing to reinstall.

I’ve been saving posts and comments regarding Linux info for the last month on Lemmy and cannot wait to take the plunge and finally rid myself of Microsoft!

icedterminal,

Try using virtual machines. You can do this entirely free. Install then take a snapshot. You can learn about the OS in a safety net. If you fuck up too badly, roll back to the snapshot and try again.

mjhelto,

Thanks for the tip. I like to live hard and fast! But this really is an idea I hadn’t considered and I use VMs at work all the time…with Windows.

BCsven,

There was a good suggestion about usimg VMs, but if you want the bare metal expwrience use something like OpenSUSE Leap, slowroll, or Tumbleweed. if you wreck your system trying sruff,you just reboot and choose an earlier snapshot.

mjhelto,

Holy shit, I love you! That’s what I was always wanting in any OS.

BCsven,

Honestly it is great, i have run the same install since 2017 without having to reinstall. the filesystem is btrfs, it is configured to take a pre and poat snapshot whenever you enter any of the Yast2 GUI GTK apps for system changes, or use zypper cli etc. You can add remove software or make manual changes and break your system. Reboot, go into advanced option scroll through the time stamped snapshots and select the one you want to boot with. it will be read only, but if it is back to the state you want, drop to command line and issue “sudo snapper rollback” that will set current readonly snapshot as your default writable boot snapshot. you can also manually generate a snapahot at any time using the yast fileaystems. They take up little space or time because it is only saving the delta differeneces.

sounddrill,

Have you tried ardour btw?

Oikio,
@Oikio@lemmy.world avatar

I did, it looks nice, it’s just that Bitwig feels more at home for me.

Pantherina,
@Pantherina@feddit.de avatar

Wait until you find out that your BIOS and Firmware are also proprietary! Gotta get rid of those, but Coreboot/Heads is a real rabbithole and needs lots of work to be usable.

jackpot,
@jackpot@lemmy.ml avatar

wine staging for yabridge btw, should mention that

Oikio,
@Oikio@lemmy.world avatar

I am using default wine package, which should be development.

Teppichbrand, (edited )

This video was a game changer for me. Turned my vanilla Linux Mint into an audio production powerhouse with a single script. Bitwig, Reaper, Windows VSTs, low latency. Incedible!

jackpot,
@jackpot@lemmy.ml avatar

will check out

Presi300,
@Presi300@lemmy.world avatar

I agree with most of your statements, though not with all of them.

I’d say use X11, only if you’re on nvidia and you’ve got 1 monitor or monitors with the same resolution and refresh rates and are ok with having to disable the X11 compositor and having no animations while playing games… You also have to be ok with tearing while gaming too… It’s a lot, and the next version of plasma, plasma 6 is supposed to fix all the jankiness with kde on wayland, as afaik GNOME on wayland is stable on nvidia, I’m on AMD so I can’t confirm though…

EndeavorOS is great, though I’d also suggest trying out nobara (or fedora if you’re not gaming… or recording).

I’m really surprised that you managed to get VR working at all, didn’t know that worked at all on linux.

lckdscl,

I’m curious what you mean by “no animations while playing games”?

I like Wayland and use it on my laptop. But I also have Nvidia on my PC and while it’s janky at places, I don’t get all the problems you describe (at least on i3 for me)

I use multiple monitors with different refresh rates and don’t really have any major issue. It syncs with the highest one. I indeed don’t use a compositor because it’s distracting and also turn off all the composition pipe line stuff. The result of turning off the latter is less latency and a teeny tiny bit of tearing in the lower 3rd when scrolling web pages but that’s it.

Games can run utilize gsync when in-game vsync is enabled so long as you disable the second monitor with xrandr.

ipkpjersi,

I believe no animations while playing games would be like, no DE animations while playing games.

Presi300,
@Presi300@lemmy.world avatar

Hey, whatever works for you, works, it’s just… is disabling your 2nd monitor with xrandr every time you wanna play a game really more convenient than using Wayland? That’s a genuine question btw, I’d be surprised if KDE on Wayland is THAT bad, where disabling your 2nd monitor on X11 is preferable to using it

lckdscl,

Of course whatever works for you works too, we found workarounds for what we need.

Yes it’s more convenient because it’s a keybinding away. Also, on Wayland I have to use kernel modeset and it is impossible to “overclock/undervoltage” the GPU to save energy. I also get more frames on X. It’s not that KDE on Wayland is bad…it’s exactly switching to X just to do that to play games is inconvenient.

Oikio,
@Oikio@lemmy.world avatar

I have Nvidia and 1 monitor, so did not run into mentioned issues. Wayland on KDE did not work well for me, also community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers have some blockers for me. Gnome on Wayland as far as I understood does not work with DRM, so no chance to run VR. Also though I used Gnome before it does not appeal to me today. Plasma on the other hand was exactly what I was looking for, plus it’s actively maintained and updated. Looking forward to see Plasma 6.

When it comes to VR - I was very surprised, it was something I did not expect to work at all. My setup for reference: I have Nvidia proprietary drivers, SteamVR Beta and Valve Index. I had problems with sound (cracking, quality and etc), but using sof-firmware helped to choose proper output channel on Nvidia GPU via Pro profile and it just started working.

monkinto,
@monkinto@lemmy.world avatar

Gnome before it does not appeal to me today. Plasma on the other hand was exactly what I was looking for, plus it’s actively maintained and updated.

Very confused by this statement, are you implying Gnome isn’t actively maintained and updated or am I missing something?

Oikio, (edited )
@Oikio@lemmy.world avatar

No, I just said it’s not appealing to me today as it did before, when I used it, years ago. I’m not implying anythings here, personal taste. I chose plasma.

monkinto,
@monkinto@lemmy.world avatar

Ok that was what I thought until I read the last part and got very confused lol

olafurp,

Arch is the one of the last things I’d recommend for an out of the box experience.

I’d recommend Fedora with Gnome if people are coming from iOS and KDE if people come from Windows.

Chobbes,

Yeah, something arch based is a really weird recommendation for beginners…

Varixable,

Anecdotal, but I jumped straight into EndeavorOS from Windows 10 with very little knowledge about Linux before hand and it’s been a very “it just works” out of the box experience for me.

Granted I just use my PC mainly for gaming, but outside of a few issues that were my own fault for not reading/doing any research before wiping my Windows install, its been an incredibly smooth experience.

EuroNutellaMan,
@EuroNutellaMan@lemmy.world avatar

While I agree that overall it can be a smooth experience I’d say for the majority of people who are just coming to Linux I woukd rather recommend Linux Mint. Especially when someone doesn’t know what they’re doing at all yet.

Arch and its derivatives are cool dor tinkerers but realistically speaking if you’re looking for stuff that works out of the box without hassle it’s much much better to stick to distros like Linux Mint, Fedora, Pop_OS!, and similiar. Need the latest stuff? Flatpack or Fedora should be good, or Debian sid if you want a rolling release (tho realistically you won’t really need a rolling release over semi-rolling if you’re still a noob). Sure the AUR is cool but it’s a bit overrated in the sense that unless you’re actively looking for stuff on it 99% of the time you’re using it because something isn’t in the official repos and that’s not good, while distros like Linux Mint have large repos with pretty much everything you need already without a real need for the AUR.

privatizetwiddle,

I ran Debian Sid on my primary computer for a few years, and it broke hard several times, requiring things like booting into recovery and package dependency untangling to fix. It was years ago, so they might have better safeguards against that now, but there’s no way I’d recommend that to a new Linux Desktop user.

EuroNutellaMan,
@EuroNutellaMan@lemmy.world avatar

That’s because you shouldn’t recommend rolling releases at all to new users. I just put it there for completion sake

ipkpjersi,

It’s also one of the last things I’d recommend to someone migrating from Windows to Linux lol it has a fairly high learning curve

Fredol,

Don’t forget Tumbleweed KDE!

onlinepersona,

For picking a distro, I’d rather recommend distrochooser.de instead of just saying “Arch or derivative”. IMO it should be in the sidebar. Opinions @AgreeableLandscape @nooter692 @MarcellusDrum ?

SaladevX,

Dang! DistroChooser is neat. I hadn’t heard of it before and it recommended Arch for me, which I’m already using (btw)

Fredol,

I don’t like the questionnaire nor its recommendations when I think about it in the pov of someone who hasn’t used Linux ever.

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