I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great • Hacker News Board

Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#101

Post by snek_case » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 5:37 PM UTC

blauditore wrote: post #73

toddmorey wrote: post #9

Commercial OSes (both Windows and MacOS) now feel so insanely agenda driven, and the agenda no longer feels like anything close to making the user happy and productive. For Mac, it feels like Apple wants to leverage what came out of VisionOS and unify the look and feel of mobile and desktop--two things no one asked for. For Windows, it feels like ads for their partners and ensuring they don't fumble the ai/agent tran…

>unify the look and feel of mobile and desktop Lol, that's what Microsoft tried 10+ years ago and everybody gave them shit for it, especially Apple fans. Now Apple is "inventing" this again.

Ubuntu also tried this with Unity. They were hoping that Ubuntu would become more popular on tablets if they had a more tablet-friendly UI... They imposed this on desktop users even though nobody asked for it and basically nobody used Linux on a tablet. It was kind of a disaster. Ubuntu is a commercial entity though, so yeah, prone to the same kind of bad management decisions. as Microsoft and Apple. At least with Linux you have options. Personally I just want Linux to keep becoming more reliable over time, and have better support for energy-saving features on laptops. It's sad that Ubuntu still has issues waking up from sleep mode in 2025. Somehow those problems haven't been fixed in 20 years.

Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#102

Post by einpoklum » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 5:37 PM UTC

iwanttocomment wrote: post #27

I hadn't run desktop Linux in several years now. (I've run it server-side for decades.) Out of the increasingly loud outpouring of support for desktop Linux over the past year, I went ahead and installed some distros to get back in on the action. I came to four conclusions: 1) You can play games on desktop Linux now other than Tux Racer. Cool! 2) There's less weird X11-wrangling. Thank god. 3) It's otherwise still pr…

... and considering the GTK file picker we still have to live with, that's saying something.

Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#103

Post by undyingtrillion » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 5:37 PM UTC

0xperke wrote: post #44

For all who switched to Linux: which distro did you choose and why? Fedora: wanted to have the newest kernel and updates due to new hardware - so far i am really satisfied; the only issue i have is that the printer does not work everytime… as a workaround i print with my iphone instead.

I also use Fedora only because it seems like Debian's nvidia driver installation is a big pain, Fedora made it as easy as Ubuntu.

Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#104

Post by davemo » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 5:37 PM UTC

0xperke wrote: post #44

For all who switched to Linux: which distro did you choose and why? Fedora: wanted to have the newest kernel and updates due to new hardware - so far i am really satisfied; the only issue i have is that the printer does not work everytime… as a workaround i print with my iphone instead.

I swapped to Bazzite on my gaming rig (5800x3D, 64gb DDR4, 4080 Super 16gb) and it's been fantastic. I tried going with Omarchy for a bit to try and have that machine do double duty as a dev/gaming machine, but I felt like the gaming experience on Omarchy is a second-class citizen compared to what the Bazzite experience is optimizing for, and I realized that the Hyprland setup and tiling window manager adds a lot more friction for my normal gaming needs. (I just want to have a few Path of Exile 2 windows open to tab between while gaming, and the tiling window setup in Omarchy had me hitting more hiccups between fullscreen and windowed mode than I care to troubleshoot on my gaming rig).

Immutability in OS updates is also something I didn't know I needed until I experienced it on Bazzite; pretty advantageous as a gamer using Linux with nVidia hardware these days.

This is my second go around on Bazzite, YMMV but I opted for Gnome over KDE this time and have had zero issues running the games I am into (WoW, PoE2) and no funky window management issues that I seemed to run into with KDE.

I'm considering a move to a Framework machine in the very near future, and still need to settle on a distro for dev; most of that is done on an M3 Max Macbook these days.

Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#105

Post by mongrelion » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 5:39 PM UTC

I ran Archlinux as my main driver on both PC and Laptop for more than a decade but after having the opportunity to use a Windows machine with WSL and eventually WSL2, I felt like I had access to the best of both worlds: a Linux terminal for development (bash + tmux + vim, now bash + zellij + neovim) without the hassle of updates breaking things every few months and a out-of-the-box native gaming experience.

But with the enshitification of Windows (first all the spam and ads on the Start menu, then Microsoft forcing you to have an account to be able to use the machine and the expensive license for Windows Professional if you want access to Hyper-V, which I did), I did some research, tried a few new distros (Manjaro, Bazzite and CachyOS) and settled for CachyOS (gaming support was the main driver, based on Archlinux was secondary).

I do everything I did on Windows and some more: all the terminal stuff plus browsing, CAD modeling, 3D printing / slicing, Office stuff... I miss nothing. No more double partition to boot into Windows when I want to game.

My RX 9070 XT runs smoothly with no driver issues whatsoever. I even have tested the waters running some LLMs with LM Studio and that also worked out of the box.

The only thing that has been a bit meh are Teams and Slack and I believe that has to do with the fact that I ran them in Firefox. Once I ran Slack on Chromium, noise canceling was again available.

2009 was the year of Linux on desktop for me. 17 years later, after going back and forth between macOS and Windows, it feels good to be back home.

One last note in my random ramble is that I do not have as much spare time as before, and I had heard this from other people back in the day whenever I'd say I ran Archlinux on my machines, so I am going to repeat what others have said to me: it's really nice to not have to worry about much, be able to sit down and get productive right away. To me, CachyOS and KDE have made that idea my actual experience and for that I am grateful.

Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#106

Post by bee_rider » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 5:40 PM UTC

philistine wrote: post #45

freedomben wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you get someone to help you with the installation, or buy a pre-installed Linux, then yes I believe this to be true. I only have anecdotal evidence, but I have my dad who is very non-tech savvy who after about a day with gnome actually said it's the first desktop environment that he liked more than Windows 95. There has been one time in 5 years that he had to reach out for technical assistance. It turned out that…

Printers. It always haunts us. I have exclusively bought Brother for home and work for close to two decades at this point because they follow CUPS standards requiring no fidgeting, and their modern offerings all have AirPrint, which eliminates the need for drivers. It's 2026, and the normies still think you cannot print from your phone because printers suck so much.

Hey, we should be thankful that printers suck. Wasn’t this whole journey kicked off by Stallman getting frustrated with printer drivers?

Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#107

Post by 0xabe » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 5:41 PM UTC

IgorPartola wrote: post #72

freedomben wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is both the blessing and the curse of the incredible work that wine and steam has done. Unless and until we get the Linux packaging stuff figured out in a way that developers can target Linux instead of having to target each individual distro, I think the clear incentive for the vast majority of gaming companies will be to target windows even if they ultimately care more about Linux, because wine and pro…

Steam runs plenty well on Linux and has for a while but I guess developers might want more than one option for distribution. But to me it seems like in the long run emulating Linux on Windows is easier than the other way around.

I wanted to setup a family gaming PC in the living room for Christmas and went with CachyOS. It gave me a one click gaming installation option that just worked. I’m not interested in the FPS games with constant anti cheat mechanisms right now. It has worked with every game I’ve tried so far. Examples include: Crazy Machines 3, Cygni, Gradius, and Bejeweled (all on Steam.)

I have a PC with Windows 10 and so does my dad that I’ll be converting to some kind of Linux soon. Windows 11 isn’t even an option due to the TPM chip requirement. The computers are still quite good and it makes no sense to abandon them. With Linux their performance will probably improve.

Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#108

Post by nchmy » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 5:41 PM UTC

wnevets wrote: post #51

WSL and Windows Terminal has done a fantastic job at delaying my move to Linux as my primary desktop but Microsoft seems hellbent on ruining Windows.

This was my stance for the past couple years, but I moved to Linux (PopOS) 3 months ago because wsl2 kept crashing from OOM (even though I had allocated excess ram). I kept having to manually manage my memory usage by choosing which apps, containers etc to run.

There's nuisances in popos, but I am generally thrilled.

Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#109

Post by raw_anon_1111 » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 5:42 PM UTC

xerox13ster wrote: post #93

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that because something is acceptable before something else came along better doesn’t mean it’s acceptable now. Would you have been okay if Android phones had still been BlackBerry clones 7 years after the iPhone came out?

I don’t know what to say to that other than I pity that mindset.

So I should still be using an Apple //e and an 80 pound CRT TV?

Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#110

Post by xerox13ster » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 5:42 PM UTC

erikon wrote: post #80

xerox13ster wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*GASP* OH NO THEY MIGHT LEARN A SKILL!!!! Snark aside, I really really don’t understand the aversion, even within the tech community, to learning new skills especially as it pertains to Linux. Would having new knowledge be such a burden? Why is it something to avoid? Why is it not a good thing if normal people learn more about computing? Do we want a population of iPad baby Linux users? Normal people can use it now,…

Because although sometimes annoying, people already have a good alternative making the hours required to invest in something they're not interested in a very high price. It's the same reason why as a software developer I use Visual Studio Code and don't plan to learn (neo)vim. I (like many who'd have to learn Linux) have better things to do.

You simply dismissed or forgot the learning you did to use Visual Studio Code.

Regardless of how much learning you did you still had to learn how to use it.

Just trying to short-circuit that logic and show you that it cuts both ways and that we should be willing to learn new tools.