I posted this before, but it feels like going back to the best days of PC ownership. It’s fast, I’m in control, everything I want works and I honestly don’t think about my OS very much.

I chose bazzite since I love gaming, but of course it’s just a competent OS overall with which I also do my private office tasks.

Booting up my PC finally feels like a joy again.

Like most people I use Windows 11 at work and the contrast is enormous.

I’m a programmer and have switched to NixOS, because I can define all my configurations in code+git repo, which is great. I now have a single repo that has some parts that are shared, and some parts are host-specific (one desktop + 2 laptops, for now), and if I fix some bug (like my Samsung 990 Pro SSDs having Linux issues), I know it’ll be permanently fixed, instead of having to re-figure everything out after a reinstallation.

NixOS BTW. We’re making it ours.

edit: Steam has been a non-issue, so gaming has been great so far! Not that I’ve been gaming a ton, but still.

Also, being able to use an LLM to fix stuff for me in my nixcfg repo has been great - I would NOT have been as productive with NixOS had I not have had Codex.

As things currently stand, I’m happy with my setups. I’m using Kubuntu at work and on my gaming/general purpose PC at home, and Mint on my server. There’s a part of me that wants to hop the server across to Kubuntu as well, just because it’s what I’m more familiar with now, but I don’t really touch the server that much, and it’s currently working without any issues, so I figure I’m better off leaving it well alone.

In terms of work; 99% of what I use my PC for is stuff that LibreOffice is fine for, so it’s solid. That’ll change in the next few months, as the company shifts from local MS Office to O365, so I’ve set up WinBoat in preparation. Not massively happy about how much RAM Windows is going to chew up, so once it goes live I’ll do more research into running O365 as FireFox webapps. Again, not ideal, but until MS gives us a Linux-native port of O365, it’s the best I can do.

Gaming-wise, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how well it works - once it’s set up. My gaming PC is my partner’s old machine, so it’s specced with an Nvidia GTX 1060 - a GPU that still has a surprising amount of utility. The drivers have given me some issues, but all in all, it’s great. Coupled with Sunshine, I can happily play lower spec or older games on my MacBook through Moonlight while sitting on the sofa, or I can stream to my Apple TV. Red Dead Redemption 2 looks wonderful, even streamed across the network.

My only real white whale is Apple Music. I’ve had an AM account since the day it launched in the UK, and use it every day on my GrapheneOS phone, so it’s a ballache that my only options for it on Linux are:

• Web App, which doesn’t support lossless
• Cider, also doesn’t support lossless
• WinBoat, which is still quite buggy and eats up the system’s resources
• Waydroid, which works, but again can be quite buggy

But overall, I’m happy with the move. The shift from macOS to macOS/Linux isn’t as tricky as from Windows, perhaps, because a lot of the terminal-based stuff is pretty similar, but it’s nice to know that my computer isn’t at the whim of a cabal of bastards. I have tried Asahi on my MacBook (and the M1 mini I now use as my Home Assistant machine), but ultimately the drawbacks are still slightly too great for me to go all-in on it.

Switched over almost a year ago, aside from a few hiccups, it’s been awesome. Gaming has been smooth, setup jellyfin, and have been developing my media library. I love to tinker around and what not, and it’s been a fun experience (especially when you figure out that one issue thats been vexing you for some time).

Switched to arch 1 year ago or so. At first I customized my experience a lot and really enjoyed it. Now I have a stable experience, just game and do some dev work on and off. Really like it.

I switched to Nobara a couple months ago. My computer is a lot snappier. Overall its great. Some minor difficulties but no show stoppers.

Signal desktop gives me an error that it is keeping credentials in plaintext which is fucked, I tried to get it to not do that but havnt been able to figure out how. (there are tutorials for ubuntu/gnome, but I havnt figured out how to translate those to fedora/kde…

I just started using crow-translate which is amazing, but keep getting a screenshot error message. Something with wayland maybe? again when I search there is a lot of shit about ubuntu/gnome but that doesnt really help.

I went to Fedora in March of 2025. I never looked back. Definitely some frustration with video drivers and hardware issues (bad Samsung monitor), but nothing I haven’t been able to work around.

Most importantly, my computer runs great, my games run great, I have more control than ever, and I will never go back to Microslop. Their pivot to “AI EVERYTHING!!!” has been abhorrent, and I refuse to cooperate.

I’m rocking Bazzite and the only time I wanted Windows was when I got stuck on a boss in Silksong and wanted to use CheatEngine.

I’m happy! It Just Works. Windows 11 -> Linux.

• I have had ONE WiFi problem that was my computer’s fault the whole year; as opposed to half the times I open the computer.
• One video game didn’t Just Work, I had to tinker, but I got it working smoothly with mods.
• A bit of trouble with flash drives initially because they were not formatted to something compatible with Linux. Once I learned that I managed to shuffle data around and format it to be compatible with MacOS, Linux, and my Windows VM. But Linux actually saved me and let me get an old flash drive working that did not work at all. Love reformatting on my distro, it’s easier and more visual than when I tried to do it on Mac or Windows.

Bought a new gaming PC with an AMD GPU and went straight for Bazzite almost a year ago. It was pretty damn painless and straightforward. Especially the only thing I use it for are singleplayer or indie multiplayer games. Almost everything worked out if the box.

A lot of sim racing stuff worked surprisingly well.

It was a pain to learn how to install Assetto Corsa with its mods, needs a specific version of proton with specific windows libraries installed, but once I figured that all out it runs great.

It was also a pain when I bought a Chinese handbrake for sim racing, but thanks to the Sim Racing On Linux discord, a member wrote a custom driver for it for me and another member that bought it. Unfortunately, I can’t exactly install custom kernel drivers on Bazzite, so I ended up switching to CachyOS and have been enjoying that so far. It was a bit of a pain to switch as it requires more tinkering, but I got to a place where it was running nicely fairly quickly.