I uninstalled my Windows 7 box and installed Mint on it recently and it seems to work okay, except there is no sound. I've tried all the troubleshooting stuff I read online, tried switching sound-cards, but no sound. I've got a Debian distro now on my USB, so I'll try that one day.

It won't take long for me to give up on Linux and to just continue to use Win10.

I have about 7 or 8 machines running some version of linux. I try to switch as a daily machine every decade or so and works fine for a couple of weeks. Then something needs an update, that update then updates some dependencies which breaks a half dozen other programs. Half of those have new updates for it the other half dont. Of the half that do about half of those also update even more dependencies which then breaks even more programs. This spirals for a month or two sometimes settling out sometimes not. Eventually i get tire of fixing the machine and just want to use it so i go back to my windows box i havent had to fuck with since i put it together. Wait a decade or so and the cycle repeats. Just waiting on that time when the cycle breaks and im still using a linux box. Maybe another 30 some odd years and it will be ready.

Having used linux 17 years ago for a year.

Honestly in my experience linux is dogshit.

Want literally any program that reads or writes files to be able to work? Well good fucking luck spending hours asking on discord and reading websites trying to figure out how to fix the permissions and never figuring it out.

Want the system to fucking boot the OS? Lol. Roll the dice baby! 1/3 of the time it's going to get stuck in command line.

And why struggle in the first place? Two of my favorite games don't even run on it.

And even the games that EXPLICITLY SAY THEY RUN ON LINUX IN STEAM DO NOT WORK

I turned a gaming laptop into a word processor. And ultimately into a dust collector.

I'm done trying. Fuck linux and fuck the first person who tells me different.

I'm lazy and haven't gotten around to it yet

You'll find some things are broken and janky in Windows and Linux. Just different jank you're not used to. I have friends who complain about how they have to do weird workarounds for Linux and then turnaround and fuck with RegEdit. You get used to either given enough time.

Isn’t mint based on Ubuntu? So that should work without a hitch for you. Worst case just boot into the live usb without installing it directly and just try it there.

As for me, I dual boot on separate drives because I have specific software that requires windows sometimes. Otherwise it’s primarily Linux on all machines in the house.

Because my PC is an entertainment box. I don't want to turn it into a problem to solve.

Also, Nvidia.

My Windows 10 PC is just as, if not more secure than any Linux machine on the planet.

But one of these days I’m going to have to actually power it on again and then I guess I’ll have to do something.

Man i wish Mint worked out of the box as well as virtually everyone on here says it does.

I am a former software engineer, and don't want my home PC to be a hobby. I'm like 6 hours into trying to make my (simple) audio setup work on Mint Cinnamon and it's intermittent at best. Never have even thought about it on Windows.

It is plug and play compared to Linux of old, it's clearly come a long way. But it's nowhere near as easy as Windows still, for anyone who isn't trying to make this a hobby

Fusion360

I have terabytes of games, shit internet and no patience for things that don't just work immediately. I can only tolerated windows because I've already fixed it and I don't have to keep fixing it anymore.

Who knows what will happen with my next gaming laptop though, if it's fresh and empty I won't have that excuse, although there is always 'cbf' to fall back on.

just make a vm of windows and use Linux for EVERYTHING else

None, we only use linux.

I made the change about a year ago now. I saw the end of Windows 10 coming up and decided to install linux in a dual boot and try my best to use it exclusively for a couple months until I properly got used to it. You will need to accept that not every program you use on Windows will be available and you may have to try out a couple replacements before you find something that works for you. But most things have decent alternatives. Especially considering how much is done in a web browser these days, there aren't too many programs I really miss from Windows (mostly 3D CAD and RAW image processing).

Also, note that the differences between distros is way overblown when it comes to compatibility, it is mostly just a case of whether your package manager has the packages you want available and how bleeding edge the packages your distro uses are. Debian based distros (e.g. Ubuntu and Mint) tend to use slightly older packages than ones that are rolling release like Arch which should theoretically be a bit more stable.

I run Linux but it’s hard because no Adobe, no Microsoft, and no esports fps games except cs.

Engineering CADs and old peripherals with proprietary drivers for me. This cannot be always solved with a VM because either they are graphically intensive or hardware passthrough just doesn't work for them.

There's one specific case of Texas Instruments' software suite for microcontrollers: they have all the tools, the IDE and SDKs available for windows/mac/linux, EXCEPT one stupid old sdk I needed that was ONLY available on Windows for some reason, so I had to use it just for that stupid piece of drivers.

For games I either do games that work on proton, or for extreme cased I have a VM with second GPU in passthrough, and that works quite qell, but cannot do on a work laptop.

VR. Even my valve index, which is supposed to be the best supported on linux, has been nothing but hell on earth to try and get running. I remember reading about envision and if i can get that to work on arch, and the performance is acceptable, i might switch over to it sometime after windows reaches EOL.

because i already did it

I'm on Linux everywhere at home except for my lounge family PC. It runs windows and Linux, but boots in to windows by default. That way when my kid or friends/family are using it, it's familiar to them, but when I use it, I can boot it in to linux.

It's not even true dual booting. Rather, they're each installed on their own dedicated drives, and I jump in to the bios to boot from Linux when I need it. It means they don't really even have to coexist and break each other's installs

My domain. I'm too lazy to bring the whole shit somehow over to Linux. But I recently moved from hyperv to proxmox. Windows just sucks ass in comparison.

And gaming. Sure, many or most games do work fine in Linux, but then there are those with shitty anti-cheat. And also there are no drivers for my soundcard, and I really love my soundcard.

But win11 really really really tested my limits of tolerance. Really....

I'm travelling atm and bricking my laptop would be a disaster. That's it

For work our projects use .NET Framework so it needs to run on windows.

For personal use it's a combination of mostly Valorant, which refuses to run anywhere but windows... and short term productivity loss because it's simply the platform I know my way around.

For my homelab I naturally have Linux running though, and the second Valorant supports Linux (lol) I'm gone.

I recently switched to Linux, but the reason it took so long was primarily:

1. Just getting the time to do it. I'm really busy these days and setting up a PC from scratch with all the stuff I need and how I want it to be takes a lot of time.
2. Concerns about gaming, which turned out to be a complete non-issue. I can game completely fine and easily on Linux via Steam's compatibility settings. I can even use it to install non-Steam games and launchers, like Battlenet.
3. Concerns about stuff not "just working" and I will say, there are more small annoyances. Already had a few segfaults from KDE Plasma when waking from sleep which crashes all programs and leaves me with an empty desktop. We really collectively need to move away from memory-unsafe languages, but yea you just don't get those sorts of bugs on Windows because Microsoft performs much, much more extensive testing of their code than Linux does (which is sad, but is the reality).

VR support, that's it for me.

There is a critical work applications that I need. I’ve tried everything to get it to run on Linux, so I really can’t do it.

Bought a Mac instead to at least get away from windows. The day that app can run on Linux, I’ll be switching back to it.

For my laptop, 90% of. The reason is pc game pass. I like trying random games out for a few hours.

That said, my old desktop is still on windows 10 and there's some shitty update that occasionally causes boot failure after which I've to either rollback the update, restore to a system restore point or (once) do a full windows reinstall.

The problem happened again a couple days ago. Since it's not my daily driver anymore, I just don't have to energy to fix it. I think it might be time to move to Linux, except I've no idea what distro to go for. For work, I've used a bunch of centos and rocky servers, but they've always been cli. I've no idea what kind of good ui based distros will work for me.

Main reasons are:

• Work - I use my PC every day, all day, for work, so making OS level changes is something I'm not keen to do for fear of breaking something. I had meant to get a cheap laptop to practice Linux on, but time/money got in the way of that.
• Lack of knowledge - I'm far from a novice with computers, and am frequently the person people turn to for help, but I've never really used anything but Windows (Mac for a year, once, but only intermittently) and I know nothing about drive partitioning, etc.
• Software - I use Adobe products frequently, especially Photoshop and Première and while I know people say that there are alternatives, I don't feel like I have the energy to start learning again with new programs.
• Time - I just don't have the time to spend on all of the above.

All that said, I'm going to have to do something about it! Ugh.

Every office job ever runs on Windows & Office. Fact of life, cannot change it.

Maybe excluding the smallest businesses where the people are actually still human.

My main workflow is on Linux, but I do have to keep a couple of Windows machines around. One laptop for work stuff (bought out of pocket, employer has BYOD policy, go figure) that needs or works more reliably on Windows. Then a repurposed e-waste laptop at home for the occasional Windows-only utility or proprietary interface software for various old gadgets. The latter forces me to have a physical Windows machine since getting bespoke hardware to pass through reliably to a Windows VM isn't a high ROI activity.