Comment by Alupis
9 days ago
Come try out Fedora, or whatever flavor of Linux you want.
It's surprisingly fantastic for almost all modern computing tasks. Yes, it's true, some software won't work, such as Adobe Photoshop, but most people aren't using software like that anyway. For gaming, I'd say we're close to 99% of games supporting Linux out of the box on Steam. The few left that still don't choose not to via kernel-level anti-cheat or forgetting to toggle a checkbox for Linux support (EasyAntiCheat and friends).
The point is, it "Just Works" for darn near everything these days and is a very pleasant experience. Try it out!
The best Linux I have ever seen is Linux Mint. I tried it out because I needed to do something with firewire, but all of the other Linux kernels had dropped firewire, and it was the only one left that still supported it. I found it to be intuitive and friendly and everything just worked.
Mint leans towards the "ultra-stable" side of Linux Distros. Fedora leans towards the "bleeding-edge". Both are great in their own ways. If you want the latest and greatest of everything, Fedora is a great pick. If you just want long-term stability, Mint is a great pick. With both, you can choose the Desktop Environment you prefer (I like KDE personally, but many like Gnome, MATE, Cinnamon, etc).
That's not to say Fedora is unstable - it's just that it iterates fast to keep pace with packages as they release new versions. There's a new major Fedora release every year, for example.
There really isn't a wrong choice here.
Eh, this is going to sound like a I'm a stick in the mud, but I've tried Linux about a dozen times now, and every time has eventually led to 'a Linux evening' that disenchants me from the fantasy and back to reality. It's fantastic as a server OS, however.
Try it again if you haven't recently. I'm unsure what specific issues you encountered, but anecdotally I can say I've been driving Fedora full-time on my home workstation for nearly 2 years now. I love it. I drove Fedora full-time on my laptop off-and-on for nearly a decade as well before that.
For me, gaming was what kept me away. But, besides a few titles, it's been a non-issue. It was very pleasantly surprising.
My desktop runs Fedora Kinoite[1] - an immutable version of Fedora. It poses a set of unique challenges for a development workstation (my primary use), but has resulted in rock-solid stability through several major OS upgrades, and a lot of development-related hackery.
I don't see myself going back to Windows anytime in the future. Every time I'm at the office an on my Win11 machine, I remember why I switched in the first place. Just my experience though.
[1] https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/kinoite/
Often Linux is great, until You update some esoteric dependency that breaks a bunch of stuff, and fixing it is just a little past your experience level …
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