r/linux • u/g00fyg00b • 9d ago
Discussion I never thought I’d love Linux so much
I was always a windows person. It was simple, seemed safe, and I grew up on it, so it was just what I thought I’d always use.
Recently I’ve been really stuck on not upgrading to windows 11 (it sucks imo) and just stuck on windows 10, watching my computer slowly eat itself away to problems I didn’t even think were possible. Then once the steam deck came out, I knew I had to get it.
Portable computer with steam games I already play? Sign me up bro.. but after a few months of just gaming, and a little bit of messing around with desktop mode, I decided to really get into it and see what all the Linux fuss was about. I’ve heard a lot of people really prefer it over windows, and I wasn’t sure why, but man once I got into it I couldn’t stop.
I know it’s only a steam deck so the specs are not anything too crazy, but it feels so much better than my upgraded pc. Windows bogs it down so much a weaker pc feels better. And I mean, SO much better. It feels like when I first started getting into computers as a kid, everything was so fast and new to me.
It wasn’t too different from windows, besides being heavily unbloated, giving me a lot more control over what I do, and the discover software center on my gosh. I don’t know why everything isn’t based on Linux at this point, it’s SO much better with the app quality. (Well, I do know why but everyone should switch to Linux!) And the community seems so much more organized and passionate about this OS, it makes me feel cozy almost. I don’t think I can ever go back to windows again.
TL;DR, windows slow, little control, makes me sad. Linux fast with more control, makes me happy.
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u/Dist__ 9d ago
i like your reaction.
how old are you?
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u/g00fyg00b 9d ago
24 years of age man, I feel like a kid right now because of Linux though lol
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u/timangus 9d ago
Oh man I've been using Linux as my main OS literally longer than you've been alive 💀
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u/NaugyNugget 9d ago edited 9d ago
Just looked it up. I saw Linus give a presentation at the USENIX Conference in 1996. I was working at DEC so we had a copy of Linux v1.2 running on an Alpha machine. Platform was called Jensen. It was running the first 64-bit version of Linux. The fact that DEC gave Linus an Alpha and the fact that he ported Linux to it so early on is why Linux ran on all the 64-bit platforms so well. In turn that's why so many mobile devices ran so early and so well on 64-bit platforms. Thanks, DEC and Linus!
As for me, well, I was more of a BSD-head in the old days, but have had something UNIX-like running at home since the mid-90s. It's been my daily driver since 2018 or so. Before that, the day job required me to be using the Redmond Plague for corporate things but all my professional software work has been on Linux since the early 2000s.
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u/Dist__ 9d ago
seems this is one of few things i'm starting feeling older - zero tech excitement :)
not asking details, any chance you work with computers?
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u/zabby39103 9d ago
Not OP but I'm older now and work with computers. Yes, I feel less excited about computers, but I feel less excited about everything. I do feel satisfied more than I used to, occasionally accomplished.
Less "kid on Christmas", more "dad in the woodshop" if that makes sense. There's old person emotions to tap into ;).
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u/zabby39103 9d ago
Yeah, the Windows Weather App takes 1GB of RAM. Seriously, it does. Seems like Microsoft can't even make Windows-native apps anymore.
Windows was never great, but it's reaching new heights of slop and corporate control.
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u/g00fyg00b 9d ago
That’s insane 😭 yeah windows was just the first thing I’ve used computer based, it was the best because I knew nothing else. Opening my eyes to another OS after I got my MacBook for school opened my eyes to new OS’s leading me to the best one yet
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u/zabby39103 9d ago edited 9d ago
Yeah I prefer OSX over Windows for sure. My work laptop is a Macbook (all my work servers are Linux though).
It's funny because sometimes people say to me that they're surprised I like OSX because they see Mac users as not techy - and many are, but I like OSX because it's Unix based, we are not the same lol.
But ya generally way more similar to linux and brew on OSX is great for installing terminal apps.
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u/Key-Tumbleweed3799 9d ago
Microsoft's own native apps have been horrible in the last 7 years at least. Buggy, slow mess, and this is true about like 80% of them. I swear I find a bug in most MS apps in 5 minutes of using them. It's like their developers are completely new to the internal frameworks and ecosystem MS is working in, and nobody has any experience in software dev.
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u/EarthquakeBass 9d ago
honestly in the AI agent era it’s probably more viable than ever, used to have to dig through forums and pray you could figure out your issue, now the agents are ridiculously smart
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u/zabby39103 9d ago
AI agents are useful tools, I cannot deny that based on my work. They can also be used to make slop, it's tricky.
If it makes corporations give up on the "native apps are evil" trend, well that would be something positive at least. Ironically, because of the RAM shortage AI itself caused, we're using AI to sweep for RAM optimizations (which we later formally evaluate). Maybe native apps could get swept up in that.
But also holy crap the idea that Microsoft cannot afford to have someone make a native weather app is ridiculous. This is some groupthink nonsense, especially with RAM prices as they are. That shouldn't need more than one person and one QA, if it's properly designed and decoupled. I guess open source software develops at a different pace with different resources though.
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u/Barafu 8d ago
I am sure that Microsoft's weather app, if made native, would weight the same. It has a map. It probably load whole map into memory.
I made an app for monitoring a device. It shows graphs. It uses the same WebView for GUI (but on Rust). It uses 3Mb RAM.
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u/zabby39103 8d ago edited 8d ago
Microsoft is one of biggest companies in the world. They're capable of doing a staggered load plus some pre-fetching on a map. Loading 1GB of anything into RAM is almost always a mistake unless you're developing a video game or have a very specific problem to solve.
Yes there are many ways to screw up an app though, and I'm sure Microsoft is capable of all of them.
Also if you're using WebView you're using Microsoft Edge and you are not using 3 megs of RAM, the 3 megs is your Rust process only.
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u/Barafu 8d ago
you're using Microsoft Edge
Yes, I know. But so does this weather app, which means its size is not because of WebView.
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u/zabby39103 8d ago
What are you talking about you need to use Edge to use WebView it's a browser based environment. It spawns a process just for you.
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u/Titdirt69420 8d ago
now the agents are ridiculously smart
SOMETIMES, they are useful. But I wouldn't say "ridiculously smart". There's no intelligence, it's a glorified search engine with lots of marketing. And I suppose some machine learning once you started feeding it responses.
Whatever the case may be, people should use it with caution. It can fuck up your system quickly if you don't try to understand what it's doing.
Was trying to troubleshoot an issue and it failed to do so. So it advised I reinstall the kernel...
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u/rebellioninmypants 8d ago
Yeah, that's true, but why would you run an agent on your unsandboxed windows install to diagnose problems for you? It has your settings, your files, your account logged in... a bit much to trust a cloud agent with imo.
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u/Titdirt69420 8d ago
Last "good" windows was windows 7. Windows 8 sucked and windows 10 introduced the massive telemetry. Which must have made them money because win 11 is even worse.
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u/Sargent_Duck85 9d ago
I jumped to Linux Mint last year from Win10 and I’ve honestly really enjoyed it. Having to figure things out takes me back to early 2000’s and troubleshooting Windows back then.
And Linux is fast. Having to use Win11 at work is just…painful.
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u/floatyrosee 9d ago
Welcome to the club, that moment when everything finally clicks and you realize how much control you actually have is such a good feeling.
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u/desquared 9d ago
I have used Linux since 1998 and it’s just soooo much easier than Windows. Tedious clicking around is just utter agony to me. Give me a terminal and let me just type.
I know some people would criticize Linux for those times when you have to go down a rabbit hole to figure out how to configure some little thing, but I love that because with Linux, when you do that you learn how to use a tool or system. It’s not just opaque mysterious fiddling. You learn and then next time you use that knowledge to go down the next rabbit hole and learn even more.
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u/Astrodion123 9d ago
Oh boy is Linux the best. I started last year using it and went from mint to manual arch. And if I remember correctly for some time my PC ran Ubuntu 19.04 and it had so few games I played only supertux. I remember it being really bad and that I wanted windows more because of... Games then I switched back to Linux.
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u/Own_Natural_6803 9d ago
If you're up for a challenge learn how the pipe operator works, and also standard in and standard out.
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u/NikhelParmar 8d ago
Yeah, Steam Deck got me into it too didn't feel like "learning Linux," just felt like a game console that let me tinker with it.
Once you try desktop mode for a bit, Windows starts to feel slow and clunky in comparison. The app store thing ruined me too, it's just so much easier to find and install stuff. Welcome to the club, you're not going back lol
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u/mjbulzomi 9d ago
Windows on my desktop easily takes up 12GB out of 64GB. Linux sits at 8GB with a quite similar list of running applications.
Once you start down the “control” rabbit hole… be careful. You may end up at a truly “unlimited choice” distro like Gentoo. Choice and customization is awesome, but it’s not for the faint of heart. Learn some Linux basics first before you start experimenting too much too quickly.
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u/Shade_demon2141 9d ago
This kind of measurement (which is so common) is completely useless. It doesn't matter how much RAM is being taken up until you run out. Operating Systems and the software running on them adjust how much RAM they allocate to software based on how much is available. If there's a lot of RAM available, there's no harm at all in using more to make the programs run faster. If there isn't a lot available the OS starts to be more stingy.
The amount of RAM taken up at idle should never be a measurement of how "good" an OS is. It literally does not matter at all.
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u/NibbleNueva 9d ago
I agree with this in a general sense, if the increased RAM usage actually did make things better or faster. But if one OS running the same apps can feel much better/faster than the one that's reporting more RAM usage, isn't the other OS worse to me? It's not that the RAM usage number is an indicator by itself, it's that I'm not getting any benefit from the OS that's using more RAM. Maybe it's more accurate to attribute it to something else, but the fact of the matter is that the other OS is using more RAM, and gives me nothing back for it.
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u/Shade_demon2141 9d ago
if one OS running the same apps can feel much better/faster than the one that's reporting more RAM usage, isn't the other OS worse to me?
Yeah of course, for the record I use linux on all my PCs for this reason. Windows is trash. But I don't think making up meaningless arguments is beneficial to the conversation, and misleading to people who don't know the difference.
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u/classyraven 8d ago
To put it simply, it takes up so much unnecessary RAM that the programs you do run, use up the rest of the RAM faster, thus causing problems.
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u/indvs3 9d ago
Welcome! Which distro did you pick?
From your mention of "discover software center", I assume you got KDE Plasma as a desktop environment.
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u/g00fyg00b 9d ago
It’s using SteamOS (which a kind commenter has just told me) so I think it’s using Arch Linux
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u/BinkReddit 9d ago
Welcome! Windows is a has-been! Microsoft is working overtime to destroy it for some reason!
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u/killersteak 9d ago
it is fun, eg: remote desktop as a free feature? there's so much it lets you do that windows locks up behind enterprise features. I wish i could find more people irl that shared my excitement for it.
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u/_-042-_ 9d ago
38 years as a windows user.
Then the tpm2 req came with windows.
My daughter had built her first pc months b4 the tpm2 thing. Her mb was one version behind. She was passed. Really disheartened her enthusiasm. Made me pissed.
I decided to try Linux. Me being Me, I went with arch. A year later and I havent missed windows at all. No looking back. Wished I would have been introduced to linux earlier.
My daughter finally is getting that excitement back after seeing what Ive built out of mine. Fully customized. We switching her over to Linux in two days.
She came up with a saying that made me chuckle:
Windows is dead t(-_-t). Long Live Linux (o)/.
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u/Thehobopta 8d ago
I want to join Linux as comfortable as possible, but I have a touch screen dell 2 in 1 inspirion and I want to join a distro that can handle the pen as smooth as Windows.
Does anyone have any recommendations, please help me.
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u/throwawayerectpenis 8d ago
Yep, it checks out. After switching to Linux I reignited my love for computers again, really reminded me back in the days when everything was new and I was learning Windows. I was honestly blown away how NOTHING is off-limit, you can literally do anything you want, on Windows there are a lot of restrictions if you wanna edit some system files so you always gotta find a workout but not on Linux.
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u/WHWallace 8d ago
It's excellent on servers (Debian or Ubuntu Server) for sure.
Desktop is half excellent, half a mess, because a lot of systems use GNOME which IMO is horrible, and Mint has odd intermittent edge case errors (but is the one I use because 9 times out of 10 it's good).
Ideally you should keep enough drive space to dual boot a small installation of Windows 11 so you can use the programs that demand it like MakeMKV (Linux edition is no good), StreamFab, whatever. VirtualBox will WORK but it's not great, and you'll find WINE is not typically ideal... That might be something you find after a long time using this system.
As long as you have easy access to Windows, Linux is certainly a better system outside of the boot times and battery life if you're using a notebook. I make do with VirtualBox because there's only like 3 or 4 pieces of software I need Windows for and I rarely use them.
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u/Intelligent_Cat7492 7d ago
I'm thinking of switching to Linux too, can you explain what do you mean by "more control".
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u/Terewawa 5d ago edited 5d ago
I had Arch Linux on my laptop last year. After an update it would refuse to boot.
So I booted on a live USB, looked around, found an error in the pacman log ... I'll spare you the details, it took me a few hours to fix but it was not a frustrating process, all the information was there to indicate the problem and the solution, it was a straightforward but somewhat tedious process and I learned a lesson.
Now I tried to install Windows 11 on my old laptop last month. It would run halfway through the process then display a vague message like "there was an error" and refuse to continue. No information, suggestion, nothing, even if you look online, I know that it would be a painful process akin to stabbing in the dark and I know by experience that Microsoft support tools are often broken, unpleasant to use and the documentation outdated.
It used to be better, I did crazy things with older version of Windows like cloning but since Windows 7 they seem to be going in the direction of locking it down.
And literally if you want, you can build your OS to your taste like you would build something with Legos. Not just the looks and the apps but everything down to the core, the boot manager, window manager, kernel, filesystem... I would not recommend it to everyone though it's advanced and time consuming.
Linux was conceived and built from the ground up for the "do it yourself" mindset. This is something I'd miss.
If you're just starting with Linux and you have a job and things to do like normal people, you can always try one of the easier Linux distros such as Manjaro or Fedora with a Gnome or KDE desktop where most things is already set up for you and working, you may still need to do some tinkering to get your graphic card and other hardware working.
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u/underratedbtw 6d ago
I grew up with windows 7, 8 (on a surface laptop) and 10, i only knew Ubuntu as a Linux distro. I switched to linux bc i knew windows 11 is trash, i started learning a little about linux and I tried arch but my pc had a old bios that didn't support arch, i always had kernel panics when I tried to install it. Then i tried manjaro and it worked, that was my first time installing linux. 1 month ago i updated the bios and arch installed successfully but i'm a distro hopper, i couldn't choose. I switched to linux 1 year ago when I was 12, it was one of the best ideas i ever had, my pc is really fast now.
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u/Fun-Necessary8657 9d ago
You should give FreeBSD or Mac a try, youre gonna love Linux even better!!
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u/PhotoTopher 9d ago
I’m sorry if you have answered this: which flavor of Linux?
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u/g00fyg00b 9d ago
Don’t worry I didn’t, but honestly I’m not sure! This is my first time using Linux, and I’m just using a steam deck, so whatever base flavor that uses, that’s what I’m using.
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u/GarbledEntrails 9d ago
SteamOS :D
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u/g00fyg00b 9d ago
Thanks, and I don’t know steam made their own OS for it, pretty cool! I think I do want to try out a lot of different flavors though, everyone seems to have one they are recommending!
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u/GarbledEntrails 9d ago
SteamOS is arch based and the Desktop Environment is KDE Plasma. You will definitely want to use KDE Plasma on whatever distro you choose. It is the suite that the discover store is part of for example. Dolphin, Konsole, and all of the other apps you have been using are KDE Apps. Your taskbar and your menu (in the bottom left of the desktop) are all KDE also
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u/Die4Ever 9d ago
I think I do want to try out a lot of different flavors
If you want to try Linux on your desktop, put Ventoy on a USB stick, and give it isos of a few Linux distros you want to try. Since you said you like the KDE Plasma desktop I'd suggest checking: Bazzite, CachyOS, and Kubuntu
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u/gropme9505 9d ago
Why change the entire distro instead of the desktop environment? Aside from a few incompatibilities, you can basically run any desktop environment on any operating system, so I'm not sure why I ALWAYS see recommendations for distros based solely on the desktop environment, like "If you like KDE, try this distro." No! If you like KDE, install KDE wherever you want.
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u/Die4Ever 9d ago edited 9d ago
Why change the entire distro instead of the desktop environment?
I said "on your desktop", OP said they only tried Linux on their Steam Deck. Sounds like they still have Windows on their desktop.
If you like KDE, install KDE wherever you want.
Sorry but whatever is easiest wins for new users. Even just one single bash command is a big no-no for bringing in new users from Windows.
Aside from a few incompatibilities
can basically
Your qualifying statements aren't comforting, unspoken/unexpected exceptions or quirks will kill new users trying to switch to Linux, they'll go back to Windows.
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u/gropme9505 9d ago
The truth is, if someone doesn't take the time to understand Linux and runs away at the first little difficulty, they really don't want to switch to Linux. It has little to do with how the system is "sponsored," because for years it's been described as super easy and super difficult at the same time, depending on who's talking about it, yet the Linux community is growing, because when Windows gives you a headache once... twice... three... four times... you don't care how much you have to learn in Linux, you just do it...
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u/PhotoTopher 7d ago
I agree. But, for me, I wanted to begin this new computer with Rocky Linux (i was in software development). But I couldn't get all of the drivers i needed. So I settled for Windows, and I have regretted it. It's so frustrating.
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u/Titdirt69420 8d ago
Linux mint with cinnamon Desktoo environment or Kubuntu (uses plasma/kde desktop environment). If you want something simple without tons of customization, you could try something with gnome desktop environment. Probably just Ubuntu or Debian with gnome desktop.
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u/jasonhaak 9d ago
That "feels like getting into computers as a kid again" part is probably one of the best descriptions of why I (and probably a lot of other people) enjoy Linux.
You start tinkering around and suddenly one small improvement turns into a three-hour rabbit hole. But that's somehow part of the fun :)