Linux The ‘I dumped Windows to daily drive Linux’ megathread

I finally got a GPU sorted, so I figured, “why bother going back to Windows at all?” It’s been five months since I last ran my PC, so I live-booted CachyOS as it happens, did a disk image of my NVMe boot drive to a .img file (I didn’t go with sparse as this way I can mount it and read from it) and then plopped CachyOS on the boot drive. No dual boot. Both feet forward.

Figured a megathread could be cool to help everyone considering this with any teething issues.

 

The only two things i've missed about windows is Call of Duty and easy control of RGB.

The ease of Windows workflow with everything being point and click is hard to beat but Linux is getting there.

 

Does OpenRGB support your devices? Tbh my PC is in a PC cupboard by my feet so I long since removed RGB fans and just have regular fans which are in a Corsair Commander using liquidctl and coolercontrol to configure the fan curves.

 

Depends on the peripheral, libratbag-piper for mice can be pretty much a 'poke and a hope' because everything is reverse engineered and often has functions missing such as reading the current mouse settings so it's better to just use windows in VM rather than risk bricking.

In future anything i buy will be RGB free or can be disabled using a web browser.

linux support is just flaky in this area, openRGB for a period of time was triggering virus reports due to the old WinRing0 driver that had to be removed.

 

Yeah fair shout. In fairness my mouse which is a Redragon only has a Windows official utility. There’s a chap who reverse engineered the protocols and made a Linux utility, which is awesome, but I have the lighting off to save battery anyway. Same with stuff like the Corsair Commanders, and various other bits. I think the Aquaero is the only fan controller with native Linux IIRC, but it’s fans only.

When manufacturers don’t bother then all we can do is wait and hope that people do bother. Although AI slop apps will probably mean more people give it a try.

 

Another tick for Linux, boo to RGB

I'll be switching everything later this year when W10 support finally runs out

At the moment it looks like Bazzite for my gaming pc and probably Mint for everything else (in particular the OH's laptop)

I'm not set on this so I'll keep looking in here.

 

Done this on my systems, no windows 11. If I need familiar then I just on the Mac to smash out what’s needed and can get back to tinkering on an OS that feels like it’d actually mine.

 

Awesome! I’ve used Linux on and off as an occasional secondary desktop OS and as cli-only server, for two decades. So for me it hasn’t been too much. I mostly play games on mine though so moving now when Proton has gotten super good has been well-timed. I’m sure I’d have made some stuff work over the years but I’d have had to dual boot for others definitely.

 

The turning point for me was seeing just how well the steamdeck ran games on its OS so with that in mind I ran an old 3400G on windows 11 and tested a few games that can be easily played in the living room (think Trine and similar) and then did the same again on Bazzite and CachyOS before settling for CachyOS on my tinkering server and Bazzite on the 3400G which made it in to the living room as it’s very console like in how it functions.

Given how terrible windows 11 has become, I think that many more will start to migrate and all being well we may even hit support parity in most games in the next couple of years. Time shall tell

 

Problem is you can't turn things off if they are throwing out rainbow strobes with some peripherals , so make sure to check hardware before you switch.

 

CachyOS’s updates might piss you off. But not in the way you’re probably thinking…

Not because they’re intrusive, or install themselves, or overwrite your settings, or force AI horseshit on you, etc… But because there are just.. so… goddamn… many….! Barely a day goes by when I boot up my PC and Octopi Notifier doesn’t have an angry red icon

To be fair, I knew what I was getting into with a rolling distro like Arch (or an Arch-based distro). It was a necessary trade-off for gaming performance.

Not to get all doom & gloom about it, but that also depends on whether the gaming PC market even survives that long. Because at the moment, that’s not looking like a solid bet…

But it’s a sunny day, I’ve got another day off tomorrow, and I've got sod all I want or need to get done, so, in defiance of the evidence, I’m going to choose to be positive about that .

As much as Valve have been a massive enabler in Linux gaming, Microsoft have done more to push people away from Windows than anyone or anything else.

 

Hasn't even thought of that, so it could be an enforced disco.

 

I actually saw a blog post for replacing the Shutdown on the Kde menu with an update and shutdown script. I reckon I will look into that tbh. But yeah! More than Ubuntu would normally do, for sure.

 

Some people have resolved the issue by either unplugging the LEDs (if they have a header) or physically cutting them off.

Even Ubuntu is becoming a pain for updates, it seems if you want a quiet life then it's either Debian stable or Slackware if you don't mind living with older files.

 

Yeah for desktop I don’t mind I guess, I just want my games to work so a rolling release doesn’t bother me much. But I do roll Debian with docker for servers and I roll Debian distroless from GoogleContainerTools for my docker baseline as a first preference. I want to do a big project to roll all my own docker images for all the stuff on my server eventually.

 

Then stick too Windows

 

Hah! You got me. They do work on Linux. Getting better performance actually. As long as the rolling updates don’t break stuff they can keep rolling on in!

 

You're more than welcome to.

 

Don’t worry he’s just being snarky because I had the gall of being unavailable to answer the door when he kindly dropped off a RaspberryPi 3

 

I mean how rude

I do both because the YT Linux gaming hype is strong and have fomo so need to know the reality of Linux is something else for me, perhaps because I run the latest stuff where Linux can be behind, in addition my machines have no resource issues so if windows use more, whatever, no feeling the hype, in much the same way, I wonder what people are moaning about with W11, it just works, nothing gets in my way.

I mainly just use Linux for work, NAS and AI play where it offers a superior environment but definitely not for games, or even web browsing uurgh.

Biggest benefit I could find using as a desktop was a superior power usage by default.