Here I share some of my experiences with Linux from a “regular user” viewpoint.
My “Linux Journey” is similar to what most people relate online, more specifically for the following reasons:
Going back to my teenager years, the only time when I heard about Linux before was when a colleague from the Sonic fan-site I was part of said that he used the system as a daily driver, since this fact was around 2013-2014 I would take a guess that probably was Ubuntu. But at the time I did not gave it too much attention since Windows 7 was around and got out of the way to run my Sonic Fan-games such as Sonic Robo Blast 2 in my old Core Duo family desktop (good times!)
I first started really searching and trying to learn more about Linux recently.
Youtube was the first place that I saw something bout the topic, if I’m not wrong was on the brazilian YT channel called Diolinux. One of his videos about Mint was enough to convince me to try the system on a Live USB two years ago.
After some time I finally decided to install it on my laptop, in the past two years I went back and forth from Windows to Linux mainly due to my work requiring specific tools that work better on Win10.
For example, when I was working as a graphic designer I needed to open Photoshop files and edit videos, in regards of PS most of the time I could get by using GIMP and Photopea instead, but for video editing using Kdenlive in Linux I ran into lots of problems with the program crashing, even using Flatpak and Appimages instead of the dated Ubuntu/Mint repositories.
Turns out that there was a bug that made the program crash when dragging multiple videos at once on Linux. When I did the same on Windows it worked fine.
And why Kdenlive and not Davinci Resolve? No GPU, that’s why.
There has been some other problems like that, such as the PCspeaker being enabled in Arch and Debian (Ubuntu seems to have solved that), and also ACPI errors on boot due to a outdated BIOS (something that also does not showed on Windows).
However, luckly nothing serious had happened in my experience so far in my system, just these minor annoyances.
And yeah, the Ubuntu-to-Arch pipeline is real haha. Regarding Arch-based distros unfortunately I had a really bad experience with Manjaro, however in EndeavourOS things went better but I was unlucky to install it one or two days before they implemented KDE Plasma with Wayland and I also had some display bugs since some features worked on X11 and others in Wayland. I spent some time in Arch but I grew fed up in updating my system every single day (that’s why I got back into Debian/Ubuntu).
Fedora? Never really used it so I am suspect to say anything about it. Maybe in the future I could try.
Nowadays I use Linux as a daily driver and I really don’t see any reason for changing back to Windows; I use 32bit Debian in my NAS, LMDE on my laptop and ZorinOS on my desktop.
In fact, recently I had more issues with Windows than with Linux.
For instance, I was unlucky enough to have a system crash due to a serious problem involving old Intel processors + old Nvidia GPUs on Win10 (hey, i’ts what I have on my desktop PC). In short the system froze and went into a boot-loop that I tought was a hardware issue, but what really happened was probably Windows Update trying to install a Nvidia driver update or something related to POPCUNT. I will never know for sure.
The most recent annoyance with Linux was related to USB Wifi adaptors, specifically from TP-Link since their Linux drivers are ancient and don’t work out of the box. So for my desktop I had to use USB anchoring and compile a custom driver from GitHub to make it work, however this driver only supports up to version 22.04 LTS (that’s why I went with Zorin for the time being), not sure about 24.04 LTS.
Anyways, I had the draft from this post sitting in my desktop for two months so I decided to post it now.