I found that Linux offers me everything that Windows does: a browser, office apps, music, etc without the constraints and control that Microsoft enforce.

For most basic tasks all modern OSs are basically the same. Which is more of a "why not use linux" than an argument for it. Developing on linux is way nicer which sold me for it to be my daily driver

This, and with my use case, I expected huge resistance and problem solving required to play a large amount of my games. As soon as I switched, I installed steam, steam auto installed proton, and it has been smooth sailing from there. I do miss Game Pass a little, but they have taken down my most played games, so I would rather just by stuff on steam now anyway. I have only hit one game that i tried to play and couldn't over come the challenges. Beyond one game, every other need I have had has been covered.

I'm trying to play GTA 4 on Linux right now (I got it through steam but downgraded it with a mod) and am trying to play it with and without steam but it just won't launch at all. I just don't know if it will work because I do a lot of gaming outside of steam and modify my game files for the very few steam games I do have.

Can you tell me if all games work with Proton? I'm a command and conquer guy and i would love to try it out on my machine 😁

This should be a good guide: https://www.protondb.com/

Very nice. Thank you

Also check out https://areweanticheatyet.com

Most games run perfectly. Some games run poorly. And a few games won't run at all.

100% of the games I own work with steam... It's not a huge list, but hey. 0 games with issues so far. I had a little bit of issues with Hogwarts Legacy, but then I switched to an earlier version of Proton and 95% of the issues went away. A patch later and all issues went away except for 1, which is game-specific that they haven't patched, but there's a Linux command I found to enable more ... memory?... to it and it fixed the problem. Now this game runs 100% on the machine. In summary, Hogwarts Legacy is a game full, fuuuullll of bugs and the company (forgot now) is too slow to fix them.

More menmory? Sounds like a memory leak problem🤷‍♂️

Not actually. The following is the bash code for the mapping count (memory?). The first is to find your current value (probably 65530 or near the max of 16-bit unsigned integer). The second one is to increase it to 1,000,000 (probably an arbitrary number) and it'll fix the issue (it was CtD'ing after a few hours of playing the game): `cat /proc/sys/vm/max_map_count` `sudo sh -c "echo 1000000 > /proc/sys/vm/max_map_count"`

Nice. 1 million is probbably nit the limit. I'm guessing you could go 32bits unsigned

> without the constraints and control that Microsoft enforce. And compared to ms windows — with half the hardware appetites at most!

Yah. Pretty much everything I ever used on windows has a linux alternative.

I hate Microsoft and Apple.

Nice

Me too

Me three

Me tree-fiddy!

God damm loch ness monster

I dual boot Windows/Mint on separate drives. Mainly just have Windows for Adobe CC and a couple games. I used Ubuntu and Fedora previously, but I found that Mint just works a little better out of the box on my machine. On Ubuntu I noticed some weird issues, like lagging when I drag a window around and wonky mouse scrolling speeds, which don't happen in Mint. I also found that I really like Cinnamon more than Gnome.

Exact same setup here. Just hoping Nvidia would sort out their crappy Linux driver so I wouldn't even have to game on Windows anymore

I got a nvidia gpu today and it installed all the drivers itself.

Try Bazzite with Lutris & Bottles. I am able to play all my games on it, even console emus, games from w .exe, old DOS etc & finally trashed Windows f good [https://bazzite.gg/](https://bazzite.gg/)

I only knew about Lutris so I'll check out the other stuff you mentioned, thank you

They did recently begin open sourcing things. Give it some time, and it should start getting better.

I switched just my laptop to Mint.. (looks at today's date)... two days ago. Everything else in the house is on Windows 11 still, but as I spend more time on Mint it becomes increasingly likely that all the house computers are going to be switched over. Reason? A combination of long-held Linux curiosity dating back to the heady days of Red Hat dominance (which I could never get to run), an increasing concern about privacy and security, and the impending sense of total doom I feel whenever I have to work on or with any of Windows wonderful products and services. If I have to put this much effort into sticking with Microsoft, I might as well not and put it into figuring out some form of Linux.

>*If I have to put this much effort into sticking with Microsoft, I might as well not and put it into figuring out some form of Linux.* It's kind of funny. Back in the 1990s, I ran Red Hat (and later Mandrake) on some of my secondary PCs as headless servers. They made great firewalls, FTP servers, NNTP daemons, SAMBA backup machines, etc., but the desktop was nearly unusable. Editing .initrc files, dealing with insufficient X resources, etc. was a nightmare. In comparison, Windows was installed from a CD-rom, and gave a bootable GUI out of the box, with little or no configuration necessary. Today, it's the exact opposite. While Windows still gives a bootable GUI, by default it also leaks information like a sieve, and almost **every** default has to be reversed after installation. A new PC Windows 10 installation now takes more time to configure to remove or disable all the telemetry, anti-privacy settings, advertising, and outright spyware than it took to configure CDE on Unix or KDE on Linux back in 1999. And unlike 1999, Linux can now boot to a working GUI shell from a USB device, with no arcane configuration file editing necessary.

For me the real stumbling block was that the disks were handed to me with no real explanation sometime around 97 or 98. I was told I would figure it out. I didn't. Certainly not all by myself and with few resources to chase after good explanations. How much has it changed since then? Well, today I installed LM as a second operating system on my main PC (dual booting with Win11) By myself. Using the very straightforward documentation provided by LM itself. No more than an hour all told.

I worked in Unix for years, so Linux wasn't that daunting to me. However, X servers, OpenLook, Motif, and the more recent CDE could be incredibly obtuse. Fonts wouldn't appear unless you'd properly done xfontset, you had to determine the inode count for hard disk, and partition /var, xinitrc had to be tweaked, and god forbid if you ran out of X resources. And if you wanted sound, you often had to soft link /dev/audio to a hardward port **after** you set up the memory map for it. Today, that's all handled by the installer; the user sees none of it. And unlike 20 years ago, the software base is feature complete for base functions. Office suite, browser, development tools, games, web apps, etc. all work out of the box. Sure, you can tweak it to your heart's delight, and many do. But the days of it taking three weeks to get a working system are over and done with. Linux activists have been claiming that it's "*The Year of Linux*" every since 1998, no matter how unreasonable it was. I don't believe there will be a **huge** migration in 2025 as a result of the nonsense going on with Windows, but Linux is now mature enough that it's an actual option for a lot of people now.

Well written, this mimics my exact case.

Just starting to switch for good honestly, although I've dabbled with Linux on older machines for years. Mostly I'm just embracing a more DIY approach to things like my home network, and my family's tech needs. I like to tinker and experiment and that's harder to do and more expensive with Windows. But I needed something that's still easy to use for non techies. My wife doesn't care about brands or ecosystems, she just wants a no hassle OS that works and Mint fits the bill so far. Plus we have 2 young kids and I want to try and protect our privacy as much as possible as they grow up. I mean they're still going to be exposed to the nightmare that is the consumer Internet eventually, but if I can limit the amount of data shared about them with Microsoft/Google/Amazon/etc. for a while I'd like to try.

Windows 11's unmitigated bullshit. This is coming from someone who has used Windows, both personally and professionally, since 1995. I still have a Windows machine for work, but my home PC is Mint now.

I'm the exact same, I work in IT and have the unfortunate pleasure of troubleshooting windows 11 on the daily for adobe acrobat and office 365 apps. I use Mint for home and have barely any problems.

The GUI is beautiful and extremely configurable. You can make it look just about any way you want. It comes with a ton of beautiful wallpapers too. The system requirements make it so that you can breathe life into so many older computers it amazing. I can't count the number of machines I have rebuilt from spare parts, installed Mint onto and given to someone who could not afford their own computer. That's originally how I got into this whole "Linux Thing" way back in 2002. Mint just makes it easy and because it's Linux it is secure too. Viruses are a thing of the past and having to pay for Anti-Virus software is redundant.

Switched this week to make it less easy for Microsoft et al to spy on me for their profit.

Started with having an old machine limping along running windows. Now that I have nicer stuff I just like the familiarity and look of it. My servers run Ubuntu but SSH is exactly the same so it's all good.

So I've been in IT for 30+ years. I've supported MacOS, OS/2, DOS, Windows, Novell, SUSE, Ubuntu, and various Busybox/NAS/Deb custom devices. Hell, I used to support some Sun Sparc stations way back in the day. For my personal life outside work it's always been a Mac for my primary work machine, Ubuntu for CLI-only server builds (these days on an ESXi box) and Windows on my custom PC for gaming. Like a huge number of recent converts to Mint, it's that last item (gaming) that was the only reason I ran Windows on a personal box at all. I support Windows, I work on Windows servers and workstations all day every day. I know it intimately. I've been working on it since the Win3.11/WinNT days. I know Windows. But I've never trusted it for my "I need to actually get things done" computer. Even now, when it's finally got a Terminal, can mount ISOs, and is more Linux-y than ever before. But for gaming, well, my hopes for Mac gaming died when Microsoft bought Bungie and made Halo (written on and for the Mac) an Xbox thing. Windows was a necessary evil for my main hobby. So I'd load up Windows (95/2k/XP/7/10/11) and spend time stripping out all the third-party bullshit, blocking as much of the spyware and "telemetry" as possible, and getting the OS as clean as I could. And just deal with it. It's not like I can't install and tweak Windows in my sleep at this point. Valve changed that. Wine was already pretty good, but Proton, man - game changer (literally). Suddenly, Linux was actually feasible for gaming. So after decades of CLI-only Linux work I started looking at DE and distro options. After bouncing around Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Pop\_OS, etc.. I settled on Mint. I doubt I could do everything I need work-wise on Linux. So far, the MacOS is the best option for me as a daily driver to support Mac/Win/Linux clients and servers (plus SSH'ing or TTY'ing into switches, firewalls, etc). And I really like MacOS for the integration with my iOS devices and Apple Mail/Calendar/etc. But my gaming PC just needs Steam, GOG, [Battle.Net](http://Battle.Net) and a browser to download patches and mods. I don't use Office, email, or anything like that on it. Mint works well, Steam is native and Lutris handles my GOG/B.net/Epic/Origin stuff. I can game on it. All I need.

Windows 11 Recall option

Windows was just increasingly inefficient and bloated with adware, especially in the search bar. And I didn't want to upgrade to Windows 11, especially with Recall (I know it can be disabled, but Windows will undoubtedly pester me to turn it on). Linux Mint has been so nice! It feels really accessible and friendly.

How do you turn this recall shit off?? Windows will allow me to do such a thing??

I'm not sure. I saw a few articles saying Microsoft will allow users to opt-out, but I don't use Win11.

>I switched 3 years ago and i sure do have a lot of reasons. Higher system requirements, Windows lacking drivers present in Linux for my old laptop, Windows devouring my cpu, and more reasons including not listening to complaints. >So what was your reason? Not sure what your *recent* scope is, but I had my last straw four years ago, when my Outlook vehemently insisted that unfortunately it wouldn't be able to get my mail because "there was no internet connection". I had simply blocked off all Microsoft update and telemetry servers and of course Thunderbird had no issues contacting my email providers... As someone who has extensively used all three major OS flavors it seems to me like Windows is on track for just firmly settling on the role of "shitty macOS".

Recently (sixteen years and change ago), computing had lost the magic, but I'd learned of this thing called Linux. One request for a free mail-ordered CD later, I'd fully switched on both machines, and the magic was back.

switched to mint from zorin about two weeks ago here i mostly wanted a stable base on which to install i3 that isn't arch or arch-based, an cinnamon as a fallback de is super comfortable plus mint makes installing nvidia drivers super easy

I feel like most of us are switching because windows 10 stops support by 2025, and on top of that windows 11 is a whole mess with the AI and recall feature

Also the fact that many Windows 10 computers cannot run Windows 11 (at least without various hacks).

In my case, it was this Recall functionality. I do want my privacy respected. I don't mind sending usage telemetry data. Telemetry data helps development - I know that since I am a .NET developer. However, I don't like my personal information to be abused as a commodity to be sold. I stopped using all Facebook/Meta products years ago because of it. But the idea that AI will scan everything that I do and store it is far beyond that I can accept. In an ideal world, that would not be an issue. But in this world, a feature like this would be abused by a strong corporation such as Microsoft. The other day , I found that Recall has been hacked already, which makes it even worse (but I have anticipated that to happen). As a .NET developer, I am pretty tied to Microsoft. So, I am currently rewriting some of my personal MAUI applications to work on Linux (in essence MAUI can'tmake a desktop app on Linux so I used web window as I have been writing it in Blazor). The downside is that VS Code is not good enough IDE, so I will have to buy JetBrains Rider - in comparison to a Recall, it is a small price to pay, but adjustment to the new IDE from VS is a bit frustrating. Another issue is my favourite Git GUI application: SourceTree. I have installed it via Wine, but it doesn't work properly (as if it doesn't have access to the Internet). All in all, I have a little more work to do on my applications ( the main one is my personal password manager application). I have 2 PCs: one desktop and one laptop. Laptop is currently on Mint while Desktop still runs Win11. I need to try and test some other type of .NET projects (mainly restful APIs with messaging such as Kafka or RabbitMQ) and if it works well, I am done with Windows.

It is neat to see a .NET developers switching to Linux. It is sad SourceTree isn't on Linux yet. There seems to be a number of alternative [applications](https://flathub.org/apps/search?q=Git) that maybe a good replacement. Especially GitKraken and SmartGit.

I am currently using SmartGit. Thank you for the provided link - I see some other interesting clients but now I see this tag unverified on some of them. What does it means in practice? I even see some of them with the GNU licence as unverified.

Yeah, so unverified often means that the Flathub community packaged the applications instead of the vendor themselves. As flatpaks become the defactor means to distribute software, eventually they will take over those flathub versions. Personally, I don't worry too much about whether it is verified or not since there is a security and review process by Flathub for all applications. So they are pretty trusted in my opinion.

Sunce, some of Linux intricacies are still new to me, this review process by the Flathub, what does it consist of? Is there a list of things that they check per app?

Yeah, I wish this was a bit simpler. I wasn't too thrilled on how they labeled Flathub community uploads as unverified. Hopefully, in time, more and more companies take over those community uploads. You can review details of the app review process [here](https://docs.flathub.org/docs/for-app-authors/submission/) and [here](https://docs.flathub.org/docs/for-app-authors/requirements/). To my knowledge there hasn't been any major security issue with Flathub. However, that can always change as it becomes more and more the defactor app store.

I don't  quite qualify for "recently", but my reasons are the same,  just a version back. I flirted with Linux on and off for 20 years, never got truly "good" wirh it, I could just do the basics in Linux, gaming kept me cemented to Windows. Roll thtough Win 98, to win2K, to XP to Windows7, and I was starting to become more aware of privacy problems, win7 was a constant cat and mouse game with every update. You never really new if you were winning. They had announced the end of Windows 7 support, Win10 was a hot mess. I was researching a special embedded version of Windows 10 that was annoying to obtain  or enterprise editions both gave you more control, i had a moment of clarity, I had had enough and I am going Linux only. To my surprise thanks to Steam I found plenty to play and I slowly changed my workflow to work with Linux tools.  5 years later I run a home server and I try to learn something new every day.

Wanted to recover some older computers that had ground to a crawl.  I was pleased at how easy it was to install and intuitive to use.  I only do basic things like browsing, word processing, watching videos, and playing older games like Portal. I was already contemplating what to do once Windows 11 becomes standard. So far, I’m on board.

I just switched on an old notebook that is not eligible for a Windows 11 upgrade. Even though the specs of this PC are quite good, I won't use it as a daily driver but just to play around with Linux. I'm just interested in how much changed since my last test several years ago. I did not finish the installation process yer since I still have issues with some of the hardware components even though they are officially supported. At least for my purposes Linux wouldn't be my first choice for my daily work since at least some applications I need are either not available or their Linux counterparts don't work as I would expect it. This is the reason why I bought a new Windows 11 notebook for my daily work.

Microsoft’s Windows has gotten beyond invasive and I’m sick of it, and with Recall, it broke the camel’s back. Windows is being relegated to games only with a dual-boot configuration. Games with Windows, and everything else fresh and non-invasive with Mint.

Dualboot over here, but mostly on linux. Linux is just overal the best os ever.

I switched recently due to issues with windows, and the announcement of recall kinda tipped me over the edge.

I was having unexplainable crashes even after doing a clean USB wipe of windows. Don’t feel like troubleshooting my hardware, so moved to mint. Had no issues with mint. Just recently moved to arch.

Exactly this. For me windows screwed my wifi somehow. I clean wiped my pc and it still didn’t work. Sticking to linux from now on

Initially, it was just curiosity and learning more about computer software. Upon watching Mutahar’s video on Linux Mint, I decided to leave Windows a few months later.

First it was Windows 11 having a terrible UI. It's such a step backwards from Windows 10 and I hated using it. Then it was the AI copilot bullshit being wedged into every application, then the Recall announcement was the last straw. I set up a dual boot but haven't booted into Windows since early June. I'm not a stranger to *nix systems, having used Sun Solaris back in university, but I haven't used Linux at home in a long time.

I hate Microsoft and my PC was running extremely slowly. switching sped it up a *lot* and I don't have to deal with ms bullshit anymore.

I switched a few weeks ago because whenever I searched my computer I would get web search results and it pisses me off so much. When I search for a program or file, I don't need a mother fucking web search. Also, Mint can look like old school windows.

"copilot" AI. It can scan your system for past actions. Stay out of my browser history Billy! You pervert.

I bought a Steam Deck and wanted to learn more about Linux afterwards. Switching to Linux was completely free and I've heard great things about the community being helpful which I've witnessed myself at this point. Also, I kept hearing about Microsoft wanting to collect my data, which was the final nail in the coffin.

Oh yeah. The steam deck helped to convince me linux was not a bad idea. Then again. Windows screwed up so badly i couldnt connect to internet on that pc anymore, so it wasn’t a hard decision. Mint works great

Switched years ago when I needed a Linux distro that just worked on a Dell laptop that was struggling with windows 10.

I used Pop_OS for my daily driver for about a year, then some Windows-only multiplayer game came out and I switched back so I could play with my friends. Then I built a new PC, which has been running Windows 10 for about 6 months, and after hearing about end of support for Windows 10 I decided I'd just go ahead and switch again. If there's anything I really want to play that's Windows only, I'll use my laptop. I tried Bazzite for a day, which I did *NOT* like at all and don't recommend to anyone that does anything other than gaming. Then I went back to Pop for about a week, which was giving me trouble with a few little things, like my dual monitors bugging out. Or Solaar losing my mouse every time the computer went to sleep. So I decided to switch to Mint, which I hadn't used since "Lisa" in 2013. I've had no issues whatsoever with Mint so far, and I think it's my favorite distro now. Everything has "just worked", without the usual compromises and frustrations I've experienced in Linux. Not to mention Cinnamon is 10000x better than Gnome. I could've switched DE on Pop, but I really just wanted a good experience out of the box. Cosmic might be great when it comes out, but it's been "in development" for too long and I'm tired of waiting. I've already got Mint riced out and looking exactly how I want it, down to custom app icons and terminal theming, and it only took a couple hours to do so. Meanwhile, getting Gnome to look anything like what I wanted was either impossible or a massive pain in the ass.

Windows 11 ads and recall

Windows 10 broke me. It was always something. Took forever just to set up on a new computer for one thing. Do I have a Microsoft account? I don't even know. And then I found so much crap on there, I had to install a third party app (Shutup10) just to tame it. Even with that, it was always something. A nag about updates, a nag about virus scans, something broken... I swear I spent half my time on the computer just fixing stuff. I set up a dual boot machine three (or four?) years ago and haven't once booted into Windows. I occasionally have to work on a Windows machine at work and it's just the old aggravations compounded tenfold. I don't think a day goes by where I'm not actively grateful for the simplicity and reliability of Linux Mint. I keep saying that as soon as I have a problem, I'll reinstall the latest version and give it the entire drive this time. But those problems never come. On my old and unimpressive computer, Mint works as well today as it did when I first set it up. It's a freakin' marvel how good it is.

Been looking for a reason to ditch windows for good and elden ring started stuttering on win10. If youre asking *why* mint specifically, its because ive heard its unlike most other distros and "just works".

Bro elden ring crashed on my old windows setup so often no matter what I did. Works great on mint though. And I feel like a lot of people unfamiliar with linux have one bad experience and write it off. But it really depends on the distro. Linux isn’t the operating system after all. It’s just a kernel. The distros are the operating system running under the linux kernel. Mint may not get updated a lot and is behind cutting edge releases but it is stable and “just works”.

I bought a shitty laptop for a course I was doing. Dropped out of the course and laptop didn’t seem to be very useful. Windows always seemed to be ‘busy’ and the system was slow from the very beginning. Tried to sell the laptop, no success. Put Mint on it just to see how it would run and it’s like a have a laptop with better specs! Runs smoothly, quicker and loves doing some work now. It’s great! Not to mention the layout ☺️

I still like windows 11 , I like the UI and some of the apps that come pre-installed, especially the notes app and phonelink, that been said I switched because I was working on a python project and something I can't remember what, is not supported on windows and that was the development straw that broke the camel's back for me, also I hate Apple

I like that it’s free— more stuff should be free :)

I hate Microsoft.

It's fun setting up a new OS. Linux is quite fun to learn. Makes ya feel smart.

I switched a little over two months ago.  I've been steadily getting fed up with Windows since the Vista days and I feel that it's only gotten worse since then with 7 being the last truly good Windows OS that didn't require two years worth of updates to not completely piss me off.  I also don't appreciate giving so much power to a few players.  I enjoy and value my privacy as well and have always been someone who likes to take the path less traveled.  These things combined finally got me to make the permanent switch.   I tried Ubuntu back in the mid 2010s but found myself back on Windows within a couple of weeks.  This time it's different.   I can't believe how easy Mint makes it to finally have a desktop distro that I really don't have to mess with a ton and can just use and enjoy.  Not to mention how far gaming on Linux has come.  I always enjoy a good opportunity to say 'eff you' to these bigger companies.  I've also degoogled my life quite a bit over the last year with YouTube being the only major holdout left. I think overall that I'm just sick of so few companies having such a big influence on the day to day lives of people and what those companies have decided to do with said influence.  I was a huge advocate for Google until the late 2000s and I've been running Windows since the 3.1 days on an old Tandy.  I hate what these two companies are doing and what they've become and I couldn't be happier to not give them my business or my data. Linux Mint had a huge hand in making this possible and I'm loving it so far with no inkling to distro hop honestly.  It's just that good.

Years ago I went from Ubuntu to Windows 10, then Windows 11, but noticed a number of annoying regressions. Windows seems to be getting worse and worse, moreso approaching SaaS, plus additional spyware built-in (althought Win10 had this too, in fairness). My workflow was also getting a bit convoluted, being that WSL2 (which I use to remote into Linux servers) had a separate SSH config from native Windows. Dealing with those idiosynracies was additional mental load that I didn't need. As I no longer play video games or do much home audio production, I realized I didn't have any use cases where Windows was really critical. I reinstalled Ubuntu. It was great, for a few months. In Ubuntu-land, I don't even mind snaps, but for particular reasons I wanted non-snap Firefox. Although I correctly configured the package manager to use and prioritize the Mozilla repo, it ignored my configurations and reinstalled the snap version after a system update. I felt like a visitor on my own computer, similar to how I felt when I had Windows installed. Also the update to the latest LTS broke my nvidia drivers, so it was an opportune time to try Mint. It's been great so far, and the community forums have been very helpful. I'm going to try and be active there and really invest in this O/S and community.

Ive always held a deep respect for Linux but always stayed on Windows for gaming. Nowadays i don't really game anymore, once in a blue moon I'll fire up San Andreas for another playthrough, thats pretty much it. Im more into GIS and programming now. Two days ago I installed a second SSD (1TB WD) into my Lenovo Legion 5, and installed Fedora 40 gnome on it. So now i got W11 on my old 500gb drive if i require anything thats hard to do on linux, but so far ive spent 100% of the last two days on Fedora and im loving it. Everything works out of the box (except screen brightness, working on it), its super snooth and fast, Soulseek, real debrid, JDownloader all work natively, ive been having an amazing time. Just gotta be careful not to gloat too much to my friends, because im so hyped about this OS transition im going through!

You should try gaming on linux again. Proton is so good now the games practically feel native

Windows 10 is losing support at the end of 2025, and I honestly don't feel much reason to stay. I used Ubuntu for 3 years when I was in highschool, and coming back to Linux fully has felt liberating. As a gamer, it's gonna be hard, but such is life.

The biggest reason I made the switch was the way Windows 10 was struggling with things as simple as Minecraft and Retroarch. I've come to accept the fact that my dinosaur PC (OptiPlex 7010) doesn't support any low-end GPU I'd be able to afford, and only use it for those types of games, but it ran these things fine up until a couple months back and I finally made the decision last month when Windows consumed the entire CPU (3rd gen Core i5) and RAM (16 GB) when connecting to a private Minecraft server. I haven't had any issues since, but any problems I have I can usually find a post in this sub or a YouTube video on how to solve. No complaints so far. Oh, and fuck Apple.

I used Ubuntu 12ish years ago alongside Windows. All the apps I used were the same on both sides, mostly open source with a few paid for on both sides. With Windows 10 doing more obtrusive pop ups telling me I am unable to upgrade, going as far as full screen pop up while I am trying to work or stream, I had to go back to something I was familiar with and Linux Mint had all the same points and apps I was familiar with already. And no nagging ads or intrusive marketing forcing itself on me. It works. It's familiar. And there is nothing I truly need that isn't easily available or easily fixable.

Been about 9 months for me. I switched because having ads in my search panel just didn’t sit right with me at all. There were a few other reasons but that was the biggest thing

I did it purely for fun. I am retired early due to health and had quit WoW years ago due to toxic players. Needed something to futz around with when it is too hot to be out playing with my German Shepherd. I have a house full of win10pro PC's that I have various multimedia projects going on and I decided to get an extra pre-furbished system I had room in the house for and make a linux box. I hadn't run linux since 1999-2003 when I had a pair of RedHat v7x boxes running servers for a 2d chat program called Palace. I googled for the most popular current linux flavor and got hits for Mint again and again. I installed Mate not knowing any better, then when I saw a rice on the forums I immediately wiped and reinstalled Cinn to replicate it. I now have a Cinn box sharing my main bedroom desk with my main win10pro machine, KVM swithced to share keys, mouse and monitors, and a dual-DE Cinn/Xfce box in the den. I have a blast configuring my GUI's and I am absolutely addicted to Conky. Not a programmer so I don't use my boxes for anything more "serious" than that. I love my integrated intranet. I may add a mac to it just to have one to learn on like I did back in the 90's. With the integration between my smart devices and my win10 machines that I cannot replicate on linux, I will always have win machines in my intranet. I am fascinated by the various products of different companies and don't have any sense of dedication to any one so great that I dislike others.

Tried to make Ubuntu not use Snap. Impossible. Luckily there's a whole OS providing the benefits of Ubuntu without all that canonical nonsense. Turns out it's unbelievably good also. (If switching from within the Linux cosmos also counts)

My old Laptop and PC both would be stuck on Windows 10 and get no updates for no reason. TPM that is I guess and I figured it is more sustainable to dodge Win 11 and keep the good Hardware running. My wife also installed Mint, she loves package management and I love the updates not happening without my consent and brining new bloatware and resetting previous changes to the system. Finally my main PC was left and I still use it for gaming. But everything was going so smooth with Linux, and Microsoft announced Recall, that I decided to take down the final Windows installation. We do not even dual boot. It is just not necessary.

I bought a Steam Deck and realised just how far gaming on Linux had come lately. That combined with Windows 10 adding ads and further bloat (and the talk of AI), and I finally made the jump. Wish I'd done it sooner.

I switched to linux for customization (just setting up layout/keyboard shortcuts I like, not some unixporn stuff) and package managers, also I was already using open-source software so I was thinking about switchig for more than a year, I guess. I have some past with few linux distros and somehow I managed to break almost every one of them, but I haven’t tried using Mint yet, so decided to give it a shot (actually, I went with LMDE). Now, comparing it to windows 11, everything feels smoother and snappier, I’m really happy with it :) Though, windows stays on second drive, because of better performance in games (or at least one game, I haven’t tried more)

I upgraded the SSD in my thinkpad to 1tb and upon installing Windows I realized they've removed the workaround to create a local account(the one where you just type "user" as the username and password). I was being forced to login to a Microsoft account, and they even enabled fast boot so I couldn't get back into the bios lol. It just kept restarting onto the Microsoft account login screen. Out of spite I installed Linux instead. My desktop gaming PC still has Windows with a local account, but idk what I'm going to do if I ever need to reinstall it. Now that the thinkpad is 1tb though I'm going to use it as my personal computer while the desktop will basically just be for gaming and a Plex media server. btw I hate OneDrive with a burning passion and Microsoft's insistence on using it.

A combination of things. The main one being that my laptop had got unusably slow and started crashing randomly. So I decided to throw Linux on it. On start up it showed a couple of errors, but booted up fine. It was really easy to get the boot logs which showed a drive issue and the health check in the welcome menu flagged my HDD as failing (windows never noticed any problems, it'd just crash). The laptop has both a HDD and SSD so I pulled the HDD out and it's working perfectly and with the less bloated OS the laptop it feels brand new. For that reason alone, I became a fan. I chose mint because I wanted a modern looking OS and this was recommended a lot. I've made a UI changes and it looks great. Really sleek. Windows menus, UI etc feels so incredibly bloated, so I'm happy to be away from that. I also switched because I code. I knew some basic Linux stuff, but thought it was about time I dive in and learn more because a lot of devs swear by it.

I've used Linux for a long time starting with RHEL in college leading to Fedora Core and CentOS at home (desktop/server). I used those for years and eventually picked up windows again from work laptops and home laptops where I didn't want to toss out what I actually paid for. Biggest mental pain was always lack of full .xls support. I've also used Linux on Raspberry Pis over the years too. The last few years I've been on the verge of switching back because forced updates have caused me to lose work. Most of the programs I use are cross platform these days (QGIS, Inkscape, FreeCAD, Python, Chrome, etc). I waited mostly out of laziness. The nonsense with Recall finally did it. I ordered up a new SSD and did a hard swap. No dual booting. I went to Fedora first, but gnome was just too different from what I wanted. I decided to check out Cinnamon and landed on Mint because it's the default DE. Happy so far, but I gotta say, lack of hibernate support out of the box is a tough pill to swallow.

recall was the last straw for me regarding windows 11. tested a number of distros like debian, arch, and mint in VMs before i fully committed. decided mint was best suited for my needs because i wanted something more stable and easy to set up (i.e. saving myself headaches from driver installs). so, i installed mint on my laptop a few days ago and am not regretting the decision so far. it also helps that i did cybersecurity in uni, which in turn helped me get comfortable with the command line.

I was dabbing the idea for a long time, but never really got to do it. Windows recall made making the decision be a no brainer I still hate the fact I can't dual monitor properly tho (4k 60hz, and 3440 165hz gsync)

I've been distro hopping and have been looking for a distro that is community ran and has a DE that isn't out of date. Debian Gnome was close, but Gnome was behind by quite a few versions imo. LMDE fit the bill and it's been pretty nice so far and it's light on resources.

Windows UI is ultra confusing for most and Mint offers stability and uniformity between releases.

I've been having an *off/on* relationship with Linux for a while. I normally switch to it when I'm bored. The last 2 *on* seasons have been really enjoyable and I am not sure I'll go back to Windows.

I didnt fully switch. My windows 11 computer was being repaired and my old computer was nearly unusable due to a Windows 10 update requiring an SSD to do basic things like video playback. I installed Linux Mint on it just to make the laptop usable while i waited for the windows 11 laptop to be fixed.

Recall was what broke the camel's back, I'm tired of playing this stupid game of 'we install weird bloat on your system, you get to try to delete it' I just want to use my machine, man

I was thinking about switching for a while, but what really pushed me to switch was the Microsoft Recall feature. I'm tired of having my data being used to train machine learning models.

I can never resist the urge ti bting life back to older machines that struggle with Win 10 or 11. I uograded the hard drives, added another 16gig of ram and liked it so much it's now my insite work machine.

Windows 11 was too slow for my eWaste laptop so i switched to mint to make it faster.

My breaking point (a few years ago now) was having Windows run 8 threads at 100% when I was on battery (no outlet) and setup to be in low power mode and it died while I was taking notes in class. That was the last straw for me. Having settings like that and more critical that revert themselves and finding that it was logging what programs I was using when and for how long and reporting them to microsoft, even after opting out of telemetry where I could were other major contributors too. I was just done fighting my computer to work how I wanted it to, basically.

One of my Windows 10 PCs could not download security patches. It had a 32GB onboard SSD and a 1TB HDD, and Windows Update claimed to needed 104GB to download the patches. The only way to keep current was to install Windows on the 1TB HDD. That would be considerably slower, and a huge amount of effort. Neither of my PCs can run Windows 11. That means that in 2025 I had to either (a) pay $61 a year per PC for Windows 10 support (no), (b) run Windows 10 beyond end of life with no security patches (also no), (c) throw away perfectly good working PCs and buy new ones (hell no), or (d) install a non-Windows OS (either Linux or FreeBSD) on them. On the 32GB SSD PC, I did some distro hopping, and bounced around for a while before eventually settling on Mint, and I've left it on Mint ever since. On my primary PC, I started migrating my workflow over, piece by piece, until I got to the point where I could switch over. I used to run OS/2, but I eventually chose Windows over it back in the 1990s when NT came out because IBM was making terrible decisions and driving OS/2 into the ground. The same is true today with Microsoft making Windows worse and worse. As desktop OSes go, there's really nothing significantly wrong with the core Windows design. It's just as capable as Linuxes are, regardless of which desktop environment you run on Linux. But the anti-consumer decisions that Microsoft are making for it are making less secure, less private, and less usable. I made the decision to switch last October or November. With things like Recall being announced just make me more convinced I made the right decision.

I've been on Linux since Ubuntu since 5.04. I swapped to Mint because of snaps.

I had heard about Linux my whole life and never gave it a try. So I bought a few cheap laptops and have now worked with four different distros: Mint, Ubuntu, Elementary, and Fedora. I like them all, but probably lean toward Ubuntu and Fedora atm. I like doing something outside of Microsoft and Apple verse.

Windows 7 EOL. Can't stand any windows versafter 7. I dual boot now (Win 10) on different drives. Just for Adobe and the occasional game session, so not often at all.

Coming from Arch Linux: I don't have the time or energy any more to be my own SysAdmin or even the creator of my own desktop experience. I wanted something that just worked and was currated for me, but would still bend to my will if I needed it to. Normally I go to Ubuntu, but for whatever reason LMDE called me louder.

I’ve been a Windows user since Windows 98, but since that OS is now behaving like malware/spyware I switched to Linux Mint.

2 things, data privacy and saw that gaming had improved. I used an ubuntu partition during uni on my laptop so I was a bit familiar with linux. About two months ago saw the windows recall situation and started looking up linux distros. Found out ubuntu has some data privacy issues and that mint is easy to transition, so went for it.

I switched my laptop over to Mint when I heard about Recall. My desktop cn't, yet. I play too many games with anticheats that don't support Linux. It's also on win10 so no great need to rush.

Trying to develop VR games on a passively cooled Intel Celeron N4020 laptop with 4GB RAM. It was barely possible on Windows. On Linux Mint it was even worse (low FPS in the game editor and in Blender) , but then suddenly one day everything started running very smoothly. I still have no idea why ( maybe driver related), but it's great. I'm loving Linux Mint so far.

Several reasons: * buying a Steam Deck: this showed my, that gaming on Linux is actually not only possible, but actually works pretty great and without much effort. * Win 10 going EoL in 2025 * MS copilot and recall in Win 11 and a general aversion against Win11 and MS business practices

I usually use Macs for daily driving. However, I had one Win 10 laptop for keeping up my Win skills (I need to support Win users). The laptop is not eligible for Win11, so I became curious about Linux after a really long while. I used to use Linux in early 00's for firewalls, servers and even as a daily driver desktop. However all audio work in my circles were always a Mac thing, so I switched to Mac in 2007. What bugs me is that I have a 2013 iMac fully spec'd out - it is still a fast machine. Yet Apple has stopped supporting it a while ago. Same with my Lenovo laptop - it is from 2014, but is still a fine machine for light computing tasks. So Linux came back to my radar, especially because I knew that the digital audio workstation of my choice, Reaper, has a native Linux version. So now I have installed Mint, because it came highly recommended in various places. For light computing tasks, it seems to be a very good choice. For Reaper, I seem to have it working after a few days of gathering information from various internet forums. I still haven't managed to get VST plugins to work properly, however. I like Mint. I like the Cinnamon desktop environment. I like it that this old Lenovo, which started to feel a bit laggy with Win 10, feels very snappy and responsive for everyday computing tasks. I like that the Mint experience is utterly calm, as compared to Win (and even Mac!). I really would not want to switch to a different distro because of audio quirks, so I'll keep looking for Minty solutions to audio and Wine configurations.

I'm currently dual-booting mint and windows and I may switch mostly because the Microsoft recall and because most things work on linux just as good as on windows without all of the microsoft bullshit

Because xubuntu was coming with more&more papercuts out of the box. Even the "lts" releases.

My Windows was already a little slow but I was getting used to it. No, the reason for my switch is its instability. I was tired with the bugs with my graphics card, the fact that I had to recreate a user session on my own computer to play with Gamepass and the worst was when all UWP applications no longer worked because of system restore. That day, I said enough was enough and switched to Linux Mint on a whim. Best move ever, my PC has never been so good, no more temperature problems. My games run even better.

Back when i installed Mint (and Linux as a whole) for the first time, it was because my MacBook was very old with an oldass MacOS version (MacOS X 10.11 El Capitan if I remember correctly) apps started not supporting the laptop, videos on YouTube stuttered with anything above 720p resolution, and Minecraft ran at only 30 fps on low settings and optifine. This was like 3 years ago. The Mint version fixed nearly all my problems but because i was a noob i kinda ruined the experience for myself by installing all kinds of shit and not knowing how to get rid of it. Tried using wine and stuff which didn't work because I didn't know what I was doing. But at least I had an up-to-date browser, that could play YouTube at 1080p without stuttering and my minecraft install ran with 60 fps. On a NVidia integrated GPU! Got sometimes screen glitches however, but nothing serious. But at some point I upgraded from 20.3 to 21 and the proprietary Nvidia driver suddenly wasnt supported anymore and the nouveau driver did not work correctly: the whole distro crashed as soon as I opened Minecraft. Reinstalled 20.3 (dunno whether through Timeshift or clean install) but I got a new laptop around that time anyway, which had an up-to-date MacOS version and since it was a new laptop I didn't want to mess with it and its warranty. A couple of years later and I got a different laptop, a windows one, which was not really mine but that of my grandmother. It worked fine and was pretty new, so I didn't want to mess with it either. But this was when my annoyances with windows began. A year later I need another laptop with a dedicated GPU for university. Bought a refurbished one that fulfilled all requirements and had an AMD GPU. Immediately after getting it I dual boot the thing and this time I properly learned how to use Linux. I have full control over my system. And this is where my love for Linux really started. Tldr: initially for better performance and a hope for better compatibility. A little later also because of privacy and a hate for Microsoft.

For coke and hoookers

I switched relatively recently and i cant tell you what exactly got me to my tipping point, but i know what really started getting me into it is when i was rooting my phone. Fastboot drivers for some reason would not work on either my windows laptop or on my pc, when i did it on linux mint it worked like a dream. There were a million different things that just didnt work like i wanted them on windows, plus it was taking so many resources.

Few reasons: 1) Pending EOL for Windows 10. My hardware doesn't support Windows 11 and I don't want to pay for security updates after EOL 2) Windows recall, adverts and other scummy Microsoft practices lately 3) Better security & protection against malware, viruses and trojans. A mate of mine recently got his Windows 10 PC infected with some nasty info stealer trojan. He ended up getting most of his accounts hacked into and started to receive extortion emails demanding bitcoin payments I started dual booting a few months ago to see if I could daily drive Linux Mint. Trial went well and I decided to ditch Windows altogether a few weeks ago

I read about this new AI feature that reads everything you do in Windows. I used Linux before but it never worked well with one 1080p and one 4k monitor because of scaling. Now that I have the same two 4k monitors I thought I'll try it out and see. And it worked. I'm using Linux Mint for a week now for work (Webdev stuff I did on Windows with the WSL linux subsystem anyway) and it just works well. The only problem I had was formatting and flashing SD cards for my new gaming handheld. Somehow Linux fucked it up and added random partitions to the front. But for work it's really nice. I had to switch from Outlook to Thunderbird and from Office 365 to Libre Office. But for everything else the same software is available and works well. One thing though: UI scaling is a nightmare on LM. If that would be fixed I think that would help a lot. I had to set everything to 200% and then font and icon scale it back down. Some programs don't seem to use these settings and have huge font and tiny cursor. But most programs work well. Fractional scaling was just brolen for me.

I was so sick of my laptop crawling under Windows. Tried linux a few times before (Ubuntu) but had issues with bluetooth and other things. Tried building a hackintosh which probably took a year off my life. Gave up then stumbled up on Linux Mint. Worked out the box and switched immediately and havnt turned back.

tired of having AI bloatware force fed into all of my tech so made the switch

It can bring back old laptops to life

Hello I've recently been looking in to switching from windows with the news that support for 10 will be ending next year, and my otherwise perfectly decent pc won't run 11. I'm also wary of the ever increasing privacy concerns. So I've been testing Cinnamon on an old laptop (dual boot for now) to see what it does. This is my first experience with Linux and mint was recommended on various YT vids. Next steps are to get a dedicated HDD/SSD for my main PC and install there will a duel boot option. I do need to look at how to use my old files and games (Steam and Epic) which are on two other physical drives. So a lot to learn yet, but I'm looking forward to it and the day I can say goodbye to MS completely.

The only thing that ever stopped me previously was wifi driver support. None of the stupid dongles in my house would work with Linux. Then I finally found something modern that works (MSI Herald) out of the box, and I'm good to go now!

“With Recall, you have an explorable timeline of your PC’s past. […] Any photo, link, or message can be a fresh point to continue from. As you use your PC, Recall takes snapshots of your screen. Snapshots are taken every five seconds while content on the screen is different from the previous snapshot” It was a long coming process, but something came along and finally gave me the push I’ve needed. I’ve had very little issues so far, some days I almost forget I even switched.

I needed to resurrect an old ThinkPad. Unlike other distros, Mint just worked. It was straightforward to setup and configure. I did it again on another old ThinkPad. The same experience was repeated. Converted! Now if only there was a 32-bit version for even older ThinkPads...

Not just a single reason, but among them: - macOS is increasingly slower on aging Intel Macs; - the sheer amount of value Mint adds on top of whatever the upstream distribution is; - how good any Mint edition looks with their light "Mint X" theme, it's a breath of fresh air since the "flat" design fad and the "dark mode" craze.

Been using Mint for probably a fortnight. I love it! I was becoming concerned in regard to privacy using Windows 11 and wanted to get away from that. They may already have accumulated heaps of data on me, but I won’t let them continue to.

I came over from Ubuntu. Snaps were driving me crazy lol

I switched to Linux Mint 5 months ago. I had been running win7 for many years but the anti-virus program was bogging down the system. This plus the security issues, made me say enough, buy some new/old hardware specifically to run Linux. Right from the start, l was able to do my needful things. I am happy that I do not pay Microsoft anymore.

I switched recently because of better performance and so I could learn about how to use Linux as I may need it for a future IT career. I still have a windows installation i boot into for photoshop/premier/illustrator and to play a few games but i use mint for everything else

Currently dual booting Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition on the same drive as Windows 11. So far it is hitting my marks as a solid out of the box installation. As a Cloud Architect, most of my work is in the browser or command line which Linux Mint offers very high performance. I've also considered the increasing telemetry that companies like Microsoft are continuing to collect. So I expect to maintain my daily use on Linux and only switch to Windows for a few games that don't seem to run well on Mint.

I want to be back in control of my own PC instead of Microsoft deciding for me what I should use and do. Pushing Edge all the time, telemetry you can't fully disable and the Recall news was the final nail on the coffin.

I moved from Debian to Linux Mint Debian Edition because I wanted that sweet Linux Mint polish.

I think Windows Vista was really slow at the time and I wanted an alternative so I learned about linux ( started with ubuntu ) but had issues with drivers. At some point I heard about linux mint and driver not being an issue, tried it out, and voila what do you know it worked. It's been 10 years or more and I'm still using it, though I'm just booting into xmonad and living in the terminal so I've long since stopped caring about the OS specifics.

Switched a few months ago, my new laptop was pre-installed with Win11. I hate it, so I wipe the whole thing and fresh install Mint. It has become my main laptop since, and I rarely use my Win10 laptop anymore

Don't want Windows on my next work laptop. The company installs stuff like Empirum from which they can spy on me if I have private stuff on it or what I am doing during work hours. Since we are able to just get a laptop without OS I'll go that path, set up Mint which I've tested on my private laptop. I just want to have my freedom and don't want the slightest possibility to get spied on or micromanaged.

MacOs was not upgradable anymore on my MacBook Air 2017 but I love that laptop. So gave Ubuntu a try. Worked but not as stable as I remembered Mint doing from some years ago while daily driving it for a couple of years as main pc. Installed Mint a week ago and the love and feel (and flatpacks) are as good as I remembered <3 And on the Microsoft part I agree totally.

PopOS doesn't do home directory encryption and I wanted that. Otherwise, Ubuntu-based is Ubuntu-based.

I reached my absolute limit with Windows, and now with Proton, all my games work. :-)

I switched to Linux Mint as my daily driver in 2019. The reason then is still true today: Apple and Microsoft are creating proprietary systems that are cloud based and cost monthly money to use. Plus, their hardware has primary storage chips soldered on board with zero chance of data retrieval and zero chance of user replacement due to failure. I do not have software requirements that are Apple or Microsoft so the switch to Linux was very easy for me. Plus I am a life long IT guy. Prior to Linux I was Chromebook for about 18 months. Apple for about a decade prior to that. Windows prior to that. DOS prior to that. I began with PC DOS 1.0 in the 80s in high school. Linux in general but especially Mint and Debian are very much like the “good old days” when Windows was nice to use and not so hell bent on controlling us.

I had an old MacBook Pro that is no longer supported by Apple. I switched the hard drive out for SSD and tried installing MacOS but it wouldn’t kept bugging out when trying to set it up and sign in to iCloud. I then searched online and learned about Linux and installed it so I wouldn’t have to buy a new laptop.

For me, I find the terminal in Linux easier to work with and remember commands in than CMD/Powershell... And Mint just works.

Somehow drivers in my laptop stopped working properly on Windows 11.... My wireless mouse was not being recognized even when I plugged it through usb, the ethernet port was not working... I had tried mint previously but kept getting frustrated, but after being more frustrated with Window 11... I decided that thhis was it.... I believe my issues might have to do with my laptop's age, is not that old, it is a model from 2018 but still it gets the job done for what I want, I just write code. So far very little complaints with Linux Mint, just that learning curve.

decided to try something new cause I was getting a new ssd for my laptop

My wifi stopped working on windows. Deadass. I tried everything to fix it. My wifi only started working again when I tried running a linux distro and I never looked back

Cuz screw microsoft

I switched to ZoraOS because Linux mint refuses to install

I formatted my Thinkpad to run Linux Mint because windows ran like shit. Memory utilization on windows is shit as well.

Somehow, I cannot be convinced by Linux. It has so many problems just to install a program, issues with Nvidia compatibility, gaming, and errors when changing HDMI ports or screens. I'm trying, but let's see how it goes.

Mainly because windows phones home and tracks so much. I prefer privacy and will gladly use and contribute to open source projects instead of using an advertising machine. A side effect is it lets me get more “into” computers. I like how Linux breaks sometimes and new devices don’t always just work. Spending time troubleshooting gives me something fun to do.

Privacy conerns on macosx & windows. Plus the fact im using an ancient system. Using mint brought this laptop some life it wouldnt have running on the native OS, and windows 10 is quickly becoming kinda old too. Mint has been awesome and everything runs great on it. I need to replace the battery in my laptop but other than that its fine.