I’ve been a Windows user all my life and had dabbled in the Apple ecosystem for a bit. With the upcoming end of support for Windows 10 in Oct 2025, I figured I’d put myself through a huge challenge of cutting over completely to LInux without a secondary backup drive with Win 10 on it. If I could survive the struggles for a few months, I’d be golden, and if I couldn’t, then I could switch to Windows 10 LTSC and be good until 2029. The intention was to completely force myself in without a backup plan - the only way out would be to install a new Windows OS. I chose Linux Mint after careful consideration, especially considering that there’s tons of resources and help with this distro, and it’s a great onboarding ramp for Windows users. I need the familiarity since I’m in tech full time and just don’t have the energy to hassle with my PC after a long stressful day at work.
I also used this as a good excuse to upgrade my PC a bit, too. 😀
After switching in mid December, I’m happy to report that I’m still alive after 30 days. My computer hasn’t killed me. And I’ve been able to do work and game on my PC without too many hiccups. Marvel Rivals still crashes ever since the Season 1 update. Overwatch works perfect. My other games, on both Steam and GOG, work perfectly fine. But I haven’t been able to test every game out there, but I know I can use Proton DB if needed.
I even edited this screenshot in GIMP after being forged in the fires of Macromedia Fireworks and Photoshop all my life! I even stripped exif data using command line tools! I even installed this cool neofetch thing that I always saw in people screenshots of their PC or whatever, every time I saw someone’s Linux build with their thigh high socks and neofetch on the terminal!
But so far, switching to Linux Mint has been great! I’m excited to deep dive more!
Note:
- I backed up all my data from Windows into a USB drive. I’m slowly bringing all that stuff over to my Linux Mint computer and rebuilding my music, video, photos, etc. Lot of work, but it’s so cool feeling so liberated!
- I may also want help from you Linux nerds from time to time. I’ll make posts/memes begging for help when I get desperate. But so far, almost every issue I’ve had has been resolved via an internet search!
- I pray that I won’t come crawling back to Windows. I don’t expect that to happen with how great my experience has been thus far.
Specs:
- Linux Mint 22
- Ryzen 7 9800x3d
- Thermalright Phantom Spirit
- MSI X670e Carbon WiFi
- Sapphire Nitro+ RX7900 XTX
- Corsair Vegeance 64 GB DDR5-7200
- Gen 5 Crucial T700 (?) M.2 x 2
- Corsair 5000d
- Noctua case fans (Lian Li too problematic on Linux based on all the research I did in advance)
- Seasonic Focus Gold 1000W
Old Specs Everything the same as above apart from:
- Windows 10 Pro
- Intel i7-12700k
- Noctua NH-U12A
- MSI Pro Z690-A
- MSI RTX 3080 Gaming Z Trio
- Samsung Gen 3/4 M.2
- Corsair Vengeance Pro 32 GB DDR4-3600
- Lian Li AL120 case fans
I dunno if this is the best approach to compeletely cut off your windows access? what if you need it for some unexpected critical reason? Would be a ball ache installing it again. I main Linux but I’ve kept my old windows install on it’s own drive. I barely use it but very very occasionally I have (and it has just been for gaming but I got the game working in Linux in the end). It’s Win 10 and I have no intention of "up"grading it to Win11.
I do actually have Win 11 set up to run in a KVM virtual machine from within Linux (I bought a Win11 key cheaply just for convenience with the activation nonsense tbh). I made the VM partly because I wanted to see how well it’d work as I like tinkering (it works fine, little bit laggy but does the job) and also to give me some easy access to the full MS Office suite in-case I want them and can’t be arsed to go to my work device. I barely ever use it (2 times so far, both just to use full Powerpoint of web powerpoint). If you have your Win 10 license you could potentially do the something similar to avoid a total block should you ever need to access windows for something and wine doesn’t cut it?
Linux gaming and selecting a non wayland distro seems an unusual choice. If gaming is your main usage, something with wayland and especially gamescope would be better. Beside that, welcome to the other side!
I’m addicted to .net, I need it to breathe
You can pay $30/year to continue using Windows 10, you know.
But honestly, give 11 a chance. It has really good HDR support (so much better than 10’s, and Linux’s HDR support can’t even compare, it’s so bad). Furthermore, the taskbar issues can be fixed by installing StartAllBack. Lastly, Microsoft is considering recalling Recall after all the backlash it got. So you still don’t have to worry about that anytime soon.
Point I’m making is that if you have an HDR display, there’s still plenty of good reasons to dual boot.
Y’all really choose hard mode for switching over. Having Windows on a partition sure is nice when a software requires it and wine doesn’t support it.
Yep, I definitely chose hard mode. I wanted to minimise the chance of me giving up and reverting to Windows. By eliminating it entirely, I’ve made it much more difficult for myself as I’m forcing myself to manage, learn, and try to get things working in Linux.
At some point, perhaps months down the road, where I find that I’m fully comfortable, then I’ll most likely add a secondary drive with Windows on it for those edge-cases that I can’t get working on Linux.
That’s fair. I have my work always pulling me back to Linux so my motivation was different.
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Hey Congratulations! I just started my linux journey a couple years ago too, just the same way you did without any duelbooting! I’ll share one thing I found out recently: apparently neofetch was abandoned by it’s developer, and now is no longer maintained. instead, a lot of people suggest using fastfetch! it works the same except its faster and still maintained! otherwise I hope you continue to enjoy your linux journey, welcome to team penguin!
Yay, welcome to freedom! Glad it’s working for you and feel free to ask for help here. Of course Linux Mint has its own forums where I’ve almost always found an answer already there whenever anything has come up for me, and it feels pretty friendly.
Enjoy!
Welcome and good luck. The community is large and we generally like to help each other.
GNU/Linux thank you very much
Go away, Richard
Welcome aboard! I did same like a year before, and it’s been a blast!
If you were me from the past, I would’ve definitely recommended you to try out tiling WMs (Guess AwesomeWM is a good start) ASAP! I can’t stress enough how good they’re, especially if you prefer using keyboard shorcuts over mouse navigation.
Also, if you’ll find linux mint problematic, I want to suggest you to try out EndeavourOS (i wish i would’ve done it sooner myself). It’s installation is as simple, but it’s based on arch, and arch has one of the most comprehensive wikis, which allows you to troubleshoot basically any problem. Also. newer software versions get there faster, and finally AURs, that will allow you to forget about manual software installation at all.
Thanks for the suggestion on tiling, I will look into that as well. I remember one thing I heard about Pop_OS was it’s excellent implementation of tiling, so this sounds interesting to me.
Curiously I forgot to try EndeavourOS. I’ll roll Linux Mint for now and then if my use case changes, I’ll explore it. So far I’ve only recently tried Pop_OS!, Zorin, and Ubuntu. Linux Mint felt best for how I currently use computers. I’m interested in the idea of whatever an “AUR”, so I’ll do some research on that too and log that away for some ideas.
Well, i mean, if mint works for you, its perfect! My suggestions come from my personal experience, demands and regrets, so be ware that they might not suit you, though i believe that one should try everything.
If you want to game on Linux check out protondb.com/ you can find what games work and even fixes. Also proton-ge works well, MangoHud for stats but it requires some config but you can use Goverlay to configure it a lot easier. Also of course read documentationarch wiki is the best but keep in mind it’s for a different distro so paths might be different
The proton db site is very confusing to me. I tried submitting a report but the UI is just so wonky. It needs a little love, but it seems like a really good resource still.
Thanks bud, saving some links for reference. I’ve heard about proton-ge, and from some quick high-level reading, it appears to be some kind of fork of steam’s proton, but has some other fixes that I believe are community oriented or address things that Steam cannot. I’m gonna doing some reading into that to understand more about it and see how it can help me in other games.
The others are helpful! I remember MangoHud from Steam Deck, but only at a surface level. Didn’t even think about putting that onto my new system as I’ve just been using System Profiler to see some metrics when I play! I come from the MSI Afterburner crowd, so I’m hoping MangoHud will meet my performance monitoring needs!
One of us
ONE OF US!
One of us!
one of us!
omg you chose the wrong distro aaahahhhh~~~
Seriously, though, I’m glad you’re enjoying the switch, hope you also enjoy the mandatory thigh-highs!
It’s the one I recommend, but honestly have never actually used. I’ve gotten a few people to successfully switch with it and got a few others away from Ubuntu (my first distro), hence why I keep recommending it.
I’ve used it for a short time, to get a feel for it. It’s really intuitive, so it’s a good springboard into the wilderness of Linux distros.
Isn’t Mint a fork of Ubuntu anyway?
Either way it’s what I’m running on my Thinkpad and it’s been fine for me.
Honestly this is the big thing I’ve found handy about using Mint. If there’s something wrong and I can’t find it a Mint answer, nine times out of ten I can fix it by searching for the Ubuntu solution. There’s so much Ubuntu troubleshooting going on.
This is why EndeavourOS was a great starting distro for me. Arch has SO MUCH FUCKING DOCUMENTATION
Yes and no. The main version is forked from ubuntu, but there is also LMDE which is debian based.
Your striped thigh-highs will be delivered in the mail within a month.
This hit me in the gender
I must have missed that promotion, any chance I could order some?
It is only for people adopting Linux after 2023
If you did it earlier, like me, you’ll have to purchase your socks separately.