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
Have you customized that Cinnamon of yours, or is that how it looks nowadays?
I do dig the specs. Looking to build something similar myself soon, except with more cores and RAM, but probably cheaper GPU, maybe even keeping my current 3060 ti, because lately I run more docker containers, VMs and compilers, than games.
As a LMDE user who usually keeps it pretty stock, that’s customised. I actually didn’t even know you could do centred taskbar with Cinnamon (even if it is objectively a crime)
A bit of unsolicited advice now you’re in to tinkering. Set up some kind of NAS.
Having everything available wherever and whenever you need it is so much better than messing about with thumb drives.
Appreciate the advice. I’ll be looking into something like that for sure to have some kind of on-prem storage solution. NAS might be the best way to go so I’ll be looking into that this year as I get more comfortable.
Edit: I realise I said USB drive in my post lol. I meant I’m using a large external hard drive for all my media rather than thumb drives! :) My external HDD is a “USB drive” I guess, it’s just a big one.
You don’t have to have anything particularly special. I just have nextcloud via yunohost on a raspberry pi. It’s apparently possible to just plug the harddrive in and use it as external storage, but I’ve mounted it in place of my home folder.
That’s how they getcha. First you install Linux because it looked fun, then you buy a small NAS to protect your most important data, next thing you know you have a server rack in your basement and a half petabyte of storage. Don’t listen to him, OP! This is the path to many financial woes. Run while you still can!
It hasn’t been a year and I already overfilled my fist cabinet.
Wait til you’re up to your elbow!
Sexy!!
Don’t make me blush bro
What are you doing step-Linux Bro?
I’ve been running Mint about a week now, same story and similar hardware. I came from substantially older hardware than you did.
As I understand it, Mint started using a much better kernel with version 22, so hardware support so far has been perfect.
Also having a great experience so far. Biggest challenge has been finding replacements for done utilities but I’ve had good luck there too so far.
I felt like such an old dude when I made a list of all the programs I used on Windows so that I could begin looking for replacements on Linux lol. Some of the ones that I still have to get setup are things like MakeMKV, as I love backing up all my purchased physical movies.
Candidly there was no need for me to change my hardware out. But if I was going all in, I figured I’d go all in. My 12700k and RTX 3080 were working flawlessly on Windows, but I always heard AMD generally works much better. New OS, new hardware, new me.
MakeMKV comes as a Flatpak: https://flathub.org/apps/com.makemkv.MakeMKV
Holy crap I had no idea about this! Thank you so much! I remember as I was prepping my switch last year, I was browisng through the MakeMKV forums and reading all about the methods people were employing to get it on Linux. Having it in a Flatpak just makes it all so much easier. I’ll definitely get this set up today!
I was in the exact same situation, until I found out there was a flatpak 😅
Same, but I was running an i5-6600K, 16GB RAM, and a 6800XT. Replaced with this: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/Vraylle/saved/YWC66h
Right now I’m still setting it up for work, so the tooling I’m replacing is dev-related (Remmina instead of mRemoteNG, NetPad instead of LinqPad, etc.).
Also grabbed InputLeap to share the same keyboard/mouse between old and new PC while I do this, and set up a local SSH server on the new so I could just SCP files directly to it over local network instead of popping USBs…
Been a lot of work but disturbingly fun.
New build looks great and that’s gonna last you a long time!
I have a Jellyfin server on-prem only, and currently I remote into it via Remmina. I tried setting up Samba between the two PCs but I couldn’t get it to work as expected due to some permissions issues. I’ll do further troubleshooting later on. But for now what worked with me was setting up Warpinator, and then I could send files easily that way. Ideally, as others have been mentioning, standing up either a NAS or some other local server to facilitate file transfer will be ideal because I pop USB drives to move media for now. Back then on Remote Desktop, Windows file share worked great but it’s no longer in the cards for me.
Glad you’re having fun with it all!
I’ll have to take a look at Warpinator. Had been just doing SCP to the new machine, I’ll check it out.
“You” nerds? It’s “we” nerds now, nerd.
NOOOOOs very darth vader-y
And I would have gotten away with it, if it wasn’t for your meddling logic.
Welcome to the fucking Linux Thunderdome
Nerd
Now they can join in on the fights about which distro is best, get long socks, and post to unixsocks.
The answer is Debian, jsyk
As a fellow Debian (and Mint) enjoyer, I agree.
I use Nobara byw.
The nerd team!
When there’s a call for action, Avengers assemble, do nerds compile?
“Did you see that ludicrous display last night?”
One of us! One of us!
Bro thank you from the bottom of my heart for the type up. I’ve been contemplating this for months and this very may well be the final tipping point for me to make the plunge. I’m in pretty much the same boat, tech savvy but don’t want to deal with shit I dont have to which has been my main reason for not diving in yet. I’ve thought of doing exactly what you described as I do love a little challenge, which I get contradicts what I just typed. Anyway, yeah, thanks again for the post! Will be doing my own switch here in the near future.
Happy to post this! I wish you good luck with your switch!
My approach was of course to backup all my personal files to a large backup drive. I exported as many as configurations for my programs as I could - like for Handbrake and FreeTube as an example. I backed up those configs so that on my Linux OS I could just import them and have all my programs configured the way I wanted. Before I pulled the plug on my windows, I also wrote down every program I used and saved it into a simple list, so that I can hunt for alternatives.
That approach I think was great for me since I spent a lot of time planning and carefully backing everything up.
It’s been very smooth for me with minor hiccups when I first cutover to Linux Mint, but I’m damn happy with how well things have gone.
Take your time to methodically prepare and I’m sure you’ll do well when you’re ready to commit.
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Pro tip, if you’ve not found it already - there’s a package for gimp called “photogimp” that makes it use the photoshop interface instead of- it makes it so much easier to use! Highly recommend.
Just installed this and tried it out. THANK YOU. It immediately cured most of the things that drive me nuts about GIMP!
Glad I could help :) It made my life a whole lot easier when I found it so I wanted to share the love.
Rip it’s not in the aur
It’s an addon that requires copying files to a specific dot file folder in your home dir, so it’s not the kinda thing that would be in AUR. I just came back to this thread to thank the commenter you responded to because photogimp improved my experience a lot! Check out the install instructions here:
https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP?tab=readme-ov-file#-how-to-install-others
Oh that’s so awesome, I had no idea about this! I jotted this down and will definitely try it out tomorrow. Things I take for granted and know so well in Photoshop, I can’t even figure out for the life of me how to do in GIMP. It’s practice what I need, and this package sounds great to help me ease into it again. Thank you!
Sounds amazing. Using GIMP sounded like the worst part of this whole endeavor.
This sounds awesome! Thank you for commenting about it
Can verify that photogimp is brilliant. As well as the interface it also creates photoshop like keyboard shortcuts too. There are one or two things not quite right but on the whole its a life saver.
Welcome to the cool side my friend
Welcome nerd!
It might not be a feature you’re interested in re: your music (or photo) collection, but one thing I missed when switching from Windows was the folder previews showing album cover art. I’ve been using Cover Thumbnailer (on Linux Mint 21.3) and it’s been working great.
Ooh that sounds cool! I’ll check that out!
What file explorer does Mint use by default? Pretty sure Dolphin has this option built-in…
Cinnamon uses Nemo.
Haven’t used it personally… But I’ve had nothing but good experiences with dolphin, and you can turn thumbnail previews on or off for individual folders (or all of them if you want).
Nice. ProTip, checkout ProtonPlus or ProtonUp-qt. They manage different versions of Proton for you. They both do the same things in about the same ways. ProtonPlus will match better with Gnome based Desktop Environments and ProtonUp-qt will match the Kde like environments.
This is helpful, I will do some research into these. So because I’m on default Linux Mint, I believe my desktop is Gnome (especially considering my screenshot which also says Gnome). KDE, I only recognise from my Steam Deck - at least I hope that’s KDE lol.
I’ll learn these terms one day. I feel ignorant, but I’m hungry to learn. The exciting part about cutting over is that it reminded me when I was learning about computers as a kid, and moving around connectors on PATA drives as a pre-teen. :) So I’m enthused to try a lot of stuff! Thanks dude
No problem. I use Gnome as well for my desktop and yes that is KDE on your Steam Deck. If you’ve got a Steam Deck then protonup-qt is definitely a must have. Maybe it was more important when the Steam Deck first released, but it’s still handy to manage Proton versions for games that are already rock solid on older versions.
Lutris would be a more universal pick, as it manages Wine, Proton and a lot more, has more settings and is generally more user-friendly.
Does Lutris manage Proton for just Lutris or will Lutris manage proton for all your other launchers?
Should do for all - after all, it’s just a matter of prefixes
Should do for all - after all, it’s just a matter of prefixes
naa, they do two different things. Sure you can go to the Lutris wine manager under runners and install Lutris versions of wine or select an already installed version of wine. That’s not the same as what ProtonPlus and ProtonUp-qt are doing. They are like Lutris wine manager on steroids, for Lutris and Steam and Bottles and whatever else. Always the possibility I completely overlooked a feature of Lutris.
I didn’t go too much into the technicalities of Lutris tbh, it just works well enough so I never had to tinker
I don’t see the point of managing Proton versions for Steam as Steam itself handles it perfectly alright, but if someone needs it - hooray!
On my end, if we’re talking about non-Lutris, Protontricks can fully manage all Proton instances, including Steam ones, similarly to Winetricks. Also, PortProton is cool and can be useful for some.
Well, Steam doesn’t install leading edge versions of Proton. For instance, if you install Battle.net through Steam. Sometimes Battle.net breaks. like here https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/01/ge-proton-9-23-released-with-a-battlenet-fix-for-linux-steam-deck/ , so you need the latest changes which wont be available to the Steam Deck, proton-experimental wont get the changes right away. If you just pop open protonup-qt, you can just download ge-proton-9-23. Of course once you have ge-proton-9-23 installed, then the Steam UI can switch between the various versions installed, or you can do it from protonup-qt while you have it open after downloading the latest leading edge proton that you need. I think it’s a good tool, especially for beginners.
The more I know, thanks!
For those making the switch to Linux for the first time, especially Mint, one of my favorite YouTube hosts is currently filming/releasing a series where he does the same.
Check it out: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXHMZDvOn5sU4nw1wdWGXQf5-Fj0k2N7n
Great to hear you switched. I just switched from Windows 10 to Linux Mint. I had actually used Ubuntu circa 2007-2009, but switched to Windows because it was just easier. I never really loved Ubuntu. Linux Mint seems amazing so far. Very intuitive and user friendly. I can see non techies in my family using it on their Windows 10 machines later this year.
That’s what I like the most about it is that it’s mostly familiar. I think it’s an excellent OS to bridge users leaving Windows.
Years ago I experimented by dual booting pop_OS! and also Ubuntu. But they always ran so poorly for me, despite having great hardware at the time (i7-7700k and GTX 1080). It was just super frustrating so I abandoned it.
Last year as part of my preparation and research to get off Windows, I rolled VMs of Zorin OS and Linux Mint. Zorin was good overall, but Linux Mint just felt better to me. There’s so much information available online for Mint, and over time as I get comfortable with the Linux ecosystem, I probably won’t be using internet search terms like “install error XYZ someprogramhere on Linux Mint”. 😀
as I get comfortable with the Linux ecosystem, I probably won’t be using internet search terms like “install error XYZ someprogramhere on Linux Mint”.
Lol don’t be so sure…
Ha ha! Fair point. I’ll be mindful of that the next time I can’t find support for an edge-case issue.
Today Valve published a Proton Experimental update that fixed the Marvel Rivals crash for me. Be sure to set it up in game properties / compatibility.
You may be my savior because I plan on playing some comp this weekend and don’t want crashes.
Do you just set the game compatibility to force Steam compatibility and then Proton Experimental? Did you get rid of any of the launch options that I saw all over the Steam forums and Proton DB (e.g., steamdeck=1 ) ?
Yes, force the compatibility to Proton Experimental. You can try without the launch options and see if it works. Keep a copy of the launch options just in case though.
For Marvel Rivals
LD_PRELOAD=‘’ fixed stuttering for me (but this also disables the steam overlay so you’ll need to remove it to make purchases in game)
SteamDeck=1 fixed crashes when booting the game
Haven’t tried the update since I’m away from home though.
You love to see it. I also switched my home machines cold turkey from win10 to Linux Mint last month!
I have been using it at work for a long time, but just didn’t do enough on my home desktop PCs for it to be worth fiddling with them and setting servers and stuff back up. But now that I made the switch, I am actually using my PC more at home because it’s smoother and more fun to use now!
The main one is an i7-9700k (8c/8t) with 32 gigs of ram and a GTX 1080. It has such a long life left ahead of it. Heck the other machine is a 2500k (4c/4t) with 16GB from like 2011 and it’s excellent for desktop use or non-demanding games.
I see myself sticking with Mint with Debian & Ubuntu upstream for the foreseeable future. But I do wonder several years from now SteamOS will push many of us to use something with Arch upstream if not just SteamOS itself.
