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
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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!
There’s also hyfetch (https://github.com/hykilpikonna/hyfetch) which comes with cool pride flags
My display support HDR400, But I don’t see much difference between Windows 10 and Arch Linux.
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?
I dual booted for 6 months just in case. Went to windows like 3 times. Made the switch completely to Mint like a year ago and never looked back.
Welcome to the penguin side! I made the switch over a year ago and it’s honestly been fantastic.
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 have no idea what Wayland is but I will do some research on that tomorrow. Thanks for the feedback as that will help me do further investigation and exploration in the Linux world. Eager to learn!
Fullscreen Xorg windows that use the gpu bypass everything, so it should be the same. Wayland could even be “worse”. Both also support direct input.
I use wayland only because moving windows around is smoother. It’s still a bigger pain overall. “Not quite there yet” is how I would describe it.
Which distros would you suggest?
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.
Welcome to the wonderful world of Linux. Yes, it is liberating, isn’t it?
I found keeping Windows on a dual boot system when I first migrated to Mint was enough to make me never want to use Windows again. It kept fucking things up and I wiped it off my system shortly thereafter.
Rather than add a secondary drive, why not run a Windows virtual machine? I created a Win7 VM just for those two pieces of software that Linux doesn’t have. I have blocked it from internet access and so it does everything I need on the rare occasions that I require it.
Your striped thigh-highs will be delivered in the mail within a month.
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.
This hit me in the gender
GNU/Linux thank you very much
Go away, Richard
Welcome and good luck. The community is large and we generally like to help each other.
I’m addicted to .net, I need it to breathe
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!
Hey I just wanted to share how I was able to get Marvel Rivals running, although I’m on a different distro it should work for you:
In the Launch options (right click game > properties > general tab) enter this:
SteamDeck=1 %command%
Then, it tricks the game into believing you are on steam deck, and it should run. If you want to disable the performance metrics, just press right shift+f12.
I’m a recent lifetime windows user to Linux but loving it! I’ve dual booted so I can still play stuff like fortnite/call of duty but surely those will come around as the user count climbs :)
Edit to add: I found this fix on protondb.com - you can usually find others posting helpful stuff there relating to any Linux game!
This also skips the launcher, which is nice
Thank you for this! I jotted down your launch options along with what some of the other persons here were posting. Hoping of course NetEase can get this addressed in a coming update so we don’t have to use this workaround.
Congrats on the cutover! I don’t play Fortnite any more but my spouse wants to give it a go some time. If I play with them, I may have to install a Windows drive as a secondary device after all. Totally forgot about this game because I don’t think I currently play any games that can’t work on Linux.
If you are a gamer you should really just make the switch to bazzite though.
Heard about Bazzite basically being like Steam Deck. I think it’s great for a handheld, or for some one who wants a specific use case such as a PC hooked up to a TV that primarily is only for gaming.
With the way I use a computer, first and foremost as a computer, Bazzite does not work for me. I want to boot directly into desktop and do desktop things. If that ever changes for me, I will definitely consider Bazzite and Steam OS as options.
Before you do, check https://lemm.ee/post/52533824 and the responses
Not at all.
Bazzite is good for a console experience or for something like a kid gamer PC.
Everything Bazzite does is perfectly possible on other Linux distros.
If you have a dusty old console lying around, Fortnite is cross play. That was my solution for the odd match with friends.
I don’t think you can jump to Linux. Don’t you have to strut there wearing sexy tights?
Not sure I’m hot enough to pull that look off
It is not the man or woman behind the socks that is hot. It is the socks that make the man or woman hot.
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
I use Nobara byw.
As a fellow Debian (and Mint) enjoyer, I agree.
“Did you see that ludicrous display last night?”
The nerd team!
When there’s a call for action, Avengers assemble, do nerds compile?
One of us! One of us!
