hey y’all! I didn’t see a general purpose linux users thread so I thought I’d start one - I figure this could be a place to share our experiences, ask questions, and swap tips and tricks
my background with linux is that I grew up on windows, became a mac user in college, and then about a year and a half ago made the switch to linux mint - it’s been surprisingly painless so far and i really have been enjoying feeling more ownership over and understanding of my computer!
I made the switch to linux mint this just this year! all my life i had been on windows but tempted to go into linux, only to be discouraged by the lack of native photoshop/premiere. Recent events got me all FOSS pilled and wanting to give as little data to fascist aligned companies.
Made the switch and I’m pretty happy with it. Everything I needed to learn was available within a 5 min search and most stuff hasn’t given me trouble (or more trouble than windows lol) been having some issues getting my array of displays with multiple resolutions and refresh rates to behave how I want when only some of them are turned on but I digress that only takes 15 seconds to fix each time)) and maybe switching to another desktop enviroment could help))) this is a very specific me issue that in windows took some regedit stuff to get it how i wanted it though))))
Just today I saw someone who had also hopped over to linux and described it as “reliving what it was like for Going On The Computer to be fun” and I couldn’t agree more.
I’m right there with you in not wanting to support the big tech corps with my time/money/data anymore - the mask has really fully come off in the last few years
also, I’m curious - did you end up finding anything to replace photoshop/premiere?
RE: Photoshop, GIMP and Krita are the two main rasterized image editors! For vector I really like Penpot but Inkscape is the classic for Linux.
Love a Linux thread! 
About 16 years ago when I was in high school I ordered a free Ubuntu CD and have been using Linux since! I’ve had bouts of Mac too, dependent on what job I had at the time. But I use Linux daily and for all my computer gaming needs.
Two major changes in the last ~8 years have made the experience a lot better: the proliferation of web apps and Proton for gaming. Web apps are sometimes disparaged by people who prefer native apps due to their high memory usage and large file size but it’s honestly led to making using Linux daily for work and personal computing a lot more viable. I think VS Code being available on it makes a big difference for a lot of programmers and helps ease the switch for that crowd.
Before Proton, it was a bit of a pain to run Windows games on Linux. Wine was around but I always found it a little more hassle than I wanted. I haven’t run into any problems running my Steam library in Linux except FF16 performs awful even though I have a plenty powerful machine. But for the most part it’s been great. protondb.com is super helpful to see what other people are experiencing with games!
I use Pop_OS! on my desktop and laptop. It’s fine! I used Fedora for years and it is also fine! Lint Mint is nice. I find distro hopping to be a lil exhausting so I try to just pick one that’s stable and low hassle and use it. I’m not big into tinkering these days. One nice way to try out other distro is to use the Boxes app. It’s nice for testing different VMs of different operating systems.
I like the SteamOS distro too, it’s pretty nice when I need to use it outside of the Steam Big Picture-esque mode. I think it’s based on Manjaro? 
For game dev, lots of options for tinkering like Godot, Pico-8, etc. Even tools like Unity and Game Maker have Linux builds these days.
In terms of apps I use, Firefox is my web browser. I use Plexamp for listening to music. Gnome Terminal for coding and terminal-ing. (I tried Alacritty recently but the cursor was always half-sized and driving me bonkers.) aseprite for pixel art!
Battery life on laptops has always been and continues to be miserable with Linux, so just a heads up there. 
as for premiere I’m noy editing much these days but even on windows i had started to move to DaVinci Ressolve, so that and Kden live have been working for me.
As for photoshop, when doing just small things like a dumb meme or the G4M3R V4L3NT1N3S I was using gimp and trying to get used to it. Tried some more serious design stuff and got too frustrated with it. Managed to install a version of photoshop with some custom wine stuff that worked but is little unstable.
Last week I did a design comission and ended up booting into windows to do it in photoshop cause that’s what I really know.
I’m curious as to how well Affinity Photo runs on Wine/Proton and see if I can use that as a proper replacement
Switched to KDE Plasma from Cinammon cause Cinammon’s display settings wasn’t cutting it for me and was running into some things like turning on my Receiver/TV which are connected to the PC would switch the displays to only use the TV and not even with Xrandr or something like that I could get my displays to behave like I want. To be fair, I really liked the feel and look of Cinammon and 99% of people will never encounter this issue. I’m just a weirdo who has 5 displays, 4 different resolutions, 3 different refresh rates, and 2 different aspect ratios connected to her PC. (i don’t use them simultaneously).
I had also read that SSDM is a better display manager than whatever cinnamon uses, so off I went to KDE. I thought I was installing KDE plasma 6 but to my surprise there 6 still isn’t supported with linux mint (apparently, haven’t researched that much) and overall installing KDE with Mint isn’t something that is strongly recommended.
Liking it so far though, it did fix my display issues, xrandr works like it should and the overall settings seem to be way more robust, which I like. I found default KDE to be a little less visually unappealing than default cinnamon but I’ll get KDE to look right for me with time I guess.
Also, went with the “Full” KDE plasma install without knowing that well what it meant and now I have a bunch of KDE apps I don’t need :p
I’ve been running Kubuntu as dual boot on my work laptop and have been pretty happy with KDE so far. Hope it works well for you!
Meanwhile my desktop is nearing Windows 10 EOL and I can’t upgrade to 11 with my hardware. I refuse paying for extended Win10 support and I don’t really feel the need or desire to buy a new computer as this one isn’t that old yet, by my standards.
So I’m considering switching my Desktop to Linux this year (probably Kubuntu as well). My main reason to stick with windows in the past has been gaming but I think thanks to Steam and the SteamDeck this has become less and less of an issue. What I’m worried about at these days is compatibility with audio software like FL Studio, Bias FX2, Guitar Pro and the like.
This statement just killed 3 Linux penguins in Antarctica.
Honestly, high dpi and fractional scaling is miserable in the distros I’ve used, which is disappointing. On my laptop I run at 200% which makes everything HUGE but at 150% it’s a blurry mess on any Gnome-based desktop environment. It’s scaled so much that the Playdate Simulator is too tall for the screen and can’t be resized so I just can’t access parts of it lol.
Compared to windows and macOS, it’s so much worse. That is one other Linux thing in addition to battery life that is a bit of a bummer.
KDE didn’t fix the stuff with my displays I was trying to fix so I switched back to Cinammon. KDE was too bloated for me. I like how simple Cinammon is and that it generally just works.
Got a laptop 2-in-1 tablet thing as mentioned in this post. I knew I was going to try something with Gnome from the start cause it seemed more touch friendly, and I wanted to be able to use it without the keyboard. Ended up with Fedora Silverblue. The immutable aspect seemed great so that if something breaks compatibility with my tablet thing I could just roll back.
Liking it so far. Can’t see me ever using Gnome on desktop but works for my use after installing a couple extensions.
I’ve honestly been loving i3 and arch after being kinda too scared to take the plunge the last time I was regularly using Linux. Works very well on my decade old laptops from college, works very well on my gaming desktop. No Gnome or KDE bloat apps if I don’t want them, and pretty limitless customization of the look and feel of my desktop. Plus arch honestly makes installing the latest versions of things easy at the expense of them maybe not being ready for prime time, but it hasn’t been an issue yet.
I’m tempted to go with arch and i3 when I switch my gaming desktop from win10 to Linux. Never used a tiling window manager before but I heard a lot of good things.
I only got started on Linux because I got into ethical hacking and I’m using Kali a lot now. I still don’t know everything there is to know but I’m getting a little better every day.
Neat! Is that a web browser in a terminal?
Yup! There’s a bunch of those, I usually use w3m because it can display pictures if the terminal supports that
That looks pretty hot, not gonna lie.
All those customization options are a big draw for me too. Love the terminal browser!
I have a conundrum. After rebuilding my PC, I have enough parts for a whole extra build sans an install drive… And a Windows license :(.
If I turn it into a media centre or living room gaming machine instead of selling it, which version of Linux should I go for? I’m very turned iff by using a command line for an OS, but I expect that’ll still be necessary for some things. Would it be easy to transfer files from my Windows PC to this one over LAN? Are Linux drivers for an RTX 3070 alright?
Right now I use Plex with my Samsung TV, and don’t play PC games on it at all because Steam Link always kind of sucked, and Samsung/Valve delisted the app anyway, blocking me from using my existing install. Smart TVs, man.
Yeah, if you set an smb share on your windows pc it should be extremely easy.
Using a 3070 with linux right now. Drivers are good. Haven’t encountered any issue and can game no problem.
If you want the simplicity of something windows like where you can just create a big desktop shortcut for steam or for your plex, something like Mint or Zorin will do it.
Another thing you could do is install something like Bazzite, (which is basically SteamOS) if you’d like something that will boot into a more TV friendly interface and you could add Plex as a non-steam game thing. (just like in the steam deck you can switch to a normal desktop)
Probably other people can elaborate more but that’s what came to mind.
You can get very far without using the command line in linux nowadays btw. And if you needed for something there’s usually tutorials that just give you the stuff to copy and paste.
