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How is Linux these days?
How is Linux these days for everyday desktop use? I'm looking to reformat soon and I'm kind of sick of all the junk the comes alone with Windows.
I've used Linux briefly, back in the early 2000's but..not at all since really. I'm also learning web dev so I thought it could be fun to use to get used to it.
Do you use it for everyday use?
If your unfamiliar with Linux, how difficult is it to get things "done" on it?
Do most modern apps work these days?
As someone that's been using Windows for most of their life, do you think it's difficult to pick up and get running?
Do games work?
Edit I'm going to test out mint tonight on a thumb drive, thanks everyone!
Mint Linux is the most user friendly distro.
I've been using it and Linux for decades.
You can make a live DVD or live USB stick to see if you like it before installing it.
If there is a particular piece of software you must use, check to see if there is a Linux version first.
I second going with Linux Mint for anyone initially switching to Linux from Windows. Generally the install and experience of transition is very smooth and a great deal of the look/feel/user experience remains intuitively compatible.
Mint is what I switched over to some decade or so ago and I never looked back. I use it on my computers and can do everything I want to on it, including gaming.
You will also get to have the wonderful experience of your operating system having been built do do what you want and intend it to do, not what a corporation wants to facilitate the most profitable engagement with their userbase.
I find Windows significantly more difficult to deal with than Linux, but I’m bringing a very specific context when I say that: if something goes wrong on a Linux system, there’s generally information out there that’ll allow me to understand the issue at a fairly fundamental level and then fix it. If something goes wrong on Windows, there’s a good chance it’s out of your hands - or, as you’re starting to find, that “wrong” for the user was actually an intentional decision by Microsoft and we’re actively prevented from changing it.
The fact you’re asking this question at all and the fact you’re learning about software development suggests you’re on the same track to be able to understand and fix issues when they happen, so you’ll probably be fine with Linux as long as you have the patience to get past the bit of the learning curve where things are just different, but not explicitly wrong. Windows is the default so a lot of its quirks get ignored as just “how computers are” - it’s easy to forget that you’re dragging those expectations of doing things the Windows way with you rather than coming at it with a completely clean slate.
Gaming on Linux is vastly improved in recent years thanks to the steam deck, so you’ll have much better luck there than you would have done even in the recent past.
In terms of modern apps, that’ll depend on what you’re thinking of? Commercial/proprietary software doesn’t tend to target Linux a lot of the time, so if there are specific things you need it’ll be worth checking, but if it’s just a question of “some software to do <fairly standard task>” you’ll generally be fine.
1000% agree.
I tell people that on Linux I have not found a single issue I haven't been able to overcome or a single thing I haven't been able to customize exactly to my liking. On Windows there would always be some things I'd hit a wall on.
I also say that it's nice to have an OS that treats you like the administrator. One of my biggest pet peeves of Windows and something I'd always get triggered by was when I'd have a popup on windows or some error that'd say "Please contact your Administrator" because I AM THE ADMINISTRATOR, I HAVE ADMIN USER PRIVILEGES. And come to find out, even me, as the administrator, can't actually solve the issue because it has something to do with proprietary closed software and out of my control.
I switched to Nobara about 2 years ago now and haven't looked back.
I've been able to get a version of photoshop and illustrator installed on it, I've got 3D printing software I've been able to get running by various means.
The only thing I haven't been able to get working completely is Fusion 360, but I've been making due with FreeCAD for smaller projects, and honestly I haven't fully tried to get Fusion 360 working. I've been thinking of getting an older cracked always offline version and seeing if I can get that working with something like Bottles or Wine or Proton. I have full faith that I'd be able to get it working somehow if I put time in to figuring it out.
I second this. I actually was out of town almost 2 weeks and came home to a fubar network setting (still not quite sure what happened), but I'm reinstalling everything from scratch as I'd been meaning to do that for a while.
That being said, I chose the difficult path because I enjoy the challenge and feeling of success when everything is just how I like it... which I'm sure it not what the OP is looking for. I use Arch, but the stepping stone to it was Manjaro, which was easier (and quicker) to install than Windows (10 at the time). And as Greg pointed out, if you're okay with doing a bit of homework to figure the bits that go wrong or don't do what you want, you can customize it in so many ways.
Additionally, I'm glad for this challenge arising, otherwise I would have gamed the entire day away. If you play online games with anticheat
virusestechnology, then you may have an issue. I cannot play Destiny 1/2, though I've not really played with others for quite a while. But as for your computer being able to handle it, that would be the limitation otherwise, generally not Linux.As for Steam, I'm finding it way less often that games won't work, and those that don't usually have enough data on protondb to provide a command line solution. Even games that didn't work on Windows are being fixed constantly (I bought LA Noire for nostalgia back in like '19 just before I swapped, and it wouldn't run on Windows and then Linux, but I was able to play it minor tweaks a couple years ago just fine).
Ultimately, as BeanBurrito mentioned, you can boot up basically any distro from a USB and play around with it, so the options are super easy to test run.
Good luck!
+1 for Mint; that's the version that finally let me quit Windows permanently.
That said ... I had a bit of an epiphany about this a few months ago.
People who start out on Windows think the learning curve is just "learning computers", and they don't realize most of what they're learning is actually "how to use Windows".
Then, when they switch to Linux (or anything else), they think they already know "how to use computers", and they tend to get frustrated because it's like they have this big learning curve they weren't expecting.
Point being, learning how to use your 2nd operating system will be easier than learning your 1st OS ... but not a lot easier. Don't be shocked at the learning curve.
And to some extent, people think that they learned how to use computers, but actually they only learned how to use Linux (and previously Windows).
Very true, got reminded about that a fair amount of years ago when I was confronted with the paradigms of OpenVMS and realized how very different things can be. If you are someone who gets tripped up by the differences in how windows and linux mount hardrives then the way OpenVMS functions will surely make you fall face down :P
Paths look like something like
DISK$DATA:[USERS.JOHN.DOCS]REPORT.TXT;3. If you notice the 3 at the end, it has "versioned" files, so you might end up withREPORT.TXT;1,REPORT.TXT;2, etc in a directory. Commands are also different. There's nocd, you useSET DEFAULTto change directories. You often don’t even need to type full commands either.DIRcan be justD,SET DEFworks just as well asSET DEFAULT.It was fun working with it at the time, but I always had to have cheatsheets on hand because I never worked with it enough to make it natural for me. On of the other things I discovered is that older protocols are very free in their implementation. For example, FTP has defined what the command is for getting a directory listing. But the output of that command is entirely up to the server. WinSCP and Filezilla have been around long enough that they support whatever OpenVMS sends back. When I tried to automate some things and used a modern FTP library I ended up needing to write my own parser for that.
Granted, at this point not many people are ever likely to run into OpenVMS. I only did as part of a migration project.
I don't have time to make a thorough post right now, so I'll try to keep it quick.
I run Linux on several machines in my home, including Steam Deck and will be migrating three more soon due to Windows 10, end of life.
I like Linux a lot, that said? I find it pretty fussy to use on my daily machine and prefer Windows 11. Linux works great on my machines that basically just need access to Firefox and Steam or is running a service such as PiHole, but for daily use, it's just constant fussing with the OS to get it to behave the way I want it to.
On my daily, I end up trying to fix little annoying issues more than actually using my computer for what I want to use it for. Just one little example: on my laptop, the fans refused to spin up to adequately cool the machine, but only in some instances. For example, some games had no issues, others just wouldn't spin more than a few thousand RPM. This isn't an issue with the same games in Windows. Because it's a laptop and it's a little more locked down, I had no control over the fan controller in Linux, so was basically just stuck that way.
That's just one little issue I've had with Linux, but there are constant other little problems that needed dealing with, which is why I ended up going back to Windows. I can load up Windows on my machine and just use my computer how I want to use it without having to constantly fix stuff.
I really like Linux and it works great on the several machines I run it on, it's also a great boon on the Steam Deck and in many cases on my gaming laptop, I did actually see a fairly substantial performance increase in most games.
Edit: I should also say, I have zero issues with any games on Linux. That said, I don't really play multiplayer, but anything I tried on my laptop and anything I've played on Deck have been great. The only exception on Deck are games that have issues with the low resolution, but work great on my laptop in Linux.
In my experience, laptops on Linux tend to be 10x fussier than desktops.
I wouldn't be surprised, as I haven't used it extensively on my desktops, but it seems to work much better there. Every other time I've dailied it, it's been on my laptops and that's where I usually have issues.
Fussy is a good word for the experience, actually!
macOS is the only option I’ve found that really does well at minimising those little annoyances, but obviously that comes with its own limitations around hardware cost and (lack of) flexibility.
I switched Linux Mint on all of my machines (laptop, gaming desktop, mini desktop/home server). It has been a mixed bag, but I'm not going back.
I did it for mainly three reasons - philosophical problems with Microsoft/Apple, Performance, and update policy. For the reasons I switched, I'm mostly very happy! I'll go device by device to explain some of my "issues". I am more tech savvy than the average bear, but I'm far from an IT worker or developer.
My oldest device is my laptop. It's from 2019 and has an 8th gen i7 and 8 gigs of RAM. It was starting to show its age on Windows - a lot of apps loading slowly, battery life started tanking, and I simply don't use my laptop very often anymore (I use my Galaxy Tab for almost everything these days) so my use case was very limited - a little bit of document manipulation, downloading certain kinds of files, and basic file management of my home server (which I still find easier with a keyboard). Linux works perfectly for these needs and my laptop is 100% better for it.
Desktop gaming PC - for the most part it is better. Most games work easily with minor tweaks. It feels a little disingenuous when people act like Proton makes games "just work." It's a 1000x better than it used to be but there are still generally specific Proton versions to use, tweaks to fix things like audio, launchers, menus, and/or graphical glitches. Maybe it's just the games I play but it very rarely just works out of the box. However, once it does work, it is absolutely true that the games usually run better than they do on Windows. Also I tend to play older games which have more problems running. Some of these games also have tweaks to run properly on Windows so it's not like I'm describing anything unusual for people who are PC gamers.
Lastly, my home server - this is the one I've had the most issues with. First of all, it was pretty new hardware when I bought it and it took a bit of finagling to get wifi/BT working, pairing my Logitech keyboard took some terminal magic, and it took a while to figure out how to monitor performance in a way that works for me. It also took a lot of terminal voodoo to get VNC running prior to login so I could restart and log back in without having to go upstairs. Permissions are way different on Linux than they are on Windows, and there are a lot of things I still haven't figured out how to do, like recording live shows on Jellyfin directly to my Synology NAS, which is mounted as a drive on my file system. There are discussions online about adding Jellyfin as a user to a group, and then giving that group permission to edit files on the mounted drive, I might be describing this all wrong - the point is I've never figured it out. My method has just been recording in the default folder, then opening the location as root and moving the files manually every few weeks. There are also methods to post-process recording to remove commercials that are really easy to figure out on Windows, but much more complicated on Linux to a layman like me. All that being said, I still prefer the way the server works under Linux than Windows, because it doesn't randomly update and the things that are working, work consistently and much more quickly.
As a summary I think the biggest thing for me is that on Linux I feel like things are getting better, whereas on Windows things have pretty consistently been getting worse. Once I find a way to fix something the way I want it on Linux, I have not yet had my solutions patched out, or undone on an update, or simply removed because Microsoft decided they wanted to be dicks. That is worth the speed bumps or learning curve or whatever you want to call it.
For Logitech mouse and keyboard you can use Solaar to manage them (via the Logitech receiver). Very nice piece of software. Usednit with cheap keyboard (K520?) and Marathon mouse (M705?), now I have MX Anywhere 3 and it can set various options on the mouse. Really like it.
I paired them using bluetoothctl and manually trusting/pairing the MAC. It wasn't very difficult, just very specific. Since pairing it once it has always stayed working though.
bluetoothctl is all you need when dealing with BT devices. Solaar is specifically for theit Unifying receiver.
I use bluetoothctl for pairing PS3 gamepads. Actually Bluez/Blueman (or whatever in the systwm tray) can do it in graphical interface as well. It is unbelievably easy to get PS3 gamepads running wirelessly in Linux.
I only run Linux on my home server, and I do it “headless” — no GUI/graphical user interface. You need to get familiar with stuff like ssh, but I guess it's worthwhile. I run Jellyfin, Transmission, and CUPS (handling an old printer), all in Docker containers on top of Debian 12. I got it ~1 year ago, and it works wonderfully, no headaches at all.
If you are used to Windows, I'm going to plug Kubuntu as the best distro for you. It has the best support for the KDE Plasma desktop environment which is a monster upgrade to the windows/explorer paradigm with almost identical workflow. It's also one of the most widely used distros (Ubuntu) which has good support. I've been running it for about three years now and it's wonderful. I'm not really in love with Ubuntu per se, it's KDE I require and I won't bother with any distros that haven't got top tier support for it.
One more caveat for gaming - if you mod games a lot, the mod tools will take more work to set up on Linux. Windows-only tools universally work, they just have to be emulated within the same Wine/proton context as the game which takes some tinkering to set up for each game. Use ProtonDB and it'll walk you through it for any game. Most mod tools on linux will not auto-detect things like game location, mod directories, and other settings you'll have to input manually.
People will say that you have to give up certain programs like Photoshop/Acrobat or Coreldraw that do not support linux, but that's not entirely accurate. Broadcom is now offering VMWare Workstation for free for personal use. This makes it dirt simple to create virtual machines running any version of Windows or Mac or whatever else you require, and then install and run those programs inside the virtual machine. One could use VirtualBox but frankly, I think VMware outclasses all other virtualization tools. May as well use the easiest/best option if you really need certain windows programs.
Side-note.
I just love how OP got his answer, said "okay-thx-bye", like 2 days ago ... and we'all love talking about Linux so much, we can't leave this thread alone.
I'm still checking in on the thread, and I love the conversation it sparked. People seem very passionate about it which is great. Currently I've been running Mint and and enjoying it. 😊
Guilty as charged, haha!
I'm using nixOS which I would not recommend if you've only ever used Windows, but as someone that plays games a fair bit, I'd say 99% work fine. I've had one or two issues with new, free to play, AAA multiplayer games fail to launch due to DRM issues, but nothing outside that category has had issues.
If you know what genres or games you like playing, you can search on ProtonDB to check for other peoples' experiences -- you'd be using the same compatibility layer as that when running on your desktop.
Re. the overall experience, I absolutely adore it and have no problems to report. Please take that with a colossal grain of salt considering the OS I'm using, which is known for being extremely fiddly, and the fact that I've been doing this for several decades at this point.
I've been dual booting nixOS for a few years now for experimenting. I really like the flexibility and stability of the OS. That being said, I'm pretty sure an AMD GPU is a prerequisite, as my 4070 Super system performs substantially worse than it does on windows.
Some apps randomly flash or go black, and my working games have low framerate and weird horizontal tearing. Things are more stable using x instead of Wayland, but still not great (and this limits modern features).
I'm pretty sure the real issue is user skill - but I have been using Linux on and off for like 15 years, am a software engineer, and would generally consider myself to be fairly technical. I've spent many hours trying to make things work better, but haven't succeeded yet.
I would think that the average PC user would absolutely despise this experience, and don't personally believe Linux will hit the mainstream anytime soon. Most people simply don't have the time or interest required.
I’m running a couple of NixOS/NVIDIA machines, one of which is a distinctly weird hardware configuration, and now that I’ve got the OS config dialled in they work totally fine - so it is possible, but the docs to reach that point were somewhere between terrible and nonexistent from both the Nix and the NVIDIA sides.
So yeah, for that reason and a bunch of others I think NixOS would be a terrible choice for a beginner, even though I look at it and think “damn, this is how operating systems should be built”.
To counter, but also agree with your post:
My 3060 (A3000, workstation flavor) worked great and saw a performance increase.
But as I posted below in this thread , yeah, Linux is full of little niggles like that. Constant small problems that I'm trying to fix versus actually just using my computer for what I want to use it for.
So I'm guessing I'll get pretty familiar with the terminal then lol 😆. What about things like USB devices? I have a portable SSD I use, and all my peripherals are USB as well. Any fighting there?
Nix actually doesn't really rely on the terminal too much if you decide to go that route, the whole system is built around config files. So if you have your config set up correctly, your system will always work, and can easily be replicated if needed.
I haven't had issues with any USB devices. Also my external audio interface worked immediately, which doesn't happen on windows (but does on mac as well).
The biggest issue for me is power control. If my computer goes to sleep before I log in, it isn't going to wake up. I'm pretty sure manually sleeping can also go badly. I'd assume if you are using a laptop, getting the camera / biometric devices working would be a nightmare as well.
Just to make sure: do note that NixOS is unlike most other Linux distros, and is particularly fiddly. For a lot of people that fiddliness pays for itself in spades, but it’s almost certainly not worth the effort unless you know you’re the sort to power through several, subsequent learning cliffs.
It’s almost certainly going to be a better experience to use a distro with more widespread support, so that you can google problems and be reasonably confident that you’ll find an answer.
Fwiw the steam deck works fine for tonnes of people, and it runs Linux (admittedly with an AMD GPU). Not sure if you meant Linux on desktops in particular, though.
Re. Graphical issues, I’m sorry to hear that. My RTX 2060 has been chugging along fine, though, and I haven’t noticed any unusual framerate or tearing issues. The most modern stuff I’ve been playing are Helldivers and Monster Hunter (veeeeerrry slowly), though, so I might be missing a bunch of titles that run poorly.
Until 6 weeks ago I'd used nothing but Linux on the personal desktops and laptops of mine for twenty years, and I'd been using it for ten more before that so I might not be an ideal person to comment what it might be like for a newcomer.
I will say that installation is a lot easier, and if you stick to the main distributions you likely won't have much of an issue either way. The main desktops of KDE Plasma and Gnome both have strong opinions of how things should be done. Perhaps boot some Live images of your potential installation candidates so you can get an overview.
I recently ditched Linux on the desktop and Laptop (though, I have changed my old Linux desktop into a Steam Box which boots straight to Big Picture, and I still have my array of linux based servers and whatnot) for actual UNIX on the desktop, which is a breath of fresh air, lol.
In all my time with Linux on the desktop I never felt I was missing out on anything, really. I actually love GIMP and Libre Office, lol
Cool! I always thought that UNIX is focused on corporative clients and selling licenses for servers and workstations. What's your thoughts on it as everyday desktop OS? What is different to your previous Linux flavor?
Sorry for the ambiguous statement, I was being mean. I moved to Mac, and Mac OS is a certified UNIX.
My most recent Linux desktop and the one that now serves my Steam games is running Endeavour OS, which is an Arch derivative, with a much more sensible install procedure.
I find Mac OS much more familiar for many reasons to Linux but in the end, I couldn't deal with the switch to Wayland in the Linux desktop space, there were too many compromises in it when using software I require every day. It was good for some things though, and therefore the back and forth between X11 and Wayland was becoming intolerable, with the inevitable, inexorable decline of X.org.
All the same software I run on the Mac, GIMP, Libre Office, Firefox, my KeePass databases work just fine. It's like a home from home.
I find libre office (calc specifically) to be kind of laggy on the Mac so I end up just using excel on it instead. Calc works fine on my Linux machines though... is this just me?
It’s my least used module by far, but I’ll check it out with a keener eye next time I’m in there
Only an occasional user of Libreoffice, but I haven’t noticed Calc lagging on an M2 MBP.
It does have an annoying bug where large parts of the window will sometimes stop responding to input entirely (no CPU spikes or delayed response when you do find the few pixels that are still active, so it seems to be an input capturing problem specifically), but that only happens very rarely.
It might not be lagging in the truest sense that’s being experienced, but an elevated sense of latency coming from things like widget repaints taking some number of milliseconds longer when compared to native Cocoa apps. It’s felt despite not being egregiously slow.
This is something that’s very common with cross platform UI toolkits under macOS. It doesn’t have to be that way (Sublime Text is just as snappy and sometimes more than Cocoa apps), but to achieve that some extra optimization effort is required, and it’s rare to see that effort put in.
I prefer Onlyoffice
I wish I could use LibreOffice on my MBA (M1), but it's impossible. High CPU usage even in idle and memory leaks, that leads to crashes. I went back to Apple's office apps…
I fully moved off of Windows for my desktop for both gaming and work a few years ago and it has been great. I have used a bunch of distros over the years, but for my desktop, I just stick with either PopOS or Mint because it has wide support and I am very comfortable with it. The only issues I have had were related to Nvidia drivers now and then. I recently upgraded to a new AMD GPU because of those rare issues and it has been smooth sailing. With the exception of a Windows laptop I keep for one of our client companies that is a Windows shop and has a VPN that does not play well with Linux (Pulse Secure VPN can go to hell), I have been blissfully Windows free for about four years.
Suffers a lot less from the “it’s a second hobby or job to keep working” but still struggles with the “last mile” problem of being good for 90% of things but then not standard user friendly for 10%
Ive been using it as my daily since 2016ish
I use a browser for most things so Ive never had much trouble. I have a backup macbook though because some government websites don’t support Firefox and I’m not willing to use Chromium. You can just install Chromium and not have to keep a backup.
Developing is way easier on here, I’m a backend dev. Having Docker super easy to install and use has been a game changer.
I don’t really game much, but Steam supports Linux now and from what Ive read most games available on Steam work on Linux.
I use Linux Mint, I definitely recommend it. Its built on Ubuntu + debian which seem to be the most widely supported.
Please be more specific- what applications do you require? And are you open to alternatives for those?
This is the area where you'll have the most trouble, especially if you need something in the Adobe suite or Microsoft Office suite.
You know, I hadn't thought of it but most of the stuff I use now is browser based.
I guess I just mostly use Discord, Obsidian, Vivaldi, VScode, Steam and Battle.net.
My experience with those specific applications on Linux:
I've had a lot of luck adding random Windows applications, even not games, to Steam because that's an easy way to get compatibility layers automatically. One thing to know though is that adding things that have installers is kind of annoying. The process is to add the installer, change the compatibility settings (to make it run through proton), run the installer, then reopen the settings but this time change the application and start directory to the right paths inside the wine prefix steam just installed the application to.
As an aside related to something I saw you mention elsewhere: I personally replaced Docker with Podman on Linux. Due to Docker's default configuration of a root daemon it can be kind of annoying to get it behave nicely with rootless containers. Podman solves that by just not using a root daemon at all. I also just shoved a small shell script into my bin named docker that execs podmam (plus a few lines of compatibility stuff to make it behave a little more like VsCode expects docker to behave) that I could also share if helpful.
To chime in on the others:
Obsidian works fine, can confirm. I haven't used it extensively, but did test it out for a while as my note taking app and had no problems with it on Linux.
Vivaldi does make Linux versions, so likely that should work too, though I have not used it on Linux before (I use Firefox and/or variants of it as I also want to avoid all chromium-based browsers)
Battle.net does work through Lutris, though the install and use process of it can be a bit buggy / wonky, so prepare for some possible weirdness there. I had some weird issues where it wouldn't update itself successfully, or the UI would randomly blank out sometimes, etc. That said I've abandoned Battle.net at this point as I've decided to not give Blizzard games any more time (except for D2 (non-remade) and its mods) which I've set up outside of bnet. If you still need it, maybe some set up through Steam is actually easier at this pt. But despite the bugs which I was able to work around, for a while I was able to play D2R and D4
Thanks for the detailed reply!
I honestly dislike Vivaldi (which is chromium..), which I know you haven't used, but as someone trying to get away from things like chromium and all that, is Firefox still the only answer?
I was just frustrated because they haven't kept up on modern web APIs. Do you have a preferred Linux browser?
Firefox is the only non-chromium browser that is in a fully usable state. There's some other projects that aren't there yet (and have other issues I won't get into here).
What APIs are not supported in Firefox? I find this interesting as Mozilla maintains incredibly detailed descriptions of all web features in MDN.
WebUSB is one that is very useful for some very specific contexts.
In mine, it's flashing microbits directly from makecode without downloading/uploading.
Interesting, so are you using a browser-based IDE that handles compilation on the server, then directly writes to USB?
I'm genuinely curious, as I don't have much hardware interface programming knowledge, but might work on some hardware projects in the future.
Two projects:
I use Firefox for basically all of my browser usage. I also have the Brave flatpak installed for the rare Chromium compatibility need, though I can't recall needing it any time within the last few years.
I do wish the browser landscape was better, but Firefox has been good enough for me. I also don't have any love for Brave in particular, but I basically never run it so I haven't cared to find a replacement for it.
I use both Firefox and chromium under Linux, and they work fine in my experience. About the same as on Windows. Don't have any other alternatives for you unfortunately.
I'm in a similar boat, I haven't tried prolonged use of desktop Linux in 20 years or so, so I'm finding the answers here interesting. But as a Mac-using software engineer I've gotten pretty familiar with a lot of Linux(y) paradigms like CLI tools, shell scripting, server administration, and lots of tinkering with Raspbian-based projects.
My impressions of those things are great. I've never really gotten into a situation where I was trying to accomplish something that couldn't be done, though there are plenty of deep rabbit holes that can be frustrating to a novice. I think in general Linux shells make a lot more sense and are just more pleasant to work with than PowerShell or cmd.exe. The ecosystem is surprisingly robust.
The last time I tried to make a Linux desktop work I guess there was a big schism between Gnome and KDE? I have no idea if/how that was resolved but I found it super annoying. I did not like the idea of having to know the ins and outs of window managers and spent a lot of time just trying to understand them after coming from other OSes where sensible window management is just a given. TBH I still have no idea how that works in Linux but it's gotta be better now, surely.
From everything I've heard, Mint is a great distro with defaults that should do everything you need out of the box. Even so, you should still probably expect to do a lot more tinkering than would be needed in Windows, which may or may not be for you. If you're getting into web dev, it probably is.
Regarding gnome vs kde, I would just pick one. If you don't want to fiddle, pick gnome. But both are fine imho.
I don't have anything to add beyond what others have said, but I just wanted to chime in some commentary:
It is amazing how quickly AMD GPUs went from "basicly unusable" to "best gaming GPU on Linux."
All it took was opening up the drivers. And that leveled the playing field tremendously.
Wut
OK OK OK let's review history.
In 2013ish, there were two drivers: radeon (open source) and fglrx/catalyst (proprietary driver. Catalyst being the marketing name and fglrx being what kernel devs called it). Everyone Knew™ that radeonsi was more stable and better with 2D, but fglrx ran at 100%ish speed (radeonsi ran at 70%ish speed, which was painful) and supported both OpenCL and mixing legacy OpenGL (GL1/2) with modern GL (GL3 etc).
(Note for later: by "radeon" I actually mean radeon and radeonsi, which are two halves of the open-source driver - radeon was the kernel half and radeonsi is the userland half.)
But mainly, fglrx was the only way to compete with Nvidia on frames (in between crashes).
Also, radeonhd existed. Just mentioning so nobody thinks I forgot it.
Anyway, so fglrx was basically Nvidia but without the stability, and radeon sucked at videogames. Also IIRC some games literally couldn't play on radeon (and IIRC there was something dumb about S3TC being a patented tech required by the GL standard, which made it impossible to "just work" in open source, for legal reasons).
Anyway, so everyone fucking hated fglrx but graphics cards are expensive and nobody wanted to lose half their frames for the sake of principle. So, AMD eventually tried to get the best of both worlds with a split driver system: basically, get the in-kernel half of fglrx open-sourced (so everyone uses the same kernel driver) and then let users choose between a proprietary or open-source userland. The new "everyone uses this" kernel driver would be called "amdgpu" (and the new userland-only half of fglrx would be called "amdgpu-pro" BTW).
...now there are three AMD drivers - radeon, amdgpu, and fglrx. Initially, amdgpu didn't support old cards and eventually radeon wouldn't support new cards, and IIRC amdgpu had some other drawback too. Meanwhile, fglrx still had the best performance and openCL etc.
Eventually, over several several years, amdgpu+radeonsi would catch up to and overtake fglrx on performance (and overtake radeon in relevance, as more cards with amdgpu support were released and also amdgpu was back ported a generation or two), relegating it only to legacy CAD and OpenCL users. But for a decade or so, AMD users just had to pick which bowl of shit to eat.
It was a slow laborious process that only happened due to the devs putting in the hard work.
Also this fucking bug. R9 390 users can go eat shit in particular, apparently.
Oh, I didn't say it wasn't laborious. I say amazing, the way building the Hoover Dam was amazing. I'm also old, so 4 years is a pretty short window.
My perception of what happened:
2000ish - 2015: AMD basically unusable for 3D. NVIDIA unusuable without proprietary drivers, because noveou was relying on reverse engineering. The incredibly common Intel/NVIDIA GPU setup on laptops a borderline impossible nightmare.
2015-2020 - AMD begins the transition to amdgpu, and has some incredibly rough edges as it goes. 2019 is when I switch to Linux full time on my Ryzen PRO laptop.
2021 - present: amdgpu has solved basically all woes for modern AMD cards as you described. NVIDIA is more or less in the same place as it was 20 years ago.
So, in the eyes of a user, it was basically 15 years of terrible, 6ish years of frenzied improvement, and then dominance. Sure, maybe not in raw pixel pushing, but in terms of overall experience NVIDIA is now a non-starter IMO.
No less amazing than Firefox unseating IE.
I really want to answer you that it's fine, but I've been using Linux for well over 20 years so I'm not exactly a good source of opinion on it. That said, Android is Linux, so I would argue if you find Android to be acceptable, then you should find Linux on the Desktop to be good in most cases.
The biggest barrier to entry is probably the sheer number of choices you have to make to get started. What distro do you use, and why? What Desktop Environment do you choose, and why?
If you want the most basic advice of the easiest way to get started: Install Fedora Workstation in a VM under Windows and see what you think. Make sure to run it full screen, the GNOME desktop really is designed with that in mind. You probably won't stick with Fedora for years, but you just download the image, mount to a VM, click through the installer with the defaults, and you're up and running. Or maybe you will stick with it, I believe Linus Torvalds uses Fedora for his daily driver. If you're not prone to switching DE's and trying to customize everything it really is a great OS with all the necessities.
If you want the most complicated advice from me for a way of diving in headfirst, that will give you dozens of options and questions to answer but puts you in full control: install Arch Linux.
While I do daily drive it, I feel that I'm far from a Linux expert and found the current state of Arch to be expectedly easy. I more-or-less just followed the instructions of the built-in installer script and stuff just worked. For maintenance the Arch wiki feels just so exceptionally helpful that it makes it often feel easier than other distros. In my time on Mint I'd be looking up stuff like "how to install X on Linux Mint" and the real answer would often be either on some random page, require some random extra keys be added, or require translating Debian or Ubuntu instructions to Mint. That stuff has effectively disappeared for me on Arch.
I have an axe to grind: Android is not Linux, in any way that matters. It doesn't use the Linux kernel (it uses forks of Linux, but not the mainline branch), it isn't open-source (AOSP is open-source but Android has tons of proprietary stuff, and especially the Google service APIs that half the apps depend on by default, which is only supported on Android and iOS), and writing your own app for Android is harder than writing an app on Windows.
The only phone that runs Linux is the PinePhone (and a handful of other niche phones). The various smartphone Linux distros don't really benefit from the domination of Android in particular, with the strongest argument being basically "at least it's not as locked down as iOS", which sure, but iOS was never going to be the only OS as long as Samsung etc wanted to get into the smartphone hardware business (which was inevitable given the profit margins and size of the original iPhone's userbase).
I've been using Linux for about ten years now. I switched after getting sick of spending my time trying to undo Windows update glitches and finding Windows less and less supportive of user intervention. I dual booted for a while so I could finish playing Witcher 3--at the time Linux gaming was nowhere like it is today.
I have never been a tech employee but I like poking around computers and learning new things. Over the years I have seriously murdered my computer to where I had to redo everything twice. The first time I lost pretty much everything. The second time it was no big deal because I got smart and set up regular backups. I don't think murdering your computer is inevitable with Linux, but it is more possible because you have so much more control. I think to make Linux work you have to like puzzles and fixing things--although I'd say 90% of my time has just been using my computer for what I want it to do rather than fiddling or fixing things.
I use Linux on my main computer and my laptop and also take care of my partner's laptop.
I chose Manjaro after trying a few other distros. The main reason I picked Manjaro was that the support on their forum was incredibly patient and welcoming (and still is, mostly--any bad attitudes tend to be addressed by moderators pretty quickly) You will hear people talk about how Manjaro is "bad": that is due to an incident years ago where one of the owners went AWOL and the other owner didn't have access to things he needed to get security updates for a bit. There was also some interpersonal drama with a moderator that resulted in a smear campaign for a bit. That's all been settled. Personally I'm very happy with my choice of distro, but it is also a "rolling-release" Arch-based distro, which means frequent updates (monthly on average). It requires more upkeep and you have to actually read the release announcements every time because sometimes there are specific requirements--it's not just click an update popup and forget about it. There are other distros with longer update cycles that you may prefer if you aren't interested in cutting-edge software.
One place to see and compare various distros is https://distrowatch.com/. That was what I used to find the distro that worked for me.
I sadly left GOG as my preferred gaming site for Steam, because Steam makes Linux gaming incredibly easy. Someone already mentioned Proton DB--that's a great place to see the current situation for any game you are interested in, but Steam can also let you filter for Linux/SteamOS games.
I have found the only real annoyance has been with some firmware support--for example my stupid Logitech G213 keyboard requires proprietary software for controlling many functions, in particular brightness. There is a Linux app called Solaar that help interface with many Logitech items--it works great for my Logitech mouse. However while it does help with some of the keyboard functions (e.g. changing backlight color) it does not control brightness, so there I'm stuck.
I've also had to wait a bit for firmware for brand new components to make to to Arch--but on the other hand if you have older equipment, there is a good chance it will be supported longer on Linux. I do take the time to make sure what I buy is Linux friendly-- I recently had to buy a new USB Bluetooth receiver and only some items I looked were Linux-compatible. So there is a smaller selection, but What I found is working great so not really a roadblock, just something to be aware of.
Also--AMD GPUs are MUCH easier to use on Linux. NVidia does very little to play nice with Linux. People use NVidia GPUs, but they are more problematic, I came to Linux with NVidia hardware, but they next time I upgraded I picked an AMD GPU and I am so glad I did.
Just FYI, in case you haven't already tried this, while it's not perfect (I don't know about the state of cloud saves/etc)- you can use GOG through Heroic launcher on Linux. I still get things on GOG from time to time and I play them via Heroic. You can even hook into Steam's Proton using it as a compatibility option if the defaults or other options don't work
+1 for Heroic. I wanted to like lutris, but for several games (E.g. Control Ultimate Ed.) it just wouldn't work, while Heroic "just works TM"
Thanks, I'll check that out!
I've been running Arch (yep, I'm that guy) for about 2 years straight now. Over the years back to the late 90s I've used Manjaro, Ubuntu, Crunchbang, Mint, Fedora, Gentoo, Mandrake, and Red Hat. This run with Arch has been the most enjoyable desktop experience since Windows 2000. There has been so much general fear about using linux but nowadays especially with the ease for gaming it's no issue to the common user IMO.
Any points in particular that you can mention as enjoyable with Arch, or is it just the overall look & feel?
I, as a mostly shell-based macOS (!) user am amazed by the comprehensiveness and by extension usefulness of the Arch Wiki and AUR, and its documentation as well. It’s like every single piece of modern software and every topic/hardware issue (not that I’d need those entries) known to mankind has an entry there, lol. I think if I ever use Linux in a non-server, desktop context, I’d feel comfortable enough to just jump into Arch just based on my experience with package management there; I don’t wanna wait for my OS to have a 6-12 month old version of my favorite tools packaged…
I also daily drive Arch. Most of my Linux desktop environment experience prior to it was Mint, though I tried a handful of others. I used to distro hop whenever I was ready to reinstall, which I do every few years because I just find that starting fresh is easier than targeted cleanup, but will probably just do Arch again next time.
The look and feel portion, at least graphically, is so customizable that I can't really say it has anything to do with Arch. I do personally like that it works great with KDE Plasma though because I find it comfy, unlike GNOME which I don't like at all. Obviously I could get KDE Plasma on a variety of distros though so I don't really attribute this to Arch.
The big things for me though are:
When it comes down to it I'm a fan of the fact that it's a bleeding edge distro with excellent support, also the meme of course. When I was getting more into using linux as a daily driver Arch was usually mentioned as being super complex so it was always intriguing to me.
I switched on all my machines except one specific-use machine, and will never look back, though it's very much dependent on a number of things- which is- who you are and how you approach these things and what you're comfortable with, and exactly the things you need / want to run. Linux is in a better state than it's ever been, but as many other comments here have explained, it's not without its own hurdles (though often ones that are worth it IMO!)
There are definite occasional exceptions of things that do not have exactly "equivalent" alternatives, but that all depends on how many things you absolutely need to be able to run.
Gaming is better than it's ever been, but there are still occasional exceptions- some things with anti-cheat won't run depending on the engine/etc... so if you play anything competitively it can be hit or miss depending on the game. Majority of my huge libraries work fine though, occasionally I need to look up tweaks others have made (on something like https://protondb.com)
I run Linux since around 2008 as my only OS. Started with SUSE and wuickly jumped to Gentoo which I run to this day for laziness reasons (I would probably jump to Arch, but... laziness).
It is perfectly usable for everyday use. I use Libreoffice for documents, VLC for audio/video playback, Shotcut for video editting (I don't do much in it, mainly just cutting), GIMP for images (I don't use it much either), Firefox as my web browser (Chromium available and also Chrome if you really need it; and many other browsers) and MATE as my desktop environment (I'm 90's kid).
I use Steam to play games and since Valve introduced Proton (translation layer to run Windows games), I can play almost anything. Games you won't play are basically limited to those with some anti-cheat, mainly ones that requires Windows root access (which is non-existent in the translation layer). But I have over 400 games in my.livrary including some old ones and I can play probably everything I have.
Good point for checking how it runs is protondb.com where you can easily find how the game runs in Linux and what has to be done or set if it doesn't work out of the box. Many games run just like in Windows - you click "Install" in Steam, after download you click "Play" and you play. I have played even some multiplayer games without problems (but I'm still singleplayer type).
Linux has many distros that are Windows-like to be as easy as possible for new users. I don't know them though, as I already consider myself kinda veteran user and I don't use those distros. But if you go Linux way, remember that Arch has the best wiki and once you come to configuring something the .conf way, you will find the wiki extremly useful. You will find useful information even if you are doing simple stuff though - they hae lists of desktop environments, web browsers, video players... and some quick summary to each of them so you know what to look for and pick.
The main obstacle for switching to Linux for many people us the same for me to switc from Gentoo to Arch - laziness. Many people just don't want to learn something new or they do and give up halfway. Which is sad, because in my eyes, Linux is already fully working desktop OS which can easily do majority of tasks many people.use Windows for. Including gaming (limited by some of the anticheat software).
I use Linux as a secondary OS on a couple of machines and have toyed with it in varying capacities over the years, with the earliest being circa 2002 with Yellow Dog Linux, which if I recall was a Red Hat variant specialized for running on PowerPC Macs, followed by Ubuntu on a Pentium 4 box a few years later.
For me, desktop Linux, in a few ways, sits in a awkward uncanny valley where it’s almost where it needs to be but just far enough off to be offputting. Also factoring into it not being my primary OS is how in some ways, its trajectory has been non-linear with a few aspects actually being somewhat worse than they once were.
The biggest sticking point as well as the primary source of non-linearity is probably with desktop environments. Older versions of the big flagship DEs (GNOME and KDE) were in my estimation more well-rounded and were better about not rocking the boat and sticking to well established conventions that made them more welcoming to switchers. Old GNOME had a design that tended towards Mac OS 9 and OS X (including Apple’s design methodology of progressive disclosure, which makes software scale well from novice to expert) with a few Windows elements thrown in, while KDE was more Windows-like. Newer versions (if I remember correctly, GNOME at 3.x and KDE at 4.x) put both into rebellious “teenager” phases focused on establishing more quirky, unique identities. Neither have yet exited this phase, though between the two KDE is probably the closest, with some idiosyncratic “KDE-isms” having been removed or disabled by default in recent years, bringing it closer to a “standard” Windows experience.
There are more traditional DEs, which include Cinnamon, XFCE, MATE (old GNOME fork), and Trinity (old KDE fork), and they’re great projects in their own right, but they don’t get anywhere near the attention and resources that the two big guys do and it shows in their level of polish.
This doesn’t pose an issue for some users, but some of us (including myself) have a set of conventions and behaviors that we’ve come to prefer and are most productive with and don’t care to mold ourselves to new ones or to spend any amount of time hammering on DEs in attempt to shape them to match our needs. We want a much more of out of the box experience where everything is “right” from the get go and tinkering is minimal. There’s not really any DE that accomplishes this at present, especially for those of us coming from a Mac-dominant background.
Another way it’s “almost” is with gaming. The majority of popular games run fine and sometimes even better under Linux, but there’s notable gaps that are the fly in the soup for some. The one most relevant for me is Facebook’s total lack of support for Linux (Beat Saber is my #1 played game and I own a Quest 2), plus there are still some games where the dev is holding out on adjusting DRM/anti-cheat to be Linux-friendly. One can keep a Windows partition to boot into for these games, but having to constantly reboot back and forth for games is a major nuisance.
The other thing is that if you’ve not built or bought your PC with Linux use in mind, it can spell trouble. Realtek networking like is built into some majority of motherboards and laptops can be a pain for example, as can Nvidia cards (the latter of which can these days be impractically expensive to replace with a more Linux-friendly AMD counterpart).
Ach — I’ve been meaning to get my Linux PCVR setup working. It seems like Beat Saber has a decent rating in ProtonDB; has that not been your experience?
As far as I'm aware, Beat Saber itself runs fine under Linux. It’s my Quest 2 that’s the problem; it requires Windows-only software and drivers. If I upgraded to a SteamVR-based headset I should be able to play Beat Saber under Linux, but at present there are few SteamVR headsets that support inside-out tracking and do not require lighthouses, and to my knowledge none of the current SteamVR-compatible controllers are as well suited for BS moderate-and-higher difficulty custom maps as the Quests’ are.
So in short, it’s technically possible for me to play Beat Saber under Linux, but to do so I’d need to buy something like the Bigscreen Beyond as well as accessories (a set of SteamVR lighthouses + controllers) and live with the controllers not being quite as good for this particular use case.
I had been pinning my hopes on Valve’s “deckard” headset, which would be like a face-mounted Steam Deck counterpart to the Quest featuring inside-out tracking (and hopefully better controllers), but the last I heard that’s not going to debut until some time next year or later which is a bummer.
Ah, gotcha! I was trying to get ALVR working in order to stream desktop VR titles to my Quest 2. I threw in the towel, though, since at the time I was still very new to nixOS.
Iirc the issues had to do with some weirdness specific to my distro, though, so perhaps that tool would work for you? If you’re up for some fiddling.
I don’t know that I’d buy one now given the age, but for what it’s worth the increased tracking speed with the Valve Index controllers was a night and day difference over the Quest 2 for me, more than enough to outweigh the difference in shape IMO.
I own an HP Reverb G2, that one operates under WMR in Windows and it's the only thing preventing me from switching from Windows to Linux. While there are guides out there that claim it works, I have not been able to make it work properly. First off, the guides were out of date and some steps I had to supplement on my own, thankfully I'm experienced with Linux enough to do that. While I technically got the headset working, it is limited to 60FPS. It does run Beat Saber fine, but coming from 90FPS everything looks too choppy, I've also read that low FPS in headsets can be a significant contributor to nausea so I'm not keen to use the headset until it goes all the way up to 90.
Everything else has worked perfectly, and I personally prefer Linux. But I can't justify the move in the hopes support for my headset will improve in future.
If you're using Monado, you can set these 2 environment variables and should get 90Hz
I realise I am late to the party here, but I wanted to put one other thing in your mind.
The most important thing imo that you haven't really touched on is what is really motivating you to do this and what is the relationship between you and your computer and the tasks you want to perform on it.
I am guessing from your list of applications that primarily the computer that you want to install Linux on is for leisure / gaming. If you want the swap to Linux to work you will have to want to be on Linux more than you want to play the latest and greatest games on release day unless you also do vfio passthru to a windows VM (or dual boot) and even then I am willing to bet there are some kernel level anti cheats that will still block you if you run windows under a VM. Otherwise you will obviously and rationally at the first game you can't play switch to windows. Which is fine! No value judgement here. I would 100% keep some windows around for gaming. I have mained Linux 20 years at this point. I would call myself an expert. The only thing I haven't done with Linux is made a mainline kernel contribution. I still have a Windows gaming pc (that just boots directly into steam big picture). I highly recommend keeping around an escape hatch in some form or other.
A lot of people have highlighted things that can finiky or annoying with Linux. This is good and right. Something that I am willing to bet is a lot of them have forgotten how annoying windows is to use :) If you value being in charge of your device Linux is the best game in town for honing those skills.
Best of luck on your journey!
Yeah, I'm definitely not a release day gamer kind of person. I was looking to reformat and was kind of curious how Linux was these days. I'm kind of sick of all the junk companies are trying to force down our throats. All the bloat.
So I've always been kind of a tech person, I've got no issues going into a terminal to get something done if needed. I have maybe a handful of games I play that are "old" at this point, and spend most of my time coding or browsing the web. Honestly, having to dig into some stuff on Linux kind of sounds fun and refreshing to "make it my own".
I get what you're saying though. I'm considering having a small windows partition..but I'm also considering the "just wipe it and yolo" approach 😆. Like I said, I'm reformatting anyway so, not much to lose.
If you want to tinker on your computer and that's interesting to you, have at it! If you are comfortable with installing OSes then let's be real, you could be back on windows 11 in 10 minutes in a pinch with decent internet.
Linux these days imo is stellar. If you mostly play older non-AAA titles via steam then it's insane how seamless it has become.
Lastly my favourite thing about Linux is how small the kernel actually is, and how resilient it is to changes around it, because the drivers are in-kernel. You can transplant the disk almost anywhere and it will still boot when asked nicely. You can even do properly stupid stuff with a flexible enough filesystem like install a new distribution side by side without rebooting and switch root into the new one. All of the important configuration is simple and human readable / editable which means that when equipped with a decent usb boot environment you can save just about any mistake. I've been running the same ship-of-Theseus Linux installation for a decade or so across a distribution change without ever wiping anything and it still has that new computer smell internally because it's easy to audit. No black boxes, nothing hidden up a sleeve (ignoring firmware blobs and AMD PSP). It's great!
I have wrote a blogpost as a response to a similar question. It goes into how you can make a mental model of the Linux ecosystem so you can make an informed choice.
One thing to add: if you have two screens, test out if the distro works well first, some setups don't work well with Xorg based distros/DEs like Linux Mint.
Thank you! That was very informative.
I've been using linux as main desktop OS for 15 years now. My use is general: media/gaming/code stuff. IMO Linux has never been better and is still going in the right direction.
The only hitch can be the X/Wayland thing, but Wayland is close to covering 99% of peoples needs. We do need a little more compositor options, but kde is nice. No real windows compatibility problems for a while, except for MS software of course.
In comparison, i actively dislike the Windows experience forced on me by work, which is is getting worse all the time.
Linux is so much easier to use. Even distributions like Debian have live images with the easy-to-use Calamares installer, which makes it easy to install, then just use whichever GUI package tool is in the distro to enable non-free and get your graphics/wifi in.
Yes. I switched to Aurora which is an image-based system based on Fedora Atomic with a bunch of additions (Distrobox, docker, podman, VSCode, virtualization, simplified wifi driver management), and some small tweaks I needed on my own github repo (waydroid, krdp for rdp). I've used it for seventeen months and have not had much in the way of issues. With this and its sister image Bluefin, you can just download the image for your hardware (nvidia, surface, or the "regular" for AMD), and it'll have graphics OOTB, and has tools to manage wifi drivers.
I like that it automatically updates every day, and I've seamlessly gone through three Fedora releases without having to make any changes. Minor issues will happen, same as Windows using Linux, like driver issues occasionally. This happened once, and all I had to do was roll back a week and keep an eye out for the patch to come through that fixed it, then I was back to rolling like normal.
Some things are harder than windows. Once you have the basics, plenty gets easier. I can run software that can run in WINE in optimized sandboxed images using tools like bottles, for example.
There will be a learning curve. I would recommend intentionally staying on windows trying to adapt to cross platform software that supports Linux as much as possible first, however, as that will round out a ton of rough edges before you switch. Most applications I use (Firefox, Brave, Renoise, Bitwig, Steam, Asperite, VSCode) all have native Linux support
Yes. the only exceptions are certain games with DRM like Easy Anti Cheat and others. Many of these systems actually can support running in WINE or VMs, but the devs make the choice to lock them down. Most other games can be run via Steam, who aim for high compatibility with Proton, and EGS and GOG can be accessed via Heroic Launcher, with platform-specific cloud saves working in general as well.
As an aside something I also recommend is to not be too precious about your native OS. Yank that Windows drive out, and any others if you're worried, pop your OS drive in, install it, connect the rest back, and just jump in and try to learn it if you're really curious. Many distros will simply use their own EFI partition, etc, which sidesteps the risk of Windows doing anything to it as well, which is a bonus of doing a separate hard drive setup.
I'm late to reply to this post, but I'll say one thing: In my previous job (web development), we were some 100+ engineers, and I don't think any single one of us used Linux on our development machines. Not even me, someone who has daily driven Linux on desktop for many years. Everyone was on Mac. I'm not saying you can't do web development on Linux, because you absolutely can, but the industry culture, as far as I've seen, is that people use Macs purchased on company dime.
To provide a counterpoint, at almost every webdev place I've worked, pretty much all the devs except for a very small handful used Linux. Most people who didn't used MacOS, and some people used Windows for reasons I cannot fathom.
The place I'm at now uses MacOS. and I can't say I'm a fan but it works well enough - all the tools are there that I need.
I obviously don't know about your company in particular, but that's a pretty common corporate governance thing. Companies don't want to support "bring your own OS" environments because it's a huge pain to have IT support.
I basically just used my issued Mac for stuff any bargin bin laptop could do (browser, email, word, etc) and then ssh'd into cloud hosted Linux machines for real work. I did this for almost every part of full stack development. The only exceptions I can think of were when I briefly had to work on apps (Xcode and Android Studio both prefer local device).
I use Void Linux as my daily driver and I have a hard time imagining not using GNU/Linux personally. There are distributions that provide a more familiar desktop experience out of the box so you don't have to worry too much about documentation, but to me it seems the strength is rather the opposite: I can start from 0 and build something much more catered to my workflow from it. That requires digging into documentation, so certainly not for everyone, but very rewarding for a power user willing to invest some time and energy into long term ergonomics.
As a development environment it's again very configurable and flexible. It's what it is, at heart. It's largely based around a now strangely anachronistic model with virtual VT100-like terminals and pieces of software interacting via unstructured plain text streams and command line arguments, but it works well and somewhat transparently across multiple machines via secure shell connections. Best of all is that any sequence of commands could easily be turned into a script to automate some workflows. In theory you could have the same scriptable environment in the Windows CLI, and maybe even better in PowerShell which has a more modern take on structured input/output data, but the boon in Linux is the breadth of software built to be scriptable in this way.
One thing that has really grown on me in the past few years is audio. Linux has a basic built-in audio and MIDI subsystem, but there are multiple options for audio servers running on top of that. That's been a bit of a PITA historically, but since the release of Pipewire I have a nice, low latency setup which is compatible with all the other audio servers and really Just Works™ in my experience. Audio is routable, not only between applications and audio interfaces but between applications. Much like OS X, IIRC.
Gaming works surprisingly well. There can be a slight performance drop in my experience, depending on the game, though YMMV since I've seen reports of Proton outperforming DirectX on the same hardware. I play Windows games via Steam and Heroic which both automate Windows API emulation via Proton. I use some Windows-based VST plugins and getting that to work was a bit of a hassle, and still hit-or-miss in terms of whether it works at all for a given plugin.
I keep my Windows installation around mostly in order to test Windows builds of my game now, but if you're otherwise happy with Windows, you can use Windows subsystem for Linux. I think WSL 1 is an API emulator much like Wine/Proton and WSL2 is based on a VM.
Linux can be a bit of a hit or miss with laptops in my experience. I've always bought laptops which I know are well supported. Some have problems with NVidia hardware, and you have to use their proprietary drivers to get the most out of it, but it's never really been an issue for me in practice.
I've been using Linux more or less daily for school/uni and work for roughly 4 years now. I was taught to use Linux a little bit through school before starting to use it on my own machine, so my situation is slightly different. We were using Mint then. For my system, I went the rarely recommended route of picking an Arch-based distro as my first after trying out Ubuntu for a day or two and not liking apt. For a while, maybe a year, I used Manjaro. When that started causing me issues, I switched over to EndeavourOS, and I'm still using that now.
Probably don't do what I did. I do like using EndeavourOS a lot for its package repos, simplicity and amount of information readily available thanks to ArchWiki, and overall, it's a much better experience than Windows. But it's far from always seamless, especially if you're new to Linux or OS power usage in general. I used my thingy for about a couple years at least without knowing what a swapfile is, nor the fact that I'd never had one at all on this system somehow. I've also had just a lot of issues to resolve manually which is something you may not want to have to do. Other distros, I assume, don't have as much of a problem so far
I have used Ubuntu and Ubuntu Studio on my home theater pc, with the intention of switching over my main rig, which I haven't done.
I didn't love or hate Ubuntu, and it worked well with my amd hardware, both cpu and gpu. I switched to Studio because I needed support for Presonus Studio One, which is the audio recording software that I use on Windows.
My family doesn't love linux because its unfamiliar, and because of the little things that don't work.
Any NBC streaming, so Peacock, Comcast cable, etc, will not work on linux. This is a small thing to me, because netflix, hbo, disney, etc all work fine, but to them it's an example of why we shouldn't have it on the HTPC.
I got a small digital Mixer to use as i/o for audio recording, and while it seems to work on the linux desktop, but with Studio One, it crashes. This is most likely the DAW's fault, but on windows it just works.
I also play multiplayer shooters, and some of them wont work because of anti cheat software not working.
Like many others, I have grown to really dislike windows and I would love to move away from it, but it's too hard at the moment to give it up because of all the little things.