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My Experience with Linux

June 13, 2025

In 2023, I installed Linux Mint onto my PC. I forget exactly what drove me to try it, but I think it had to do with the release of Windows 11 and the fact that the user of the operating system loses more and more control over time as Windows continues to update. I got fed up with this and decided to give Linux a try. I configured a dual boot setup so that I still had Windows 10 on my computer, but was also able to boot into Linux whenever I felt comfortable to do so, and over time I gradually moved my use cases over to my Linux install (my main use cases were programming, college work, and video capture/streaming). It was a pretty hard adjustment, but I think the gradual move helped me a lot. I think it would’ve been a lot harder to do an instant switch. Having a dual boot setup helped me slowly adjust. If you have any considerations moving to Linux, I would definitely recommend giving dual booting a try. Completely deleting Windows and installing Linux on top of it seems extremely nuclear to me.

I used Linux as my daily driver for about 2 years, on my PC and then eventually my laptop. In December of 2024, I installed Windows 10 and started using it as my primary OS on both my PC and laptop. So I will go over why I made this decision. There are a lot of pros and cons with using Linux, and I definitely did enjoy my time using Linux (I still use it for servers). But I definitely also had some issues with it that I am happy to leave behind.

Pros

The one thing I absolutely loved about Linux is the fact that it felt like I owned my computer. You can basically customize everything about your system, and I really liked being able to do that. I can customize how the UI looks and feels, what certain keystrokes do, etc. I really liked being able to set things up the way I wanted them. I will say that I didn’t really take this feature to its fullest potential though, and that is simply because I was fine with the stock options. I wasn’t picky with what was already handed to me.

Additionally, I had the option to make it so updates to the OS were not automatic, and I chose to run them manually. While some may see this as a downside, I want to have the ability to update stuff when I want to, because I know that once I run an update I will have to prepare for some sort of change. Having updates randomly apply to stuff without me knowing what specific stuff is being updated throws me off. Being able to see the list of all the stuff that will be updated, and being able to willingly press the “Update Now” button whenever I wanted the update to execute was very convenient.

I was also a big fan of the terminal. Using apt felt so seamless and easy to use. If I wanted to download something, I just typed “sudo apt thing” and it gave me the thing. I did not miss having to hunt down installers and using installation wizards to get the stuff I needed. Updating stuff on the system was just as convenient. Since everything was installed through apt, everything could also be updated through apt, so I didn’t have to go into each individual program to update everything.

Cons

The one thing I absolutely hated about Linux is compatibility. If I ever came across a program that only had an .exe build, it meant that I had to spend a good chunk of time trying to get the program to maybe work. This would require screwing with wine configs and I barely even knew how that stuff worked. It was a giant pain. And if I couldn’t get it to work, I had to boot up a virtual machine and use it in there instead, which had its own slew of problems and annoyances.

Some of my Steam games wouldn’t run the best through Proton while they would run perfectly fine in Windows. I don’t play many PC games, and majority of my games can either be ran natively on Linux or work perfectly fine on Proton, but some games would either run poorly through Proton, or are just straight up not compatible with Linux whatsoever (my VR headset was a huge culprit). This required me to boot up Windows, which became annoying because then I need to configure two OSes to be how I want them to be rather than just staying on one. I did primarily use Linux because I preferred using that, but it felt silly when half the time I was booting into Windows anyway.

Getting my capture card to work on Linux was a huge hurdle, and it is surprising I even got it to work for as long as it did. Capture was very important because I like to record and stream speedruns every so often, so if it wouldn’t work on Linux I would have to boot into Windows just to stream. I have an Avermedia Live Gamer 4K capture card, and there are no official Linux drivers made for it. However, someone made a semi-open source driver for it by utilizing a different Avermedia driver that has Linux support. Overall, it was a hacky mess to get set up, and the driver wouldn’t work half the time, but eventually I got it configured to where it would pretty much be stable and working.

LiveSplit also does not have native Linux support, and while there are alternatives to LiveSplit that work on any OS, I wanted to use the Windows version since it has the most features and it is what I am used to. Getting LiveSplit to work through wine is a giant pain in the ass for some reason, and even after getting it to work, there are some things that didn’t work and would crash LiveSplit, so I had to find workarounds to those issues too. Also, if you use autosplitters or any other LiveSplit plugins, you can forget all of those exist because they are definitely not working. I would only try configuring a speedrunner streamer setup on Linux if you genuinely hate Windows, because this setup was horrible. I was able to endure it for quite some time and it worked fine once I got it running.

I didn’t even get to my laptop yet… so I have a laptop that also turns into a tablet. It isn’t a Microsoft Surface, rather one of those laptops that has the keyboard attached but you can flip the keyboard to the back of the screen so it makes a “tablet”, and I use this laptop as my primary means of drawing art. The pen compatibility on Linux is really strange and weird. I used PopOS on my laptop because it was the only distro that kind of worked for pen stuff, but I did not really like anything else about it otherwise. If Linux Mint had good tablet compatibility I would’ve preferred that instead for sure. When I put Windows on my laptop, it felt like the pen functioned properly, and I forgot how normal it felt to draw on my tablet.

It is unfortunate that compatibility is the largest concern when trying to use Linux. If everything just worked with it, it would be so much better to use. It sucks that it is mostly ignored as software usually prioritizes Windows first and foremost.

Why I Switched Back to Windows

The two reasons why I switched back are because:

The second point is honestly kind of sad, because I would expect that Linux desktops would have caught up to this point already. Is it not common to have a setup where monitors have different max refresh rates? I found that kind of absurd. I tried to remedy this issue by switching to a different distro that uses Wayland (tl;dr is that Wayland is a different but new display protocol that includes more modern features over Xorg, which was what I was using), but Wayland is still pretty new and was kind of a buggy mess, alongside the fact that the distro I was using was also hard to adjust to after needing to hop off Linux Mint because Mint doesn’t support Wayland. It was extremely aggravating, and I think that rage led me to move back to Windows because I miss not needing to have to screw around with my computer to get things to just function properly.

I think that this was something that I really did miss about Windows. I forgot how nice it felt to not have to worry about compatibility whenever I came across a new software, where I had to pray “I hope that this has a Linux build”. Now I just see a program and assume it will work on my computer, and I don’t need to mess with wine configs for an hour to have the program maybe run properly.

I do not regret using Linux for the time I did. It was cool to experience how it worked and why people backed it so much. It kind of annoys me when those using Windows dislike Linux when they do not even try it first. I think that opinion should only apply if you end up trying it and disliking it, rather than just assuming that it is bad because “it’s Linux, of course it will be bad”. What is great about Linux is that more often than not, they will allow you to try the OS from the installater before actually installing it to your computer, so it is great if you just want to try it out and see how it feels. By the same token, I also understand why “Linux diehards” exist and why those who use it want others to switch to it. My opinion on that is, if you are a Linux user, you should not try to force Linux down people’s throats. I think it is fine to suggest at least trying it and getting a feel for it, but nagging people to install it is not cool. People have different use cases for their computers, and sometimes Windows just works for people, as annoying as the OS could be sometimes. I think that these people want to get others onto Linux because the larger the userbase is, the more reason there is to develop compatibility for Linux. The main reason why compatibility is so low is because of the large userbase Windows has compared to Linux. I take an approach in the middle here, because I feel like the only thing stopping me from using Linux is its compatibility. It would be great if it just worked with everything.

I’m not saying that using Windows is a perfect world. I honestly do miss Linux sometimes. I miss being able to customize how my OS looks and being able to use the terminal for a lot of stuff (command prompt on Windows just isn’t the same). But man do I not miss having to screw around with my computer. The amount of time I have wasted trying to get Linux to work for the sake of not using Windows was not worth it. I respect those who continue to use Linux. Maybe I’ll try switching back once Windows 10 reaches end of life? Who knows…

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