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The original was posted on /r/fedora by /u/Aidas_Lit on 2024-09-25 22:22:04+00:00.

I see these “departure” posts every now and then, claiming linux doesn’t work and windows is better. After making the switch over a month ago, I feel like im using a whole different OS than these people, most of the things I thought would work, did work. The times they didn’t were mostly caused by me myself taking the difficult route, instead of the simple one that is near guaranteed to work out of the box.

For context, I did what most recommended against: I jumped in blind, without having a windows drive to fall back to. I do still have a windows laptop for studies, but this time it was about my personal machine, and I decided to just go all in after upgrading the hardware. The installation process (Fedora KDE spin) was alright, learned about the various partition types during it and went with a mostly default setup. And once I started using the machine, these were the only major cases of something not working:

• First off, the biggest offender: Discord. Screensharing on wayland just does not work as intended. Now there is a workaround, so I just use Vesktop now, I only lose my custom mute/unmute keybind which is really not a big loss. And so it works, all it took was not being stubborn and installing a different client. But this is a case where I feel like people might misplace their disappointment, at least I know my friend was blaming linux when I couldnt screenshare for a time, “why would you make life harder for yourself by using linux”. Yet, why is linux at fault here? Discord itself isn’t fixing that functionality on wayland, it’s not an OS problem preventing it. The flatpak I used is official, so why blame linux when it’s the app developers being stubborn?
• There was a game I downloaded from itch, small game that didnt have built in linux support. Well, I tried adding the exe shortcut on steam, the game didnt launch. Alright, tried adding it to Lutris, some sort of a DirectX problem preventing a launch. And then I tried bootles, as I heard it handles automatically installing neccessary stuff better, lo and behold the game runs with no issues. Making this work was ultimately simple, the same could be done with plenty other games. Overall I’ve had no problems with gaming, my games didn’t have Linux breaking anti-cheats and so it “just works”. And those anti-cheat games that do break, I think anyone who tried linux has heard before that it wouldn’t work. It’s like signing a contract stating they won’t work, and then acting surprised when that’s the case. Again, I wouldn’t blame it on linux, kernel level anti-cheat is a plague that never should’ve existed in the first place (although genshin impact works out of the box, despite using a kernel level anti cheat)
• I needed to run a virtual machine for an university task, so I thought “hey let’s try that QEMU thing I keep hearing good things about”. This one was a big headache, as not only did it not support the OS image file type provided to me, it refused to connect to the internet once inside the VM. After struggling for half a day, I gave up, made a custom windows 10 VM and installed the app there, which did solve my issue. But here’s the thing, I always could’ve just used virtualbox and have a working VM there, as I have done so before previously. My problems came down to me trying to do something that I KNEW isn’t the easy way to get something working. And who is to blame for this trouble but me?

There are more, but ultimately the situation is similar: something doesn’t work because I either took the risky path myself, or there are functioning alternative ways to make it work, just takes one google search. Even the infamous nvidia drivers, that *somtimes* dont load after system updates (one more system restart and no problem), just WORK. Before I made the switch, I was worried and did extensive research into what might break. Now that im on Linux, I can confidently say I’m never going back. I have never felt so in control of my system, I no longer have issues when alt-tabbing out of full-screen games, I no longer have some mysterious service eating up 70% of my CPU, I no longer have to worry about telemetry, things JUST WORK.

This was a rather long way to say - I am in love with Linux, Fedora and KDE made it a very pleasant experience. After seeing a departure post titled “Life is too valuable” (to struggle with linux), I have to completely disagree. Life is too valuable to stay on windows and receive zero respect from it’s developers.