Linux

Linux is a lot better than the last few times.

It might just be 'good enough' at this point.

I was one of those nomadic users, every year, since 1998 with Mandrake Linux.

I have always been in love with the idea of an open source OS, but if I couldn't game and work on it, it wasn't ready. Every year, until Valve made it easy to game on Linux.

I made the switch when Proton was released and never looked back.

My point is, every time users go back to Windows, they have their own personal reasons, but those will some day not be the truth anymore.

many people will go back, but of these, i’m sure many will also come back eventually

i’ve tried a bunch of distros in my last 2 years with windows. many didn’t satisfy my needs at the time, so i stayed on windows.

but now, it’s been over a year since I definitely switched to linux, and over 6 months since i nuked (accidentally, but shhh) my windows partition. and i don’t plan on going back anytime soon.

But this time Linux actually plays video games right out of the box. No trickery. Just install steam and the rest of the experience is smooth as butter

I’ve looked at Linux for years but it was always so intimidating to me. I finally installed it when my pc was being aged out of windows 10 and honestly it’s really fun to play around with even though I’m not super tech savvy. It’s easy enough to find a solution online if I run into any problems and everything is free!

Desktops only frankly became remotely useable to normal people with recent revisions of things like kde...

Between that and software actually finally started becoming remotely reliable in like 2022-2023 for your avg windows user.

Comparing the past to now is not reliable fair.

More progress towards making things normal user friendly have happened in the last 3-5 years then the last 20.

It bears repeating, so: fuck Microsoft and Windows.

Same, really liking it. Bit of a learning curve, but in a fun way.

Anecdotally, I was tinkering with it earlier this year and finally stopped being lazy and flipped my main PC over. After I talked about it enough in my friend chat, three more friends followed suit and a fourth is going to soon. It's not just the end of supporting Windows 10, it's all of the repeated bugs, glitches, and AI garbage Microsoft has been pushing everywhere so aggressively. People who would likely only rate themselves as "mildly" tech savvy are sick of it and willing to make a move, I feel.

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Depends on what you feel lost about, if it is the basics in general then I would suggest you start of and read about the basics here https://labex.io/linuxjourney they write about the very basics in a very simple way. I think they did a good job, they start of with what Linux is, what distros are to commands from the most basics as how to navigate in the terminal to more advanced combinations. They also have vms where you can try out the commands if you haven't switched yet.

If it is a cheat sheet as in commands then i would say it is better to make your own of the commands you care about but you can start of by using other ppls list like this one https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/linux-unix/linux-commands-cheat-sheet/ but it can be overwhelming for you so use the linuxjouney first. Also it is very important to learn how to look up how to use the arguments in the terminal with man or -h to make it faster and less painful to use.

If you are lost about programs then there are a lot of good GitHub pages that links to useful programs and cli tools, you just need to search for awesome Linux list

Examples:

https://github.com/luong-komorebi/Awesome-Linux-Software You can use their web pages version too https://luong-komorebi.github.io/Awesome-Linux-Software/ https://githublists.com/lists/awesome-lists/awesome-bash

Here is one for distros https://github.com/kolioaris/awesome-linux-distros

Here is an example for customizing https://github.com/fosslife/awesome-ricing

When looking for programs is it very important that you know what distro you are on, what desktop environment (like kde, gnome, xfce) and what window composition you use (usually Wayland or x11, x11 is older and is more compatible).

So in short start of at https://labex.io/linuxjourney

Then look up distros here https://github.com/kolioaris/awesome-linux-distros

For new ppl do I think Ubuntu based is best because almost everything has a Ubuntu version, when you feel ready can you test out other distros. I haven't tried bazzite, I started of many years ago on debian (a few random ones like arch and mint) and then pop os for many years and now cachyos, I liked my journey but that doesn't mean it is correct for others.

I would suggest to have all of your data you care about on a separate disk or have automatic backup of it so you can break your os without care. And if you start customizing would I suggest setting up a GitHub repo and commit your changes everytime you like what you see so it is easy to go back if you regret something.

I hoped this helped on your journey, I didn't want to overwhelm you so I hope I kept it simple enough :D

I do free infinite troubleshooting on matrix, I have over 15 years of experience

For all their faults, LLMs are pretty damn good at basic trouble shooting of Linux. Ideally prepare context for them with installation details. Use CLI client, recommend opencode CLI, plan agent is good to inspect the commands it will plan to run and let's you inspect and think through what it is doing. Can also ask for clarifications along the way.

It's not perfect but very good.