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Made the switch recently too, I only use the windows box for gaming so went with bazzite-kde. Games were up and running in no time, though I am still noodling over getting Japanese IME working in one though haven't given it any effort yet.

Other issues were Bluetooth dongle not being compatible though I happened to have one that is. Ironically the old one doesn't seem to have the same temporary connection issues I was seeing on Windows. And also fingerprint reader is probably in the worst spot, "compatible" but not functioning, i.e. can enroll a print but never recognize it.

All-in-all I'm fine with it, especially once the IME works. But there are still too many issues to recommend to users that want a working experience out-of-the-box, which should be most users.

Unfortunately I am somewhat skeptical on how things will improve. One issue I see is there are way too many forks, many versions of wine, even the xiv launcher I use is a fork. There was a fork of libfprint that I was curious to try but in the end avoided given the sensitive nature of the library. Appreciate the enthusiasm, but it doesn't seem like moving towards a stable state when there is so much forking happening.

  > getting Japanese IME working

same issue, for me its mostly working but properly recognizing jp keyboard is still a wip for me (can't get forward-slash/yen symbol or kana keys working smh) probably i am kissing something obvious...

To be fair, most forks - especially of Wine - are more like testing branches. The useful stuff tends to find its way upstream eventually

Setting up a Japanese IME in a so-called 'immutable' distro is a good way of developing a drinking problem. Tip: you really don't want ibus, you want fcitx5. No offence to the ibus developers, but ibus is garbage, fcitx is way, way better.

Thanks! I have it working in apps via fcitx5 no problem so "just" need to get it to kick in game. Getting that far was really easy though, clicking through some panels I summon with random keywords in the ... sorry I don't know what it's called and will say start menu. But the excellent indexing powering that has been really amazing.

I have well-specked Windows box dedicated to gaming ONLY. Nothing else on it, just my Steam collection. I keep it updated and re-install it from scratch every few months (Windows is known to slow down with time).

Everything else is done on Linux laptop (I used Mint and Fedora at various points in time). It's a Thinkpad so there's no issues whatsoever, everything works out of the box. I don't have to worry about my data being leaked, or an update crashing everything, or latest AI feature breaking the features I need, or malware infection (or not as much at least). I have all the browsers, email clients, word processors, spreadsheets, development IDEs, graphical and all kinds of software I need. For free.

A few years down the road, as Linux becomes more and more mainstream and game devs start paying more attention to compatibility? I'll happily put Linux on the gaming rig and that'll be all.

> kind of like the old Control Panel.

Aaaah, old Control Panel. One of the things that made me realise that I'm now better at administering a Linux system than a Windows one is that the old Control Panel has been replaced by a series of other screens that don't link together by the same concepts that Control Panel used as groupings.

I think the old Control Panel still exists, but they make it hard to find, and if that's the case then it's not going to exist much longer.

It really is one of the things / realisations that properly ended Windows for me.

It's worse than that - the older the layer, the older and typically more powerful the UI you'll find. Such a crazy hodgepodge.

The fact that they have this accumulating crust of interfaces, usually with different capabilities and visual styles stapled on top of one another, really makes you wonder whether Microsoft is really thinking about what they're doing.

And they've gone such lengths to hide it! An innocuous text link somewhere to the right, hidden between some nondescript lorem ipsum, or somewhere way down where you'd never know to scroll because the scroll bar is hidden by default... it's a great adventure of discovery, so much fun!

“It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'"

Same here, now running Fedora KDE but with an Nvidia card it is exceedingly buggy. Doing a single system update the normal way made the kernel version unbootable. I also had some (I suspect) OOM related full freezed that forced me to hard shut off the computer. The UX is really that good though when things work.

I love KDE Plasma but I gave up on it because Mint Cinnamon runs my RTX perfectly rock solid. I could not find a KDE distro that did not have some issue.

As nice as KDE Plasma is, nothing is as good as the RTX actually working perfectly. It is a dream.

That's how I feel about KDE on AMD or Intel graphics. It's just buttery smooth and problem-free.

My parents run a Windows PC as, from what I can tell, a home for stray botnets. The main uses are checking email and working on Word documents. (They have a laptop and iPad, respectively, which does most of their work, so it's an infrequently consulted machine.)

What Linux build would you recommend that I can fire and forget, that would be compatible with the Windows 10 machine they have running and will likely never replace.

Given that I've been using actively this just month, my opinion is bit biased.I run myself basically Fedora 43 KDE version: https://www.fedoraproject.org/kde/

However, for folks who don't want to install some random packages, maybe Atomic version of the distro is better: https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/kinoite/

Atomic Linux desktops has the neat feature for ability to "rollback" if installation fails. A lot like with ChromeOS, the updates are done in atomic fashion and the flipped over to new version.

Normal Linux distributions are more mutable, atomic are lot more immutable.

ZorinOS keeps it easy and consistent if you are familiar with windows.

I think it’s pretty good for non dev users. The distro doesn’t provide any earth shattering new innovations but they spend efforts to polish the interface and make it easy to use.

Its pretty good for people who just want a working system and don’t care about whether it’s linux or something else.

The types and degrees of customization they do to their poor Ubuntu base gives me the willies. I can hear it pleading "kill me" from all the way over here...

Fedora. I've introduced it to many people, all coming from windows, with great luck. Based on use case and individual, it may need a few programs installed that otherwise aren't, and about 7 minutes of patience to learn the UI.

I would recommend Fedora only hesitantly.

Fedora's release cycle is usually a little over a year from final release to EOL, at which point, you need to upgrade. My Mom and Dad ain't gonna wanna do that. For them, better to install the latest Ubuntu LTS once, and then I can upgrade for them at Christmas in 4 years.

Fedora is usually a bit...evangelical about open source software. If one of the things you really want is closed source, you'll have to take a few extra steps. Notably Nvidia drivers, but also stuff like Discord or Steam.

Fedora tends to move fast and break things. They tend to adopt things before they're good and ready. I believe Fedora was the first to switch to Wayland, and they did so before it was really ready, but I might be mistaken.

For a lot of users, #1 and #3 above are good things; they want the latest and greatest stuff, but don't want the occasional breakages that result from using a rolling release distro like Arch or Gentoo. For a lot of users, notably my Mom and Dad, they don't want to deal with shit like that, they just want to turn their computer on and forward funny pictures to me and their friends and do their word puzzles.

Fedora is a great distro, and it's the perfect distro for a lot of people, but some of its core philosophical principles make it a suboptimal distro for the less computer literate.

Solus. Same install for five years running, rolling release, no breakage.

Kubuntu.

KDE is generally considered close to a Windows experience, although, I'm afraid the "start" menu is still affixed to the left hand side and not in the middle of the taskbar (which is weird). It also doesn't bother with too much telemetry and all that stuff.

Kubuntu is Ubuntu but with the KDE front end, instead of the Gnome one or whatever it is. Being Ubuntu it supports Secure Boot which ticks a box.

It is just as easy to install as any other mainstream Linux distro, which is very easy. Its also quite easy to upgrade. I do recommend that you stick to Long Term Supported (LTS) releases.

I took a customer's "redundant" laptop (destined for land fill, too old, ran slow for Win10) about five years ago and repurposed it for my grand-daughter and stuck Kubuntu on it. If you recall we were heading into Covid related lockdown back then and this was for her to access school remotely.

She is still using it! I have updated it from 18.04 to 24.04 remotely through an OpenVPN tunnel. Try doing that with Windows ...

... I also need to point out that the other suggestions here eg Fedora and Zorin co are also valid choices in my opinion.

You should revel in the fact that you now have choice and not a single option. That does mean you will have to pick one.

All of the options you have been presented with will work fine - there is literally no wrong answer here!

All of them are very well documented and you will not get a "SFC /SCANNOW" type answer if you have a problem.

Win <= 10 had left side taskbars so that should actually be a plus. I didn't quickly update to Win 11 because of it being in the middle really, then because of the ads, then swore off it because of the AI stuff so in the end it kind of helped that they messed up the UI.

Nice! Reusing old hardware is great.

You can center the taskbar. Add a spacer on the left of "Application Launcher" and on the right of "Icons-Only Task Manager", and they'll center what's in between.

Unfortunately, that doesn't completely center the application launcher popup, it's still a bit more on the left. Good enough for me.

How can they manage without Office suite? I really can't without teams that's why I keep coming back. PWA doesn't have the "5% feature" I need.

For most people, Google Docs, Zoho, M365 Online, Proton Docs, or some web hosted instance of OnlyOffice or Collabora Office handily meets the majority of needs.

As someone that is 100% on Linux and is occasionally forced to use Teams (where a fat client is no longer possible and was worse than the browser version when it was), I'm curious what that 5% was for you.

For an office suite, I use LibreOffice. The fact that it has a normal/standard WIMP interface instead of the ribbon is a plus for me.

what's missing in the linux teams client out of curiosity? I use it every day and, besides being slightly less stable it doesn't seem to be more junk than the windows client (which in itself is pretty junky. There was so much moaning when we switched from telegram to teams at work just because message delivery was not rock solid)

It probably depends a lot on your parents.

I went with Popos. It is simpler than KDE for someone with dexterity and mild cognitive issues. Plus it fixes a lot of the annoying ubuntu / gnome decisions like snaps and hiding the taskbar etc.

There were a few initial teething questions in the first week, but 6 months in now and no other issues (apart from forgetting her password). Highly recommend.

PopOS is great, but I wouldn't recommend it right now while the new DE is in beta.

Mint offers LTS releases (in lock-step with Ubuntu) and Cinnamon is familiar and highly usable, with Firefox, Thunderbird and LibreOffice bundled. Make sure Timeshift is targeting a sane location before you let them loose on it.

I had a Windows laptop set up to dual boot Linux recently, and Mint was the one that gave me the least hassle. Cinnamon edition looks a lot like Windows 10, too, before they broke everything.

Linux Mint worked fine for my mother.

I have a story quite similar to yours, both timeframe, KDE and fedora, but I did instead switch to CachyOS instead.

But regarding your Nvidia issue, I did get it working on Fedora first, but it was remarkably cumbersome (I put the blame squarely on Nvidia though). I used this guide:

https://github.com/Comprehensive-Wall28/Nvidia-Fedora-Guide

Which libraries have you tried for writing small Wayland GUI apps?

Gnome is something and gast multiple tasking which takes away me from windows like button program switched. Fedora gnome is snappiest for me

Generally, people who think apple has made good os ui/experience choices like gnome, people who are used to windows or like to tinker like kde, people who are comfortable with linux and want to specialize their workflows for greater productivity go tiling window managers (I personally like hyprland but a big part of that is it's the first tiling window manager I managed to get key combos to my liking before the big change of tiling pissed me off so much that I fled back to kde. I also don't mind the drama because I too hold political beliefs that would be characterized as center right libertarian sympathizing in the 80's and 90's but were labelled fascism 2017-2024ish. There are other options, niri is interesting, sway is an old standby that I never liked the aesthetic of.)

kde and fedora.. a thing of beauty.

Try Activities and set a shortcut to Meta-Tab to switch between activities. I love it so much for running several projects at once and keeping all my browser/terminal/IDE/SSH together and out of each others way. You can also use Meta-Q to bring up a list.

Also, Meta-T for snapping windows into tiles with Shift-Drag multiplies that organization.

The sheer productivity gains of using Plasma makes Windows look pathetic.