Comment by Ciantic
Comment by Ciantic 3 days ago
I switched to Linux in the past month.
First, I installed GNOME based Fedora 43, that was a mistake. I got it working "somewhat" like Windows, with Dash to Panel etc. widgets, but stability was not there after all the hacks.
Then I figured I try KDE Plasma, and this is so close to Windows that I made the switch permanent. Even little things like double-clicking on top, or bottom resize handle vertically maximizes the window, like in Windows.
KDE is not just better than Windows, but it is way more configurable out of the box. I really like window rules, which allows to set window locations, always on top settings for specific Chrome PWAs or other windows. KDE Settings panel is light years ahead of Windows, it has all the settings in one place, kind of like the old Control Panel.
There is rough spots, but not that many... I did end up buying AMD GPU, as with Nvidia GPU I had bunch of bugs.
I wanted to switch to Linux for a long time now because Windows Subsystem for Linux just wasn't good enough, it was mediocre. All the development happens with tools that have bash scripts as a glue. Windows was a hindrance at this point for me.
Right now I'm trying to learn to write small native Wayland GUI apps that use minimalish amount of memory, this is a bit tricky compared to Win32, but with new toolkit libraries pretty doable.
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.