Long time Windows user here. I’ve been a M$ sysadmin at a large healthcare conglomerate for 20+ years. It’s all M$ products that I work with.

Anyway…I’ve dabbled here and there with Linux, ran it in VM’s or dual booted, but I’ve always gone back to my comfort zone of Windows.

I’ve “recently” (last 6 months") tied Kubuntu and I did like it, but really hated Snap, so about 3 weeks ago I jumped to Mint. Now I know that both distros are Linux training wheels, but I have to say that I’m really impressed! I forget how fast and responsive Linux is without all the bloat that you get with Windows. The main detractor of sticking with Linux before was gaming, but with Lutris now filling in that gap, there’s nothing holding me back.

For the first time, I would really recommend Linux to friends and (selective) family.

Long story short, after 25+ years of using Windows almost exclusively, I’ve finally made the jump and just blew away my entire M$ partition and I don’t feel bad in the least.

I’m sure I’ll be hanging around this sub for a long time, and I’ll make a jump to a more traditional distro like Debian or Suse. but for now, I’m really impressed with how far Linux has come.

<p>

Edit- Wow, thank you for all the love and support! I’m very happy to hear that I"m in good company with Mint. <p>

I love all the great suggestions too for Vbox alts and game launcher. Gotta love this community. <3

  • BlanK0
    6·
    5 months ago

    Welcome aboard! 🐧

    If you decide later to test other distros I would highly recommend using a virtual machine in virtualbox. Saves the hassle when it comes to testing distros 👍

      • BlanK0
        3·
        5 months ago

        KVM is indeed a much better hypervisor, but it does require some setup with the terminal.

        Since he is a beginner I decided to recommend virtualbox since it just works after installing. But if he doesn’t mind setting up things via terminal then KVM is definitely the way.

        • d3Xt3r@lemmy.nzM
          4·
          5 months ago

          @agr8lemon@lemmy.zip The other person mentioned virt-manager, but there’s a much more easier app: Gnome Boxes. It uses the same backend (libvirt/KVM) but it’s much more easier to use - in fact, I’d say that it’s even more easier to use than VirtualBox. For starters, Boxes automatically detects OS ISOs on your drive and allows you to just click on them directly to install it - or you can even choose to download and install a distro directly from within Boxes. Also, when you consider the post-setup phase: there’s no need to install any guest modules/drivers because it’s already built-into Linux distros.

          https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/gnome-boxes-easy-way-set-virtual-machines-linux/

        • Zoidberg@lemm.ee
          1·
          5 months ago

          I’ve worked extensively with both virtualbox and kvm/qemu. While I prefer kvm since it’s open source, I could never reproduce the video performance of virtualbox. I’m not even trying to game, just use regular applications that I cannot run under Linux.

          I wonder if I’m missing something.