I’ve been a long time Windows user, in fact I got my start in computing in the mid 90’s on Windows 95 and never really left the Microsoft ecosystem. While occasionally dabbling with Linux I never really dared to make the jump since there has always been software that was not available on Linux, but that I needed (or thought I needed), and also there was gaming. Lastly: Microsoft had a product that did not get in my way too much and I did know the rough edges and how to navigate them. I have been a paying Office 365 customer for the last couple of years (mostly for OneDrive) and was happy with value-for money.
However: When Windows 11 arrived things started to change for me. In my mind MS has really dropped the ball here. Win11 has been in a state of constant brokenness ever since it released. From small stuff like “the temperature/weather display in the task bar is blurred”, to more annoying “it won’t talk to my Logitech Keyboard’s LED illumination and just switch it off” it has been a constant source of small nuisances. Then, last year there was the train wreck, that was the announcement of “Recall” and forced AI features. Then I really started to doubt the ecosystem and to consider alternatives, but still, I was hesitant, by now it was mostly “I have nearly 20 years worth of investments in my Steamlibrary – the risk seems too high to lose access to a lot of those games.” and a lot less the availability of the tools I like. The latter nowadays all have Linux versions, and with most of my private development work being Rust only there is really no issue with that at all. So it’s just games. And then there’s Proton, and all the work that has been spearheaded by Valve to make Linux gaming a thing – I was starting to seriously consider a switch, but OneDrive kept me, but when Microsoft announced a 30% price hike on Office 365 (“but you do get a lot of AI features!!!!”) I decided to jump ship.
So, I got my hand on a NAS, put a large high durability drive in it and kissed OneDrive good by. I settled for Pop!_OS as distro since it seems to work well for gaming. Fast forward, five months later and I’m pretty happy with the move. I’ve encountered very few hiccups along the way, with the most serious one being, that I initially opted to keep one NTFS formatted drive since I didn’t want to re-download a lot of already installed games. That was a bit of a mistake, since the available NTFS driver and most games don’t really like each other – about half of the games I tried would immediately crash without any meaningful error message. After digging through forums I finally decided to reformat this drive to Linux native file system and all the problems went away. I’ve yet to find a game that won’t start and work. Even new games usually work like a charm (for what it’s worth: In my 3rd run through Cyberpunk 2077 since release, I feel that the performance on Linux is actually smoother than on Windows). Other minor issues included: Getting any of the game launchers to actually use another drive than the primary harddrive (they all very much want to install into ~ or similar), finding the right launcher (I tried Lutris first, but have stuck with heroic, as it has an a lot nicer integration with existing stores), fiddling with fstab to have the system mount my second drive on startup.
So, was the new “freedom” worth the effort? For me it definitely was, however I would not recommend people without a firm IT background to switch to Linux, if they want to do gaming. While for me everything ultimately worked fine there was definitely a learning curve. For myself: I never really regretted taking the leap, at least not for the past five months and I don’t see myself doing so since, apart from gaming, everything that is software development works really a lot better on Linux than on Windows (that is of course, because I ditched “real” IDEs like Visual Studios a couple of years back, in favor of more lightweight solutions, e.g. CMake + VSCode for C++ or Helix for a lot of other things). Also: Anything “Docker” is just yuck on Windows.