I never see much love for ZorinOS, but I find it a very solid replacement. I still use my Macbook for certain things, but I am slowly moving away from even that thanks to Apple’s spying and whatnot.

It's ready if you use a Linux device, you get dedicated laptops for as low as 600€ by now.

Unfortunately people keep comparing diy machines with Windows and Mac. That's simply not a fair comparison, there are reasons a Linux vendor often charges a few hundred bucks more for a Clevo or Tongfang design laptop (not just because they have to finance their support). Thousands of work hours are needed for every detail of a device-software combo to be prepared for the average user. And most of that hard work eventually get upstreamed or is about fixing FOSS bugs in the first place, so buying from Linux computer vendors is a win for everyone.

That's also the reason why Channels (or "Influencers") like The Linux Experiment are talking so positively about everything while still aiming at a relatively "average" audience (meaning no Linux nerds). They use Slimbooks, Tuxedos, System76's, Star Labs…

If you got the money, get one of those. If you absolutely hate it Windows will, in 99% of all cases, still work on them.

How do I make the change less scary? I made my pc like 10 years ago and not looked at it since. I just use it for personal admin now and Rome 2 total war twice a year.

Ship laptops with LM and people will stray on Linux. Some might switch due to windows OS locked apps like ms365 but for most watching YouTube and maybe managing photos is all they do.

I run dual boot and honestly, if only all things which run on windows would run on Linux without tribal shamanism rituals, is never ever had to switch. But my favorite DAW is not running Linux. My occasionally useful editing software is not there (but kdenlive is cool tho). My very specific apps for games are not running native or at all.

When I'm not using these, I just flip a switch and run DAS with Bazzite. And I love it. But you just can't substitute everything windows offers. It is a gaming and working software OS after all.

The main push back i get is in order to maintain soc2 compliance the IT department needs to run auditing software on the laptop. Microsoft intune barely support linux and is years behind on the os versions it will work with. IT does not want to run multiple audit software packages.

I'm at the point where printers, bad WiFi, local file sharing/casting, crash recovery, GPU compute, even some driver issues, stuff like that just works in Linux (CachyOS specifically), but doesn’t in Windows.

Windows is getting progressively worse.

I still dual boot a very-stripped Windows for games, HDR stuff, and anything that requires a weird driver (like phone tethering), but man, Microsoft just keeps removing or hiding things I use to make Windows sorta functional.

I always loved the "it's not polished" excuse withoutb a single example

So my experience has been mixed. I should note that I have always run some Linux systems (my pihole as an example), but I did, about 2 months ago, try to switch over my windows media sever to Linux mint.

(Long story short, I am still running the windows server)

I really, really, really liked Linux Mint, I should say at the outset. I wanted to install the same -arr stack I use, and self-host a few web apps that I use to provide convenience in my home. To be very fair to Linux Mint, I’ve been a windows user for 30+ years and I never knew how to auto-start python scripts in windows.

But, to be critical, I spent hours and hours fighting permission settings in every -arr app, Plex, Docker, any kind of virtual desktop software (none of which would run prior to logging in which made running headless impossible), getting scripts to auto-run at startup, compatibility with my mouse/keyboard and lack of a real VPN client from my provider without basically coding the damn thing myself.

After about a month and a half of trying to get it working, I popped over to my windows install to get the docker command that had somehow worked on that OS but not Linux and everything was just working. I am sorry I love Linux but I wanted to get back to actually coding things I wanted to code, not my fucking operating system.

I’ll go back to Linux because Windows is untenable but I’m going to actually have to actually set aside real project time to buckling down and figuring out the remaining “quirks”.

If you see this meme and think "well actually, I had a really difficult time last time I tried to install Linux" - did you ask for help? That's what the internet is for.