My 25 Year Linux Journey from a Side OS to Replacing Windows and macOS fully. 

If you wanna learn more about Linux and how I got my desktop like this check out this playlist ru-vid.com/group/PLd2rY36Ym3b9r1LJlm3HILctjBHDAuFsd hope you all enjoy and don’t forget to subscribe.

I started with DOS and Windows 3.1, raised a family building Windows labs and teaching children and educators Windows-based products. Retired and burned out on Windows. In June 2023, I loaded Ubuntu Budgie on a 2015 HP touchscreen PC. Today, Hyprland with Fedora 40 is on all my PCs. I like computers again.

Welcome new linux users!

Windows became a spyware, not usable anymore

I put linux on a $286 Costco special HP laptop my sister was tossing because it was "so slow".I put linux on it and the laptop was instantly usable again. At that point I felt it was worth upgrading it as far as it could go (being am AMD A6 laptop with 4gb of ram...didn't have to go far) Got a 16 gb kit from ebay for $2 (yes... 2 dollars) and a 480gb Micron SSD for $15 and it was a whole new laptop. It was my linux workstation for 2 years while I still had a windows desktop. That was my start on linux. Now I daily drive linux on a decommissioned HP Z230 ssf workstation. The last windows machine I have will soon have an upgraded gpu, ram and SSD and be reborn as my casual "gaming" PC running Nobara or Bazzite.

I remember my "Removing the Windows partition" moment very well. As an extra dopamine bonus, I got a huge chunk of extra free space. I had been using Linux for a long time and found that I just didn't use Windows anymore.

I must say this is the most comprehensive, non Linux fanboy video I have ever seen. You've honestly mentioned the real pros and cons of the Linux operating system without the Windows or Linux fanboy biases. I hope you continue making more videos like this where you help Windows expats get into the world of Linux without dealing with the Linux neck-beards that belittle non Linux fanboys just so that they feel better about themselves.

Been seeing a lot of "Switched to Linux" vids in my YT feed nowadays. It's nice to see. Not sure if more people are switching, or if the algorithm is just throwing more at me.

Using Edge on Linux is like showig that you actually use what fits you best, not what somebody told you to use, awesome!!!

I've been using Linux for about 6 months, i actually installed Arch fallowing a video you made, and i couldn't be happier honestly, specially after driver 555, now everything just wroks amazingly!

The Steam Deck is what got me using Linux. Shortly after buying a Steam Deck, I installed Linux on my Laptop. Now just a couple weeks ago, I finally have Linux on my PC. I still have Windows on a separate Drive just in case I need it, but I can pretty much do everything I need to do on Linux.

Started using Linux in 2008 and liked how niche it was. I used windows 7 allday every day. As soon as windows 10 borked some programs I was using for my arcade and Photoshop became a monthly subscription I've been using Linux on all of my PCs. in the last 4 years linux has really made some incredible strides.

Recently installed and been using Fedora 40 KDE on my lenovo intel gen 13 laptop for the past two weeks. The best desktop experience i've ever had. Windows, while it still wins in APP compatibility loses in every other category..... KDE is just beautiful, customizable and better in every single other way

I stopped using Windows around 2010 and I've never looked back.

I switched to Mint about 6 months ago to test the waters due to Proton and my huge Steam library...works beautifully. Microsoft has overstepped one boundary after another, switched exclusively to Linux several months ago, never going back.

krita is more used by ilustrators than people doing image manipulation, a lot of ilustrators prefer it over photoshop.

I started learning linux out of curiosity about 6 months ago. Started on endeavouros and became hooked with the freedom that you dont get with windows. After a few months I wanted to try my hand at a clean "from scratch" install and followed your arch guide and everything works fantastic, especially with the new 555 drivers. I also deleted my old windows install about 2 weeks ago. Fully linux now!

This is freaking amazing Matt. I have just switched form Win11 pro to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and there's so much I can learn from your channel. Thank you for all the work you have done already.

I've recently made the permanent swap from windows to nobara (Fedora 39). I've had a malware scare in my life that didn't feel too great and recently had a close encounter with a second. I'm tired of the cycle and being the easiest to target as a windows user so I've swapped to Linux to make it less of a possibility. My machine is performing better than ever before and using wine to still have my favourite windows applications work fully as intended with desktop shortcuts is all I could really need from a machine.

The more people who are brave and move to Linux the better it will be for all of us. It is a up hill battle as there are still problems under Linux, but many things have been fixed or mitigated. Still need better anticheat, hdr, wayland, supports. There is some of that working already, but not fully or feature complete.

I switched to linux for this three main reason: 1. Every time windows adding spyware after spyware, the last "FeAtUrE" called recall will let me stick to linux for a WHILE. 2. I had cases where after i shutdown the pc the next day or the next boot-up i had windows completely destroyed and unusable. 3. The very difficult customization. I love to customize my machine to my liking and windows doesn't have that much customization to do. After that i like linux more than windows and i didnt find it to difficult to understand and i started with Arch (btw)

What is your theme? the title bar is so slim. Thank you

Mint XFCE user here, happy to see you're on a good path on setting yourself up in Linux. My reasoning to switch was due to how Windows has been a plague on many low-end devices and computers where I am, one of them being my Celeron laptop. Due to how drastic the performance issues were getting, and also the one time Windows Update broke my laptop for a whole 4 hours, I decided to hop over to Linux Mint back in late 2022. It's been swell and usable ever since, and I hope everyone who wants to make a switch for whatever reason settles down well.

Welcome aboard from a 22-year full-time desktop Linux user! :)

I'm a Linux veteran. I started on opensuse back in 2006 when Vista was released. I'm so glad more people are now switching up. I have had near trouble free computing in 18 years, thanks due to linux. I currently run Arch, Ubuntu and Manjaro.

my windows 11 nuked its own boot partition so was a good reason to main linux lol

I moved to Linux because my heavily modded install of Cities:Skylines had GPU Memory Leaking in DirectX. I was lazy and didn't wanted to individually disable each of my around 6k of assets and 100 mods to check which one it is, than restart the game wait 30 min until the game has loaded all the data and repeat. so I installed the Game on Linux which was natively supported and the Memory Leaking disappeared.

I just made this switch as well. In one week I switched my company supplied work machine to a Mac and switched my gaming PC to Linux (ubuntu) just to see how easy my workflows would be. So far, in both cases, everything I need works and everything is better. I used to run Linux probably 20 years ago, regularly rebuilding the kernel, etc.. the desktops have come so far. All the apps I want are there and all the games I want work perfectly.

Lol love the windows deletion bit at the end - looks like you've got your system running nicely. that's the best part make it how you want - might take some extra work but once you've got it how you want it, it's awesome

Your app startup time seems bonkers and no more flashbangs.

I been a Fedora user since Fedora 34 and was on nobara 39 but flatpaks breaks for me so I moved to cachy os bc you reccomend it. What kernel do you use?

Really GREAT video and a honest review / comparison! Thank you very much!

I‘ts great that you switched to Linux and I love that you and your community are writing a couple of guides regarding many things that have to do with Linux. However, it would be nice if you could „publish“ them in a forum (maybe even make your own forum), in Reddit or make a small website for that purpose. This would help many more people, since the first instinct one has, when they encounter a problem on Linux, is to google it. But google can‘t display messages from Discord channels as search results.

Good video, switched to Mint yesterday after the Windows bs. Gotta say, the personalization is amazing, and just as you, the emulation runs so much better at Linux, im having a pretty good experience, no plans to change to windows again ever.

Fedora, my favorite distro and the heavyweight champion of the Linux Ecosystem. Always a good choice!

Matt, what you suggest for gaming? Fedora 39/40 following your instructions to ser it up or Nobara?

Welcome to the world of Freedom and Penguins 🐧. Linux has really grown from its early days into a telar OS. I would have to love to join you in this Journey as I first strted dabbling in Linux in the 2000s. Nice setup you got there!

I haven't kicked Windows to the curb yet, but I am well on my way. I've been using Windows since the DOS days, and into computers as a whole even longer. I'm talking green screens, man. That said, I am already running various versions of Linux on VM's and figuring out which one I like most. At present, I am really liking LMDE, but I'm still browsing. My goal is to be completely free of the disease named Windows in six months or less. The whole reason I liked windows was that I had so much more freedom compared to Apple (which is ridiculously proprietary), the fact that it was easy to use and I could run all of the apps I needed for work and leisure. Now Microsoft is pushing everyone to Win 11 which is by far the most intrusive and controlling OS I've seen from Microsoft in my lifetime. I get the sense that Microsoft wants the ability to spy on us, tell us what we can and can't do with out silicon, and then want to nickel and dime us for every little thing. The have become what I hate. So I'm done with Windows... for good. The only question now is what flavor of Linux will I choose for my silicon? 🤔🙃

How well does Photoshop work on here? And I assume you're running it through Wine or a Virtual Machine?

i am jealous of your ricing, how did you do ittttt

thank you for this video, I completely agree, I don't feel like I can "do" Windows anymore. The spying on users and exposing people to threats and stupid ads because of their greed and data grifting is getting out of hand. I still haven't decided if a Mac would be better for me, but in the meantime I guess I'll check out Linux and hope that I, a programming noob, will be able to deal with it

If Microsoft wants to save itself. They should create a new branch of windows called something like Windows 11 Gaming Edition. They can give full control what features you want but for fhe most part should have everything needed for games to run at their best while removing all unnecessary services that gamers wont use on their computer. Basically an optimized version of Windows for gamers.

I appreciate you have Majora's Mask pinned to your taskbar. I do wanna switch from windows eventually, my issue is comparing a billion distros and trying to minmax the pros and cons of each

I bought a laptop and HP Z Book just for running Linux originally I was going to run Arch but kept running into issues I went to Fedora 40 and I love it my favorite one so far, great video!!

I own a 12 year old Lenovo X1 Carbon. It was painfully slow on Windows, but I was emotionally attached to it lmao. It's been with me for almost a decade. I finally decided to install Mint on it, and my God. It runs almost like new again. I've been ignoring my gaming rig just because I finally love using my thinkpad again. I can see the point of Linux now haha

I noticed that you didn't mention an office suit. And while there is Libre Office for that as well, in my opinion, MS Office is one of the main reasons for keeping me from going full Linux. Thank you for your informative video.

Left Windows seven years ago, and I'm not looking back.... I don't miss it at all...

What distro and theme do you have? I can see the macos look by the buttons in the left, dock and the bar at the top

What made me switch to Linux this year permanently was a few things. I installed a fresh clean install of windows 10 which was on a brand new USB, brand new SSD, Cleaned & re-slotted PC. Worked for a bit and I proceeded to get blue screen after blue screen I even ruled out the parts. No way I will touch Win 11, I switched to a distro I enjoy Linux Mint. Worked okay but started too have issues kept on working on it and attempting to figure it out. Bite the bullet and went back to Pop Os after not touching it since 2021, I mainly play games on my pc but I do multitask as well. But honestly I'm happy for the lack of random unnecessary notifications & more bullshit that Microsoft is shoving down the consumer. I hope your experience continues to go well, much like everyone who has started to change over.

Bravo!

Just redid my boot partition today because I couldn’t access linux and windows had two extra boot manager links that didn’t do anything. I finally recovered my pop os on the second day, and I fixed my mistakes.

Also cool Zelda music in the background

yo that ricing looks so coool is that nobara with gnome or kde ???? (nvm it's gnome) . a video about ur ricing ?

Installed Nobara 39 and currently in the waiting room for version 40. Anyways I tried a few games that are EAC and Battleye protected and while there are some exceptions (Destiny 2 for example) there's a decent amount that works great in Proton Experimental (bleeding-edge branch). So far Apex Legends, The Finals, and DayZ I tried and they all work great, with DayZ requiring a third party launcher to join community servers that are modded.

Welcome to the Linux community glad to have you around I switched to Linux a few years back locked back a few times had to deal with a trash dual booting experience grub shitting itself and not being able to play fortnite witch i dumped because the new updates arent real updates and are just shitty collabs i never asked for i got into gaming vms witch were a pain to set up started with Ubuntu use Nixos now and i also think deleting windows from gparted is really satisfying

I’m primarily a Mac user, as I’ve been using Macs since a G4 eMac running 10.3 Panther. My main computer now is an m1 Mac mini that I absolutely adore , but I also have an hp laptop running Linux mint with Cinnamon. That laptop is for my 7 year old son, and I’ve installed on it a bunch of educational apps and have educational websites bookmarked in a browser. Happily, he hasn’t had any issues or headaches adapting to mint.

Even on a heavily locked and stripped out version of Windows, MS still manages to introduce new 'features'. I have seen advertising on my pc even after clearing MS Store and Edge from the OS. Windows is no longer safe for people and the company operates in a black box so you don't know what they are doing or where the data they are mining from you is being used. I'll be switching to Linux as soon as I can get my projects cleared and dropping the ever increasing subscriptions for FOSS (Free Open Source Software), where I'll give donations to them to continue developing. Hell, even the German gov has swapped to Linux from MS. Good practice anyway as the world goes online to not assume people can afford MS products.

Fedora is a nice pick. They're upstream from Red Hat and the Fedora team keeps the distro up to date with security patches and they have a release cycle of every six to seven months.

Congrats!

I already moved to Linux permanently in 2017. Started with Peppermint 8. I'm not a gamer. I settled on MX Linux Xfce. I want stability. I don't need the latest of everything. Only benefit of Edge is that it plays Netflix in 1080p. But like you said, you like it and that's what counts. Personally I prefer Firefox.

I’ve been using Linux for almost 20 years. Left Windows full-time 10 years ago. I can play my entire Steam library of 500+ titles no problems. Once Valve comes to an agreement with all of the anti-cheat providers, it’s a wrap for that argument. I’m still rocking Fedora 39 KDE. I’ll probably upgrade to 40 this week. Welcome to the club dawg.

Dude, how did you get Photoshop working? (Your dock desktop entry)

I am on Nobara 39 with KDE Plasma 6, and it is amazing

As a long time Linux user one of the greatest things in Linux is that the operating system does not fight against you. A good example of this is when I switched from Intel to AMD on my desktop machine: Take backups, swap the motherboard, boot and login. Everything just worked like nothing would have happened at all. I've seen this stunt being attempted on Windows couple times and they've all ended poorly. Even if you managed to get the installation some how not to BSOD out of reality due to driver mismatch all that awaits is a license deactivation hell.

Definitely 27:18 the best part of the video lmao

I've been back and forth with Linux for a while. About 8-9 years ago or so, while getting into computer science for real for the first time, i did a fresh install of Arch Linux (which, for someone who was clueless, was a whole day's worth of work), eventually getting KDE to work and sitting on that build for a good while. This was before proton or the big push for gaming on Linux by valve, so i was really locked out of like half my library. Still, i was moving over from windows 8 at the time and i really appreciated it as the nerd i am. I ended up going to Windows 10 to play other games i wanted to and generally have less painful of an experience. When Windows 11 rolled around I took a look at the OS in general and committed to a swap to Linux as soon as Microsoft would force me to switch to it (basically when i upgraded my pc) That was about a year ago, and I've been running Linux since then I think your average user would be frustrated with the little details. It's not necessarily even trying to be seamless in the way windows or mac does, and i think there's an expectation of that from our technology. The biggest draw for me is that if I'm committed to it, i can fix any issue i have on my own devices, and most of the time it isn't Even that difficult. For your average user, I think it might be harder to find someone who can trouble shoot Linux for you, usually you'll just the information to do it yourself.

Thanks for that Nice background music 😌

The 'up and down' clichee for Windows versions honestly is a delusion of the lesser informed people. In reality it was a steady decline since Windows 2K. The wrong impressions stems from too many people only acknowledging the immediate visible surface - the GUI, while mostly not ever informing about what's going on inside (which for Windows btw. is the same continuingly modified base through all years!). And by fact, since the end of XP, Windows has lost a lot of very important features (for example low level stuff like Sound hardware acceleration being removed since Vista, or even some visible and important productivity stuff stuff like individual folder options per path, or even a properly useable UI at all which doesn't hinder the user by silly visual design, which has been lost since Vista) and only added utterly useless things plus all the spyware and ads.

I plan on switching to Linux some time after Win10 reaches EOL. The spyware, ads, bloatware, forced updates, and other annoyances is making Windows unbearable to use.

honestly this video so soothing like that wallpaper. Maybe its silly but i got sold with your wallpaper and how smooth every window opens and closes ( ofc it depends on hardware power). My fingers were itching to try Arch as a newbie, but i will use an ointment or something for that and go with this !! P.s. is everything setup for nvidia and gaming ootb ? or do we have to setup after installation?

Started computing with Windows 2000, then XP, then Win7, then Win10... The HDD on my old HP Pavilion from 2010~2011 dyed out, so I replaced it with a Lenovo ideaCentre 5 and then when Windows 11 started rolling out in October-November 2021, I thought maybe it was time to get out while the getting was good. It was then that Mutahar of SomeOrdinaryGamers posted an Ubuntu tutorial, and I decided to start using Linux from there. I installed it, and I didn't look back. Since then, I've only hopped across three distros. I moved from Ubuntu to Kubuntu, as I learned I preferred KDE over GNOME. Now, I've stuck with Arch and could never imagine going back to Windows with all the recent events that are happening under the nose of the general public.

I’m learning Debian 12 I’m happy I’m away from windows now and never again will I go back nope I’m staying with Linux or Debian

Windows is a dinosaur from an age long passed....Linux is the future and Linux is free.

As someone who is also trying to switch I was wondering, with nvidia how did you get fractional scaling on Wayland ? On a 4k monitor it’s either too small or 200% is too large. Also how are you running photoshop?

I saw a video about Garuda for gaming.. Was planning on dual booting my laptop when I got it but then I remembered that laptops aren't really good for dual booting and Idk anything about linux lol Great video!

I felt very sad. I've been playing cs for half my life . But on Linux at the moment this is not possible because the main gameplay in CS2 revolves around the faceit league, which requires anti-cheat at the kernel level. That's why I continue to use Windows. Dualboot only leads to the fact that I forget about Linux, because I feel more comfortable on Windows because everything is more familiar after so many years. I envy you MattsCreative

Thanks to AMD I made the switch in 2016. Pls link me that wallpaper is gorgeous.

I rarely comment on videos. I recently decided to finally make the full switch to Linux this past week, and I am starting the journey of mapping out the path to it (I had even made a list like you said before I had found this video). I've used windows as my main my whole life, but dabbled in Linux on my laptop with many distros from Mint, to Fedora to some other obscure ones. Gaming has always been the main thing that has held me back from switching. (And backing up important data to do a fresh start of an OS for the first time in 9 years). I have followed some other Linux channels for years, but I really like your take and opinions on it. I'll definitely be following your videos to help me with setting up Linux in my journey on this transition.

Where'd you get that wallpaper from?

Bye Junior and hello Nvidia

Dude. I am more than ready to dump Microsoft. Apple isn't much better now. Free range computing. Damn it.

Thanks for clearing the air for people that might be uninformed otherwise. 💯 I'm sure some people will appreciate this.

How’s your quit button in applications in the upper left (like Mac) corner?

Hades 2 is out on early access on Steam. The install button is greyed out for me, is this a scenario where i need to install wine to play a steam game? im new to linux.

One thing I can't figure out is. That I can't find my save game folders like in windows...in windows I go User/documents/mygames and find all my save games or folders for modding like ckII, but I can't find it under Linux Pop!_OS. Do you have a suggestion or tipp? Maybe I'm blind or something...

I would do the same if I didn't heavily rely on Ableton and music production plugins along with the Adobe Suite. The good news is, Windows 11 IoT Enterprise just released and it literally solved all my complaints about windows 11; no bloat, no copilot or recall functions, extremely few background processes and heavy optimization into stability and lightness. Basically a dream come true tbh, will be switching to it for now :)

What distro are you using and that is the gui environment name? I think I like it a lot

i'm glad to know black desert works, it's the only mmo that i play regularly, and the only game that i play with friends is league, which is the only reason that still keeps me on windows, and for my work every application works under linux. Really tempted to try out fedora, looks pretty good.

I switched from Windows to Linux in win8 era. At that time the Windows pissed me off with his look, updates and setup possibilities. The second thing was also broken motherboard on my PC, at the time. I bought raspberry pi and start my Linux experience. For me the biggest problem was how the file folders are organized and where are the drives - letters to store something.

Hey man, where do you get wallpapers like that?

Can I ask where you got the background image? I really like it

i think today was the day, i was utterly impressed after installing Linux Mint Cinnamon edge in my i5 12600k, wifi and lan working out of the box, the software manager allowed me to setup my work environment in minutes without the need of the Terminal (VScode, Arduino IDE, audacity, Sunshine/Moonlight, Jellyfin, emulators, etc), i was finally able to reliably pair my xbox controller through bluetooth using xpadneo, and Lutris streamlined the process of installing windows apps and games with wine prefixes and running the games using the proton compatibility layer, i only had time to try Dark Souls 3, Sekiro and Tunic but so far performance is the same as running them on windows, after 10 years and over a dozen ubuntu intallations i think i found my linux distro. great video man.

I mainly use ms Office 365 mainly excel with lots of custom vb macros i have written over the years, onedrive, lightroom classic and photoshop CC. Can i use those on linux? Or is the only option a VM on linux?

I switched to Pop OS for the same reasons, hope to see more people doing the same :)

I'm looking to move from Windows to Linux, I'm considering between Pop OS or Zorin OS, I'm a gamer and my only needs are to game (obvs) and to record quick moments of the games I play (I use Nvidia's Instant Replay thing), I was looking for something similar in Linux and found this GPU screen recorder thing, which looks awesome, I have a couple questions about this transition: I have a NVME drive for Windows OS only and an SSD for the games/files/etc. So, if I choose to install Linux, should I wipe the NVME drive or dual boot? does this mean the SSD data will not be recognized by Linux since it's NTFS or do I need to convert it to something Linux can understand?

when i launch battle net with linux, lutris theres no working Bnet chat and wow crashes after the cinematic. I did this on a low spec PC but im too scared of running into an issue on my primary machine so i dont switch from w11.

I just decided to install Fedora on my used to be Windows drive. I have decided to stop dual booting and commit to using Linux. No excuses

Impressive video... indeed Fedora 40 and Tumbleweed are my distros of daily use too

Can you share what GNOME extensions you have installed?

What OS are you using in this video? Looks slick!