Linux

Most people are trying to play video games they do not care about the professional software

Davinci Resolve is not a solution for at least 60% of the people who would move to Linux. The new version has trouble working on Debian-based systems (even with the various scripts and workarounds that exist), and it requires an nvidia card with lots of GBs of VRAM (while it does work on Windows with Intel/AMD without big problems). So I'd never suggest Resolve to someone moving to Linux unless they're going to use Fedora, and have a recent nvidia card. For everyone else, there's KDENLive and Shotcut. Which are way worse in the things they can do compared to Resolve (especially when it comes to professional color grading and audio plugins specifically for human speech), but that's the situation we're in.

I just dive head first and use Arch btw if games or softwares I play/use refused to run Linux I just stop playing/using it and find alternatives, I yet to find any softwares that doesn't have open source alternative

This is how switched, though I’d recommend properly platform agnostic software (Windows, Mac, and Linux support) since if you don’t find Linux proper works for your workflow, you could switch to a Mac.

Another thing which helped me was switching my Laptop first before my Desktop since if I had problems (which I did) I could loose my laptop and not worry about data loss.

As of now, I am 2 year with Linux on my laptop and 6 months on my desktop with no noticeable difference between my Windows experience and Linux.

I get what you're trying to say but I disagree with this. Software can be a barrier to switching OS but it very much depends on the individual user's needs - it's not as easy as substituting open source for closed, and is only part of the difference anyway. For example, I use Outlook at work; Thunderbird is great but it is in no way a substitute for Outlook. Similarly, I use Microsoft Office 365 at work; OnlyOffice is in no way a substitute for an individual user (it can be for a whole business or for personal use, but not if you're tied in to an organisation or employer using Office). If you're tied into those platforms with work, then for occasional use you can just use the online versions of Microsoft Office in Linux via a web browser. And if you need to work from home or do more, then realistically you need to have Windows and access to the full suite installed locally.

But software does not preclude switching to Linux; for example I dual boot between Windows and Linux on my home PC. I have an M.2 drive for Windows and another M.2 drive for Linux. I rarely use Windows at all now, but when I do it's if for some reason I need to be doing work related stuff from home or rarely if I can't get a game working in Linux. In Linux I can do all my web browsing, social media, video streaming, music listening, even gaming and I know I'm doing so privately and securely.

I'd say the best way to switch to Linux is to switch to Linux. New users do not have to be "all in" - they can dual boot between Linux and Windows (or MacOS and Linux), and then have a low level of risk to try out the OS. It can even be beneficial in itself as they can compartmentalise work and free time by OS. And if they don't want to dual boot, then just try it out by virtualisation.

Great write-up, but in my opinion this is exactly the wrong way around.
That way, you don't gain anything from your "switch" up front.
Better to switch to Linux and keep the apps you know wherever possible. Office, Teams, Photoshop, Lightroom and many others are available as web apps now. For many others, there are versions ported to Linux or running well in Wine. Finally, Gnome Boxes makes it trivial to integrate a small 50GB Windows VM to run apps where there's no other option.
Then you can slowly migrate to Linux-specific open source tools, in your own time.

It helps if you can get away from an app-centric view of computing to a result-centric view:
You don't need MS Office, you want to create/edit documents, tables or presentations.
You don't need Photoshop, you want to edit images.
You don't need Outlook, you want to connect to Exchange.
Almost all tasks are possible to do on Linux if you change your workflow a bit. Some aren't, especially when you're forced to collaborate with others in a professional setting. In that case, you can still minimize your Windows usage to what's necessary, by using Wine, web apps, dual-booting, using 2 devices, running a Windows VM inside Linux, or running a Linux VM inside Windows, depending on your needs.

Being a linux user for 23 years and a linux promoter and installer for newbies, I don't agree with so many of your recommendations and priorities.

Is it people that want to switch away from Windows or switch to Linux?

In my case it was the former, having spent a lot of time on FreeBSD so in 2007 I bought a Macbook Pro running OSX 10.3. This gave me most of what I wanted and when I needed something Windows (XP) specific I installed a VM running under Parallels, then Virtual Box. I was able to run most of the open source software at that time such as Open Office, Firefox, Thunderbird in preference to the Apple supplied apps.

Use libreoffice over open office.

To add to the software point, STOP buying hardware that requires some shitty software to fully work.

I did this back in the Windows 7 days years before I even knew anything about Linux. But Razers rootkit managed to load in before the Win7 login screen then crash it. After that I avoided any peripherals with mandatory software and it made my transition to Linux a lot easier than most people I know.

I've installed Linux on dual boot because I've always loved it and used it as a solo operating system or in dual boot configurations years ago. Now I'm using KDE Neon for the sole reason that it has the wobbly windows. Otherwise, any operating system is fine for me. The only thing I need to find is a good alternative to Affinity Designer 2 or a way to make it work on Linux. I know there's Inkscape, but I'm not used to it or its user interface.

Libreoffice draw is really bad.

Instead, you either need

• masterpdf, paid but I guess worth it
• a mix of: Firefox PDF editor (drawing, inserting images, text annotations), Pdf arranger (bundling PDFs, removing pages, reordering), GIMP (redacting, compressing), Okular (viewing, marking, drawing, bookmarks)
• stirlingPDF, in a local Docker/Podman container, used in the browser

There is no free tool that does all the needed things. StirlingPDF is really close though and I am working on good desktop integration.

Enough with your psyop, Bill. Go back to trying to cure malaria to atone for your past sins.

OnlyOffice is problematic. They abuse additional clauses in the AGPL license to make code redistribution impossible. Thus, effectively making the software source-available freeware while still profiting from the Free Software image.

I would still say dual booting is the superior option, but that might be complicated for some people, so this is probably a good recommendation.

This is good advice, but I would add having a bootable Linux distro on a usb, and using more and more until you find yourself not needing Windows, then move to Linux with just it or a dual boot configuration with Windows as a fallback

My concern with this take is that it positions the switch as all downsides. You do not get any of the Linux benefits, just the compromised experience on Windows. You may decide it is not worth it even before switching.

Old hardware runs better on Ubuntu than on Fedora or Tumbleweed? Nani?

Or, conversely, just switch to Linux.

Take an hour or so to have a look around the place.

Go on the internet if you have any questions.

People are smarter than you assume and if you want Linux to grow in popularity we need to stop pretending any if this is difficult.

Who wants to start a flame war? NixOS is a better bleeding edge distro than Arch. Nixpkgs has way more packages than Arch.

Really neat post, I'd not heard of a few of these (never knew libre office draw could edit pdfs!).

Couple of extra ones:

Note taking and pdf annotation: Xournal++ is amazing, it's also great to use on larger whiteboard screens. Plug and play support for scribe tablets on both windows and Linux.

Emulation (up to ps1): Mednafen is lightweight and comes with a gui. It also supports recording, though not netplay.

Ebook management/reading: Calibre - allows easy importing and exporting of ebooks to devices, also has a great built in search letting you find DRM free versions of a book.

I keep trying to explain how Linux advocacy gets the challenges of mainstream Linux usage wrong and, while I appreciate the fresh take here, I'm afraid that's still the case.

Effectively this guide is: lightly compromise your Windows experience for a while until you're ready, followed by "here's a bunch of alien concepts you don't know or care about and actively disprove the idea that it's all about the app alternatives."

I understand why this doesn't read that way to the "community", but parse it as an outsider for a moment. What's a snap? Why are they bad? Why would I hate updates? Aren't updates automatic as they are in Windows? Why would I ever pick the hardware-incompatible distros? What's the tradeoff supposed to be, does that imply there is a downside to Mint over Ubuntu? It sure feels like I need to think about this picking a distro thing a lot more than the headline suggested. Also, what's a DE and how is that different to a distro? Did they just say I need a virtual machine to test these DE things before I can find one that works? WTF is that about?

Look, I keep trying to articulate the key misunderstanding and it's genuinely hard. I think the best way to put it is that all these "switch to Linux, it's fun!" guides are all trying to onboard users to a world of fun tinkering as a hobby. And that's great, it IS fun to tinker as a hobby, to some people. But that's not the reason people use Windows.

If you're on Windows and mildly frustrated about whatever MS is doing that week, the thing you want is a one button install that does everything for you, works first time and requires zero tinkering in the first place. App substitutes are whatever, UI changes and different choices in different DEs are trivial to adapt to (honestly, it's all mostly Windows-like or Mac-like, clearly normies don't particularly struggle with that). But if you're out there introducing even a hint of arguments about multiple technical choices, competing standards for app packages or VMs being used to test out different desktop environments you're kinda missing the point of what's keeping the average user from stepping away from their mainstream commercial OS.

In fairness, this isn't the guide's fault, it's all intrinsic to the Linux desktop ecosystem. It IS more cumbersome and convoluted from that perspective. If you ask me, the real advice I would have for a Windows user that wants to consider swapping would be: get a device that comes with a dedicated Linux setup out of the box. Seriously, go get a Steam Deck, go get a System76 laptop, a Raspberry Pi or whatever else you can find out there that has some flavor of Linux built specifically for it and use that for a bit. That bypasses 100% of this crap and just works out of the box, the way Android or ChromeOS work out of the box. You'll get to know whether that's for you much quicker, more organically and with much less of a hassle that way... at the cost of needing new hardware. But hey, on the plus side, new hardware!