My story is a simple one.

I turned on my computer I logged in, did some work, played some games then I turned it off.

No one tried to murder me (force updates), or put me in a potato (notification ads), or feed me to birds (change my defaults). I had a pretty good life.

Bazzite, the thing freaking works. I can do whatever I want without it crapping itself. Gaming, working, whatever. It’s the best experience I had with a PC ever. Windows, Mac OS, or any other distro. On my work laptop I daily drive Aurora, which doesn’t have any gaming stuff baked in, and has more dev tools at my disposal out of the box.

The speed of transcoding video using FFMPEG on a non-GUI installation of Debian, on an old small-form-factor PC - 2nd-generation i7, 16GB ram, 240GB SSD.

is this irony?

bazzite in general has been great as an all purpose os including gaming

i did disable almost all the gnome extensions it installs but apart from that it’s been super reliable

Q: Which Linux distro were you using?

A: right now, kickesure a Debian based distro focusing on security and privacy. Before that, used started with Knoppix and, mandrake and then many other Debian based distros (maontky Xubuntu and Mint)

Q: What feature or aspect made the experience stand out?

A: smooth, stable, fast, secure

Q: Did it change the way you use Linux or tech in general?

A: not really but made me more interested in learning about my OS to serve my privacy better

This has the feel of a marketing questionnaire. “Are you not ready to give a 5-star rating to Linux? Click here and we’ll get right back to you!”

Oddly enough, I’m struggling to think of a single experience or feature. The decisive benefit of Linux specifically and FOSS in general is something less tangible: it’s the feeling of empowerment and control you get. A computer of any kind is always something of a black box. Knowing that you have full control over it, even if you don’t understand everything, is revolutionary. I’m certainly not going back.

• NixOS and its declarative approach irreversibly changed the way I think about system configuration and maintenance. Home manager and flakes are really important puzzle pieces in that as well.

• The steam deck is an amazingly well thought-out Linux computer that just anybody can use intuitively.

• From a UX standpoint, I love being able to remap keys on the system level with Interception Tools. (e.g. CapsLock is Esc if pressed and Ctrl if held on all my hardware for all users.)

Everything. Software, usability, customization, community, you name it. Using Linux has advanced and keeps advancing my computer literacy skills. This would have never happened if I kept using Windows. There’s also the “activist” angle. By using Linux and other FOSS software, I feel like I’m disengaging the worst parts of modern life and society and taking power away from the corpos even if it doesn’t have huge impact.

It makes me feel like I own my PC.

Bend to my will, silicon golem, for I am root!

After getting fed up with Windows I finally returned to Linux desktop as my daily driver. I have used Linux for servers and to keep old computers usable just a little longer, but I couldn’t make the switch because I used Adobe and played games.

So, with I finally had enough and switched to Fedora, arguably a boring distro, I was pleasantly surprised how well my games run on it. The killer feature is that it gets out of my way and it just works.

I owe Valve a lot of gratitude for putting all that work into making gaming work on Linux. I could not have switched without it. I hope the trend continues.

Boot times - I have an old and weak laptop, but it still works fine for some purposes. Boot times are so much shorter with Linux and I don’t sit around waiting anymore :)

When I can just work on my thing and the OS is invisible

When I fully switched 2 years ago, I thought I’d try doing all my gaming in Linux and was really anxious wondering which and how many games I wouldn’t be able to play. Imagine my surprise when all of them ran. I haven’t found a single game I couldn’t get running. Hell, I even beat one I couldn’t get running in Windows! That being said there’s a bug preventing VR from working that I’m a little sad about. Apparently Steam only supports Ubuntu, I use Endeavour.

Back in 2010, when compiz effects were still a thing, all my windows were “wobbly” and burned down when closed.

This alone was enough reason for me to change my main OS to linux.

Edit: Added link to video