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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 :)

I worked tech support for a software company. In the summers things were slow and they allowed a little leeway for working on personal enrichment projects.

I was aware of a room near IT that was filled with outdated computers and hardware. I asked if I could play with them. A few 100 hour weeks later and a coworker and I held a demonstration for IT and management. We proposed using all the old hardware as PXE boot thin clients (1GB RAM + Small HD + PXE NIC) using a modified Debian that would run all the tech support agent software via Citrix. It went off without a hitch in the demo setup.

Management loved it as they could see the cost savings. IT loved it as they’d get another ProLiant Server to house the Citrix and VMWare tooling. It also meant significantly less time dealing with Windows issues on all the agent machines. Ended up rolling it out to 50 agents that year and it was a success. They eventually moved to HP Thin clients, which built on the original idea.

For a lowly tier 2 tech support agent with a passing knowledge of linux, it was a proud achievement and got me noticed in the company.

Project 2.0 was an Asterix box. We were spending a ridiculous amount of money on international calls. Was able to route all the international calls in the office with logic routing on the primary Tadiran PBX (which ran OS2/Warp…lol) to a little Dell workstation with a Digium telephony card and FreePBX. Costing actual pennies on the dollar. It was like magic!

Linux was the wild west back then.

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

Did my PhD on a like $500 Linux box 20something years ago. My lab was dysfunctional and I was a WFH pioneer of sorts.

Improving my battery life from 1h to 5h. I knew it would be better but never expected it to be so much better.

(OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on a power hungry gaming laptop)

It’s been my daily driver for 26 years. 40 years or so if you include Unix before.