After many years of failed switching attempts, I finally made the move to CachyOS 2 months ago. Windows 11 updates constantly force-feeding copilot and not letting me shut down my system without updating is what finally pushed me to give it another honest go.
I want to caution people though because I see posts like this all the time, but nobody mentions just how tough it is to mimic the "polished" look and feel of Windows in Linux. Even getting it installed in a dual-boot setup was an absolute nightmare. If it had not been for Claude, there's no honest way I could have made this transition. It would have ended just like all my other previous attempts: going back to windows.
Here's a list of issues I documented along the way (with many more that I didn't document), some of them resolved with other methods (I game on Windows VM with GPU Passthrough now) and some I live with:
- Not able to choose same display resolution as Windows, especially when mirroring my laptop to my monitor. Most offered resolutions are too slow or too blurry with text also.
- Having to force browsers to use my dedicated nvidia GPU instead of the Intel one, rendering simple web games in browsers is still choppy even with this solution.
- Choppy games (RDRD2, Last of us 1 and 2) when using Proton/Lutris/Wine despite 3080 GPU (these games run smooth in Windows). Kind of expected this...
- Blocky artifacts showing up in most games (tried multiple drivers and Proton flavors)
- Have to disable secure boot in BIOS for some reason otherwise bootloader doesn't work
- Come up with hacky solutions to not get prompted for root password every time I connect a removable drive that is Bitlocker Encrypted
- For some reason when shutting down/rebooting, my CPU fan just stops cold turkey and it makes a "thud" noise. I've found no resolution and it only happens with linux.
- I can't control where applications on my taskbar live. If I place a pin in the middle and click it, the app launches a separate instance at the far end of the taskbar. Tried different sort options, no fix. Some apps work fine, others don't.
- Can't click shutdown/reboot when screen is locked. Need to click "Switch User" first.
EDIT: should mention some other pain points: support for broken software is very slow moving due to so many distros and flavors. If you update a package for security reasons and it breaks functionality, you could be stuck waiting quite a while (sometimes a month) for it to get fixed.
Also earlier this week CachyOS black-screened users that updated their OS, we could not even get to the login screen. The solution for me was obvious, just rollback to a snapshot, but some people couldn't even get that to work. When users complained or offered solutions, I saw one of the mods get snappy and basically blame users for updating too quickly. I mean, I get WHY that would occur, but it seems like such a weird thing to scold people for. The community is still very abrasive to Linux newcomers, but this has been the case for decades.
I want to caution people though because I see posts like this all the time, but nobody mentions just how tough it is to mimic the "polished" look and feel of Windows in Linux. Even getting it installed in a dual-boot setup was an absolute nightmare. If it had not been for Claude, there's no honest way I could have made this transition. It would have ended just like all my other previous attempts: going back to windows.
Here's a list of issues I documented along the way (with many more that I didn't document), some of them resolved with other methods (I game on Windows VM with GPU Passthrough now) and some I live with:
- Not able to choose same display resolution as Windows, especially when mirroring my laptop to my monitor. Most offered resolutions are too slow or too blurry with text also.
- Having to force browsers to use my dedicated nvidia GPU instead of the Intel one, rendering simple web games in browsers is still choppy even with this solution.
- Choppy games (RDRD2, Last of us 1 and 2) when using Proton/Lutris/Wine despite 3080 GPU (these games run smooth in Windows). Kind of expected this...
- Blocky artifacts showing up in most games (tried multiple drivers and Proton flavors)
- Have to disable secure boot in BIOS for some reason otherwise bootloader doesn't work
- Come up with hacky solutions to not get prompted for root password every time I connect a removable drive that is Bitlocker Encrypted
- For some reason when shutting down/rebooting, my CPU fan just stops cold turkey and it makes a "thud" noise. I've found no resolution and it only happens with linux.
- I can't control where applications on my taskbar live. If I place a pin in the middle and click it, the app launches a separate instance at the far end of the taskbar. Tried different sort options, no fix. Some apps work fine, others don't.
- Can't click shutdown/reboot when screen is locked. Need to click "Switch User" first.
EDIT: should mention some other pain points: support for broken software is very slow moving due to so many distros and flavors. If you update a package for security reasons and it breaks functionality, you could be stuck waiting quite a while (sometimes a month) for it to get fixed.
Also earlier this week CachyOS black-screened users that updated their OS, we could not even get to the login screen. The solution for me was obvious, just rollback to a snapshot, but some people couldn't even get that to work. When users complained or offered solutions, I saw one of the mods get snappy and basically blame users for updating too quickly. I mean, I get WHY that would occur, but it seems like such a weird thing to scold people for. The community is still very abrasive to Linux newcomers, but this has been the case for decades.