Tbf I didn’t like it on windows either lol

And if I listed all the things I don’t like about it the list would also be a lot longer than one (relatively mild) annoyance haha :3

I actually used GNOME for most of my linux time lol :3… now im kinda jumping around between TWMs until COSMIC, I only tried KDE in VMs and it was very much not for me (and tbf I only like GNOME with a ton of extensions too)

All the different window top bars/UI elements not lining up… especially for stuff that has nothing up there… extra annoying when disabling window decorations don’t disable them

Glad to see it’s going well :3

I’ve been on linux for years at this point, and it’s such an astronomical upgrade over windows, that sometimes when I don’t think while talking about PC stuff with people I forget that most people aren’t using it, and it throws me off to hear them to refer to windows things lol

Not quite hah :3

It’s actually not one of the things I’ve tried when looking for the best DE/WM for me, though I might at some point just to see if im missing out on anything

Funny thing, I had switched off from firefox to zen for like… 7 months and it was the best browsing experience, but then I accidentally broke a thing when messing around with the zen mods, and had to reinstall, and when I did it turns out I had an old version, and the new one was so shit I came back crawling to firefox

Anyhow :3… im also kinda on a hunt for a browser that fits my needs that isn’t chromium based, but nothing I found particularly had the stuff I’d want over firefox, so im just using it cause it’s my “fine enough” fallback option

What do you use it for?

Everything? Lol. I mean… I just run my desktop in hyprland, no matter what im doing. Which for me I guess is gaming, drawing, some coding, and writing… oh and tinkering with linux (though honestly I mostly do that in VMs)

How much does it make your experience better?

I’d say it’s an improvement over GNOME :p… though I have enough issues with the configs that I wouldn’t really recommend it unless you have issues with GNOME that majorly bother you… or unless you use one of the premade dotfile configs that people make lol…

For me being able to adjust the windows with my keyboard without needing to enter a special mode for it, and having windows forced into the tile size was worth it, as it was something that was a pet peeve of mine (and now I get to be annoyed by trying to set up my waybar vertically, tradeoffs lol)

Yeah it’s not in apt afaik, I think it is on flathub tho :3 im not sure if there are any issues using it in a sandboxed environment, as I never used it. And you can also use it as an appimage I think… that’s all the kind of stuff you’ll learn along the way tho, I mean… I remember the first time I had to install something not in my distro’s repos, and hitting my head on my keyboard for like a day, before I realized that im doing it the hard way haha

Depends on how you install it

You basically chose one of the more complicated ways to do it, short of compiling the source code lol

I’ve tried out a bunch, but at the moment I’ve mainly been playing around with hyprland, cause it’s also a dynamic tiler and im used to that layout now

The main advantage to me tbh is that certain windows don’t overflow the assigned tile space like in pop-shell (this is also fixed in cosmic), but there are other things like having all your move/resize actions on the main mod layer instead of needing to enter adjust mode (super + enter is the default keybind on pop-shell), and the fact it uses wayland instead of x11

Of course there are also things that can be downsides depending on how you see it, like the fact it’s a TWM not a desktop, which means if you want to adjust any setting you’ll need to manually adjust config files, and that it doesn’t come with things like a top bar or app launcher etc. So it can take a while to get up and running

Yeah :3… I use pop which is ubuntu based, but they replace all snaps with flatpaks, and over the 4ish years I’ve been using it it’s been the most stable experience on the desktop I had. If not for snaps ubuntu/kubuntu would probably be one of my default distro recommendations for beginners

I started with pop!_os and still use it (though now with a proper TWM on top), and I can’t go back to a non-tiling desktop honestly lol. I can’t wait for COSMIC to come out as even in alpha that’s my favourite tiling experience

Ubuntu

Snaps

Gods forbid consenting adults see a drawing of an ankle or a breast, oh the humanity!

but ideally I’d like a distro that’s a bit more Linux-y.

Im not sure how you’d even quantify that? I mean… there’s a lot of variation in linux, so there’s not a “standard” linux experience… DEs like KDE or cinnamon are more Windows-y, and ones like GNOME or Pantheon are more MacOS-y. There’s TWMs which to me is what makes the linux experience, but those aren’t for beginners and I wouldn’t recommend you start with that

Really it doesn’t matter what enviroment you use, so honestly im gonna agree with the other comment and just say use one of the big begginer distros like mint cinnamon lol

Was about to comment that too

There’s a ton of linux rant channels with a following, so there is a market for them

I’ve been on pop!_os consistently for… 3 and a bit years now? some distro hopping before then

What you should expect to change… well other than the obvious like the UI and such… chances are you’ll need a decent bit of different software than on windows, im assuming you looked into alternatives for the software you use, or if it simply just runs, so im not gonna list a bunch of stuff here :3.

Tech support online is mostly gonna be through terminal commands, which actually makes it way less painless imo since you can just copy-paste stuff instead of navigating though a bunch of interfaces.

Installing apps is different since you’ll often find multiple packages for the same thing, and have to decide between .deb or flatpak etc.

All of that seems like fairly obvious stuff you’d find along the way to the process of looking into switching to linux tbh, but I can’t think of much that’d be a major shock otherwise lol

In terms of gaming, I’ve had no major issues :3… some minor ones that were easy enough to troubleshoot did occur tho. Generally just checking out protonDB to see what people are saying in terms of compatibility is good, but basically 90% of what doesn’t run now are games with kernel level anti-cheats

Hah, I did that too in my first weeks with linux x3… I think I wanted to hit alt + f4, but for some reason I also hit ctrl with it… had a mild heart attack when my screen just went to CLI, but I figured it out :3

I just chose the automatic partition thingy ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯