In the spirit of recent events (like win10 being no longer supported & windows enshitification in general) I will tell you my story on how I migrated to Linux successfully and not planning to go back. Hopefully I encourage you to do the same.

First, my hardware: nvidia 4080, Ryzen 9 7900X3D, Asus Prime X870-P Wifi (with mediatek mt7925e wifi+bluetooth board, this will be relevant later) and a dual monitor setup (primary monitor is 1440p high refresh rate HDR capable monitor, secondary monitor is a 1080p from 7-ish years ago).

As a background, I had used windows ever since I can remember but with the latest developments in win11, like copilot everywhere, ads in the start menu, windows search being terrible, bing, teams, OneDrive and the horrible update experience I had enough and decided to show MS the middle finger and move.

Around point in time, some of the news around hand-held gaming, steam os, pewdiepie linux transition caught my attention and I started to consume some Linux-related content on YouTube (one of the channels was Michael Tunnell https://www.youtube.com/@michael_tunnell, amazing guy btw, worth checking him out) and I felt ready to jump ship.

After some very quick research I decided to just go with Pop_OS! (yes, despite the famous Linus incident), the only reasons being that is not based on arch (as many people don't recommend it for beginners) and it comes with all the nvidia drivers pre-installed. My plan was to dual boot it for a while and as I was afraid of messing up the partitions I got myself an extra SSD, installed it in my computer and I was ready. I created a bootable USB with the pop_os ISO and finished the installation.

Right as I finished the installation I was pleasantly surprised because my wifi just worked. As a comparison when I installed windows on the same machine wifi was not working because of the lack of drivers, so I had to connect my phone for internet pass-through in order to get the drivers....silly.....

About the things I liked about Pop_os:

• Blazingly fast OS installation
• No "Hey we want to spy on you" steps during installation
• No bloatware
• I was able to log into my google account and the events from my google calendar were showing in the desktop calendar. Not sure if this is a Pop_os thing or a Gnome thing, but it was such a quality of life
• Stacking windows was nice
• I could easily switch between a tiling or a floating window experience

About the things I disliked:

• For non-trivial customization you need to install some other apps (can't remember the name precisely, I think it was gnome extensions (?))
• It was hard to adapt to it coming from windows (not blaming Gnome here, I understand that not everything must appeal to everyone, but if you are coming from windows *things* might no be easy)

Things were looking good enough, but sadly, soon some problems appeared. My secondary monitor randomly froze at times. After days of troubleshooting the only workaround I found was to use the "xrandr" command and reset my monitors, but doing this felt more and more annoying each time. At this point I remembered something that Michael mentioned in one of the streams, namely that Pop_os 22 was quite old at the time and it might not work that well with newer hardware, so I started to look elsewhere in terms of distro.

My goals at the time were to find something non-arch, a bit more recent than pop_os 22 and preferably without Gnome. This is when I came across Kubuntu 25.04. At this point I was so determined to make Linux work that when I installed Kubuntu I decided to also get rid of the Windows partition.

The Kubuntu installation felt even faster than the already fast Pop_os one and again after install I was pleasantly surprised to find the wifi working (spoiler: somewhat working).

Again some issue appeared shortly, this time it wasn't the monitor, but the wifi was for some reason loosing all the traffic (going to literally 0.00 kb/s) for like ~5 seconds every 10 or 20 minutes. I troubleshooted for few days trying all sort of commands and bios settings and nothing worked, I was feeling defeated at this point.

Right when I was about to start looking for a new distro something clicked in my head: "The wifi card is detected and somewhat works out of the box, there must be drivers somewhere....ah they are in the kernel... what if I just move to a newer kernel". I installed the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel Installer and moved to a newer kernel (6.16) and IT WORKED and man I felt soooooo good when I realize I fixed it.

After a quick while another problem happened, when I was turning on the computer, after the "ASUS" splash screen my computer would hang for ~2 minutes displaying the typing indicator "_". I noticed that bluetooth also didn't worked (classic "Bluetooth adapter not found") and after many attempts I started to think maybe there is some driver initialization at boot time which times out. After further research someone mentioned to power-cycle the computer (turn it off and press the power button 30 seconds) and after IT WORKED and I felt just as good as when I fixed the wifi.

At this point there was only one small issue which annoyed me: When I was using Windows, I had my mouse's (Razer Cobra Pro wireless) receiver plugged into the main monitor's USB and the monitor plugged into a usb hub and this worked find on Windows. On Linux this will sometimes work, sometimes don't, meaning sometimes when I booted the computer the mouse won't work and I would have to plug in directly into the computer. This time instead of troubleshooting for days I decided to as an AI bot (Gemini) what should I do and the suggestion was to turn off the "CPU PCIE ASPM Mode Control" setting in the bios and this worked. I still can't explain it as the information about this setting is somewhat vague online but I was happy.

The above issues took in total like a week to sort out but after this I was ready to enjoy my working Kubuntu-powered computer.

After a few months of using Kubuntu 25.04 here are my toughs:

The good:

• KDE. Man.... it is simply amazing, I like it in almost every aspect more than Gnome. The customization, the shortcuts, the virtual desktops, the screen edges, the fact I can drag a window with Super+Left Click or resize it with Super+Right Click. There are also other subtle quality of life features, like zooming in with Super+"+", annotating with Super+Left Shift, it just feels incredible. Also KDE connect works amazing with Android.
• Both HDR & the high refresh rate work
• Again no massive bloatware (besides some KMahjongg and KPatience games) and no spyware, the telemetry is opt and and is off by default during the
• Installing Nvidia drivers it was way easier than I assumed
• Stability, not a single "blue screen" linux-equivalent
• Performance & Computer resource utilization (I had 2.8 GiB of RAM in idle)
  • Low Idle RAM usage (2.8gb)
  • Fans spin less often and are quieter
• Gaming just works, I can easily play my steam games (Dota2, Cities Skylines2, Dying Light The Beast, Manor Lords, Magabonk).
  • For non steam games I just add them as non steam games (I did this for the battlenet launcher in order to play WoW and Diablo IV, and it works wonderful)
• I have a Choice to if/ when I update my system
• Offline account
• Running programming related tasks is easy
  • Docker containers, Go, CurL, Vs Code (yeah, I still can't VIM yet)

The not so good:

• Package formats: flatpak | snap | deb. It feels confusing to have so many options and as a beginner I don't fully understand them, but as a rule of thumb I use snap/ flatpak as from my basic understanding they do a better job at sandboxing (for security security) and self contained dependencies (as they work similarly like a docker container)
• The google account - to - system calendar integration does not exists in KDE, or not out of the box at least. I heard about merkuro but it looks like ass. It is a bit off-putting that it would required another app.

My advice is if you feel tempted just try it out, dual boot if you want for a while. Things in the Linux space are getting better and better and there is a good change that any problem you face, someone faced already.

My desktop, the good 'ol classic KDE nordic theme:

https://preview.redd.it/who344lw74vf1.png?width=4480&format=png&auto=webp&s=e27c0d114ee86dea757e94f4aa9eae91c87ee172

submitted by /u/PuzzleheadedUnit1758
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Blocks fall. You shoot. Simple — until it’s not.
Dodge waves of glowing enemies, collect powerups, and push your reflexes to the limit in BlockNova.

💥 Key Features

• Fast-paced block-based combat with smooth controls
• Power-ups that stack for insane combos
• A glowing neon aesthetic that feels alive
• Progressive difficulty — every level gets more intense

• Built in Python with pure arcade energy ⚡

  Play now on Windows or Linux — lightweight and action-packed.

Link --> BlockNova

submitted by /u/Secure-Holiday-5587
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Hi, is there a way to have fake Fullscreen on the bottom half of the monitor? I can use any wm or de. I just thought that I could get a big monitor and play on the bottom half and multitask on the top

submitted by /u/Faurek
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In Vulkan with VK_EXT_memory_budget - seems Nvidia create copy of entire VRAM in RAM.
If my assumption correct - in game case on system with just 16GB ram - and game use 90% of RAM - Nvidia tries to copy 8GB(VRAM) to RAM - goes to swap - huge slowdown or crash.

On tests - just 41MB over VRAM - drop to 30FPS - 1Gb over VRAM - drop to 4FPS.

Read full post - Nvidia-memory-over-vram-info submitted by /u/S48GS
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Only game i had issues with was Sonic Frontiers when shaders was disabled so i uninstalled it enabled both shader options and launched a different Sonic game with Denuvo and it worked perfectly definitely happy with this

I did move all my VHS rips to a USB drive before i formatted my other hdd to work in Linux

submitted by /u/SecurityExtreme2470
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I'd like to pull in the FPS for games I play to a Grafana dashboard to track performance issues/frame drops. Is there any easy way to do this?

Edit: To be more specific, I want to pull these stats in via CLI/API call to an InfluxDB measure to chart against other metrics. I already have the Steam overlay enabled.

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When I play Genshin, sometimes the game randomly starts stuttering, then it stops after a while. What I've noticed is that this stuttering usually happens when there are a lot of effects happening on the screen. One thing to note is that when I played in Windows, there was no such issue. It only arose when I started playing on Linux.

My CPU is an AMD Ryzen 5 5600 and my GPU is an AMD Radeon RX 6600, if that helps.

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With Microshaft giving Windows 10 the 12 gauge goodbye, I decided to go with Linux (CachyOS is what have interested me most).

What I wanna know is about games not sold on Steam and GOG, like fangames, mods, indie games on Itch.IO, abandonware gmes like The Punisher, is there something I should watch out for them, or just run them through Lutris/Wine like normal?

submitted by /u/MateusCristian
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Has anybody else lost the "Fullscreen" option in the CS2 video settings? A month ago a friend and I could play the game in fullscreen, but nowadays we can't. He uses Mint, and I'm using Kubuntu. Is this the case for anybody else?

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Is there any way (except steam input) for dualsense to work in RDR2? For windows there is a mod but it requires DSX which is not compatible with linux.

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I have used Windows since XP. I almost made the switch to Linux a few years ago but decided against it because it seemed like everyone I discussed it with made Linux out to be this big scary thing that I would spend my whole life having to tweak just to possibly play my games.

With Win10 losing support, I thought about it once more as my disdain for MS had hit an all time high. I decided I would enroll in the extended security updates to be able to use 10 for another year but guess what? Gotta create a MS account for that. This was my final straw. I installed Kubuntu and absolutely love it! I managed to get WoW working with ease through proton and so far everything else has worked great too. I haven't had to touch the big scary terminal once yet either. All this to say, I'm really digging Linux and look forward to learning more about it.

Sorry that this is not formatted better as I never really make posts. Thanks for reading!

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I made native Linux builds for the big Next Fest update of our demo. It was running quite okay with Proton before, but I could see performance improvements (more stable FPS and less fan noise) on my very old Laptop (Intel i5-4210U, AMD Radeon R7 M260) running Lubuntu 24.04.3 LTS with the native build.
Cloud saves should work too, but I could only test Windows <-> Linux syncing as I'm the only one owning a Linux device in our team.
Link to the game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3405540/Tiny_Auto_Knights/
Please tell me if everything works and what could be improved!

submitted by /u/KaTeKaPe
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Hello everyone!

A quick follow-up to my previous post; thank you so much to everyone who tested our Linux build and confirmed that it runs well! Your feedback really helped us prepare the final release.

Our psychological horror visual novel Livber: Smoke and Mirrors will officially launch in less than two weeks, during Steam Scream Fest at the end of October ^^

We’re a small team of five friends, and seeing your support for our first project means a lot to us. The demo is still free on Steam if you haven’t tried it yet, and we’d love to hear any last feedback before launch.

Once again, thank you for helping us make sure everything runs smoothly on Linux and for being part of our journey <3

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submitted by /u/se_spider
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Dropping the first bit of proper news on Steam since early 2024 after the release of Battlefield 6 is certainly a choice - BattleBit Remastered is still alive.

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Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

I have the Fantech eos pro ii s controller, the controller has an audio jack but linux doesn't seem to detect that, is there a way to make it work? Does anyone have anything?

submitted by /u/Feisty_Confusion8277
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If you love your adventure games be sure to check out Shadows of the Afterland, with a new fully voiced demo available to try in Steam Next Fest.

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Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.