I switched two of my PCs over to Linux Mint last week. The automatic driver support is shockingly good compared to when I last installed Linux on a PC (almost 20 years ago). It even found a driver for the random no-name USB wireless receiver I bought on Amazon, whereas I had to install that driver manually on Windows.
Part of my motivation was that one of the machines was still on Windows 7, but more than anything it was the incessant push to associate my OS account with an online Microsoft account, and the cramming of Copilot into everything, that have left a bad taste in my mouth.
Finding it's much easier to migrate to linux with an llm as a troubleshooting assistant.
Even used it to make a task bar applet adjacent to Media Controls, where I can rate the current plexamp song without having to open plexamp.
A big plus of linux is the easy ability to use workspaces and switch between them with a hover over the workspace taskbar applet and the mousewheel (and other options).
> Finding it's much easier to migrate to linux with an llm as a troubleshooting assistant.
Especially with NixOS. I would never allow an LLM to make core updates to my OS for fear of breaking it. Now LLMs manage all my packages and upgrades, and because it's all declarative, I can always revert anything that goes wrong.
A recent ubuntu update made my boot fail - the splash screen for disk decryption has a known bug in the latest update for my exact video card. Being able to get into terminal-only recovery mode and launch Codex CLI and ask it to diagnose the problem was incredibly nice. I don't think I'll ever deviate from Linux again since most of my issues with it were random bugs like this, but they're now easily solvable.
I run claude code with 'dangerously skip permissions' flag enabled, and just tell it what I want. I hardly even interact with the OS anymore. I literally just tell it "install X, fix problem Y".
Someone should develop, or vibecode I guess, a Linux tool that does exactly this. A support agent so I can just install it for my mom and she can vaguely write her issues and needs and the agent does it.
I still use chat copy/paste for this. Can't argue too much when the results work. The tried and tested alternative for niche Linux issues is browsing the internet and checking different options until something works anyway.
I do recommend checking methods against another provider. Occasionally Claude will suggest X, and Sol is like WTF are you insane? Clear often and update the prompt with your latest findings, because there are so many opportunities for the agent to find red herrings that they'll fixate on.
As with all LLM work, if you know some sysadmin, the process goes a lot smoother because you can say specifically "Write me a systemd unit file that does X" instead of a vague "I want to automate this, how do I do it" and not have a gut feel for which approaches are jank.
I switched my primary PC over in 1999, my secondary over in 2001, and haven't looked back since.
You're in a better place today than back then as finding software solutions to common problems is much easier now.
For other OS needs, just virtualize. I started off using VMware Workstation, after a decade (or so) transitioned to Virtualbox, and now today, virt-manager (qemu, kvm through libvirt).
That was about the time of the Redhat 9 to Fedora shift and I felt the pain too. I was using RH9 for the stability, but then switched to Fedora like everyone was supposed to. Well, that was a big bag of something left on the doorstep. I had to spend countless evenings messing with configs to get the system useable; then upgrades would break things. Finally found stability with Ubuntu after a few years, and still use it today, albeit with KDE since Gnome's philosophy of unconfigurable defaults is disappointing.
Good that you decided to do the move. Often any existing problem on Linux has already been solved by someone; it may just take a while when you find a solution. In that case I also recommend to make local notes. I do so since +20 years. Some of those local notes helped me many years later.
Part of my motivation was that one of the machines was still on Windows 7, but more than anything it was the incessant push to associate my OS account with an online Microsoft account, and the cramming of Copilot into everything, that have left a bad taste in my mouth.