Since some of us are making the change, I figured this might be a good spot to share the processes we’ve taken and the tools and tips we have
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On Linux Mint atm (will amend version later).
As mentioned over in the microblogging thread, I installed Wine initially just off the cuff with apt and this was 100% a mistake since it installed wine-6.0 when I needed 7.x+.
That said, the instructions off WineHQ worked great.
Next tasks are learning about & sorting out FTP and maybe hunting down a good IRC client (I can’t fully leave Discord behind but I’m nostalgic for older chat clients).
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I’ll be hopping on this train on my main machine, probably with Mint?, this fall when win7 support officially ends. (I know extended security updates has already been cracked lmao but no food or movies? I’m outta here.)
I’ve poked around on Linux for a bit on an old laptop, first trying EndeavourOS (I cant remember why I chose this one to start I think I just had a list of Linux distros I’d seen people talk about recently and picked one at random) and then replacing it with Mint partly just to get more comfortable with OS reinstallation.
I’m honestly feeling pretty comfortable already after just a couple hours of mild playing around and I think switching over fully isn’t gonna be too scary. My one concern is going to be getting Clip Studio Paint running for art. 
I was all excited to ditch CSP also and become a Krita person but then I discovered Krita is a single-canvas software and being able to open multiple windows of pictures and move them around my screens is like the one part of my workflow I’m not willing to let go of. There’s several guides out there for getting CSP running on Wine but seems like it’s potentially a bit buggy so we’ll see how it goes, I’ll have to try it out on my trial laptop sometime soon.
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After the initial trial period, I think I’m going to clear out an entire drive to install Linux on, or pick up a separate drive, instead of piggybacking off the same HDD that Windows is using. A clean install of Mint, get it set up and have the optionality at start up.
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Oh! I set up dual-booting on my office computer and laptop last year and had been meaning to blog about it, but kept forgetting. (I might have chosted about it but my archives are gone now, rip) But the tl;dr is that I am on Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) which is Mint but based on Debian instead of Ubuntu. It was pretty easy to set up iirc, the MAIN THING THO is that if you want to use an IME (input method editor, basically the thing that lets you switch between typing in English and other languages like Japanese) you should set that up FIRST before installing anything else or doing a big first-time system update. I had to redo my install like four times because I kept botching it before I figured out what was going on, the IME in Linux is uhhh… quite finicky, ahaha.
But once that’s over with, everything is great. My main environment is LMDE and I occasionally switch over to Win 11 for whatever else. Not everything works in LMDE (it’s missing some stuff from Ubuntu like Nvidia drivers, etc) but which I really appreciate because then I can focus on work (in theory) and switch over to Windows for anything that doesn’t work. On my office PC I have two SSDs, one for Windows and one for Linux, and a shared hard drive that I use for files that I can access from either OS. My laptop, which had been CHUGGING under Windows before, runs LMDE smooth as butter, tho I also maintained a dual-boot setup there too just in case.
On the whole, I recommend checking out Linux! Especially if you have a crappy old laptop that otherwise you’d never use, like how I did ahaha
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My desktop is super boring and not altogether different from my Windows 11 workspace, show me your cool desktops
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I’m not on Linux at the moment but I’ve been thinking of going back to it sometime this year, perhaps via Fedora. I used Linux Mint for a time as a young teen, so I already have experience maining it, but the switch to Windows 10 on the gaming rig I subsequently built was over seven years ago already, so it’s been a while.
Back then I dual-booted, but rarely switched over to the Windows side for personal reasons, and also the whole time zone thing screwed that side over a bit.
Some screens of Mint from way back when:
And also one of a Fedora Live USB test run from last year:
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gonna be watching this thread like a hawk beclaws no way in hell am i “”“upgrading”“” to win11 LOL
that being SAID i’ve never run linux before but my bf and gf both run it so i won’t be alone should i decide to switch!
it’s good that (some?) linux distros can run steam and games but i’m just worried about a lot of the weird little programs that i use not functioning with linux LOL. (4kyoutube2mp3, calibre, cyberduck, mp3tag, etc).
does anynyan know, related to the above, if there’s like a repository of like… idk how to word this. like a site that tells you what progrgams run on what distros of linux?
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Calibre has a Linux installation
Cyber duck might need to run in WINE because it doesn’t have a Linux app. But Linux might have built in FTP capabilities?
This was good to look up because I would need to know about those two as well lmao.
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the first one is FANTASTIC, the second one slightly less so but still good bc unfortunately the thing i use cyberduck for is webdav with neocities (neocities is not compatible with plain ftp for some reason)
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Same hat. That’s what I use it for. If I find anything out I’ll let you know.
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I don’t think CyberDuck works (outside of a container like Wine at least) but FileZilla is on Linux and supports WebDAV! I used to use that for Neocities when I was on there so you should be good 
And yeah calibre works just fine in Linux
Re: mp3tag, found this:
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omg I love the WinXP vibe on that second screenshot in particular ahahaha
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its happening!!
as soon as i get this lil USB we’re trying linux mint on an old computer tonight 
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it took me a ridiculous amount of hours to get my vpn working (im very big on if i feel like the process should be done, i just…stop reading and then am confused when i come back and i missed a step) but it is done and that plus finally remembering my obsidian vault password we in there i spent a good chunk of time on it last night and feels pretty good
oh wait i had a question: so do people tend to use linux for day to day things and windows just for gaming if there isnt a linux alternative?
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i’m 100% on linux - most games work and i have like 1000 so i’ll just shift if one doesn’t. Devil May Cry 5 lately
having a windows partition for gaming was more common like 5-10 years ago, but the steam deck made so much more stuff work that like . feels less pressing
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I installed a new hard drive to use as my Linux hard drive, but surprise, the computer isn’t reading it so now I need to take everything apart again to make sure it’s seated right. hooraaaaay.
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ive only done some testing but to my knowledge the only big specific pain point is games with kernel-level anticheat, like destiny 2. beyond that as isomorphism said steam proton has done a ton of work to get games in general compatible. youre still gonna run into issues with some games here and there but its my understanding that you can generally assume a majority of games will run rather than the opposite. and with emulators ofc most of them have linux versions.
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Got it set up on the new drive but man, I really need to find something like MusicBee for mint. The music players I’ve tried so far have been absolute Function, being just a list of all my songs, but I couldn’t find a shuffle option in Clementine, let alone visualizers.
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