I’ve tried to switch multiple times and always found or encountered some issue that got me back to Windows (on desktop PC).
Last year it was after 2 months on Fedora 38 KDE when I had enough with the KDE Window Manager acting weird and broken unusable VRR on desktop and some other smaller but daily issues that I went back to W11 on my PC.
I like GNOME over KDE and back then there was no VRR support on GNOME so I only had to stick with KDE, now it’s a different story.
I still have some minor annoyance which are probably solvable but I don’t know how as I didn’t put enough effort in finding solution.
Namely:
1.) Sometimes my 2nd monitor after boot remains blank and I have to unplug and plug back in the DP cable from the graphics card. Typically happens after a kernel update or restart but rarely on cold boot. I’ve seen others having this issue on Fedora40 but I haven’t seen any solution mentioned.
2.) Steam UI hangs up sometimes for several seconds when trying to navigate fast trough it and especially if it needs to pop a different window.
3.) GPU VRAM OC is completely busted and even doing ±1MHz will result in massive artifacting even on desktop, not a big deal but I would take the extra 5% boost I can have from VRAM OC on Windows :)
4.) After every Kernel update I have to run two commands to get my GPU overclock to work again. I haven’t figured out yet how to make a scrip that can read output from 1st command and copy it into 2nd command so I just do it manually every time which is roughly once a week.
5.) Free scrolling does not work in Chromium based browsers :( Luckily Vivaldi has some nice workaround with mouse gestures but I would still like free scrolling like on Windows.
And these are about the only annoyance I found worthwhile to mention.
Gaming works fine.
The apps I use typically work fine on Linux as well. Mangohud is amazing. No issues with audio unlike my last experience. Heck even Discord has no issues streaming video and audio now despite just using the web app. VRR despite being experimental works flawlessly on GNOME for me. I’m happy.
You’re probably just lucky or you just don’t run any weird HW combination that may cause issues. For me Fedora is the best and most stable distro with least issues. I never used any distro on which I had no issues and I don’t believe there is such a distro anywhere. The issues usually just change to different ones when I switch.
I remember these times, then I started buying hardware with 1st class Linux support. Highly recommend when it’s time to upgrade!
I’m not a saying I have none, but, I definitely don’t have the issues I used to. I’ve been able to install a couple distros more recently with basically no problems. I’m also installing on laptops so that could be a difference, standard hardware configs. Also the equipment I install on is older equipment because I’m poor so I’m sure that is probably working in my favor.