What OS are you most comfortable with?

[crytt]

I used XP for the longest time, but eventually had to move to 7 and then 10.
Even though I preferred XP or 7 back then, 10 was still a pretty good OS... until they started forcing updates. I didn't have a broadband or WiFi connection back then and windows would end up eating all my limited monthly data downloading updates when all I wanted to do was check emails and browse the internet.

Eventually I had enough and just took the plunge to start using Debian Linux, which I still use to this day. The first few months were rough but it doesn't feel too different from early XP days where you had to look up and perform troubleshooting yourself.
And ever since Steam started work on Proton, Wine now runs almost everything that is windows-only. I don't see myself changing OS back and if not for work I would never have used Windows 11.

 

[Jee]

Switched to Linux last year after I finally had enough with the Windows and haven't looked back since. Was a little difficult getting used to things in the beginning but didn't really face any problems after the initial hiccup for maybe a month with a lot of looking up to learn new things. Fedora and Nobara was a good start for my gaming rig but currently running Nixos now on both gaming rig and laptop which I am very happy with as I really fancy the concept and like messing with the config. Installed Mint on my sister's old laptop and Debian on my aunt's old PC. Both are great but for me, Debian is the most sexy option with Plasma and additional features that comes from KDE. Have no choice but to use Windows 11 on my work laptop tho, send me job offers if you got any.

 

[CeyeN]

Switched to Linux last year after I finally had enough with the Windows and haven't looked back since. Was a little difficult getting used to things in the beginning but didn't really face any problems after the initial hiccup for maybe a month with a lot of looking up to learn new things. Fedora and Nobara was a good start for my gaming rig but currently running Nixos now on both gaming rig and laptop which I am very happy with as I really fancy the concept and like messing with the config. Installed Mint on my sister's old laptop and Debian on my aunt's old PC. Both are great but for me, Debian is the most sexy option with Plasma and additional features that comes from KDE. Have no choice but to use Windows 11 on my work laptop tho, send me job offers if you got any.

As far as I know, most games don't run natively on Linux and most developers don't bother supporting Linux because of the very small user base. Needless to say, most translation layer for running Windows games on Linux either comes with a performance penalty or just doesn't work well. Gaming is the only reason why I haven't switched to linux yet. I always feel it's not worth the hassle to get my games working on linux. How are you managing gaming?.

 

[ronnie_gogs]

Most comfortable with Windows. Always used the latest version of windows as main OS. Current windows 11 home on Laptop and pro version on desktop.
Secondary OS is baremetal Fedora Workstation current 41 no both laptop and desktop.
WSL I use Debian. Works great when I need a quick Linux.
QNAP NAS has a Debian VM running as download box.
Raspberry pi OS on raspberry pi3. Used to run pihole before.
Kali on raspberry pi4
SSH access to all devices.
Also have Arch installed on a VM btw

I don't see the need to ditch windows fully as I am more dependent on programs which run better in windows. Davinci resolve, affinity photo & designer, latest games, ableton live, game maker studio and unreal engine. Some of these work fine on Linux and when I need linux I just boot up wsl or Fedora.

Recently getting more into programming so I decided to learn and configure neovim. My neovim configuration is same across all OSes so it doesn't matter whether I am in windows or Linux. It just works the same with project folders and files shared across all devices if I am working locally. If I working in git its even more easy with neovim.

 

[crytt]

As far as I know, most games don't run natively on Linux and most developers don't bother supporting Linux because of the very small user base. Needless to say, most translation layer for running Windows games on Linux either comes with a performance penalty or just doesn't work well. Gaming is the only reason why I haven't switched to linux yet. I always feel it's not worth the hassle to get my games working on linux. How are you managing gaming?.

Ironically the same games have higher FPS on linux because windows has massive overhead compared to Linux.

 

[Jee]

As far as I know, most games don't run natively on Linux and most developers don't bother supporting Linux because of the very small user base. Needless to say, most translation layer for running Windows games on Linux either comes with a performance penalty or just doesn't work well. Gaming is the only reason why I haven't switched to linux yet. I always feel it's not worth the hassle to get my games working on linux. How are you managing gaming?.

Proton is so good that most games wont see much performance difference or even has better performance than windows. But ofc it all depends on each game so you can check https://www.protondb.com/ to see how well your games run. The obvious ones are most FPS games wont work because of invasive kernel level anti cheat and some just choose to ignore the Linux variant of the same.

I simply choose to play a different game like CS2 than to use a different OS like Windows. Currently I have about 250 games in my steam library and I would guess I can play around 230 of them with 40 of them currently installed and running great. I use AMD gpu though as I have heard Nvidia has poor support on Linux as they refuse to cooperate with Linux drivers but heard there are open source alternatives which are quite good these days.

 

[crytt]

Proton is so good that most games wont see much performance difference or even has better performance than windows. But ofc it all depends on each game so you can check https://www.protondb.com/ to see how well your games run. The obvious ones are most FPS games wont work because of invasive kernel level anti cheat and some just choose to ignore the Linux variant of the same.

I simply choose to play a different game like CS2 than to use a different OS like Windows. Currently I have about 250 games in my steam library and I would guess I can play around 230 of them with 40 of them currently installed and running great. I use AMD gpu though as I have heard Nvidia has poor support on Linux as they refuse to cooperate with Linux drivers but heard there are open source alternatives which are quite good these days.

You mean Nouveau? It works but isn't very performant compared to official drivers.

 

[CeyeN]

Proton is so good that most games wont see much performance difference or even has better performance than windows. But ofc it all depends on each game so you can check https://www.protondb.com/ to see how well your games run. The obvious ones are most FPS games wont work because of invasive kernel level anti cheat and some just choose to ignore the Linux variant of the same.

I haven't tried gaming in Linux, but it's good to know that Linux can indeed provide near native performance. How does it work with third party launchers like steam, which are necessary for most Ubisoft and rockstar games?

 

[crytt]

I haven't tried gaming in Linux, but it's good to know that Linux can indeed provide near native performance. How does it work with third party launchers like steam, which are necessary for most Ubisoft and rockstar games?

Works well. Steam has native binaries for Linux while Uplay and Rockstar Social Club work the same as on Windows through Wine/Proton. I recently played GTA 5 start to finish and there wasn't a single issue. Even GTAO works without issues.

 

[CasualGamer91]

Windows 10 iot LTSC 21H2 activated with MaS

 

[Tracer_Bullet]

As far as I know, most games don't run natively on Linux and most developers don't bother supporting Linux because of the very small user base. Needless to say, most translation layer for running Windows games on Linux either comes with a performance penalty or just doesn't work well. Gaming is the only reason why I haven't switched to linux yet. I always feel it's not worth the hassle to get my games working on linux. How are you managing gaming?.

steamdeck made a major push and now most games work without trouble through steam/proton.
I have just force enabled proton and so far have not faced issues. But ofc, there would be games that don't work.

Only reason my playtime is limited is because setting up HDR wont be possible/easy for my nvidia gpu.

I use AMD gpu though as I have heard Nvidia has poor support on Linux as they refuse to cooperate with Linux drivers but heard there are open source alternatives which are quite good these days.

Drivers are fine and fast, just not opensource. I am using for a few years now without issue.
And future drivers will now have open source kernel level stuff so installation might be more seamless. Its already not bad via ubuntu driver install program. DLSS/RT both work.

ofc, AMD is better supported for linux stuff with things like wayland/HDR.

 

[ishanjain28]

This is a easy one, It's Linux and maybe even freebsd.

Windows is annoying. I have a windows vm as my moonlight/sunshine instance so I can play games. I have a macbook but macos is so annoying to use, drives me nuts. The battery life/performance on it is insanely good though. I am window shopping for a linux machine(trying to find a good machine with hx370/hx375) so I can back to linux again.

On linux, I have been using arch for maybe 8 years now and it's arch every where, on my work machine, VMs on Vultr etc. Before that, I was using Debian and Fedora and those were pretty good too.

 

[rsaeon]

I read about Debian in a magazine, probably CHIP, about how it was compatible with everything and how exceptionally stable it was. At the time, everyone was on XP and I clearly remember the awe I had for people who could do everything in Linux with a command prompt.

Today, I am that person.

Whether on Debian or macOS, a terminal is where I get the most productive work done. Just last week I wrote a simple ZSH script to parse a PDF into PNGs, upload for OCR with Azure's Compute Vision, and reconstitute as JSON to be indexed by Apache SOLR with a simple Google-esque search front end in PHP.

Over the years I did try FreeBSD and CentOS, but kept coming back to Debian, probably because of that magazine article.

For GUI, I know windows the best. I don't have the curiosity I once did to explore macOS so I don't know it as well even though I use it every day.

 

[gourav]

I have used Windows, Mac OS, and Linux.
Windows, of course, had been my daily driver for almost 20 years. So that's what I'm most comfortable with, no two ways about it.

However, I've been on Kubuntu for the last 1 year or so. I've gotten used to it and most of the time I don't miss Windows.

I still have my PC in dual boot mode. I use Windows when I want to use MS Word or MS Excel. I use Excel for some tracking and budgeting. Some of the simpler sheets, I use through Office online in browser itself. However, there are one or two features which don't work in the browser (ex. one of my sheets pulls data from postgres Db on my NAS), for which I have to boot into Windows. I'm in the process of migrating these to a Python dashboard.

All in all, I'm fairly comfortable with Linux now. Definitely not as comfortable as I'm with Windows, but comfortable enough to use it on a day to day basis.

Mac OS, on the other hand, was a whole different story. After using it for a few months, I didn't even want to switch to it. I had a Mac Mini. Mac OS is built for a touchpad and it's just horrible to use with a regular keyboard and mouse. Eventually sold off my Mac mini on this very forum.

 

[Sola Minor]

I've used Linux all my life and I love Pops and Mint , but ultimately I end up spending more time fixing it and tuning it than using it. In that sense windows is just better it just works out of the box much better especially for gaming . I think macOs is what I am most comfortable with though personally.

As a geek Linux is best , but in terms of simplicity nothing beats macOs. For gaming though windows is for sure best option

 

[Tracer_Bullet]

I am very comfortable with linux, have used it for more than a decade.
Started off from a live cd made by pcquest long ago and had to deal with sound issues (alsa stuff) among other things.

Now it all more or less just works and we dont have to deal with windows bs. I use linux for everything ( including work) but gaming.
I do play a bit on linux, but most of it is in windows as HDR support is limited for nvidia/linux and 3rd party ecosystem is also generally better ( but its getting close, esp with AMD cards).
Hopefully, we will get fully featured steam os release with nvidia support on desktop.

I used to use Arch for a long time, but moved to Ubuntu LTS for stability and peace of mind as i also work on it.
Have seen kernel bug in Arch that slipped through and corrupted files, and also generally update is more involved and anyway i want package frozen so nothing unexpected happens.
So no rolling distros for me, upgrade process is largely painless from LTS to LTS.

 

[Sola Minor]

Alsk

I've used Linux all my life and I love Pops and Mint , but ultimately I end up spending more time fixing it and tuning it than using it. In that sense windows is just better it just works out of the box much better especially for gaming . I think macOs is what I am most comfortable with though personally.

As a geek Linux is best , but in terms of simplicity nothing beats macOs. For gaming though windows is for sure best option

Also funnily enough Noones mentioned it but I think I am in love with chromeOs , my works mostly online and battery life is insane and they are cheap relatively and lightweight , battery can last days if used sparingly and can work as a media device too and very distraction free.
I mean it's not the best in terms of gaming or raw power but for someone who travels a lot it's the best thing and very robust. I love my Chromebook more than my Laptop I think .

 

[gourav]

Also funnily enough Noones mentioned it but I think I am in love with chromeOs

I don't think ChromeOS really qualifies as a full fledged PC OS. It's a purpose built OS which serves a very specific function. In that, it is similar to something like LibreELEC, which is purpose built to be a media player.

A full fledged PC OS should allow you to interface with the hardware and allow you to create/compile software for it, without the need for it to be hosted on a specific app store.

It's the same reason why nobody has mentioned Android or iOS, even though those are possibly the most used, even by the users who have responded above.

 

[Sola Minor]

I don't think ChromeOS really qualifies as a full fledged PC OS. It's a purpose built OS which serves a very specific function. In that, it is similar to something like LibreELEC, which is purpose built to be a media player.

A full fledged PC OS should allow you to interface with the hardware and allow you to create/compile software for it, without the need for it to be hosted on a specific app store.

It's the same reason why nobody has mentioned Android or iOS, even though those are possibly the most used, even by the users who have responded above.

We'll the question was OS not Pc os .
Regardless I think chromeOs lies somewhere in between the Android and windows and it can serve most basic to intermediate functions that you would expect from an older laptop for work.

I would compare it a bit to surface tabs in that sense , not powerful but gets the job done and the fact there's proper screen and keyboard makes it very different from a mobile experience . Also btw you can dual boot a Chromebook with a LINUX as well pretty damn easily, infact it has Linux developement environment inbuilt . I am not suggesting it's best , but for how cheap it is , how robust it is, how long the battery lasts it's a great alternative if you aren't a gamer or power user or need windows specific apps

Just my two cents

 

[crytt]

For those that use Mac OS, have you considered using Darwin?