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.
I’ve been “on” linux for a decade and even ran it on my desktop without dualbooting for months at a time back in the Ubuntu 16 days. A few months ago I’d had enough of the Microsoftisms and installed straight Debian with i3wm on my desktop with intentions of dualbooting Windows for the rare graphical work I do. Maybe once a month. I managed to boot that thing 8 times, none without issues, before it finally stopped booting alltogether and I spent 14 hours yesterday trying to reinstall it to no success. It would commit suicide on second boot consistently and I said well dog darnit then. I guess I have to bite this bullet and learn how to do my graphical workflow on Linux.
Honestly, I should have done that sooner. I’m now Adobe and Windows free and I have literally no reason to go back. There’s nothing I need or miss. All my games work (thanks valve) and all my creative tools are here in some capacity. There aren’t many bugs I encounter daily in i3wm, and none are showstoppers.
Shoutout to Blender for being superior to industry standards, and Darktable for being good enough.
While I never had issues with dual booting in the past, I’ve just found it to be annoying in general and even thinking about having to switch to the other OS because of X for few minutes made me not want to deal with it.
I also use Blender. It’s amazing. For my occasional office work OnlyOffice more than suffices. Photopea in browser as a Photoshop replacement or Krita in a pinch. OnShape for CAD for personal use. FreeCAD is nice too but has some severe limitations.