I Don't Think I Can Go Back To Windows...

For over a month, Elijah, Luke, and I have been daily driving some flavor of Linux. We showed you what we chose to install. We talked through some of the roadblocks that we hit. We even attempted challenges with uh varying degrees of success. But now it's time for our final verdicts. Who will stay on Linux and who will go crawling back to Microsoft like a baby? That's a joke, of course. These are just our personal experiences and your year of the Linux desktop might come sooner or later than ours. There's no shame in either. But one thing that we can say for certain is that the year is closer today than it was the last time these two did the challenge. So true. It feels like Linux has been moving forward at the same speed that Windows has been moving backward, which is both are pretty impressive. All three of us, spoiler alert, seriously considered staying on Linux rather than returning to that sinking ship. Just like we considered which of us would Segue to our sponsor, Privacy. They let you make virtual cards to help you control who charges you and when. And get peace of mind every time you buy something online. Click the link in the description and make privacy part of your daily routine. I want to start by thanking everyone out there for your interest in this series along with a special shout out for the folks who played along at home. Seeing the community rally around Linux shows me that at least some people really do care about important things like freedom, privacy, and owning their own stuff. Uh we did a whole video discussing how the legitimate threat that Linux now presents is finally forcing Microsoft to wake up and do something, take action. And this is just proof once again that competition is good for absolutely everyone and everything. So with that in mind then let's kick off with the highlights from the first month. For me the first one has got to be speed. Maybe it's just general bloat. Maybe it's because everything doesn't have to check in with co-pilot when I do literally anything. But Basite just felt snappier than Windows and quick application launch time made my system feel honestly brand new every single time I used it. I also did love how supportive the community was overall. I lurked in the Discord a decent amount and if you ignore the couple times that they on me before this challenge, the community seemed really keen on helping get new users the best Basite experience possible. Saying that, there were some other things. Nope, we're only doing positive right now. Positive things only. I think the biggest eye openeners for me happened every time I was back on Windows for some reason. Like when I jumped on the W show laptop for instance, I go to sit down and boom. Do you want to use Edge? Do you like Xbox gaming? WOULD YOU LIKE A ONE DRIVE SUBSCRIPTION? NO. JUST LIKE THE last time you were all up in my grill asking me about it. It drives me freaking crazy. Like if Microsoft was a guy at college, he would be the kind of guy that the bartender would type up a thing and then show it to the girl sitting NEXT TO HIM. HE DOESN'T TAKE NO for an answer. And I just found that or yes, remember my login just he just doesn't listen. I just found that over the course of my month with Linux, my trust in it grew. And by comparison, my trust in Windows is just shattered at this point. I think the main thing that I was surprised by was actually game compatibility because last time this was a pretty big issue. And for most of this challenge, you know, we I started with every time before I was going to launch a game, I load up a browser, check Proton DB. What are people doing to make it work? Didn't believe Proton DB. Yeah. Yeah. And then within honestly not that much time, I stopped checking. I stopped even checking force compatibility and I just started pressing play and almost everything just worked. It's like roulette but five of the six chambers are full. Yeah. Yeah, it would almost always work. The problems were I guess. No, no, we're only doing positive. Yes, we are. So, I'll stick with that. So, what we can do is go to lmg.gg/flowplane where some of the free flowing discussion might end up on the cutting room floor, but I've got a few more things that are positive. I did a trip to Sony where I was checking out a new TV and I realized, oh no, I can't use their display source because it's got copyrighted films on it. Sure. So, I needed something to output to it. And I was like, well, I have HDR footage, but do I have an HDR capable device? And I went, "Oh gosh, it's my Linux laptop." Kubuntu handled it like a champ. Absolutely zero BS. Honestly, it was a better experience than Windows. Wow. I was floored. For me with Basite, I actually found a lot of positives came from external launchers, which was honestly really surprising because obviously Proton is very tied with Steam, at least online, in terms of the narrative behind it. But there was times where I was able to get the Xbox launcher working and I even managed to boot brand new Forza Horizon 6 on it. Interesting. Cuz I didn't. But we're not talking about that right now. No negatives. This is this is a positive. All right. All right. All right. I think I think Yeah. I the the other bit of positive is that it's it's just more fun. Like the problems that I'd run into on Windows for the last honestly years, like not a short period of time, has almost always just been really annoying. I felt like they're problems by design. Whereas on Linux, I feel like they're problems by We didn't get to that yet. Your your HDR thing is so polished because some person out there was just annoyed about HDR and made it awesome. and just maybe someone hasn't been annoyed enough about the problem that you're dealing with right now, so it hasn't been made completely awesome yet, but you can probably fix it yourself. Yeah. Shifting gears a little bit, as someone who has set up a lot of computers. The whole going through and getting the drivers rigma roll bothers me more than it probably should. And on Linux, it just isn't a thing. If you've got a recent kernel, it just every my Wi-Fi, my Bluetooth, all of my crap mostly just works. And it blows me away that in the year of our Lord 2026, Microsoft can't have a similar experience with Windows Update. Windows update was actually like I kind of fascinating like going from updating Mint and Cashy to updating my Windows machine felt like I went back a decade. It it was not only are you not getting those driver updates, but it's also not updating just all the software on your computer. In fairness to Windows, Chocolatey, Windgate, these things do exist and the Microsoft Store does exist. It just doesn't feel like part of the native experience. And the parts that do, like the Windows Store, feel crammed down my throat and like they come with downsides and like you're best off to try to avoid it. And I mean, speaking of that, I actually enjoyed using the built-in like Bazite store cuz it worked very well. There was no other ads shoved in my face. Nine times out of 10, I could probably find what I wanted. And you don't need to log in with your 2FA and then like randomly you have to log in again in the Minecraft launcher app that you downloaded from the Windows Store with the same credentials. Why? Yeah, it was just inherent. It was awesome to actually use a store that I kind of liked. Honestly, it just the the the experience of getting software in general on Linux feels pretty good. Like updating with Pac-Man and you have the little animation of it like eating little bits as it goes along. It just like feels good. And then going to update Windows after only like a week not only took forever, but it's not entirely clear like what's even going on. Things will sit at 99% for 10 minutes. And it's so rewarding when you go to update. Uh I I have this experience with Cashi all the time where it'll be like this big system update and it finishes and it's like net size change minus whatever like it just got smaller. Like what? Are you kidding me? And even when things don't work. Okay, this might be a bit of a controversial take but I was blown away by how quickly I could solve things with an LLM. Oh yeah. Yeah. compared to like trollling endless you know ancient forum posts because that's the thing about Linux double-edged sword is it's moving really fast which is great for it like getting better all the time but not great for the archive of information that's out there on the internet with something can be from 6 months ago and be completely irrelevant today I I also found that I I tried to I did a bunch of LLM usage with trying to learn how to use Linux um but I tried to use it as an educational tool instead of like an auto complete, but FS tab. I was messing around in there. Uh, but instead of just like I I would ask it like what should I put here? And it would tell me, but then I'd be like, okay, well, there's like two random numbers at the end. What are those? What does that mean? I'm like, what what is this? It says no fail. What is it? What is it not failing? Why would I want it to fail? I mean, speaking of fail, it's funny you brought up LLM because of how much people made fun of you in part one for using it to decide your DRO. I was so scared of that kind of reception that I cautiously was like, I'm not using an LLM to solve my issues. I broke that after like two weeks. Yeah. Yeah. Because I tried what you said. I went through like old forum posts, old Reddit posts or whatever. And hey, six out of 10 probably worked fine. But those four out of 10 that didn't drove me nuts. So, I also ran into the LLM just like gaslighting the heck out of me. Oh, that happens. But you have to be aware of that as well. Now, we do have to move on. And I get it. Criticizing Linux feels a little bit like walking outside on a crisp autumn day to discover that some kind neighbor has rad all the leaves in your yard. Then tracking down that neighbor and explaining to them that you would have done it differently. However, we do have some ongoing sources of friction with Linux even a month into our switch. Why don't we start with Luke? Yeah. I I've had some issues with my like pressing my middle mouse button. Yeah, which you might not think you use that often. I like scrolling that way on really long web pages. I'm a middle mouse die hard. I love it. I don't know how many people are, but I am as well. And that just wasn't working anywhere. I figured out that that's a settings toggle that you can do in browsers. So, I was able to solve that. But like in in Balders's Gate, the way that you turn the screen is you press in your scroll wheel and then rotate the screen. Well, one of the ways you turn the screen. Um, but I I just rebound that the the middle mouse version to a single key because it just wasn't working at all and end up looking into this and it is a thing with Linux where drag select copies whatever you select and then pressing in the middle mouse wheel past it and it's just like okay but I don't want that. And I tried to look up some resources online and then just figured out that okay, I can just change the settings in the browsers. That's 95% of what I need to change here. Another annoying thing that I had is I didn't get Forza 6 working. There's kind of an issue here that I don't run into when I'm troubleshooting things on Windows, which is I couldn't tell if this error was because I was running Linux or if this error was just an error with the game. That's a really good point. Whenever you're doing something unsupported, and let's face it, Proton, even though it's super cool and magical, is effectively from the game developer standpoint, an unsupported use case. You have no way of knowing, is this just me? Is this my weird flavor of Linux? Is this the game? Is it my hardware? I mean, speaking of things that don't just work sometimes, for me it was search. and search on Bazite was surprisingly terrible. This is not the direction I was expecting this conversation to go. To be very clear, Windows search absolute ass as well. In fact, probably worse than Basite. Okay, but the problem is that Basite/ Linux, I believe this is probably under the whole roof. They sometimes make things different just for the fact of being different from Windows. I do get that sometimes. And so when I would type the word sleep to adjust my sleep settings and because I type sleep enter, my computer would go to sleep. That is a habit I still have not broken. It's such a minor thing, but it paints the bigger picture that I'm talking about. The hard thing about a lot of these frustrations is they could be like habit- based or based on just sort of the logic of operating systems that you're used to like your middle mouse expected behavior. And I I don't know how to solve that, right? Because on the one hand, you don't want all Linux distros to just be Windows clones. Like that's the whole point. That's what we're trying to get away from. But on the other hand, if they're too different, it's hard for you to confidently look at someone in your life who uses Windows or Mac OS and go, "Yes, I recommend this Linux." Fully acknowledging that I'm going to be the tech support for it when you run into problems with it. which I guess is part of why so many different dros do need to exist even if that itself may continue to be a painoint for Linux and for me in particular. Enter any Linux distribution conversation and you will find at least half a dozen people who are confidently declaring that their one dro to rule them all would have solved all your problems and it'll be half a dozen different dros. So clearly right like whether I'm expecting a Windows clone or whether I'm expecting something totally different not all of them can be correct and that's something that I find difficult anytime I encounter like a hyper passionate community the Linux user base I think if I had to summarize it is weird because collectively the community is actually really great and individually they're really great usually but It's like the little clicks, the little tribes that form and then things get kind of toxic. But even that, I feel like it comes from a good place. Like my goal of choosing a single DRO for all of my machines was probably a mistake. And the people berating me for not choosing their better DRO, the only reason they were going at me was because they wanted me to have a good Linux Not the right way to be welcoming. I have one last gripe. Display capture in Wayland. I I wish it could be simpler. I also Oh, I ran into pairing issues with my Xbox controllers. Display capture in general is a little bit clunky on the Linux side. I was like a little bit surprised you didn't do your streaming setup originally. That was probably the right call. Yeah, I wasn't going to go like 2 months without streaming. Yeah. Well, no. I like I've been streaming and it's been fine, but I have to kind of reconfigure things. Like I I'll open up OBS and every single one of my desktop capture sources will reload and be like, "What do you actually want to capture?" It doesn't remember from last time. There might be a way to solve that. It doesn't take me that much time to reconfigure it. But when I was back on Windows, I open OBS and I click start stream. It's just a little bit smoother. But it only takes me 30 seconds to fix it. It's not the end of the world. But that also lies in that area where it only takes me 30 seconds to fix it. So, I'm not going to spend the half an hour that could make it so I never have to spend the 30 seconds again cuz that's probably possible. Um, yeah, I'd say the like 30 to 120 seconds is the danger zone for problems. The I will never fix it time frame. I'll just do this forever. On the subject of unfixable things, there was one final gripe for you, I believe. Yeah, it was some software. The Proton compatibility layer has made incredible progress. Even actually during our last couple of months, it's improved a lot. But it can't do anything about developers who block their games on Linux. And there was one gaming experience that was really negative on Linux, but only partially because the game itself didn't work. You see, I was really excited to play Marathon. Wait, shush, shush. I was excited. Okay, I don't care what you think. Deal with it. I don't even care. I was going to say there's no way he's played it. There's no way. Anyways, we started this challenge literally 2 days before marathon came out. And of course, it has colonel level antiche that does not work on Basite. And I was really, really bummed out. And I kind of just ended up venting about it online. And I was shocked at the number of people who responded with levels of copium that can only be described as delusional or who directly messaged me telling me to stop hamming up this drama so that way I could make Linux look bad. Yeah, why do you hate Linux, Elijah? It's all my fault and hot dogs. I love hamburgers. And it's a big problem because most people will not switch to Linux unless those games are working. And devs aren't going to prioritize the Linux development. You know, if people don't switch over, I don't know the solution for this, but I do know that staying quiet and pretending it's not a problem isn't the solution. Yeah. You just shouldn't want to play that game. No, I'm going to get loud because I'm going to put pressure on developers. Yeah. Yeah. And the good news is that more games work than don't on Linux. And I know both myself and Elijah have been trying more games because of that. Like sometimes I'll be like, "Oh, does that work?" And it's kind of exciting to even launch it. Uh there there's so much to explore both in the ecosystem itself and in the games. It can be really fun. Like in a way I do see where people were coming from on the marathon thing. Sorry, I do. They just came at the person instead of talking through the issue. You are not crazy if you want to play the uh third part of the Final Fantasy 7 remake on the PlayStation 5. That's not crazy. You're not crazy if you want to play Marathon on a Windows machine. But it's also not crazy to see Linux as a platform separate from those things that supports these games and framing everything in terms of what it doesn't support. I can see how people would find that kind of toxic. And I can see how you being blamed for a game you want to play, you might find that pretty toxic. Yeah, I'm I'm going to both sides this one. This this is honestly what largely pushed me more and more towards LLMs throughout the process is that I would be having No, but seriously, damn. That's the absolute truth bomb I'm being completely honest. I talk to LLM cuz people are worse. Meta is so happy. Uh, okay. So, the the reason why was because I would be having fun with my experience. I would be messing around with things, enjoying toying with Linux. Like, there was genuinely times where I would sit down at my computer fresh, excited to tackle something that I ran into the previous day because it reminds me of old school computing where you tinker with your system and you work on things. And I like that. I've been missing that for a very long time. and I'd be messing around and then I'd go, "Oh, okay. I need to look up something." And I'd end up on some Reddit thread and it's just 400 comments of people going at each other's throats and I'm just like, "What? Uh, sorry. I was having a good time. I don't what what is happening here?" A lot of the information on the internet right now is centralized on Discord, which is practically uncarchable, or Reddit, which is, I think, inherently flawed, a rough place to go. So, like if I couldn't find something in in a select kind of few different places, level one text forum is a fantastic option there. If I could find something there, I would read it. I would go through there. That was a good experience. But if if if I searched something and it was like seven Reddit threads in a row is all that came up, I would just be like, "Okay." And I would go over to an LLM and just try to figure it out. One of the things I really miss from Windows is Windows Hello. um just easy, quick to set up biometric authentication. And this guy right here, shout out this guy, is a classic example of the kind of toxic non-answer that is going to end people's personal Linux challenges. I do want facial login because I like the convenience. This is not your choice. This is my choice. I found that attitude as well sometimes with people telling me I don't want to do certain things or I should have these as solutions instead. For example, when I complained about not playing PUBG in part one, do you know how many people commented saying, "Hey, use GeForce Now." And I'm like, "Dude, I'm trying to get away from Microsoft, whether it's because of the adinfested hell hole that it's become or subscription-based services, and you turn around and tell me to use a subscription-based service." Like, excuse me. Hey, I meant to check in with you. Yeah, my like non-native Teams app actually worked really well for me the whole month until the very end when I ended up in like uh a login authentication loop that I couldn't get out of. And that happened to be when I was like reformatting to Windows anyway. But I was wondering how did yours end up working? Mine ended up improving pretty significantly over the course of the challenge. So we had like opposite arcs. Um, most my issues with it, I think, really are just teams. All right, this brings us to the big moment. One at a time, starting with Eli, who is staying on Linux. I am, but not on Basite. I'm actually going to be swapping over to Cashios. Hey, immutable operating system ended up coming back to bite me in the butt a little more in the later half. saying that I am going to be dual booting. I'm going to be trying to make Cashachi my primary, but as someone who wants to stream the latest and greatest games, I can't have it be an issue and a block to not be able to play Marathon. Windows is going to be a dedicated basically just Steam launcher so that way I can play some games that don't work on Linux. Well, you do some video editing as well, right? I do. That would be another thing. Um, yeah, I had issues with video editing in part one and part two. I just ended up paying video editors. So, wait, you weren't willing to subscribe to GeForce now, but you would hire a person as a workaround. Yeah. Hey, I gave someone a job. One uh last remaining question. You said you're having fun. Is that the primary reason you're switching is cuz it's been more fun? So the primary reason I am staying mainly on Linux is because Microsoft when I I I have been actually only on Windows for the last 2 months because I didn't want to kind of give away that this is what I was going to do. My time on Windows has been really frustrating. There's been a lot of moments like Lionus pointed out where I'd turn the computer on and it would bring me through three or four prompts and I'm just like all full of dark patterns. Like I I don't care about being edged for Microsoft Edge. Like stop it. like let me just play my video games, please. Yeah. Yeah, I'm I'm staying and I'm staying on both systems. Uh so I switched my laptop over for this challenge to Mint. Uh that has honestly been like the biggest W. There has been zero loss. I have had zero drawback to Windows. I think it is only better. Um I And but a lot of that comes down to the use case is so simple. Yeah, I'm I'm just sitting in a browser. Every once in a while I need to sign a PDF. Every once in a while I need to open a document. Both those things I can easily do. Other than that, I'm sitting in a browser. Every once in a while I'll be like on a plane and I want to play Slay the Spire. No problem. It can do all that kind of stuff. I've literally never ran into an issue. But anytime I'm using another laptop on Windows, I'm like, "Oh, I just wish I was using my machine." So that's like a clear W. And I don't honestly think right now that I'm like ever going back. Um, on the desktop it's a bit of a mixed bag, more similar to yours. So, I have divided machine my machine kind of in half at this point. So, I have I think actually we're going to do a video on his kind of unique dual boot setup. So, uh, make sure you get subscribed. I was given a 1 TB for this challenge, which is actually running the DRO. You know, you're supposed to give that back. that's staying in there forever. To be fair, to be fair, I was going to do the same thing. Yeah. Thanks, Lionus. This is the payment for us having to do this for the last month. As for me, I was very surprised to discover that I can. I could. Linux is ready and I think soon I will be too. I ran into so many moments throughout the last over a month. I mean, I didn't even bother removing my Linux installs after 30 days. I was pleasantly surprised so many times by how well something worked, but the compatibility barrier is still a tough one. If you're willing to be a Linux gamer, it's easier than it's ever been. There is so much to play that works either perfectly or well enough on Linux that if you start with here's the platform that I have, I want something to do. It's easy. It's a very console-like experience. And I actually mean that in a really positive way. However, I don't buy many consoles and I do almost none of my gaming on the ones that I do. And if you want the broadest compatibility and you don't want to think about it at all, Windows is still the king. Especially if there's a social element to your gaming and if your group happens to want to play something that isn't Linux pled, like Marathon. Another aspect of this, and the reason that I actually did just switch my system, is because as a reviewer, the vast majority of the stuff that I need to do is Windows native. And so if I have a new Logitech Super Strike X2 mouse or something and I'm supposed to be using it and evaluating it and what I'm just going to give the only the Linux perspective and hope that the, you know, third party app that maybe will interface with this brand new hardware is going to No, come on. Be real. I need to be on Windows. I need to install the native app so that I can evaluate this hardware. And that happens a lot for me. With everything I just said out of the way, though, I'm not ready to go back to vanilla Windows either. It has been so refreshing to not be bothered a single time over the last couple of months that I happily extended my time without even thinking about it. And I think that my happy place is going to be to try and find the middle ground. I want to hang out in the Windows debloating community for a bit. Then if I can't make that work, I might distro hop for a few months and settle on Linux. I sincerely hope that by that time Valve is ready with an Nvidia capable Steam OS because I am like super Steam OS pled still. I did end up with that in my home theater room and it just like it's the most consolelike of all of the gaming experiences on PC and it's just pretty freaking cool. Oh. Oh. And now here's a cool segue to our sponsor, privacy. Privacy virtual cards create a secure layer between your real card and the merchant. So even if a merchant gets compromised, there's nothing useful to steal. 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Click the link in the description and make privacy part of your daily routine. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe go watch through the whole playlist. Um, this one and then also the first time we did it if you want to see just how far we've come. What was how long ago was that? Like over four years. It's almost 5 years ago. Four years. They have made four decades of progress in that. It's been insane actually. It's completely night and