I got my grandmother to use Linux Mint, zero complaints.
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Nice! Did you change the UI or anything to make it easier to use?
Yeah. just needed more familiar symbols and icons to that of windows, both for her and my late grandfather.
It was an interesting insight into the language of symbols, if the symbols are too foreign for the layman or the elderly, it makes it more difficult to use. Much like the spoken language, and the difficulty of learning new languages as we age.
Though to those of us who grew up with this stuff, we likely rely a little less on knowing a handful of specific styles of symbols, like that of their colors, or specific silhouettes. Though the symbols themselves must at least convey their purpose.
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Gotcha. I think I know what you mean. The icons should be less fancy and more indicative of the function they represent.
I am back, and pushing to run the challenge again. I am almost done with this semester of school, and no longer will be required to have windows on my machine. (No, I couldnt use a VM for what I needed it for) Time to push myself again.
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Windows 10 stopped supporting the graphics chip on my laptop, despite the fact that it DID work as recent as 1803. I got so pissed off about the fact that my previously working driver no longer works (and I canāt change the screen resolution now) that Iām switching my laptop to Ubuntu and my main desktop as well. I already use Red Hat at work, and Iāve run servers with Cent OS for a whileā¦ but this will be the first time Iāve ever had Linux on my main computers.
I chose Ubuntu for itās ease of use and setup. I just donāt have the time to configure too much out of the box, so Ubuntu is as close to a āplug 'n playā as I think Iām going to get, especially with Steam. I only get a couple minutes a week to play games, so I donāt want to spend that precious little bit of personal time trying to get them to work in the first place.
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Not a year into Linux Gaming [yet], but have been getting feet a bit wet. More so screwing around with relatively older games, as the CPU [PhenomII] is choke point to newer games via lacking instruction sets [DOOM '2016, Witcher 2], that also have āNativeā Linux Support. I will eventually give Proton a go, for other some other games.
DOOM, has been a generally [surprisingly] fair comparative point, for the Linux Box against my newer W10 rig. OpenGL would hover away at mid-70s, as worst case fps scenario ā while Vulkan is kicking well >>100fps.
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is this challenge still on?
if so, iād like to participate 
my āyear of the linux desktopā was 2016, since then i have been using ubuntu (unity) , arch (i3wm) and now ubuntu gnome almost exclusively (work notebook is still windows ā¦ because ā¦reasons)
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Yep, this has been ongoing for ages.
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I started my challenge in 1998/1999, how am I doing?
Currently administer for family 
2 Fedora 33
1 Opensuse Tumbleweed āFYI Oracle Virtual-box with windows 10 resides on this systemā
1 Qubes OS
1 POP OS laptop
1 micropc with Antix
IOT devices run: Rasbian, Ubuntu, FreeBSD,
When this started I think I tested a few OSāes and quickly moved to SUSE due to itās usability. I quickly ditched win 98 on my first pc.
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It has been just over a full year (basically my join date on level1 is a few weeks after the start of this struggle) for me on a Linux desktop and sad to say Iām probably going to call it a day and install Windows on this system.
When I started out, I was really excited, I bought new PC hardware for the first time in years. I was looking forward to using a Linux DE for my daily non-gaming stuff and having the benefit of VFIO on a Windows VM. Even if there was some still some minor issues on VFIO but I figure it would likely be resolved in a few months.
First I had problems with a dual monitor setup and my physical KVM. This was finally fixed by hooking a xrandr script to udev event but recent updates broke this along with the inexplicable renaming of my video outputs from HDMI-0 to HDMI-A-1 and DVI-1 to DVI-0. Script still doesnāt work reliably even after fixing the names.
Then VFIO also broke for no reason I can think of. Was working fine after applying the new vendor-reset patch but then just stopped working. Spent the last few days trying to stop it from hanging the host machine and yay, finally Iāve got my over-powered web browsing PC working again.
A Windows 10 gaming setup with Virtualbox to run the stuff I need on Linux VMs seems like the better option at this point. The good thing is that this is the longest Iāve ever managed to live with a Linux desktop, slightly over a year. So chances are by the time I get the impulse to try this again, it would likely last a few years. Possibly the games would all be able to run on Linux so I wouldnāt even need a gaming environment
Iām not saying Linux is no good, I use it daily for work and run servers on it for over a decade. But as a desktop environment to me, itās just feels too tiring.
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In 2 months (started 6/2020), Iāll be one total year free of the Microsoft Windows.
My main OS is Arch Linux (btw), and Debian is a close 2nd. As a software developer, I find that I am much more efficient when using Linux. Most Steam games that I play run fine as well, I even played GTA: Vice City the other day, a game that I thought would surely not run on Linux!
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Iāve been a long time windows user but got feed up with a lot of things and decided to switch to Ubuntu as my daily driver in January. I had an Unraid server for about a year now but never really dived into until installing linux on my main PC. So far I have not ran into many issues I wasnāt able to figure out. I do still dual boot windows for somethings however. I no I could use a VM but honestly I like having both on bare metal even if I only use it every so often. Mostly for games I cant get working right in linux. I also have kali installed kali on a laptop but I might go back to windows and run that in a VM again. That one I did run into a lot of issues with that I struggled to fix. We will see though. Anyways looking forward to a full year of linux and good luck to everyone else that makes the switch or has already.
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So I have a question pertaining to this challenge: Does this mean Linux on the main rig (or 3 in my case) for a year? Or Linux for a year in general. I have a happy mixture of boxes that I use frequently, this would also include my OpenWRT routers (Yes currently use 4). I am just curious, I donāt think I could be completely Linux (DoD side of things sucks with it though it is very doable). I am actually quite interested. I am just curious of the ramifications.
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I think the original intent was, use Linux as a daily driver for a year. Preferably as a desktop but any daily use should be fine, as long as you actually use Linux command line and/or GUI each day. Not an expert though!
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One year in, I still like Pop OS quite a bit. Itās not dramatically different from Ubuntu, but the GUI looks nice and I have had good luck with Steam games. (I never intended to game on this machine, but the pandemic changed that.)
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About a year ago, i totally switched over to Manjaro Xfce. I went all in , I backed up my windows machine and than formatted. I started with Fedora, then Ubuntu, than finally settled on Manjaro. I havenāt missed windows. Iāve had a few issues. Driver updates with Folding at home running are a little complicated. NVIDIA drivers are annoying. Timeshift saved me more times than I can count. Most of my steam library works just fine. I run the latest Kernel thatās not real time, which caused only one problem again with NVIDIA drivers. I donāt see myself going back to windows.
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So, I have been using Ubuntu 20.04.2 on one of my computers, exclusively, since September of 2020. I have also switched on my other two computers since January 2021 but, I still have one install of Windows for gaming on one of my cmputer.
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I have been using Linux for quite some time, but a couple weeks ago I began to figure out how to install and manage Arch Linux on my laptop. I have setup the system fairly well, I would think, as of now. I also made the switch from Gnome to the i3 tiling window manager. I learned quite a bit about Linux while setting everything up manually. Letās see if I can stay on this setup for a year! This is how it currently looks:
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If you manage to make it 3 weeks, youāll be stuck there forever.
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