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As a long time Windows user, I switched from Windows to XFCE (Manjaro) and it was pretty seamless. Most of the keyboard shortcuts are the same (or, easily confi

As a long time Windows user, I switched from Windows to XFCE (Manjaro) and it was pretty seamless. Most of the keyboard shortcuts are the same (or, easily configurable to be the same). I had to hunt down one xdotools script and bind a shortcut for moving windows from one display to another for it to work the same. There are many things that XFCE does even better or just as good. Window snapping works great. The start menu is back-to-basics simple and fast. Searching in it doesn't search the internet or my whole hard drive by default and it just works and finds things faster. The taskbar is also better IMO because it has way more useful options (such as middle-clicking) and less anti-features. On Windows, I have to use some unsupported 3rd-party thing called 7+ taskbar tweaker to add the same features and remove some anti-features. I am a minimalist and I loved the classic taskbar. I hated some new Windows behaviors like "preview window-content on hover over taskbar item", jump lists and grouped taskbar items - some of which you just couldn't turn off in Windows without that 3rd-party tool. So, after years of fighting against that I figured if I have to hack my DE, I might as well run the one that's free and gives me all the power. (I also have to modify macOS to make it even bearable to use...way more than Windows even, with third party hacks. And Apple certainly gives you less control than Microsoft, so I'm definitely not using that!) Some things I'm missing on any Linux DE though: GPU acceleration in Chrome. Games. However, I'm now even doing Microsoft-specific work with dotnet core, VS Code, SQL Server and Azure Data Studio on my Manjaro workstation. For work, I don't really need Windows anymore unless someone gives me some Windows-specific thing to work on, for which I have one machine on standby to do. Overall, I like how much control I have in Linux. However, Windows is still more stable than any Linux desktop in my experience. For instance, I've lost desktop settings/icons a crash after an update. Wifi stopped working after an update once. But things are/were easy to remedy so I'm staying.

deleted 7y ago
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jhasse 7y ago
There's a patched version of Chromium called chromium-vaapi (in Fedora's RPM Fusion repositories) which supports GPU acceleration.
orloffm 7y ago
Wanted to thank for the post, it finally triggered me to ditch Windows on my laptop. But it seems that Xubuntu would be a better choice for dotnet core development: there is an official 3.0 SDK for Ubuntu while Arch is not officially supported, and no one has built the 3.0 SDK for it yet. I also read some description of the state on Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/cx64r5/the_state_of_net_core_on_arch/ https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/cx64r5/the_state...), and it seems that there are too many hoops to jump on Manjaro.
- wayneftw 7y ago
  You know what? Reading your post has now made me want to convert another machine, that I have sitting right here, to use Xubuntu because Ubuntu does seem to have much more official support for things, plus I'd really like to compare it to Manjaro and finally many of our servers are running Ubuntu so it will be nice to get a deeper familiarity with it. I was just this minute looking at .NET Core 3.0 as well because I had such a good experience with 2.2 on a recent job. Your comment actually alerted me to the fact that I can't get it yet :) I was off of .NET for years doing mainly Node.js/Angular/React and I'm kind of excited to be getting back into .NET - I'm so glad my 15 years of .NET experience won't go to waste because ASP.NET has been looking very good in web server benchmarks. Plus, C# and .NET are much nicer to work with than JS/TS and Node IMO. Everything is just cleaner. Anyway - good luck and I hope you have a lot of fun on your Linux desktop adventure. One of my favorite things about the switch over the past year has been the fun of being a sort of hobbyist again, exploring and figuring things out. At this point, I have setup 4 different desktops and I even got advanced touch gestures working on my cheap Acer E5-575g laptop. Can't wait to setup Xubuntu next! So, thanks to you as well!

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jhasse 7y ago

There's a patched version of Chromium called chromium-vaapi (in Fedora's RPM Fusion repositories) which supports GPU acceleration.

orloffm 7y ago

Wanted to thank for the post, it finally triggered me to ditch Windows on my laptop. But it seems that Xubuntu would be a better choice for dotnet core development: there is an official 3.0 SDK for Ubuntu while Arch is not officially supported, and no one has built the 3.0 SDK for it yet. I also read some description of the state on Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/cx64r5/the_state_of_net_core_on_arch/ https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/cx64r5/the_state...), and it seems that there are too many hoops to jump on Manjaro.

wayneftw 7y ago
You know what? Reading your post has now made me want to convert another machine, that I have sitting right here, to use Xubuntu because Ubuntu does seem to have much more official support for things, plus I'd really like to compare it to Manjaro and finally many of our servers are running Ubuntu so it will be nice to get a deeper familiarity with it. I was just this minute looking at .NET Core 3.0 as well because I had such a good experience with 2.2 on a recent job. Your comment actually alerted me to the fact that I can't get it yet :) I was off of .NET for years doing mainly Node.js/Angular/React and I'm kind of excited to be getting back into .NET - I'm so glad my 15 years of .NET experience won't go to waste because ASP.NET has been looking very good in web server benchmarks. Plus, C# and .NET are much nicer to work with than JS/TS and Node IMO. Everything is just cleaner. Anyway - good luck and I hope you have a lot of fun on your Linux desktop adventure. One of my favorite things about the switch over the past year has been the fun of being a sort of hobbyist again, exploring and figuring things out. At this point, I have setup 4 different desktops and I even got advanced touch gestures working on my cheap Acer E5-575g laptop. Can't wait to setup Xubuntu next! So, thanks to you as well!