One Year Without Windows: An Honest Account of Going All-In on Linux at Home

I want to be upfront about something before this article goes any further: I am not a Linux evangelist. I do not believe everyone should abandon Windows, and I have no interest in recruiting converts. What I do have is twelve months of lived experience after making a full transition from Windows 11 to Linux across every machine in my home, and I think that experience is worth documenting honestly — including the parts that were genuinely painful.

The decision to switch was not ideological. It was practical, and it was triggered by two specific events: Microsoft announcing that my perfectly functional desktop did not meet Windows 11's TPM 2.0 requirements, and a detailed report about the extent of telemetry data Windows collects by default. Neither issue was new, but together they crossed a threshold I had been approaching for years.

The First Month: Choosing a Distribution and Getting Oriented

The first real decision any Windows migrant faces is which Linux distribution to adopt. After considerable research, I settled on Fedora for my primary desktop and Ubuntu Server for the home lab machines. Fedora's commitment to shipping current software without excessive modification appealed to me, and Ubuntu Server's documentation ecosystem made it the pragmatic choice for services I had never self-hosted before.

The installation process was straightforward on both counts. What was not straightforward was the mental adjustment of working within a system where the package manager, not a browser or a .exe file, is the correct way to install software. That shift takes longer than any tutorial suggests, and the first month involved more than a few moments of reaching for habits that no longer applied.

Driver support, which remains the most common concern cited by Windows users considering a switch, was largely a non-issue on my hardware. My AMD GPU worked out of the box. My audio interface required a single configuration file change. My monitor's color profile transferred cleanly. The experience was not perfect, but it was not the nightmare I had been warned about.

Gaming: Better Than Expected, Not Without Friction

I want to spend real time on this because gaming compatibility is the argument Windows advocates reach for most quickly, and the reality in 2024 is considerably more nuanced than it was even three years ago.

Valve's Proton compatibility layer has matured into something genuinely impressive. The majority of my Steam library runs on Linux without any configuration beyond enabling Proton in Steam's settings. Titles I expected to be problematic — including several competitive multiplayer games — launched and performed without incident. Frame rates were comparable to what I had measured under Windows, and in a handful of cases, slightly better.

The exceptions are real and worth naming. Games that use kernel-level anti-cheat software — a category that includes several popular titles — do not run under Proton and are unlikely to in the near future. If your gaming life revolves around those specific games, Linux is not currently a viable primary gaming platform. That is not a criticism; it is an accurate statement of the situation.

For my library, approximately 85 percent of titles ran without intervention. The remaining 15 percent split between games that required minor configuration through ProtonDB community guides and games I simply accepted I would not play on this machine.

The Printer and VPN Problems Nobody Warns You About Adequately

I will be direct: printer support on Linux remains an area where the experience is inconsistent in ways that feel disproportionate to the problem being solved. My home office uses a mid-range laser printer from a major manufacturer. Getting it to work required installing a driver package from an unofficial repository, editing a configuration file, and restarting the CUPS service — a process that took the better part of an afternoon and required comfort with the terminal that a casual user would not have.

Once configured, it worked reliably. But the configuration process was not acceptable by the standard I would hold any operating system to in 2024.

VPN compatibility was more complex. My employer uses a commercial VPN client that offers no Linux support. The solution involved configuring an OpenVPN profile manually using credentials extracted from the Windows client — a process that required both technical knowledge and a willingness to spend time in documentation that assumes familiarity with networking concepts. It works now, and it works well, but the path to that outcome was not smooth.

Self-Hosting: The Unexpected Highlight of the Entire Year

If the printer situation was the low point, self-hosting services was the unambiguous high point — and the area where Linux's advantages over Windows became most tangible.

Jellyfin, the open-source media server, replaced a Plex subscription within a week of deployment. The installation process on Ubuntu Server took under thirty minutes, and the service has run without interruption since. Nextcloud replaced Dropbox and Google Drive for file synchronization and document collaboration, with the added benefit that my data resides on hardware I control rather than on servers operated by companies with their own interests.

I also deployed Pi-hole for network-wide ad blocking, Wireguard for a personal VPN back to my home network, and a Gitea instance for private code repositories. None of these projects required extraordinary technical skill. Each one required reading documentation carefully, being willing to troubleshoot, and accepting that the first attempt might not succeed.

The cumulative effect of these deployments was a home network that feels genuinely mine in a way that no Windows-based setup ever did.

Who Should Make This Switch — and Who Should Not

After a year, my assessment is more calibrated than it was when I started.

For home lab enthusiasts and developers, the switch is worth making immediately. The tooling, the philosophy, and the community resources align perfectly with how these users already think about software and systems.

For remote workers in technical roles, the transition is manageable with a few weeks of adjustment time. The terminal skills that Linux rewards are the same skills that make technical professionals more effective regardless of platform.

For casual home users whose primary activities are web browsing, streaming, and light document work, a distribution like Linux Mint or Pop!_OS offers a genuinely accessible experience. The honest caveat is that any hardware-specific issue — a finicky printer, an unsupported peripheral — will require either technical troubleshooting or external help.

For small business owners who rely on specific commercial software without Linux versions, the switch requires a realistic assessment of whether web-based alternatives or compatibility layers can cover the gap. In some cases they can. In others, they cannot.

The switch is not for everyone, and I would not claim otherwise. But for the right user, it is not merely viable — it is genuinely better.