Well, the PC is an older one and hadn’t been in use in years, so it has HDDs (a small SSD for the OS), was running windows 8 still, and I think has an unusual amount of DDR3 RAM. Maybe 24gb?

It was taking 5-10min to boot (the first boot took 20, and I was worried it was dead). When I was transferring files off of it before formatting everything, it was so slow that I had to leave it on overnight. Basic tasks were hanging. Just imagine your typical end of life, bloated Windows PC that hadn’t had a fresh reinstall in a while.

Now, Pop!_OS boots in a matter of seconds, minimal delay in opening apps/moving files/downloading stuff/etc. It could probably be faster, but it feels like it’s brand new relative to how it was functioning before.

The true end game of all of this…

Sorry, I meant that about Mac and was getting some wires crossed.

Thanks, at least that gives me a place to start if something acts up. I haven’t had any issues yet, but I also haven’t tried any games on it.

Pop_OS I s a great first “it just works” experience.

This is my hope. I figure I’ll use this until I find some niche reason to need something else.

I saw a lot of positive talk about Bazzite too.

It is now!

I’m using an old Nvidia GPU, yeah.

I just really love the persistent top bar, the floating dock, and the way you mount apps to install. It all feels so natural for some reason.

Oh, and the search bar for finding apps/files. I’m glad Pop OS uses that too.

Ha, at the risk of limiting my Linux skills forever, I don’t think that’s for me.

Haha, yes!

I went with Pop!_OS

I’ve always been aware of it, but I guess I just needed the extra push. Being on Lemmy has been like having one of those Civ missionaries in my base spamming “spread religion” for 2 years, and I think they’ve successfully converted me.

I love how much you can customize whatever you want. I saw some cool setups while watching videos about distros, and I think I could get unhealthily obsessed with that if I let myself.

The bloat is real! I really thought this old PC was just chugging along because of the hardware, but it seems perfectly content to run Linux.

About 15 years ago, I installed Ubuntu for a few months for fun, but not being able to game on it very easily was a major drawback for me, so I bounced back to windows.

Now that gaming on Linux seems to have come a long way (and Windows is annoying me way more than it used to), I’m feeling motivated.

Between windows and mac, I enjoy the UX of mac more, and Pop!_OS feels familiar in a lot of good ways.

Penguins together strong?

After watching videos about different distros until my brain went numb, I went with Pop!_OS. It seemed like a really polished and noob-friendly option, which has felt true so far.