Career software engineer here, love terminal/CLI, hate using a mouse - keyboard shortcuts are king.
Every 3-4 months I try to switch to Linux and I lose 2-3 days trying 5+ distros only to arrive back on my debloated Windows because things just. don’t. work.
Shortlist of things that don’t work at all or don’t work in a performant manner:
RDP/ParSec/AnyDesk/RustDesk/xRDP/VNC
Customizable window tiling managers
Drivers - whether it’s my earbuds, my keyboard, my mouse, or other various things - at least one thing doesn’t work right
Font / display scaling
Teams, which I need for some jobs
I really would love to make it work, but every time I try and something comes up and I ask online about how I can address it the answer is typically, “you can’t” or “you just need to be OK without that”
I just vm’d my entire win7 install an duse that inside my kubuntu.
For stuff that I can’t- usually extended disk recovery and some vid mastering - i have a racked win machine literally disconnected from the network with a CRU for drives and a kvm to my main monitor.
I’ve been using some variation of Linux since the mid 90’s but never been able to fully switch over. That said I am on my longest and perhaps permanent switch over with KDE EndevourOS (Arch based). I don’t believe this is what you are hoping for but I do believe it is close so perhaps something to keep an eye on for the future.
I have gotten Teams to run once for a about an hour before it crashed and now I can’t figure out what proton/wine voodoo witch doctor recipe I used.
No idea what luck you will have with RDP or RustDesk.
KDE plasma’s window tiling manager is really damn cool but has no documentation. Still you can do neat stuff with it like having a floating window tile on top of another tile (basically an always on top state but on steroids) with distinct tiling arrangements for each virtual desk space.
Scaling has been good but font support is still at the “almost but still not perfect”. A graphics designer might be in trouble.
Drivers - This is where Arch’s pacman (software package manager) and pkgbuild really shine. If it can compile and is available as a git repo, an rpm, or deb file then there is a good chance you can get it working. That said there are still an unfortunate mountain of unsupported stuff.
Otherwise, with all the improvements to Wine via proton and the other forks, it is getting easier to run a lot more Window’s applications.
Like I said, EndevourOS/Arch with KDE is getting pretty close to being an easy jump from Windows but not 100% perfect.
I’m using RDP from my CachyOS machine to access my Raspberry Pi and a home server with Linux Mint. The Remmina RDP client works quite well.
I’m quite new to running Linux at home and as an admin, and I recall it took me a bit to get RDP working on my servers but I’ve been very happy with it.
No idea (when starting) which documentation or patterns go with which version.
But once it clicks you have a fully declarative setup**. I edit a file, activate, commit to git. On another system, pull, activate.
** The config system is expansive but not exhaustive. I still have to login to Slack, pick my theme, etc. My VPN on the other hand is just ready credentials and all.
I never have to remember the 100 little tweaks I made, every tweak is in git. Noise canceling pipewire filter, what software I had installed, service configurations, secret management, disk partitions, all portable between different systems.
A lighter introduction is probably home manager, works in any Linux system or macOS. Manages your home directory as the name implies.
You can also go lighter with a repo flake.nix and a devShell. Its like a generic virtual environment. Auto activate with direnv. A step up from a devShell would be https://devenv.sh/ which tracks more like home manager with configurable modules. A devShell is really a bash script with these programs available from Nix.
Not wanting to start any distro wars, its all a matter of taste but I could advise you to try cachyos its also arch based, but with a few performance tweaks, what I believe that it could help you is that on cachyos start screen it gives you the option to install and setup winboat and winboat is great when you need to run windows applications.
Unfortunately, the hardware you use still matters. Hardware manufacturers just don’t care to invest in Linux support, so it’s basically all community driven. The community has done amazing work in spite of that, so a lot if hardware works, but unfortunately, if you want to make a permanent change to Linux, it really pays off to be mindful of that goal when you’re picking components. AMD hardware tends to work better than alternatives in my experience, especially in the GPU, but I don’t use and so can’t speak to any other peripherals.
But I’ve had great luck with some of these things. I used to RDP into my Linux desktop all the time just fine, including from a Windows laptop. I haven’t really played with tiling window managers, but I know there are some powerful ones out there if you’re willing to take the time to learn how to config to your personal taste. I think i3 and xmonad are common for X11 and Hyprland for Wayland. Font and display scaling is highly dependent on the desktop environment you use. I want to say GNOME and KDE have made big strides here in recent years as they try to become adaptable to tablets, phones, and other small hardware, so if you haven’t tried that in a long time, it may be worth a look again.
For specific software you just can’t live without like Teams, there’s two option. WINE is the less resource intensive option, and it’s basically a translation layer that turns Windows system calls into Linux ones, and it’s really good these days. In the rare (for me) case that WINE doesn’t work, if you have the spare resources on the machine, you can use a virtual machine running Windows. If you really need that VM to work fast, you can set up hardware pass through so the VM gets direct access to it. That’s generally pretty easy with CPU cores and RAM, but if you need to pass through the GPU for anything, that can get complicated fast last I knew. And of course, a VM is a heavy option for just making Teams work, but if you want on Linux bad enough, it may become worthwhile.
Really, I feel like the only thing here that should be insurmountable is drivers. Maybe Windows software that you need if you’re really unlucky, but most of that works well these days in my experience.
Career software engineer here, love terminal/CLI, hate using a mouse - keyboard shortcuts are king.
Every 3-4 months I try to switch to Linux and I lose 2-3 days trying 5+ distros only to arrive back on my debloated Windows because things just. don’t. work.
Shortlist of things that don’t work at all or don’t work in a performant manner:
I really would love to make it work, but every time I try and something comes up and I ask online about how I can address it the answer is typically, “you can’t” or “you just need to be OK without that”
I just vm’d my entire win7 install an duse that inside my kubuntu.
For stuff that I can’t- usually extended disk recovery and some vid mastering - i have a racked win machine literally disconnected from the network with a CRU for drives and a kvm to my main monitor.
I’ve been using some variation of Linux since the mid 90’s but never been able to fully switch over. That said I am on my longest and perhaps permanent switch over with KDE EndevourOS (Arch based). I don’t believe this is what you are hoping for but I do believe it is close so perhaps something to keep an eye on for the future.
I have gotten Teams to run once for a about an hour before it crashed and now I can’t figure out what proton/wine voodoo witch doctor recipe I used.
No idea what luck you will have with RDP or RustDesk.
KDE plasma’s window tiling manager is really damn cool but has no documentation. Still you can do neat stuff with it like having a floating window tile on top of another tile (basically an always on top state but on steroids) with distinct tiling arrangements for each virtual desk space.
Scaling has been good but font support is still at the “almost but still not perfect”. A graphics designer might be in trouble.
Drivers - This is where Arch’s pacman (software package manager) and pkgbuild really shine. If it can compile and is available as a git repo, an rpm, or deb file then there is a good chance you can get it working. That said there are still an unfortunate mountain of unsupported stuff.
Otherwise, with all the improvements to Wine via proton and the other forks, it is getting easier to run a lot more Window’s applications.
Like I said, EndevourOS/Arch with KDE is getting pretty close to being an easy jump from Windows but not 100% perfect.
You can rdp from nix to win pretty easily, but rdping to linux requires fuckery that works about 80% of the time, even in the most ideal environs.
I’m using RDP from my CachyOS machine to access my Raspberry Pi and a home server with Linux Mint. The Remmina RDP client works quite well.
I’m quite new to running Linux at home and as an admin, and I recall it took me a bit to get RDP working on my servers but I’ve been very happy with it.
Vnc over ssh works fine
I’ll check it out! I’m a glutton for punishment. Thanks for the suggestion.
If you want punishment go for NixOS!
But once it clicks you have a fully declarative setup**. I edit a file, activate, commit to git. On another system, pull, activate.
** The config system is expansive but not exhaustive. I still have to login to Slack, pick my theme, etc. My VPN on the other hand is just ready credentials and all.
I never have to remember the 100 little tweaks I made, every tweak is in git. Noise canceling pipewire filter, what software I had installed, service configurations, secret management, disk partitions, all portable between different systems.
A lighter introduction is probably home manager, works in any Linux system or macOS. Manages your home directory as the name implies.
You can also go lighter with a repo flake.nix and a devShell. Its like a generic virtual environment. Auto activate with direnv. A step up from a devShell would be https://devenv.sh/ which tracks more like home manager with configurable modules. A devShell is really a bash script with these programs available from Nix.
Not wanting to start any distro wars, its all a matter of taste but I could advise you to try cachyos its also arch based, but with a few performance tweaks, what I believe that it could help you is that on cachyos start screen it gives you the option to install and setup winboat and winboat is great when you need to run windows applications.
Added to my last to try! Thanks!
Unfortunately, the hardware you use still matters. Hardware manufacturers just don’t care to invest in Linux support, so it’s basically all community driven. The community has done amazing work in spite of that, so a lot if hardware works, but unfortunately, if you want to make a permanent change to Linux, it really pays off to be mindful of that goal when you’re picking components. AMD hardware tends to work better than alternatives in my experience, especially in the GPU, but I don’t use and so can’t speak to any other peripherals.
But I’ve had great luck with some of these things. I used to RDP into my Linux desktop all the time just fine, including from a Windows laptop. I haven’t really played with tiling window managers, but I know there are some powerful ones out there if you’re willing to take the time to learn how to config to your personal taste. I think i3 and xmonad are common for X11 and Hyprland for Wayland. Font and display scaling is highly dependent on the desktop environment you use. I want to say GNOME and KDE have made big strides here in recent years as they try to become adaptable to tablets, phones, and other small hardware, so if you haven’t tried that in a long time, it may be worth a look again.
For specific software you just can’t live without like Teams, there’s two option. WINE is the less resource intensive option, and it’s basically a translation layer that turns Windows system calls into Linux ones, and it’s really good these days. In the rare (for me) case that WINE doesn’t work, if you have the spare resources on the machine, you can use a virtual machine running Windows. If you really need that VM to work fast, you can set up hardware pass through so the VM gets direct access to it. That’s generally pretty easy with CPU cores and RAM, but if you need to pass through the GPU for anything, that can get complicated fast last I knew. And of course, a VM is a heavy option for just making Teams work, but if you want on Linux bad enough, it may become worthwhile.
Really, I feel like the only thing here that should be insurmountable is drivers. Maybe Windows software that you need if you’re really unlucky, but most of that works well these days in my experience.