I’m a retired Unix admin. I’ve been using Linux since I installed Slackware 3.1 from several boxes of 1.44MB diskettes. But, working in a corporate environment with lots of M$ Office requirements meant that my work desktop has always been Windows. I know it sounds crazy, but I was really hesitant to switch to away from Windows - I guess after 30+ years I’d developed a bit of Stockholm syndrome. But, Copilot and the looming Recall were enough to push me over the edge.

Anyway - I spent a while making sure I got all my data off OneDrive etc. and then installed Debian 12 with LXDE - my laptop is an older i7 with 16GB of RAM, but lightweight and minimal really appeals to me. Everything just worked and I was happy for a day or two. Then I started noticing video tearing - especially on my 2nd monitor. I did a bit of research and found a suggestion to enable TearFree in the X11 configuration - X wouldn’t even start when I did that. So, I did some more reading and now think I understand that the lightweight window managers don’t have vsync and this causes the tearing. Apparently the real solution is to use a compositing window manager (I don’t understand what that means…) with OpenGL. Oh well, I can’t have minimal lightweight - so, I installed KDE. It’s very clean and no video tearing. I still don’t have it doing power management for my monitors the way I want, but other than that - I’m very happy. It was noticeably sluggish compared to LXDE, but I’m used to that already after only a day.

It’s only been a few days, but I have not regretted the switch for one second.