Steam Proton made me ditch Windows for Ubuntu

I've used ubuntu and zorin os on and off since about 2010. I always found some impossible bug that would drive me insane and I couldn't play games so I'd always end up back on windows. Well Windows 10 is a giant pile of crap and I always had the honeymoon period where it would work just great after a billion updates, reboots, installing drivers, etc. I thought that was normal for any system so I bit down hard and dealt with knowing that every reinstall of windows 10 was going to be an all day affair.

So windows 10 finally crapped the bed again about 3 weeks ago and I eventually fixed the issue but I was so annoyed that MS simply cannot get basic things to function in their system like the taskbar. It would lock up and freeze and at least 2x a day I'd have to restart explorer.exe.

I had linux mint on my 2nd hard drive and wanted to just go work on some stuff and cleanse myself from that troubleshooting nightmare. The icons were too small on my 50 inch TV I use as a monitor and I tried to fix that but got frustrated and gave up. On a whim I said "I'll just try ubuntu... linux mint is based on Ubuntu so maybe that will work better."

I haven't touched windows or even thought about it at all in the last three weeks. The Icons and text are easy to see. Everything "just worked" when I installed 18.04. I just said... well... I'll stick with this.

Then something amazing happened. I knew about steam proton but largely ignored it until I was thinking "what games are on linux" so I start up steam and see a few I like then decided to turn Proton/Steam Play on. I install Oblivion, a notorious game that constantly crashes on windows just for lulz and turned out... it didn't crash. At all. Nothin. Worked outa the box with no mods or issues... I'm very impressed.

Not going back to windows anytime soon.

Bonus story:

My dad has a PC he just uses for teamviewer to work on his office PC in a different town and his PC was so junked up on windows 7 that it just wouldn't work. It would lag and take literally 10 minutes to boot up or do anything with a regular HDD and it just flat out refused to work after I spent HOURS trying to make it act like it had any sense.

I decided to install ZorinOS which of course didn't want to install teamviewer for some reason and then Linux Mint which just worked. I had his files backed up from the home PC and put them on mint, installed it all, done in 10 minutes and he has been perfectly happy with it ever since. Hasn't had a single issue, error, or crash like he did on windows 7. He's not computer savvy at all and it's made my life a lot easier lol

Edit: One extra thing that should be noted. If you are using firefox and the taskbar or address bar are too small for you tread try this:

"Firefox normally follows the system size. You can manually increase a preference in Firefox to globally increase the size of everything -- user interface and content. If you want to try that, here's how:

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Click the button promising to be careful.

(2) In the filter box, type or paste pix and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click layout.css.devPixelsPerPx and change its value to 1.5 and click OK. That makes everything 150% the size it would have been a few years ago when all sizes were fixed.

If this size is too big, double-click the preference and try 1.25 which is equivalent to 125%.

Important: do not use any value lower than 1.0 or things may become too small to adjust. The value of -1.0 is a special flag to Firefox to follow the system Text Size setting. If you want to return to that, right-click the preference and choose Reset rather than risking entering it manually.

Can you get it sized the way you want?"

Copied from