Got told this morning that I'm getting laid off from work. Company is doing some restructuring and my role is no longer required.

Bit poor form imo. No heads up or warning, even my manager didn't know until I told him. Just first thing this morning being told Friday is your last day, see you later.

Really bad timing for me as well. I'm off travelling in Asia for 3 weeks from Saturday, then when I return in December, hiring is usually pretty slim pickings in the run up to Xmas. So looking like I could be unemployed for a few months.

Thankfully I've been putting some cash aside for most of the year, and I've got a good few months of runway to keep myself afloat. After the UK Chancellor put up taxes on businesses for hiring employees, I thought that something like this might happen. And given they're looking to put up taxes again at the end of the month, not surprising that a lot of businesses are reacting by slashing staff.

You don't get economic growth by raising taxes...

I'm in the fortunate position of being a single guy with relatively few outgoings. But for the guys with kids, a mortgage etc. Being laid off with only a few days notice, you think what the hell are they supposed to do.

Gonna enjoy my trip as it's already been paid for, but I'd be lying If I said I wasn't a bit worried. First time being laid off, job market isn't great and the economic outlook isn't looking particularly rosey...

Seems like it's just been one of those years for me where everything has gone down the toilet.

But, gotta crack on. Gonna spend the rest of the week writing my CV (on company time, screw 'em). And hopefully I'll be on to greener pastures come the new year.

@woodsmoke Mint is a great distro and one that I would recommend for those new to linux. It's very similar to Windows (I'd recommend the Cinnamon Edition), and has great hardware/driver support. Also any troubleshooting you find online will be aimed at mint/ubuntu.

The other one I'd recommend is Fedora. SteamOS is built on top of Fedora so it has the best game support of basically all the distros.

I'm a software developer by trade and I'm very familiar with linux, so OpenSUSE is a distro that works well for me as it's aimed more towards software developers, wouldn't really recommend it for the average user.

I'm still hoping someone else in the PC market, particularly the gaming sector, sees this whole thing for the golden opportunity it is. Microsoft is cutting off it's left arm to spite its face and leaving literally millions of customers twisting in the wind. If Valve can get off their ass and develop a working PC version of their OS they could sweep in and play the hero while handily pocketing all the money Microsoft is leaving on the table.

Perhaps this year will be the year of linux.

SteamOS isn't available on desktop, but {Bazzite](https://trp.red/t/1fbd) is and is essentially the same thing. Personally I haven't tried it but I've heard good things.

Now that Windows 10 has reached end of support, and sadly my PC does not have TPM on the chip, so it's not supported by Windows 11.

I'll be damned if I'm gonna upgrade a perfectly working and fast PC for the sake of Windows. So, I've decided to run Linux full time on my PC.

I've been running OpenSUSE for the past 2 or 3 weeks now, and it's fantastic. Aside from a little hiccup getting my Nvidia GPU drivers installed, everything works flawlessly.

Even games now have great support thanks to Valve/Proton. That really was the last reason I had to keep using Windows. Historically it was always the case that everything bar games worked on linux, and if you wanted to play games you were forced to run Windows.

Now, I can full time daily drive linux and do everything I want to, and I doubt I will ever be going back to Windows.

If anyone else is in the same boat I would really recommend switching to Linux. Don't stay on Win 10, as it will no longer receive security updates and you will get pwned over the coming months as vulnerabilities are discovered and exploited.