I’m probably not the best to ask. Most of my VR use these days is in Resonite. Great for building stuff and hanging out, but a lot of people focus hard on the building side.
That being said, one of my first games was Windlands. Nowadays it reeks of early VR weirdness, but grappling and swinging around gave me super stable VR legs. Might still be worth trying if your controllers support it.
Ohhh I misunderstood. I thought you meant actual applications but you just meant vr apps in general. Well, thank you for the recommendations either way!
Thanks for this. I loathe the idea of being stuck on a platform that’s hard to use and swarmed by too many angry idiots who only ever say that linux is perfect and everybody who doesn’t think so is too dumb to read. Everything that makes linux approachable is a big win.
Gotta ditch Microsoft though. Ugh. Changing an OS is such a massive pain, regardless of how much of a requirement Microsoft Recall makes it.
Anyway, more stuff like this, everybody! Thank you again.
You can’t get stuck on Linux any more than you can get stuck on Windows. Every OS is just one short install away. And if you switch to Linux, there will come a point, like there is with everyone who tries it, when you start experimenting with different distros and downloading new ones to try every week, before you probably end up settling back on the one you started with.
They don’t need to understand DEs or any of that. Press Super (“the Windows key”) and start typing “mouse”. Please teach people how to use PCs properly; this is the fastest way to access any program or setting in both Windows and popular DEs: Cinnamon, KDE, MATE… Windows will even happily send anything you type here to Bing for easy web search by default 😑
My wife is not good with computers. I moved her over to Linux with vanilla gnome. It took one 1/2 hr session and she was off and running. The next day I got a bunch of questions - another half hour. About a week later she said “this is SO much better than windows - I love it!”
Linux is easy to use. Installing and maintaining-no. But using - yes.
Honestly, even if I don’t like Snaps that much, Ubuntu/Kubuntu ain’t so bad after all. I’ve been running it as a daily for months now on my Linux-only gaming PC and it’s working quite well. There’s good support for proprietary drivers and media codecs out of the box.
And personally, I’d advise on using the Kubuntu version because KDE is so much closer in terms of desktop paradigm than Gnome.
Canonical (Ubuntu) bastardized their own OS. I recommend Mint Debian for noobs; Mint is what Ubuntu used to be when it was good and going Debian gets away from Canonical entirely.
Snaps, their own app-in-a-box format. Which would be fine, except they’re provided only by Ubuntu’s closed-source Snap Store, have larger size and inferior performance because dependencies are redundantly rolled into each one, and the worst part is that they started turning nearly every app in their OS into a Snap. If you sudo apt install firefox, you get a Firefox Snap instead of a native package.
It’s like a Honda Civic. It’s just reliable and easy to maintain with good performance and some good features and some you don’t really want but are still practical. And there’s a big community giving lots of support and documentation to tweak it if you want more out of it.
I’ll second PopOs, I was sick & tired of windows, I’d wanted Linux for a while and tried a few, PopOs just clicked for me and I’ve not had one problem gaming (which is what I mainly do). 20 min install time and not one problem since, which is about 14 months.
I’m currently on Pop for the last couple years and I’m really happy with it. Being stuck based on 22.04 is getting a little old, but at least it means no new big bugs (in theory).
This may precipitate a massive shift to Linux, especially for gamers.
I run it on the servers I administrate and recommend it to everyone, but I can’t switch until the get Adobe support. I NEED to use Adobe apps for work. At least macOS is UNIX and far better than Winblows.
The very same reason I use macOS for work. I know older versions work fine but when you’re collaborating with a bunch of people using the latest versions and all the cloud and AI stuff, macOS is the most reliable *nix host to run it on. Can’t wait for Wine to figure it out so I can throw my last Windows box and mac in the trash.
M$ ended win7 support in January 14, 2020. Steam did not end win7 support until January 1 2024.
M$ ending support for their OS does not mean Steam will do so anytime soon. Considering how small number of their users has updated, there’s a good chance Steam will keep supporting win10 for many more years.
By that time I know I will no longer be using Windows.
There’s a decent chance M$ continues supporting Win10 after “End of Life,” just like [ checks notes ] every single “mandatory” update they’ve ever attempted.
And even then, the only reason Steam ended support for Windows 7 was because it’s an Electron (Chromium) application. They decided to upgrade their version of Electron, probably to take advantage of newer security fixes in Chromium, which forced them to drop Win7 support because Chromium already had ended support for it.
You are not wrong here. However, this is a double edged sword. By running windows 10 after a good while (let’s say, after 1 year of eol) you are risking for malware that is going to be non patched on windows 10. Of course, if you use the PC mostly for gaming and get stuff mostly from the usual places, I really doubt you get anything. If you work with documents however with macros and stuff, or you might have questionable internet hygiene or foreign external devices like usb on a frequent basis, do not get close to an out of date system
Also, “end of life” doesn’t mean your computer bursts into flames, it just means you stop getting patches.
People around here are super excited about it being this momentous occasion, I guarantee the people that have lived with the “Activate Windows” watermark for a decade don’t care about the “patches are over” pop-up, either.
I mean, Windows 7 has more users than Linux Mint in the Steam survey.
Install SimpleWall. Turn it on. See how many connections MS tries to establish. Block them all and realize your CPU’s been running pretty hard at idle when your fans spool down and your PC is finally quiet.
Tried it on my laptop and work computer. Absolutely hate it. I refuse to upgrade my gaming PC to it. I’m planning on swapping to Linux Mint whenever I feel motivated.
It always feels like Windows users hate moving to the new version every time. Maybe for valid reasons, but they drag their feet kicking and screaming. Then they eventually move to it.
Wine likely just runs your personal programs without issue. And you can swap them to a native compile at some point in the future if you feel motivated.
The only reason I’m still on windows 10 is because I’m dreading the weekend of head banging against table I’m going to have when I do the switch to Linux before October… Not looking forward to getting it all set up and working
Do you have a separate computer that you can use to do a “test run” of using Linux? If not, I would at least play around with Linux in a virtual machine before committing to the bit (and I say this as someone who has been using Linux laptop / Windows desktop for 6-7 ish years now)
Yeah, this was my strategy. Used Mint on a secondary computer until I got more comfortable with it, then made the plunge on my main computer. Made the transition so much easier, as I was able to learn the differences at a relaxed pace.
I might make the plunge soon as my desktop is just slightly too old—but, at the same time, I need Windows for a few things for work so it’s a little frustrating 🫠
Gaming wise I’m completely able to use Linux, but I also don’t really play competitive games with anti-cheat so it is not exactly surprising.
I was dreading trying Linux as well and it was nowhere near as bad as I anticipated. Did full transition (I got new SSD for dual booting to try the waters) to it much faster than I ever anticipated.
I mostly just use the PC for gaming though so mileage may vary.
If you’re switching over with gaming in mind, then using Bazzite or Nobara will make it so you have no head banging. Bazzite has everything you need for gaming all ready to go, and since it’s an immutable distro, it’ll be difficult for a newbie to fuck up on accident.
Sure, if you want to. I run Bazzite on my Steam Deck, and frequently emulate GBA and Switch games. I’ve never done any Playstation (yet), but I know there’s emulators for them. And for many other consoles as well.
Emulators aren’t installed by default on Bazzite though, since it’s geared more towards PC gaming. They’re pretty easy to install though.
If you have a spare drive on your PC I’d recommend trialling Linux on that. With that setup, you will have it dual booted with your existing Windows installation. It should help with the transition since you can just boot into Windows if you still need it for anything. That will give you time to get accustomed to Linux while still having that Windows safety net for a while.
Also if you later find that Linux isn’t for you then it’s easy to undo that, since all you will need to do is boot into your Windows drive instead.
I went with that strategy when I made the jump 4 years ago, and later dropped Windows entirely when I built my new PC a few months later since I realised I didn’t need it at all.
If I modify my existing PC to dual boot from the same drive into Linux, can I easily and safely delete Windows once I have migrated my files into Linux?
Just one piece of warning for dual booting, if the EFI portion for Linux and Windows is on the same drive Windows could decide to nuke the Linux bootloader with any update…
It’s not too difficult to create a redirect to the windows bootloader in Grub or similar, which is the solution I went with in the end.
Yep, you can delete your Windows partition once you no longer need it or any data within it. Then once you update your bootloader (usually GRUB, some distros do this automatically when updating the system), Windows will disappear from the boot options.
Then you can either create a new partition in its place to store data on, or extend an existing partition to fill the empty space.
I’d recommend also backing your data as a precaution in case something goes awry.
Windows 10 isn’t going to suddenly stop working the instant it’s “EOL”. If anything, I’m looking forward to no more random reboots at 3am following a mandatory update that didn’t do anything useful.
Honestly, just install Kubuntu 24.04. Install it and forget it. It’s super stable and has great support. Whatever people argue about the Snap packaging system, that will be almost invisible to you as the end user.
Snaps would be fine if they worked but I don’t know how that shit passed QA AND Ubuntus will install Snaps even when you apt install expecting the proper deb. I’ll keep repeating: Mint Debian for noobs. Mint is what Ubuntu was before this snap crap and Debian base gets away from Canonical entirely.
Once you get it all setup and proud of your work, make a fucking backup image, because a single update that changes an obscure library in some forgettable package that was part of your install will break everything and you will be pulling your hair out kludging a CLI script to unfuck some other binary that was unimportant, but now has affected another thing that was crucial for a graphics card or network adapter to function.
I promise you I’ve been using Linux likely for longer than you’ve been alive, and have used every permutation of Linux, from old school CLI-only shit, to fringe PowerPC YellowDog, to modern Ubuntu/Debian.
Sure thing, friend. I only started on Knoppix and Mandrake. Commodore 64 didn’t have it… I saw in the modern age C64 can run a Unix that takes weeks to boot. 😂 I haven’t managed to put a Debian in dependency hell in about 10 years. 😅
PowerPC YellowDog
Reminds me of swap-trick to install burned Linux for PlayStation 2. I see someone is still compiling kernels for PS2, up to 5.x 😆
This is why I really don’t want to have to use Linux, but Microsuck just can’t stop with the fucking greed and I’m absofucukinglutly not running anything with recall… :(
i dont know what you are using but the general linux experience hasn’t been like this in years. and even if there is a problem now and then a bit of googling generally is all it needs. the one thing you cannot get around is malware like kernel level anticheats. that’s windows only.
having a backup is good advice no matter what system you use
Yeah, same in my experience: updates do not breaks things in debian-derivatives at least. That’s how I managed “well” without backup. That said, linux support is certainly hit-or-miss, which is usually the bigger problem.
AMD support is baked into the kernel, so you really don’t have to do anything unless you’re on bleeding edge hardware and the drivers are in a version of the kernel your distribution doesn’t ship yet.
Isn’t best practice to install your system on a different partition than /home anyway? Back when I used Linux (and the experience was a bit like they described) I’d just nuke the system partition and reinstall if I fucked something up.
Steam runs pretty smooth on Linux. Am currently using OpenSuse. Steam runs smooth. Games run smooth with one or two exceptions. For those exceptions I have a dual boot Windows 10 that doesn’t need Windows Update for anything I ask it to do.
Steam does, but that doesn’t necessarily mean your games will. I spent like an entire day getting comfortable and customizing some distro to finally fit my liking, only to later on realize that proton just doesn’t fucking work for shit on it.
Did you install Steam for Windows in Linux or Steam as a flatpak or something? My experience on many PCs is install Linux, install Steam from the distro’s repo, flip the compatibility switch in Steam settings, and only customize bits here and there because I’m busy gaming or doing work.
This has nothing to do with steam (as much as you can separate the two). Even through Lutris it Proton work. Even plain wine was janky but technically worked.
Huh. Yeah, proton is from Valve… it’s not difficult to get proton-ge from Glorious Eggroll in the mix for some finicky games. I don’t try to put non-Steam games in Steam because Lutris is good at getting everything the game might need. It’s not Valve’s or a Linux OS’s fault if Windows games can’t package everything the game actually needs to run with the damn game. Yeah, yeah, people just want the software to work… For Windows software, that means automatically downloading shit from all over the place and Wine/proton needs to have all that software set up in a workable fashion. It’s like having a bubble of chaos properly contained within the order of Linux but letting in what the bubble needs.
I saw antialiased text in Wine for the first time the other day, that was exciting. 😂
I have to say, in general this doesn’t happen too often. But if you are afraid of this scenario specifically, my advise is either use a separate partition for the home folder (this is where all user installed things go, as well downloads, documents and pictures by default) and make a backup in some other drive with something like timeshift, or use something a bit more advanced namely immutable distro. I will give a bit of advise here: immutable distros can be extremely unintuitive, so if you want to try and understand it, go for a VM and take a weekend playing around. For gaming, bazzite comes to mind for this specific case.
There are two things that hold me to Windows (10) as my daily driver: MS Office, and support for a virtual file synchronization a la Nextcloud (which I presume piggybacks off of what MS built for OneDrive.)
My secondary laptop, my 4 year old’s laptop, my gaming device (Steam deck), homelab, are all on Linux. It has been fun to learn Linux and it’s what I intend for my kid to grow up on.
Eventually, when I get a new laptop (current is 8 years old and I’m really hoping Framework gen 2 has a touchscreen) it’ll be Linux first… And I hope Nextcloud gets that virtual file sync going by then because a network share/WebDAV connection will make me sad.
The Nextcloud application on Windows shows the entire contents of your Nextcloud account in Windows Explorer, as if they were on your hard drive. They are indexed in search. When you access a file, it dynamically downloads that to your hard drive where it stays and is kept in sync with any changes on the server and the server is updated with any changes to the local file.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
No game suggestions, friend requests, surveys, or begging.
No Let’s Plays, streams, highlight reels/montages, random videos or shorts.
No off-topic posts/comments, within reason.
Use the original source, no clickbait titles, no duplicates.
(Submissions should be from the original source if possible, unless from paywalled or non-english sources.
If the title is clickbait or lacks context you may lightly edit the title.)
Let me introduce you to our lord and saviour, tux
And for those of us who heavily use VR applications, pirated 10 LTSC. Once that runs out though, I’m definitely gonna be switching to Linux.
Hey I’m picking up VR currently. Can I get some recommended apps from you?
I’m probably not the best to ask. Most of my VR use these days is in Resonite. Great for building stuff and hanging out, but a lot of people focus hard on the building side.
That being said, one of my first games was Windlands. Nowadays it reeks of early VR weirdness, but grappling and swinging around gave me super stable VR legs. Might still be worth trying if your controllers support it.
Ohhh I misunderstood. I thought you meant actual applications but you just meant vr apps in general. Well, thank you for the recommendations either way!
deleted by creator
Been using Bazzite. Super simple install, been working really well.
Thanks for this. I loathe the idea of being stuck on a platform that’s hard to use and swarmed by too many angry idiots who only ever say that linux is perfect and everybody who doesn’t think so is too dumb to read. Everything that makes linux approachable is a big win.
Gotta ditch Microsoft though. Ugh. Changing an OS is such a massive pain, regardless of how much of a requirement Microsoft Recall makes it.
Anyway, more stuff like this, everybody! Thank you again.
You can’t get stuck on Linux any more than you can get stuck on Windows. Every OS is just one short install away. And if you switch to Linux, there will come a point, like there is with everyone who tries it, when you start experimenting with different distros and downloading new ones to try every week, before you probably end up settling back on the one you started with.
deleted by creator
They don’t need to understand DEs or any of that. Press Super (“the Windows key”) and start typing “mouse”. Please teach people how to use PCs properly; this is the fastest way to access any program or setting in both Windows and popular DEs: Cinnamon, KDE, MATE… Windows will even happily send anything you type here to Bing for easy web search by default 😑
deleted by creator
My wife is not good with computers. I moved her over to Linux with vanilla gnome. It took one 1/2 hr session and she was off and running. The next day I got a bunch of questions - another half hour. About a week later she said “this is SO much better than windows - I love it!”
Linux is easy to use. Installing and maintaining-no. But using - yes.
Honestly, even if I don’t like Snaps that much, Ubuntu/Kubuntu ain’t so bad after all. I’ve been running it as a daily for months now on my Linux-only gaming PC and it’s working quite well. There’s good support for proprietary drivers and media codecs out of the box.
And personally, I’d advise on using the Kubuntu version because KDE is so much closer in terms of desktop paradigm than Gnome.
And Fedora ain’t bad either.
Canonical (Ubuntu) bastardized their own OS. I recommend Mint Debian for noobs; Mint is what Ubuntu used to be when it was good and going Debian gets away from Canonical entirely.
Wait what did they do?
Snaps, their own app-in-a-box format. Which would be fine, except they’re provided only by Ubuntu’s closed-source Snap Store, have larger size and inferior performance because dependencies are redundantly rolled into each one, and the worst part is that they started turning nearly every app in their OS into a Snap. If you
sudo apt install firefox, you get a Firefox Snap instead of a native package.deleted by creator
It’s like a Honda Civic. It’s just reliable and easy to maintain with good performance and some good features and some you don’t really want but are still practical. And there’s a big community giving lots of support and documentation to tweak it if you want more out of it.
You’re clearly wrong. The answer is Arch
OK, but seriously. There are two main general use families:
Debian based and redhat based
Pick something that has a DE out of the box. Use it. The big ones used to be GNOME and KDE. I dont know which one is more recommended now.
Find equivalent programs (ie. Notepad -> gedit, adobe pdf reader -> evince).
Figure out the windows start menu equivalent: how do I access my programs?
Maybe six months to a year later, learn how to use a terminal emulator.
Maybe a year later, switch to arch and find out why it’s superior
I’ll second PopOs, I was sick & tired of windows, I’d wanted Linux for a while and tried a few, PopOs just clicked for me and I’ve not had one problem gaming (which is what I mainly do). 20 min install time and not one problem since, which is about 14 months.
I’m currently on Pop for the last couple years and I’m really happy with it. Being stuck based on 22.04 is getting a little old, but at least it means no new big bugs (in theory).
I was stuck too and I had to reinstall everything to get the upgrade done. That’s the Linux game
This may precipitate a massive shift to Linux, especially for gamers.
I run it on the servers I administrate and recommend it to everyone, but I can’t switch until the get Adobe support. I NEED to use Adobe apps for work. At least macOS is UNIX and far better than Winblows.
The very same reason I use macOS for work. I know older versions work fine but when you’re collaborating with a bunch of people using the latest versions and all the cloud and AI stuff, macOS is the most reliable *nix host to run it on. Can’t wait for Wine to figure it out so I can throw my last Windows box and mac in the trash.
Maybe because Windows 11 sucks
I won’t upgrade til they let me use throttlestop with virtualization enabled.
M$ ended win7 support in January 14, 2020. Steam did not end win7 support until January 1 2024. M$ ending support for their OS does not mean Steam will do so anytime soon. Considering how small number of their users has updated, there’s a good chance Steam will keep supporting win10 for many more years. By that time I know I will no longer be using Windows.
Yep, that was the only reason I finally pulled the trigger. What makes me laugh is it wasn’t even about windows, it was because of fucking CHROME.
There’s a decent chance M$ continues supporting Win10 after “End of Life,” just like [ checks notes ] every single “mandatory” update they’ve ever attempted.
And even then, the only reason Steam ended support for Windows 7 was because it’s an Electron (Chromium) application. They decided to upgrade their version of Electron, probably to take advantage of newer security fixes in Chromium, which forced them to drop Win7 support because Chromium already had ended support for it.
You are not wrong here. However, this is a double edged sword. By running windows 10 after a good while (let’s say, after 1 year of eol) you are risking for malware that is going to be non patched on windows 10. Of course, if you use the PC mostly for gaming and get stuff mostly from the usual places, I really doubt you get anything. If you work with documents however with macros and stuff, or you might have questionable internet hygiene or foreign external devices like usb on a frequent basis, do not get close to an out of date system
11’s been fine for me. I know this is a hot take around here but if any readers are dreading it because of things you’ve read, just try it out.
Also, “end of life” doesn’t mean your computer bursts into flames, it just means you stop getting patches.
People around here are super excited about it being this momentous occasion, I guarantee the people that have lived with the “Activate Windows” watermark for a decade don’t care about the “patches are over” pop-up, either.
I mean, Windows 7 has more users than Linux Mint in the Steam survey.
It’s not the usability that’s the issue, it’s the spyware.
Windows 10 has had more or less all of the same spyware backported to it.
People said the same shit with windows 10 vs 7/8. I swear every other update is the same cope over and over again.
I’m not worried about functionality, I’m worried about ads, AI, and privacy. Win11 is actively hostile on all three points
Install SimpleWall. Turn it on. See how many connections MS tries to establish. Block them all and realize your CPU’s been running pretty hard at idle when your fans spool down and your PC is finally quiet.
Then ask why.
Tried it on my laptop and work computer. Absolutely hate it. I refuse to upgrade my gaming PC to it. I’m planning on swapping to Linux Mint whenever I feel motivated.
fuck Windows, I am done with M$
Already begun the switch to linux on smaller pcs. Moving to some larger ones this summer to verify initial impressions… big gaming pcs going in fall.
Well… BYE Felicia
It always feels like Windows users hate moving to the new version every time. Maybe for valid reasons, but they drag their feet kicking and screaming. Then they eventually move to it.
This time it’s an issue with hardware requirements though. Many people will have to upgrade to even install win11
I prefer stability, so I only swap to an new OS when I have a fresh machine. Plus, MS is a bully and just plain suspicious. My PC, my rules.
If they want to buy me a new laptop, go for it.
deleted by creator
Wine likely just runs your personal programs without issue. And you can swap them to a native compile at some point in the future if you feel motivated.
The only reason I’m still on windows 10 is because I’m dreading the weekend of head banging against table I’m going to have when I do the switch to Linux before October… Not looking forward to getting it all set up and working
Do you have a separate computer that you can use to do a “test run” of using Linux? If not, I would at least play around with Linux in a virtual machine before committing to the bit (and I say this as someone who has been using Linux laptop / Windows desktop for 6-7 ish years now)
Yeah, this was my strategy. Used Mint on a secondary computer until I got more comfortable with it, then made the plunge on my main computer. Made the transition so much easier, as I was able to learn the differences at a relaxed pace.
I might make the plunge soon as my desktop is just slightly too old—but, at the same time, I need Windows for a few things for work so it’s a little frustrating 🫠
Gaming wise I’m completely able to use Linux, but I also don’t really play competitive games with anti-cheat so it is not exactly surprising.
When you make an installer USB stick, it also doubles as a live preview (for most? all? distros).
So you just boot into it and you can play with it before running the installation.
Bazzite was a 15 minute experience for me, from first boot to playing X4 foundations and sea of thieves.
Take the leap.
I was dreading trying Linux as well and it was nowhere near as bad as I anticipated. Did full transition (I got new SSD for dual booting to try the waters) to it much faster than I ever anticipated.
I mostly just use the PC for gaming though so mileage may vary.
If you’re switching over with gaming in mind, then using Bazzite or Nobara will make it so you have no head banging. Bazzite has everything you need for gaming all ready to go, and since it’s an immutable distro, it’ll be difficult for a newbie to fuck up on accident.
can it run some emulator? like nintendo or ps or ps2?
Sure, if you want to. I run Bazzite on my Steam Deck, and frequently emulate GBA and Switch games. I’ve never done any Playstation (yet), but I know there’s emulators for them. And for many other consoles as well.
Emulators aren’t installed by default on Bazzite though, since it’s geared more towards PC gaming. They’re pretty easy to install though.
If you have a spare drive on your PC I’d recommend trialling Linux on that. With that setup, you will have it dual booted with your existing Windows installation. It should help with the transition since you can just boot into Windows if you still need it for anything. That will give you time to get accustomed to Linux while still having that Windows safety net for a while.
Also if you later find that Linux isn’t for you then it’s easy to undo that, since all you will need to do is boot into your Windows drive instead.
I went with that strategy when I made the jump 4 years ago, and later dropped Windows entirely when I built my new PC a few months later since I realised I didn’t need it at all.
If I modify my existing PC to dual boot from the same drive into Linux, can I easily and safely delete Windows once I have migrated my files into Linux?
Just one piece of warning for dual booting, if the EFI portion for Linux and Windows is on the same drive Windows could decide to nuke the Linux bootloader with any update…
It’s not too difficult to create a redirect to the windows bootloader in Grub or similar, which is the solution I went with in the end.
Yep, you can delete your Windows partition once you no longer need it or any data within it. Then once you update your bootloader (usually GRUB, some distros do this automatically when updating the system), Windows will disappear from the boot options.
Then you can either create a new partition in its place to store data on, or extend an existing partition to fill the empty space.
I’d recommend also backing your data as a precaution in case something goes awry.
Windows 10 isn’t going to suddenly stop working the instant it’s “EOL”. If anything, I’m looking forward to no more random reboots at 3am following a mandatory update that didn’t do anything useful.
Honestly, just install Kubuntu 24.04. Install it and forget it. It’s super stable and has great support. Whatever people argue about the Snap packaging system, that will be almost invisible to you as the end user.
Snaps would be fine if they worked but I don’t know how that shit passed QA AND Ubuntus will install Snaps even when you apt install expecting the proper deb. I’ll keep repeating: Mint Debian for noobs. Mint is what Ubuntu was before this snap crap and Debian base gets away from Canonical entirely.
Just get another disk or partition and get it running on that. If it goes fucky, boot into Win and game, try again later.
Once you get it all setup and proud of your work, make a fucking backup image, because a single update that changes an obscure library in some forgettable package that was part of your install will break everything and you will be pulling your hair out kludging a CLI script to unfuck some other binary that was unimportant, but now has affected another thing that was crucial for a graphics card or network adapter to function.
You’re either running Arch/some other bleeding-edge system without Linux experience (do not recommend) or you haven’t tried Linux in 10 years.
I promise you I’ve been using Linux likely for longer than you’ve been alive, and have used every permutation of Linux, from old school CLI-only shit, to fringe PowerPC YellowDog, to modern Ubuntu/Debian.
Sure thing, friend. I only started on Knoppix and Mandrake. Commodore 64 didn’t have it… I saw in the modern age C64 can run a Unix that takes weeks to boot. 😂 I haven’t managed to put a Debian in dependency hell in about 10 years. 😅
Reminds me of swap-trick to install burned Linux for PlayStation 2. I see someone is still compiling kernels for PS2, up to 5.x 😆
This is why I really don’t want to have to use Linux, but Microsuck just can’t stop with the fucking greed and I’m absofucukinglutly not running anything with recall… :(
i dont know what you are using but the general linux experience hasn’t been like this in years. and even if there is a problem now and then a bit of googling generally is all it needs. the one thing you cannot get around is malware like kernel level anticheats. that’s windows only.
having a backup is good advice no matter what system you use
Yeah, same in my experience: updates do not breaks things in debian-derivatives at least. That’s how I managed “well” without backup. That said, linux support is certainly hit-or-miss, which is usually the bigger problem.
I don’t know, the last time I tried Linux the fucking Nvidia driver fucked my system a couple times before I said fuck it and went back to 10.
Going to try again with my amd card at some point
AMD support is baked into the kernel, so you really don’t have to do anything unless you’re on bleeding edge hardware and the drivers are in a version of the kernel your distribution doesn’t ship yet.
That’s fantastic news! Nvidia drivers are literally the reason I’ve abandoned Linux easily a half dozen times.
Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, can’t control what support Nvidia offers for their own products, but he often shows his opinion of them:
Isn’t best practice to install your system on a different partition than /home anyway? Back when I used Linux (and the experience was a bit like they described) I’d just nuke the system partition and reinstall if I fucked something up.
Steam runs pretty smooth on Linux. Am currently using OpenSuse. Steam runs smooth. Games run smooth with one or two exceptions. For those exceptions I have a dual boot Windows 10 that doesn’t need Windows Update for anything I ask it to do.
Steam does, but that doesn’t necessarily mean your games will. I spent like an entire day getting comfortable and customizing some distro to finally fit my liking, only to later on realize that proton just doesn’t fucking work for shit on it.
Did you install Steam for Windows in Linux or Steam as a flatpak or something? My experience on many PCs is install Linux, install Steam from the distro’s repo, flip the compatibility switch in Steam settings, and only customize bits here and there because I’m busy gaming or doing work.
This has nothing to do with steam (as much as you can separate the two). Even through Lutris it Proton work. Even plain wine was janky but technically worked.
Huh. Yeah, proton is from Valve… it’s not difficult to get proton-ge from Glorious Eggroll in the mix for some finicky games. I don’t try to put non-Steam games in Steam because Lutris is good at getting everything the game might need. It’s not Valve’s or a Linux OS’s fault if Windows games can’t package everything the game actually needs to run with the damn game. Yeah, yeah, people just want the software to work… For Windows software, that means automatically downloading shit from all over the place and Wine/proton needs to have all that software set up in a workable fashion. It’s like having a bubble of chaos properly contained within the order of Linux but letting in what the bubble needs.
I saw antialiased text in Wine for the first time the other day, that was exciting. 😂
Make a dual boot system. You can continue to use win10 while getting comfortable with linux. If something breaks just reboot.
I have to say, in general this doesn’t happen too often. But if you are afraid of this scenario specifically, my advise is either use a separate partition for the home folder (this is where all user installed things go, as well downloads, documents and pictures by default) and make a backup in some other drive with something like timeshift, or use something a bit more advanced namely immutable distro. I will give a bit of advise here: immutable distros can be extremely unintuitive, so if you want to try and understand it, go for a VM and take a weekend playing around. For gaming, bazzite comes to mind for this specific case.
There are two things that hold me to Windows (10) as my daily driver: MS Office, and support for a virtual file synchronization a la Nextcloud (which I presume piggybacks off of what MS built for OneDrive.)
My secondary laptop, my 4 year old’s laptop, my gaming device (Steam deck), homelab, are all on Linux. It has been fun to learn Linux and it’s what I intend for my kid to grow up on.
Eventually, when I get a new laptop (current is 8 years old and I’m really hoping Framework gen 2 has a touchscreen) it’ll be Linux first… And I hope Nextcloud gets that virtual file sync going by then because a network share/WebDAV connection will make me sad.
What’s a virtual file synchronization?
I may be pulling out the wrong term, but:
The Nextcloud application on Windows shows the entire contents of your Nextcloud account in Windows Explorer, as if they were on your hard drive. They are indexed in search. When you access a file, it dynamically downloads that to your hard drive where it stays and is kept in sync with any changes on the server and the server is updated with any changes to the local file.
Maybe on demand file sync is a better term.
Ah, like the Android app. I think the Linux Nextcloud version has an experimental option for it but I never gave it a try.
I assume the partial sync is not sufficient for your use case? I usually only sync the folders I need on that machine.