If you’re planning to try Linux but have no experience with it, the best piece of advice I was given is this. Learn how the filesystem is structured. It will make everything else you try to do easier.
You’re also going to get a ton of conflicting advice on which distro to use. Pop OS or Mint are my suggestions. [email protected] is a good resource to know about too
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).
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.
Ye, my dirty little secret is that I’m still running kubuntu on my main laptop (which I do a lot of gaming on as well fwiw.) It’s what it shipped with, and it works just fine. I can’t say I would have actively chosen it, but It’s also not bad enough to make me want to go through the hassle of installing something else
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.
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.
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.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t do a little of that in my younger years, but I’ve calmed down a lot. These days I generally advise caution when someone tells me they want to switch to Linux.
I personally don’t actually think any one variant of Linux is that much harder to use than Windows or Mac. I think the difficulty comes from two things:
One, I think people forget how much learning is involved in those OS’s as well. If you’ve ever tried to teach an elderly grandparent how to use “the computer” then you know first hand how much of this specialised knowledge you can take for granted. Simple things like knowing where to look to change mouse sensitivity as an example, are really challenging to any new user of any OS.
Two, there isn’t just one variant of Linux. It’s biggest strength is also it’s greatest weakness here. It’s amazing that you have so many choices for your desktop environment, but that comes with the major drawback of users needing to understand what a desktop environment is, and why Googling “how to change mouse sensitivity in Linux” is probably not going to return anything useful. You have so much choice in Linux for every little thing. Down to a level of granularity that most Windows or Mac users wouldn’t even realise they’re not getting a choice in. Alsa vs pulseaudio, xorg vs wayland, not to mention the plethora of package managers. Hell even drivers for your video card: proprietary vs open source. And yes, some of those examples boil down to the old way vs the new way, but ALL of this is added complexity, which results in a steeper learning curve for a new user.
So yeah, Linux is hard to use. The learning curve is a cliff, and anyone who thinks it’s perfect is kidding themselves! ESPECIALLY for the user who just wants to play a few games, and maybe do some browsing. We’ll never get the year of the Linux desktop with this mentality!
I do also try to warn new users about this. It is a whole new ballgame, and it will take some effort to get up to the same level of comfort you have in Windows. It really is best to not just jump in to the deep end, and fully wipe your system on day 1.
Start with a VM, then dual boot, and once you’ve stopped booting into WIndows in frustration, then you’re ready to commit.
One thing I promise though, it is 100% worth the effort
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.
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 😑
OK so I think you might be joking but in case you’re not:
“They don’t need to understand DEs” and “Please teach people.” Well which is it? is it intuitive or does it need to be taught? It can’t be both
That was just an example. Your solution doesn’t solve the problem I’m describing as a whole and I think my point still stands. Search might be common to most DEs but that doesn’t change the fact that they all work slightly differently, and if you want to know how to do something that can’t just be searched for, you need to know what DE you’re using. Which means knowing what a DE is. Not to mention, a user coming from a Mac wouldn’t think to just hit super anyway. It’s cmd + space there.
It’s not the “proper” way, it’s just “a” way. There is no “proper” way do to this kind of thing. I would even argue that it’s not even the “best” way because you’re not learning how to navigate your OS/DE if you do it that way.
This is exactly the kind of facetious bs “ugh, it’s not hard, just rtfm, noob” response the op is talking about
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.
Thing is, there’s people out there on windows 10 on a computer without the magic special chip windows 11 demands.
Lots of those people can’t update and lots don’t know about Linux or understand how to even use a USB drive to install it.
Yes it’s easy for us semi tech people, but remember not everyone is into tech or understand how computers works.
People NEED computers to do stuff like applying for jobs, or searching online, or video games with friends.
Those people who don’t have a tpm chip and can’t upgrade will just not and continue using a insecure windows 10 because they don’t know or understand what it is.
Remember Lemmy, just because you understand tech, doesn’t mean everyone knows about it, or can grasp the concepts.
My dad has a bunch of old friends that elected me to be their tech support, which makes me have to explain the basics of the basics most of the time. Trust me when I say that a lot of people in these forums have no idea how tech illiterate some people are.
I had a situation years ago where an old guy asked me to reset his android phone. I - unfortunately - complied because I made the mistake of trusting that he knew what he was asking, so I just made sure everything was backed up on his cloud. Result: he lost access to his photos, numbers, etc because he had no idea that he had a gmail account associated to his phone. Fortunately, his daughter knew and remembered the password so he recovered them.
Another situation I had with another guy was having to explain why stremio wouldn’t work on his iphone while his friends (with androids) could use it. Without going into details, he didn’t know what an “OS” was.
Let me repeat it because it’s relevant to this post: the guy didn’t know what an Operative System was. And he’s hardly alone.
In these kind of tech forums, I found that a lot of users don’t truly grasp how tech illiterates can be (and sometimes confuse that for lack of intelligence, but that’s another discussion). It’s hard for them to understand how most people don’t care what OS they are running. A lot of people will continue to use Windows 10 and not care they don’t receive more updates, as far as they are concerned, it still works and lets them do their stuff.
How could anyone consider themselves a well-rounded adult without a basic understanding of silicate geochemistry? Silicates are everywhere! It’s hard to throw a rock without throwing one!
Like seriously, if there was ever a time to do a concerted push for linux, it’s now. Start the campaigns, start the tutorials start the memes and the warnings and get the process down to under an hour. It won’t be a weird thing, it will be the lord and savior allowing your PC to continue even when windows says it can’t.
Sounds nice and I wish it was like that, but people who are not into tech won’t get those messages and wouldn’t care as for them it’s “it’s turning on, I don’t need to do all that”. Remember there’s people out there that do not understand computers in the slightest, and it’s just not there thing, have to much going on, or some other reason.
Plus Linux is far from “I just turn it on and it works” kinda person friendly.
I went out of my way to get a TPM from my systems OEM. I’m a tech, I’ve built dozens of machines without issue. I personally use a Dell, because I can’t be arsed to deal with it for my own kit.
Granted, the Dell I’m using can easily fit the HEDT description, but still.
I’m still using Windows 10 because fuck Windows 11. I am forced to use that shit for work and I hate it. I’m constantly in need of stuff from the settings/control panel to fix other people’s shit, and every time I go to settings, shit is somewhere different, buttons are moved or entirely missing… It’s a right fucking mess.
On any Windows 10 system, I go to control panel, find the appropriate item, such as programs and features, or network and sharing center, etc… And all the controls are there, working, and haven’t changed in any meaningful way since XP.
The thing that Microsoft seems to have abandoned is sent semblance of consistency. They’re so deep in the shit with their CD/CI with the settings panel that for every feature build of Windows 10/11, the settings menu will have options in dramatically different locations. The main difference between 10 and 11 here is that, in Windows 10, the control panel was still in one piece. In Windows 11, several control panel icons now take you to the settings menu “equivalents” to the cpl you’re looking for.
This is particularly bad with printing. Omg. How tf do I check/change the fucking driver in use for a printer in the fucking Windows 11 settings menu?
If I go through what’s left of the control panel, and go to devices and printers, I get taken to the settings menu for devices which includes a section for printers, so I go into printers, and I have to hunt down a moving target for where tf they put the button to open the control panel printers and devices dialog, which seems to change weekly. Then I can open the printer settings dialog and see what driver is in use on the advanced tab, or what fucking port it’s connected to… Which, when you deal with network printers, is a pretty fucking important piece of information. Then, half the time the printer port is a fucking wsd, and I have to go spelunking into the registry to find it’s fucking IP address.
Wsd ports are fine right up until they fuck up, which happens frequently, TCP/IP ports don’t really have any problems at all. So why the fuck are we moving everyone to fucking wsd ports? Where is the benefit? Explain Microsoft! Explain!
It’s so goddamned frustrating to use as a technician. A lot of this stuff doesn’t really apply to steam users or home users in general, because these menus aren’t really looked at a lot. So the TPM requirement is the usual suspect for people’s frustrations with Windows 11.
I wouldn’t give nearly as much of a shit if they would just leave things where they are. I would only need to learn where the buttons and knobs and dialogs are once, and that would be it. But they have a bug shoved so far up their ass about making “improvements” that I can’t rely on anything staying where it is.
This is true not everyone out there has the capability to go out and have something like Linux, or the best version of windows 10 on their machines. But most people here are either knowledgeable enough, or have enough patience to try something like Linux out. If you know people that are in this position with their current machines from windows 10 to 11,and are not tech savvy, help them, and try not to be patronizing. Help them out by installing something like mint or Ubuntu and walk with them on the system, as many times as needed. If they cannot get used to it or find something that simply won’t work, don’t try to force Linux on them. Just find the best windows 10 version and install it. At some point if something doesn’t work anymore on windows 10 and they want to keep the machine, they will reach out to try Linux again, or, they will try to sell the machine they cannot operate with anymore (or give away, depending on the situation). Either way, help people out but don’t be abrasive if things do not work out the way you wanted.
I wish it was more straightfoward to make vm, customize settings and then transfer that to an external ssd to dual boot, I want to ease into linux but I get confused seeing all the differetn ways to do things and no consensus.
Also people talking about changing Distris all the time, do they retain their data? Is that what a home drive is for? Just asking here since you seem to know lol. Like can you redload your apps, ui, retain your data “easily.” (once you do it once)
I’m a PC that’s not currently “compatible” with Windows 11, because I’m too lazy/refuse to enable TPM 2.0 in my BIOS.
Given how much of a pain in the ass my work machine is with Win 11 — I’d honestly rather switch to Linux than deal with it on my home system.
I’ve been tinkering with my Steam Deck for almost a year, and haven’t been able to accidentally brick it - it’s definitely come a long way from where it was back in my uni days (early 00s).
I did get TPM 2.0 enabled and the updater still thinks it isn’t there. Linux is now my primary with Win10 as a fallback for the handfull of programs that won’t run acceptably in Wine or Proton. My biggest problem so far is Civilization 6; Aspyr hasn’t updated the Linux build in ages and doing multiplayer with the Windows version via Proton makes it lag with terrible frame rate. Single player is fine, and multi in Win10 is also fine, so I’m not sure what to do about it.
Have you given any thought to switching to a LTSC version of Windows 10 Enterprise? There are a few trade-offs from what I can see, but at least it eliminates the issue of no security updates for up to 5 more years.
I’m still mulling over the pro’s and con’s - curious on what you think.
It’d hopefully allow you to keep Civ6 multiplayer going for the time being until (if/when) the Linux issues get solved?
My I7 7700k is a good processor. It serves my needs from office work, to software dev, to gaming, to video production. I’ll eventually retire this machine, but that’s at least a year off, and even then, it’ll be repurposed since it’s an extremely capable machine.
I shouldn’t have to upgrade because MS made an arbitrary decision to not support capable hardware after telling me Win10 was the last Windows OS. Nah, I’m switching everything over to Linux and using the hardware I have now instead of creating e-waste.
One of the requirements is full secureboot and recovery arrangements that didn’t exist when I installed back in the 8 days. Now I can reinstall over the old drive and that will do all the plumbing that enables 11. So the hardware is 11 compatible, but the existing software install isn’t.
*Edit to answer the question, no, it’s not too late. Most compatible CPUs have a lesser firmware TPM, but most mobos have a slot for a vendor specific hardware TPM. Which is what I got.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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. 😂
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 😆
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I moved my wife’s computer to Windows 11 because it was using a 12th gen Intel, and from what I had understood, the scheduler was better for the P-core/E-core nonsense.
Over the last year I’ve seen numerous popups, copilot being injected everywhere, nonstop bullshit. And plenty of benchmarks showing that Windows 11 is actually slower than Windows 10 on my particular hardware. I’d just really rather move to something with healthy support for Proton/SteamOS ecosystem and be done with MS forever.
I mean, I already use Linux elsewhere in life. I’ve got Proxmox set up with a bunch of VMs, so Linux isn’t a stranger to me - but I use a *cough* version of Solidworks and there’s just simply nothing that comes even close to its capabilities. Additionally, one of the games I play has a hard enough time not crashing on the system it was designed for - trying to figure out if it’s the game, or the system I’m playing on when it’s crashing would drive me absolutely bonkers.
For me, I am concerned about Microsoft going fascist. Last thing I need is my PC to be a turncoat. Also, I hate being forced to update. I want to pick my updates and schedule.
From what’s been seen checks and balances no longer exists in the US and is moving towards authoritarianism, and threatening allies is not normal. And enemy in the west is more of a concern for a lot of people due to proximity.
Any country undergoing a huge purge and closures would be raising alarms, and it is more worrying because of the huge military and economic influence and power of the US.
America just lost a huge amount of federal workers, Elon has broken into the treasury, and Trump ended our foreign relations for no good reason.
America is splitting apart, and corporations will have to pick a side. Considering that Microsoft controls the most common OS in the world, it would be very strange if DOGE didn’t try to take control.
Think of it this way: Microsoft can use Copilot down the road to monitor what games and media you have. Considering that the Trump Regime has literally forced the disbanding of military cultural clubs, removal of posters featuring minorities or women, established a DEI watchlist, and so on…as someone who plays a great deal of Japanese games, I wouldn’t feel safe. Plus my PC has all of my passwords, documents, and so forth.
Ask yourself this: “Am I safe from persecution?”
Just because you have no interest in politics, it doesn’t mean that politics aren’t interested in you.
CAD is certainly the most difficult shortcoming of FOSS.
Freecad is fine fine a single part and it’s actually stable unlike everything else, but doing assemblies requires an add-on. I don’t recall if those work in simulation though. Its workflow also needs more time. It has come a long way in the least several years though. I suspect it will get to be competitive in the next few. Especially as dassault and Autodesk keep trying to inject AI BS and force you further into their cloud services.
The Enterprise LTSC versions will be supported for a few more years, regular support for Pro is ending in October same as Home. Some of the worst stuff like Co-Pilot hasn’t made it in
to LTSC (yet).
I dual boot and still use Windows 10. And everything I’ve seen from Windows 11 just seems like trash to me. My mother got a new laptop about a year ago and I came along to help her set it up. With her previous laptop, I opted to not do the free update to Windows 10 because people were complaining about it at the time (and I was still on Windows 7), so she ended up stuck with Windows 8.1 for years. So this time I did opt for the free update to Windows 11 and it feels like a huge mistake so far.
Her machine is now slow and struggles to get things up and running. And every single fucking time she tries to use it, it decides to run virus scans and download and install updates all at the same time. And these updates often seem to take an entire day. The last update took two days where she could barely do anything on her laptop because it was slowing things up so much.
And that all makes the frustration add up when you come across the other fucking stupid things they’ve done. So now when you right click on the desktop there’s a few seconds where Windows needs to get its shit together to show you the new useless menu that’s been slapped on top of the old useful menu. Then you need to click ‘show more options’ for the actual useful menu. Then another few seconds for Windows to get its shit together to load that menu.
And I don’t want to load a bunch of stuff like classic shell or winaero tweaker because she’s old and just wants to play hidden object games and solitaire. So I’m going to have to come running every time something happens that she doesn’t understand. So I prefer leaving it vanilla.
But fuck Windows 11. It’s absolute fucking garbage based on my experience so far. I was going to hold out for the inevitable Windows 12 because Microsoft seem to love using their paying customers as beta testers with every second OS they release but now I’m not so sure. Hoping there will be some sort of hack to keep enterprise updates coming or something.
I’m still on 10. I’m waffling between installing bazzite on my laptop, building a new computer and installing bazzite, or just using my steam deck as a daily driver. But none of the options include using windows.
When I was young and dealing with Win 98 and XP before all the service packs updates had like 10% chance of bricking the OS and would give me anxiety so I’d avoid them. Even with Windows 7 had an update that made explorer.exe refuse to start. It hasn’t happened in many years, maybe they got their shit together but I still have anxiety about updates even though I’m savvy enough to fix issues now. Just because I can doesn’t mean I wanna.
Still on 10 here, turned off the TPM chip, got kubuntu on a second drive, just hoping proton can get the other 70% of my vr library to recognise before EoL
Anyone that is on 10 still isn’t going to go to Linux
Eh, there’s a few of us. I intend to at least give Linux a solid try before I swap to Win11.
My thoughts are that at that point I realistically have to swap anyways. It’s just a question of whether I’m going to Win11- which I’ll have to customize to my preferences and generally figure out, or Linux- which I’ll have to customize to my preferences and generally figure out.
I’m on the tech savvy side of things, and I still find Linux intimidating so I don’t think this will be a mass migration to Linux or anything.
I’ve considered Linux a couple times in the past, but generally stayed away because my PC is primarily used for gaming which didn’t have the best support then. Things are kinda different now- support is generally better.
Yeah, I stayed on xp until I got a new pc during 7, then I stayed on 7 until I got a new pc during 10. I’ll probably stay on 10 until whatever is after 11 comes out, even though I know better, because I just don’t care enough.
I know i would, lol! I def fit the type being described. I just jumped over to Linux after having a hard drive crash necessitating the installation of a new OS. I was just gonna go with windows 10 again but it was giving me fits trying to install it for some reason. Starting to wonder if i had a bad PC and not a bad hard drive, i decided to make a bootable usb stick with Mint using an old laptop. Eventually i got it to boot up my PC and i never looked back. Took a little while to get used to the new system but so much of it works the same way as Windows that i had little trouble bridging any gaps. I don’t do PC gaming though, so i probably haven’t run into the problems that i imagine are preventing others from making the leap. I guess I wouldn’t bother going back now even if I could, now that I’m talking about it…I’m very happy with Mint.
I know someone that is deathly afraid of tracking by Microsoft to upgrade their pc from Windows 8. They won’t spend the time to learn linux, as they use a proprietary app specific to windows for what they use. I point out Win8 has the same kind of data collection and they dismiss it with a head-in-the-sand response.
Yea, as someone who games on linux (ArchBTW), I don’t know if its really there yet for mass adoption, I was helping a younger sibling troubleshoot their dying PC and they even suggested I install Linux on it for them. With a fresh Linux Mint iso on my Ventoy USB, the voices raged at me to convert another penguin. But sadly I knew, deep down, they are not ready to deal with the issues if something goes wrong, a software has no Linux support, or if they ever want to mod their games.
Those kinds of people probably wouldn’t be able to deal with issues in Windows either. Just teach them how to install the OS and start firefox. If it completely breaks at some point tell them to install the OS again.
Can anyone speak to the VR experience on Linux? I mainly use my desktop PC for VR nowadays, steam deck for everything else. From what I’ve heard, however, VR is still steaming garbage on Linux.
I’ve been meaning to get a Linux VM spun up for testing games. I gather that I’ll have some issues (i.e. blockers) with multi-player games and cheat-prevention, but I’d just as soon play single player games anyway.
I’ve been a Linux/Unix admin for 25+ years so I’ve no excuse other than convenience. But I’m done.
Thanks for posting this, I didn’t realise how many of my most played games have issues, or are unplayable, according to Proton DB. I forgot that it was effectively impossible to play a huge number of multiplayer games with anticheat/whatever stuff.
That’s really unfortunate, but yeah, better to know beforehand.
The really painful part about this is it doesn’t need to be this way. A lot of popular anti cheat software supports Linux, but the game devs just don’t enable it. GTA is one example of these. It’s allegedly just a checkbox that Rockstar won’t check.
Honestly I migrated to bazzite about a month ago and my entire library has just… worked. It was shockingly easy. I haven’t changed anything from defaults at all.
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Gonna repeat something I said a little while ago.
If you’re planning to try Linux but have no experience with it, the best piece of advice I was given is this. Learn how the filesystem is structured. It will make everything else you try to do easier.
You’re also going to get a ton of conflicting advice on which distro to use. Pop OS or Mint are my suggestions. [email protected] is a good resource to know about too
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
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.
Ye, my dirty little secret is that I’m still running kubuntu on my main laptop (which I do a lot of gaming on as well fwiw.) It’s what it shipped with, and it works just fine. I can’t say I would have actively chosen it, but It’s also not bad enough to make me want to go through the hassle of installing something else
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.
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.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.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t do a little of that in my younger years, but I’ve calmed down a lot. These days I generally advise caution when someone tells me they want to switch to Linux.
I personally don’t actually think any one variant of Linux is that much harder to use than Windows or Mac. I think the difficulty comes from two things:
One, I think people forget how much learning is involved in those OS’s as well. If you’ve ever tried to teach an elderly grandparent how to use “the computer” then you know first hand how much of this specialised knowledge you can take for granted. Simple things like knowing where to look to change mouse sensitivity as an example, are really challenging to any new user of any OS.
Two, there isn’t just one variant of Linux. It’s biggest strength is also it’s greatest weakness here. It’s amazing that you have so many choices for your desktop environment, but that comes with the major drawback of users needing to understand what a desktop environment is, and why Googling “how to change mouse sensitivity in Linux” is probably not going to return anything useful. You have so much choice in Linux for every little thing. Down to a level of granularity that most Windows or Mac users wouldn’t even realise they’re not getting a choice in. Alsa vs pulseaudio, xorg vs wayland, not to mention the plethora of package managers. Hell even drivers for your video card: proprietary vs open source. And yes, some of those examples boil down to the old way vs the new way, but ALL of this is added complexity, which results in a steeper learning curve for a new user.
So yeah, Linux is hard to use. The learning curve is a cliff, and anyone who thinks it’s perfect is kidding themselves! ESPECIALLY for the user who just wants to play a few games, and maybe do some browsing. We’ll never get the year of the Linux desktop with this mentality!
I do also try to warn new users about this. It is a whole new ballgame, and it will take some effort to get up to the same level of comfort you have in Windows. It really is best to not just jump in to the deep end, and fully wipe your system on day 1.
Start with a VM, then dual boot, and once you’ve stopped booting into WIndows in frustration, then you’re ready to commit.
One thing I promise though, it is 100% worth the effort
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.
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 😑
OK so I think you might be joking but in case you’re not:
“They don’t need to understand DEs” and “Please teach people.” Well which is it? is it intuitive or does it need to be taught? It can’t be both
That was just an example. Your solution doesn’t solve the problem I’m describing as a whole and I think my point still stands. Search might be common to most DEs but that doesn’t change the fact that they all work slightly differently, and if you want to know how to do something that can’t just be searched for, you need to know what DE you’re using. Which means knowing what a DE is. Not to mention, a user coming from a Mac wouldn’t think to just hit super anyway. It’s cmd + space there.
It’s not the “proper” way, it’s just “a” way. There is no “proper” way do to this kind of thing. I would even argue that it’s not even the “best” way because you’re not learning how to navigate your OS/DE if you do it that way.
This is exactly the kind of facetious bs “ugh, it’s not hard, just rtfm, noob” response the op is talking about
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.
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
Been using Bazzite. Super simple install, been working really well.
Thing is, there’s people out there on windows 10 on a computer without the magic special chip windows 11 demands.
Lots of those people can’t update and lots don’t know about Linux or understand how to even use a USB drive to install it.
Yes it’s easy for us semi tech people, but remember not everyone is into tech or understand how computers works.
People NEED computers to do stuff like applying for jobs, or searching online, or video games with friends.
Those people who don’t have a tpm chip and can’t upgrade will just not and continue using a insecure windows 10 because they don’t know or understand what it is.
Remember Lemmy, just because you understand tech, doesn’t mean everyone knows about it, or can grasp the concepts.
My dad has a bunch of old friends that elected me to be their tech support, which makes me have to explain the basics of the basics most of the time. Trust me when I say that a lot of people in these forums have no idea how tech illiterate some people are.
I had a situation years ago where an old guy asked me to reset his android phone. I - unfortunately - complied because I made the mistake of trusting that he knew what he was asking, so I just made sure everything was backed up on his cloud. Result: he lost access to his photos, numbers, etc because he had no idea that he had a gmail account associated to his phone. Fortunately, his daughter knew and remembered the password so he recovered them.
Another situation I had with another guy was having to explain why stremio wouldn’t work on his iphone while his friends (with androids) could use it. Without going into details, he didn’t know what an “OS” was.
Let me repeat it because it’s relevant to this post: the guy didn’t know what an Operative System was. And he’s hardly alone.
In these kind of tech forums, I found that a lot of users don’t truly grasp how tech illiterates can be (and sometimes confuse that for lack of intelligence, but that’s another discussion). It’s hard for them to understand how most people don’t care what OS they are running. A lot of people will continue to use Windows 10 and not care they don’t receive more updates, as far as they are concerned, it still works and lets them do their stuff.
Operative System?
It’s the thing that lets you do the things in your electronic thing
Maybe go and quickly google what OS actually stands for, especially since we were just making fun of those who don’t know.
We were? I wasn’t
bad translation btw. In portuguese we say “sistema operativo”, thus the error
That’s good then.
Operating System
Ahh my bad, bad translation
No worries I wasn’t trying to give you shit, I figured it was a translation error
And of course there is an XKCD about this: Average Familiarity (2501)
Title text:
Like seriously, if there was ever a time to do a concerted push for linux, it’s now. Start the campaigns, start the tutorials start the memes and the warnings and get the process down to under an hour. It won’t be a weird thing, it will be the lord and savior allowing your PC to continue even when windows says it can’t.
Sounds nice and I wish it was like that, but people who are not into tech won’t get those messages and wouldn’t care as for them it’s “it’s turning on, I don’t need to do all that”. Remember there’s people out there that do not understand computers in the slightest, and it’s just not there thing, have to much going on, or some other reason.
Plus Linux is far from “I just turn it on and it works” kinda person friendly.
Sadly, it’s the part of keeping it working for the periodic 5 minutes after that that is also a hurdle.
I went out of my way to get a TPM from my systems OEM. I’m a tech, I’ve built dozens of machines without issue. I personally use a Dell, because I can’t be arsed to deal with it for my own kit.
Granted, the Dell I’m using can easily fit the HEDT description, but still.
I’m still using Windows 10 because fuck Windows 11. I am forced to use that shit for work and I hate it. I’m constantly in need of stuff from the settings/control panel to fix other people’s shit, and every time I go to settings, shit is somewhere different, buttons are moved or entirely missing… It’s a right fucking mess.
On any Windows 10 system, I go to control panel, find the appropriate item, such as programs and features, or network and sharing center, etc… And all the controls are there, working, and haven’t changed in any meaningful way since XP.
The thing that Microsoft seems to have abandoned is sent semblance of consistency. They’re so deep in the shit with their CD/CI with the settings panel that for every feature build of Windows 10/11, the settings menu will have options in dramatically different locations. The main difference between 10 and 11 here is that, in Windows 10, the control panel was still in one piece. In Windows 11, several control panel icons now take you to the settings menu “equivalents” to the cpl you’re looking for.
This is particularly bad with printing. Omg. How tf do I check/change the fucking driver in use for a printer in the fucking Windows 11 settings menu? If I go through what’s left of the control panel, and go to devices and printers, I get taken to the settings menu for devices which includes a section for printers, so I go into printers, and I have to hunt down a moving target for where tf they put the button to open the control panel printers and devices dialog, which seems to change weekly. Then I can open the printer settings dialog and see what driver is in use on the advanced tab, or what fucking port it’s connected to… Which, when you deal with network printers, is a pretty fucking important piece of information. Then, half the time the printer port is a fucking wsd, and I have to go spelunking into the registry to find it’s fucking IP address.
Wsd ports are fine right up until they fuck up, which happens frequently, TCP/IP ports don’t really have any problems at all. So why the fuck are we moving everyone to fucking wsd ports? Where is the benefit? Explain Microsoft! Explain!
It’s so goddamned frustrating to use as a technician. A lot of this stuff doesn’t really apply to steam users or home users in general, because these menus aren’t really looked at a lot. So the TPM requirement is the usual suspect for people’s frustrations with Windows 11.
I wouldn’t give nearly as much of a shit if they would just leave things where they are. I would only need to learn where the buttons and knobs and dialogs are once, and that would be it. But they have a bug shoved so far up their ass about making “improvements” that I can’t rely on anything staying where it is.
Windows: Let me show you an Ad, endeuntured beta tester.
That too. FFS.
I just want the OS to run things, and get out of my way. Windows used to fit that description.
This is true not everyone out there has the capability to go out and have something like Linux, or the best version of windows 10 on their machines. But most people here are either knowledgeable enough, or have enough patience to try something like Linux out. If you know people that are in this position with their current machines from windows 10 to 11,and are not tech savvy, help them, and try not to be patronizing. Help them out by installing something like mint or Ubuntu and walk with them on the system, as many times as needed. If they cannot get used to it or find something that simply won’t work, don’t try to force Linux on them. Just find the best windows 10 version and install it. At some point if something doesn’t work anymore on windows 10 and they want to keep the machine, they will reach out to try Linux again, or, they will try to sell the machine they cannot operate with anymore (or give away, depending on the situation). Either way, help people out but don’t be abrasive if things do not work out the way you wanted.
I wish it was more straightfoward to make vm, customize settings and then transfer that to an external ssd to dual boot, I want to ease into linux but I get confused seeing all the differetn ways to do things and no consensus.
Also people talking about changing Distris all the time, do they retain their data? Is that what a home drive is for? Just asking here since you seem to know lol. Like can you redload your apps, ui, retain your data “easily.” (once you do it once)
I’m a PC that’s not currently “compatible” with Windows 11, because I’m too lazy/refuse to enable TPM 2.0 in my BIOS.
Given how much of a pain in the ass my work machine is with Win 11 — I’d honestly rather switch to Linux than deal with it on my home system.
I’ve been tinkering with my Steam Deck for almost a year, and haven’t been able to accidentally brick it - it’s definitely come a long way from where it was back in my uni days (early 00s).
I did get TPM 2.0 enabled and the updater still thinks it isn’t there. Linux is now my primary with Win10 as a fallback for the handfull of programs that won’t run acceptably in Wine or Proton. My biggest problem so far is Civilization 6; Aspyr hasn’t updated the Linux build in ages and doing multiplayer with the Windows version via Proton makes it lag with terrible frame rate. Single player is fine, and multi in Win10 is also fine, so I’m not sure what to do about it.
Have you given any thought to switching to a LTSC version of Windows 10 Enterprise? There are a few trade-offs from what I can see, but at least it eliminates the issue of no security updates for up to 5 more years.
I’m still mulling over the pro’s and con’s - curious on what you think.
It’d hopefully allow you to keep Civ6 multiplayer going for the time being until (if/when) the Linux issues get solved?
If you don’t have a motherboard with a TPM in it by now, then you’re way overdue for an upgrade anyway.
My I7 7700k is a good processor. It serves my needs from office work, to software dev, to gaming, to video production. I’ll eventually retire this machine, but that’s at least a year off, and even then, it’ll be repurposed since it’s an extremely capable machine.
I shouldn’t have to upgrade because MS made an arbitrary decision to not support capable hardware after telling me Win10 was the last Windows OS. Nah, I’m switching everything over to Linux and using the hardware I have now instead of creating e-waste.
Or you add the chip and it still doesn’t want to upgrade because you don’t have secure boot enabled.
Can you do that?
Mine is a bios upgrade to add the feature apparently.
But I deliberately left it non-upgraded so I didn’t get forced into 11.
Can I still upgrade or am I too late?
One of the requirements is full secureboot and recovery arrangements that didn’t exist when I installed back in the 8 days. Now I can reinstall over the old drive and that will do all the plumbing that enables 11. So the hardware is 11 compatible, but the existing software install isn’t.
*Edit to answer the question, no, it’s not too late. Most compatible CPUs have a lesser firmware TPM, but most mobos have a slot for a vendor specific hardware TPM. Which is what I got.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
If they want to buy me a new laptop, go for it.
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)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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. 😂
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.
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.
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.
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:
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 😆
Make a dual boot system. You can continue to use win10 while getting comfortable with linux. If something breaks just reboot.
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.
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.
Bazzite was a 15 minute experience for me, from first boot to playing X4 foundations and sea of thieves.
Take the leap.
Just get another disk or partition and get it running on that. If it goes fucky, boot into Win and game, try again later.
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.
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.
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.
I moved my wife’s computer to Windows 11 because it was using a 12th gen Intel, and from what I had understood, the scheduler was better for the P-core/E-core nonsense.
Over the last year I’ve seen numerous popups, copilot being injected everywhere, nonstop bullshit. And plenty of benchmarks showing that Windows 11 is actually slower than Windows 10 on my particular hardware. I’d just really rather move to something with healthy support for Proton/SteamOS ecosystem and be done with MS forever.
I mean, I already use Linux elsewhere in life. I’ve got Proxmox set up with a bunch of VMs, so Linux isn’t a stranger to me - but I use a *cough* version of Solidworks and there’s just simply nothing that comes even close to its capabilities. Additionally, one of the games I play has a hard enough time not crashing on the system it was designed for - trying to figure out if it’s the game, or the system I’m playing on when it’s crashing would drive me absolutely bonkers.
For me, I am concerned about Microsoft going fascist. Last thing I need is my PC to be a turncoat. Also, I hate being forced to update. I want to pick my updates and schedule.
Fascist? Really? Jesus Lemmy has really lost it…
From what’s been seen checks and balances no longer exists in the US and is moving towards authoritarianism, and threatening allies is not normal. And enemy in the west is more of a concern for a lot of people due to proximity.
Any country undergoing a huge purge and closures would be raising alarms, and it is more worrying because of the huge military and economic influence and power of the US.
Sir, this is /c/PCGaming
America just lost a huge amount of federal workers, Elon has broken into the treasury, and Trump ended our foreign relations for no good reason.
America is splitting apart, and corporations will have to pick a side. Considering that Microsoft controls the most common OS in the world, it would be very strange if DOGE didn’t try to take control.
Sir, this is a gaming community. wtf are you on about now…
Think of it this way: Microsoft can use Copilot down the road to monitor what games and media you have. Considering that the Trump Regime has literally forced the disbanding of military cultural clubs, removal of posters featuring minorities or women, established a DEI watchlist, and so on…as someone who plays a great deal of Japanese games, I wouldn’t feel safe. Plus my PC has all of my passwords, documents, and so forth.
Ask yourself this: “Am I safe from persecution?”
Just because you have no interest in politics, it doesn’t mean that politics aren’t interested in you.
Yeah - once again – This is a post about Steam statistics; take your fear-mongering shit elsewhere.
CAD is certainly the most difficult shortcoming of FOSS.
Freecad is fine fine a single part and it’s actually stable unlike everything else, but doing assemblies requires an add-on. I don’t recall if those work in simulation though. Its workflow also needs more time. It has come a long way in the least several years though. I suspect it will get to be competitive in the next few. Especially as dassault and Autodesk keep trying to inject AI BS and force you further into their cloud services.
I’m not going to Windows 11 or Linux. I found a copy of Windows 10 LTSC with support til 2027+.
Any advice for those of us wanting the same?
massgrave.dev has .isos and instructions
You need the enterprise edition? What about pro? I would rather switch to Steam OS if it was out.
The Enterprise LTSC versions will be supported for a few more years, regular support for Pro is ending in October same as Home. Some of the worst stuff like Co-Pilot hasn’t made it in to LTSC (yet).
IIRC, you can download the .iso from Microsoft themselves, then use a keygen program to create an auto-renewing key. WindowsKMS, I think it was?
I like the optimism of Linux users thinking there will be a massive flood towards their favourite Linux distro.
When the obvious path the majority of gamers will take is just … not upgrade anything and stay on an unsecure OS until their next major PC upgrade.
Most users don’t care about security as long as it allows them to do with their computer what they want.
If Microsoft didn’t push people to a new version, you know too many would still be rocking Windows 8.
Windows had to force updates because so many people just didn’t update
Anyone that is on 10 still isn’t going to go to Linux
I dual boot and still use Windows 10. And everything I’ve seen from Windows 11 just seems like trash to me. My mother got a new laptop about a year ago and I came along to help her set it up. With her previous laptop, I opted to not do the free update to Windows 10 because people were complaining about it at the time (and I was still on Windows 7), so she ended up stuck with Windows 8.1 for years. So this time I did opt for the free update to Windows 11 and it feels like a huge mistake so far.
Her machine is now slow and struggles to get things up and running. And every single fucking time she tries to use it, it decides to run virus scans and download and install updates all at the same time. And these updates often seem to take an entire day. The last update took two days where she could barely do anything on her laptop because it was slowing things up so much.
And that all makes the frustration add up when you come across the other fucking stupid things they’ve done. So now when you right click on the desktop there’s a few seconds where Windows needs to get its shit together to show you the new useless menu that’s been slapped on top of the old useful menu. Then you need to click ‘show more options’ for the actual useful menu. Then another few seconds for Windows to get its shit together to load that menu.
And I don’t want to load a bunch of stuff like classic shell or winaero tweaker because she’s old and just wants to play hidden object games and solitaire. So I’m going to have to come running every time something happens that she doesn’t understand. So I prefer leaving it vanilla.
But fuck Windows 11. It’s absolute fucking garbage based on my experience so far. I was going to hold out for the inevitable Windows 12 because Microsoft seem to love using their paying customers as beta testers with every second OS they release but now I’m not so sure. Hoping there will be some sort of hack to keep enterprise updates coming or something.
I’m still on 10. I’m waffling between installing bazzite on my laptop, building a new computer and installing bazzite, or just using my steam deck as a daily driver. But none of the options include using windows.
When I was young and dealing with Win 98 and XP before all the service packs updates had like 10% chance of bricking the OS and would give me anxiety so I’d avoid them. Even with Windows 7 had an update that made explorer.exe refuse to start. It hasn’t happened in many years, maybe they got their shit together but I still have anxiety about updates even though I’m savvy enough to fix issues now. Just because I can doesn’t mean I wanna.
Still on 10 here, turned off the TPM chip, got kubuntu on a second drive, just hoping proton can get the other 70% of my vr library to recognise before EoL
Eh, there’s a few of us. I intend to at least give Linux a solid try before I swap to Win11.
My thoughts are that at that point I realistically have to swap anyways. It’s just a question of whether I’m going to Win11- which I’ll have to customize to my preferences and generally figure out, or Linux- which I’ll have to customize to my preferences and generally figure out.
I’m on the tech savvy side of things, and I still find Linux intimidating so I don’t think this will be a mass migration to Linux or anything.
I’ve considered Linux a couple times in the past, but generally stayed away because my PC is primarily used for gaming which didn’t have the best support then. Things are kinda different now- support is generally better.
You mean Windows 7
You mean Windows XP.
Surely you mean 3.11
You mean 7, right? Most people skipped 8, and that’s why Microsoft made the update to 10 free.
Yeah, I stayed on xp until I got a new pc during 7, then I stayed on 7 until I got a new pc during 10. I’ll probably stay on 10 until whatever is after 11 comes out, even though I know better, because I just don’t care enough.
No they’d still be running XP if they could.
I know i would, lol! I def fit the type being described. I just jumped over to Linux after having a hard drive crash necessitating the installation of a new OS. I was just gonna go with windows 10 again but it was giving me fits trying to install it for some reason. Starting to wonder if i had a bad PC and not a bad hard drive, i decided to make a bootable usb stick with Mint using an old laptop. Eventually i got it to boot up my PC and i never looked back. Took a little while to get used to the new system but so much of it works the same way as Windows that i had little trouble bridging any gaps. I don’t do PC gaming though, so i probably haven’t run into the problems that i imagine are preventing others from making the leap. I guess I wouldn’t bother going back now even if I could, now that I’m talking about it…I’m very happy with Mint.
I know someone that is deathly afraid of tracking by Microsoft to upgrade their pc from Windows 8. They won’t spend the time to learn linux, as they use a proprietary app specific to windows for what they use. I point out Win8 has the same kind of data collection and they dismiss it with a head-in-the-sand response.
Just like skipping Vista was the way to go. We need to skip Win11.
Microsoft making the upgrade free is them pushing people to a newer version.
They would also be on Windows 7, but too many would be on Windows 8 as well.
Yea, as someone who games on linux (ArchBTW), I don’t know if its really there yet for mass adoption, I was helping a younger sibling troubleshoot their dying PC and they even suggested I install Linux on it for them. With a fresh Linux Mint iso on my Ventoy USB, the voices raged at me to convert another penguin. But sadly I knew, deep down, they are not ready to deal with the issues if something goes wrong, a software has no Linux support, or if they ever want to mod their games.
Those kinds of people probably wouldn’t be able to deal with issues in Windows either. Just teach them how to install the OS and start firefox. If it completely breaks at some point tell them to install the OS again.
Can anyone speak to the VR experience on Linux? I mainly use my desktop PC for VR nowadays, steam deck for everything else. From what I’ve heard, however, VR is still steaming garbage on Linux.
I got some good answers here
Sounds like it’s not perfect, but may be workable depending on what you’re trying to do
I was curious about this too, particularly if and how well the Meta Quest 3 mirroring/tethering or whatever they call it works.
I’ve been meaning to get a Linux VM spun up for testing games. I gather that I’ll have some issues (i.e. blockers) with multi-player games and cheat-prevention, but I’d just as soon play single player games anyway.
I’ve been a Linux/Unix admin for 25+ years so I’ve no excuse other than convenience. But I’m done.
I’m sure you know this already, but for anyone who doesn’t: If you want to know if a specific game will work under Linux, Proton DB is your friend!
Thanks for posting this, I didn’t realise how many of my most played games have issues, or are unplayable, according to Proton DB. I forgot that it was effectively impossible to play a huge number of multiplayer games with anticheat/whatever stuff.
Again though, appreciate it!
That’s really unfortunate, but yeah, better to know beforehand.
The really painful part about this is it doesn’t need to be this way. A lot of popular anti cheat software supports Linux, but the game devs just don’t enable it. GTA is one example of these. It’s allegedly just a checkbox that Rockstar won’t check.
Out of curiosity, what games are you looking at?
R6 Siege, Apex Legends, PUBG, Insurgency Sandstorm (which seems to be an off/on thing from the descriptions.)
Honestly I migrated to bazzite about a month ago and my entire library has just… worked. It was shockingly easy. I haven’t changed anything from defaults at all.
I’d recommend the other way around; Windows in a VM for the vew games that don’t work on Linux.
Kernel anti-cheats won’t (shouldn’t) work in a a VM
Now no one should have those but if someone was smart enough to know that then they would be on Linux already
Wait, really? I only knew VM-detection from malw… oh.