- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.linuxuserspace.show
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.linuxuserspace.show
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Been on linux for almost half a year now. Don’t miss a single bit of windows, thanks to steam proton. Also thanks to microsoft for pushing me over.
Same here. I do not miss all the shit windows did. Things like:
- starting drivers manually to use graphics tablet
- finding drivers for hardware that work
- random driver crashes for various pieces of hardware I have
- BSODs
- rummaging around settings, configs and regedit to get something to work a bit better
- disabling things you don’t want through regedit or some hidden config
- uninstallable bloatware
- ads everywhere
- super key + type in the program you want to open not working
- messing around with tons of files for old games to work
- going through shady sites to get software
- not having a software center for all your downloads
- needing to install weird programs for sftp support
- needing to reinstall the os when a big issue develops and you did not manually set up backups
ironically half these things are what people think is the linux ux. Seriously, windows is just terrible, clunky, buggy and full of things you need to be an advanced user to fix.
I’m a very recent convert. I downloaded mint a couple months ago after seeing that my entire steam library was rated as highly compatible on protondb. At first I planned to dual boot but I didn’t have any reason at all to use windows and finally just took the plunge and made Mint my daily, and sole, driver
I also went cold turkey to fedora and once I solved my two main problems: disabling secureboot and formatting my steam library to be a linux filesystem, I have a better ux overall. Now I’m looking to move to endeavourOS since fedora is too fast with its updates which breaks nvidia drivers sometimes. (Which just means I restart while the pc is booting and select an earlier version of the OS)
As much as people complain about electron (some valid, some not) Linux has benefited quite a bit to the cross platform availability of local applications.
what distro do you use? im looking into moving from windows, but currently use apple devices to sync my music to my phone so im on hold for now
I tried Mint initially, but it had some issues with Wayland and some other small issues, so I ended up settling on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed after a friend recommended it.
Been on CachyOS for a couple months now. If you want to go Arch, I highly recommend it. No issues with NVIDIA drivers or any of my other hardware. The only thing I need Windows for anymore is Solidworks.
Switched to Mint recently. So far it’s been smoother than I expected, but still had some crazy rough patches. Luckily, helping me through this junk seems to be one of the things AI excels at. I’m set up mostly how I want to be and it’s been mostly working well enough so far. Mostly.
Mint’s popularity is unfortunate because it (the last time I checked) defaults to X11, which gives you a desktop built on technology from 1984.
It’s actually comments like this which will scare people the hell away from trying Linux.
My comment wouldn’t exist if some distros didn’t cling to X11.
I’d be more worried about the lack of HDR support. Shame they killed off the Plasma edition. To anyone considering using Mint you can install Plasma on top of it with ease and get a modern desktop that supports HDR. If you don’t have an HDR monitor then Cinnamon is great.
This weekend I want to make a point to finally begin the transition to Linux…
You will be pleasantly surprised almost daily, I hope! There will be a minor learning curve since you are used to windows philosophy and linux is different.
I want mint to be my distro.
Jeez. Pathetic losers. On Linux for 15 years never thought of going back.
And u know what? It was harder back in the days nowadays all software is in the browser anyways so what are u even missing.It’s funny, you’re using Linux for 15 years, but you’re still 15 years old…
I tried ubuntu 15 years ago since it was the easiest. It was hell. Now linux is a more functional OS than windows is that asks the user to do even less in order to have everything working.
Switched to CachyOS a couple months ago and haven’t looked back. Everything works right out the box including NVIDIA cards. Recommended it to a coworker to check out and he switched from Windows a month ago.
Peppermint is always left out. That is the perfect on for just working, stable and easy to move to from windows. It’s also lightweight and fast.
the copilot nonsense really irked me, but it was then they had the gumption to force this absurd recall bullshit on everyone–that’s when i said i’m done, no more windows, no more M$
it’s obviously a “feature” they sold to senior executive board members so that middle managers could spy on their cubicle drones, but to have the gumption to try and convince the world that this was something we wanted? get fucked microsoft
It’s more than that. They want training data for their LLMs. With enough training data, they can train these models to do office knowledge work themselves, removing the need to employ cubicle drones at all.
I wonder what will win out, the sociopathic need of managers and execs to gaze over heads in cubes like it’s their kingdom - e.g. “return to office” mandates that saved no money and made no sense other than to control people - or the sociopathic need of the business to cut costs so low that the stability of the entire company teeters on a house of cards, be it AI or something else.
That’s what free software advocates have been telling everyone for decades. When you use proprietary software licensed to you, you have no agency in what becomes of it, they can force you to accept changes that you don’t agree with, violate your privacy, take what you thought you owned from you.
People give up freedom for convenience and treat those that don’t as crazy misguided idealists, thinking they’re fools for using less convenient and sometimes powerful fools for pointless principles only they care about… Meanwhile, if everyone was just a tiny bit like the crazy idealists, these companies wouldn’t be able to abuse their position because a modicum of resistance from everyone would be an overwhelming force for them.
Some will say it’s dumb being idealist about computer software, but aside from computer software being serious fucking business, the practices of these companies are what birthed disposable, unrepairable electronics, privacy erosion, robber AIs and so on. Do you think a tech industry dominated by free software supporters would have allowed the rise of people like Bezos, Zuckerberg or Musk?
Dabbled with Linux over the years but have finally made the jump to using it as my primary OS. I tried a bunch of distros and settled on the elegant simplicity of Mint. Every game has worked just… fine.
It feels genuinely refreshing to know nothing will change without my consent, I know I will not login one day to find a surprise cortana/copilot/clippy icon in the taskbar or an ad for Avowed waiting for me. I can’t believe that is even considered a ‘pro’, but here we are.
AMD or NVIDIA user?
AMD. I think if I had nvidia I might’ve gone for Pop OS, I heard that has good support for them out the box.
Good to know. I’m NVIDIA myself
I’m running pop on 3 machines. One is an old Dell core 2 duo, and I’m amazed how quick it runs and never freezes (10g ram, 120gb ssd). Only issue issue have is the pop shop freezes up sometimes, even on my higher power machine. Otherwise, solid.
I feel like eveyone should reccomend Fedora KDE edition, its close enough to Windows for new users and modern enough to not push people away.
I have KDE on my laptop and gnome on my desktop. Beyond basic custiomization like icons, background, loading screen animation and some hot corners and shortcuts I don’t feel the need to touch it and it just works.
I don’t want to reccomend fedora since you need to add your own nvidia drivers. I’m looking to move to bazzite or endevourOS myself. Bazzite seems to be super easy to install and “gaming os” just seems to mean “its linux but steam and nvidia repo is preinstalled”
Check out CachyOS as well.
Most people who just have a PC don’t have a DGPU, for those who do the built in open source driver is good enough for 99% of use cases. People heavily exaggerate how much you need the proprietary drivers and you can always install them later if you really want (its not needed in the vast majority of cases to get it booting).
Tons of people game and those usually always have a nvidia gpu. Might as well get a linux with the drivers preinstalled otherwise your first half hour of linux use will be honestly a bit daunting looking rpmfusion.org and terminal. As opposed to same as windows, minus the debloating and rummaging for drivers.
No I mean genuenly you dont need then, maybe they preform better but strictly speaking proprietary drivers arent nessesary. You could just as easily not install them and the vast majority of people wont notice the 5% performance penalty.
Without rpmfusion drivers my games become slideshows.
People have their gripes over the “big corporation” side of this but I also daily drive fedora KDE and I love it. My only complaint is 2 things.
-
Wireless shuts off after long periods of sleep. Suck if I’m torrenting my Linux isos.
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Very rarely it’ll freeze up and I need to hard restart.
Both of which could be a me issue. But besides that it’s a beautiful, easily and highly customizable system. Highly reccomend as well.
I also have issue number 2 with fedora KDE (kinoite). It’s happened like 3 times in the past several months
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Ive been seriously looking into making the switch. After some reading I decided Mint would be the easiest transition and downloaded the ISO to try it out with a USB boot. Im sure its a fluke, but since I have dual monitors the display was messed up and whenever I tried to fix it the entire GUI went away on both monitors and wouldn’t recover. I had to force power off the machine and ive been hesitant since then to make the actual switch. Id hate to brick my machine right off the bat, just trying to swap display sources.
Please give it another go. I think you’re right, thrt was a fluke.
I’ve heard that happen with mint before. Try a bit more modern distro like fedora or openSUSE maybe?
I had a bit of trouble like that too… Tried Ubuntu and my 2nd display would have static bursts going through the middle horizontally. Couldn’t figure out a fix, tried out Fedora and had no problems.
As a long time Fedora user, it’s difficult to convince other Linux users of how reliable it is. I’ve used it on multiple computers for I think about a decade and I’ve rarely had problems, certainly fewer than I had with Windows.
Last week I finally parted with standard Fedora to try out an immutable version, right now it’s Bazzite… I’ve got to say it’s very cool, for some things it may be better for beginners, but for most I’d say it’s better to stick to the normal ones.
I think it’s better with KDE, though, especially if you’ve got multiple monitors with different pixel densities.
I had some gaming issues on Gnome, the mouse wouldn’t lock to my main window and it caused all kinds of problems.
Could not find a fix, swapped to KDE Plasma and the issue was gone, I’ve been liking KDE a lot more since, haha.
I flip flopped a bit over the years on my laptop, right now I’m on KDE as I feel it’s the better DE at this time.
On the desktop I’d always go with KDE, no question.
Mint is the one everyone touts, but mint is pretty shit tbh. Check out Zorin OS. I have a funky triple display setup and it handled it like a champ. Also UX/UI on Zorin is fantastic. There is GUI for everything.
As a 15 years old pc user who likes to play games with a 15 years old nvidia graphics card. The only thing that’s preventing me from fully migrating to linux is the fact that nvidia doesn’t support my gpu anymore, so no proprietary driver, unless, I use a 6 years old kernel version.
The only choice I have for modren distros is the nouveau drivers, which lacks behind alot specially when it comes to gaming. I now have a dual boot setup running Popos and windows, but still I can’t be fully free from Windows, having to reboot every time I feel like playing something. I hope in the near future I get less broke to buy a new computer or maybe the new nvk drivers will supports my gpu which is unlikely.Which graphics card?
Quadro 2000M, it’s a miracle that it support dx12 games.
That’s a workstation card, significantly higher grade than the consumer cards at the time. How did you even get your hands on it?
I have a 8570w hp elitebook laptop which i bought back in 2016 from an aftermarket sales shop, you rarely see a new laptop in stock here in Iraq and if there’s any they would be ridiculously over priced.
I’m used to saying pc as a general term, that might created som sort of confusion? Sorry if that’s the case.Ok that’s even crazier, I had no idea they made the quattro in a mobile format. Yeah the HP website calls it a ‘portable workstation’.
I mean compared to modern cards it’s a little old but back in the day that was mainly used by data scientists and field statisticians that needed ridiculous amount of simulation math
Also, the designator ‘workstation’ back then was more than just ‘A place to work’, but a specific class of PC that was designed for high end tasks like rendering video or CAD, and they were ridiculously expensive. Fitting all that power in a laptop is really mind blowing to me
You found a treasure there
Dualbooting is great. Whole idea of linux is “you can tinker in any way you see fit” and putting multiple OS on a single computer is one example.
Fact that you did this at 15 is impressive btw. Willing to mess around with computers is a real skill. Half the CS students in my college had hard time setting up a fedora VM by themselves for UNIX class.
You are already ahead of actual college students in this field lol. You learnt more about computers thanks to old GPU.
I’m going to be migrating to Linux and using Mint. I’m just paranoid about doing something wrong and accidentally walking into a security vulnerability. So I want to set aside time to properly learn things and understand what I’m doing but I’m just busy AF these days…
This is a very valid and smart concern to have. But the scary commands all start with “sudo”, which gives everything you type in root access. Other than that linux is very secure and idiot proof as long as you read what the commands do. For software linux is way more secure as gone will be the days of rummaging through dodgy sites for installers. Instead you just open up software center and find the app you want and it will be installed straight from the official upload. The repos software centers have are customizable so you can add and remove them. Instead of checking if the installer is secure, you check if the repo is secure on the rare case you add a new repo.
I mean a popular app distribution is flatpack that ships apps like steam and blender and whatever in a sandbox with access only to resources they absolutely need access too. To the point where you need to allow the apps to get access to another drive even. Just to make sure nobody will inject ransomware through the blender default cube I guess.
Take it slow and do it the right way, don’t let Lemmy pressure you if you’re making slow but steady progress. It’s a learning curve for sure
I have four pieces of advice
- btrfs file system for easy backup and recovery
- Encrypt your drive
- use an ad blocker everywhere
- use virus total to scan anything you might be wary of, and if you really feel like you need an AV, they do exist for Linux.
I usually prefer Debian based systems, but when I finally ditched windows 3 weeks ago, I switched to Manjaro, and I’m loving it. You got this!
If you are worried about disk space don’t use backup on btrfs though it fills up yr drive I never encrypt my drive but maybe you should Manjaro is great though!
What’s wrong with EXT4 ?
Basically don’t run random sudo(superuser do, root access) commands you find on the internet without reading what the command does from docs or asking ai.
Leaving windows makes you more secure.
Also don’t worry about turning secureboot off. It makes it a lot less annoying and gets rid of a lot of issues. Also also steam doesn’t like running on linux and having it’s library on windows filesystem you gotta format them both, if your games are on a separate drive.
There you go, the two hurdles i had with linux.
Agreed.
Had the same problem with the Steam library on a Windows filesystem and some annoyances with NTFS drives.
Other than that, pretty easy overall (you have to tinker around with some games and wineversions though)
My only two issues were also steam on ntfs and secureboot, which are easy fixes. I’d like to add “flatpack apps not having access to another drive” as a very common beginner problem I had. Solution was easy: Add the drive in flatpack settings/flatseal or just don’t flatpak.
Is it necessary though? Microsoft have already been campaigning pretty hard to get people to switch to Linux. Telling people their perfectly good PCs won’t work anymore because the operating system is expiring, and they can’t even “upgrade” to Windows 11 is a pretty powerful message.
Honestly I don’t mind 11. It’s miles better than 10 ever was IMO. However with that being said, Linux is better. I have to dual boot Windows 11 on my computer because unfortunately there’s no way I can use my Elgato Capture Device on a Linux machine.
I downvoted you for not minding Windows 11 🐵
How can I convince the GF to switch? She only plays The Sims and the occasional hentai game; her Skylake i5 and 1050ti are more than adequate for those tasks. Yet she refuses to try Linux; won’t even let me install LTSC to buy some time.
I think she just wants an excuse to buy a new laptop. She’s the kind of person who replaces her shower curtain every six months, rather than do the sane thing and simply wash it. I’ll never understand such a wasteful mentality.
Bazzite and don’t tell her it’s Linux?
She’s not stupid
She uses windows.
As do I. Sorry, but KDE’s HDR support is trash; half implemented at best (and it doesn’t even support AutoHDR nor RTX HDR). Until that changes, I will continue to dual-boot Win11 and Arch.
Linux makes more sense for the GF than me, because her laptop has a basic 60Hz SDR display. It’s the perfect OS if you don’t have modern hardware.
Hdr? I barely know her!
Then she can run Linux.
This isn’t helpful at all.
There is nothing wrong if someone doesn’t want to switch to a new OS. That being said, isn’t her buying a new computer better? Old one becomes unused then.
Putting lightweight linux on an unused old computer and seeing it become better is like the standard procedure. You could even make a custom rice for her.
My gf is on win 11 and doesn’t uses it mainly for very light gaming and work. I offered it to her once and she doesn’t care.
Her windows is already having fun problems people think only linux has like her not being able to pay except using edge and other small annoyances. I just say “weird, if it works flawless on linux why doesn’t it on windows” every once in a while.
