Microsoft officially recommends a new PC and OneDrive to update to Windows 11

Oh man, fuck that shit into the sun.

Just run DISM afterwards and it'll be fine...

If a game won't support Linux I won't support it. There are thousands of games out there.

Its not fully released yet and also, it will only be on a select set of PCs to start. But eventually over the years it will be on most new windows PCs.

Effort

Platforms like Windows and Chrome can also use it for remote attestation, i.e., verifying you haven’t bypassed security controls and locking you out if they think you have.

I keep mine enabled because it’s good for secure boot and secrets handling.

If only someone was here to tell me something by the way, it arches my back not knowing.

As long as you tell everyone you use it. That's what counts.

I use EndeavourOS. I know quite a bit about Arch, the only thing I don't really know how to do is install it manually.

Ppl that still use Windows even after all this shit has been rammed down their throats will not have a good time on Linux. You still need to be able to do basic trouble shooting. I installed win 11 a few months back and it took me three tries on installation to get all the garbage out of it.

I think the best bet is an entirely new system from the ground up that has an open architecture that every company can equally implement that from the ground up and is as simple as possible. Like the computers we had in the 80s, but with better graphics. You want to play a game, you boot into it and it's the only thing running. No anti cheat needed.

While it sounds ridiculous, there is a reasoning for this even nowadays:

Any periodic activity with a rate faster than one minute incurs the scrutiny of the Windows performance team, because periodic activity prevents the CPU from entering a low-power state. Updating the seconds in the taskbar clock is not essential to the user interface, unlike telling the user where their typing is going to go, or making sure a video plays smoothly. And the recommendation is that inessential periodic timers have a minimum period of one minute, and they should enable timer coalescing to minimize system wake-ups.

Found 1 test that seems to confirm battery life is slightly worse (2%) with seconds enabled. But this is true only when nothing is going on on screen. If you would actually work on PC, I imagine difference would be practically nonexistent.

All that said, I use seconds on my private and work PC. Was pissed when MS initially removed this as an option.

The only time that would make a difference is if you're staring at a blank page and the only thing causing the screen to update is the clock. Theoretically the GPU could go completely to sleep, except for having to draw the updated clock every second.

But there's a reason battery life is commonly measured as "hours of video playback". If the laptop's not actually doing anything you may as well turn it off and get weeks of battery life.

My god. It really does!

Oh no! I left notepad.exe open. That cursor was flashing on and off for hours! I'm sorry everyone!

Are you using a framework 13? While I find the battery life to be usable, if it's that much worse on Windows I'm not sure I would have gotten a framework if I used windows lol.

The bullshit of chromeOS to be capable of running on the shittiest hardware but having an artificial lifetime for devices is stupid. To google's credit, they did increase that limit to 10 years, but that was only recently.

Yes, and they’re encouraging people to throw it out. At least some users think to sell on the secondary market, but third party buyers can only get so much out of EOL Windows machines and there are only so many linux users with an interest in buying up old hardware.

I myself have a couple of used laptops, but don’t need any more hardware for a while, so it’s not like I’m able to buy up any. I fear much of it will rot in a landfill.

yup, its an "oh, you concider it garbage? oh well, more for me then!" situation.

Ubuntu is actually falling down the ad hole lately. It’s not great, even if you leave out the technical issues that the distribution leans into these day (snaps, amongst other things)

Not sure I'd want to see that, tbh. It would only introduce more avenues for DDG to make questionable choices when they're already on thin ice.

Mint or Fedora. KISS.

DuckDuckMint

Gaming in Linux on a windows VM isn’t viable for most systems. Most games run really well through proton with little to no effort. Some even run better on Linux than on windows. You just can’t play a lot of the most popular competitive online games because it flags their anti cheat.

Most of the time, yeah. Check ProtonDB for the particulars regarding any particular game. Games with intrusive DRM or anticheat probably won't work though.

If you are lucky, things run with minimal tinkering or out of the box.
If you are me... You won't be able to play using virtual lans (zerotier one, xlink kai) and some games that should work out of the box just won't start.
That's literally the only reasons I haven't switched OS.

Yes, some on steam, others on wine/bottles/lutrix/etc

Many distros nowadays have decent support forngaming accessories and a mix of Lutris and Steam/Proton have given me a near seemless experience on Linux. Smooth enough for my partner to hop ship to Bazzite for their ROG Ally.

Sometimes there are small quirks, like controllers on Bazzite just work™ but on Vanilla OS 2 my xbox controller wouldn't be recognized by Steam or games wirelessly (wired worked) but my DS5 controller worked flawlessly (including the trackpad that I never got to work on Windows).

Most of the Steam library will work well and ProtonDB is a great resource for compatibility. Furthermore there are Decky plugins for setups like Bazzite and Chimera that embed the ProtonDB rating into the Steam game page.

Running software designed and compiled only for XYZ system is always going to incur overhead when translating or emulating to ABC system.

Game authors and publishers who only build for Windows are giving users a big middle finger and essentially saying "You must suffer through Windows in order to enjoy our product hassle-free lol".

What worked for me (which may or may not work for others) was to wean myself away, at first with only playing games that were built natively for linux.

Then moving the line in the sand to only DRM-free native linux builds.

Then advancing to only open source games.

These days, I just don't even play games and I find that it really frees up what kinds of things I want to do on my computers, such as daily driving exotic CPU architectures (and also I have so much more free time for actual meaningful pursuits like learning new skills).

Or just use one of the hundreds of guides the AI was trained on.

https://www.wikihow.com/Install-Linux

Eh, just look up a reputable YouTube channel and guide. Chatbots can randomly make dumb mistakes that a total newbie won't recognize, potentially causing them a lot of headache.

And no, I'm not one of those diehard anti-AI people. My work has its own custom GPT model and I utilize it almost daily for menial tasks. But even having it generate script boilerplate and whatnot, I sometimes notice it writing stuff that won't work and/or does it in a really verbose/weird way.

Do chatbots provide accurate and safe instructions for all steps? Or will it mix different instructions for different scenarios?

Ai is not that good unless it's like hugginchat where it scraps sites for info and stuff

I dislike AI but I think you’re unfairly downvoted. I find it helpful for ensuring I’m taking care of necessary steps in a common, low-stakes procedure. It’s useful to generate sequences of terminal commands as well, though it’s important to check and understand what you’re doing.

Wine (which Proton is based on) has had support for Wayland since version 9.0 (about half a year old). Admittedly it’s not even enabled by default, but it works and I’ve played Path Of Exile through wine’s Wayland backend. There’s talks to ship the Wayland driver along X11, but not enabled by default yet, since there’s still some issues before they consider it on par with X11 backend. Proton might take longer, since I don’t think Valve will enable that before they add Wayland support for the Steam client.

I'll also add the audio stack in Linux at the moment is a hot mess. I'm currently trying to resolve a problem that seems to exclusively plague the rear mic input on my system and nothing else and this shit is fucking obtuse. It's ridiculous how many competing audio frameworks there currently are.

I feel like people concerned about the expense of a new computer aren't generally going to look at Macs, but I'm not too familiar with their longevity/support; is it a good length of time?

Until the next security hole you can't fix with an update.

Secure boot means that only the intended bootloader runs, it can be any one, but it just needs to be the intended one.

Secure boot works with Linux.

What do you mean? I remove all vendor keys and enroll my own secure boot keys. This way only my install with my bootloader signed by my keys will boot.

"Abrupt" and "current" are pretty generous for windows 10 tbh. This has been a known deadline for several years at this point, and windows 11 has been out since 2021.

Absolutely fuck microsoft with a cactus, but this is hardly new or surprising at this point.

You should.

Ohh yeah, forgot you need to pay for it.