Linux has gotten great over the years and keeps improving while windows gets worse and worse every day. This has been going on for many years now.
I switched already and suggest you give it a shot as well. It's honestly much easier than windows if you know the basics and understand how things are done there.
Fantastic - made the jump a month ago. I don't play FPS games. Those are the ones that have trouble running on Linux due to anti-cheast software, but the vast majority of my 600 steam games run with no issues it all - at sometimes running even better than on windows.
For example division 2 was sluggish on win11 on my Lenovo y540 (integrated GeForce whatever gaming laptop card) with 16gig of ram, now that I swapped over to Pop!_os - it doesn't lag at all.
I mostly play single player games, but guild wars 2
2 and ff14 work great too if you are an MMO fan.
I play mosty either indy games or just older games on an older gaming laptop (geforce 1070m based HP Omen) and Steam/Linux Mint work pretty great. Outer Wilds works even better in Linux now that I've begun using CoreCtrl to disable CPU power throttling. Otherwise, it runs about like it did on Windows. The MCC runs flawlessly. Recently purchased No Man's Sky and it runs pretty well and is actually incredibly smooth--no idea how that one runs in Windows because I've been just using Linux full-time for maybe two months now.
There is some weirdness like having to process Vulcan Shades before games boot up which can be annoying, but it hasn't discouraged me yet. You can also skip that and the only difference is there might be a bit of stuttering for the first bit of game play. After going back to Windows to compare performance, I think it does this stuttering thing anyways?
Not a gamer myself but from reading it used to be "this is a limited list of games that will work in Linux" and now it's a "this is a limited list of games that will not work", with a lot of thanks to valve, pop-os!, etc.
I have been a Linux gamer for the past 10 years. I haven't booted into Windows to play a video game in 8.
When I started out, it was very much a question of "Here is the list of games that work on Linux." You had to look for that Steam logo next to the Windows or sometimes Apple logo on the Steam page, and there are some games I would have played years earlier had that logo been there. With Proton, it has switched to "Here is a list of the games that don't work on Linux." Because most just do, with the very notable exception of competitive shooters, because something something anticheat.
I often hear that games actually run better on Linux than they do on Windows, except the newer whiz-bang features don't work. Give a recent example, apparently Cyberpunk 2077 runs at a significantly higher framerate on Linux than Windows, but DLSS, HDR and RTX aren't available.
Let me tell you the tales of two gamers on Linux:
My tale: I was disgusted with Windows 8.1, I had been learning some Linux because I wanted to use a Raspberry Pi with my ham radio stuff, so I went...why don't I try switching? This was circa 2014. There was exactly one game in my Steam library that just could not be persuaded to run and that was Sleeping Dogs.
There have been a few games I've wanted to try that refused to run in some way or another; Heave Ho! by Devolver Digital...the demo ran fine, had a good time with it. Bought the game, and the UI on the player select screen didn't work. Grow Up or Grow Home (one is a sequel to the other, I forget which it was) launched, but the character didn't respond to any controls. Oh and Fallout: New Vegas launched one of those Windows-style autorun screens then asked me to put in the DVD. I bought it from Steam. And refunded it.
I generally avoid AAA games, I don't play many online multiplayer games, I do play multiplayer games with friends, stuff like Stardew Valley or Unrailed, but I don't go play with random people online, those just are not fun to me. I tend to prefer more indie stuff, more nerdy stuff, like I've got hundreds of hours in Factorio and Satisfactory, both work fine. I think it just so happens that I'm into games that are likely to be well supported on Linux. Antichamber, Firewatch, Hollow Knight, Return of the Obra Dinn, every Zachtronics game I've tried, Undertale, Subnautica, these all run great.
My cousin: had an aging Dell upgraded from Windows 7 to 10 on an "optane boosted" hard disk drive, starting to run pretty sluggish. Swapping out the hard disk and optane module for an SSD and attempting to install Win10 on bare metal just wouldn't work, it kept throwing cryptic errors, so to get the machine to work at all I put Linux Mint on it.
She has more mainstream tastes than I do, lots of Bethesda and EA games. Funnily enough, I found that the third-party launchers were the real problem. The Sims 4 ran pretty well on Linux...Origin barely does. Minecraft support on Linux is actually worsening with time as a result of Microsoft's involvement, but at least the Java edition does currently run.
In brief, I have observed a very stark inverse relationship between Linux compatibility of games, and the size/corporateness/evilness of the developer.
Mildly inconvenient at worst unless certain anti cheat software is being used. At best, you can run games on Linux that your machine may not be able to handle on windows because distros that use more resources than windows are rare. Steam on Linux has proton built into it and it just works once you set it to run through it. You might have gpu driver trouble with Nvidia but it’s a maybe issue that happens less and less.
I play Baldurs Gate 3 on it and it turned out the issues I thought might be linux related were hardware, when I fixed it it worked perfectly.
Great, I play a lot on it and the only game I had to use windows for so far was titanfall 2 because it kept stuttering on linux and troubleshooting stutter is hard.
Pretty great actually. Not as out of the box as on Windows but almost there.
Firstly you get a vastly different experience depending on if you are using Steam. Since I have my entire library on Steam I can't say anything about other stores.
There's imo 3 points where the experience still differs:
1 - you have to enable Proton as the default compatability tool, Valve has a guide for it and the setting is pretty straightforward to find.
2 - Most games just work now but a few don't in those cases things like protondb.com are an enormous help.
3 - Mods are hit and miss (Steam Workshop works fine) depending on the game, for Cyberpunk for example I had to mess with the Proton Config a bit but there were guides for it. However since we are now in a niche of a niche (modding a game running proton) you're likely to run into unexplored territory
With the release of the steam deck Linux gaming has gotten a lot better and more support since their steam OS is a branch of Debian. A lot of games now support Linux gaming more than before.
Not every distro of Linux has gotten better, for the most part this comment is innacurate. That said, I have generally had the same experience here, but I use arch btw.
More and more I am considering taking a vacation with the specific goal of migrating to Linux. I've got decades old workflows linked to certain programs and tools that I know for sure only exist in Windows, so I'll likely have to still run it in a VM for those, but my system setup is just kinda the place I call home the most, yet my patience for all this nonsense is rapidly declining.
Do it, my friend. I took the leap ~5 years ago and have not once regretted it. You're right, you have Wine and Windows VMs available, if need be. But, honestly, I bet you end up replacing those work flows with better ones within Linux before long.
I mean, I'd like to. But some of my work requires me to use stuff like Adobe products and I find it massively easier to keep up to date with what these tools can do, if I can just muck around in my private projects (I actually care about) and then transfer the knowledge to my work stuff. I'll mull the idea some more time. Not really interested in dual booting at all, though that might be a solid solution, but windows simply deciding to kill everything else, even if its on a different disk entirely is not a prospect I relish.
I'm doing it. I build a new pc every 5 to 10 years. The new monster has posted. Need a few small cables before I really get started. I was going to put an older copy of win10 pro on it. But I'm going to take the Linux leap. The tower will be free of windows from day 1.
Nobara simply because the author also wrote Proton, the Steam linux gateway. (Open to suggestions).
All AMD.
Gaming. Streaming. Internet. Video files. Voice recording. Occasional simple documents. That's 99.99 percent of my usage.
Best of luck. I can't go back to windows any more. Well, I still dual boot for one game and the digital features of my national ID cause OF COURSE that software is windows only. 😒
In case you didn't know or haven't tried yet: AusweisApp2 does exist for Linux. But I assume, like me, you tried unsuccessfully already. For me, the Linux drivers of my card reader don't work...
But once you have tweaked things a bit, a new home is surprisingly quickly found. I mean, i know what you mean. But in the end, like or dislike boils down to a few basics and the rest accumulates over time.
It would be nice if lemmy made it easy to create a community or such for every program and let people join to collect the necessary knowledge together.
I switched to Linux when the "We've scheduled your free update to Windows 10!"-like popup started appearing again and again on my Win7 machine even though I disabled it. I didn't like not having a choice and they only got worse from there. Meanwhile, you have full control over every part of a Linux system. You can even uninstall the update manager if you feel like it.
They're getting there with windows 11.. first it was 'hey you're compatible with windows 11' now they've stepped up to a full screen non-skippable screen a big 'upgrade to windows 11' but still with a button to stay on windows 10 hidden in the corner. It's only a matter of time before that button disappears.
I tried the Win11 compatibility app once, it said i wasn't compatible due to some BIOS settings I needed to change. Nah, I'm good, and it hasn't bugged me to upgrade since.
Everybody does it at least once, just to see. Usually it’s just to see. MS support reps still learning the power of grep …. “Where are the backups” is both a question you want to hear … and really don’t want to hear. (At the start, it says they’re… at least thorough… an hour to the end of the patch window… not so much.)
Remove the update manager? Remove the bootloader and all kernels if you want to - you might if you're preparing a container image, it won't stop you. Remove glibc and init? Fine, if that's what you want - might have no need for those if you're prepping it up for embedded.
The price of having a computer that does exactly what it's told is that you have to know what to tell it. But that's well worth while.
Same with 'compatibility telemetry runner' after every update I have to disable it and delete the .exe from system32. None of the permanently disable tricks work. Plus I always have to run "oo shutup" to disable the other privacy stuff. I wish I could switch to another is, but most of my software is windows only.
They ought to be. You might have to change ownership of the file to some other local user (and disable permission inheritance for that file so admin can't touch it), but I bet this would work for most use cases except like a system restore.
Windows, on my work computer, decided Monday morning was a good time to turn my default pdf reader to Microsoft Edging. Turns out you can't delete Edging from add or remove programs.
ah i got that too!! I thought it was because monday i updated foxit reader and then for some reason it gave back the default to edge! Instead it was edge that took it back by force without my consent!
But don't you want to have what I've come to enjoy: Printer roulette?
Win, "printer", enter.......come on Printer and Scanner control panel, baby wants a new printer queue to kill that stuck job......dammit edge, no I don't want to search bing for an inkjet.
Win, "printer"...., enter.......come on Control Panel, you can do it......HP Smart Panel, you piece of crap
It amazes me that print management continues to be so spectacularly bad in Windows. It's been terrible since my first days using Win 3.1 and it has never gotten better.
I'd say it's come a long way since Windows 3.1 and the days before PnP, to the point that I can actually clear my print que, where not that long ago clearing your print que seemed to be an option MS offered to allow us to experience the rage that arises from unadulterated powerlessness. Hell, half the time it even switches default printers based on whether I'm at home or the office. Now, if Adobe could make it easier to distinguish from settings that will only work in the printer's driver settings, vs. the Adobe application's print settings, we'd be halfway out of perdition.
really looking forward to getting another SSD and just installing linux on it so I don't have to deal with that kind of bullshit anymore. The bullshit I will be dealing with will not be privacy related, just compatibility related.
When using Microsoft products and accepting their incomprehensible terms and conditions, you have no say and your opinion doesn't matter.
Group policy doesn't matter, domain administrator, GPO rules, all of it- none of it matters.
You'll get dogshit and you will like it. (Friendly reminder that it was extremely overpriced also) That's the tax you pay for being in their horrible, horrible "ecosystem" from hell. Enjoy! Grease up or take it dry, you're "taking it" either way.
PC people: Many of you are now realizing what “Windows as a Service” means. Your OS is harvesting every bit of your data and sending it back to the MS Mothership.
And you’re kind enough to pony up the cash to supply the hardware for it to run on.
Doesn't detract from the point whatsoever. Exactly what the Linux fanboys were always made fun of for is what's happening. It's heading exactly where Stallman has always warned. (Edit: I'd argue it's already arrived, actually.)
Honestly not sure we should be referring to windows as a PC OS anymore, Microsoft changing settings without your permission doesn't sound like something that should happen on a Personal computer...
I use Linux for my daily driver. It has really come a long way even in the last five years, but especially compared to 10-15 years ago. For the most part, stuff just works out of the box.
My ONLY beef is that many of the games I play (Civ 5, Banished, Sins of a Solar Empire, Frostpunk) are not stable and/or have performance issues under Linux, so I occasionally need to boot into Windows. For example Civ 5 works great until around 20 turns in when the lag between turns grows unbearable. That really sucks in multiplayer.
The funniest thing is that people complain about Windows, but at the same time are afraid of switching to Linux.
Linux has improved so much over the years that it is capable of doing most of the same things as Windows can do (and I don't mean restoring the search bar every update)
I think for most people, including myself, it seems daunting. Especially since I've used this environment for close to thirty years. Additionally, I don't have money to buy extra hardware to experiment with.
A dual boot setup doesn't require any extra hardware. Hell, you can run some Linux distros directly from a USB drive if all you want to do is play with it and try to learn some things.
My switching to Linux felt a lot like the transition from Windows 95 to XP, or XP to 7. Linux Mint genuinely felt more familiar to me than Windows 8 did.
You can try out Linux, learn about it, experiment with it, in VirtualBox. Install a Linux machine in a file right on your Windows machine. I think it's wroth at least trying out.
Yeah, same shit happened on my (W10) laptop today (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻
Luckily, I rarely have to deal with this shit since I daily drive Fedora on my desktop PC, and only dual-boot into W11 when I want to play games on Game Pass.
I don't even use the built in taskbar anymore, I always put mine up top and windows 11 broke that functionality so I'm using some other taskbar replacement
I just spent more than an hour fixing this shit, everyone was right. It forced search bar on LTSC also. Which I thought was against Windows 10 LTSC policies for Enterprise editions? Or at least, against it's very core functions? lol
If you have no choice but to use Windows download Microsoft 10 LTSC iot, lock down all policies and use Shutup10 and WPD to remove all telemetry. Blackbird can also block specific Windows 10 addresses that phone home but it's better to just get a third party firewall and block them because Blackbird can sometimes break things.
I also was able to remove Microsoft EDGE forever using this. Follow the steps exactly:
If an update you want forces edge back then just follow the steps again. If Edge "remnants" remain, use bulk crap uninstaller on any leftovers.
I've never had the search bar return or anything I didn't want to return on a locked down Windows 10 LTSC installation except Edge, and that's easy to remove. You can even turn off updates for a while if you want to, but I still update because you should.
If you have hardware that needs Windows 11, they're releasing an LTSC version of that, too soon.
Even without any network connection at all, windows update will quietly revert system changes it doesn't like. You can go in as a trusted installer or whatever the highest user space auth is called these days, completely remove the execute permissions to windows system binaries, power down the system, and when you turn it back on again there's a chance that the permissions will revert.
At this point it is honestly a bit of a miracle that the windows update layer hasn't been hijacked for malware. Or maybe it has and we have no way of knowing.
As someone running a windows 10 update right now that I procrastinated to let install I am now having a bad day already. Can't wait for this to happen to my pc!
the only reason I'm still using windows is for my simulators and race sims and better setup compatibility. X-Plane works on Linux but even though the flight model is better on X-plane the sounds and graphics of Microsoft Flight sim it's hard to go back. I say this because I actually need them for my work. other than that Linux all the way.
Is it hard to get two monitors running on Arch w/ i3wm? I can't really read another bullshit thing about microsoft again and thats all I am worried about for the switch.
Hey, I used to use that before switching to sway a few years ago. It isn't hard at all: There is not a single line in my config concerned with monitors, it just works by default.
I've moved to Arch like a month ago, first installed i3, I think you'll only need xrandr and setup some hooks that set/reset xrandr on the screen plug/unplug, if you ALWAYS have two screens plugged in, you can execute xrandr on X startup and that's all about it
italian, it says "we added back the search bar on the taskbar, keep or cancel?" If you click anywhere else except the grey "annulla" button, for example you click on the desktop, it assumes "yes i love the search bar, keep it", and is set back to the state microsoft wanted to be.
In my case it said something like "you apparently don't know how great our search bar is, so we reactivated it. You can disable it again if you want to"
yes but it's opt-in instead of opt-out. If i click on the desktop it's dismissed and the search bar setting is reverted to their preferred setting. If really needed, should have been the opposite like "did you know that you missed out on the latest spambar? Click here to make the change permanent"
It's the equivalent of asking "Would you like to cancel? Are you SURE you'd like to cancel? Are you REALLY sure? Take a look at our new features and make sure you'd actually like to not cancel. You said yes - so you'd like to not cancel? Okay!"
An extremely forceful and dishonest way to keep people on the feature. Should require just one No to permanently keep it off.
Yeah that's what I do. Wait what are you guys talking about? Is the search box a different thing? I can disable that and still use the searching feature?
I deleted bing using osm& and it removed functionality of searching for files. It's unfortunate that they implemented it this way. I'm going to see if I can block requests in firewall.
This comment requires more detail. As far as I can tell the search bar is only useful for typing "cmd" and getting a command prompt window. I'm pretty sure that's all I ever use it for....
Windows search sucks balls so hard it boggles the mind how it can suck so bad. It's like they created the search bar for Windows XP and haven't updated it since. How can a company with so many smart people create something that shitty and never fix it?
So anyway, if I'm missing the toggle for "make windows search not suck", please fill me in.
Yea I'll install something and try to search for it a week later just to open it faster and Bing is like "oh here's some tasty breakfast places near you" then provide restaurants near North Korea.
Yes, the only way to make it useful is disabling it and use a complete replacement like keypirinha (Foss but abandoned) or powertoys run (Foss but looks like no contribution allowed and 100% controlled by Microsoft)
Personally, as much as these little things annoy me, the big things just work. Games just work. My hardware just works. Updates just work. Software just works. I never, ever, ever have to open fucking terminal. That alone is worth all the bullshit in the world. I got into an argument the other day with someone who was chastising a Linux user for updating their distro without checking dependencies first. Like doing homework before an update is a normal thing everyone should be expected to do. It's not, and until Linux figures this shit out, it's going to stay niche in the consumer space.
Just to be perfectly clear, I am rooting for Linux to succeed. I think our best chance at this stage is Valve. I suspect the use of immutable SteamOS will begin to creep into the desktop space. Developers will love it because they can build exactly one repo and call it a day. Users will love it because shit will "just work." Yes, we lose some control, but no one will care because the biggest flaws will be gone.
I suspect the use of immutable SteamOS will begin to creep into the desktop space. Developers will love it because they can build exactly one repo and call it a day.
Fedora Silverblue does this.
It's a cool experience where you primarily use flatpaks, or containers for legacy / dev work, it would work great on a phone.
You can also fork the OS and customize the base installation and share it from a container registry. It would be awesome from the "I am my family's IT support person" perspective.
You think I check for dependencies when I update? I just click a button that says update on my Nobara distro. Idk what you think Linux users do that is so much more difficult than Windows. All of my apps except for Tresorit was a click to download. This is easier than Windows's "search for website, click download, run .setup, get the program".
it's a useless duplicate that takes useful screen estate. You can open the start menu, and if you start typing, the search bar appears. It doesn't need to waste 20% of the taskbar for that
But anyway, the search is broken. It gives priority to web searches, so if you want to search "libreoffice", to open "libreoffice writer", it suggests "libreoffice download" which is pointless. I replaced it with "powertoys run" and now i get useful results.
some people don't know that, and it isn't made obvious, so having it by default on is great i think... but, enabling it at random for no reason? that's ridiculous
Even if you hide the search bar, you can hit the windows key and start typing your search query. The search bar doesn't have to constantly take up screen real estate in the taskbar.
Whether I want to open a document I open once a week, or a program that I use every day, the search takes a minimum of 10 seconds to turn out a result, after first consulting its server for Firefox websites. It is useless beyond useless.
Ladies and gentlemen, a prime example of exactly why people don’t switch to Linux.
The loudest portion of the community are insufferable twats, and you know it’s bad because I’m an insufferable twat and I’m calling this one out on it.
often the content isn't even related to Linux it's just tirades of anger against corporations. Doesn't even have to be Microsoft, any commercial that dares make any move in the Linux space - Canonical, red hat, oracle get derided too.
Yeah, if you want people to try switching you need to understand their use case and nicely explain the pros and cons. Being a dick about it just makes people think it’s some elitist club for computer nerds instead of a tool they may find useful
Yeah, but, DAE LE WINDASS WINDOWNS BAD??! LOL LE MICRO SHIT USERS LOLOLOL XD XD EGGS DEE MI$RO$OFT IS BIL GAETS DIK JOKE. Seems perfectly welcoming to me, especially the heavy insinuation that absolutely everything is PEBKAC, even if you're on a fresh install of something allegedly intended for mainstream - following verbatim, explicitly appropriate instructions. If you're really lucky, someone might deign to link you an LMGTFY.
This stuff truly has helped make Desktop Linux a force to be reckoned with over the years. So much so that Year of Desktop Linux has been... pretty much every year of the past 20, I think.
On Windows, we all know it's spackled together shit with shoe strings, spit and duct tape - probably still involving some tech out of the 70s-80s or at least tech debt from back then. We tend to not pretend it's flawless because no software is.