Only semi-related: Why do they always show pictures of Gates when he hasn’t been involved in MS in a long time? Why never Satya Nadella?
EDIT: Also, yes, related to the actual question already living Linux full time and when October rolls around probably gonna back up everything from the Windows side of my dual-boot and wipe the 1TB NVMe Windows is on to use as storage.
Personally, I think this picture of Steve Balmer is so much more iconic and should be used for every single article about Microsoft or Windows:
It’s weird how MS’s putting developers first became a joke. Back in the 80’s, companies like HP and IBM had open warehouses with coders at desks lined up like factory workers. MS was the first big company to give a private office to every programmer.
The approach isn’t what became a joke, it was the absolutely unhinged way in which it was presented in that famous Ballmer stage appearance.
I was thinking the same thing. He will just forever be known as the guy. Maybe it will change once he dies?
I couldn’t name another Microsoft employee if a gun was to my head. but I can still vividly remember myself in 4th grade reading about Bill Gate’s mega mansion in Popular Mechanics for Kids
Gabe Newell?
He would be also be a reasonable person to include on an article citing Steam data.
I’m somewhat in the same boat but I remember Mister “Developers Developers Developers” Steve Ballmer who was also immortalized by the “Ballmer Peak” XKCD. https://xkcd.com/323/
Already did and it’s glorious! Steam works beautifully and the only final thing that I’m missing is Adobe products.
I recommend, if you want to try Linux, that you try out the ‘Debian’ distribution, and use the ‘KDE Plasma’ desktop environment. It makes for a very Windows-like experience and really assisted me with the transition between OSs.
Outside of Steam, how have you found gaming compatibility? I know Xbox Gamepass doesn’t work as that’s very specifically a Windows app, but how about other standalone games/platforms?
Outside of steam will be a case by case basis. I wouldn’t expect a lot of luck, and it may require that you use a compatibility layer like Wine.
I completely disagree. Debian is not beginner-friendly. Go with Bazzite if your focus is gaming.
It is a gaming-focused distribution. It’s also an “atomic” distribution, which basically means it’s really hard to break it. It’s more like Android or IOS where the OS and base system are managed by someone else. They’re read-only so you can’t accidentally break them.
For example, instead of trying to manage your own video card drivers, they come packaged with the base system image, and they’re tested to make sure they work with all the other base components.
I’ve been using Linux since the 1990s, so I’ve run my share of distributions: Slackware, RedHat, Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu, etc. Even for someone experienced, atomic distributions are great. But, for a newcomer they’re so much better.
In what world is a Debian base not beginner friendly my fiancé that could barely use windows is using it just fine
Has your fiancé had to update drivers? Has he had to upgrade to a new release? Has he had to figure out how to install a version of something that isn’t in the Debian stable repositories?
If the only application your fiancé uses is Firefox, then he might go a long time before having any kind of problem. It all depends on how he uses it.
It’s basically a Chromebook for her
If it’s a her, you mean fiancée, fiancé is used only for men. And, it’s basically a chromebook in how she uses it. But, chromebooks are designed so that you never have to do any system administration. You never have to upgrade drivers or figure out how to get to the next release.
She probably hasn’t had to deal with that yet, but eventually the system will have to be updated. Over time, cruft piles up and makes it harder and harder to upgrade and manage. Atomic distributions are designed to be much more like chromebooks. Someone else manages the upgrades and the tricky choices, and then you just install their base image.
and the only final thing that I’m missing is Adobe products.
I miss Affinity Designer! Bought a license and I like it but no linux port 🙄
I can’t get used Inkscape, it’s so different and confusing for me
Have you ever seen how to draw a circle in GIMP?
I hate you :c that was… Disturbing
Krita > Gimp
Krita and GIMP are tools for different use cases.
Being a deck owner not over obsessed in the latest tripe A games.
Most people won’t budge. It doesn’t matter if Win10 is unsupported or isn’t getting a security update, I reckon a solid 40 of 43% will just stay on it until programs they use stop working.
Already prepared everything for the jump. Switched MS Office for LibreOffice, and Outlook for Betterbird. Tested install, configuration and access to backups in a VM. Next vacation I take I’ll go for it. Mint is my choice of Distro, because of Steam/Gaming reasons. With the US being antagonistic, if not outright hostile, right now, and Microsoft having their disgusting Copilot AI Analysis Fingers in everything, it’s the rational choice I think.
I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that it generates a new system for you on update and lets you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lmde is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
Just a small update, I made the switch to EndeavourOS /w XFCE4 about two weeks ago and so far everything works perfectly. Even modern games on Steam w/ Nvidia graphics card. Thanks again.
Switch to Linux. As a big-time gamer, I did it last year and it’s been fantastic. Only issue is if you main games with root kit anticheat…but with enough momentum in Linux direction, game studios will be forced to abandon those dubious detection methods anyway.
Sadly I use way too many programs that only work on windows or Mac that Linux would handicap me. The free open source versions of yhe apps I use are no where near as capable.
My only option I can think of would be running a virtual machine of Win10 on a Linux install so I can still use those apps.
Would you mind sharing a couple of the names of the programs that only work on Windows for you? I’m a bit curious.
I’m not Tyler Bourbon, but it’s Fusion 360 for me. I sound like a broken record at this point, but it’s the only piece of software that keeps a windows install in my house
Hey Autodesk you should put F360 on Linux
FreeCad is getting much more capable, have you tried it?
The more people hop onto Linux the faster and better funded support for Linux development becomes. If you’re a single player gamer or play Valve multiplayer games primarily, make the jump to Linux. Get on Mint, get on Fedora, Ubuntu, etc and get off Microsoft’s shitboat. You already took off from Reddit. Wean off all these other money/data leeches
I already switched to Bazzite Desktop and it’s been so good. I had some pains configuring somethings to my liking, but that was more due to me not being familiar with Linux. I’m never going back.
If I was considering Bazzite and Pop OS as options, which would you suggest I go with?
Well, I cannot comment about PopOS because I simply don’t know how it is, but Bazzite on desktop has been great. I didn’t need to install anything related to gaming because it already comes with everything on it.
Pretty much anything I needed is on the discovery store and it’s handled like the app store on Android, so no headache of messing it up with installations or worrying about updates. Although, Bazzite is an immutable OS so anything that you need to install that’s not on the store can be a headache.
Also, my computer is an old laptop, so I got a performance boost as the system feels way smoother now than with Windows.
About games, I played some indie games on Steam and Lutris and it worked flawlessly. But do note that for more recent systems, it appears to be some headaches, especially with NVIDIA graphics cards. I only play new games on streaming services, so I don’t have those problems. But I do have some problems with the streaming service using my 8BitDo controller, but it’s not related to the system, it’s related to the service’s bad drivers. When I stream the game using Steam, it’s smooth sailing.
No way I’m switching to Linux yet, multi monitors support with mixed resolutions and vrr on nvidia still kinda sucks. As soon as someone makes that work I’ll try it out on a separate partition. Buy last time I tried my other monitors had all kinds of issues when I had games open with gysnc
Dual mon with diff res works as expected here. I even have different hz I think
I gave Linux Mint a try last week when I received the news about the obligatory MS account for W11. Not that I’ll “upgrade” to W11 but anyway.
Very smooth installation experience. The OS and software like Steam, Brave, Nvidia drivers and some audio & video stuff installed through the package control in no time. I could actually work with it.
Half of my game library is made only for W though. Or the small blocker things like GTA V that works well in Mint in story mode, the Battleye thing won’t start of course, so expect no GTA Online in Mint either.
I think I’ll keep Linux Mint and Windows under dual boot and use Windows only when necessary. Or run W10 in a virtual box in Mint 😎.
I was able to run SimTower on Linux. I haven’t tried SimCoopter, but there are so many bugs in that game it likely won’t work lol
Thing is, before battleye, gta online worked perfectly. I played it for years on every remotely popular linux distro, from debian, to ubuntu, linux mint, fedora etc. It’s just the fucking anticheat.
Dual boot is the way for right now. Proton is huge, but there are still a good number of games with compatibility issues or rootkit anticheats. Personally I advise steering clear of the latter, but that’s neither here nor there.
I use CachyOS as my daily driver and booted up the Windows partition maybe 3 times since setting this up back in February (and most of those times were just to play REPO because Elgato hardware with dual input and output has serious issues with Linux, but I’ve sorted that out now with a workaround)
I had read that Steam on WINE is pretty stable. Is it not?
Valve made a compatibility layer for the Steam Deck and Linux called Proton. It uses a lot of technologies, including WINE, dxvk, and more to make Windows games run well on Linux. It basically takes Windows API calls and translates them to Linux with little to no performance penalty.
Steam also has native builds for Windows, macOS, ChromeOS, and Linux now, so you can just install it. Most Linux distros have Steam right in their software manager now.
Typically, unless the game has blocked Linux with something like kernel-level anticheat, it’ll “just work” on Linux now. There is a community database called ProtonDB that has a list of games and how well they do or don’t work.
Hope this helps and feel free to ask any questions.
I’m planning on it.
I tried a rest run with Kubuntu on an old laptop I had, and it runs 95% flawlessly. My biggest issue is my new Brother printer that I’m trying to install connected to Wi-Fi. The system sems to know it’s there, but then doesn’t seem to install the drivers. My Android phone prints there just fine.
I assume you tried adding a new printer through KDE? There’s usually no driver needed if all you need to do is simply print/scan.
Does it fail with both options?
I thank you sincerely for getting back to me on this. I wanted to let you know I just figured it out! I thought I’d document it for the next person to come along.
I had tried all of the options in that screenshot, and none seemed to work.
Investigating further, it was a Brother printer, so I needed to download special drivers: https://support.brother.com/g/b/productsearch.aspx?c=us&lang=en&content=dl
Then, arcane magic needed to be performed on the command line: https://support.brother.com/g/b/downloadhowto.aspx?c=us&lang=en&prod=mfcj4335dw_us_eu&os=128&dlid=dlf006893_000&flang=4&type3=625
I had done all that, but I still had a problem. Digging through the script output, apparently I had a bad “libsane” installed with apt. Also, to add to the problems, apt doesn’t recognize the string “libsane” now. We are to use its new name “libsane1” now in apt! So, I tried to reinstall and then reinstall the brother printer drivers, to no avail. Eventually, I had to completely uninstall libsane, and then reinstall it. And everything magically worked.
It’s so easy! 🤨
One thing to be ready to have is the IP number of the printer, which I was able to get in the WiFi options of the printer.
Whew! Test page printed on my test machine! I feel like this was my last major hurdle before adopting Linux on other machines.
Again, thanks for responding!
Thanks for documenting it for future people! Glad you got it to work.
Unpopular opinion but I’m just using 11. I deal with enough problems with Linux at work and as hard as it is to believe, Windows just work and fits my workflow too well. Linux works great on my Steam Deck but the occasional weird quirks it has with certain games/launchers means I can’t use it as my main gaming platform, it’s only fine on the Deck because it has advantages for the form factor.
All games work in 11. You will get the best picture quality for graphics on 11. More DX9 games work in 11 than worked in 10. Path tracing is best on 11. I have some games that are DVD installs, no game store launcher.
There are different Linux programs that address most Windows issues but not all. With Windows, you can install Win 11, install GPU driver, and start playing games. I do avoid using Steam due to their extortion, so eventually I find games that can’t run on Linux.
I switched to linux full time almost a year ago.
I have been thus far entirely unsuccessful in convincing anyone else to make the jump. Normal people do not give a fuck, will not lift a finger to improve their digital lives. I’ve been telling friends and family about adblockers for YEARS, and not a single one ever bothered to do it of their own volition. If I don’t do it for them, then they just sit through ads like complacent sheep. None of them are going to change operating systems if they can’t even install a browser extension.
I’m been a Linux power user for more than half of my life, 8 last years spent on NixOS. I self-host my everything. I’ve bootstrapped a toolchain and a Linux distro from scratch^Wtcc for giggles twice, first without a package manager, then without one. For the last five years, I earn a living by working on a Linux distro. I still have my only decent GPU in a Windows 10 box half a continent away I stream games from. Would you be able to convince me to switch?
Just face it, Windows is the gaming console firmware.
I’m talking about normies, not gamers, and not power users like yourself.
Normies touch their pc for less than one hour a day, because everything they could want is in their phone. Many normies don’t even have internet connections in their home because they exclusively engage with the internet through their phone. I’ve talked to normies who don’t have pcs at all because their ipads do everything they could possibly want.
It’s a fact that there are certain games that simply do not run on linux, because of drm or developer stupidity or any number of reasons. As a separate argument, I’d argue that those games are not worth playing. I used to be a hardcore gamer, I’ve gotten old since then and become a casual. I don’t have time nor energy to dedicate to figuring out why game x won’t run on pc y with configuration z. If the big green play button doesn’t work, I refund the damn thing, and in my almost 2 years of linux usage I have yet to need to do that. Another separate argument is my disdain for AAA games, the lack of ethics in their creation, and the abysmal conditions in which they always launch in these days.
So as to your actual question, can I convince you to switch your gaming pc to linux? No, and I’m not even going to try. If you insist on playing the latest AAA slop that the megacorps shovel at you, then you must have windows and you must continue to allow microsoft to continue to rape your digital existence in order to have crappy entertainment that I wouldn’t dignify with the time of day.
And 25% of users in Asia still use Windows 7. People are going to stay on the OS for as long as possible.
If only we had a reason to upgrade.
Instead, we have many reasons not to.Yea just set up a windows 11 pc for the first time and the experience was basically:
It forces you into making a Microsoft account or log in with one, then it told me mine was locked even though I was able to log in fine elsewhere. I had to use the alternate log in method to get in (I know you can make a local account but I already had one set up for this).
Then it tries to force you to “back up from your old pc” which this was an entirely different system so I’m not even sure why I would want that.
Then it tries to convince you to send them a bunch of telemetry while reminding you that you’ll still get ads if you don’t, they just won’t be targeted towards you.
Then it tries to push microsoft office on you.
Then it needs to do updates which took like 45 minutes.
Then you’re finally at the desktop where you get probably half a dozen othe pop ups between windows and the vendor.
Then it’s “usable”
By comparison Bazzite took like 20 minutes to get to a usable desktop and isn’t nagging me about ads at all. I have a laundry list of things still to figure out but so far way less annoying.
- There is a workaround for installing win 11 with local account, it’s still horseshit
- the fact that they think that just because they still show ads it’s ok in any way shape or form to collect any personal information is insane
- don’t forget they are also trying to screen record 24/7 and then store it in the cloud (yes they store it “locally” in you appdata, that they then decided to sync with OneDrive)
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Yea, I had a throwaway account already to use for the login so I didn’t bother trying it. They still managed to make it annoying even when I did it their way and agreed it is horseshit.
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Agreed.
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I DID forget about that. Thanks for reminding me I need to figure out how to opt out (assuming it’s even possible).
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