Could be small or big.
My answer has always been that, Linux can’t handle everything I’d ask out of it that I normally can with Windows. I know the games issue has been progressing far from the days when that used to have been an archaic flaw with Linux for the longest time. Games might not be the issue except for some concerns I have for some games.
I was taking some time a few moments ago, to check if a program called Firestorm Viewer would work on Linux Mint which could’ve been my distro of choice. And the description written on the linux page described exactly the kind of concerns I’d have for compatibility and usability from going Windows to Linux.
They said that their viewer was tested and designed to function mostly with Ubuntu and while it could work with other distros, it’s not to be expected to be smooth.
That’s the kind of sentiment and concern I have always had with Linux if I were to go from Windows to it. There are programs and tools on Windows that I have that are used for specific purposes and I know they will not function on Linux. Furthermore, incase anything breaks down, any and all solutions would only be applicable to that thing that would be far easier to solve than just being SOL if I was on Linux.
It is something as a user that I just can’t simply afford to deal with on a regular basis if I made the switch.
So while I may not have too much of an issue running games, I won’t have too much of an issue using alternatives, I won’t have to deal with the Windows ecosystem .etc I will just be running into other walls that would simply make me second guess my decision and make me regret switching to the point where I would dip back into Windows in a hurry.
My domain. I’m too lazy to bring the whole shit somehow over to Linux. But I recently moved from hyperv to proxmox. Windows just sucks ass in comparison.
And gaming. Sure, many or most games do work fine in Linux, but then there are those with shitty anti-cheat. And also there are no drivers for my soundcard, and I really love my soundcard.
But win11 really really really tested my limits of tolerance. Really…
None, we only use linux.
At the house yeah its the family computers. Haven’t had to reimage for years. The windows 10 old lap had to get reimaged after the last windows update blue screened it haha.
At work its because all the tools work on it. That’s it.
Although there’s a minority that is moving to phone and Mac. And they are growing. Its interesting to see the transition last 2 years. A lot of the vendors have put their products online after covid so there is less and less reasons to use windows.
And the last crowd strike issue made management OK with deploying on Linux. So about 2/3 of the servers a that are in existence are now on Linux. Guess between windows server and Linux are the most stable?
My Windows 10 PC is just as, if not more secure than any Linux machine on the planet.
But one of these days I’m going to have to actually power it on again and then I guess I’ll have to do something.
I’m lazy and haven’t gotten around to it yet
+1
+1
I did flip my peripheral electronics, it’s just my main computer I haven’t changed yet. I made an attempt a while back ago but ran into enough snags, after already having a rough day, that I gave up and I haven’t tried again since. I’m pretty sure I know what the problem is, I just haven’t found myself wanting to sit down and burn the time it would take to install the new OS and get everything installed and tweaked how I like it etc. The latter part being a most-of-the-day project.
I will do it eventually though. I am sick of Windows. Now I just need to get over my fatigue and get off my ass.
For me, the snag is that I haven’t sorted through my files yet to decide what to keep
If you’re definitely making the hop, copy the whole windows file system to an external NTFS-formatted drive and then mount that and sort the files later haha.
You won’t be able to boot it as a backup, but the files will be there. If you have drive encryption you have to turn it off
Isn’t mint based on Ubuntu? So that should work without a hitch for you. Worst case just boot into the live usb without installing it directly and just try it there.
As for me, I dual boot on separate drives because I have specific software that requires windows sometimes. Otherwise it’s primarily Linux on all machines in the house.
Yeah! Once you get into linux you discover that in reality there are like 3 maybe 4 linux distros. Ubuntu is based on Debian and Mint is based on Ubuntu. And if you are knowledgeable enough then you just compile everything from source and it doesn’t matter if you’re running Fedora or FreeBSD.
I may be a fool though, don’t listen to me.
The only thing a beginner needs to know is Linux Mint. I think any time anyone shows curiosity in trying Linux, it should be stressed that there’s a really simple and “safe” way to start, which would be through Linux Mint.
Because my PC is an entertainment box. I don’t want to turn it into a problem to solve.
Also, Nvidia.
Also, Nvidia.
Was waiting for this to pop up LOL
If you are on a market for a Linux-first laptop, AMD is the way. I mean, yes, Nvidia is far better now than half a decade ago, but still, the hoops you have to jump? FUCK YOU NVIDIA
What hoops? Installing the NVIDIA drivers is pretty straight forward.
Yea, until you tryna upgrade that laptop 😂
just make a vm of windows and use Linux for EVERYTHING else
You could always dual boot - have a secondary drive to ease into Linux and keep your Windows drive as you work on setting things up/functioning in Linux.
Personal: Linux with a secondary, occasionaly used box for things that only seem to work on Windows. Would just do a VM if I didn’t already have a spare hand-me-down box.
Work: I’m not fighting that battle. If they deploy Windows, I’m using Windows.
Going 100% Linux, even just in personal use, is still not feasible.
Was staying away from Linux for this reason. Last time I used it, it was brutal.
I just installed pop OS and everything works out of the box except for the faceID thing. But that was 10 minutes setting up another app and now it works.
The laptop performs so much better now than it did with window 11
My wife has zero computer skills. Windows drove her mad. I put nixOS on it, asked what programs she needed for work/home (zoom, chrome, libreoffice, cups) filled the config in by copy paste, and ran the rebuild… She hasn’t bugged me in 5 years for anything.
ZorinOS is another install and use option. There’s no need for hacker CLI level stuff anymore
There’s no buildabear OS stuff in my industry. If I replaced the OS on my work laptop with Linux, I would 1) not be able to access anything, or 2) if I got access I might get arrested at worst and have a serious talk coming from HR for security violation at best.
What industry is that?
Every corporate setting ever.
Corpo says use Windows, you have to do that. Circumvent it and you are going to get fired. Even using a nonstandard browser, or whatever, can get you in hot water. Corpo protect their legal standing, workers are irrelevant.
Just curious, the corpo I first worked at had both Linux and windows. Other places, even with fully locked down world enterprise, have a form you can fillout to explain why you need something. Current place has enterprise software ports for Linux or Windows. So I was more curious what industry it was not the level of industry.
I’m in design and manufacturing aerospace systems/components. And before that, design and manufacturing of laboratory instrumentation. Both were similar: options were 1) default Windows build for engineering functions and 2) default Windows build for non-engineering functions, or 3) an act of god to get something else approved. Security, monitoring, retention, I’m sure were all reasons. Also just simplifying the number of builds IT would have to accommodate.
Ive know one person who managed to get a Linux box approved. It was so they could use a particular aerodynamics software package, iirc. IT made them keep it off network and would not support it in any capacity.
I made the change about a year ago now. I saw the end of Windows 10 coming up and decided to install linux in a dual boot and try my best to use it exclusively for a couple months until I properly got used to it. You will need to accept that not every program you use on Windows will be available and you may have to try out a couple replacements before you find something that works for you. But most things have decent alternatives. Especially considering how much is done in a web browser these days, there aren’t too many programs I really miss from Windows (mostly 3D CAD and RAW image processing).
Also, note that the differences between distros is way overblown when it comes to compatibility, it is mostly just a case of whether your package manager has the packages you want available and how bleeding edge the packages your distro uses are. Debian based distros (e.g. Ubuntu and Mint) tend to use slightly older packages than ones that are rolling release like Arch which should theoretically be a bit more stable.
I saw the end of Windows 10 coming up and decided to install linux in a dual boot
This is something I need to learn how to do - I’ve no idea how dual booting works, but I could do with learning. Did you have any good resources to help you, or did you already know how to do it?
Dual booting is easy as long as you have a second drive or can shrink your Windows partition to provide space for your Linux install (this can be done within Windows). Your distro installer should have a couple options during install, one of which should allow you to install it on a specific partition without touching your Windows partition. After you select that option it should install everything including a bootloader like GRUB or systemdboot that will allow you to select Windows or Linux on startup.
A warning about dual booting though, Windows doesn’t like to be installed alongside another OS, it may realize this and fuck with your bootloader resulting in a system that won’t boot into your linux install. You need to boot up a live CD and do something called “chroot” into your sytem to reinstall your bootloader. Its not actually that difficult but can be a pain to figure out the first time. https://discovery.endeavouros.com/system-rescue/arch-chroot/2022/12/
Man i wish Mint worked out of the box as well as virtually everyone on here says it does.
I am a former software engineer, and don’t want my home PC to be a hobby. I’m like 6 hours into trying to make my (simple) audio setup work on Mint Cinnamon and it’s intermittent at best. Never have even thought about it on Windows.
It is plug and play compared to Linux of old, it’s clearly come a long way. But it’s nowhere near as easy as Windows still, for anyone who isn’t trying to make this a hobby
What (simple) audio setup? Does it rely on proprietary software?
Nope. Motherboard SPDIF to (“dumb”) speakers. Can’t get the mobo SPDIF out to work in Mint.
I’m certain if I sink enough hours in I can figure something out but like 6 hours into troubleshooting this I decided I didn’t have the bandwidth to take 100% of my fun time away to do what feels like my job to me.
I’m sure you’ve spent a lot of time trying different things, this is what I found:
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In Linux Mint’s sound settings (Applications -> Preferences -> Sound), under the Hardware tab, choose a profile that does NOT mention anything digital or IEC. For example, select “Analog Stereo Duplex.” This can help PulseAudio avoid blocking the digital output and allow passthrough to work properly through ALSA.
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Use alsamixer in a terminal to select the motherboard’s sound device and ensure SPDIF outputs are enabled and not muted. Sometimes SPDIF is muted by default.
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In terminal, run gstreamer-properties and set Default Output to ALSA with the digital device as the output. This bypasses PulseAudio and can solve passthrough issues.
Not actually sure if any of that will help, but I tried. 😂
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That’s exactly how I feel about it as well and largely contributes to my hesitation.
I read and hear how so many people just gush and gush about how Linux Mint or this distro just ‘works out of the box’. What they don’t tell you, is how they must have had to spend hours getting something to work. Like sure, Linux Mint or a more friendlier distro will work out of the box - if you do nothing but just browse online and maybe install/uninstall programs you may want or need from the software package manager.
But I have had my battles before trying to make things work on linux distros, like getting proprietary functions of a browser to work. Hell, I have even had to fight a little just to get a displaying clock! Like with its formatting from 24hr to 12hr, I’m not saying getting it to display or anything but I don’t get this desire to default to a 24hr format. And I have had to fight at times to switch formats.
The point is, I or others should not have to spend more time than we need to, to get things to work when there is already an OS that readily does that without question. It doesn’t make us dumb, it doesn’t make us incurious or boring or uninterested in computers and technology. It’s about patience and respect of time and if some Linux distro is not going to respect my time or patience, regardless of how welcoming it appears, then it is not worth swapping to.
Fusion360
I’ve found real solutions to pretty much everything but this. For Fusion, I still just have to run it in a windows VM under Linux.
I’m travelling atm and bricking my laptop would be a disaster. That’s it
Almost 20 years ago I was living in China and my Mac’s hdd got corrupted. While I was able to restore the os I couldn’t get a copy of ms office anywhere - that’s when I switched over to saving everything as .rtf Wrote my dissertation in Nisus Writer Pro and still won’t fuck with any proprietary file format.
I have terabytes of games, shit internet and no patience for things that don’t just work immediately. I can only tolerated windows because I’ve already fixed it and I don’t have to keep fixing it anymore.
Who knows what will happen with my next gaming laptop though, if it’s fresh and empty I won’t have that excuse, although there is always ‘cbf’ to fall back on.
I use Endeavour and it’s near flawless because all the drivers are imstalled, Steam knows when to use Proton, Heroic Launcher handles everything else. 6TB+ of games. All run. When they don’t it’s because of Epic Games’ login requirement. No crashes. No launch errors.
Basically, there’s no excuse for incompatibility any more. One exception may be some online multiplayer games with kernel level anticheat that’s not supported by Proton. But I don’t play those so idk
Compatibility my only concerns are modded games afaik. Forza I think has issues but I’m pretty sick of forza, anyway, fh5 gave me a ton of grief.
It’s literally redownloading everything. My internet is likely slower than the moon. Im not touching it without needing to start from scratch anyway, because it’ll knock my internet out for like a month.
You can back up your games using steam’s game transfer tool to another drive, then attaching that drive to the new install :)
It’s even designed for people with data caps. (Since most compatibility is through Proton it shouldn’t have any difference in the actual game files)
