- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
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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…
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Ubuntu 12.04 was nice for desktop users. It just didn’t do anything good for gaming at the time.
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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?
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.
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.
Microsoft Access and Publisher, the Adobe suite, VR. That’s just the tip of the iceberg of why I can’t completely abandon Windows, yet. I do have a handful of older PCs running Mint though, and I’ll be switching over more. But not all of them.
Ok, I really need to know what you’re using Access for in 2025
Old nonprofit, old files, continuously maintained for about 30 years now. Tiny staff, not many resources to work on migrating the files. It’s just not a missional priority.
Publisher is being discontinued soon and will be removed from Microsoft 365 installs
I’ve never used 365. I use a 2019 purchased version. I refuse to pay subscriptions. But my job has a lot of graphics that were created and are still updated in publisher. I’m sure I can find an alternative, but recreating hundreds of files will be terrible, and it will likely all fall on me. And that’s only like 5% of my job.
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.
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My laptop is about 7 years old now, I think I will do this actually, thanks for the tip comrade
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…
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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!
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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)
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.
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.
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.
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Mints file explorer when moving large files does leave some meat on the bone for me.
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.
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
Download a new OS // Download the operating system you want to install. Search for Linux distributions for beginners to get some suggestions.
I feel like it’s better to actually list/suggest a few beginner distros than to tell people to look it up.
Yeah, I agree. Especially since there’s SO much information out there that’ll come up if they try to search, and lots of it isn’t good, and tons of it is conflicting with each other. It’s best to make it as easy and simple as possible. Like just suggest Mint or something.
Zorin OS is going to be the best for windows refugees. It is so far ahead in this area that it isn’t even remotely close.
I don’t know why people keep trotting out mint. Mint has far too many issues to be a serious suggestion.
Mint has a common issue of destroying itself on updates. It happened again to a coworker of mine a week ago when he decided to give nix a go (we are both systems engineers/network engineers).
That and mint’s GUI elements are a thin veneer. There is still a lot of legacy garbage. It isn’t made with the premise of “this GUI needs to be rock solid”. It seems to be built upon the old tired bullshit that nix users always trot out e.g. “most users only log into x y z site and make a document once in a while” or some shit. It simply isn’t true.
Most users do a variety of things. Some may be complicated, some may not be. The reason I tell people that Zorin is the distro of choice for refugees is that Zorin understood the assignment (although there are some very specific areas where it offers too much choice to the user, but those are exceedingly minor) and realized that the GUI and UX centered around that GUI is everything. Especially when you are trying to court windows users.
It should be noted that I am quite familiar with *nix, and he is to some degree familiar with it. Another guy we work with switched to popos on a whim a little over a week ago. He said he’s really enjoying it.
Thank you for the answer! Much appreciated.
Mint has a common issue of destroying itself on updates.
Could you be more explicit? Like, I don’t think it literally deletes itself from your drive. Right? So, what is it then?
I recommend Gentoo for a beginner.
What better way to understand your new OS than by compiling it from scratch?
I think it doesn’t actually matter what distro you use.
It’s like whether you’re wearing red socks or blue socks. As long as you’re wearing socks, so you don’t get cold.
Myself mentioned a bit below that the choice of a distribution isn’t that meaningful in the long run. But I still think that some distros should be recommended - otherwise the newbie simply says “Hannah Montana Linux, Justin Bieber Linux, Ubuntu Satanic Edition… bleeergh I can’t choose, I give up”.
damn Ubuntu Satanic Edition sounds cool.
A shame the project was discontinued, the visuals were fucking cool. (Yup, it was a real distro.)
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Linux Mint (XFCE desktop) is the best for beginners coming from Windows, in my opinion. Linux enthusiasts will fawn over KDE because of customization, but they ignore that the vast majority of people don’t want to spend months tweaking pixels, widgets and animations, they just want to use the computer.
Why do you suggest Mint over Ubuntu?
Ubuntu is developed and controlled by a corporation (canonical) and they have some non ideal practices (like pushing snaps heavily instead of the more open flatpaks or native apps). Mint takes what’s good in Ubuntu and cleans it up a lot.
Because fuck snaps
Mint in any of its default offerings feels significantly more familiar to a Windows environment than default Ubuntu, Lubuntu (LXDE desktop) or Xubuntu (XFCE desktop), making the migration “less painful”;
The ISO image is ~1GB smaller \Snaps probably 😆
My point is that the site should be recommending a few newbie distros, instead of telling the newbie to search it. Specially because the choice of a distribution isn’t that meaningful in the long run, but newbies struggle picking one.
That said I agree Mint would be a good choice. Not sure on Xfce; I’d probably recommend Cinnamon instead, as it looks a bit more modern (even if myself would rather use MATE or Xfce than Cinnamon).
I like https://distrochooser.de/
While your endorsement is definitely well-intentioned, I’m unsure if it correctly reflects the project’s health[1]. I’d argue we’ve got (a lot) better resources on the fediverse. Like, e.g. this excellent guide: Understanding Linux and choosing your first Linux distro, v2.0
While that’s a good read for someone more technical, the distro chooser brings it to people of lower technical prowess.
While that’s a good read for someone more technical
I would perhaps put more importance to eagerness to learn. But (I think) I understand where you’re hinting at.
the distro chooser brings it to people of lower technical prowess.
While the distrochooser definitely has a lower entry barrier, I’d argue that if one isn’t willing to read the above guide, then they might as well roll a die and choose between Bazzite, Fedora, Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, TUXEDO OS and Zorin OS accordingly.
Windows user: I’m thinking about switching to Linux, mind helping me out Linux User?
Linux user: ok, so what you want to do is just figure it out yourself.
Windows user: finds debian and fucks everything up wow Linux is terrible, I’ll stick to using Windows 11.
Speaking on that: a lot of people act as if promoting Linux means simply “to get others to install it”. And they ignore that the newbie will need help the first days, weeks, even months. Then the newbie gets burned out and switches back to Windows.
That probably explains why some people manage to retain even tech illiterate people using Linux, while others struggle to convince even tech literate ones to switch.
As a newer Linux user I think the priority in communication should be use Mint and then have some general information about how Linux isn’t Windows, with some key differences and how to do things. I know that’s more complicated than just saying it, but a “simple” get started guide would ease transition a lot.
Realistically, the best distro for a Windows user is one that runs all their existing Windows software (both applications and games) right out of the box.
Does any distro even come close to doing that?
Not that I’m aware of. Wine only goes so far before programs misbehave. It didn’t work well with heroes of might and magic 5 for me in 2022, for instance, terrible framerate
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I need autodesk for work so I’m setting up a 2nd box I can remote into. I looked into virtual cloud environments but they are too expensive
With no Adobe CC on Linux, I’m stuck on W10 for the foreseeable future. Otherwise I’d have already switched.
Are you able to run windows in a VM for your software?
As you can’t ditch it for alternatives, I suggest:
- KVM, kernel-based VM for better performance. See this vid about setting it up: https://youtu.be/BgZHbCDFODk Licenses (and cr=cks) should work, judging by the Adobe forums, but you’d have an overhead with Windows running, so you’d greatly win by stripping everything off from it, up to disabling system services or even their Explorer DE (like some gamers did with Win Aero in W7 times, killing it while the game was running).
- Wine (Proton) directly or via Bottles\Lutris\Steam increased it’s emulation capabilities and performance in the previous years. It works for highly demanding games, talks OK with my various discrete v-cards, skips the Win10 overhead, shows CC apps not unlike other programs, but it can cause random bugs, apps not communicating right to each other, and activating it may be not as straightforward. Before starting to rely on that, it’s better to test your exact worklfow, tools you use, etc.
You’d be probably drown in a question of what Linux distro to choose, considering there’s stuff like AV Linux or Pop_OS being recomended for media design. But you’d easily hop from one to another as you go, so it’s better to install something as simple as Mint first, and try Adobe workarounds there before moving next.
If you have specific hardware, I’d say that Wacom-like graphic tablets work like they should (tried several pieces, adapted some touchscreen devices, nearly out-of-the-box on modern Linux), but for something else, like controllers that need to talk to your programms in some special way, you’d better google their compatibility or try it yourself. Making a passthru of inputs to VM or taking it’s inputs by Wine wouldn’t usually be a problem, problems start when this piece needs a specific Win\Mac-only driver, and they can, especially if they are old, have a temper of a feral ghoul. I know that there are a lot of linuxoids creating in different kinds of media, so I’m pretty sure there are some answers on the web, at least for the same manufacturer, series or kind of hardware.
With no Adobe CC on Linux
How’s this?
Nice, that’s big. Thanks for the link.
It has been my pleasure! Hope it’ll work out for ya!
Tried using Alma on my rig at home (since I’m using it on my servers), and I’m already going to be looking for a new distro. Went back to it after a week or so not having the energy to deal with it and apps like Firefox and steam wouldn’t launch.
Need to find a decent OS to run in its place so I can stop booting to Win10
Fedora is the obvious answer for you. It’s upstream from your upstream. It has the same tooling you’re used to, but newer packages. A less obvious answer is to embrace the atomic/immutable future and look at Fedora Silverblue or the stuff that the Universal Blue community is putting out. I switched from Silverblue to Aurora-dx and I’ve been extremely happy with it.
Funny you mention that, Silver blue was the first thing I tried (because I’ve used fedora off and on for over a decade) and something about it just didn’t work for me, but I don’t remember what. Didn’t try the regular version tho.
In the end, I want something I can game on and dev with (which is the easy part, since VSCodium is multiplatform). If Steam doesn’t work, the install is getting torched (which is why Alma is getting the boot).
I’m a sys admin by trade, so the OS should require minimal troubleshooting because I’m sick of doing that by the end of the day.
It’s a different family then what you have been playing with, but if you want “just works and not fancy” - Debian.
It won’t have the latest and greatest software (security patches sure but nothing else). You trade that for stability.
Any reason to go vanilla Debian and not a Debian based system like Ubuntu? I’m not looking to do much advanced on my desktop other than maybe some docker/bash/Powershell development, gaming, and basic browsing.
I definitely am attracted to ‘it just works’, but I also want to make sure I’m not handcuffing myself with an os that makes it hard to play with it as well. I know those are at two ends of a spectrum, but worst case I have plenty of VMs to use to play if necessary.
“It just works” is why Linus Torvalds uses Fedora and not Debian. Just saying… Debian does a lot of weird hand holding and many packages come with pre-configured pieces rather than what the developer pushed. They’re usually sensible, but if you don’t know it’s doing that it can be strange. For example, fail2ban on Debian will come with an SSH jail pre-configured. That is what most people use it for, but IMO it’s kind of weird that someone made that decision for you on an app that isn’t pre-installed.
In the defense of Debian vs Ubuntu, Debian won’t force snaps on you.
And to be clear. I’m not going to say Debian is not without it’s flaws. It is the system you choose if all you care about is stability. Case in point, I work with Linux day in and day out for my job, the absolute last thing I want to do is tinker with my laptop when I’m not at work - so I picked Debian. For me, the absolute stability is the most important thing - for others the fact that software can come preconfigured or is just old will be deal breakers.
As for Ubuntu vs Debian - ultimately they are similar. However Ubuntu has made some (IMO) choices I dislike (eg snaps).
If all you care about is stability, check my other comments about the Fedora Atomic family. Hard to be more stable than immutable with built-in rollback capabilities. That’s why I currently run Aurora DX.
That might be a good selling point of Debian, if you never try anything advanced with it. I wanted to get GPU passthrough working on Debian with qemu, and it was such a pain trying to get the packages that Debian didn’t come with. Had to add new apt repositories, started messing up the boot cycle, and I eventually just gave up.
Silverblue is a totally different beast than what you’re used to. The filesystem is immutable with the exception of /var and /etc. Even /home is moved into /var/home, although a bind mount exists so /home still appears to be there. You are expected to use flatpaks for applications, toolbox for rpms that don’t have a flatpak, and very last resort you can overlay an rpm on the base image. I absolutely think this is the direction linux as a whole is moving. OpenSUSE has MicroOS that does a similar thing and Leap 16 will default to being immutable. Debian has an immutable variant, and SteamOS is built on an immutable flavor of Arch. The Fedora Atomic family specifically supports bootc. You are essentially booting a container as your OS. That’s why it has so much community buy in. You could try looking at the Universal Blue images I mentioned. Bazzite is gaming focused with the option to boot straight into gaming mode, Aurora is a general workstation with KDE, and Bluefin is a general workstation based on GNOME. Each image has a DX version that includes developer tools like VScode and Virtual Machine Manager included.
I’m also a sysad by trade. A consultant for Red Hat. I personally switched to Aurora DX and the only overlayed package I have installed is
clevis-dracutso network based disk encryption with tang works. Other than that I have the built-in stuff, flatpaks (Steam is installed this way), and a couple of utilities installed with brew (btop, nvtop). I also don’t want to manage the OS. Getting the OS updates as an atomic image is very appealing. OStree also allows you to rollback if an update does fail for some reason… Doing it this way makes your OS kind of an appliance that you run applications on top of instead of alongside.Damn, that’s a hell of a high effort response, thank you for the info!
I’ll try another SilverBlue install, probably a bluefin variant you mentioned. It definitely sounds like I need to unlearn a lot of the info I’ve picked up over the years, including avoiding flat packs (or was that snap?). Not sure what toolbox is, but I expect I’ll have to look into that in due time.
The biggest downside to Flatpaks is that they’re kind of containers. That’s obviously also they’re biggest upside. But with that isolation comes some bloat compared to rpms directly installed, some don’t integrate as cleanly with the host OS, etc… The Universal Blue images ship with Flatseal and Warehouse which help manage those Flatpaks. For example, if you want to add an external library to the Steam Flatpak, you can use Flatseal to allow the Steam Flatpak to access that directory. By default Steam sandboxes itself to just its own ~/.var area.
A word on toolbox. It’s really cool and it comes with Fedora Atomic spins. However, it was forked and the fork is called distrobox and is miles better. So much better that it’s my opinion that we at Red Hat should deprecate toolbox and just embrace distrobox. What is it? It’s really just a wrapper for podman. It sets up containers to act kind of, sort of like VMs or LXC system containers, but it mounts your home directory inside the container. You can share apps between the distrobox and the host. The idea is that you can create a distrobox for whatever thing you’re doing, install all of that thing’s dependencies, and work from your home directory, but never actually touch your host installation. Kind of like a devcontainer for your system.
Snap is the one we poo poo. Canonical is always going to Canonical. Just like when they tried to make the Unity desktop (which I actually preferred) and the Mir compositor, the community had already settled on GNOME 3 and Wayland. This is sort of snap vs flatpak. Last I knew snap used a proprietary, hosted by Canonical, backend. That’s a big no from me. I’m not staunchly open source or nothing, but there is just no reason for Canonical to be making proprietary anything.
If you can’t tell, I’m stoked about the immutable future of Linux.
I’ve layered zsh, zsh-autosuggestions, zsh-syntax-highlighting and syncthing. The first three because the version from homebrew behaved weird, syncthing because I’ve got two users on this computer and
systemctl enable syncthing@useris easier than dealing with podman containers right now.
How can I play cracked the last of us on my popOS sytsem?
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It seems it’s just a platform that I can run games on, and I need to find a cracked version of the game by myself, right? Do I need to look for a Linux-specific cracked version? Sorry for the dumb questions.
No it’s running Windows game on Linux so cracked versions work just as well. Don’t ask how I know that…
Oh that’s spicy thanks!
Zorin OS is the distro for windows refugees. Nothing else even comes close.
Why? Never hear of it. What makes it better conpared to other popular distros? And how does it serve the need of Windoofs refugees better?
Might want to have some people a hit more coherent on which version of Linux so they don’t get frustrated. Some people are jumping to distros that I’ve never heard of and getting annoyed it’s not windows. Like yea no kidding Justin Bieber OS isn’t getting updates. And your 3k series Nvidia isn’t working. Switch to Hanna Montana DE like the rest of us.























