Well, I switched to Edge for work with the latest Chrome update (since internal apps were Chromium only), and was pleasantly surprised. It actually let me turn off almost all the junk, and is responsive in a way I haven’t seen in a Chromium browser in years.
Safari and Firefox for personal use though, and nothing compelling to make me change that.
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The performance is pretty on-par with other major browsers now, but it is the obscene amount of popups built into the browser that irritates me.
I use edge for work every day, what popups?
Once you set it up it’s fine, but on first opening you have to click through a bunch of menus (no, I don’t want to share data, no I don’t want to sync my account, and so on). In other browsers it’s a small popup in the corner which you can ignore, and just google what you wanted to google. In edge they’re fullscreen and you have to click no on each one.
Probably a rather unique problem because I regularly set up new machines, most people just go through it once and never see it again.
You hit the nail right on its head! It’s pretty bad that there is no skip all option, and for some of them you have to manually uncheck before continuing.
I’m in the same situation as you where I often work on fresh virtual machines, and so I see this a lot too.
May be worth building a default config to “install” for those setups; that’s saved me quite some time when configuring new/spare machines at work.
There’s the shopping popup that tries to find better deals or vouchers for products you’re looking at. It’s easy to turn off though.
Searching the settings for “notification” does show others - a feature called Discover and sidebar apps seem to be able to send notifications but I’ve never seen either.
Same I’m a developer who uses edge as my daily driver and once setup right I love it
I use arc on my mac and it’s nowhere near as nice as that, but I like the side tabs, the way it gets out of the way when I’m searching, and bing isn’t too bad; I’ve actually used it a few times. Once I found a customizable start page I haven’t looked back. Again, for work
If you need to use Chromium, just use Ungoogled-Chromium or Brave. But Firefox/LibreWolf will always be superior.
Maybe look at
BromiteCromite? Open Source Chromium browser where you don’t need to disable anythingBromite has not been updated since January.
One of the old Bromite contributors forked it: https://github.com/uazo/cromite
Yes, that one. Thanks for pointing it out
Mulch to
Same, I’m only allowed to use either Chrome or Edge on my work laptop, so I chose Edge.
Librewolf on my personal laptop and Firefox on mobile tho.
Bonus for Librewolf!
I love Firefox… But the listicle ads are seriously tacky and annoying. I do not want Pocket. And I do not want Pocket randomly re-enabled after a set of updates.
Gee Bing. You really are pathetic. Respect yourself dude.
Next time edge is going to ask… what are you going to do? Install Google chrome? 😂
tried it up to when it asked to remember CC #s. not stupid
Ff has that feature too. It’s if anything more secure than remembering passwords because at least you still need the expiration date and cvc (unless edge saves that too).
already using chrome for that. nothing but random passwords for about 300 sites. edge: import? no thanks dis chrome if you like. G has been good to me so far. was ff for a spell, got bloated
Windows put a full page ad for windows 11 before my computer started, I’m never upgrading. Hope to God Linux gaming gets better by 2025
Honest question - what is the current problem(s) in Linux gaming? And I don’t mean that the way it sounds, I just haven’t done it in a long long time. I mean back then it had to have a linux specific version and you had to deal with X11 mouse input.
Now with Wayland and things like steamdeck existing I’m surprised it’s not more viable.
I’m sure it’s a long list but what are the main factors? Just a curiosity. Unfortunately I just don’t get to play games these days. Still GPU and sound driver issues? Publishers refusing to take the extra steps to make a multi platform engine work on it? Too many unknowns based on flavor of Linux installed?
Only reason I don’t switch to linux is because of both riot games and easy anti cheat(you can kinda play league of legends most of the time)
but valorant’s vanguard is just straight up built for windows so you can’t cheat in their game, so you can’t even open that game in linux
And 99% of games that use easy anti cheat are also unplayable (except elden ring somehow)
Tbh I haven’t really played their any games that fall into this category lately, but I don’t want to have to install windows every time I get a urge to play league and tilt myself
and I know that dual boot exists but I have a very limited storage right now (I’m only on a 480gb ssd since my hdd broke)
An interesting point… i didn’t even think about the anti-cheat engines nor considered they’d be bound to windows but yeah i get it, i deal with that on licensing services.
I feel your pain on storage. It’s cheaper now but it’s all relative. I’ll save your UN and hit you up if i stumble into something that may help.
A lot of EAC games work just fine on proton now. For any game released and/or updated since September 2021 enabling EAC on proton for the devs is as easy as ticking a checkbox.
My main issue is a lack of support from games like DCS, which will never get Linux support, and not having trackIR support, but I suppose that just needs someone who is experienced.
Also I can’t play fortnite/cod and that’s what my friends play.
Hah I had to look some of that up. I bet I could guess your age within a couple years. :)
DCS seems like a cash grab and travkir thing seems quite the gimmick. But i understand you wanting to play with your friends and so do they and they aren’t going to bring Linux support despite it’s likely built on it.
Windows is essentially free anyway these days so you’ll just have to suck it up for now. You can disable things like realtime scanning for a performance boost. If you can’t make your own DNS try quadr9 to block a majority of the telemetry and shit.
Being able to play with your friends is more important really. Just dual boot or use a VM to get your nix skills. I’m sure many won’t agree with me and that’s cool. There is nothing Linux can’t do, yet there are apps (or games) that will simply require windows to participate. Sucks, but that’s reality.
U didn’t have to be so condescending lmao
Sorry yo, wasn’t intended that way I promise! I don’t have great people skills text based or otherwise. And actually I’m the one that sounds like an idiot anyway haha In my defense I’m quite tired and seeking excuses to not be working so yeah, my bad, no offense intended
I get that for sure! I’m also a bit uh, trigger-happy with people online. I definitely get that feeling, though.
I’m not the guy you asked but I can answer for myself - it’s still not nearly as effortless to use for gaming as windows. I work with computers all day, so when I sit down to game at night I absolutely refuse to debug shit. For Starfield as an example, it works via proton, but the protondb page is full of “to get around X issue use the following workaround”, and I just can’t be bothered.
I use Linux for work and hobby software development, but for me to switch my gaming pc over would require it to not just be “viable”, but effortless
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Definitely more work to set things up the first time, though
This is ultimately my point - looking through protondb, it looks like all the games I play today work, but a good few require some workarounds, hacks, or just have crashes reported while playing
Gaming is my escape from my day job of working on software, fiddling with configs and whatnot is really the last thing I want to do when I have free time to play.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m stoked that gaming on Linux is improving so much, and I deeply look forward to the day that I can ditch Windows for good on my gaming PC, but for now its just the best tool for my requirements
Thank you, that’s the perspective I was looking for.
And while i understand, it’s certainly not limited to games or Linux. I too just want things to work and it’s become a struggle for one reason or another. I can find a common thread on that but probably not the place for that.
I am optimistic though that gaming will continue to get better and that will be helpful. Despite all the faults it’s at least going in the right direction.
I will say this - nowadays I have to figure out maybe 5% of games I play on Linux, and often times those games have issues with certain windows setups too
That’s actually pretty positive. Probably a multitude of reasons but in my very limited experience with recent games they are pushed out with tons of problems on any platform. Sometimes the game was just rushed out and this is what turned me off of games for the most part. “It’s online, we can just patch it later!”
Also not a fan of paying for the privilege of being a beta tester. Open betas used to be fun times.
That said, based on yours and others replies i think it seems worth it to dig up an old ssd and try some of my games out on Linux on my main. Honestly it seems way better than what it was years ago so I should go see for myself. Thanks!
Absolutely. It’s honestly the older titles that tend to work better as well, perfect for an older setup. A nice static target for the conversion layer. Proton was pretty good 3 years ago, now it’s amazing.
Lots of Devs I’ve noticed tend to be happy to tweak things on their end to get something to work better with Proton as well, or if we’re lucky they just use Vulkan out of the gate and make it a very straightforward job.
A good benchmark is seeing how steam deck users get along with that game. If they don’t hit any snags it’s a very good chance you won’t either
Great info, thanks. Most of my hardware is old. But that’s actually a good thing I think. I have a Lenovo ideacentre i plucked back from a friend as it was gathering dust. I upgraded the ram and SSD and installed neon on a whim and it’s amazing.
That’s what sorta started tracking me back… have continued using Linux for servers but i was impressed at that desktop. Now I know neon is a bit bleeding edge so any recommendations on a distro? I started with freebsd back in the day, then gentoo for desktop, then Ubuntu minimal for servers if that helps. Not afraid to get my hands dirty but prefer simplicity.
I found a 256GB SSD that should be enough for some testing. I need to grab some files off it but then it’s ready to go. Distro advice appreciated. Remember i just want to test :) TIA
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I hope gaming on GNU/Linux were bad, so I wouldn’t have wasted hours of my life :')
It needs a larger user base before companies will make the native version for it
By not switching you play into a self fulfilling prophecy
In 2016 you had 2 or 3 AAA games releasing Linux native versions. Now you are lucky if you get a working proton version. Linux has moved backwards. Honestly I think people tried it and hit a lot of problems with it then left. 2016 was the year of the Linux desktop but it failed to capture the market.
One of the biggest problems with Linux is simply additional hard drives. If you fill up your / drive you are basically screwed of you don’t know how to use the command line. Even the easiest Linux distros suffer from this problem. With windows I just reinstall programs to a different drive. With Linux you have to learn about symlinks, create then in the right spot and even then it doesn’t help unless you have a bigger drive. Alternatively you can learn about lvm and combine your drives in to one large monolith but this is even far more work for what’s it’s in Linux literally at worst a 10 minute fix and 0 second if you just install stuff to the right drives.
Genuinely no idea how Linux gaming could be better. I’ve been playing on desktop and Steam Deck for years, both “flat” games and VR games and it just works. Sure I don’t try literally everything but with ProtonDB I’m confident it will work, or not, and decide accordingly. Obviously not all games work on Linux but definitely more quality games that I have time for. For me it just works, I spend at least 99% of my time gaming on Linux actually gaming, in fact I can’t even remember when is the last time I tinkered. I don’t even have problems with GPU drivers despite tinkering with containers with machine learning. I’m not trying to say nobody has problems or dismiss problems people do have, just sharing my experience.
I think this is overselling it a little. I still run into issues with Proton from time to time that require sigkilling it and its children, and some games (especially EA titles) are finnicky and can take a few tries to launch properly.
As for VR, SteamVR on Linux outright sucks. It virtually never works the first time I launch it and requires some combination of reconnecting hardware and restarting software and the computer, and it’s plagued with bugs (most recently the UI rendering upside down in the new beta).
Don’t get me wrong, Linux has been my primary platform for some 5 years and my only one for the last few and I’d never dream of going back to Windows, and gaming on Linux has progressed unbelievably in the time I’ve been daily-driving it. But it still isn’t totally painless and there’s definitely more room for improvement in the coming years.
Linux gaming is even better than Windows in many ways now
How so?
Well, Elden Ring had a bug in it that killed performance, Proton was able to fix it without touching the game itself and resulted in Linux performance being markedly better.
Then with Starfield it performs about 30% faster than windows consistently.
I can force AMD FSR on any game (and I have an Nvidia card) to get a significant performance boost with no visually detectable loss in quality.
The list goes on.
Linux is still only compatible with 10000 games on Steams 70000 games store.
Windows is compatible with all of em.
It’s 12,000 and those are rated as “playable”. The majority of games on Steam would be playable out of the box, but Valve is being cautious with their verified program.
ProtonDB has over 18,000 user submissions for playable games.
There are many games in my library that aren’t listed as Steam Deck verified or even on ProtonDB and they just work.
My game still does not support proton. Fuck that game.
I switched back in 2019. It was pretty good then and it’s almost seamless now. Hell EAC works now and I can play Squad without any hiccups
I am glad squad works, haha
linux gaming is basically there at this point proton can run most games flawlessly unless you wanna play games with hyper aggressive drm or anticheat it mostly “just works”
Man, I just tried for a few weeks and just had no luck on the games I was trying. It maybe is there for most people, but I still ended up in the “google for commands that might resolve these weird crashes / errors” and building random packages from source. However, I tried on a gaming laptop, which have notoriously had worse support than standard discrete cards. I wonder if my experience would have been different with a standard PC. I also recognize that Steam is the answer for a lot of people, but I just don’t have that many Steam games.
What games/distro?
I was on Mint and primarily using Lutris, but tried many different WINE runners. I would have tried Ubuntu, which I think is a little closer to upstream updates, but I only had a 4gb USB stick to install from. For games, I tried Horizon: Zero Dawn (which I finally got to open, but it was running 0-3 FPS), Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, and Baldur’s Gate II (which seemed to work). I’m not giving up forever, my next gaming tower will likely run linux of some type. I do lots of self-hosting on a Ubuntu PC, so I’m pro-Linux. Just ran out of patience with the laptop!
Interesting. Got Horizon Zero Dawn to work out of the box myself but I’m using Garuda. Any chance you’re using an nVidia GPU? They tend to be a lot more fussy with Linux than AMD
Yep, sure enough nVidia 1650 laptop GPU. I tried the proprietary drivers, forced so many versions of VKD3D and DXVK to try for better performance. Oh well, my next box will have an AMD GPU.
As a linux noob, I’d say it 90% there. I got a new computer recently, decided to only install linux to see if I could dump windows entirely, expecting to dualboot eventually. The only problems I’ve had so far are Curseforge, MC realms, and One Shot. I’ve got Modded Skyrim and modded Hollow Knight working, I’m incredibly happy with linux gaming.
As Phuntis said, curseforge is easily solved with prism launcher. They have a nice GUI to browse modpacks and set up everything automatically. For mods that don’t allow direct downloads over the API, they give you a browser link you can open and automatically pull the downloaded files from your download folder.
The launcher also has integration into modrinth and a bunch of other useful features. IMO the better launcher compared to the official one, even if you don’t play modded.
Love Prism, love Modrinth, still can’t make modpack updates curseforge clients can use. Since everyone else on the server uses CF, I need to build the modpack on CF then import to Prism for myself.
I did see that making a CF modpack file might be possible soon though.
yeah I’m also quite a noob with linux I’ve only been using it for about a year and also dual boot my pc for the few games I have to for me it’s actually bethesda games mostly due to no mod managers on linux and I know there’s the workaround for MO2 which is what I use anyway but fomods didn’t work :/ I’m also actually playing through hollow knight on my deck at the moment though vanilla and that’s been working flawlessly as for curseforge dunno what you’re modding but if it’s mc I used prism launcher and that worked flawlessly way better than curseforge on even windows with that being full of bloat
Prism is life, I agree. My friends don’t, so I need a curseforge pack to distribute server updates with. The stupid part is curseforge has a working linux version, but it only does WoW.
The other one is playing on a realm. The desktop solution is supposed to be the Win10 version, but screw that. I’d love to see a mod that lets java join bedrock servers, but they all run the other way. The solution is running the android version with a third-party launcher.
I still have many issues regarding VR games. Mostly related to the view being delayed from what I am actually doing, making me nauseous.
For me, that’s one of the biggest issues holding me back from switching. I don’t want to bother to dual-boot OSes just for a few VR games.
ah haven’t tried vr too expensive for me and not enough space really wanna try it in future though alyx and beat saber look really cool hopefully that’ll improve soon with all the rumours of valves deckard headset and them dedicating so much to linux I mean deckard will probably still be tethered to a pc so it’s not a guarantee since most people will be on windows then but maybe it’ll come with improvements to vr on linux
Don’t worry Gill it will set itself back as default next Tuesday
I’ve never had that happen. Either the US version of Windows is fucked, or people are bullshitting hard.
From time to time when you update windows it’ll show you a welcoming setup again similar to the first time you logged in. In that process it will try to convince you to setup some Microsoft stuff on your pc, including changing default apps, but it shouldn’t do it on its own.
But sometimes it does. It happened once for me this year.
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There was a while there where it would default to Edge for PDFs and as a web browser after a update. Quite annoying for a factory full of PCs that I wanted to use Chrome and Adobe Reader instead.
I tried Edge for a bit but stuck with chrome. Recently I’ve gone back to Firefox but I’ve not had one of those major updates yet that even tries to get me to log into Microsoft as a log in so it will be interesting when that happens again if Edge shows up as the default.
I have to use Acrobat for my job. If it opened it up in Edge every time instead, I’d go nuts.
What is does do way too often is make itself my default PDF viewer. I’ve got Adobe Acrobat Pro and Bluebeam. I have zero reason to ever want to see a PDF in Edge.
I had it happen once after a windows update. What it has done is put a shortcut on my desktop enough times that I wrote a script to check for and delete them whenever it does.
I’m in the US and have never ran into half of the stuff people say MS forces on them on a daily basis.
Same
I think this has a lot to do with what license you bought. My old Win8 Pro key install has never had ads and shit pop back up or re-enable candy crush or whatever. One of our shitty laptops at work with a win10 home license I absolutely dread updating because there is some new bullshit nearly every time.
I’m on 11 home. :/
I’m still on 10, but half the shit I see people complain about with Windows I’ve never experienced personally. Maybe I’m just lucky? Maybe I just read? I don’t know, but I’m not having the same experience as a lot of people on here.
In general any bad thing about windows that it manages to fixes still gets commented about online for several years after the fact. For example: BSODs stopped being a regular thing in windows user’s life very long ago, but it took another 10 years after that for people to stop making BSOD jokes online.
Ironically enough, I actually did have my first blue screen in likely 5+ years yesterday. I was so shocked by it I wasn’t even mad, just impressed it’s been so long.
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Is it just me or is edge actually a decent browser? It’s not like the dark internet explorer times.
It’s a decent browser, but half the reason people hate it is because MS tries to force it on you. They should let it stand on its own merits then maybe it wouldn’t have such a negative reception.
Meh, Chrome is a piece of shit as well. If you use gmail on another browser, they keep pestering you to try Chrome.
Ye I hate chrome too
I just opened my gmail in Firefox and I don’t see this Chrome notification right now. Maybe it pops up every now and then. I wouldn’t be bothered by it that much, since started using Thunderbird as mail client last month, and the interface is so much better and customizable than gmail ever was. I did use Thunderbird a long time ago, but stopped when I got gmail in 2004. And all this time I thought Thunderbird still had the old classic UI. Apparently it became a bit too messy with all different volunteer contributions and Mozilla didn’t have a project management to stay with a certain direction. In Feb 2023 they announced in this blog post to rebuild Thunderbird from the ground up and invest the resources to support the community again, although with more control. Then a few months ago this big update to 115 was released, which was featured in a computer tech website so I became curious again. One of the best decisions of this year (although I’m still using it to access gmail), together with joining Lemmy of course.
Solution, don’t use Gmail either
It’s because Edge is built on Chromium now.
It’s better than chrome for sure. Depending on what your criteria for using a browser it, it might even be in the top 3 browser options.
But it’s still a Microsoft product filled with the usual Microsoft shenanigans. If you don’t care about your browser keeping track of what you do and that sort of privacy concerns, absolutely give it a try. You can even use it on Linux and Android and it works fine on those too.
One other negative aspect I can think of is that Microsoft is quite open to adhering to Google’s own shenanigans like that recent proposal they got ridiculed for. For that reason I’d rather recommend Vivaldi instead - there’s very little that edge does better than Vivaldi and there’s plenty that Vivaldi does better than it.
But also, please, consider using Firefox if you don’t have any problems with it. You’ll literally be helping make the internet a better place just by using it. So many people use chromium based browsers today that Google literally owns the way the internet works.
I’ve never really liked Firefox and I’ve tried it multiple times. As for big companies tracking data, I think that’s pretty much unavoidable at this stage and I don’t really care.
My only criteria for browsers is just stuff loading when it should and fast. Corporations are welcome to my shit data, the only thing that annoys me about that is they profit from it and I don’t.
and I don’t really care.
This is why we can’t have nice things, like privacy.
Just being honest. It’s only the 0.5% of nerds that use Lemmy that actually care. It’s just one more thing I can’t bring myself to care about.
I wasn’t a fan of Firefox either and personally lived using edge. When the whole web integrity thing started happening, I felt like I should switch to Firefox and haven’t looked back.
I still have some complaints, like you can’t install sites native app which I used a lot. I don’t think tab groups have been implemented yet, which isn’t a huge deal but very useful. And there were a few others I can’t remember off the top of my head. In the end I value my privacy a bit more so I’ve decided Firefox is worth it.
Plus mobile ad blocking is a god send.
you can’t install sites native app
There’s an extension that lets you do this. I use it and it works great.
I don’t think tab groups have been implemented yet
Funny thing is that forced group tabs on Chrome mobile is what made me ditch it.
The PWA app works decent, but, unless I did something wrong, it would open links in itself instead of my main Firefox window which wasn’t what I’d want normally.
I still use it, but it’s definitely not as nice as I’d want it to be.
Definitely one of those things that’s minor and I can look past though.
There are several, possibly dozens, of tab group extensions for firefox.
Sure, and there’s also an extension to install a web page as an app similar to Chrome. The point is that, out of the box, it lacks some features that I enjoy. Extensions are great and I use plenty of them, but that doesn’t mean that Firefox has those features, it just has extensions that have them.
Firefox is great, don’t get me wrong, I’m definitely preferring it, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have all the features that I wanted up front.
Yeah, I like it too
Better than Chrome for sure. Not better than Firefox
Sounds like good opportunity for US and Europe to whip out some fines over Anticompetitive practices. With Microsoft sort of being repeat offender the fines should reflect that.
Honestly with Edge being not too bad alternative for Chrome this sort of shady behavior from Microsoft doesn’t do it any good at least in my eyes.
there actually begging at this point
I was getting a bit annoyed at Firefox and after recently formatting my PC, I decided to freshen things up. So after the mandatory new PC Edge Google, I must say I’m really enjoying the new UI of Opera.
Now I use Opera as my main driver, Firefox for the things that Opera struggles with, and Edge is there too.
Opera is spyware
edge uses half or less of the system resources versus firefox with twice as many tabs open even on linux
plus edge allows microsoft office to run on linux without workarounds
Just use chromium then
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Bing chat has saved edge and bing search for me, it just works. I ask it a random question, like how many spiders you’d have to eat to have eaten a pound of them and it just tells me and shows the work. I don’t need to look up how much a spider weights and then do math myself, it just does it.
Firefox is still my main browser, but I’ll open edge to ask dumb questions and I have a lot of stupid questions and it has answers without me needing to dig through bullshit to find what I need.
Sounds like a great way to get a wrong answer
It shows it’s work, you can follow it’s citations to ensure it’s not complete bullshit.
Also no seriously these are dumb questions, I was watching Fraiser the other day and it implied his ratings were in the millions, and I asked bing if that was even possible considering he was on AM radio in the 90s (it’s not), but even if it was completely wrong it literally doesn’t matter…
The great thing about Bing Chat compared to other chatbots is that it sources its claims. I always check the sources before trusting it.
Sounds like a regular search with extra steps
With regular search, I have to look through all kinds of results before I find something, and often I have to adjust my search parameters until the search engine even understands what I’m looking for.
The AI still needs me to actually confirm what it’s saying, but that’s checking 1-3 links, not entire search result pages.
It’s also just waaaaay easier to talk to my search engine in natural language than keywords imo. I never know what keywords get me to my intended destination, I guess the difference is less big for people that do.
You really should reconsider your priorities if stupid questions like that are what causing you to stay with edge.
“Hmm do I need privacy, or do I need to know how many spiders are in a pound?”
Get the extension that enables bing chat for Firefox
I switched from Chrome to Edge and initially was really impressed. But then Microsoft had to go and Bing it all up. So now it’s back to Firefox after a 15 year hiatus.
You want something even better? Check out LibreWolf. It’s Firefox with all the privacy features preconfigured, uBlock Origin preinstalled and all the crap like Pocket and sponsored websites removed. And of course it uses DuckDuckGo instead of Google by default.
That duckduckgo default is the thing that aggravates me the most. Sometimes those results just don’t cut it but I don’t even have the option to chance my default browser. I had to bookmark google
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Use Startpage or an instance of Whoogle. They are both meta search engines for Google, they allow you to search on Google without exposing your data to Google. If you are a user of Mullvad VPN, you can also use Leta, their own Google meta search engine.
Sorry Gil, it’s still chromium ;c
