Statcounter reports that Windows 11 continues to lose its market share for the second month in a row. Windows 10, meanwhile, is gaining more users and is now back above the 70% mark.
Okay, this seemed wrong. As the article said, even Win8 didn’t go down in usage over time. So I went and checked the methodology for the source data.
Turns out, this number is based on social media and search engine referral data. Also turns out, they warn that while they do track Bing chat referrals when you follow through a link, they don’t see chat responses where you only read the AI response but don’t click through:
We have no way of measuring the number of queries performed in bing chat. However, we also don’t measure the number of queries to regular search engines like bing or google either. Instead we track search engine referrals.
i.e. If you go to a search engine and do a search for anything and you click on a website result, we’ll record that click as a search engine referral if that website had the statcounter code installed. It’s the click to a website that we measure, not the actual search queries that were performed.
When you do a search using bing chat, and you click on one of the “learn more” websites we can track that as a search referral. So we are monitoring bing chat in the same way we measure the regular bing search engine.
From this data we can see from the statcounter network of webites, that the amount of traffic being sent to websites from bing chat is very, very small. Less than 1/100 of 1 percent.
So from our data we can say that bing chat is not currently translating into enough clicks to our network of websites to change the search share.
Of course you are less likely to click on a source website from bing chat than a regular search, as it is intended to give you the answer rather than have you go visiting websites to find the answer. So that needs to be factored in when using our stats for your analysis.
That is very interesting. That’s a likely culprit for Win11 specifically to have gone down a couple of percentage points in the US and EU (the other territories seem to remain flat), but it’s hard to prove.
It’s also a bit concerning in terms of measuring the effects of AI search in both network traffic and in how search results are consumed. If that’s the cause it does suggest that AI chat users are less likely to follow through to the source info, which seems risky, although it’s also hard to prove what that does to receiving truthful info.
Lots of counterintutitive, hard to parse implications from this one data point, but I’d be surprised if it was as simple as “people have randomly decided to roll back to Win10 (and Win8, which also grows) for no reason”.
Steam hardware survey is another data point.
Looks like in March Win10 usage increases a little. Overall it’s on a downward trend though.
I think we just need to move on from this methodology of data collection. Firefox is often cited as very unpopular because it blocks statcounter tracking by default, social networks have absorbed some search volume too. I do think it makes logical sense that people are dropping 11; I did so myself last year. But this data is likely bad, so it’s pointless to try and extract a reason based on it.
Well, a data point is a data point is a data point. You just can’t make all your decisions based on a single one, at least without understanding what’s behind it.
FWIW, the Steam survey has Win 11 growing by 3.5% last month, with Win10 going down by about the same amount (Linux stays at 1.9% there). Neither data source is wrong or bad, necessarily, but you do want to be aware that one is an opt-in survey of gamers and the other is a tracker of search engine referrals.
So the takeaway is that people are probably not deserting Win 11 in droves, but maaaybe their use of online search is being impacted by MS’s integration of AI search or something else changing Win11 users’ behavior around social media or search engines. Or mostly that it may be too early to tell and we may need more sources of info. For all the glee and schadenfreude in this thread, the big teachable moment is that data and stats are nuanced and hard to read and that confirmation bias is a bitch.
“Solution” is to break Windows 10
I hope they do. I would laugh very hard.
Isn’t that literally their road map? It’s supposed to be end of life shortly
End of life ≠ breaking it. It will continue working as long as Microsoft doesn’t touch it and apps support it.
Well, win10 is going End-of-life next year.
Execs: what can we do?!
Jim from marketing: We could throw ads into windows 11… That’ll get em flocking! People love ads!
More AI in the start menu!
Execs: Holy shit. Give him a raise.
Lay off everyone else while you’re at it.
Hang on a sec, this isn’t Google!
Speaking of, let’s see if we can get that Prabhakar Raghavan guy, he seems to know what he’s doing.
Ads will continue till the users fall in love with ads
With that attitude, you’ll never work in marketing…
REPLACING the start menu with AI is the way to go!!!111
On a related note, YouTube just gave me a pop-up advertising premium again, only this time the cancel button was “No, I like ads.”
I was gonna sit back and watch an hour of YT (with ads) but that pop-up rubbed me the wrong way and I didn’t watch anything so that I might skew the A/B test in favor of no dark patterns.
In my company they legitimately try to convince us that our users love ads.
I conducted user research on one of our websites, which showed complaints about the amount of ad placements we have been throwing at them. The execs responded by telling me “but we are actually HELPING them, we’re showing them products that will improve their productivity and processes”. Then, they came up with ideas for new ways we can place MORE ads on top of the ones already there. I’m sure our users are loving it!
Where is the research part of “marketing research”? lol
You should tell them that if users love ads so much, you should add a slider to let people control how many ads they get. Surely they’ll only increase the ad count, right?
Good god that’s actually insane. Corpos have completely lost it.
It’s more like the execs know that ad revenue is a significant chunk of the revenue stream and cost very little to implement so they’ll keep growing that until it starts measurably impacting other revenue centers in the org
Looks like Microsoft needs to further enhance the consumer experience by adding more personalized product recommendations, that’ll fix it right up!
I recently moved my media PC to Linux Mint. I had Bluetooth issues with windows despite my hardware not that old and ‘Windows 11 ready’. Zero problems on Linux. I play the same games thanks to Steam Proton library. I use Mac for work. So I finally did it. No more Windows. I tried to switch 5 years ago. But today Linux is polished. And mostly works as expected. You still need to open terminal a few times to change some settings. I’m happy. Highly recommended.
Yeah, on Windows Heroes of the Storm was using 10gb on my gpu and stuttering massively
On Linux (Lutris) it just works
Hey fellow HoTS Linuxer!
Windows just sucks at handling Bluetooth. It’s ridiculous that you can’t change audio codecs, or choose between handsfree and high quality audio. You have to let windows guess at both
Whenever I try switching to Linux, there is always something that doesn’t work right and takes forever to finagle with to fix if it’s even possible. I’m primarily a Linux Mint fan (daily drove it on my aging desktop until it died of old age a few years back), but I’ve also dabbled in a few other noob-friendly distros like Ubuntu (was really into it when everything was still orange and brown lol) and Pop OS.
Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love using Linux to breathe new life into older systems, but it just isn’t a good option for me personally if my device hasn’t gotten sluggish yet.
As an example, I have an aging laptop that started blue screening a bunch. It doesn’t support the Win 11 upgrade due to it’s processor not meeting minimum specs. So I thought it was finally time to see if Linux would improve it.
First of all, I had a hell of a time installing various distros without having them boot to a black screen after installation completes. Took absolutely forever to finally sus this out on the various distros I tried. Then I find that the couple extra buttons on my basic Logitech mouse don’t work. These are essential buttons for me that I use constantly. I go through a million troubleshooting steps before finding out that it’s a Wayland issue, so I switch back to Xorg and everything is cool. But then I start running into lag issues which never occurred on my Windows install. I also tried playing some games I had in my Epic Games library. I could not for the life of me get it to work, no matter which platform I tried. I get that Steam has better Linux compatibility, but not all of us have all of our games on Steam.
Finally got tired of the whole ordeal and switched back to Windows. Did a bit more troubleshooting and seemed to have resolved the blue screen issues and now it seems to work perfectly and much better out of the box than Linux. It’s not an old enough device a Linux refresh to be worth it yet.
I get that Lemmings are die hard Linux fans, and I think Linux has some fantastic use cases…but for many users it actually isn’t a good alternative. I find it works best when you want to breathe new life into older hardware or if you have every component specifically built to work for a particular Linux distro. But when basic features don’t work properly without hours of troubleshooting (if you can ever get them to work at all), it’s a little hard to just recommend it to your average Joe whose Windows/Mac computer works just fine.
This “everything just works” Linux experience a lot of people talk about on Lemmy/Reddit has absolutely never been my experience, even though I’ve been a casual Linux fan for over a decade now. Meanwhile, I’ve had the opposite experience with Windows (unless you’re talking really old Windows versions like Win XP and older).
I’ve been exclusively Linux for years, and all the crap now going on with AI and ads being shoved into literally everything makes me happier than ever with that decision.
But you’re absolutely right. Linux is “it just works” in a relatively narrow use-case.
Just going on the internet to browse and play some Facebook games (my parents). It’ll absolutely work out of the box.
Doing some light creative work (design, writing, etc…) No tinkering needed.
But from there it becomes a scale from “probably work fine” to “hours of work and extra repositories needed”.
Video editing or 3D modelling with an NVIDIA card because CUDA, it SHOULD be easy to install, but there’s a chance it won’t be. You take your chances.
Gaming through proton? Single player games, yeah. I’ve literally had 95% work out of the box because Valve is awesome. But I don’t play online multiplayer. If you need to play nice with anticheat software, good luck.
I too get frustrated with the fundamentalist Linux base who think its the right fit for everyone. Because it absolutely is not, and its okay to admit that because admitting that drives the motivation to improve it.
To comment on the first paragraph, that is just a skill issue. Before I switched to Linux I was pretty adept at Windows, but some things are hard to figure out because it’s hidden behind layers of bullshit. Running commands that obscure what exactly they’re doing, just because some guy on some forum said it worked for him, is how you get around on Windows and that knowledge is something you build over many years. Knowing where specific settings are or what values to use takes time. The same counts for Linux. If you stick to it, that knowledge will come with experience.
Just remember the dism and sfc scannows, registry hacks etc the average Joe doesn’t know about. Your learnt it, you didn’t start using Windows with that knowledge. The same will happen with Linux.
I don’t think Linux is for aging hardware. It just depends of your needs. Linux support all mainstream hardware, I guess. Never had any problems with something not working on Linux. I remember many years ago I had a scanner, which used to work only with Win XP or Vista because of outdated drivers. Windows 7 was too modern for it. I tried it with Linux and it worked. Now I have some random-hardware PC, everything works. It’s Intel Core 11400 hardware, AMD RX-GPU, quite modern. I think problems could be on laptops with display backlight, sleep mode or something else. Desktop PC’s should be good. Even if you have last-gen hardware, just use the latest kernel. I haven’t heard about Linux build hardware. It used to be a thing for Hackintosh builds.
My previous company HP laptop worked better on Linux, it wasn’t that hot all the time. Because Linux was consuming less system resources. My work: Browser + IDE. I had dual-boot Win10 and Ubuntu. Ended up with Windows because of Pulse Secure crap and some specific network restrictions. It was years back.
I remember I gave up with Ubuntu 5 years ago at home because after system update It just failed to boot. I didn’t touch anything. I don’t know if it’s possible today. And Proton wasn’t here and I wanted to play games. I remember I was using Lightroom, but for my very basic photographer needs Darktable works perfectly. And it’s free!
All you need is basic troubleshooting skills. You need to google sometimes. I know that it could be an issue. Linux not for everyone. And it’s fine. It’s good to have a chose. Linux gives that choice.
This. I have dabbled with various Linux distros over the past 15+ years out of curiosity. I have, without fail, had to spend days troubleshooting and fixing various problems of all kinds. Sometimes it was WiFi drivers, sometimes it was GPU drivers, sometimes it was power management issues, and most recently it’s soundcard drivers and poor audio control/quality issues. I always installed Linux as dual-boot so I had my normal Windows install to fall back on but I just couldn’t see myself able to fully switch primary OS over.
Nowadays I couldn’t switch over even if I wanted to because numerous programs I use for my work are not supported properly or at all. Linux has indeed come a long way over the years in terms of UX and software compatibility, but not everyone uses their computer just for games. There is a lot of creative and productivity software (and devices!) that have limited or zero Linux support and many FOSS alternatives are not sufficient. I hate Adobe as much as the next person and Photoshop is a bloated pile of trash, but part of my soul dies whenever a Linux fan tells me I can just replace Photoshop with GIMP. GIMP is clownware.
Another major issue I had was the community itself. When troubleshooting the issues I’ve had over the years, one big problem that kept popping back up was how toxic and condescending the Linux community can be. On more than a few occasions my requests for help on forums were met with passive aggressiveness and hostility because I “should have known better” or something along those lines. The most recent example I can think of was someone asking me to post a debug log to troubleshoot an issue I had and I had to ask him where to find the log. He told me the folder it would be in but not the folder path to get there. When I asked again where to find the log, he just told me that “maybe Linux isn’t for you”.
You know what? Maybe it isn’t. It sure isn’t for most people and I can’t see that changing soon.
Another major issue I had was the community itself. When troubleshooting the issues I’ve had over the years, one big problem that kept popping back up was how toxic and condescending the Linux community can be. On more than a few occasions my requests for help on forums were met with passive aggressiveness and hostility because I “should have known better” or something along those lines. The most recent example I can think of was someone asking me to post a debug log to troubleshoot an issue I had and I had to ask him where to find the log. He told me the folder it would be in but not the folder path to get there. When I asked again where to find the log, he just told me that “maybe Linux isn’t for you”.
I had almost exactly this same issue years ago when I tried Mint. I was trying to get something to work (I think install games on Steam? Something like that) and it would just do nothing, no message, etc. When I asked for help, I was told “This is super obvious” and after trying their suggestions and having them all fail, was told “just go back to windows.”
Ok, done?
(It also doesn’t help that there is a huge difference between ‘you can use the terminal’ and ‘you have to use the terminal.’ I’m an 80’s kid, I grew up with DOS, so I understand how to navigate terminals, I just don’t want to constantly.)
I’ve had similar experiences. Never posted questions myself, but I’ll be Googling for help and find forum posts that are as toxic as you describe.
It’s been bad enough that the Linux elitism on Lemmy leaves a bad taste, even if I haven’t seen as much of the toxic parts here. I know I’m not the only person of my friends group that feels this way about Lemmy’s Linux crowd.
Yeah in college I tried to switch for nerd cred and it sucked, but over the past year I switched and while I’ve had some hiccups, I honestly think it’s more a result of me going with an arch based distro than a Debian one. I’m thinking I may hop soon, but I assume it’ll be a massive pain
I thought Arch was more tricky, than Debian
It is, it’s trickier and less supported
My friend, have you checked out the arch user repository? What do you mean with less supported btw?
Less officially supported. Say what you will about the chaotic aur it is chaotic. I think I bit off a bit more than I can chew
I switched from Win10 to Arch and now I do have problems with bluetooth, because my mouse officially only supports Windows. Think I will just force my mouse to support Arch (or the other way around). Still way better and faster than Windows.
Now I’m a bit curious how a mouse could theoretically be windows only?
IIRC bluetooth mice use basically the USB protocol but through bluetooth instead of a cable.
It says officially so and I couldn’t connect so far, I’ll let you know if I manage to connect it.
What mouse is it?
https://www.rapoo-eu.com/product/mt350/ Ok, Windows, Mac, ChromeOS, iOS and Android, I will probably get to fix it if I have some time.
This one should work via bluetooth, some pages online indicate so, and it would be very rare that a bluetooth mouse does not work on linux.
And it should absolutely work via the little usb dongle that came with the mouse, as for example my logitech wireless mouse even works in my uefi/bios with the usb receiver.
I sadly don’t have the right USB-port for it, but I’ll try fixing it without the dongle. Which pages?
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I may yet try it in the next few years. I think one large frustration I anticipate (among others) is keyboard shortcuts. I’ve become very experienced with those on Windows, and my brief efforts at Linux (eg, on my Steam Deck’s monitor hookup) have not come across enough matches for them.
I can absolutely see value in enduring the pain of a large switch though.
Funny, one of my longstanding frustrations with windows was that I didn’t get a say in my keyboard shortcuts. Namely the fact that the shortcut to swap keyboard layouts has historically been very easy to accidentally hit.
As someone who uses all 3 (work-issue MBP, personal dev laptop on fedora 40, overbuilt gaming-oriented desktop on w10 with a dual boot Ubuntu partition I haven’t used in ages because WSL lets me do what I need to most of the time), it’s really not that bad. Then again, I’ve had a trifecta like that for well over a decade at this point, so maybe I’ve just fully acclimatized to switching machines and OSes for different primary activities all the time.
If you ever do switch I suggest something with KDE, I love keyboard shortcuts and I find anything other(Windows the most) extremely lacking in that field.
Linux mint keyboard shortcuts mimic those of windows tho, Linux mint is the best choice for windows refugees, this is one of the things majority of Linux community is agree about. Edit: in Linux mint you also can change keyboard shortcuts with gui tools already pre installed
I switched recently to Nobara after having a great experience with my steam deck. However, I’ll probably add windows as a dual boot option since CS2 doesn’t run properly (like 16fps…).
CS2 linux version has some issues. Sometimes forcing steam to install the windows version and to run it via proton makes things better.
Thanks for the tip. I’ll definitely try that.
I dont have CS2 because, well, the obvious reasons. But I do have the original Skylines, and its linux version is also a festering pile of rancid dogshit.
Running the windows version via proton made it run smooth, stable (well, as stable as can be expected with a few hundred mods…lol), and without headache.
so yeah, install windows version and use proton. Overall better experience probably.
Honestly, i think thats my advice about gaming on linux in general, to generally avoid the native version. Personally, I’ve only run into two games that the native version wasnt shit, and that was Stardew Valley and Rimworld.
CS2 is Counter Strike 2. Cities: Skylines 2 is C:S2
I just got a steam deck, and needed to install FF14 (non steam) so I was mucking around in desktop mode… yeah. I’ll prob be getting a spare drive for my tower now to try out Linux. I’d love nothing more then to cut ties to windows.
I tried to get nobara to run a few times but sth was always broken. I’m now on Bazzite after testing Linux Mint a few months. Bazzite seems to be the more polished fedora based gaming distro.
I’ll have a look into that. For work I use Mint and really like it, however wanted to have a gaming distro that already delivers everything that I need and since I already used ProtonGE it was a natural choice for me. But i already had some issues with it probably due to NVidia drivers. Seems to be better now with the latest kernel
I think I get slightly better performance on Bazzite than on mint. Mint e.g. still has the 535 Nvidia drivers as recommended (we’re at 550 now). On Bazzite you’ll probably have to enable x11 until the new update with explicit sync drops mid May. (At least I had a ton of flickering on Wayland with my rtx 3060)
How was it broken?
I had a lot of crashes as soon as I installed it. Must have been some driver/hardware issues probably. I’m not knowledgeable enough (and frankly had no energy to troubleshoot) I just installed mint which ran without (much) trouble. I was interested in a more up to date system and KDE plasma as well as pipewire already integrated and looked at bazzite (after another unsuccessful try at nobara) - have been t running it for a few weeks now and I’m perfectly happy with it. CS 2 also runs without problems - but I mainly cast matches instead of playing myself.
Using Bazzite, myself. I have a weird issue with rebooting, though. Tends to freeze at the boot screen (grub doesn’t show up at all) then the whole boot/login process becomes a slideshow. This doesn’t happen if I manually turn my PC off and turn it on, though. Really odd problem that I haven’t had on other distros.
I like Bazzite as a whole, though.
That sounds awful. Have you tried disabling energy saving options (like automatic screenlock/sleep)?
Automatic screen lock and auto-sleep get disabled everytime I install a KDE DE. I could take a closer look at energy savings, but I don’t think there’s much else I can do there. I know it’s not hardware-related, as this doesn’t happen with any other distro. May be an issue with KDE 6, for all I know. Gonna have to look into it more when I get home from work.
I switched my four home computers to Linux Mint this week. Windows is just more trouble than it’s worth nowadays.
Windows is just more trouble than it’s worth nowadays.
To be fair that’s exactly how Microsoft management feels. For half a decade now Microsoft is a company that sells Linux and opensource judging by their yearly reports, other departments either don’t grow nearly as fast or are just straight detrimental. So they do want you to dump that shit, preferably gaining some cash before it happens naturally.
Just so we’re clear, the data in the headline refers to the share of Windows editions among Windows users. By their count Windows actually went up slightly in the overall Desktop OS share last month, while Linux remains basically flat at 4%.
But I keep hearing everyone here saying this year is totally the year of the Linux desktop.
I mean, it is higher than a decade ago at least. I think most people are expecting some Linux growth when Microsoft finally axes 10 and millions of machine with no TPM have to move to Linux or face a life of no security updates
Same, its just like everywhere enshitification of companies who try to get more profitable by spying,advertising and many anti consumer practices. Linux just stays good. and / or if you dont like your distribution just swap to another, its easy :D
Hell you can even just change desktop environments to shake things up as well.
When I finally learned how do install a different desktop environment, and still use Debian, I was set. KDE!!! KDE!!! KDE!!!
I recently jumped ship to a new gig that MS’s account reps have burrowed deeply into.
It’s been about 7 years since I’ve been in a “Microsoft for all the things” shop. Now that I’m back in Microsoft land after 7 years, my first thought is “what the fuck happened in Redmond?”
The software is buggy, people are restarting left and right, and everything is missing 25% of their competitor’s features. I feel like I’m visiting a childhood home that is now occupied by hoarders.
FIS👏CAL👏CLIFF👏
So for all people that are on the fence about switching to Linux: Here’s a sort of review and starter guide from a guy who switched to Mint about 4 weeks ago.
Are you someone who mostly plays non-competetive games (games without anticheat) and browse the web? You’ll probably have a hassle free life on Linux. Steam’s Proton layer does a lot of heavily lifting. Even if games are not officially supported. Turn the compatability on in the steam settings.
If you play VR or competetive games, it’s a different story. VR is dependant on the headset. I unfortunately have all Oculus Headsets, which there is no good controller support for right now from the open source community. Anticheat simply doesnt work on Linux.
Design software From what I’ve read, the affinity suite now can be used through Wine (a program that lets you use windows apps on Linux) However, from my time with Wine, it is hit and miss. One update from either the application or Wine can break everything. So it is not reliable, unless you freeze all updates from both the application and Wine. Wine can be great (working out of the box) but also the biggest pain in the ass with hours of debugging. Stay away if you dislike troubleshooting.
Inkscape can be an alternative to Illustrator if you don’t do heavy design work.
I haven’t touched Gimp for about 6 years (used to be my main editor) but when I switched to photoshop it qas no competition. Don’t know what the state of Gimp is now, will try it over the coming year.
music software Cubase or any of steinbergs plugins outright will not work on Linux (unfortunately my main DAW) However, I will probably switch to Bitwig (native Linux), which looks really promising. I got some VSTs working through Wine (all arturia stuff works great) but have had hours of troubleshooting without luck with others. Use Yabridge as a vstlink for windows VSTs. If you’re a professional musician with thousands of dollars in plugins, I’d be hestitant to switch to Linux. You’ll be dependant on Wine a lot, which is kind of a pain to rely on for professional use.
overall tips Might be a bit controversial, but if you’re a novice: don’t dump all the solutions you find online in your terminal. Actually, try to use the machine as much as possible like you normally would on Windows, unless you want to do Terminal stuff. If you dislike terminals, you’ll only be frustrated by all the terminal advice people give you, which might even break stuff on your machine.
Try to download .deb packages from the official sources.++ Software center on Mint is great, but will moatly be outdated or flatpacks. Flatpacks can work, but I’ve had many issues with permissions and flatpacks (like an arduino flatpack that didn’t give permission to use the USB port…)
Welp, I’m out of time, so I’ll just randomly stop my reviewish/comment here
You can change flatpak permissions with flatseal (you’ll need to install it). A lot of them have absolutely braindead defaults It’s really not great to get in the habit of installing random debs from the Internet. Aside from being a massive security issue, you’ll never get updates. If mint repos don’t get updated though, I suppose that’s the easiest workaround
Thanks for the heads up about flatpaks! I’ll look into it.
I believe debs are installed through my Software Manager ? When I said “get debs from official source” I meant that bigger software like Godot, Steam, Handbrake etc I prefer to download from their official website. Most stuff in software managers are several versions behind.
I agree that you shouldn’t be downloading random debs for some small apps made by a random person, for obvious security reasons.
Yeah when you’re downloading from sites like those, there’s not a security risk anymore. The thing is that Linux software generally expects you to be using a package manager, so it doesn’t update itself. When you download and install debs, you lose auto update functionality. But when you’re on a distro like mint with old packages, that doesn’t really matter since you’re not getting up to date software through the repos anyway
About anticheat: it depends which games you’re playing. If they use Valve’s EasyAnti Cheat you should have no problem (been playing dota2, cs2, csgo… without trouble for some time now). If they use
malwarekernel-level anticheat (iirc helldivers 2, valorant, league of legends) you won’t be able to run them in linux and should keep a windows dual boot.Games that use Vanguard don’t work afaik, but Helldivers 2 works just fine via Proton.
Helldivers 2 works on Linux.
Some kernel anticheats work too, I had no issues playing Helldivers and Hell Let Loose, both of which use EAC. Developers have to enable Linux support, which AFAIK is just one checkbox, so you still get games that don’t allow it (like EVE Vanguard), but most of them are OK.
League and Valorant is a different story, those don’t work.
Oh thanks for the correction, I was mistaken. I’m happy I was wrong :)
Good to know!
Anticheats can work on linux given the developers have enabled it. For example brawlhalla has EAC but you can still play it
Helldivers 2’s AC works also
Losing Ableton and all my VSTs are dealbreakers with Linux for me. Would be fine with the games I play, being all mostly single player indies. I could relearn a new video editing software, and I assume Citrix will work fine for all my work programs, but maaaan I’m not losing my favorite VSTs.
Lack of Ableton Live support is also why I probably won’t switch to Linux. Even though years ago I used to dual boot Ubuntu and quite liked it as an OS, the lack of DAW support is the real deal breaker for me too. Ableton Live is just too good and I know it too well to switch away from it.
I feel you man. I’ve finally used Cubase enough to get proficiently fast at editing stuff, and I can’t get it to work on Mint. It is quite the dilemma. From what I’ve seen from Bitwig, I still might switch though. It looks a lot like Ableton, but I much prefer Bitwig’s UI. And my most used plugins (arturia stuff) happens to run without any hassle on Wine (for now).
Still, I’ll probably keep dual booting for a while. I have so many Cubase projects backed up that I don’t feel like converting all to Bitwig projects.
@[email protected] @[email protected] - you might want to take a close look at Bitwig. It’s a top-notch DAW developed by former Ableton developers. I hear it’s fairly similar workflow to Ableton, but also that it’s better in certain ways. This is without even taking into consideration that Bitwig supports Linux. I don’t have any association with Bitwig, don’t even own it (yet?), but just wanted to let you know.
I think I’ve heard that some VST support may be tricky though. I could be misremembering, but also worth researching.
Nice to know, but it’ll really come down to VST support. I can relearn a new DAW, but I can’t magic up new libraries. I also don’t really wanna have to learn futzing with Linux when I have enough hobbies. As much as windows sucks, it’s convenient that their product supports everything I want out of the box. Once a Linux distro can do the same for my needs, I’m all in.
No problem, I understand.
Also in terms of games…I know Steam compatibility is supposed to be great, but if you use other platforms, you might run into some issues. Most of my library is in the Epic Games store (I know, terrible to admit this online…but they give you a lot of free shit), and I just could not get it to work at all the last time I tried Linux (maybe 6ish months ago).
I think for that usecase, Lutris might help. It is basically Wine for games, where it tries to find the right settings for your specific games. If the Epic store installs at all, that is.
But I’ve commented this a few times now: Wine is… very hit and miss and might not be worth your time.
Never rely on Wine, both in Linux, and in the real world.
Haha agreed.
I would highly advice against using Wine. It requires constant root access, just like virus scanners, making your system vulnerable.EDIT: I was wrong :)I want to make the switch as win10 moved to 11 without asking and 11 sucks donkey balls. It even has ads as notifications, soon it will have ads in the start menu (not that I use it, but wtf Microsoft!). The games are no issue anymore now a days, so that’s fine with me. I just don’t want to switch DAW. I just got a work flow using ableton for recording, editing and mastering my dawless setup. Kind of same story with photoshop, used to the work flow and don’t want to switch. Other than that, I don’t see a reason why not. So maybe it’s going to be a multiboot. I’m definitely going back to win10 but support will stop next year or so, so I have to use Linux by than anyway.
I think you’re mistaken there.
Wine is a vanilla Linux executable that runs as the user who launched it. The Windows program it runs thus also runs under that user. That’s possible because Wine doesn’t do anything system-wide (like intercepting calls or anything), it already gave the process its own version of i.e.
LoadLibrary()(the Windows API function to load a DLL) and can happily remap any loaded DLL to Wine’s reimplementation of said DLL as needed.Here are, for example, the processes created when I run Paint Shop Pro on my system (the leftmost column indicates the user each process is running as):
Also, some advice from WineHQ:
I guess I’m wrong than :)
I’m just saying what my experience was with Wine a while ago and what all my Linux friends tell me. But I guess things changed! Awesome!
Did you know you can edit your posts? Could be helpful for other readers since you were incorrectly posting in several messages that wine needs root access.
Check, will do! Good point :)
I would highly advice against using Wine. It requires constant root access, just like virus scanners, making your system vulnerable.
This can’t be right. Was it maybe a particular workflow you used that required root access? I know I’ve used wine as part of Steam’s Proton as well as via Lutris and neither app has ever requested privilege escalation. I’ve also run
winemanually from the terminal also without being root.Maybe it changed recently, but this is what I know about wine. Many Linux friends of mine all advice against it.
I would say: don’t rely on Wine if you’re dependent on the programs it runs somehow. If you don’t want to spend hours troubleshooting programs, then accept your losses.
After days of messing about getting music VSTs to work, I decided to stop troubleshooting any error I have within Wine. If a program works with Wine straight away: lucky me! If something doesn’t work: I count my loss and accept I won’t be able to use that program on Linux for now.
And obviously, don’t install and run andom programs that you wouldn’t install on Windows either. But that’s just common sense.
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Affinity Suite through Wine would be pretty big. Do you know if it’s only the newest version that’s “working”?
I got my info from the Affinity Forum
No first hand experience. However, with my short time with Wine, I’m hestitant to rely on it. Any update from either Wine or the software it’s running could break things. Cool if it works, but not something I’d want to bet my work on.
Thanks for the link. And yeah, maybe not something you’d want to rely on. But it’s worth a try as a compliment to running Windows in a VM to run Affinity.
Good that my windows 7 system still runs when I need it once a year ^^
So glad my job allows me to use Linux as my OS. I do IT, and everybody else in the company uses Windows.
Constant problems, brutal driver issues, OS crashes and lockups, software installation failures, hardware incompatibility problems, it’s awful.
Linux at work, Linux at home, such an improved experience.
I’ll still always love XP though, the last OS from Microsoft that felt like it had a soul.
I literally haven’t had ANY of those problems running Windows 10 or 11 FWIW, not have any of my friends or relatives.
I’m not anti-Linux or anything though, have used it for 26 years now, but only briefly on the desktop.
Work laptops in particular suck, I find. My first one was lagging, freezing, and crashing within months. The second one is three times as expensive but the same brand and is still not happy.
I also use Windows at home and haven’t had the same experience. I think it’s really manufacturer dependent
I’m happy for you, I wouldn’t wish it on people, it sucks.
Windows 7 club here.
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I use W11, I have no problems with it, sure the settings menus are shit but I just open the control panel directly and its the same since W95. The rest I don’t care that much, for work I use Kali anyway.
WSL and installing python from the store (with all the PATH issues automagically solved) is pretty great.
If anybody is planning to dig their own mass grave then I recommend Windows 10 LTSC Enterprise. Notice it comes in two flavors: vanilla or IoT, I don’t think IoT should be used unless you actually need it because it can be less secure.
That aside, Linux is cool. Maybe try out some of the new distros before committing to yar-har-dery.
It seems that permanent obsolescence is beginning to cost too much for the users. I hope they will all keep dragging their feet, but will be a tough fight because friendly providers of professional tools will keep releasing the new versions only for Windows 11, eventually they will force some to upgrade.
