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We are so back
I never left the party
Reference to my server lol
I have been dual booting for some time now. Come back to windows 10 for gaming. But then I suddenly realize that the blizzard games that I play can run on Linux, and even from the same folder with the NTFS partition. I was stunned. No notable performance difference either.
I recently shows my mum that have an old Core 2 Duo that it can run Linux Mint. She said it works, and the computer shutdowns directly when I tell it to do. No more updating windows to wait for before unplugging the power cable. Still have to dual boot Windows 10 for Microsoft Office Word document compatibility and Google Picasa.
She also just have bought a new computer with Windows 11, could barely make it through the installation. So many questions and configuration needed to get rid of ads and popups in Edge. Need to evaluation Mint more before I try to dual boot it on this machine as well.
Or… Just fuck off windows altogether?
There is a learning curve for old people. It takes time. So dual boot is a must until then.
This. It feels to me like driving a stick shift when you’ve been using an automatic transmission for years. You have to do a little more fiddling but I honestly don’t mind learning a new OS that isn’t actively working against me.
With Windows . . . on the other hand . . . every time I’ve had to go “under the hood” (tweak Registry settings, Config files, etc) it’s been to prevent Microsoft from doing something crappy to me.
Yes, with Windows it is a fight about disabling all the new stuff they come up with. Here, you must use OneDrive if you save a file. Here, lots of ads in the start menu, nothing is installed. Or here, please try copilot+ or bing. Do you want to set bing as your startup page? If you say no, we will ask you again… A new windows update? Lets ask everything again.
It also doesn’t help that my dad still isn’t filly convinced Linux isn’t a virus/dangerous to my PC.
He is just afraid of learning new things. Best way here is to show him how it works. Learning.
Oh I’ve been trying. He’s tech adverse in general, so the concept of open source software scares him because it means trusting others with regards to tech.
Picasa? That’s been google-bandoned for a while now. What does she use it for? Plenty of photo management tools in Linux. Darktable, Digikam…
If the office alternatives in linux don’t cut it, and she uses Office 365, you can run it in Linux as a PWA
Picasa because it had worked fine. And the replacement, Google photos, is not an option with storing everything in the cloud. Both Darktable and Digikam looks too advance. I think Gwenview will be a good fit. Will try later when she has the time to test. Just viewing the images in the folder, that is all that is needed.
It would be a good idea with the Office 365 but we don’t want things in the Cloud. If the PWA could run offline it would be a different story.
If you want you can try OnlyOffice, it works really well as a replacement for Office. That is if you only use Word, Excel and Powerpoint. I even convinced some Windows people to use it as its free, open source, cross platform and perhaps even easier to use at this point.
For Picasa maybe digikam? It maybe isn’t a perfect replacement though. You could always try to run Picasa in a VM (or maybe even wine?)
Microsoft does not follow its own standard for doc and docx. Any other software tries to follow the standard, thus you can get different view of the document depending on what editor you use.
Picasa I think is easier to replace. Just need to relearn. Leaning towards Gwenview. VM is not an option, too complicated and slow for her. Picasa has been depricated for a long time now so it is time to move on.
You might want to check out Libre Office. It’s document compatible with MS-Office and I think it comes pre-installed on Linux Mint.
Time for me to go FreeBSD i guess
7.14% unknown!
The year of Plan 9 on the desktop!
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Serious question: you’d use that for your daily driver?
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I mean, leave it to us weirdos on sdf for stuff like this.
Out of curiosity, do you use it for fun, or does it provide you with some specific features?
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You explained it so well, that you actually got me interested in trying it some day.
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I wish someone would port Python and BorgBackup to it. Venti/Fossil are not quite as nice for multi-OS backups.
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Are you on oftc?
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ah. I’ve been doing linux things, but maybe i’ll try out gridchat next time i’m on 9front
What desktop environment is that? Or is it built in by default or doesn’t work quite similar to linux?
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They got a DE built in and say GNU is bloated. Foolishness
A rare sighting of a Plan 9 user! You need to be protected at all cost! Your species is extremely rare and important for future studies.
BTW for a moment I was upset, because I thought this is a screenshot of Reddit. I kinda like the old look of it.
Surprisingly many people don’t need the “modern” “web” for daily driving.
Can I join the club, I use 9front
One of the few times I think where this is not only correct, but also most accurate
The “unknown” is Windows. If you change the graph to see the whole range from 2008 to date, you will see that whenever there’s a big spike or dip on Unknown, it’s the exact opposite for Windows.
Thanks for ruining it for me.
GNU HURD remains ignored.
Good.
I unironically would use it
Please do. Why don’t you yet?
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It says “THE PLAN FELL OFF” and “DO NOT INSTALL”, everything OK over there?
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How do I hide which OS I am using? What is behind the high Unknown number?
Use user agent switcher and set it to something random. However that makes your fingerprint unique. I’ve read that people set it to windows just to blend in the masses
Every browser has a description like
"Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 8.1.0; SM-T580) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/74.0.3729.157 Safari/537.36"called User Agent. You can set this value to something else, but be careful. If you set it to something that does not exist, then it makes it more likely to be identifiable. Or some things could potentially not work right if it expects a specific operating system, in example when downloading files. Usually not a big deal.So ultimately you want to set this value to something that exist and something that is used by many people. There are addons which can make this process much easier or even change it automatically after some time period in example.
Chameleon at https://sereneblue.github.io/chameleon/ is such an addon for the browser. There are lot of other alternatives, I used a few of them in the past, but stopped using them because there was here and there trouble. If you do, I recommend to install this addon from the addon store of your browser and not from the website, but that is just my personal recommendation.
Thanks. So what is measured is merely the browsers people are using? Then I can see why the metrics are more general ballparks than precise measurements, seeing that the user agent can be modified with ease.
The question is, if they only evaluate the User Agent? This is an organization specialized into statistics, they know it can be modified too. The ad industry tries to track you and find out everything about you despite these modifications. Don’t underestimate them!
Fair enough. They still don’t know what >7% of people are using, though.
That 7% might not even be people. It could be bots doing HTTP requests and throwing garbage in the user-agent.
9 crossposts is crazy
with like 600 comments between them, holy moley
One for every current ~0.5% market share!
That FreeBSD club looks pretty good. There’s a niche for every niche.
NetBSD needs some love too 🚩
I wonder if it is higher. Think about all the people using Librewolf
Cool. My wife switched to LMDE yesterday, so that’s one more into the fold.
If only MS Office worked well on Linux, due to her muscle memory, my wife would’ve switched to Fedora for her laptop. Aside from light gaming (Sims 4, mostly), she’s not a tech-person at all, so that’s saying something in my book!
She might adjust to LibreOffice, it borrows heavily from the MS Office UI. I think it’s also available on Windows if she wants to try it before switching. Sims 4 works great on Linux too.
im doing my part 💪
switched to arch a week or so ago, absolutely loving it
I’m doing my part
Linux Mint here. Soon to switch to a more “manual” distro.
The only real reason to switch to another distro nowadays is because you want to get updates faster (rolling release [like Arch] vs steady releases) and/or you want the ability to customize the OS more easily. Also, if you wanna be that person that wants to remove SystemD from Linux or have a version controlled OS.
I like mint cause it stays out ofy way for literally everything.
Or if you’re sold on the hype of atomic distros (such as Fedora Kionite)
Or if you’re sold on reproducable OS configuration (Nix)
Or if you simply like the defaults of another distro better and don’t want to have to deviate from standards.
Or…
Nah, there’s still a lot of variety to Linux systems.
I can’t think of time where I needed anything more than Mint for a desktop. It’s been on at least one device in my house since 2010.
Windows 11 is a strong motivator. I suspect like many other people, the only reason I was keeping Windows around was gaming. But thanks to Proton and the Steam Deck, the number of games in my library that won’t run on Linux is vanishingly small. I deleted my Windows partition a few months ago and haven’t looked back.
Install Linux or buy a Mac, fuck Windows.
Same here. If I could get Vortex Mod Manager to work under Wine/Proton, I wouldn’t use Windows at all.
Nexus Mods is working on an AppImage version of their mod manager that works perfectly in my testing.
Currently it only supports Stardew Valley and Cyberpunk i think.
I’m excited for it to have parity with Windows Vortex.
Give it a shot again, something changed recently in Proton (I assume) that made Vortex “just work” for me on my Steam Deck. I didn’t even need to do any fiddling, I just ran the installer exe from desktop mode using Lutris and whatever Proton was latest, and it installed perfectly. Vortex now runs entirely as expected, even from game mode.
Vortex should be easy to get working, it probably just needs the Dot Net and Visual C libraries installed, which I think you can get via Wine Tricks.
What games are you using it for? I’ve used Mod Organizer 2 for Skyrim SE and it’s worked great on the deck
I checked out Mod Organizer 2 recently, but it didn’t support Subnautica the last time I tried it. I only use mods for a few games, line Stardew Valley and the Fallout games.
Really? The last few times I’ve tried (granted it was a year or more ago) I got like 15 FPS on a heavy modlist running on my desktop, which had a GTX 2080 and was running Arch, btw. Trying to get MO2 to launch the Linux version of Skyrim running via Steam/Proton and not the Windows version of Steam running through WINE was a fun mess to deal with. Once all that was handled, then half of the modding programs (xEdit, Nemesis, BodySlide, etc…) didn’t work with MO2s virtual FS. It was just way too many layers of abstraction to deal with 🤯
Yes, really haha. I don’t think I would consider the mod list I used heavy, at least not graphically. I didn’t use any of those programs you mentioned.
Trying to get MO2 to launch the Linux version of Skyrim running via Steam/Proton and not the Windows version of Steam running through WINE was a fun mess to deal with
I recall using some sort of script that installed MO2 and handled all of this (at least for the Steam Deck).
Either way, I hope their new cross-platform launcher works out well.
Nice, thanks I’ll give it a try again because Windows 10 is really pissing me off regarding how practically anything that you used to be able to easily disable now requires one or multiple registry hacks that may or may not work anymore.
I totally understand you not giving all that a try because while it is a handheld Linux PC, it’s probably more of a pain in the ass to use on that screen and with the standard input (obviously docking it would solve these issues) than it’s worth. I just keep Windows on my Desktop to play a few games, my home server is my workhorse and I have a Linux laptop that work gave me (literally, they laid me off and never asked for it back).
Gaming works pretty damn well as far as I’m concerned, the few that I can’t get to work are irrelevant.
I’m keeping Windows around for work… fuck Autodesk and fuck Dassault. So I am trying to get a VM with GPU pass through to work (had it working once but then I screwed it up and now I can’t seem to get it working again).
I dicked around with the VM route for a while and could never really get it working 100% to my liking. There was always a trade-off. I ended up just getting a second PC and tucking it in a cabinet out of sight. When I need Windows I just use remote desktop to connect to it.
Having done the transition some months ago, there is still some stupid shit one has to deal with (especially, but not only, for games NOT from Steam) at times, more than in Windows, but it’s all so much better than it was before and by now quite close to the Gaming experience in Windows.
Then on top of that there are all the the longer term peace of mind things versus Windows: upgrading your Linux costs zero, changing your hardware won’t invalidate your Linux “OEM License” (plus it will probably just boot up as normal with if you just move your SSD to a whole new machine rather than throw you into driver nightmare), games that work in today’s Linux will keep on working in tomorrow’s and so on - this is actually massive advantage of Linux versus Windows which is seldom talked about: more often than not, hardware migration with Linux is to just move your SSD to a whole new machine, with all the stuff just the way you like it and all you files, and it just boots with and keeps on working.
(PS: Especially relevant for gamers who have to upgrade due to the increasing demands on hardware from the gaming side of things even though the hardware is fine for everything else they do in that machine, and who would rather that all those other things they’ve installed and kept on using rather than uninstall after “finishing the game”, just carry on configured just the way they like it and working just the way they’ve always did, even when they do upgrade the hardware because of games. People who are fine with hardware dedicated to gaming and with replacing the whole thing - hardware and software - for newer games, just get XBoxes or similar consoles, not PCs)
Linux not only saves you from enshittification, keeps control in your hands and preserves your privacy, it’s also a reliable and functional long term OS layer for your hardware that doesn’t force hardware upgrades on you.
I’m Linux user since 2008 and as much as I want to agree with you, I can’t. Even if Mac is much closer to Linux with its BSD roots, I probably would choose Windows over Mac. Why? Because Windows is much more open and less restrictive than OS X. And there is the support and compatibility of Steam games (and games in general) in Windows. The hardware repair ability is terrible on Apple too.
Yes, Microsoft is bad, Windows is bad; so is Apple and OS X. I personally can’t live with the restrictions Apple has.
Don’t buy a Mac. That’s more limiting than a Windows. But yeah install linux.
More limited, but also less enshittified than Windows.
If you want a good, well-polished experience for certain creative workloads, or even programming, MacOS is great and their Apple Silicon CPUs are excellent.
If you want to do ANY gaming besides WoW (which surprisingly enough has always had great MacOS support) or you can’t stand the lack of configurability, Linux is immediately the superior choice by far.
I would like to add that if you want to do any real customization of your setup don’t get mac either.
Oh definitely
Even though I do hate Apple as a company, they do make great products, they just charge out the ass for them
Nah, even their hardware consists out of laptops with screen protection falling off, phones bending themselves into breakage and cables with the sensitive connectors on the outside so they’ll break often.
Their OS is surprisingly buggy, too.They’re actually just shit all around, in my experience.
I dislike Apple as a company but I love Apple hardware. Old Macs are my favourite thing to run Linux on.
The whole business model of Apple is to force a hardware upgrade cycle on you and force all your devices to be in that same ecosystem.
I mean, I can see the advantages of it on the short term, but on the longer term having stuff that keeps on working even as always even in older hardware (or you just install new hardware under it and it just recognizes it and keeps on working) is a massive benefit versus a $1500+ bill every
twofive years and having to migrate your stuff.It’s more like 6-7 years and the migration tool basically clones your drive in 15 minutes
Literally the only reason I keep Windows around is because modding Skyrim (using MO2, not Vortex) is a nightmare. I use Wabbajack as well, so the idea of installing 500+ mods manually in Vortex doesn’t sound ideal, also since Vortex’s conflict management is an absolute nightmare compared to MO2’s.
Mac?! Christ no, that’s doing the opposite of liberating yourself and it has less gaming than Linux I’d say.
I didn’t mean for gaming specifically, probably should have used a transition statement. For creative and professional use cases, macOS is still far far better than Windows. For gaming yeah that’s not your platform, Linux is.
It does. Gaming on mac is a pain. Gaming on linux is a much better experience, and has much better support at this point. Apple really alienates developers.
I don’t think “liberating” your machine is the reason people are just now getting mad at windows.
- “I can’t choose when to update, anymore”
- “I can’t uninstall all sorts of things, anymore”
- “I can’t even use my perfectly fine laptop of 6 years old, anymore”
It’s all about liberation, I’d say.
“I can’t choose when to update, anymore”
That changed with windows 8 12 years ago.
“I can’t uninstall all sorts of things, anymore”
Unless you installed the embedded versions of windows you’ve never been able to do that, best you could do was turn like 5 things off in the features screen.
“I can’t even use my perfectly fine laptop of 6 years old, anymore”
I wouldn’t call your computer not getting updates so you install a different OS “liberating” it.
Also your computer not getting updates doesn’t magically turn it into a brick, you can still use it just fine. This is something I’ve never understood. As long as your web browser still gets updates that’s the biggest security vulnerability that I’d be afraid of. Chrome supported Windows 7 until 109 in 2023, and Firefox ESR is still going until September this year. 10th gen and older intel machines don’t get graphics updates anymore, are those machines ewaste? Shit some shitty laptops never get bios updates and there’s a whole host of vulnerabilities there.
That changed with windows 8 12 years ago.
Oh yeah, it’s been a gradual process.
And not to mention specific equipment such as train management that uses Windows XP, Windows 98 or 95. Just one example.
the number of games in my library that won’t run on Linux is vanishingly small
at this point, it’s pretty much only about Roblox.
…which I don’t want to play, I’m not happy about my nephews playing, but that seems like the only big one which really continues to struggle on Windows.
edit: that’s from my limited POV, as someone who loves gaming but i don’t follow or try out big new titles, I’m pretty much happy with my 30 favs, trying out like 5 new games a year, usually older or indie titles.
at this point, it’s pretty much only about Roblox.
It’s Honkai: Star Rail for me.
Petty as it may seem, I’ll begrudgingly dual boot Win10 until H:SR is playable on Linux.
Roblox is about the only reason why I can’t switch my kid’s computer to Linux, they play almost exclusively that and Minecraft. Once win10 goes EOL, I’ll probably start budgeting to replace my laptop with a new PC and give them the laptop. The old PC will then get Linux and handle 3d printer stuffs
I might be out of date but for a long time my 2 nephews (10 and 13, cousins to each other) have been playing Blox Fruits, which I understand is pretty much a standard “grind” MMORPG. (Which I don’t necessarily find that bad; having to put a lot of work in a character and seeing it grow slowly and steadily can be a lesson.) I like how they are having fun trying to coordinate and take out a boss together (sometimes dying all the time), but I suppose other games can give that, perhaps even better-looking ones and certainly ones made by less shady companies. (Oh, and actually working on Linux/steam deck)
So I was wondering if there are other games that I could introduce them to, if only to remind them that world outside Roblox exists. I never played any MMORPG’s (or pretty much anything multi-player, except Minecraft/Terraria/etc. with the kids) so I’m out of the picture. I’ve only tried few in my life and never stuck for long.
Albion Online seemed child-like enough, albeit a little boring for my taste. One I really enjoyed recently is Path of Exile (and I it looks more than good enough to be hard to resist for a kid), but who knows – is that safe for 10 to 13 year olds…?
Thank you Windows 11!
I’m so happy.
But also liked when linux felt like a secret.
Microsoft finally did something right: they made their shitty product shitty enough for people to realize it.
But also liked when linux felt like a secret.
Don’t worry. You can still tap into that sweet sweet Linux elitism by running an Arch based system or a tiling window manager.
Also what the fuck is a tiling window manager? I want it!
Instead of having your windows float around, they perfectly snap and fill the space of the monitor depending on how many windows you have open. A new DE in alpha right now called Cosmic has both floating windows and tiling, you can change with just a toggle.
Cosmic is great so far, I run it on Fedora.
I want my windows anywhere I want them, and in Cinnamon I can snap windows to corners, o top, or bottom… Being forced to work tiled is backwards.
If as someone mentioned in Cosmic you can toggle it off and on ( and the toggle is esasily accesible, not buried in settings) I’m fine with that
“Being forced to work tiled” that’s the main feature of a tiling wm though…
If you tried it for a while, you’d realize just how annoying floating windows really are. All that manual positioning, focus issues, getting them stuck or hidden behind other windows, etc. For big monitors, I would say tiling is just flat superior to floating windows managers.
Oh my gosh I need this now.
Fedora? 🤢 jk
The big common ones are i3, Hyprland, or Awesome. However, there are tons out there and there is no right answers.
I’m sorry, can you clarify what you wrote? I read it but then got distracted by my cursor moving on its own while I was reading an article about xzutils. Perhaps I should read it again since it made no sense the first time.
Only if you’ve installed Arch itself, using a GUI is noobs.
I see your Arch and raise you a Gentoo.
That’s old news, NixOS is the new hotness
I think Gentoo with no binaries should be the new archlinux. I’ve literally used archlinux virtually unchanged outside of updates for years now. It’s been trouble free outside of some minor bugs and I change my settings in the kde settings panel 90% of the time.
Would be interesting to know how much of that the steam deck is
Yeah, these results are skewed because it’s only desktop Linux, so mobile devices (which I believe the Steam Deck and other portable PCs/gaming devices fall under) aren’t counted, and those primarily run Linux. It seems that the foothold of Linux never was, and probably never will be, the desktop PC.
It is not a steam user percentage, but according to the site by user data from web pages, it explicitly mentions search engines and social media. I doubt that the steam deck is extremely significant here.
I’ve been docking mine and using it as my primary pc. The only issue I’ve had is that I was able to play CSGO perfectly, and CS2 don’t do so good.
i hear its great for that, but you are the exception.
Oh yeah, people who need more power definitely want something else. It’s all I need really. I’m about to inherit my daughter’s old gaming laptop though so I’m not sure what I’ll do then. Definitely Linux with a small partition for windows to play some VR games. I’d say I’ll still use the Steam deck for most things though because it’s so portable.
Why a windows partition for vr? Vr works on linux
Well, I guess I won’t need one then. Hardware is a bit older but if I can get the same performance I’ll avoid the windows partition.
Microsoft’s advertising campaign for people to switch to Linux is working great.
