Funny how corporations think taking away consumers freedom and privacy is a good idea.
Have fun losing customers.
Its a good idea for their shareholders, who don’t think beyond the next quater. Pretty sure most of them don’t have object permanence.
“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”
-Benito Mussolini, 1932
How does this work nowadays when you buy a PC from a store?
Does it come with Windows already installed?
And if so, with what account?Installed yes, but the OOBE that runs (assuming the OEM didn’t fuck it up) is more or less the same as a retail install: you have to add the account, untick the 300 ‘yes, please spy on me’ boxes, and tell it that you do not want office 14 times.
Remember clippy on word 2000? That was annoying.
Ok, so this solidifies my desire to never buy a Windows PC/laptop and why my switch to Mac was a good choice a few years ago. However Mac gaming is nowhere near where it should be right now and I was thinking about getting a cheap Windows laptop for games that aren’t available on Mac.
I remember a push a few years ago to get some linux distros pre-installed on some OEM hardware but I didn’t hear much of anything past the hype. Anyone have any good OEM brands that have linux installed instead of Windows and are relatively affordable?
This forced account shit is infuriating. I’d see students with computers that cannot get to government-provided education sites because they are forced to sign up with a Microsoft account to use their PC, which forced them to setup a child account because of their age and therefore be under a parent account, which means the child account can only use Edge and can only go to whitelisted websites, which blocks some government education sites unless the parent account allows it through which they can’t until the student goes home.
Aren’t the students provided computers?
Here students usually get provided computers and then MS accounts are no problem since they just have to logon with their domain account.
I didn’t know Gentoo was named after a penguin.
Now I want a Chinstrap and a Southern Rockhopper Linux.
GalapagOS
Chinstrap Linux haha. It’s like Fedora, but for a totally different demographic.
Uh
Who’s ready to talk Linux
Sadly, steam VR and fusion360 are still tying me to windows. :(
Steam VR runs on Linux natively, doesn’t it? I switched to Linux a few weeks ago but haven’t tried VR gaming on it yet.
It does, but performance seems a lot laggier than Windows.
I’ve been using Linux full time for a while now, and only recently installed Windows on a secondary drive, just for those two things.
Before, on Linux, it was a bit of mixed bag. Sometimes it would start up without issue, other times sound wouldn’t work, etc.
Using corectl is a must, and make sure you have a stable steam install. (iirc the steam I installed didn’t come with half of the 32 bit libs it was expecting). I’m rocking a 7900xtx, so it’s not exactly low-end, and half-life alyx was giving me a lot of stutters.
No they don’t. Steam VR is native on Linux, and most of fusion 360 can run in wine. Good news for you!
Unfortunately the “horror” that is windows persists almost as much as the horror of Linux. Which is a bunch of fanbois crowing about their distro without any explanation at all. But why do they do this? Because that’s how they got into it, and that’s how the people that got them into it got into it.
Which fucking distro should I use?
- Well, really it’s just preference.Then I choose arch.
- Uh, wrong try again lol.Fair enough, Which fucking distro should I use?
- Well, really it’s whatever works for you.Okay, I didn’t like the feel of that one.
- Well, you were using the wrong desktop environment.😐😑😤😠… …Which fucking desktop environment should I use?
- Well, really it’s just preference.🤬. 🤬🤬, 🤬. 🤬.
- Look clearly you don’t know what you’re doing just use Ubuntu, or Kubuntu, or Lubuntu, or Xubuntu, or Fubuntu, or Poobuntu, or Schmubuntu. And with cinnamon obvi.Well how do I know? The site for each one uses the exact same bloviated claims. They’re all feature rich, and lightweight, and extended support, etc. Do I have to install them all to find out?
- Yes but that’s impossible. So just use mine, it works.Until it doesn’t. Then you need to hit up Linux self help forums, to get help from Linux bros, who are the most detestable group of unhelpful, impatient, and pretentious neckbeards imaginable. “Did you try searching first?” “Just use our discord!” “Just use [my fucking distro!]”
😖🤯👺
FML
I typed 6 words. Are you alright
Lol, thought I was replying to a different comment, my bad 😆
Please accept my apologies 🙏
I’m not unhinged, more or less
Been there. Accepted
To answer your questions though, I suggest the non-Cosmic version of Pop!OS. (and switch to wayland if it’s not the default yet- not sure, I’ve had this install for YEARS) It’s a good blend of “just works” and “up to date enough” to run anything, and I recommend steering well clear of Arch. I’ve been using Linux for a decade and I’ve always found a way to whoopsie it into a broken state. That’s a “me problem” yes, but if I can fudge it up that easily and I have experience using it, I think it’s unsuitable to recommend to anyone.
Most people live in a web browser- does it really matter if the desktop environment isn’t riced enough or isn’t windows-ey enough? That said, it takes actual hackery to make any version of Windows usable these days, so I’ll forgive a distro not being “absolutely elite” for someone’s preferences. Let’s not compare Linux forums to Windows forums, where no-one has ever, I repeat ever received ANY useful advice besides reinstalling their Windows, am I right?
Lol, touche. Unless you include how to “unbreak” every single windows update, but even those resources are growing ever more seldom. Thanks for the explanation. I think I remember hearing about pop during the great steam Linux supportathon a few years back. I held off since the video card support wasn’t quite ironed out of something like that and haven’t checked back.
I’m liking Linux Mint and Kubuntu personally.
Especially Kubuntu for my main desktop PC, Linux Mint for my little clunker PC I use to run my 3D printers.
Same, I just loaded kubuntu on another new system
I’m so glad I finally ditched that shit for good
I really hope the whole shift away from American products will convince more software and game developers to provide native support for Linux. I am approaching the fence.
Are they trying to kill windows on purpose?
I wouldn’t say that, more just abusing a monopoly.
companies do things like this when they feel they have the power in the business/customer relationship and there’s no regulations to stop them.
They have done that for years, and every time there is an army of geeks and gamers who look for registry hacks or PowerShell scripts to install Windows anyway. If even those geeks do not want to spend 5 minutes looking for doc on how to install Ubuntu (which is a billion times easier to use than Windows), you can be sure Windows will never die.
The sad thing is they know the large majority of users will comply. Most people put familiarity and convenience above their own privacy and general well-being.
Games. Most of the games I play don’t play well with Linux.
I keep a Linux laptop for banking that only connects via ethernet cord while I’m banking. Which is nice, I don’t worry about key loggers now.
What games do you play? I’ve been gaming exclusively on Linux since Windows 7 went EoS, and especially since the Steam Deck came out, I’ve had very few problems. That said I don’t play competitive stuff, which is what tends to have anti-cheat rootkits.
Yeah. Gaming isn’t the issue for a long time. Productivity is. Rantmode
Proper CAD for Linux? Nonexistent, even worse, some manufacturers intentionally make sure you can’t use a VM either until you massively pay extra.(Looking at you Dassault) FreeCAD is a shitshow (and that is entirely the communities fault) and no professional competitor has shown any incentive - even though there is a increasing market for Linux in some professional capacities. And the current projects to get bottles/wine/etc. to work are maintained by a single guy (bless him) who tried to do it for multiple systems at once and seems to have given up mostly.
Graphic design? While the situation is a little bit better,it’s still a shitshow. No, GIMP and Inkscape are not sufficient replacements for Adobe or even Affinity. They are “good enough” for most things,but they are not nearly ready for production use in any professional capacity.
Office? Yeah. Sadly equally bad. I really really really hate Microsoft and Office. But: They are inherently good at what they do. Not because people get used to it - but because they work. I used LibreOffice since back when it was still StarOffice. (And have used Lotus before that) But we as the open source community still rather fight about ribbons (even though they became the standard everywhere) than get LibreCalc halfway production ready or make proper collaborative working possible. Or get a proper fucking search into thunderbird.
And this is the problem: OSS is so damn up its own ass, that it does not see the bigger picture. We can fight about the kernel allowing Rust, having Ribbons, which is the proper workbench in FreeCAD or about packet managers, distro flavours,etc. In the end what will happen is that the other side will be alienated, excuse themselves from further contributions and, and this is even worse, a lot of possible future contributors will also not contribute. And wow, someone was right and can think he (and it’s almost always a he) thinks he knows the only truth.
While the actual truth is held by the others. The ones that don’t even are bothered by the whole fucking discussing because they make the money, they influence millions and they are the ones setting de facto standards. And yes, that will mean we will need to adapt.
Including adapting market standards. When 95% of the world does a thing “that way”, it’s simply preposterous to claim “your way” is the right way, even it’s for historical reasons. (Easy example: CTRL C / CTRL V)
Same goes for adapting software. If 10% of the development power of Libre Office,GIMP, etc. would have been used to further Wine/Proton to get people to be able to use their industrial standard software we would have seen much much much larger adoption rates,both professionally and for private users.
Because that is literally what happened in gaming. Once Valve basically put massive efforts into allowing Windows games to be played on Linux - and not into developing native Linux games all of a sudden Linux gaming went ahead. Because it is a advantage for your game to work natively and well on a steam deck.
This is even more relevant for production software. If a CEO/CIO has reached a point where his main production software runs on Linux and he has deployed Linux in his company his next software contract for other software will go towards the company who runs better in their environment.
Rant out
(Nothing personal,mate, I just spent the last two days to get fucking CAD to work on Fedora…)
Blender at least has gotten to the point where an indie flick made with it actually won some Oscars and other big awards, so that pretty much put it on the map as a viable Maya or 3DSMax alternative, so there’s that.
Do you play exclusively esports games or something? It’s rare I encounter a title that doesn’t work just fine on Linux. It seems I barely need to tweak any settings anymore.
I do play eSports games
The fact that Facebook still exists is proof of this.
Once valve drops better nvidia support into the kernel, and steamos starts coming pre-loaded on laptops and pre-built desktops it’s over for their consumer division.
There’s nothing special about SteamOS. Linux has been available as an option from several manufacturers for years.
What we need to see is a major studio pushing for Linux like valve has been doing.
Imagine if call of duty or fortnite had a Linux promotion to have a penguin hat. That would help
What we need to see is a major studio pushing for Linux like valve has been doing.
That’s it. That’s literally what makes it special. You, me, and half the fediverse probably aren’t going to use steam os unless maybe we buy a steam deck.
The fact that there’s a multi-billion dollar company throwing money at both it and proton is what makes steam os special. Its what’s going to give Linux a unified brand name that every machine can put on their case badge.
Normal people and the companies that sell them computers need that unified brand name. Why on gods green earth, I don’t fucking know, but I know that they do. Its how you get them to use shit.
There kind of is though. I’m not here to argue it’s enough to unseat windows but it is markedly different
From a technical standpoint it’s just another linux distro with some nice tweaks for gaming but from a human perspective it has brand recognition, familiarity, a known company behind it. Those things do really matter for adoption. No idea if that’d be anywhere near enough, I’m not inclined to make predictions, but it does have explicit advantages over consumers hearing they can get a laptop with Ubuntu or fedora on it
Yeah I agree. I just don’t wanna see more apps made exclusively for the steam deck with SteamOS and winderp. So I feel it’s important to highlight it’s just another Linux distro.
https://youtu.be/5KYQRk_SIB8 this is what pulled my attention to the matter.
No it’s not, multiplayer games with anticheat that hard-locks you into Windows and productivity software with DRM that hard-locks you into Windows is still a thing, if that were to stop being a thing, then Windows’ dominance on the desktop might finally be threatened, but until then, sadly, no.
Also, I will not be surprised if they audaciously disable Win 10 Home edition for security purposes once end of life is reached.
They already said they are going to charge $30/year for patches. They want recurring revenue from ads in 11 or from you paying yearly for 10.
I don’t know what is going on at Microsoft. I’m starting to think that they are trying to pivot to a completely different business model. In addition to this Windows 11 crap and XBox seemingly being given up on, they appear to be losing their embedded market as well. In the past, if you saw any screen in an industrial setting, there’s a good chance that there was the embedded Windows version behind that screen. Lately, all the new products are moving over to Linux.
They are, and have said they are.
Subscriptions are the wave of the future.
Why the fuck is a Microsoft account so important to Windows that running it without one is considered a “loophole”?
because microsoft is shifting focus from selling you a product, to selling you as a product
And they need a unique account to track every single click and thing you do on your PC, and the web, and everywhere else to facilitate doing that with greater control and ease.
Its literally what, and for the same reason, google has done for the past decade+
They want to make money off of services, every service they offer requires a Microsoft account to purchase and use. Everyone that they force to make an account during setup is one step closer to paying for a Microsoft service.
There are obviously tradeoffs (less sales of these versions of windows and some users pushed away from Windows altogether among others), but the motivation is clear.
My guess is that’s it’s easier to neatly package your data up for when they go to sell it.
Because we need your data silly 😊
Will people just stop using windows already. I get for work but if you just waiting on that one game then fuck off it’s not worth it. I gave up some of my favorite games because it wasn’t worth using Windows
For people with “that one game” there is a middle ground. Mine is Destiny 2 and they use a version of easy anticheat that refuses to run on Linux. My solution was to buy a $150 used Dell on eBay, a $180 GPU to be able to output to my 4 high-res displays, and install Debian + moonlight on it. I moved my gaming PC downstairs and a combination of wake-on-lan + sunshine means that I can game at functionally native performance, streaming from the basement. In my setup, windows only exists to play games on.
The added bonus here is now I can also stream games to my phone, or other ~thin clients~ in the house, saving me upgrade costs if I want to play something in the living room or upstairs. All you need is the bare minimum for native-framerate, native-res decoding, which you can find in just about anything made in the last 5-10 years.
I loved destiny 2 but I gave it up. Fuck Bungie because someone got it to work and they banned them
Can I run multi-monitor high refresh rates without the desktop slugging? Last time I seriously tried switching to Linux, this seemingly simple setup in 2024 was too much for it to handle.
I don’t know about high refresh rates, but multiple 4k screens was a pain point in 2023 and it’s a complete non-issue in 2025.
Sure, as long as you run a wayland capable DE. Like GNOME or KDE. It’s still experimental in linux mint afaik. You might have a few problems if you have an NVIDIA card (no proper wayland support) or HDMI cables (limited to 144 fps because of copyright issues iirc).
I have Nvidia yeah and quickly learnt that I wasn’t going to get it working smoothly and went back to Windows. If I manage to get a RRP 9070XT, then I will try Linux again.
I hate the “stop using windows” comments, when it’s quite impossible to have the same experience without specific hardware and setups.
It’s not the fault of the creators of an operating system that Nvidia refuses to write comparable drivers. Nvidia are the only ones with the technical knowledge of the GPU’s internals that is necessary to write the 100% functional driver. Open-source Nouveau drivers exist but are less functional because of this, its programmers have to try to reverse-engineer and do a lot of guesswork and testing, and for free.
Basically: If you value FOSS software at all, buy from manufacturers that are friendlier to FOSS software, or you may unknowingly lock yourself out of it.
Edit: Buying newer (especially of Nvidia) is probably a bad idea if you intend to run Linux. Older cards have had more time for them to fix the inevitable bugs. I run a GTX980Ti 😅 with the closed-source drivers on an Arch-based system and I’m honestly surprised a video driver update hasn’t seriously broken anything yet.
Never said it was the fault of the creators, I love the idea of Linux and wish it was the mainstream desktop OS, then none of these issues would really exist. I only have issue with people pretending it’s so simple to change to it from Windows, which is just almost never true.
I have an Nvidia card because it was the best option for me at the time I bought it, Valve’s Proton hadn’t matured enough for Linux to even be considered for gaming at that time (other Linux quirks aside). As much as I support FOSS, I love playing a variety of games with friends and that just wasn’t going to be feasible with Linux 5-6 years ago. I wasn’t going to dual-boot when I would end up spending most of my time in Windows anyway and the rest of my time troubleshooting Linux.
Now AMD has released a good card, Proton is really good and Linux has progressed further to where I can seriously consider it. With Windows 10 support ending, I am very likely to jump ship.
Sorry, I was not trying to put words in your mouth. I just usually hear, “Linux not good for me because it doesn’t support my setup well enough” when it should be “Linux not good for me because the manufacturers of my hardware don’t support Linux well enough”. Trying to put blame where it belongs in hopes of raising awareness to both users and manufacturers.
I also mistakenly thought you mentioned a newer Nvidia card when you are considering AMD. 🤦♂️ Good luck in your computing future!
You can still skip it with MicroWin and also Rufus. I’ve tested it just recently.
Did you try that with the latest beta build?
No with the latest ISO from windows 24H2 I believe
They give me more and more reasons to stay on W10 until I give up games and move to Linux permanently.
I’ll miss my TCMD scripting, though. But besides that and gaming, most of what I do nowadays is cross-platform.
Same here.
Game performance on Linux isn’t always the best. So I’ll keep a Win10 around.
Are Linux ports of games so hard to do? Genuine question. I am not a games dev.
Are Linux ports of games so hard to do? Genuine question. I am not a games dev.
My personal opinion is that Windows is an easier target because all Windows machines are consistent in their underlying interface with the user’s hardware. Same idea with MacOS. You know what display manager and graphics library to target, and what packaging format to target.
Then, there’s Linux, which can be one of any number of distributions with varying software stacks, packaging formats, etc. It’s not that Linux gaming is radically difficult to support, it’s just much less standardized. This makes it a lot more work for a much smaller demographic. The Vulkan graphics API has made some of the software issues much less of a problem, but you still have to contend with things like different display managers and stuff like packaging differences between distributions.
Makes sense. Would packaging like Flatpak or AppImage be an option? Or just make sure it runs with Wine? Probably all not that straightforward.
I think the problem with packaging isn’t so much that there aren’t good options. Some people don’t like Flatpak. Some people don’t like snaps. Maybe AppImage would be a good option. But these are all choices that can potentially fragment the target demographic even further, which reduces the value returned for the time invested in supporting it. Just my opinion, certainly not an expert.
Wine is a great solution for windows-only things. The great thing about gaming, though, is that many of them are using languages like C++ which have full support on Linux systems natively. If you then have your graphics running through Vulkan, that also works across platforms. So, in my opinion, Wine shouldn’t be something we continue to need for gaming. Not saying Wine won’t be used or won’t continue to be useful for gaming, just that it doesn’t have to be the primary path to support Linux.
What games keep you on Windows? Besides a few anticheat-enabled ones which choose not to support it, basically everything works fine. I game (and work in gamedev!) 100% on Linux.
My vr driving Sim rig just works in windows, the most I’ve ever had to do is map my shifter in game. Steamvr, hardware drivers, the actual games, it all just works without doing anything. Plug and play. I’m sure I can get it all working in Linux, eventually. I was(trying to) gaming on Ubuntu 10.04 with wine. I was first batch steamdeck and the amount of progress with gaming I’ve seen thanks to valve and proton means I’ll be coming back. But I’m just waiting for steamOS to be open release. But I am a KDE head so honestly I’ll end up whatever distro that does proton and KDE by the end of this year.
Come on in, the water is fine. The latest version of Ubuntu is like 24, so things have changed a lot, and for the better.
Get yourself a Kubuntu image, and give it a try.
Install bazzite. Done.
Over like half of the games I play with friends just do not work Linux because of anti-cheat. I hate it. I also can’t use it for work or studies since I need access to a good CAD that just works. These 2 things and a proper Adrenaline software from AMD is all I need to fully switch to Linux. I do have a dual-boot Windows/Linux PC at home, but honestly, I can barely use Linux most of the time.
Ouch, that sucks yeah. Guess I got lucky with the games my friends like to play. Only one is I guess Valorant, but I don’t engage with that one anyways. Guess you’re stuck on the dual boot until devs of these games start ticking the Proton support box :P
“Hi, I liked XY development tool having a proper GUI on Windows where can I find a non CLI…”
“LEARN TO USE NEOVIM!”
“LEARN TO USE GDB!”
“DO EVERYTHING FROM THE COMMAND LINE!”
I’ve used the unpatchable Win11 account loophole, that exploits a functionality of your pc, where you wipe your boot drive, and install NixOS on it
That’s a neat trick!
