Switch to Linux, today. It’s always been the better option, but for the last decade it’s been the easier option as well. Installing Linux is a walk in the park whereas windows is a Hilarious clown show from hell with no end.
That reminds me that now in the office we’re dealing with windows machines where the network card just stops working, drivers are suddenly gone. Don’t ask, it’s windows, it’s Microsoft abd this is just considered normal. If a Linux machine has a bug it’s “oh my god Linux sucks sooo hard, it’s impossible to get it to work!” but this Microsoft bullshit just gets handwaved away with “well computers are complicated, let’s just reinstall this”
Yes, there is still a limited set of specialty hardware that may not have drivers available for Linux, but the vast majority of people can easily run Linux and have a much MUCH better experience than windows, and that is ignoring the spyware, the adware, the ads, the plain security nightmare of having a windows machine…
Switch to Linux, it’s easy, it’s beautiful, it’s fun. Come to Linux, come to the dark side, we have cookies
Installing Linux is a walk in the park whereas windows is a Hilarious clown show from hell with no end.
As a server maybe. Switching everything on my desktop to Linux has been a constant fight against all kinds of problems and there’s several things I haven’t been able to get working at all. Microsoft’s constant enshittification is closing the gap and it’s currently a tossup between which one I’m going to land on but that’s not Linux improving so much as Windows getting worse.
It’s very hardware dependent with a few problem’s like Nvidia. For Best results go established brands that support Linux like thinkpads.
That advice doesn’t help much when I already have all the hardware. The whole point is not having to buy new shit.
I wasn’t trying to give you advice, I was describing the situation in general. 🤷
Exactly, I have a bunch of weird issues when running Linux on my Lenovo Legion 5 Pro with an RTX3060. So unfortunately I w9nt be switching until the situation improves.
It’s not even about gaming either, virtually all animations are like 2fps, no matter the drivers or power management. I wasted days on this with some guys from the Lenovo Legion Linux discord server, and some with exactly the same laptop don’t have the same issue, but windows runs fine.
It’s a real shame that, maybe on the next laptop!
Is your model covered by a NixOS module?
https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware/tree/master/lenovo/legion
Could give one of these a twirl and see if it fixes the issues you’ve been seeing.
Thanks for the lead, but I’m afraid I don’t know what to do with these modules. Do they only work with NixOS?
Yeah sorry should have listed that, they do require a NixOS installation.
Pick a DE for the installer, and if you want to change DE the installer will guide you through the process.
Then it will leave you with a config file and some man pages, it’s a bit much at first but spend some time with it. In my eyes easily one of the better distros out there.
That reminds me that now in the office we’re dealing with windows machines where the network card just stops working, drivers are suddenly gone. Don’t ask, it’s windows, it’s Microsoft abd this is just considered normal. If a Linux machine has a bug it’s “oh my god Linux sucks sooo hard, it’s impossible to get it to work!” but this Microsoft bullshit just gets handwaved away with “well computers are complicated, let’s just reinstall this”
Ah, yes, that. I switched in 2011 and the first impressions were about how flawless everything is compared to Windows.
the plain security nightmare of having a windows machine…
Eh, about that - Linux really isn’t immune to that. Just right now Windows is still by far the more profitable target.
Linux security is not perfect, nothing is. But compared to windows security? Come on, seriously? Is .exe still the extension that’ll automatically execute a program?
I’m not sure this is anywhere near what a security comparison would look like.
And the fact that the traditional Unix security model is being augmented with ACLs and selinux and what not hints, that it’s not sufficient. And what these things are being used for is, well, similar to Windows security model.
Seriously. If you’re used to fiddling with Windows and especially if you have installed Windows recently, go try something like Linux Mint. Just the install process will blow your mind. And then wait until you get a system update and it doesn’t affect what you’re doing!
And you can say no if you want to!
Yeah I guess I left that part out! It’s funny because like so many things in Linux, you have all the power but you often don’t need to use it because the same problems just aren’t there.
You get to decide when to apply the updates, but they are so quick and unobtrusive that I choose to apply them immediately!
No cookies!
Punch and pie!
But what if we already use Linux? Can we still have some cookies? Or is this new users only?
You can have them, just click accept all on the cookie pop up.
I had a Windows 10 laptop that has a CPU not supported by Windows 11. It’s not e-waste, though. It just runs Ubuntu now.
what a bizare take to suggest hoping for ReactOS to mature before using Linux as daily driver. A lot of the current reactOS app compatibility depends on WINE implementation anyway.
ReactOS is a very fun project, but anyone expecting it to be a real useable OS is absolutely mad. It’s been going for almost 30 years, and they’re almost at the point of binary compatibility with Windows Server 2003…
Last I checked it didnt play very nicely in real hardware, and required running it in a VM
Debian user here. All people have a doorkey. Some people have an alarm system as well. Infosec is about ’ what do you have and what do you know '. So in principle TPM is a defencible argument. You should absolutely bail from MS products for different reasons. Like privacy. Your PC isn’t yours anymore. Your NPU will reduce THEIR costs. Etc.
Don’t enter Linux thinking its a drop in replacement. Go slow and do ‘ships in the night’. Move data over to the new ship. Start embracing OSS on windows, it’ll be familiar when you finally bail. G luck.
TPM is the wedge to put a cryptoprocessor in your computer so program can finally operate under the tyrannical scrutiny of users and the pirates using ghidra !
Fucking Christ, you have choices people. If windows won’t meet your needs anymore, USE SOMETHING ELSE! Why do these people pretend there are no alternatives to windows?!
There are no alternatives to Windows. You will join us. Embrace ☀️. Extend 🌈.Ȩ̷͙͙̺̰̦͊̏͜x̷̱̹̃t̶̡͉̍̋̌̿͗̈́͘í̴̡̼̱̫͚̺͙̉ň̶̛̮͠ģ̴̛̹̮͎̏̓u̷̢̢̜͊̆̈̉͐̑i̸̛̪͔̤̰͚̾͌̈̍͜ͅs̶̳̜͎͓͚̣̼̖͌̇̈́͊̌͋h̷͉̹̄͐̋̐͛🌚.
Think about all the people with computers that don’t know about Linux.
Why do these people pretend there are no alternatives to windows?!
They’d have to admit they were wrong.
Most people are incapable of doing this unless they literally have no choice.
Where’s Microsoft’s Chief Sustainability Officer on this one? Too busy looking the other way on Copilot’s massive energy usage?
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I’ve converted a ton of my older family to Linux, it does everything they need as far as web browsing and some basic office applications, and it offers a polished enough UI these days that most barely tell it apart from windows, some even prefer the UI more. Even 2/3 of our home systems have gone full Linux now too (no more dual booting) and handle all my own gaming, audio and programming needs. I really hope this message keeps getting out there and we can cut back on ewaste and forced obselence.
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I have a custom built PC running on Windows 10, which has no TPM and therefore cannot update to Win11. I might consider Linux as an alternative on some regular laptop, but I’m afraid that my games might no longer be running if I switch the OS from Windows to Linux.
Proton has come a long way.
The only game I can’t play is fortnight, and that’s because Epic won’t enable the anti cheat to run on Linux, not because the game doesn’t work.
What is “Proton” in this context?
Adding to what the others were saying, proton has an unaffiliated website for reporting purposes, protondb.com. It tallies user reports of the games working or not. The data is associated mostly with steam libraries.
I don’t have a lot of games in my steam library, relatively speaking, barely over 100. But there are zero games that would not work on Linux for me:
In this context Platinum means it works out of the box, Gold means some users experienced minor issues (mostly older reports by nvidia users) that required some tinkering with launch options, such as setting an environment variable. Silver and Bronze mean gradually more tinkering required but still works. This excludes native apps (which do not use wine/proton) and borked apps (of which I own zero).
Note, that this is a translation layer, not emulation, and often games can have better performance under Linux thanks to the system not getting bogged down by the OS itself.
Also note, that 99% borked games are due to kernel level anticheat and DRM being implemented improperly by the game developer, which proton can’t handle. You can still make it work under Linux, but you’d actually require emulation for that, instead of proton.
Edit:
Another screenshot of the top50 played saturation to show you what to expect.
OK, thanks for the information, that sounds really interesting. I was playing Doom Eternal and Metro Exodus some time ago, but I made a bread and didn‘t pick it up anymore due to a lack of time. Many years ago I was also trying a bit of Linux on a Netbook (small notebook). By then it was really a different world than Windows.
However, I am not sure how easy that is to manage with getting the right Linux distribution, then Wine, then Proton and then getting all tricks and tweaks right… - I am not a tech expert, so leaving a system that works out of the box is a bit of a hurdle for me.
What would be the best Linux „Distro“ (I guess that‘s how it is called) to start with? I would prefer if I would not have to deal with command line stuff… ;-)
Luckily, Steam handles all of that for you.
People keep saying Bazzite now for distro. But as a relatively new linux user (since last summer) I’ve managed to make things work with Linux Mint, arch and Fedora no hassle.
Heroic launcher (GOG, Epic) or Steam will handle proton&wine for you. Just need to check a check-box in the game’s config on whether you want to run native or proton.
Which Distro would you recommend for a relative newcomer? My PC was once “high-end” but is already a bit older (2016/17?). Still quite powerful, I guess.
As another person mentioned Proton is Linux’s compatibility layer for Windows applications, from my understanding it installs necessary .NET frameworks and other dependencies into a fake C:\ drive an then utilizes that fake C:\ to trick the game into thinking it’s running Windows.
Every windows applications I put through Proton has not once failed to open. Now the claims that Anti-Cheat for games isn’t supported is purely false, most popular anti cheat’s do support Linux however, it’s entirely up to the publisher to tick the checkbox to allow Linux users to play.
Battle eye, Punk Buster, Easy Anti-Cheat all support Linux natively.
What games? Even games with EasyAntiCheat work in Linux nowadays, but it depends on the devs.
try them out. the only real exceptions are some multiplayer games that are specifically blocked on linux. anti cheat itself is working, its up to the companies to let us use it.
a lot of games run faster, even through proton.
Almost every single modern game runs on Linux, i always thought it was an issue but in reality it just works out of the box most of the time.
Linux is fantastic for gaming. You’ll even see performance improvements. The only games that have problems are those that intentionally block linux, like Destiny 2, but they’re not worth playing.
The places you are likely to run into problems is with certain desktop apps. For example, the Affinity suite or software designed to support specific devices or peripherals. But if gaming is your focus, Linux is genuinely a better choice than Windows all around.
For what it’s worth, I switched 2 years ago and have yet to run into a game I wanted to play and couldn’t. There are some glaring holes, mostly around “serious e-sports” games that have overly invasive anti-cheat (or devs that specifically choose to block linux) that won’t work. Riot and Epic both seem to have a hard on for blocking linux users, as an example.
But here’s the neat part. You can make the switch and see, and it costs you nothing. If you are in the minority that it just won’t work for and have to switch back to windows, you are in the exact same spot you are in now, with nothing lost but a bit of time.
If it’s not “any game of a list of 200 and it must run without effort”, then most games can be made to work either with a certain version of Wine and winetricks settings, or with a certain version of Proton, and there are many things to consider trying.
I once couldn’t play X-Wing Alliance under FreeBSD because of joystick not being visible, so I went as far as patching Wine’s winmm (I think) to make it work, and carrying that patch around when upgrading Wine or installing someplace new. Glad to report that now one doesn’t need it.
That’s more than most things require, and some can’t be made work with just one simple patch, but the point is - a lot of games work.
And once you’ve made it work, no additional effort is needed. Just having, maybe, a script setting the right environment variables and launching the game.
A lot of games will just run.
Microsoft: BUT WE’RE THE MOST ECO CONSCIOUS COMPANY WE KNOW!!!
You can’t say they’re not. The even have a Chief Sustainability Officer! /s
OK I’m sold…they are officially the most eco efficient and conscious company in the WORLD and bill gates is not about to garrote me agent 47 sty-
DON’T TURN ON DISPLAYING SECONDS IN THE TASKBAR BECAUSE THAT’LL USE MORE ENERGY!
I can’t wait for the surge in cheap PCs available to buy and install Linux on. Please, Microsoft, lock down Windows more.
The writer clearly understands that something isn’t adding up with Microsoft’s claims about TPM, but nowhere do they address the accusations that Microsoft plans to use it as DRM (and potentially spying).
Similarly, only supporting certain CPU’s is suspect as hell. Between all this and Recall, it really feels like the driving design focus behind Windows 11 was to build the best spying machine they could.
ROFL no. I once knew someone who got offered an upgrade from whatever to Windows 10, only for it to fail half way through because their CPU was some weird corner case that the OS thought it supported but when it was time to boot… didn’t.
Also if you want to talk e-waste, look no further than Chromebooks.
Windows 11 has problems, this is hardly one of them.
Chromebooks and Apple products hitting EoL for sure.
Chromebooks sound good in theory but fall short because kids are great at breaking them and there is a lack of repairability.
There is also chromeos being kinda ass
Idk about the lack of repairability, those things are really easy and cheap to fix in my experience. They are at least no less repairable than 95% of laptops on the market.
Depends on what. The most common thing i see is that the kids mess with either the keyboard and or the screen, which you’re basically forced to scavenge another broken Chromebook for because the replacement parts are pretty much like half the cost of the chromebook
If it’s something simple then yea I agree, but kids are menaces against their chromebook so damage usually ends up being on the extreme side.
I couldn’t bear to make e-waste, so I repaired two c.~2012 era chromebooks earlier this year. The end result was equal parts rewarding experience and a complete was of my time xD. Those sandy bridge cpus are sloooow
It may be a bold of me to say, but I hold the controversial opinion that I don’t really give a shit which computer OS you use. If you can use a mouse and keyboard to navigate a desktop environment then 🤙 you are ahead of the curve at this point.
I can hear the ‘just use Linux/BSD/etc.’ crowd already clamoring in the comments, and will preface this by saying that although I use Linux and BSD on a nearly daily basis, I would not want to use it as my primary desktop system for too many reasons to go into here.
Still though.
🐧
This rings a little hollow to me. Most of the people I know that understand Linux can quickly summarize why they might not use it as their daily driver (eg staying on macOS for graphics/video or staying on Windows for desktop Word/Excel). If you can’t summarize that quickly, it really makes me wonder if you really understand it. I’m not trying to No True Scotsman my way around it; I really don’t understand.
The reasons I personally know are “I have to use an app for work, there is no interoperable alternative, I have no leverage to replace that entire ecosystem and it won’t run with wine” and “It’s a company-issued device where I have no rights to change anything anyway.” Combined, they make the reason that my work Laptop runs Win11, but my private PC is Linux through and through. I’d like to be able to use said app on my private PC too, but if it doesn’t, no big deal.
Personally, I’m sticking with macOS as my primary OS until the point that Asahi solves DP alt mode and I can run two displays from it.
My 2014 Mac mini runs Mint, so I’m more than happy to dive in to Linux as my main.
Right? I tried to switch my primary computer (framework laptop) to Linux earlier this year and ended up going back to windows after I had absolute nightmares with my type-c KVM. Coupled with performance issues while gaming (and the absolute hassle of having to force games to use my graphics card). Add in whatever random issues I was getting trying to remote into other windows machines on my domain (for CAD work). My day job is in software engineering/ programming, so I’m not exactly a stranger to digging through documentation and fixing computer issues, but spending time fixing my computer instead of using it got old pretty quick.
Perfectly happy with Linux in my HomeLab and on my steamdeck though!
See‽ Easy explanation. I get it, absolutely reasonable issues, and one of several areas Linux just isn’t great with. “Too many issues to explain here” doesn’t click with me.
Word
I just switched to Linux mint as a HTPC and it works great! Wine and Bottles bridged most of the gaps in software availability.
Try winegui as well…
nice!
Ive personally used proton as well for the one program that I need in windows land. It works really well.
I would not want to use it [Linux or BSD] as my primary desktop system for too many reasons to go into here.
https://twitter.com/MayaPosch/status/1809311467545735654
The Linux kernel not having a stable driver ABI is why Linux will never amount to anything outside of some embedded and server applications.
— Maya Posch, author of the submitted article
I guess maybe that’s their reason.
FreeBSD has stable ABIs (inside one major version).
Anyway, this is not an answer, NVidia drivers had a binary part and a part compiled during installation for the specific kernel version, that’s one possible solution. Linux developers are ideologically against this, yes, and don’t want binary drivers to be first-class citizens.
never
That tweet must be some kind of joke, because I don’t know what to make of the many people who use Linux outside of embedded and server applications. And it doesn’t even have to be my hearsay because the Steam Deck is exactly such a device.
In fact, I have a USB audio interface which I use near daily on Linux that has no driver support in modern Windows, because the vendor only provided beta support for Windows 7 as that OS was releasing. By Windows 8 it was unsupported. So the journey of that device is XP->Stable, Vista->Stable, 7->Unstable, 8±> Non-functioning. If the driver ABI were so stable, why does my device not work on Windows anymore?
This is on top of potential tariffs which if enacted will make PC costs skyrocket. I feel like a lot of people are just going to skip the generation like they do with every other windows OS version. They will just keep windows 10 forever kinda like XP did back in the day.
I’m pretty hesitant to find the time to install and learn Linux but I’m VERY hesitant to upgrade to Win11. I’m having trouble understanding what the selling point for it is over Win10. I feel like it used to be clear and exciting to upgrade but they’ve managed to make this feel sort of dreadful.
There is no particular selling point. That’s why they force it.
Well yeah, w11 has no selling point, that’s why they’re forcing you to switch by removing support by autumn 2025
Install Linux already
