Your Windows 10 PC will soon be ‘junk’ - users told to resist Microsoft deadline::If you’re still using Windows 10 and don’t want to upgrade to Windows 11 any time soon you might want to sign a new online petition
Or just try linux. It’s pretty great
I love Linux. I have it installed on 3 machines, have been using it for over 3 years, and would install it right away if I ever got a new computer.
A couple weeks ago, I was feeling pretty exhausted and just wanted to play a game thru Proton on my laptop. I got it running, but it was unplayable because it was using my integrated GPU instead of my discrete one. I spent the night switching compositors, cables, and drivers, but none of it fixed the issue.
The next day, feeling exhausted from fruitless debugging, I tried to launch another game via Proton that I knew had worked in the past, but it crashed on launch. I spent the whole day going thru the same steps I did the day before, but also consulting ProtonDB and trying software that would force usage of the dgpu.
The next day, I installed Windows 10 to an external hard drive and spent the day debloating it. Drivers got installed automatically, I downloaded both games on Steam, and they just worked. So I guess I now dual-boot Windows just for the games that don’t work thru Proton. Loading game worlds and booting up take ~75% longer, but that’s to be expected because it’s running on a 4 year old HDD connected over a USB cable.
As mentioned earlier, I love Linux a lot, and if all games had native binaries or Proton worked 100% I’d format that god-forsaken hard drive. But when real life has got me down, I don’t need Linux to get me down further. I don’t like Windows, and I feel incredibly dirty whenever I press F7 on boot to get to Windows. But when my choices are “spend 8 hours on fruitless quest to get >2fps” and “press play button”, I’m going to take the path of least resistance.
Yep. And then there’s gamepass. I vastly vastly prefer working and using Linux day to day, but games, man. Man’s gotta be able to game after a long day at work and I wasted literally a week of after work hours trying and failing to get Starfield to run on Proton.
iGPU+dGPU, esp with Nvidia is pretty bad on Linux. It’s pretty flawless these days if you’re using only one vendor and it isn’t Nvidia.
Don’t know what you are talking about. I use an Nvidia GPU with a Wayland compositor/Window manager (Hyprland to be exact) and I’ve never experienced any issues whatsoever.
I have an external monitor that runs at 144Hz, but a while ago I realized because it was connected over HDMI, it was limited to 60Hz (for some weird reason). So I bought a DisplayPort cable, and after plugging it in the screen was flickering/artifacting in some weird way that I haven’t seen it do on X11 or Windows with the same cable. So as a result I’ve had to reluctantly switched back to i3 for daily use
Sure, use whatever works for you
What game was it?
The first game mentioned was Bille Bust Up. I liked the demo that was off of Steam (and it ran fine using the proton-call command), so I subscribed to the developer’s Patreon (which gives a Steam key) and it wouldn’t use my dgpu.
The second game was A Hat in Time.
Nvidia laptop by the sounds of it?
Anything with an AMD GPU is going to have a better time (or even just a dedicated Nvidia GPU in a desktop).
Thanks for sharing. I’m sorry to hear you had trouble. Both games are rated as gold on ProtonDB. So, I am surprised you had trouble with them.
My experience has been the opposite. Everything has worked surprisingly well. Do you by chance use an Nvidia gpu?
Yep, Nvidia gpu. At the time I bought it I wasn’t aware of their reputation for Linux support, and I bought my laptop from System76 (with Pop!_OS, because Nvidia drivers are more “just works” on it). I’ve had a fairly good experience with all of it, but the next computer I buy will definitely have an AMD GPU.
I think this is the first time I’ve been fully unable to get the dgpu working. Every other time it’s just worked or worked with tweaking
I work in a linux shop.
You couldn’t pay me to use Windows for development, sysadmin, backend services, etc.
But on the desktop? Hell no. We maintain a modern debian desktop environment for our users, and it’s a pain in the ass. Mediocre UX, mediocre integration of mixed-bag third-party apps, and too many workarounds and gotchas you need to Just Know About. I just don’t have the energy.
I use windows at home, and for my underlying work environment - and I just SSH into linux boxes for the actual tappy-tappy stuff.
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So… today?
I’m a Linux user. Been one for a long time.
When I’m doing dev-work, shelling into remote VMs and stuff yeah I have to get nitty-gritty with the command-line.
But on my regular daily-driver OS? I only use the terminal because I want to; or sometimes I think it’s more efficient. But I haven’t absolutely needed to for a long time now.
Linux GUI has really come a long way. It’s not at MacOS level (yet), but it’s very functional and aesthetic. Give it a try.
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Yeah, I hear you. I still run an old MacbookPro with MacOS for personal computing stuff. I just don’t always want to tinker. It’s been a living meme: “the year of the Linux desktop” for years on years now and yet we still comprise like 0.3% of the desktop market.
But I really do see a tide shift now. Microsoft is doubling down on the enshittification of Windows. Apple’s hardware is still—as always—prohibitively priced. Steam OS on the Steam deck. The Indian government officially adopting it—and its FOSS office application offerings. Companies like Pop!_OS and Framework are making real headway for popular adoption. HP, Dell, Lenovo all offer Linux-default laptops now, that aren’t just “Pro-Dev” offerings.
Linux is not as polished as the for-profit offerings. Perhaps it never will be. Perhaps that’s also its appeal.
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There are a few distributions out there that are genuinely trying to abstract the nitty-gritty away and bring a polished Linux to the masses. ElementaryOS, for one. Yet, it is still Linux at its core and all the poweruser functionality isn’t far away.
But to face a bit of harsh reality, the average computer user doesn’t want that. They resist change and learning something new, they want it to “just work” and “work for me the way [company] says it should” even if that means gross (often implicit) violations of privacy, control, agency. They just don’t care. Or maybe they don’t know. It’s amazing how hard it is to “degoogle” oneself, let alone “demicrosoft” or “deapple”. As I type this on an iPhone…
There will always be bleeding edge computation environments. I just hope that we users can force Big Tech’s hands to respect data privacy and agency. We had a big win with Google conceding web-DRM, but it won’t be the first nor last attempt and their patience is immense.
Tron: “I fight for the users.
Hundreds of commands is just not true with many distros. Everything is gui based these days. The command line is worth getting familiar with, but it’s not necessary.
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If you haven’t checked out linux in 5+ years, I recommend that you check out something user-friendly like Mint. No commands needed!
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Sure ok, can you give us some examples from the hundreds of commands you need to memorise for basic use?
The time is now then!
I mean, it won’t let me. Windows Update inists my PC doesn’t meet the minimum spec, and I’m not inclined to argue with it.
#GleefulCompliance
You can use Rufus to install windows 11 and bypass the requirements. It does everything for you – downloads the latest win 11 service pack, removes the blocking requirements, and you can even tell it to automatically disable all of the telemetry and phoning home. You’ll still need a license key when you install, or run it on a machine that was running a valid win 10 install previously. But I’m running win 11 on an 8 year old PC with zero issues.
Here is a good guide that explains in detail.
True, or I could just not.
I would like to point out that this is exactly the same difficulty of just installing linux, without freeing you from microserfdom.
The problem for me is that I basically only use my PC for gaming and YouTube.
I know SOME games work, but I don’t want to add to the list of games I can’t play because they’re console/windows only. :/
I have the exact same use case for my PC and have no issues gaming on Linux for the vast majority of games. The caveat, however, is that anti-cheat can be problematic, so if you exclusively play games with anti-cheat that could be a problem for you. The only titles I have issues with are competitive shooters.
We’ve long since transitioned into the “most” games work territory. Basically apart from anything with rootkit-like anti cheat, you shouldn’t have any trouble playing games at all.
Comparing the level of effort to run windows vs Linux is a whole other thing I’m definitely not getting into. I use Linux for work and run it on two machines at home, but I also use my Windows box for games. You can use and enjoy both, it doesn’t have to be a religious war.
I highly recommend you attempt to run your games on a Linux box, as the experience has improved vastly. I also keep a Windows install around for the odd game that doesn’t work in Linux (basically just a couple competitive shooters that I enjoy), but the number of times I need to boot into my Windows partition are diminishing day by day. Definitely did not mean to be a zealot about it, but going through the effort outlined above just so you can get Windows updates from a company that clearly doesn’t care if they trash your machine forcing your upgrade seems foolish to me.
Mine doesn’t, either. Go go gadget 12 year old processor! Who knew being a cheapskate could be so beneficial?
Is it the UEFI security thing?
TPM. Probably switched off in the BIOS or something.
Don’t care, don’t like what I’ve seen of 11, happy to wait until I’m forced to change.
Just follow this guide and all of your problems will be gone
But refusing to upgrade me to 11 is an anti-problem…
Fun fact: Linux is so customizable that you can run a modern GUI and software on 46mb of ram and a CPU from 1989. Don’t let Microshit tell you to throw out your old PC, it’s truly surprising what’s possible.
Yeah but can it run signed drm in a way that the owner of the computer can’t read the keys? Checkmate atheists.
I’ve switch my home computers to Linux. Unfortunately, at work, I have to maintain a Windows environment…
Did your job give you a work Laptop? If you personally own it then you could just run Windows in a VM.
I do IT support at my company. We are a small business, but we work on many government contracts. I’m personally not experienced enough on Linux to support it at a businesses level. Part of working on government contracts is that we have to be CMMC certified in the relatively near future, probably first or second quarter next year. I’d love to get off of Windows, but like I mentioned I don’t have the knowledge to get us there, and we’re pretty entrenched in Windows until at least after the audit. Maybe someday, but the Microsoft m365 business GCC High is built with that specific certification in mind. It would require changing everything about our business to switch, and I don’t care enough about the company to go through that.
But can I be fucked waiting 5 minutes for a VM to boot every time I need to use a Windows-only tool?
You could just use the earliest version of Windows that the software works (Windows 7 usually) and then keep the VM air gapped (aka no Internet connection)
Let me introduce you to Adobe. Single-handedly keeping Linux adoption in check.
Lmao. This article is junk. Yew I’m sure millions of people are going to suddenly dump their PC’s because they don’t get security updates. Most people don’t follow this at all and don’t care.
And no, they’re not going to magically jump to Linux as much as the Lemmy circlejerk loves to believe. If they know enough about security they probably already have looked into Linux and decided against it.
The article is typical clickbait from the Express, that’s bottom of the barrel trash.
Companies are a tad different and this could be a big problem with adhering to security and patches. It’s a big problem with companies doing this engineered obsolescence (stares at Apple) and making products that work trash.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about banks during my time as a developer, it’s that they’re on the oldest version of windows they can get to run.
Why would they decide against it? I understand security and thats part of why i switched
There is no way they don’t offer extended support for Windows 10. Many PCs can’t get to windows 11. Imagine all the malware infected machines that will be out there.
I worked for a large computer company in the late 90s, early 2000s. When XP came out, they said there would be no site licensing. This meant we had to keep track of license keys for thousands upon thousands of systems, costing millions. This was before KMS or anything.
“Nothing we can do,” Microsoft said. “We have no gate key.”
Our server farms at the time were 40% Windows NT 4, 55% Sun systems, and 5% Linux. So we said, “okay,” and called Red Hat. In a year, our back end was 60% Sun, 35% Linux, and 5% Windows NT. We were already in talks to start switching to Linux workstations for desktops.
“Oh, you mean this gate key,” said Microsoft.
Asshats. They lost our server business, but let us use XP with a site license.
I assume eventually they’ll drop the UEFI security requirement, which is why 90% of the “can’t” cases occur.
Uefi isn’t the push, the push is tpm 2.0, which I think is a much much larger percentage of “incompatibilities”. tpm allows for drm that is much harder to bypass, since the random number generator operates securely in hardware. It’s for their benefit not yours.
Precisely why I’m in no rush to “upgrade”.
My Windows install is still in compatibility mode. It’s the sole reason I can’t upgrade to 11, not that I want to. I can’t be bothered to reinstall Windows on UEFI when there’s no point anyway. I’ll happily stick to 10.
Microsoft products are all about getting infected with malware. That’s the whole point of this company.
Dude what ad ridden hellscape is that site, ublock pinged 45 ads on that page just on load lol
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🥇
The day i had ads on my start page i immidiately uninstalled windows. I installed some linux distro its been like three years and ive finally settled on arch. it was hard but fuck ads on the start page and i feel smarter for it
When you swap distros, how do you manage all your files and settings? Do you just save your files externally and start from scratch every time you change a distro?
how do you manage all your files and settings?
I don’t. I just use a separate drive for /home. And since I just prefer KDE no matter which system I’m using, all my files, settings, layouts, panels, etc are exactly the same whenever I switch out the OS.
You can have a separate partition for your files so that you change only your OS. Even with windows. This way you’ll always keep your files and just need to customize your distro and reinstall your apps when you change between distros
Yeah i kept my files on a seperate drive and just wiped the one with the os. for settings i was trying a different distro and desktop enviroment so those where always a bit different and i started from scratch
My machine running Win10 LTSC is getting updates until 2029. I also have machines running Debian. There is no way I am installing the regular version of Win11. Its trash made to pander to greedy shareholders. If they take the garbage out for LTSC, I might run it.
Well, your best option is to switch to Linux
Just in case you don’t want to go to the tabloid hell that is the Express Petition Link pirg.org
It’s such an awful site, and always surprises me when I see it being used/shared. Surely when it comes to tech there are better resources than a tabloid for it.
A bit clickbait’y. Windows 10 will still work just fine for another decade at least, even without support.
In the Enterprise we ran 10+ year old PC’s with XP still on them because the CNC program only runs on XP. No issues but of course you wouldn’t use the internet on that machine.
Does having support really make a massive difference, especially if you’re running AV anyway? A good AV suite will still be updated for years to come.
The government sector like hospitals etc will pay for extended support so not to worry.
It’s only Enterprise that might have an issue because they want patched systems but may not be able to afford Win 10 Enterprise. Especially small to medium business.
As for the home user, it’s not a massive issue.
Personally I don’t care because I run Linux exclusively. I only gave win 10 running in a VM for printing. Canon said on the box that the printer supports Linux, then after I bought it, officially stopped all Linux support on their site. The original Ubuntu driver only support black and white. So I’m forced to use Windows in a VM for printing. But it’s not connected to the net so it will fulfill this role forever.
If you’re a regular home user and don’t use any special proprietary software like Photoshop, I highly recommend you try Linux Mint. It will also breathe new life into your machine
Not having security patches on a system you do things like go to your banking website on is actually a pretty big deal, and I don’t think it should be dismissed lightly. Also AV is mostly snake oil, and is in no way an adequate substitute for a properly patched OS.
Hi, someone that worked on banking stuff in the past.
You are not safe, nothing is even half as secure as it should be and you are most likely just using a web based front end puppeteering a much much older system. The browser you are on is normally the second weak point after your own dumb self and I have not even heard of one case (not saying there are none) of a OS related vulnerability with online personal banking.
I’m with you there. It’s all layer upon layer of vulnerability and false security, and then at the bottom of all of it lurks the Ken Thompson hack.
Still bad advice to tell people it’s okay to use an explicitly vulnerable OS, I think.
But in that lies the rub, how is it explicitly vulnerable?
It’s not as big a deal as you think because most banking hacks are done via browser vulnerabilities rather than OS vulnerabilities. The exception being if you’ve somehow managed to install a keylogger, in which case the issue is the user and a decent AV should detect and block the keylogger.
As long as you use a browser that gets the latest updates (Firefox, Vivaldi, Chrome), run a decent AV, and don’t install dodgy software you downloaded from some dodgy site, you should be ok.
AV is definitely not snake oil. I worked in Enterprise IT and a robust AV alongside other security measures is a must and does catch alot. More than the built in Windows security catches. Plus the AV normally incorporates a virus/malware removal tool which tends to be better than Windows built in tool.
Would you advise your enterprise clients that running Windows unpatched is ‘not a big deal as long as you have patched web browsers and AV’? Of course not. Because that’s dangerous advice and could even open you up to legal liability.
So why would you advise otherwise to home users, who are often more vulnerable in the first place?
Because home users are not Enterprise users. They are not nearly as juicy a target.
Last winter I ripped my DVD collection to my NAS. Problem: Neither my current daily driver laptop or desktop have optical drives. So I hauled out my father’s OLD Dell XPS. This thing has a Core i7 with three digits in the part number, I think it was built in 2008 or so. Felt like absolute sluggish crap running Windows 10. It feels perfectly modern running Linux Mint. And I have the old box a pretty hot supper ripping and transcoding all those DVDs all winter, but it did it.
Computers don’t slow down, Windows does.
I’m running windows 10 on a first Gen i7-930. I’ve upgraded my ram and video card over the years but still on a crappy hdd. Windows isnt lightning fast by any means. But it’s not unbearable. Perhaps my mind will blow when I finally upgrade.
My pc isn’t eligible for upgrade to eleven. Guess I’m sol then.
Great story 👍. Amazing
Have you tried installing CUPS ? And setting up your printer using the web UI ? Worked for me perfectly for every printer I threw at it.
I could not get CUPS working in a docker container for the life of me. So now I have a stupid little CUPS server.
It does work great, even though it feels like they finished dev in 2003 and never revisited it.
Why docker and not a normal package ?
Because my main server is running UnRAID and most things are ran in containers. I could probably do it in a VM, but it seemed like more of a hassle and it might have the same discovery issue the container had. Throwing it in an old dying server as a package is what I ended up doing, but I’m not happy about it. 😅
AV cannot fix it all, unfortunately. But Linux is the way.
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Once ALVR becomes even remotly usable on Linux im wiping my windows partition and going full Linux (I’m already using it for everything exept VR)
The next Steam OS device is supposedly aimed at VR. I can’t imagine it launching without ALVR.
It sounds like they have beta support for Linux, so it seems like it’s getting there.
Your PC will soon be be junk if you do not want to try out Linux.
Your PC is already junk if it runs Windows. But you can easily fix that by installing Linux.
Sounds like a good time to give Linux a try!
I often play old games that have compatibility issues with windows 10. Most recently FEAR required a .dll from a site for a stable framerate.
People keep saying “gaming works” on Linux but are they talking about modern games? Do old games “just work?” I have very little free time to fart about with fixing too many issues with an old game. How well does this stuff work?
Old games are likely to work better, as new games are likely to use new features or behaviour which aren’t yet handled properly by Wine/Proton.
And yet Proton/Wine are able to handle unique fixes for some new games to make them work even better on Linux.
Check protondb for reports on whether a specific (steam) game runs.
In my experience, pretty much everything that doesn’t have anticheat works. I can’t remember the last time a game didn’t work fine, from stuff so old it stopped working in Windows Vista to day 1 AAA titles. Even DOS stuff is playable with DOSBox.
Just be aware, Linux is not windows. If you try to use it like windows, you will only experience pain. It’s not hard, especially with mainstream distros like Ubuntu or Mint, but you really should invest at least a bit of effort into learning how the system works and how to use it properly.
Just be aware, Linux is not windows.
As a funny aside, the reverse is also true. My first IT job that involved system administration I kept trying to treat the windows servers like I would Linux servers and that just doesn’t work so well. Especially if you’re making heavy use of powershell sessions and the administrative capabilities of powershell it can be really jarring when it works like Linux until it doesn’t
Proton is amazing. There are several games I’ve played on my Linux laptop that have Linux versions, and they don’t run as well as playing it with Proton.
Check out protondb
I would say old games work better also get Steamtinkerlaunch which makes fucking around easy
If the game isnt steam just add as non steam game and bang steam will handle the rest
)leave aside old games , despite what Lemmy Linux Community have you believe, even new version of many s/w don’t work with Linux , package managers are crap and “everything is easy with terminal” is a lie. I am not fan of MS either but Linux just does not work.
Steam works in Linux, guy. The functionality of buying/downloading/playing games doesn’t change between Windows and Linux. There’s nothing additionally complicated about it (aside from occasionally switching from regular Proton to GE-Proton for better performance, and that’s 3 clicks).
Go to Linux Lemmy and search for Minecraft. There was a post few days ago on how to run it in Linux. Nobody had answer in how to run it natively nobody. It was not far long that Linux on any version had problems accessing YouTube b cause of flash, and installing flash was no easy job with multiple dependencies. Now it may work here and there may be 80% but as easy as windows .no way , it’s not a everyday OS who don’t want to touch Terminal ever.
You don’t need to run it natively, it runs just fine on Linux with Proton. I’m not sure you understand how far it’s come since Steam Deck. Dwarf Fortress plays better on my Linux laptop using Proton than using the Linux runtime version. Like way better.
I don’t care about Minecraft, so I don’t know specifics. But why would I search lemmy for a solution like that? A quick Google search shows Minecraft is playable on Steam Deck, which means it’s playable (probably better/easier) on a Linux desktop. It’s a very popular game, so there were even hotfixes to Proton in the past to make sure it works
In line with many folks’ suggestions here, I’m ALL for switching to Linux full time after playing around with a few distros… BUT, I use dxo Photolab for photo editing which doesn’t run on Linux, yes, even through wine etc.
Also yes, I know the are a bunch of great Foss alternatives. I’ve tried them all. Nothing touches the results from my current program unfortunately.
I would be stoked if anyone could enlighten me as to how I could get that working.
Your best bet is virtualization. I use that for my CAD software, games that dont run under linux and Microsoft office
This allows me to only use Windows that 10% of the time I need my software and be using linux for all other stuff.
Only issue is that it requires some effort to get it going and some additional hardware if you want to run both at the same time.
Nice, i will take a look at this. With virtualization are both OS able to share files/ access the same files?
Not by default, but can be set up without much PITA.
Kind of… You usually can mount a directory or similar from the Host machines (Linux in this case) on the Guest (windows in this case). It uses a virtual fs so it doesn’t matter the filesystem used on the host or similar. That said due this is slower than direct use of files.
Alternative even if that wasn’t a thing you could always do a network share in SMB or similar and as long as they have access to network it would work too.
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Have looked at dual boot before but it seemed like a ( admittedly fairly minor) pita. File sharing/ access across both systems is my main concern. Thanks for your response.
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FWIW, I only needed to install one package to be able to read the drive that my Windows install is located on/a shared drive between my two installs. It has been very easy to access the Windows partition from my linux install, but I have not needed to access my linux partition from the Windows install yet, so can’t speak to the ease of doing this.
I usually use USB sticks for sharing files between VM and host.
Yeah, just make a drive/partition NTFS, and it will be usable by both systems. Please note that some Linux software doesn’t work well with NTFS, for example Timeshift (backup utility) and Steam Proton, so it’s best to have an ext4/btrfs drive for things you do exclusively on Linux and NTFS for common files of both systems (like documents, music, films, whatever)
I personally had much better experience with QEMU than Virtualbox (although all my VMs are Linux, so might be specifics here).
You have a W10 license, so just run up a VM, and install your software in that. Whilst it will be marginally slower, it will be 100% compatible and run on your host OS (this is not good for gaming in general, but if the VM software you use supports passthrough, mainly for GPU, then its pretty negligible).
Keep the Win10 VM off the WAN, and who cares how out of date it is and lacking in security updates.
Lots of people suggesting VM, but you can also consider dual boot.
I use Linux for everything except for the very few things were I can’t (specific games for example). That way you have the best of both worlds.
I even have it set up in different drives and use the MOBO boot menu to choose, so no worries about Windows breaking stuff
