My Windows Computer Just Doesn't Feel Like Mine Anymore
My Windows Computer Just Doesn't Feel Like Mine Anymore
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It’s so weird to me that Lemmy is full of anti-Windows, anti-Google posts but the comments are always “I’m thinking about switching.”
How about… just do it?
I don’t know what I’m trying to say but being 20 years into “Windows-free” a few years of “Google-free” it’s tiring. I know everyone isn’t me but it’s tough watching this from the other side.
You know it's not the same person posting every time
Some people have moved passed thinking about it. Others have just started. Its a growing sentiment and more people are starting to feel it.
It's not easy committing to the change when you have no knowledge of the platform. The status quo is always easier until it no longer is.
Having seen how different Linux is from what it was 20 years ago, it's way more approachable than it used to be. Most people could adjust pretty quickly, but with so much of the technical bits hidden from sight, the average PC user these days isn't as tech savvy as they were many years ago, and making the switch can be intimidating.
Good point — I’m pretty far down the rabbit hole. I haven’t really wanted to mess with a non-UNIX/Linux based OS in ages.
Side note: what OS would that be besides DOS or Windows? Old-school Mac OS comes to mind (System 7) but I like playing with modern platforms more than older ones.
BeOS/Haiku?
Linux won't work for my needs. I would switch if it did.
What are your needs, if I may ask?
Specific flight simulator hardware and specific audio/video hardware and software
I built my entire flight sim setup around Linux, X-Plane 12 has a native Linux version and all my hardware works flawlessly. MSFS2020 also works through Wine/Proton. But you can always create a Windows VM with GPU and SSD passthrough, (you can also pass through other PCIe and USB devices) and use that for your Windows-specific tasks. I use that for online games that require Windows-exclusive anti cheat solutions.
If you have windows in a VM do you need a license key
Nah, just use massgrave.dev
I can relate to the anxiety that comes with the thought of switching and finding out you're missing something essential.
It wasn't a big deal for me since I've used FOSS alternatives for almost everything even on Windows and was hardly gaming anymore when I made the switch (but somewhat ironically I started again on Linux). But that's hardly the position most unhappy Windows users are in.
That’s a good point too.
I’m primarily a web developer so essentially my entire toolkit is already FOSS and it doesn’t make sense to even run half of it on Windows. Windows is usually the odd one out with weird hacks to make it play nice.
I use macOS a lot too and because it’s UNIX my Linux toolset is available and ported to the OS with (what I understand to be) minimal changes.
And I’ve never needed to deploy to some Windows Server either (the thought frightens me).
Every day, a large number of people start using Linux for the first time. But the internet has a lot of people on it - so you can expect to see "I'm thinking about switching" posts for many years to come. Posts like that won't slow down until Windows is in minority. (And that is unlikely to happen any time in the foreseeable future.)
I gave Linux a try 2 or 3 times back when I was in school. It was a horrible user experience and games wouldn't work back then.
Now that games on Linux are a thing, I would love to give it a try once more. But now I have a full-time office job and a family. When I'm off work, I just want to fire up the PC and have everything work, which it does with windows. I also have the Pro version of Windows 11 and don't experience all of the ad horror that everyone here is talking about.
If I gain back the free time and mental capacity, I'll give it a try.
It's not like it's difficult to switch these days. Try something like Bazzite or Nobara and gaming should work out of the box.
Bookmarking this comment, never heard of those distros!
They are gaming and content creation specific distros designed to work out of the box for those use cases. Lots of patches and stuff to improve performance and compatibility for gaming. Some hardware compatibility stuff is added too, such as bazzite having different images for laptops.
Keep in mind it's still a drastic reduction in security by default.
What are you talking about? Windows isn't very secure to begin with. Bazzite in particular is one of the more secure Linux desktop distros as it's immutable and comes with SELinux enabled by default. It's secure enough to actually cause me problems lol.
It's a real challenge to get a fully encrypted system with secure boot (easier now but still hit or miss with Linux) and tpm.
What you're describing is the user level security model which is as you said restrictive enough to be annoying, and more controlled than windows.
Edit: undid autocorrect from user level to user never 🙄
I don't use or particularly believe in secure boot.
I have a fully encrypted root partition, with automatic unlocking using the TPM. Wasn't even that hard to setup either. Bazzite makes it fairly easy to enroll a secure boot key if you really want that, as do some other distros. Nothing you are describing is that difficult.
A lot of systems use AppArmour instead of SELinux, as this is easier to work with while still providing enhanced security.
It's not hard to set up if you already have sufficient baseline technical knowledge to feel comfortable copy-pasting the right commands from the Internet with hope that you don't brick your computer (which ironically fedora or opensuse kinda did although I eventually found out how to work around the failure which makes my laptop permanently unable to use an older version of Linux lololol).
Arch was really easy to set up, I followed tutorials for fedora from fedora which never worked, and opensuse worked until a power outage then never again. So easy. So simple.
Secureboot with shim is the easiest, the arch (/standalone) way seems to work better and more securely since it's my own keys, but again depends on feeling a lot of unearned confidence. Some distros like Ubuntu and suse include mechanisms for secureboot, others do not, hence hit or miss.
Tldr I know what you're telling me, and from my pov and experience none of that changes what I said for the average "go on, try Linux, you'll like it" user.
Only computer I have Windows on is my laptop and that's only because it's fairly new and laptops are notorious for proprietary hardware that's hard to get decent drivers for. My desktop has had Linux for a couple of years and everything else runs Linux.
If you've got an external USB drive bigger than the laptop's, and are willing to take the time, you could back it up by making a disk image with Clonezilla so you're sure you have a backout option if you run into too much trouble getting Linux working
I tried a live USB image of Ubuntu and couldn't get the touchscreen to work. I didn't try out everything, but that was the first major issue.
Give it a couple weeks and maybe by then I'll hopefully have upgraded from win10 on my desktop to either Spiral or Netrunner. Only thing holding me back from upgrading on my desktop right now is how much stuff I have to save to my new external drive and how it feels like a Herculean task.
Poor you