6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux?
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I'm in Windows 11. I have regret it, but after so many tweaks of the system, removing telemetries, changing menus, and other Windows shit, i had not the energy to move back to Windows 10.
Only OS change i am willing to make is to move to Linux, but gaming is not there yet, and am now trying to move from big proprietary companies to FOSS, so time is needed.
Gaming on Linux has never been better. Out of the top 100 (mostly Windows platform) games, only 7 are entirely unplayable according to https://www.protondb.com/
80/100 are Gold or Platinum rated which means very playable. I often get better performance in Linux than Windows, even with the default open source drivers. I am using an AMD GPU which gives an advantage as they have better open source support, but for NVIDIA all the Linux distros I've used have had a documented path to install their binary drivers for better performance.
It's true that it sometimes takes a bit more tinkering, especially if you're using some esoteric controller or other funky hardware, but in the days of LLMs that can coach you through issues it's more accessible than it's ever been.
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My laptop still works perfectly well so if Microsoft don't want to support it any more then I'll bung Linux on it. I've already got my Mint stick ready, just need to get round to it.
Nice! I was lucky to have extra drives when I switched to Linux on my PC, haven't done it on a laptop yet. Do you just back up all your data to an external SSD/HD beforehand or go the partition route?
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Mint
I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that it generates a new system for you on update and lets you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lmde is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
So, oddly enough, I'm not a complete novice. My background is mostly just lubuntu, puppy, mint and a bit of debian. I've shifted away from Ubuntu after the pro service ads in terminal, and the absolute fucking nightmare that is snap.
I've done my time in "oh shit I fucked up Linux again" purgatory, and it's my daily driver for work. Terminal is a place I'm generally ok with; I know enough to find my way around and fix things as needed.
My issue is I've never really run dedicated graphics from a Linux distro, and because of the continual updates and proprietary elements I worry about keeping up. I don't mind breaking things, it comes with the territory.
That said, bazzite sounds interesting - especially the optimisation. The guides on the main page also alerted me to something I'd not considered - going to have to redo my filesystem on every drive. Thanks for the idea of an alt distro, will dig into this a bit more - if it's built in fedora I might have a bit of a learning curve (never used it as a distro).
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It's not like that shits gonna make your computer explode the day they end support lol
No that feature is only planned for TPM v3
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Gonna be a useless recommend, but try Fedora or Bazzite (Fedora Silverblue gaming with tweaks to make it easier).
I've had some friends with similar complaints about Mint having one off issues with hardware, which is usually because its downstream Ubuntu which means kernel support can be all over the place.
Fedora is probably best bang for buck in latest stable release without entering the realm of unstable rolling like Arch. Really the only thing I've found that it lacks is more varied support for ARM boards out of box and a cross compile package for ARM from x86.
By default it does have a slightly annoying repo setup because software that isn't FOSS ends up on RPMFusion which you have to enable as a user, which is why I suggest Bazzite, which also uses the immutable Linux design which makes it much easier to prevent from breaking or fixing by rolling back a change.
Fedora is fully supported on my Framework laptop (as is Ubuntu and Mint), and I did have it working off an external SSD to try.
But.... Sigh....
It's American, so I won't use it. American is one big reason why I want to quit Windows. Maybe I'll just keep trying.
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I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that it generates a new system for you on update and lets you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lmde is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
I appreciate the reply.
Fedora and Ubuntu are officially fully supported by laptop, so it's Mint and a few others to a lesser extent.
I won't use Fedora due to it being American, but the Fedora experience was quite nice the last time I tried.
I may explore other options through the Framework (laptop) community to see what else I can try.
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I appreciate the reply.
Fedora and Ubuntu are officially fully supported by laptop, so it's Mint and a few others to a lesser extent.
I won't use Fedora due to it being American, but the Fedora experience was quite nice the last time I tried.
I may explore other options through the Framework (laptop) community to see what else I can try.
Bazzite works around the issues with american patents, if that's the problem.
If your problem is american control over your computer, I assure you, they have extremely limited control, at best, they own the package manager, which only runs if you tell it to.
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So, oddly enough, I'm not a complete novice. My background is mostly just lubuntu, puppy, mint and a bit of debian. I've shifted away from Ubuntu after the pro service ads in terminal, and the absolute fucking nightmare that is snap.
I've done my time in "oh shit I fucked up Linux again" purgatory, and it's my daily driver for work. Terminal is a place I'm generally ok with; I know enough to find my way around and fix things as needed.
My issue is I've never really run dedicated graphics from a Linux distro, and because of the continual updates and proprietary elements I worry about keeping up. I don't mind breaking things, it comes with the territory.
That said, bazzite sounds interesting - especially the optimisation. The guides on the main page also alerted me to something I'd not considered - going to have to redo my filesystem on every drive. Thanks for the idea of an alt distro, will dig into this a bit more - if it's built in fedora I might have a bit of a learning curve (never used it as a distro).
Again, infinite free troubleshooting if you run into any issues, feel free to message me! I've given a bunch of people bazzite at this point, and can run you through just about anything.
Make sure not to accidentally choose "steam gaming mode", on the download since that'll turn it into basically a steam-deck interface.
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Yeah with Linux if it doesn't work you're often just screwed.
I can recommend a rolling release distro, having the latest and greatest can sometimes give you bugfixes that are critical for your setup. It can also break stuff but nothing a rollback won't fix.
Another reason to prefer rolling release is the upgrade path. For Ubuntu upgrading is just awful when you do any tinkering. I ran Kubuntu 20.04 for a while and because I had some custom package sources installed it wouldn't let me upgrade to 24.04. Nobody could help, and the package manager is awful it doesn't let you trace which packages are blocking the upgrade.
I'm kind of miffed that everyone is recommending mint as a starter distro because as soon as they start looking for guides on how to tinker there is a high chance they are going to make their system un-upgradable.
Yeah with Linux if it doesn't work you're often just screwed.
This has been my experience for decades. Even if it works, something will suddenly stop working and I'll have no way to fix it without hours of research and messing around.
With windows, I can fix anything quickly through the GUI. But haven't had to in a very, very long time.
I'm going to look at other options. I want to stick with a distro that is fully supported by my laptop to avoid even more issues. But the options are limited.
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My plan is to use my Linux box as my main PC with Steam installed so that I can remote play from my Windows gaming PC since not all titles natively work on Linux for me. That way, the only activity being performed on my Windows machine is gaming and everything else will live in Linux Mint
@MattTheProgrammer @The_Picard_Maneuver
Since you wanna Game using network anyway did you ever thought of Cloud Gaming (aka Geforce Now) ? That way you don't have a "unsecure" device in your network. From a security standpoint even an device only used for gaming is a security risk
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Didn't they get rid of some 11 requirements? Won't most regular people just do the upgrade to 11?
They didn't get rid of it, they're allowing you to upgrade to 11 and calling it unsupported. Just like 10 is unsupported.
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Has your fiancé had to update drivers? Has he had to upgrade to a new release? Has he had to figure out how to install a version of something that isn't in the Debian stable repositories?
If the only application your fiancé uses is Firefox, then he might go a long time before having any kind of problem. It all depends on how he uses it.
It’s basically a Chromebook for her
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Swapped to Arch Linux! I wouldn't say it's been a bug free swap but it's been extremely doable and everything I needed to work worked like a charm. Gaming was uninterrupted and nothing hasn't worked yet.
I need to figure out how to connect my stupid printer but I couldn't do that on windows either, which is sad cause I thought printers were gonna be easier on Linux but I guess this brother model is a pain in the ass or something. Oh and connecting to network drives while on a VPN. That's my list of pending problems and I've been on Linux for two months. Not bad really.
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/brother-cups-wrapper-ac this might help you!
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For gaming, It’s mostly niche windows things in my experience. In my case I opted to stay on linux anyway. Also worth noting, I find that outside of gaming linux is superior for work and general pc use.
Some manufacturer programs for doing things like mouse macros or controlling LED lighting, auto hotkey scripts, some types of overlays tied to directx apis (yolomouse), etc. These things don’t and probably will never work. I think some of them might if you really know your stuff with wine, but that usually ends up being dependency hell for me and I give up more often than succeeding when trying to force a windows native program to run.
For the first 2 there are 3rd party programs for it the rest yea probably won’t work
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Did she set it up herself?
For the most part
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Man, I wish these people would fucking be cool. I just want to play games. There is nothing valuable on my desktop for you
Me too brother, but I disagree with your assessment on value
An non-blacklisted residential IP address with reasonable throughput is valuable in and of itself. DDOS botnets, proxies to bypass geo blocks or to obfuscate illicit traffic, etc. Also your gaming PC could be used for distributed compute workloads of compromised, usually crypto mining.
Any hardware/connection has value if it's "free". It's just a numbers game beyond that.
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I was running mint, but had to go back to windows because of a hardware bug I'm still trying to fix where my PC will randomly not wake up from sleep and that results in corrupted drives, which windows can fix with it's automated repair at boot, but Linux has done commands that I need to run and if I fuck it up it would fuck my computer up even more, so until I can fix the hardware bug I'm stuck on windows, but by fuck do I hate it. I prefer Linux so much more over windows, so much more convenient, efficient, personalizable and it actually works in many places where windows simply doesn't even with a lot of fiddling around in settings and shit
Do you have a swap partition? Is it the correct size? Also I think you can do a drive check on boot by changing an option in fstab.
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Or League of legends. Cant play on Linux with riot anticheat
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You seem awfully optimistic about Microsoft's response time lol.
How many people are out there today with broken locks on their doors or windows? How many stores do you think close every night with the minimum wage worker forgetting to lock up properly? How many people out their use incredibly weak passwords, share their credentials with others, or leave everything on post-it notes?
Security is a cost-benefit analysis. Depending on what exactly this hypothetical exploit requires I might very well be comfortable running Windows 10 anyways. The vast majority of security exploits require physical access to the machine- we only hear about the remote ones more often because they are scarier.
It might be a remote exploit or it might not. An OS is not just a program that runs in the background, if it is critically important.
These kind of exploiters don't tend to attack you in particular, they have botnets scanning the web for any compromised machine.
Running windows 10 is fine today, might not be fine after EOL. It is irresponsible to shrug it off and not even consider the alternatives out there, including windows 11.
