Thinking on switching to linux
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I see we are not going nowhere here, but I highly appreciate your effort to make me understand your view. Russia and China, let alone Cuba, Venezuela, Iran etc al want to develop an alternative from Android... how is it going? Only China is pulling it off, and after 5 years already and massive investment... just forking sure...
Just as a remark... "cannot legally become closed source". Do you really think the US is bound by any legality at this point?! And it is not just Trump... any President could scrap off any legality if it need be and lower courts could just complain all the want... Of the 100+ lawsuit cases Trump already has accumulated in 3 months you won't see much progress... and recently, even the US Supreme Court already gave Presidents "Broad Immunity for Official Acts" and "Absolute Immunity for Core Powers" so good luck for upholding GPL if an administration wants to force software out of it.
I see we are not going nowhere here, but I highly appreciate your effort to make me understand your view. Russia and China, let alone Cuba, Venezuela, Iran etc al want to develop an alternative from Android… how is it going? Only China is pulling it off, and after 5 years already and massive investment… just forking sure…
Like i've said repeatedly, it's the google play store, the proprietary parts they are having trouble duplicating. Even little people can make ROMS on XDA, it's not a big deal.
Just as a remark… “cannot legally become closed source”. Do you really think the US is bound by any legality at this point?! And it is not just Trump… any President could scrap off any legality if it need be and lower courts could just complain all the want… Of the 100+ lawsuit cases Trump already has accumulated in 3 months you won’t see much progress… and recently, even the US Supreme Court already gave Presidents “Broad Immunity for Official Acts” and “Absolute Immunity for Core Powers” so good luck for upholding GPL if an administration wants to force software out of it.
There's no precedent for this and it seems like baseless paranoia. Again, fedora's whole selling point is essentially the GPL, getting rid of it would make it completely worthless, none of the KDE devs would be down for this, none of the linux kernel devs would be down for this, all they'd have is DNF...
None of the value proposition of fedora is in the actual software they make, it's the distribution of that software that's valuable, they package it well, but they don't make it themselves... KDE will not go with redhat, they're separate orgs, as is linux, as is systemd, even coreutils aren't made by them.
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Approaching the end of window 10 and have no plans on upgrading to 11.
I am trying to find alternatives to applications I regularly use before jumping ship (it is mostly a gaming focused pc) any suggestions?
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Approaching the end of window 10 and have no plans on upgrading to 11.
I am trying to find alternatives to applications I regularly use before jumping ship (it is mostly a gaming focused pc) any suggestions?
If you have nothing to lose, ie. if you don't play anything with anticheat or you don't use any productivity software with crazy DRM platform-locking you into Windows, do it, switch over.
The bulk of all games will run in Proton or even vanilla WINE now and the minority that's platform-locked into Windows is anything that uses kernel-level anticheat, if you only play single-player games, those will broadly work fine in WINE/Proton, and as for productivity software, there's plenty of alternatives to things like Maya, Photoshop, Lightroom, or Premiere/AfterEffects to choose from that isn't platform-locked anywhere, eg. Blender as a Maya alternative, Krita or GIMP as a Photoshop alternative, RawTherapee or Darktable as a Lightroom alternative, and KdenLive or Davinci Resolve as a Premiere/AfterEffects alternative.
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Approaching the end of window 10 and have no plans on upgrading to 11.
I am trying to find alternatives to applications I regularly use before jumping ship (it is mostly a gaming focused pc) any suggestions?
What do you use iTunes for? That stood out to me.
Also Chrome works fine on Linux, though Firefox is a better browser even on Windows.
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What do you use iTunes for? That stood out to me.
Also Chrome works fine on Linux, though Firefox is a better browser even on Windows.
Fooyin's a really good alternative and if you can flash Rockbox onto an older iPod that supports that firmware, then it'll just function as a normal external drive.
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Software Linux support AMD driver open-source drivers for CPU and GPU are included in the Linux Kernel and work very well. If you have bleeding edge news hardware, check online in which Kernel version they are supposed and choose Linux distro accordingly
Web Browser Chrome/chromium,
Firefox. All are commonly available in your distro software repository by default, or otherwise with Flatpak
Web-based email not dependent on OS. Local Email client software are available, one exemple is Thunderbird.
Office suite LibreOffice, or anything web-based such as Google Docs will work independently of the OS
Itunes Many music players/library managers are available on Linux, I don't have any specific recommendations here, I am self-hosting Jellyfin for my music needs JBL not sure what you mean here ? Your headset/speakers ? Don't see why it wouldn't work Music score reader/editor MuseScore, I also use Guitar Pro (7,
inside Bottle (wine) and it works with some tweaks needed for fixing font bug
Antivirus ClamAV, arguable if you need an antivirus at all
Python many IDEs are available, a scary amount of Linux distribution rely on Python under the hood
@op, they may suggest you to change your kernel version to support newer hardware, don't do this unless you know what you are doing and can undo it from cli. its usually fine but can cause weirdness. its better to choose another distro if yours don't support something very new you need.
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Star Citizen works great on linux with Lutris.
https://lutris.net/games/star-citizen/As good as it runs on Windows, anyway... It is still Star Citizen
(No shade, really promising and most of it is pretty slick and impressive when it's working and I hope they get it stable sometime soon-ish)
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On windows you install things from random websites as the primary method of installing stuff, this means anything can install anything and has installers that can install bonus stuff. This is why windows has so much malware.
On linux, imagine your distro is an app store, ubuntu is an app store, mint is an app store, fedora is an app store. The apps themselves can't manage installation so they can't bundle nonsense with them. you just click install and you get only the thing you wanted and nothing else.
Since your distro curates all the software, as long as you trust your distro, you'll know there's no malware on your computer, because you get all your software from the distro (or flathub but same idea).
You can install things from random websites for Linux too, though.
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Approaching the end of window 10 and have no plans on upgrading to 11.
I am trying to find alternatives to applications I regularly use before jumping ship (it is mostly a gaming focused pc) any suggestions?
Star Citizen runs just fine under linux.
https://github.com/starcitizen-lug/lug-helper
I would recommend using Wine directly over using Lutris right now, but that's an option you can pick in this script. Join the discord if you have trouble, people are friendly there if you're polite.
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You can install things from random websites for Linux too, though.
You can, but on windows it's the standard way to do things, on linux it's almost never done.
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For an average user i would recommend Firefox
For someone tech-savy and privacy focused - LibreWolf
Why? Some websites will not work properly on LibreWolf because of how hardened it is (not extremely, but just enough to break some things on websites). I don't mean it's bad, it's just not for everyone atm since many people want things to just work
If you want more customizability, then Floorp's also a great option .
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@op, they may suggest you to change your kernel version to support newer hardware, don't do this unless you know what you are doing and can undo it from cli. its usually fine but can cause weirdness. its better to choose another distro if yours don't support something very new you need.
This isn't exactly what I recommend. Only in the case the hardware is bleeding edge, as in, it was released less than 6 month ago, then check in which Kernel version it starts to be supported, as well as check the Kernel version shipping with the distribution you are interested in installing. Distro Kernel version >= Kernel version where the driver starts to be included, no problems. Otherwise, check a distro that has more frequent upgrades.
Things to check: GPU, CPU, WiFi chip, Ethernet chip. In windows you can find the information in the device manager. On Linux (e.g: test with a live USB) the command
lspci
with display the information.A common case would be: I am interested in Debian because I heard it's the most stable, will my AMD 5070XT work with that ? Probably not very well, better Check Ubuntu non-LTS or Fedora.
I am not recommending op to modify the Kernel from the Linux distro, just consider this point in choosing the distro.
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What do you use iTunes for? That stood out to me.
Also Chrome works fine on Linux, though Firefox is a better browser even on Windows.
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Proton owner came out as big creep, so don't really recommend.
oh that’s sad. I mostly switched out of proton bc I didn’t want to put all my eggs in one basket. Also, not having IMAP sucksss because both the official proton and tuta apps are SLOW
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True for wayland, not true at all for x11
It's true for any variation of Linux. Hell, the vulnerability (Mimikatz) that was crucial in the most expensive cyber security attack in history is still there in Windows.
And for X11 to be exploited you would need to get and run malicious code in the first place. The Linux security model kicks in before you get to that point.
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tl;dr
You don't need antivirus on Linux in 99% of scenarios
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AMD DRIVERS - Linux's built in drivers
Chrome - Chrome
gmail - gmail
Office 360 - Office 360 (web)
Norton - You don't need such piece of adware in Linux
Py-charm - py-charm
Star citizen - Star citizen though steam
VPN - Proton VPN (my suggestion)
Windows 10 - Fedora KDEMy suggestions if you want a smoother transition, repeated ones have Linux versions
You need to double up your newlines
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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, color management, 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.
Have to agree. Mint runs on long term support versions of Ubuntu releases. A lot of times this can cause issues with gaming because the kernel is so out of date, and thus the graphics driver is as well. Plus, they have snaps which are terrible compared to flatpaks.
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You need to double up your newlines
Thank you, kind stranger, I haven't noticed my formatting was messed up
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AMD DRIVERS - Linux's built in drivers
Chrome - Chrome
gmail - gmail
Office 360 - Office 360 (web)
Norton - You don't need such piece of adware in Linux
Py-charm - py-charm
Star citizen - Star citizen though steam
VPN - Proton VPN (my suggestion)
Windows 10 - Fedora KDEMy suggestions if you want a smoother transition, repeated ones have Linux versions
At least get clamAV setup. No OS is virus immune. And if wine is installed without proper sandboxing ...