Before installing Linux, I had originally planned to dual-boot on my main PC, but somehow a gaming rig from 5 years ago isn’t good enough to run windows 11, which is ridiculous.
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Support for Windows 10 ends on October 14, 2025.
Microsoft wants you to buy a new computer.
But what if you could make your current one fast and secure again?
The good news for Microsoft is the EOL did make me buy a new computer
The bad news is that I have no intention of ever using Windows again now. I was already on the fence whether I’d ever willingly upgrade to Win11, but making it a high barrier to entry cemented my decision
Win11 is 4,5 years old and still feels like 10 builds away from going gold. It feels thrown together.
I spent probably 5-10 minutes trying to figure out how to get into the old “add a printer” thing from control panel so I could manually install a USB printer for someone yesterday. The new version in settings was presenting a list of every device on the network (corporate environment so 100s of devices) and doesn’t even have a search field. Completely fucking useless.
and if you want to add some old scanner - you might also embrace Satanism because fuck this shit.
Regularly, file explorer just stops being an explorer for me. Window sizing and buttons work, but I can’t select files or folders. I have to exit file explorer and relaunch it.
also - for whatever reason File Explorer occasionally decides to think about life and stuff for a minute or two upon opening random folders - it just keeps loading even if there’s like two files inside 2mb total.
I found when my new system bogs down it is ai.exe hogging resources. Which is part of the Office install. I go into the folders (2 places) and delete ai.exe aimgr.DLL and a few others and the system behaves better till an update from MS restores the files
I’ve got this creeping suspicion that Microsoft really wants everyone to embrace Mint but is too shy to just say it like it is.
With how much effort they put into getting WSL1 and the WSL2 working, it makes me think they will end up switching to Linux and just have Windows webapps as services
sounds like sound consumer strategy
I just want to know why I can only click on the date on the main monitor to view the calendar. Why? It’s such a workflow killer when I’m scheduling something and trying to check what day of the week it’s happening on. Takes multiple clicks on the non-main monitor before I realize what’s happening every time
Satya enters chat: “Thrust da phrosess!”
That pisses me off as well. It works fine on Windows 10 so somebody fucked that up along the line somewhere. There’s no excuse for it.
Weird, my gaming rig that I built before COVID runs 11 like a champ. Didn’t buy good parts by the sound of it.
I bought a shitty laptop 3 and 1/2 years ago that came with Windows 11 on it and I’ve never had an issue with it I don’t know how all these people are having problems with these supposedly well-built systems
These memes about required specs make Linux look like its primary userbase are bums.
I think it means we like to be able to make full use…
Whether its a couple of servers with 4416+'s with 128GB ram and a pair of rtx 6000s or an 11yr old thinkpad w/8GB ram, its not the OS getting in my way.
Look at this rich guy who’s thinkpad is only 11 years old and has 8GB of RAM. Must be real nice to have been born with a silver spoon.
😉
Business discard pile is my favorite pile!
Linux: the official OS of vagabonds
Vagabums (idk which, but def a name for a foss project)
I’m literally camping out in the woods right now and installed linux on a mini PC last night. No real home, no job, but I’ve got penguins!
I miss the old images of the batshit crazy homemade Beowulf clusters people used to throw together that looked like something straight out of Serial Experiments Lain.
I have Linux running on a machine with 256 MB of RAM and a single core 700 MHz ARM11 CPU.
I also have it running on a machine with 128 multi-gigahertz cores and a terabyte of RAM. That flexibility is part of why I use Linux.
God, I love Linux nerds.
That is a glorious pizza box computer.
:) I have an old 2010 network drive, running Debian and OpenMediaVault for music and video shares. It has 256MB of memory and doesn’t need it all to act as a folder share and streaming box. Windows 11 needing such a high end chip to run is just really poor optimization
I had the same on my 5 year old gaming rig. Turns out only thing blocking it was TPM being disabled. I reluctantly upgraded, as I have too many files on my PC needed for my wife’s visa process, as well as a 2 year old toddler, so I really don’t currently have the time to sort through, and backup all the files, and then install Linux.
Totally understandable. I took literal years to finally get a backup set up so that I could do this.
Well hey, if you keep your old hardware there’s probably a ton of different ways you can use it for other purposes! :)
Ok so important advice: regardless of Win/Linux, back up your data! Hard drive failures happen, and it can happen randomly at any time. So if you have important documents or any data you want to keep, back it up onto another drive, and ideally a second back up off site. And then get in the habit of refreshing those backups regularly,
I have had multiple hard drives failures over the years and learnt the hard way that you need multiple backups.
This is also important as a 5 year old gaming PC means 5 year old hard drives, and shit really does happen.
EDIT: And if you really have 0 time, get a second drive the same size as your hard drive and clone it. It’s better than nothing and can be set up in minutes. It’s not efficient as you will clone data you don’t need but at least you’ll be safe as soon as it’s done.
You speak a lot of truth, and something I subconsciously know I should have been doing.
How do you recommend I do it? Buy an external HDD/SSD and manually copy everything across once a week or so?
*optional (everything in the lower right panel)
I recently built a PC and installed Windows 10 on it because I primarily built it to play League of Legends (don’t judge me). Aside from that, I’ve also found a couple ways to get my hands on other games as well. My other daily driver already Kubuntu installed onto it and I’d really like to use some distro on this desktop PC, but it’s just not really practicable since all the games would be running from exe files or have anti-cheat (screw you League). I don’t really see a way around this apart from using virtual Windows for the games within Linux, right?
Not all anticheat-games won’t run on Linux. For example, I got Wuthering Waves running on Bazzite, although it uses kernel level anticheat. If a game does not have any anticheat software, it will probably run fine via Proton.
League of Legends used to run on Linux in the past, but I haven’t checked how the situation nowadays is.
Yea it used to but it’s been killed by Riot’s new Vanguard anti-cheat system. It’s also kernel level afaik, so it’s officially impossible to play League on Linux now
I recently picked up a couple of e-waste laptops, Thinkpad x130e’s with an AMD E-300, 4GB RAM and a 320GB spinner. For the pair I paid $60 shipped. These were low-end semi-ruggedized laptops meant for students released around the time that HBO started showing Game of Thrones.
I’ve put Debian on one and it runs great. All the hardware just works, everything is pretty quick after boot, and I love how rugged and portable it is. Email, writing, basic productivity, hobby development and 2D gaming all work great. Web browsing takes a hit if I open too many tabs, the video card is too underpowered for most 3D games that came out after 2010, and large compiles are slow. I’m a bit worried about the aging HDD so I’m going to replace it with a cheap SSD which should help with boot and compile times.
The other one I’m not sure about. I’ve tried HaikuOS and the video and wifi work well and the whole system feels very snappy, but there’s no audio or webcam support. Redox seems interesting but needs a whole lot more hardware support. I’ll probably just end up cloning the first one unless I can get a better suggestion.
All that is to say, Linux is great on old cheap hardware.
Even the cheapest SSD you can find will improve the performance quite significantly.
My laptop is also an old e-waste Thinkpad. I run Xubuntu on it and it flies.
E-waste Thinkpads are quickly becoming my favorite laptops.
… I should really start a business selling nice socks …
Attractive thigh-highs with toes are impossible to find in my size. You’d have at least one customer.
Step 1:
Create (foss) app that collects feet pics.Step 2:
Built & test a 3D knitting/weaving machine.Step 3:
Create bylaws that will endure enshitification attempts.Step 4:
Make the world profit/a better place.
i use some of those low power soc laptops, running with lid closed (heat is basically a non-issue), for pihole, white noise, and a few other ‘little’ things. one of 'em is even running stuff in VMs (the rest are debian-based dietpi).
If they stopped showing so many ads, maybe they’d leave enough memory to run an operating system.
That’d be like asking a a kid to stop selling lemonade so he can focus on making a sign out of something other than cardboard
More like asking a kid to stop selling lemonade so he can focus on making lemonade out of something other than cardboard.
Nah man, Microsoft doesn’t give their OS away for free. The ads are just greed on top of an already expensive product.
That box is suspiciously similar to the laptop I leave at my parents for when I visit. The mouse and keyboard even look identical!
Would you describe your laptop as “hot-n-ready”?
Delivers in 30 minutes or less, free either way?
🤌
I made the switch to Linux about ten years ago … mainly because I didn’t want to upgrade to the latest Windows 7/8 and I just didn’t have the need to use any Windows software … all I do is write documents, store photos, some light video editing and go online - why do I need any other OS? The only problem I had at the start was video editing … it just meant I didn’t do any. Now there are several options to get that done too.
The fun part was that my old hardware suddenly ran twice as fast with the latest Ubuntu at the time … and I haven’t look back since.
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I thought that for a while myself … then I started editing things with simple cuts and very few effects. They did build an entire movie industry for most of the 20th century on editing equipment that was no more complex than simple cutting and splicing.
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If you want a more simple video editing package you could give OpenShot a try.
Linux gang rise up!!!
I switch to Linux in college (20ish years ago) and have been exclusively using it since. Windows XP was my last windows machine. I’ve never regretted it.
If it wasn’t for work/school and Microsoft fucking around with document standards I’d happily never see a windows machine again. My last true windows machine was 7 for gaming and correcting document formatting in college.
I went 15 years without needing a windows machine and now I’m taking online courses where a full windows install is required for some test taking, so I have tiny10 on a dirty gross separate drive, dual booted, fuck off with windows 11. I have a VM with it as well for fixing formatting in docs and spreadsheets I make in libreoffice, because Microsoft STILL has to just fuck with open standards.
I’ll be damned if I have to use it more than I have to.
My wife is in grad school (again) and has survived on a cheap Chromebook so far, but it entirely depends on the university (and maybe the class/degree).
I’m doing a computer information systems degree, but it’s through the business school. So my first class is “how to use Microsoft Office”. The assignments are basically “do these things to make look exactly like this” so I have to pull out the VM to look to see if the formatting stuck (it usually doesn’t on the little obscure things).
Plus there’s a locked down browser for testing that ONLY works on a full install of windows (not even VM) but I have yet to be required to use that, so Windows is staying off until they time. I’m super tempted to try to put windows on a USB so I can throw it across the room in a biohazard bag when not in use.
My first “true gaming PC” has been turned into a NAS and small docker host. Its about to turn 15, and I have spare hardware to upgrade it, but I like to see how much I can churn out of it.
I did the same for a while using TrueNAS … I cobbled together every single spare HDD I had at the time onto my first true desktop PC (450Mhz CPU with a gig of RAM, in a giant box full of HDD that felt like a small heater in my office)… I think it was six or seven drives that added up to about 2TB and I felt like I had become Hackerman … I even set it up with Transmission to download a bunch of Linux distros I wanted to try as well as a ton on movies and TV shows I couldn’t get at the time. Basically the reason why I got back into watching all the Star Trek series after downloading all of TNG, VOY and DS9
Hey, that looks like the same PC I recently got … I immediately installed Linux on it, though.
You might want to invest in some spacers to prevent your monitor from breaking when you close the box.
Heh. I actually meant the colorful one.
Quattro stagioni? Delicious…
