Called it
Me, using my MacBook:
(Don’t roast me for not using Linux, I’m all in and happy in the Apple ecosystem!)
I ain’t roastin’, but I am confused as all hell if you planned on gamin’.
I do not. I don’t game on my laptop.
Fair enough then, glad you found something that works for ya. (I’d put Asahi Linux on it if it was my PC tho XD)
Heheheh… I too have apple hardware… running unsupported installs (am currently on Mojave as I require 32-bit support for old peripherals and software), so when Apple tells me to upgrade, it lasts until the System Update checks the hardware then promptly fucks off never to bother me again.
I think am going to ignore Microsoft just like I do Apple and leave the gaming PC with Win10 Pro until I get a second drive for it to run Bazzite on.
I mean as long as you’re not being too stupid with your PC, and not like doing your taxes on the computer the risk is pretty low.
yay! hi mint!
I am also newly minty fresh.
Although up graded anyway because the games I play aren’t an Linux.
The only downside is gaming.
I made a portable flashdrive for Linux for anything I want to keep privet and left windows for exclusively gaming.
basically my current setup too. it took me just a couple of months on Win11 to straight up give up on Windows because it’s just not very good
Gaming is not the issue for me. All my games work fine. The problem is using some cheats that I did for some games like cyberpunk 2077. I cannot get PINCE or cheat engine to work on it.
Steam has a native Linux client and every game I bought on Windows runs just fine on Linux.
All my older, non-steam games, like “Deus Ex” or “Giants: Citizen Kabuto” run great under Wine, using the default settings. Also, there are Linux versions of DOSBox, for older games.
Depending on the games you play, thanks to Valve with Proton and Steam Deck, most games are actually already playable on Linux. The only exception is newer multi-player online games with kernel-level anticheat. I haven’t done any gaming on Windows in years pretty much.
Games work great in Linux!
And that’s not like “oh, about 3/4 of my favorite old games work without too much trouble.” It’s more like opening steam and “holy crap, half of my old favorites have native Linux versions and everything else just works using proton.”
Remember, the Steam Deck and the general shittiness of Microsoft has directed a lot of Valve’s resources towards gaming on Linux.
If you want to play some brand new AAA multiplayer thing with rootkit type anti cheat, then maybe you’d be stuck dual booting into windows.
I’d argue that those games could be abandoned, because there is SO much choice out there that I am certain I already own copies of dozens of games that I will never play. But if it’s a matter of playing what your friends are into, then yeah make the computer adapt to the human needs and not the other way around.
Not sure why we’re surprised. And even then, it took a while for the “good” OSes to get good. Windows 7 is remembered fondly because it ended well, not because it started well.
Windows 95: OK Windows 98: Bad Windows 98 SE: OK Windows ME/2000: Bad Windows XP: OK Windows Vista: Bad Windows 7: OK Windows 8: Bad Windows 10: OK Windows 11: Bad
This entire article is trusting the word of Microsoft’s director of marketing
Finally got my last PC switched off Windows. It feels good.
The malware has been dewormed.
I upgraded to Windows 11 last week after my laptop initially came with it 2 years ago, but was so bloated and slow I installed Windows 10 from USB.
With the EoL I reluctantly upgraded due to company policy, and it was running surprisingly smooth. Really thought they’d fixed it. Only that two days later when I booted the system, I had a blue screen - the first one I have seen since Windows XP.
Page fault in non-page area 0x50 - google suggests reboots, or if they don’t bring any progress, boot into safe mode and update all drivers. Only that I couldn’t boot into safe mode, the BSOD locked me out.
Second suggestion was faulty RAM. Did a memtest from boot stick, no fault.
Third suggestion was to run checkdisk and scm or whatever it was called (some system file integrity check). All good.
Fourth suggestion was to boot into recovery mode, roll back into the system image the Windows 11 installer created, and redo the upgrade. Only to find out that the system restore point had not been created, despite the info box during the installation that this was happening.
Last suggestion was to reinstall Windows 11 from the repair mode, and select the “keep files” option. The offline installer crashed at 25% repeatedly, the online installer moved to 92% and stopped there. Repeatedly, again (tried 3x, and it takes about 1h to get there).
After all that frustration I had enough of that shit and installed Windows 10 IoT LTSC with updates until 2032. When the time comes I’ll either have a new job where I can use Xubuntu, or Microsoft installed on a chip in my brain. Let’s see.
10% chance of BS when I plug in my docking station. Has been working for years before the upgrade.
VMware is straight up broken on some of our laptops. Hyper-V is noticeably slower, too. Why would I recommend Server 2025 to anyone?
New job provides hardware and allows me to install Linux. Hell yeah.
If it’s working fine in 10, it’s very unlikely to be a hardware fault. Possible (but unlikely) a hardware configuration.
The answer was almost certainly drivers. While I acknowledge that you were unsuccessful at changing them, that is still where your issues came from. You probably could’ve fixed it WinPE/WinRE, which is admittedly way more complicated than it should be.
I’ve never had a windows 11 blue screen but then again this computer has always had windows 11 on it. It wasn’t an upgrade.
But there is virtually nothing in the OS and that is an improvement over 10. As far as I can sell all of them it’s had a bunch of ads to it and make it simultaneously impossible to use anything other than OneDrive, but at the same time not having OneDrive be remotely reliable.
Not to speak for Windows or against Xubuntu, but didn’t Xubuntu just recently have some secrity exploit that was pushed as an update to devices?
Nah their website got hijacked and instead of an ISO they spread malware. The system itself was never at risk, if you ran it.
Four Horsemen of Apocalypse
- The country where a lot of tech countries are headquartered in, elects a wanna-be dictator
- Android restricts “sideloading” (aka: non-approved install)
- Windows has mandatory AI
- Mandatory ID Verification
How do I escape this shitty timeline?
Stop SERN, Prevent WW3, Find the Steins;Gate Seikaisen (Worldline)
El. Psy. Congroo.
Just ask ChatGPT…
Microsoft is going to implode with the AI bubble
Long time windows user, games retained me but I found Proton so bye bye forever windows. Now convincing my wife to switch it’s the real challenge haha
Just do it while she’s at work!
Wow the new Windows 11 UI update looks wild… I like it.
“Honey, why is the wallpaper of ‘Hannah Montana’?”
I swapped my mother’s computer to Linux (Mint). She had no issues using it, because I put the desktop icons in the same place, and copied the browser profile.
I will continue to enjoy my incredibly straightforward and to the point Linux desktop that’s somehow gained a new AI-free feature by doing nothing.
Would you be able to point me toward a good thread about “beginner-friendly” distros that works well with games?
I honestly have no idea what to trust when it comes to this
Linux Mint has been able to run games for me. Look up the steam proton virtual windows tool
Winboat
I installed Mint a week ago and it has played all of the 13 games I tried without any effort from me, except one which ProtonDB told me to change the compatibility mode in the steam properties then it worked great.
I would say see the ProtonDB entries for some games you like to set your expectations.
Bazzite is specifically for PC gaming and is a very friendly starter distro.
Pop_OS! and Bazzite were the first two I tried when I made the switch. They were advertised as working right out of the box, which they did not for me.
When I was trying Nobara, I learned I had to run something in the command line to get gamemode to work properly with Steam. Ever since then, Nobara has worked for my gaming needs.
A few tweaks are needed here and there, but it’s literally copy and paste from protondb.
Distribution are basically a bunch of presets, nobara is just fedora with a few gaming defaults, bazzite is immutable fedora, popos is ubuntu… If you can pinpoint the problem you probably could’ve fixed it in both bazzite and popos without moving around; there’s thousands of different pc configurations so ymmv across distros.
If you have an Nvidia GPU, i can warmly recommend Nobara (a Fedora spinoff) to you. https://nobaraproject.org/download-nobara/
Pop!_os worked fine for me out of the box. The UI is a little mac-like (dock on bottom, spotlight like search when you hit the super key) by default.
Steam just works. Heroic launcher just works. It’s simple.
I’ve also used mint, but had slightly less luck with its install working out of the box. All issues fixed eventually but there was some head scratching.
Linux nerds tend to have opinions and it’s easy to lose sight of what it’s like as a beginner.
But ultimately it’s pretty easy to switch distributions. They’re all free.
Bazzite, definitely.
I haven’t done much gaming but Steam seems fine on my old laptop running Mint.
I Will get down votes but none works well, most work fine given you spend enough time tinkering. Pirated games are a waste of time to get running and there will be some distros that already come with stuff set up to be " plug and play ", but it never is.
Would you recommend an alternative?
Dual boot windows unfortunately it’s the best option for games until things change.
That said my daily driver at work is Arch at home is Ubuntu and I have a Ubuntu server for my NAS.
That’s a bit like asking, “Can you point me toward a beginner friendly car that has air conditioning and a radio?” You’re going to get 100 different answers because there are a hundred different distros that do all the things. The differences between them are small and not really of interest to a new user.
So I’ll give you a general rundown of the names you’ll probably see:
- Ubuntu: The classic recommended option and the most used worldwide. Though they’re corporate run and occasionally makes weird decisions that piss off the linux community, so you won’t see it mentioned as much as it was 10 years ago.
- Kubuntu: An Ubuntu flavor with a very customizable Windows-like desktop that should feel very comfortable for new users.
- Linux Mint: Essentially decorporatized Ubuntu with their own custom Windows-like desktop. It’s often the go-to recommendation to new users now, though I’ve personally never tried it.
- Pop!_OS: Basically Ubuntu with NVIDIA drivers enabled by default, so it positions itself as a gaming distro.
- Zorin: Another Ubuntu clone that tries to look as much like Windows as possible for new users.
- Fedora: A more frequently updated distro, which is appealing to those with newer hardware. A little less straightforward for new users but still not super challenging.
- Nobara: Pop!_OS except for Fedora.
- Bazzite: An immutable Fedora distro (meaning you can’t edit the underlying filesystem,) making it behave more like a consoles. Honestly, immutable distros are a niche in linux so you should probably avoid it as a new user, but you’ll see it listed as it has some diehard fans.
- Arch: A DIY distro for enthusiasts and tinkerers with very frequent updates, so good for newer hardware.
But again, they’re all like 95% the same as each other. I’d just pick between Kubuntu or Mint, maybe Pop!_OS if you don’t feel like going into a menu and enabling NVIDIA drivers.
Like others said, bazzite and pop os, though I’ve never used either. I use mint and never had a problem.
Though it should be pointed out that some MP games that use a kernel level anti cheat can’t be played (battlefield 6 for instance).
But I also wanted to mention, you can run Linux from a USB flash drive. So of you want to try out one of them without actually installing it, you easily can. If you don’t like it you don’t install. If you do, then you go for the full install. Easy non committal trial so to speak.
Don’t go onto specialized distro. Just use the main ones like Mint (which is based on Ubuntu, which is based on Debian). I would say that Debian is the best one, but it needs to read some docs if you have a Nvidia Graphic card (but if not, it should be easy and super stable). Bazzite, Nobara, etc, are based on distro that are quickly changing (Fedora or Arch), which are really nice in their own way, but as a beginner, you need stability first!
Try this : https://www.linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=325 It is Linux Mint, but directly based on Debian instead of Ubuntu!
I don’t agree that Debian is a good choice for a gamer - it sacrifices performance and features for stability, which is not ideal for gamers, who probably want to run the newest drivers and featuresets. Don’t get me wrong, I really like Debian, but as an server os, not for a gaming machine. Something based on Arch or Fedora is a lot better for the rapidly changing environment we are talking about, they can adapt much quicker than Debian.
I have a been using it for 2 years and I was playing games without any problems. Thus said, I agree that they need to setup nvidia drivers if they are unlucky to have one.
I’d say especially for beginners it’s important that Nvidia GPUs work out of the box. Someone coming from Windows would likely not think highly of an OS that needs extra steps for something that just works on Windows, and there are enough Linux distros offering just that.
Then you install Docker because may Linux apps come distributed only as Docker images and find out that Docker has its own AI built in called Gordon.
Then Lemmy dogpiles me for, “What do you expect for running corporate software.”
I use it and I have not encountered this. You’re referring to the desktop GUI maybe?
Yes, Docker Desktop which if you follow the guide for Network Proxy Manager and other docker apps you end up installing. You’d have to already know that Docker Desktop has AI to avoid it and find a work around install.
If the default is getting Docker AI when you install popular apps in Linux, at that point it’s not different from knowing that the default is getting Copilot in Windows and then following online guides to remove it.
I assume you mean Nginx Proxy Manager? I’m surprised that you would even run that on a desktop with a GUI, seems far more fit for a headless system. Of course, nothing stops you - it’s your system.
As a general note I’d recommend docker CLI / compose, most applications will assume you’re using that and have instructions tailored for it (which is helpful if you’re new to docker).
To be honest I didn’t even know docker had a desktop app for Linux, I’ve only seen folks use it on Windows and macOS.
I’m surprised that you would even run that on a desktop with a GUI,
???
The install guide says you need docker compose and links to the docker compose install guide. The link provided for docker compose installs docker desktop. Docker Desktop is a program that shows your running Dockers and allows you to start and stop them.
But fuck me for being a simple man that Read the Fucking Manual and followed the directions provided.
No need to be so hostile.
Installing docker desktop is fine but if you are on Linux and in any way comfortable using the command line I’d definitely run without the desktop part. Just docker and the composer addon is enough.
That nginx proxy manager recommends desktop for Linux environments which most of the time don’t even have a GUI is a bit bizar tbh.
No need to be so hostile.
It’s frustratingly hypocritical that Linux users rightfully dunk on Microsoft for it’s AI yet defend Linux platforms despite the AI.
When it’s the default in Windows, Microsoft is evil. When it’s the default in Docker, you should know better and figure out how to install it despite the official online documentation telling you to install Docker Desktop to get Docker compose installed.
Only Docker Desktop has the AI feature. You can install the Docker engine and CLI tools without it on Linux. Or Podman, a similar alternative.
Nobody expects new Linux users to use the CLI though. For a normal user that just wants to run their software they will encounter this crap.
Don’t you want a bunch of pop-ups nagging you to use their AI gimmicks, though?
Damn it! I’m in.
If you absolutely need to use Windows11, use Tiny11. But for the great majority of users, Zorin/Ubuntu/Mint or Bazzite are best pick
IDGAF for my personal machine. If MS jams AI up my ass, and I can’t shut it off, then I’ll bail. All these stories are overblown, as is lemmy’s take on Windows.
For example; only ad I see is the occasional sentence on my lock screen, “You should try $whatever!” That blurb isn’t on my radar. But to hear lemmy tell it, I’m overrun with ads at every turn.
I’m told Windows is constantly fucking up and updates are crippling. This machine was originally Windows 10 and has been through 3 machines, same SSD, did nothing but swap it. No issues. At all.
Want to talk about issues? Lemmy is the most clusterfucked IT experience in my life ATM.
We’re so glad you shared.
only ad I see is the occasional sentence on my lock screen, “You should try $whatever!”
Why put up with any ads? No other desktop OS does this…
I hate windows 11 so much. Notifications are so much harder to read compared to 10 due to the right menu being nonexistant, instead we have this floating notification area that I never use. Everything takes ages to load, even on my beefy pc Settings still takes like 10 seconds to open. And it feels like the programmers died halfway though re-coding the context menus. Everything slightly more advanced can only be done through the old stuff so you end up with this awful mess where there’s no design consistency, and it takes twice the clicks to get to something.
Makes me wonder if anyone actually likes the windows experience. The main resistances I see to moving away from it are about familiarity and compatibility, plus some people tired of linux’s popularity here.
I’m thinking that the company is only surviving based on large org buyin, including the main PC system makers who make windows the default option.
I’m hoping I can last one more month with my Win10 laptop. After that I’ll have the time to see if UNIX is the way to go. My laptop is almost 10 years old so I’m not sure if that would be like putting lipstick on an old pig or not.
You’ll likely be amazed at how well it works, I’d take a 10 year old laptop with Debian+KDE over a brand new laptop with Win11, and it’s not close.
Since security patches are not being deployed on a daily or weekly basis, you should be fine for even more than a month. Eventually using Windows 10 for security or privacy relevant activities, like banking, e-mail or such will become dangerous as more and more unpatched weaknesses might evolve.
I just put cachyos on an hp laptop from 2016 or so. It runs so much better now. The old devices dont handle the bloat of Windows well anymore. Ive heard others have had compatibility issues but I haven’t so I can’t comment on that.
nah older laptops flourish with linux. get ventoy and you can already try out distros without getting committed
Linux is exactly where you should go with old computers.
With a proper distribution/DE combination, you can run it on 20+ year old computers with no issue.
But overall, if your laptop runs Windows 10, it will likely run every Linux distribution easily.
