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.
Have Win 10 and was a Windows die hard since I was a kid.
Been running Linux on another drive as my default boot for a year and a half in anticipation of this horseshit and was only hesitant to delete Win because my Fanatec sim racing hardware wasn’t supported on Linux.
Welp, turns out hid-fanatecff is a thing. Installed the kernel driver and boom, working Fanatec peripherals. Even my Moza shifter is plug-and-play.
Bye bye Microsoft.
Ok, guys. I’m reading some of these replies which are saying the amount of outrage is out of proportion. I have to disagree with that. I don’t want an AI running on my PC that is monitoring and learning about my shit. I didn’t want that data saved even locally, let alone the monetization of that data. I don’t want to be paying for power of a device that is turning me into someone else’s paycheck.
Can you turn it off? I believe you can. But I also believe that doing it manually would be incredibly annoying since that does go with a lot of past practice. I also get it would reactivate itself after major updates, like how Edge keeps reinstalling.
Are there other solutions to my Microsoft issues, yes. Chris Titus Tech comes to mind.
But overall, the Windows ecosystem does not feel right to me anymore. Could other people still use it, yes. Am I going to stop them, not intentionally. But my Arch gaming PC runs games better than the same machine running Windows. I’ve always entertained the idea of a full switch, still have a Windows 11 dual boot and haven’t officially done it yet, but with this the moment feels right. At least for me, hopefully you can understand that.
I had dual boot with win10 for a while, but when they had that ‘bug’ that was wiping peoples linux partition I dropped Windows completely. As dar as I’m concerned Linux and other FOSS in general has reached a point where it meets the majority of my needs. Same goes for local storage vs needing anything through the cloud or streeaming.
Every hang up I had eventually got solved. Except with modding games, I sorely miss Vortex or Mod Organizer and there’s no alternatives I know of besides doing it all manually.
That wasn’t a showstopper for me though. VR, HDR, Video Games were. These three are solved well enough for my tastes this year to drop my dual boot.
Fortunately on the modding front, the community’s already been cooking:
I‘m using it for Stardew Valley and it works pretty well. Still early days and a bit clunky to use though. Not any power user features to speak of but I guess that isn’t their target userbase for a mod manager.
Vortex works on linux though, This is the guide I used.
Is it just Bethesda games with these post-deploy scripts? I assume this:
https://github.com/pikdum/steam-deck/
Is forcing the Windows version to work somehow, but is it every game on Nexus or just Bethesda titles?
I have no idea, I only tested it with skyrim, and it worked well.
Nexus Mod Manager is working fine under Linux. It’s still under development, but i’ve been modding Cyberpunk 2077 to hell and back with it.
You’re stretching it to say that when the Linux version has extremely limited game support.
It’s literally just CP2077 and Stardew Valley.
https://nexus-mods.github.io/NexusMods.App/users/games/
Researching more, I found LIMO:
https://github.com/limo-app/limo
And some more ideas here:
Hopefully LIMO works because the other ideas look like a brittle PITA.
well, next up is bethesda games support, and development of the app is pretty fast, so i would expect a release supporting skyrim this year. You’re right that it’s pretty barebones now, but i wanted to say that we linux users will finally have a mod manager on par with the windows side of things, which is pretty awesome!
I think we have a bit of a degree of “Yep, that’s Microsoft alright” mood as a whole because it’s accepted that things are going to get worse for their users perpetually, so I personally stopped giving a shit because I already left before win10 EOL anyway. I’m guessing there’s a similar mood among others who already saw the writing on the wall.
Do yrself the favor and cut the cord.
The cool part is that 100% of the “AI features” they’re advertising are either not running locally or not AI at all
If you don’t need to do 3D work, you can still use a virtual machine with kvm, it is really fast! (then ditch Windows :) )
If you mean CAD, I found that FreeCAD works nicely as a parametric 3D modeler with some nice macros and addons, with the perk of also running on Linux
E: added info
I’m not too into 3d modelling stuff myself, but I understand Blender is pretty good, too.
I’d agree that blender is very good. I find that it would be more suited to static stuff and renderings, as well as animations. FreeCAD is more like the commercial CAD software you’d find (Fusion 360, Solidworks).
On the topic of blender, It has some amazing features, and I am amazed at what people do with it (I also find it a bit tricky, but I probably just need to put a few more hours into learning)
Yeah, to clarify I didn’t mean Blender as an alternative but that there are decent options for another kind of 3d work in addition to CAD stuff. FreeCAD for design stuff, Blender for making pretty things (or ugly things if that’s what you’re into), Vulkan/gcc for real time 3d stuff if you like working close to the metal, Godot for real time 3d stuff if you want to do it from a higher level.
It’s off by default.
Edge keeps reinstalling because it powers lots of other things in the OS. Removing it breaks other things, which is why so many people on here think that Windows 11 is “broken” or “buggy” - they run random “debloat” programs and completely fuck up their OS.
For now.
Also fuck edge for so many reasons, like ring zero access. It’s "used by (not “powers”) other things in the os by design so that they "can’t " comply with EU rules(and more).
I work in IT and far be it for me to tell you what OS to use on your own computer.
The only thing I want to die right now, is the AI bubble. Just pop already. Holy fuck what a worthless endeavor this has been.
+1000. one of my coworkers keeps thinking he’s saving time with AI-generated code but what he’s really doing is pushing the thinking downstream when we have to pick apart the absolute garbage that gets generated.
PR feedback gets turned into AI prompts and the cycle continues. It’s exhausting
Yeah, it’s BS. I scrutinize PRs to let peers realize that it’s often not worth the time when they have to redo basically everything the agent wrote in the first place. There’s been some truly lazy PRs…
The logic behind the voice controls sounds pretty questionable, but it’s supposedly backed by data showing that users spend billions of minutes talking in Microsoft Team meetings, according to Mehdi — so they’re already used to talking on the computer, right?
Do they really reason like this? Oh my. That’s stupid. And here I was thinking Microsoft employs clever people.
I was thinking Microsoft employs clever people
As a programmer, I’ve had numerous colleagues who have ended up as software engineers at MS. They were mostly either unbelievably lazy or extremely incompetent. The rest who were both ended up there as managers.
Microsoft’s technology specialist are top notch regarding their own product. The other 90% are sales(wo)men and their managers.
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TBF this was all more than 5 years ago when the job interviewing process at most IT companies involved just putting a moistened finger underneath the candidate’s nostrils. Apparently the programmer job market is pretty horrific these days, although I wouldn’t know since I drive a school bus now.
As with a lot of corporate thinking, someone is tasked to justify the idea after the fact. Its not that they are unclever but that they think backwards. Conclusion first, support later.
Is that like deciding that Tylenol causes Autism, then trying to find evidence after making an announcement?
Yes, that’s a great example. I have had to deal with people that worked in such an environment and its wild. They actually thought that reports needed to show only good since that was their job before, we are talking about inventory reports being changed to be perfect as that was what they thought was wanted even though it made the report pointless.
And during those billions of minutes, most of them are cursing the existence of the spyware experience that is teams.
Finally got my last PC switched off Windows. It feels good.
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…
Don’t downgrade to Windows 11, update to Linux
Did it last month. Just open your mind like a flower in the morning, and it will only hurt a little.
I’m dangerously close to moving my gaming pc to Linux. What’s the consensus for the best distro for gaming?
I’m comfortable enough with *nix, as my daily is MacOS and I have a home lab/server.
It’s insane how much extra time, effort and sanity you can retain simply by switching to Linux. I initially switched a few years ago, then fully shortly after. Using my PCs has never been better and I had no issues with gaming. The only games that don’t work are some of the live service ones I’ll never be interested in.
One of the best decisions in my life, right up there with deleting all social media. Life keeps getting better, relatively speaking, but of course rich pedophiles just can’t tolerate us having a good time.
Switched everything to Bazzite as a start. Easiest switch after figuring out Windows sabotages boot drives.
I may have pirated all my Windows but man it feels good to be off that ride. Spoofing corporate licenses for the authenticator was such a hassle.
They do what to boot drives?
If you’re dual booting, Windows may at any time eat the other partition or, more often just its GRUB, leaving you unable to boot into Linux.
Even if you’re using separate drives, the Windows bootloader may still affect your other drives. On one of my old laptops, I had Pop!_OS and Windows on two separate SSDs. After installing Windows on the second drive, it put itself as the first boot device and broke the option to change boot order inside the BIOS. It worked, but only sometimes, and Windows would keep setting itself to the top upon every boot. Might not have been intrinsically a Windows issue, but never happened with other configurations.
I’m trying to move to Linux so that’s terrifying.
Windows can automount USB drives, so a flash drive can get inadvertently formatted, (or something to do with the bootloader, i don’t know the technical details that well.) Point is the automounting can break a flash drive that isn’t formatted for windows.
Microsoft literally wanted me to convert my desktop to e-waste as it lacks the magical TPM chip that Win11 demands.
I said “fuck that” and pulled the Boot SSD, kept the existing non-boot drives for data, and put in a brand new SSD, encrypted it and installed Pop OS in one shot.
Not only was it easy, I lost literally zero critical functionality vs. what I had with Win 10. There is a Linux app equivalent for everything I had before. I had a few driver issues but most were auto-discovered including obscure ancient printers and scanners on my network.
it lacks the magical TPM chip that Win11 demands.
How old is it? TPM 2.0 has been standard equipment for nearly ten years now. It’s disabled by default on some systems.
Intel Core 8th gen and above, and Ryzen 2000 series and above, should all have TPM 2.0 built into the CPU (fTPM)
Does it really matter? I’ve been using my i7 from 2016 and it’s still going strong.
Depends on if you use any security features that require a TPM. If not, the older chips are fine, or some motherboards allow a separate TPM chip to be added.
For example, my employer requires TPM 2.0 for both Windows and Linux systems, since they store most encryption keys and certificates on it - including WPA2-Enterprise key for wifi, 802.1x key for wired Ethernet, SSH keys (in some cases), LUKS key for full-disk encryption on Linux, Bitlocker key on Windows, etc.
For home use, if you don’t use any of those features (or require strong encryption for them), the main thing you’ll miss out on is support for Windows 11, which is fine if you’re using Linux.
In a way, I see the lack of windows support as a positive.
Sure, but there’s Linux features that use TPM too, although you probably don’t need them in a home environment.
Why did you have to replace the SSD?
In case they had to roll back, and so they can pull data
I didn’t “have to” but, a few reasons…
-
Swapping the drive created a pretty easy rollback path that was just “put original drive back”
-
The drive was ~10 years old, and was in the range of recommended replacement for an SSD with the amount of TBW and age it had.
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Original drive was kinda small and a new larger drive was available for not very much money.
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Arguably sometimes drivers for older devices are more likely to have been ported to Linux at some point then conpletely new devices.
It’s not TPM. Older Intel CPU’s have unpatchable hardware flaws.
I moved to pop!_os on the 14th and I am not looking back
good for you.
remember, you’re not alone and many people are making the switch. find a community you like and help each other.
Welcome. It’s a good OS for me.
Same (from macOS). Work and personal machines.
My windows laptop has been disconnected from WiFi while I back stuff up so I can migrate it to Linux. Last windows device I own.
Looking forward to them building out on Pop OS and hoping they do these:
- Apps in Folders and Folders in Folders and Folders in Folders in Folders for App Launcher (For better app organization)
- Having different task bars for each workspace pinned and saved to save different workflows
- A simple quick way to add Icons to Executable Apps instead of manually finding each to add them. Maybe an app to make executables integrated right away and to simply put Icon on it by picking an icon
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.
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.
While there is quite the push thanks to Valve, they built upon the work of others, mostly Wine (which I think they fund nowadays) and DXVK (they hired the dev after a short while). So they’re definitely not freeloading, but the main lifting has been done by Codeweavers and Wine contributors through their massive work over the years, plus the quantum leap that was DXVK.
I’m not trying to shame Valve here, they definitely go beyond what they’d be required to by license, but I feel it’s also not fair to call them the reason most games work under Linux when others have poured literal years of work into making it possible.
I assumed you knew I was talking about the DXVK dev given that he’s literally an employee of Valve, as you mentioned. Either way, I’ll now be more detailed with my comment.
Of course all the contributors to Wine deserve credit too, and I do have an active Crossover license, but Valve are the ones who explicitly made a push for gaming on Linux and focused specifically on the gaming aspect. Wine covers everything, not just gaming, Proton is specifically for gaming. It’s doubly true given that they want to sell more units of the Steam Deck so they can get more people into the Linux and Valve ecosystem. Not that you don’t know that, but it’s worth pointing out regardless.
I’ve been daily driving Linux since before Proton was even a thing, and the difference between gaming then versus now is not even comparable, it is infinitely better now and keeps improving. I no longer have to hope that a new game will work or that I can somehow manage to get the right set of libraries and flags to get it to run, if a new game comes out and it doesn’t have a kernel-level anti-cheat, I can expect that it will work out of the box just fine without any tweaking because I have seen this happen multiple times now. I’ve even started getting into Mac gaming to get some of that tweaking and configuring thrill back that I used to get from Linux gaming, having to tweak and configure things to get them to work properly or to work even better.
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.
Can’t wait to see the day when every game, or as close to 100% as possible, are made for Linux Native and Linux Compatible. We are getting there day by day
Even some Windows rootkits work well with proton. For example Helldiver 2 with nProtect work perfectly since release.
If someone, totally not me, were in possession of exe-files of games outside a platform like Steam, Epic or whatever, would it be possible to run them on a Linux distribution? Say something like a Steam rip or a GOG rip. Said someone has tried researching but didn’t find any conclusive answers
Yes. It’s very easy. There’s really two ways to do it. You can actually open Steam and add non-steam games to steam if you want it all in the same place. Otherwise you can use something like Lutris, which is what I do. That gives you a nice place for everything also and you can even load your Steam games on. But yes you can absolutely use GOG stuff and exe files.
What would adding the games to Steam accomplish? I assume I can’t just log on to my account and have the required files to download and install the games since they’re not originally from Steam. Or is it just a matter of being able to launch them once they’re added to the client? Or a convenience thing?
All of the above. Steam automatically downloads and installs proton if you go into the settings and enable compatibility mode. It will run the most recent proton and just play the game. You also allow it to be in your group of games on Steam so it’s convenient. And yes you can launch them from the client. The only thing you can’t do is download the exe yourself you would have to get that from Gog or whatever.
So, I don’t know off the top of my head, but I need to figure it out as well because I have plenty of game installers that I’ll want to use eventually. Lots in my GOG account, others from 20 years ago with sources lost to time, lol.
I would expect that Steam could be used as a launcher, but I know there is also an app called Lutris for managing games and compatibility layers and such.
I’m thinking about it, and yeah I may have not yet installed a windows version of a game outside of Steam at all. Honestly I have most often installed Linux native versions via steam.
Lutris and one other program is used for that, I seem to remember. I’ll probably have to do some research. What’s the current go-to distro for gaming?
I’m not sure there is a go-to, which is good. There are some gaming-focused ones to be sure, but i’m using Mint which is super mainstream focused and user friendly (and based on ubuntu and debian) and I’ve had a great experience.
Heroic Launcher.
If it’s a new release sometimes it takes a minor fiddle but zero issues more than not.
Absolute truth. I haven’t run into a single game that doesn’t run on my second-from-top-of-the-line gaming PC I built last year under Linux. I know they exist because I see articles about a developer removing Proton support for odd reasons, but it hasn’t impacted me yet.
MS has largely made their own OS irrelevant by putting the Office Suite in the cloud. If you need Excel but don’t want Copilot throwing all your screengrabs to Redmond a box running Ubuntu or Mint or Bazzite or MacOS (a legit option for some people with niche applications that cater to the Apple crowd). MS is following the same playbook with the Xbox brand. If everything is an Xbox then why would you harness yourself to a crappy MS branded one?
It’s funny you mention the office side of things in addition to gaming, because I have remarked about the same thing.
Using Librewolf(firefox) on Linux, all of the M365 applications work fine in the browser. Probably even better, since I can actually close them when I want to. I use Teams the most, which is obviously a very connected thing. But for a word processor, which seems like the most local thing ever, the web app lets me share in MS format and accept comments and all that.
I could absolutely see Microsoft’s execs planning out the most efficient way to grind every bit of value out of the windows brand on their path to subscription everything.
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.
There is also the Lutris project. I play Guild Wars 2 and Elder Scrolls Online with no issue. AND they have install scripts for many games on their site.
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.
Windows is becoming so trash that a bunch of my not-that-tech-savvy friends have been hitting me up asking about gaming on various Linux distros. (Just a few years ago it was all “Linux? Haha nerd”.) And the non gamers are switching to Mac at a remarkable rate.
And things have progressed so well that even for the non-technical crew, after installing Mint and showing them how to use ProtonPlus to install and select Proton-GE, they’re pretty much off to the races without much further hand holding.
Linux is the only viable solution to this mess. And no it is not as scary as it seema
Does Lemmy have a “Stallman was right” community? Or is that just all of Lemmy.
Most of it, yes.
i was thinking the same thing
If you replace the c/ with ! it will become a clickable link that will take the visitor to their local instance’s copy of that community.
thanks :)
No problem, thanks too! :)
See ya on Windows 7 with 0patch micropatches :D
It’s not fear, it’s laziness and just general fed-upness of dealing with computers and the overwhelming complexity of everything nowadays. There’s nothing fun or thrilling about computers anymore, it’s a black box to me now.
FreeBSD has been on a bit of a glowup arc too though, at least for general desktop use. No, but really, there needs to be a viable third option other than Windows and Linux in the desktop PC space.
I’m so glad that they’re clinging on! FreeBSD is great and they’ve made some serious moves these past years.
NetBSD even explicitly banned AI from their codebase to boot, as quoted from their Commit Guidelines:
Code generated by a large language model or similar technology, such as GitHub/Microsoft’s Copilot, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, or Facebook/Meta’s Code Llama, is presumed to be tainted code, and must not be committed without prior written approval by core.
Unlike Linux, whose recent embrace of AI in the codebase is worrying to say the least, you flat-out cannot submit AI-generated code to NetBSD unless it’s approved in writing*.
*originally in another reply, but deleted that and moved it here.
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Still waiting for nvidia to pull their heads out of their asses and fix gaming performance on their GPUs under Linux before I make the jump myself. And no, I don’t want an AMD GPU.
What’s wrong with amd? In the market for a gpu right now
Nothing really wrong with them if they offer the performance and features you want. But I am a high end user and I also use some software that’s really reliant on CUDA. So they’re not really winning in either the performance or the features department for my personal use.
Nothing. The current generation card is slightly worse in rasterization performance while handily slapping my 7900 XTX in Ray tracing performance.
Obligatory GamerNexus Video. https://youtu.be/yP0axVHdP-U
I’m just shocked Fedora is playing well with a quadro series card, and I’m not looking back. If there’s some bottleneck, it’s no larger than the one on my general experience with windows. Though I would very much like to be runnung a non-tainted kernel.
Yeah I understand that things have improved a lot. But it’s the 10-30% performance hit in DX12 games that keeps me from wanting to dive into Linux as my primary OS on my gaming machine. If they can get that closer to parity with Windows, I’m all-in on Linux for life.
I use NVIDIA on Linux and nothing no issues or performance hits
It’s fine. Not sure where you heard it’s terrible.
I know it’s not terrible, but there is a performance disparity there that you can’t ignore. If someone is spending $1000+ on a high end GPU I think it is fair for them to expect a level of performance that’s a little better than “fine”.
If by disparity you mean sometimes Windows is better and sometimes Linux is better. I have one of those GPUs. Give it a try before you slam it. Valve has thrown so much money into Proton that support is amazing compared to when I tried a decade ago.
Benchmarks are readily available, I have a 5080. Some DX11 and older games do run slightly better on Linux. But a lot of them don’t. And pretty much 100% across the board DX12 games run 10-30% slower on Linux compared to Windows. Nvidia has even acknowledged the issue and claims to be working on a solution.
