Plan on, if possible, cloning my account to a new account on a new internal drive (preferably a 2TB+ drive) to save all my stuff that I want and don’t feel like moving over due to laziness. Then on another partition, I plan on having the rest of the space being used for Linux. All I gotta do is make sure the win10 partition doesn’t receive an ounce of Internet connectivity at all and pray I don’t end up with a virus or something similar somehow (because even the safest internet practices aren’t safe enough anymore).
Hopefully I can turn that partition into a cold partition where I can keep the current games I have that aren’t downloaded through Steam installed to ensure I can still play them. Then I can slowly debloat it by uninstalling everything I don’t need on there and get rid of a ton of files/unnecessary programs so that way I can still have roughly 500-600GB for win10 just in case I ever need it for anything, like a program I genuinely cannot figure out how to get working on Linux.
I’ve got a few computers - my daily driver is Win10, there’s a media player still on 8.1 (only accesses music streams and it’s not spotify, it’s URLs like das-edge15-live365-dal02.cdnstream.com/a98345), the main pihole machine runs vanilla Debian, the backup pihole on a Raspberry Pi also running Debian, and a couple of older laptops also running Debian.
Man, I really tried today to get Linux on my Framework laptop.
I can’t believe how goddamn frustrating the experience has been, and I’ve dabbled in Linux for decades.
I try Mint. Install as a dual boot… Installation done. Reboot. Straight into Windows. Check partitions and nothing has changed.
Try again. All seems fine. Boot. Some error screen that won’t let me get into Mint.
Do this like four more times with no luck.
Tried Ubuntu. No easy way to install as a dual boot unless I want to mess around with custom paritions. Also, GNOME sucks ass, but Ubuntu seems way more polished than Mint.
I did get mint on a mini PC I have running through my TV. But audio wasn’t working, so that took a while to sort out. And the onscreen keyboard does nothing on the lock screen. So unpolished, and I have no idea why it’s recommended “for beginners” when it feels unfinished.
With windows, there’s no messing around. Everything just works. And I fucking hate that I feel forced to choose a miserable, hacky, terminal-based experience with countless hours of installing shit through commands… Or a smooth, reliable, easy one with bloatware and spying on the backend. Goddammit!
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.
Had the completly oposite experience: mint installed in 2 hours with everything working. No bloatware, no bullshit. Biggest obstacle was, that changing the device bootorder is nog enough- uefi seetings needed some love to. I can imagine that this is not necessery if you do not use dual boot ( like win…talking about experience…)
For me everything works perfect- mint is my primary os now
After posting, and a little soul-searching, I decided to install Ubunu and give things another try.
Installation failed the first time, seemingly right at the end! Tried again, and it went through.
Set things up, and things seem to be OK. I’m only running a browser, and needed to try a paid windows program through Wine, which installed and loaded up without any real issues.
I go for a walk during lunch. Come back to the Linux login screen (expected, as I’d assume it locks like Windows). Log in… blank slate. All my work was closed, and it was like a fresh reboot. What the hell??? No error messages or anything. I literally have the browser and like a few other programs installed, so it’s not like the system is a mess from years of bad software installations.
Sigh…
Then I try another paid Windows program used to convert video files. It seems to work, but it’s not detecting my Intel graphics card. As I look for help on how to do this (officially, from my Laptop vendor), I get pages and pages of things to try… all through the terminal.
I mean, this is stuff that just works on Windows. No messing with stuff.
I really want Linux to be my daily driver, and even I type this from Ubuntu, I can’t help but feel like something is going to catastrophically self-destruct at any moment, and that kind of anxiety is never felt while using Windows.
I couldn’t imagine setting linux up for my wife, if this is the experience I’m having.
Your experience is not invalid, but It’s fucked up that you’re giving Windows credit for “just working” when Windows doesn’t even try to support dual booting. In fact the reason Linux is having so much trouble is because it has to tiptoe so that Windows doesn’t break.
If you don’t like Gnome or Mint Cinnamon, why not try KDE? Something like Kubuntu, perhaps? I use Fedora KDE myself.
From Window’s perspective, there’s no need to dual boot. But I get what you’re saying. I’m not trying to defend Microsoft, and think that they’ve been enshittifying windows for years now.
But everything works without jumping through hoops. And if it doesn’t, the fix is usually very easy and done through a GUI 99% of the time.
But you are right. There are many flavours of Linux to try. Aesthetics aren’t my priority, though. I do need things to work without spending hours trying to figure it out.
I’m at an age where messing around on my computer for days on end is long gone. 😵
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.
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.
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.
I can’t switch to Linux due to software requirements for work. On my personal computer I’m using Xubuntu for well over a decade, I didn’t like the unity window manager of Ubuntu. I heard they changed to something else by now, but I can’t be bothered to switch.
It’s the other way around. In general, you should choose Linux over Windows, and only if you really need it, use Windows. Also, if you need Windows just temporarily for some things, consider running it in a VM inside Linux just for those occasions.
Why - well, to keep it short, Linux’ main weaknesses for common users (difficulty, compatibility) are gradually fading away (they are already almost non-existent these days if you have mainstream hardware and a mainstream desktop distro like Mint, Fedora, Ubuntu) while Windows’ main disadvantages (forced stuff like cloud/AI integrations/ads, complete disregard of user’s privacy, increasing security issues due to outdated stuff being kept in the OS for backwards compatibility reasons, and many more things) keep on increasing at a rapid rate. Microsoft has a big business interest in getting all users locked into their cloud ecosystem, locked into a subscription with ever-increasing monthly fees, and give up control over their own computer and their digital privacy. They want users to pay them with their data AND monthly subscription fees. MS Office, for example, will probably not have a pure locally runnable version after 2029 (or around that year) anymore. This Microsoft train is heading towards that wall. And the speed is increasing. And tons of users are still inside that train. And Windows itself likely won’t be spared either. They want you to pay monthly for M365 and they will get their customers there, eventually.
Furthermore, by supporting Microsoft you’re supporting a very unethical company. They partner with big surveillance companies like Palantir and they are an active participant in the despicable ad-tech-industry (the industry that’s spying on literally everyone and buying/selling/storing tons of intimate user data even though it’s illegal in most countries), they partner with the military, law enforcement and other things. Also, they are a US company, and we all know how US politics is like these days, and this can have a big influence on how “trustworthy” US-based proprietary software will become in the near future. Since 2020, arguably no US-based proprietary software or online service is trustworthy anymore anyway, because of the CLOUD act, which is current law in the US - it means that the US government has access to any customer data stored by a US-based company, regardless of where on Earth they are storing it. This means the often-used claim “my data stored by that US company is safe because it’s in a European-based datacenter!!!11” is false since at least 2020, because MS is forced by US law to grant technical access to customer data to their government. Also, all previous “data transfer privacy agreements” between EU and US like Privacy Shield were all a joke and were dismantled in courts already. So there’s currently zero legal data protection - any data you send to a US company is theirs to do with as they please, essentially. And even if there were any meaningful legal data protections left, those big tech companies might still simply ignore that data protection law and only face minor or no fines at all.
So this is not a baseless claim. Just because I might keep some statements short doesn’t mean that there are no backing arguments. It’s a very good idea to reduce your dependency on Microsoft’s (or in general, US-based) proprietary software and services. For multiple reasons. Digital sovereignty has never been more important than these days. It has always been important but it was maybe too abstract in the past for many common users to realize. They are slowly starting to realize now that dependencies on proprietary software from any rogue regime (and the current US regime also falls into that category now) are not great to have. Plus, there is Microsoft on its own already putting ever-increasing user- and customer-hostile features into their products. It’s like being in an abusive relationship (as the one being abused). It’s just not good for you long-term.
So as a user, you should instead choose software which allows you to retain your digital sovereignty and control over your own computing, and simply not take all that abuse. Linux- or *BSD-based OSes with their open/transparent development models, fork-able/modifiable code bases, permissive licensing and essentially zero unwanted crap like adware, spyware, bloatware etc. offer exactly that. And because mainstream Linux distros have already become so easy to use these days, there are almost no reasons not to start using them.
All your arguments are logically sound and completely miss the main point.
The issue with Linux is not that “it’s getting there” in terms of user friendliness. It’s that it’s not there YET.
On top of that you have the community - just the other day I was searching to solve an issue, found a very similar thread, and the only reply the guy got was “here’s a link to the ArchWiki, welcome to the Linux world, you need to figure this out yourself”.
My 80 year old mother is not figuring out shit, she’s terrified when she has to copy a photo from a USB stick to here Photos folder.
Saying “Linux is fine for the massestoday” is just showing how detached many Linux users are from reality.
ALVR isn’t awful. I needed new hardware and bit the bullet knowing I was likely going to lose VR, but with the hardware upgrade, it’s nicer in the new machine (Bazzite, 7900XT) than the old (Win 10, 2080 Super Max Q). Definitely not a drop in replacement yet though.
of course, the only good VR game is Alyx and once you finish that it’s only tech demos and chat rooms - nothing else really worth the bother of strapping a monitor to your face.
They are on that website, not just only the activator. They are better than retail isos because they come without bloat. I use iot LTSC permactivated with HWID on all my PCs and VMs
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