I run Linux on a small mini pc for some casual browsing.
I run windows on my main pc.
As long as some kernel anticheat (fortnite, cod, etc…) doesn’t run on Linux, I won’t be swapping.
30+y of windows use also makes me infinitely more comfortable with windows. All the complaints I always read about are totally moot for me (I understand the issue of privacy in windows. It’s the price I pay to have an OS that “just works” for me) .
While I enjoy tinkering, Linux is a royal PITA to use if you’re not used to it. I spend hours trying to figure out how to fix something that takes me 5m max in windows. I understand it’s a more a me than a Linux problem. But I’m certain many people struggle with the same things.
Maybe the last time you tried Linux was 30 years ago, but Linux compared to Windows just works.
If it takes you HOURS to find a fix to something that takes you literally 5 minutes on Windows, you are doing something wrong. Your research methods are flawed.
Some of my friends still use Windows, fixing their problems takes me half an hour to find a solution, while on Linux, I just open the terminal and insert one command. Last time that happened it was about a VPN kill switch. So the person had a VPN App installed on Windows with a kill switch enabled. Then they uninstalled the VPN application and the kill switch was still there.
How do you remove the kill switch? On Linux it’s ‘nmcli c ‘killSwitchName’ del’ on Windows it’s a journey to a new adventure.
For how I use my pc, everything just works. To give you a counter argument. My logitech devices just work out of the box on windows. For Linux I had to get a little specific tool. Also try installing Japanese language input on Linux. Compare how much simpler it is on windows. Linux is NOT simpler than windows in all situations. Maybe your own research methods are flawed?
I game, manage my NAS (truenas running jellyfish for media etc) , sail the high seas, and browse on my pc. I also remote into a small spare mini pc running Ubuntu server with a minecraft server on it. (Could’ve ran the server on windows, but wanted to tinker with Linux to learn)
It all works flawless.
Also, give me a Linux alternative for parsec that just works as well for remote gaming, both from other desktop devices as from a mobile devices.
If I can get it working, I will absolutely use debug mode on pokemon fan games because it saves me time not to have to do things like going back for healing my party, grinding to a certain level defeating bosses I’m not supposed to using cheated in legendaries, etcetera.
Definitely not developer intended, nor am I sure this would count for an intended answer to the question. Otherwise, I cannot think of any other answers to this question.
My gaming pc has just switched over to bazzite (as I use it like a console/htpc). Been wanting to do it for ages but needed to get an amd card beforehand for the best experience. Windows really started to grind my gears in the last few months too.
Made the upgrade last week to Linux mint and I’m loving it. Got my Arr stacks and stuff setup as dockers and it’s never worked so well. All the connection issues I’ve had on windows is now gone.
The interface is nice and not bloated. And I’m not being tracked which feels liberating.
Welcome :), if we’re being honest lot of the tracking still happens on Linux once you open your web browser but it definitively feel nice to be liberated of the one at OS level and a solid start for caring about online privacy
Yeah, it’s about reducing the amount of tracking though. I’ve since deleted my Google account, stopped using gmail, moved to proton, stopped using online password managers, deleted Reddit, quit watching YouTube, moved everything I can to open source programs. Libre office instead of 365 etc.
So 43% of Steam users are the kind of stickler that refuse to update their Windows to an objectively better version because it’s something new and different and breaks their habits. What would make you think these people would possibly just switch to a different OS altogether if a simple update was too much to ask for the past years?
Maybe 43% have hardware that is not supported by Windows 11. And don’t want to run windows 11 on unsupported hardware or go through the hassle of even installing on unsupported hardware.
If doing one registry edit and installing Win11 from the iso to bypass the silly “processor unsupported” message is a too high barrier for these 43%, how do you realistically expect these same people to go out of their way and install a Linux distro? Why should they be motivated to learn in which ways it works differently from the Windows architecture? And let’s not get started with “unsupported hardware” - even though the Linux experience has gotten so much smoother, it’s still not uncommon to have components with subpar or no real support.
Don’t get me wrong, I like Linux and I use it for work - but to think a huge part of gamers will switch to Linux with just because they don’t want to update their Windows is just illusory.
I don’t expect them to switch. I think it’s more likely they will stay until there games are no longer supported. Simply because a lot of people just don’t want or can’t edit the registry, because they think stats for people with technical knowledge. But I also don’t believe they will all switch to Linux.
I have no idea. I rely on music software that doesn’t have a Linux port. This sucks, because that software cost money, and if I can’t get it running reliably on Linux I might have to… either that, or get a Mac :/
How do I even get started? Do I just install Mint and figure it out from there? Linux seems so complicated but it’s been a decade since I last tried. Nowadays, I feel old and this seems like it needs too much research
Honestly, one of the great uses for gen ai is “write me a script to diagnose this problem” and then pass the output back with “write me a script to fix it”
I don’t have the bandwidth in my life to diagnose and tinker for fun, and it’s really made a bunch of big annoying things easy.
I found KDE way more intuitive than gnome, even though I was last on a Mac before the switch. Perhaps pick a KDE distro.
Also maybe list here if you have any deal-breaker apps or workflows to the folks can say if it’s worth your effort.
I would recommend to try linux first by dualbooting. Try Ubuntu, Fedora, Linux MINT and KDE Neon (i really like it because it has a Windowsy feel). You can see how those distros look here: distrosea.com
I personally dont like the stock ubuntu, was really suprised by fedora.
Whatever you do. Don’t dualboot. It gives a wrong impression of what Linux is, and complexity is not inherently a part of it. Try Mint as a live USB OS first. That means the OS runs from a USB thumb drive. This will allow you to dip your toes before you dive in. Just like dipping toes, it’s a no-compromise way of testing, but if you choose to install you already have 90% of what you need.
Also it’s soooo easy for someone not very knowledgeable to misconfigure the boot loader. Don’t touch boot loaders unless you’re okay with potentially losing access to both your original OS and the new Linux install. You’d then have to either learn on the go and repair it yourself, or beg/pay someone else to repair it.
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.
I have to disagree here. I find using Cinnamon is very close to using windows. Everything hardware wise pretty much runs out of the box on all desktops and laptops I have installed it on. Have been using it for years. The one thing I can’t comment on is hdpi. I never owned a high enough resolution screen to have problems with scaling I guess, although I do have a three monitor setup. Immutability might be nice, but I think it’s also personal preference. Windows doesn’t have it so it might be a strange feature to new users coming from Windows.
I have to disagree here. I find using Cinnamon is very close to using windows.
So is KDE, that’s why I recommend it over cinnamon and not gnome.
Everything hardware wise pretty much runs out of the box on all desktops and laptops I have installed it on.
That has (mostly) nothing to do with your desktop environment!
Have been using it for years. The one thing I can’t comment on is hdpi. I never owned a high enough resolution screen to have problems with scaling I guess, although I do have a three monitor setup.
Just because you’re familiar with it doesn’t mean it’s the best choice for beginners. People want HDR, mixed refresh rates, and mixed DPI displays to work properly, they do on KDE, they possibly never will on cinnamon. Just as an example, look at the rate of development on KDE based distros vs cinnamon… cinnamon is entirely outclassed. The KDE team is massive, the cinnamon team is a few people with no real funding. ( if you don’t believe me, here are the stats for the last month cinnamon side: github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon/pulse/monthly vs github.com/KDE/plasma-desktop/pulse although you’ll note kde isn’t developed on github and that’s just a mirror. It’s not even close, cinnamon has less monthly than 1/10th of the weekly for kde. The KDE text editor alone outpaces all of cinnamon dramatically, github.com/KDE/kate/pulse ) The rate of code output and refinement is not even close. The level of customization you can do with KDE vs cinnamon isn’t even comparable. If you run into an issue with cinnamon, you’re SOL, whereas KDE can actually worry about your bugs, because they have so many more developers.
That’s not even going into the massive disparity in security between the two, KDE uses wayland by default, and as a result is SIGNIFICANTLY more secure, just off the top of my head, here’s some problems with cinnamon that will not be resolved anytime soon, that have all already been resolved by this transition KDE-side:
Every single app can read your keyboard input without asking
Every single app can see what every single other app is doing without asking
Apps can fullscreen themselves and go over everything else, because they can control their own window placement to any degree they want, again, without asking.
Immutability might be nice, but I think it’s also personal preference. Windows doesn’t have it so it might be a strange feature to new users coming from Windows.
Windows does have it… actually, it only has it. UAC already prevents you from modifying system files. There’s no way to turn it off without mucking about in the console. And it’s not a personal preference thing at all, it’s objectively superior for a beginner, and anything you can do with a normal distro can still be done with an immutable one assuming you have root access.
Reminder that just because something works for you, doesn’t mean it’s the best choice for a beginner. Try all the options extensively before you make a suggestion, you might not have made the right choice for everyone just because you have made the right choice for yourself. I make these suggestions after YEARS of extensive testing with many people as my guinea pigs.
I have tried giving people cinnamon, it has gone disasterously, usually due to DPI problems. But I don’t think it’s a safe recommendation at all, just given the security issues.
In short, i think the only reasonable recommendations for beginners in terms of desktop environments, are KDE or Gnome (if they’re mac users and are willing to learn something different), unless their hardware is TERRIBLE and old, in which case they might want lxqt or xfce, maybe.
I would recommend Mad Max on Steam. It is a great open world game with much freedom of movement. Obviously, you will do more driving than walking, but the driving feels very satisfying.
The combat is mostly in Batman-style group brawls, where you have to dodge/block when a prompt appears over an enemy’s head.
Unfortunately not. Even as an IT person I can say I just wanna come home and boot up my games without hassle. Sure alot of things have been done with proton etc but still a massive amount of games don’t work without Soo much dang tweaking. I don’t have time for that especially with a job/being a single parent. I am highly interested in steamos though.
that’s also my excuse, but then again, i don’t even game that much. and i’m on rtx 3070 which will be getting too old soon for new games and new GPUs are just too expensive.
And god i hate w11. i mean it’s not that different than w10 but things just don’t work!
my logitech mouse stutters for no fucking reason, 10 year old games lag for no fucking reason. the whole windows lags after being waken up from sleep after a few days, i could go on and on. none of these problems existed on w10.
Why not dual-boot with steamos in that case? Sure, some things may not work out-of-the-box now, but work is constantly being done and at least won’t regress like the step from W10 to W11.
honestly, i’m just lazy. I would need to clear out one of my drives, i have three of them, 256gb, 512gb and 2tb. I keep windows on the smallest one. I would need to clear out the 512gb one and just get it done.
might get it done when w11 pisses me off a few more times :D
I had the same outlook before switching to Arch Linux, but honestly gaming on Linux is actually the lesser of my hassle. I can genuinely just grab msi files or exe files for games and feed them to Steam to get them playing via Proton. There’s only one (1!) game that I can’t play, and I’m 99% certain it’s a problem with my hardware, not my OS (Monster Hunter Wilds seems to hate my GPU and crash all the time). But even that was fixed with a mod (up until the latest update).
With that said, I’ve had a lot of hassle handling other things that are upstream of gaming so it’s not like you’re unreasonable in wanting an OS that is mostly stable. Then again, I made the decision to use Arch Linux, there’s distros that are simpler afaik.
Is Windows actually stable though? I used to have to use it for work, it’s a disgusting OS. Now I use Ubuntu for work, also disgusting, but it’s much better than Windows
“Mostly stable”. I’ve had my fair share of issues with Windows.
But one of the big benefit is that it is much easier to diagnose an issue on Windows, just by sheer volume of mainstream usage (IE users complaining about issues and seeking help online). Also, tech support won’t turn you around because you are on Linux, an OS they straight up refuse to support.
I thought the same, especially since I had tried Linux on my main several times since the 90s (my first dual boot was with Slackware).
Then maybe 8 months ago I did the transition, and installed Pop!OS since I’m a gamer plus I have a NVidia graphics card and didn’t want to go through the whole hassle related to that (Pop!OS has a version which already comes with those drivers).
Mind you, I did got a separate SSD for Linux and meanwhile added a new one, which is where my games directory is mounted and upgraded the root one to something a bit bigger,
So, this time around, what did I find out in about 8 months of use:
Once, I did had to boot into CLI mode and have apt do some failed upgrades, which included doing some kind of rebuild thing (you get instructions of what command to run when apt fails). This was due to a upgrade of the apt itself, I believe. All the other times it just boots to graphics mode (I’m using X rather than Wayland) or if it fails to start it (happened only a handful of time) you just reboot it.
In general even though I’ve done things like add and change hardware components, I have done little tweaking via CLI and some of it I did it because I’m just more comfortable with it or wanted so obscure options (for example, I wanted to mount the drive shared with Windows with a specific user and group, so I had to edit fstab). Except for the more obscure stuff there are UI tools for all management tasks and one doesn’t have to actually do much management and things almost always just work (for example, I changed graphics card - whilst staying with NVidia - and it just booted and worked, no tweaks necessary)
As for games, I use Steam for Steam Games and Lutris for all other game versions including GOG. Both have install scripts specific for each game, that configure Wine appropriately, so you seldom have to do anything but install, launch and play. That said in average I have had to tweak maybe 1 in 10 games. Further, about 1 in 20 I couldn’t get them to work. If you do install pirated games, then there is no install script and you do have to do yourself the whole process of figuring out which DLLs are missing and configure them in Wine using Winetricks (curiously, I ended up having to install a pirated game because the Steam version did not at all work, and the pirated version works fine). Note, however, that since I don’t do multiplayer games anymore, I haven’t had problems with kernel-level anti-cheat not working with Linux.
Interestingly, for gaming you have safety possibilities in Linux which you don’t in Windows: all my games launched via Lutris are wrapped in a firejail sandbox with a number of enhanced security restrictions and networking limited to only localhost, so there is no “phone home” for the games running via that launcher (Steam, on the other hand, is a different situation).
I still have the old Windows install in that machine, but I haven’t booted into it for many months now.
Compared to the old days (even as recently as a decade ago), nowadays there is way less need for tweaking in Linux in general and for gaming, even Windows games generally just install and run as long as you use some kind launcher which has game-specific install scripts (such as Steam and Lutries), but if you go out of the mainstream (obscure old games, pirated stuff) then you have to learn all about tweaking Wine to run the games.
If you have a desktop and the space to install the hardware, just get a 256GB SSD (which are pretty cheap) and install a gaming-oriented Linux distro (such as Pop!OS or Bazzite) there, separate from Windows and you can dual boot them using your BIOS as boot manager: since the advent of EFI, booting doesn’t go through a boot sector shared by multiple OSs anymore, so if you install each in their own drive then they don’t even see each other (you can still explicitly mount the Windows partitions in Linux from the Files app to access them, but otherwise they have no impact whatsever on booting and running Linux) and only the BIOS is aware of the multiple bootable OSs and you can get it to pop up a menu on boot (generally by pressing F8) to change which one you want to boot.
For the 20 or 30 bucks of a 256GB SSD it’s worth the try and if you’re comfortable with it you can later do as I did and add another bigger one just for the directory with you games (or your home directory, though granted to migrate your home like this you do have to use the CLI ;))
Bravely running away is the quintessential FromSoft experience. The ultimate flex on enemies is to not even bother attacking them and just rolling to dodge occasionally while you grab items and run past them to the next checkpoint.
It’s been going great! Everything works as I expected. I now have full confidence that I will never switch back to Windows. It really does feel liberating having an OS that doesn’t track me.
bin.pol.social
Najstarsze