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Your Windows 10 PC will soon be 'junk' - users told to resist Microsoft deadline
(www.express.co.uk)
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this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
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Or just try linux. It's pretty great
I love Linux. I have it installed on 3 machines, have been using it for over 3 years, and would install it right away if I ever got a new computer.
A couple weeks ago, I was feeling pretty exhausted and just wanted to play a game thru Proton on my laptop. I got it running, but it was unplayable because it was using my integrated GPU instead of my discrete one. I spent the night switching compositors, cables, and drivers, but none of it fixed the issue.
The next day, feeling exhausted from fruitless debugging, I tried to launch another game via Proton that I knew had worked in the past, but it crashed on launch. I spent the whole day going thru the same steps I did the day before, but also consulting ProtonDB and trying software that would force usage of the dgpu.
The next day, I installed Windows 10 to an external hard drive and spent the day debloating it. Drivers got installed automatically, I downloaded both games on Steam, and they just worked. So I guess I now dual-boot Windows just for the games that don't work thru Proton. Loading game worlds and booting up take ~75% longer, but that's to be expected because it's running on a 4 year old HDD connected over a USB cable.
As mentioned earlier, I love Linux a lot, and if all games had native binaries or Proton worked 100% I'd format that god-forsaken hard drive. But when real life has got me down, I don't need Linux to get me down further. I don't like Windows, and I feel incredibly dirty whenever I press F7 on boot to get to Windows. But when my choices are "spend 8 hours on fruitless quest to get >2fps" and "press play button", I'm going to take the path of least resistance.
That's the thing. I love to use Linux for work, but when I don't want to tinker it sometimes sucks for gaming.
Yep. And then there’s gamepass. I vastly vastly prefer working and using Linux day to day, but games, man. Man’s gotta be able to game after a long day at work and I wasted literally a week of after work hours trying and failing to get Starfield to run on Proton.
iGPU+dGPU, esp with Nvidia is pretty bad on Linux. It's pretty flawless these days if you're using only one vendor and it isn't Nvidia.
Don't know what you are talking about. I use an Nvidia GPU with a Wayland compositor/Window manager (Hyprland to be exact) and I've never experienced any issues whatsoever.
I have an external monitor that runs at 144Hz, but a while ago I realized because it was connected over HDMI, it was limited to 60Hz (for some weird reason). So I bought a DisplayPort cable, and after plugging it in the screen was flickering/artifacting in some weird way that I haven't seen it do on X11 or Windows with the same cable. So as a result I've had to reluctantly switched back to i3 for daily use
Sure, use whatever works for you
I would probably rather get a gaming console for the TV to game.
Why not a steam deck?
I love my steam deck but there's enough games from my library that won't run at all or only run after some manual trickery in desktop mode.
Tbf that really depends on the kind of games you like playing.
What game was it?
The first game mentioned was Bille Bust Up. I liked the demo that was off of Steam (and it ran fine using the proton-call command), so I subscribed to the developer's Patreon (which gives a Steam key) and it wouldn't use my dgpu.
The second game was A Hat in Time.
Nvidia laptop by the sounds of it?
Anything with an AMD GPU is going to have a better time (or even just a dedicated Nvidia GPU in a desktop).
Thanks for sharing. I'm sorry to hear you had trouble. Both games are rated as gold on ProtonDB. So, I am surprised you had trouble with them.
My experience has been the opposite. Everything has worked surprisingly well. Do you by chance use an Nvidia gpu?
Yep, Nvidia gpu. At the time I bought it I wasn't aware of their reputation for Linux support, and I bought my laptop from System76 (with Pop!_OS, because Nvidia drivers are more "just works" on it). I've had a fairly good experience with all of it, but the next computer I buy will definitely have an AMD GPU.
I think this is the first time I've been fully unable to get the dgpu working. Every other time it's just worked or worked with tweaking
I work in a linux shop.
You couldn't pay me to use Windows for development, sysadmin, backend services, etc.
But on the desktop? Hell no. We maintain a modern debian desktop environment for our users, and it's a pain in the ass. Mediocre UX, mediocre integration of mixed-bag third-party apps, and too many workarounds and gotchas you need to Just Know About. I just don't have the energy.
I use windows at home, and for my underlying work environment - and I just SSH into linux boxes for the actual tappy-tappy stuff.
You're talking about my Windows 10 experience? The european, less spying/advertising version, mind you.
If only there was an OS with an excellent graphical user interface and a direct UNIX pedigree, where you can drop into a full zsh and POSIX user land directly after install at the touch of a button.
If there's one thing that both windows and Linux users agree on, it's how weird and annoying macs are.
I'd wager that's because "we know better what you want" in mac is even stronger than in windows. It's all good while you are an average Joe, but other than that you either pay, or get a lot of issues setting things up.
At least macOS let's you change your default browser without showing you 5 million popups that look like fucking malware saying "Please switch back to Microsoft Edge, we know that it sucks ass but please use it"
As a Linux user, I'd use a Mac over some garbage Windows PC any fucking time of the day. Nearly every operating system under the sun uses some kind of Unix implementation under the hood, well, except for Windows. Running anything in a command line environment under Windows is a huge pain in the ass... Not even having GNU coreutils, BusyBox or the BSD equivalent is just horrible. Just like PowerShell. And don't even get me started on this antiquated piece of shit called
cmd. Every time I see a CLI under Windows I just want to take the computer that it's running on and throw it in the trash. At least macOS offers some standard CLI utilities and is basically out-of-the-box compatible with most Linux CLI tools. The filesystem structure is also kinda similar to what you would find on a Linux or BSD operating system. Oh, and recent Mac hardware is pretty awesome whereas Windows on ARM is unusable. And macOS at least looks visually consistent because unlike Microsoft, Apple can actually decide to use one single UI framework for all of their stuff. You can block all of the Apple spyware with a good firewall like Little Snitch and Homebrew fills the gap of the missing package manager. And unlike Winget, Homebrew actually works and is worth using. I can also set up macOS declaratively through Nix, something that won't ever be possible on Windows either.As a linux user, I SSH to a Linux box when I want to do things that aren't file/print/email/media/games - though honestly, Powershell is pretty fucking awesome as a scripting language.
Imagine if every command used JSON when piping to/from another command, so you aren't fucking around with cut and awk and sed all the time just to pull values out. It's nice. I don't have much application for it personally, but it honestly is pretty grown-up.
People will disagree with me on this one and it's totally fine, but I don't like JSON. Over the many years of using nothing other than Linux or other Unix-like operating systems I just got used to using stuff like awk to filter out data. PowerShell might be nice for scripting, but it's terrible for interactive usage. I spend a lot of time in the Terminal and fish shell is my favorite because it's awesome for interactive usage. You don't have to use your shell for scripting though. You can also just use something like Python, Ruby, heck even JavaScript. There's also Nushell which has an interesting way of handling data, I think it's kinda similar to what PowerShell does. Check that out if you are interested.
So… today?
I’m a Linux user. Been one for a long time.
When I’m doing dev-work, shelling into remote VMs and stuff yeah I have to get nitty-gritty with the command-line.
But on my regular daily-driver OS? I only use the terminal because I want to; or sometimes I think it’s more efficient. But I haven’t absolutely needed to for a long time now.
Linux GUI has really come a long way. It’s not at MacOS level (yet), but it’s very functional and aesthetic. Give it a try.
Yeah, I hear you. I still run an old MacbookPro with MacOS for personal computing stuff. I just don’t always want to tinker. It’s been a living meme: “the year of the Linux desktop” for years on years now and yet we still comprise like 0.3% of the desktop market.
But I really do see a tide shift now. Microsoft is doubling down on the enshittification of Windows. Apple’s hardware is still—as always—prohibitively priced. Steam OS on the Steam deck. The Indian government officially adopting it—and its FOSS office application offerings. Companies like Pop!_OS and Framework are making real headway for popular adoption. HP, Dell, Lenovo all offer Linux-default laptops now, that aren’t just “Pro-Dev” offerings.
Linux is not as polished as the for-profit offerings. Perhaps it never will be. Perhaps that’s also its appeal.
There are a few distributions out there that are genuinely trying to abstract the nitty-gritty away and bring a polished Linux to the masses. ElementaryOS, for one. Yet, it is still Linux at its core and all the poweruser functionality isn’t far away.
But to face a bit of harsh reality, the average computer user doesn’t want that. They resist change and learning something new, they want it to “just work” and “work for me the way [company] says it should” even if that means gross (often implicit) violations of privacy, control, agency. They just don’t care. Or maybe they don’t know. It’s amazing how hard it is to “degoogle” oneself, let alone “demicrosoft” or “deapple”. As I type this on an iPhone…
There will always be bleeding edge computation environments. I just hope that we users can force Big Tech’s hands to respect data privacy and agency. We had a big win with Google conceding web-DRM, but it won’t be the first nor last attempt and their patience is immense.
Tron: “I fight for the users.
If you haven't checked out linux in 5+ years, I recommend that you check out something user-friendly like Mint. No commands needed!
Sure ok, can you give us some examples from the hundreds of commands you need to memorise for basic use?
Hundreds of commands is just not true with many distros. Everything is gui based these days. The command line is worth getting familiar with, but it’s not necessary.
The time is now then!