Frankly, I don’t care.
I’m going to keep using Windows 10, updates or not, until I absolutely have no other choice, hoping against hope that the cracks in the Recall/AI monolith with have spread wide enough that a future Win 12 or 13 won’t have them in it. I don’t run a business. I don’t keep sensitive information on any internet capable devices and my work uses the AS400 system.
I know Linux is a thing, and about a dozen years ago I spent a year using Ubuntu exclusively. While appreciating the OS, I got tired of chanting magic spells at computer every time I wanted to use software I liked on it, and so went back to Windows.
These days, despite being a reasonably tech savvy person approaching 60, I’m getting to the point where I’m just not up to learning/relearning an OS unless there is a critical need, and using Windows 10 there just isn’t. At least not for me.
The days of “chanting magic spells at computer” being synonymous with the Linux experience are far gone. I recommend you just make a Fedora installer and take it for a spin on the live test system! You don’t need to commit to it to just try it
This will be the best thing that ever happened to Linux. Hell, it might even make it up to 4.5% market share.
A better use case for linux desktop could not have been invented.
Thought about it… but drivers are hell…
You just download them, like with windows?
If you’ve never downloaded drivers manually it’s super easy these days. You’ll get a tool from the device manufacturer that checks your hardware and system and automatically installs the correct driver with computer restarts at the correct places. You just press the go button.
That said most default drivers are open source and included in Linux, so you should be able to get by without downloading anything unless you need the latest manufacturer driver.
Old hardware is usually very well supported.
Are they?
Nope I haven’t had trouble with drivers in a while. Printers are still probably thr worst but not bad.
Just buy a brother laser printer with a USB port.
That’s what I have, except networked. . Works fine. Just meant out of all the things, printers are still the hardest
Can confirm. Works on every distro I’ve tried.
These days IPP Print Everywhere support makes driverless printing easy
I have installed Linux on a dozen computers from crummy laptops to custom build with graphics card. Most went fine. For the graphics card one, I installed popos to avoid learning about internals , but I could have spent time to solve it, I was lazy.
But I recommend having several distros on usb to do tests . That way things are easiest. Some installs have default settings that work best for random computers. So just spend a few minutes on each to test sound, WiFi and graphics. 5 minutes on each to test 10 flavors
No need to mess with any text settings at all these days… I mean, you can
My biggest worry for this is, there’s probably dozens of black hats out there that have found some very large exploit for Windows 10, and are holding off on abusing it until the day Microsoft ends support.
Currently, my plan is to make a partition for Linux Mint, set up dual boot, see how much of my daily computer obsession I can execute through there, and then try to slowly transition while slowly moving stuff from Windows. (I am vaguely worried I’ll run into that Windows issue where files accessed from outside the OS login are security-restricted. That has even screwed up my Windows reformat fixes)
PR nightmares will keep significant exploit fixes coming. Microsoft isn’t that stupid.
Mint’s sweet I switched from 10 a few months back. Biggest difference is getting use to the different file system, only 2 games have been unplayable (didn’t try to make them work tbh).
might be better to separate drives, windows has been known to fuck up Linux partitions recently.
This sounds like something I should be wary of, but it’s the first I’m hearing of it. Any other info?
I haven’t booted into Windows since
It typically happens during updates. People have reported their grub screwing up. If you’re able I would honestly suggest separate drives
only anecdotes unfortunately.
Just keep regular full system images (as you should be anyways, as part of your 3-2-1 backup plan), and you’ll be fine as you can just restore an image if everything gets broken.
My what now?
NTFS file reading and writing is reasonably well supported under Linux, though exFAT or native filesystems are preferable. Actually finding software that will understand your files is one level removed, and getting equivalent or even the same software running is another level still. e.g. reading MS Office documents - LibreOffice is pretty good at that. For games, Steam and Proton have a lot of that covered.
If all you do is on websites, most if not all of the usual web browsers are available and work indistinguishably.
That said, I will leave you with these three words: Backups. Backups. Backups.
I’m not worried about interpreting the NTFS filesystem or individual files of given formats. Mainly, I’m worried about a Windows security-level problem I’ve had where Windows restricts access to whole directories based on user-level permissions, since the old “user” that owned them on a given operating system has been obliterated. It’s an issue I’ve had even when reinstalling Windows to the same computer.
As far as I know, Linux ignores NTFS permissions when given raw access to a disk, or rather, acts as thought it’s SYSTEM or some other high-level user, working around anything Windows might have set.
Worst case, you could still move your important files to an exFAT partition (or into an archive) where permissions don’t apply.
As far as I know, Linux ignores NTFS permissions when given raw access to a disk, or rather, acts as thought it’s SYSTEM or some other high-level user, working around anything Windows might have set.
I think that was the case for ntfs-3g.
I’m not certain that’s the case anymore with the new kernel NTFS driver, though I havent tested it. If it isn’t, it should be correctly handling the file premissions.
LMDE6 still uses ntfs-3g as far as I can tell, so I’m going to assume that regular Mint does too.
lsmodreports nothing like ntfs, and the tried and tested, if no longer developed, ntfs-3g suite is installed.Things might change as and when the kernel driver is more stable for writing. I’m sure more bleeding-edge distros are already running the kernel driver, but then, those who run those distros are deep into Linux and NTFS is not really something they deal with regularly.
With the different distros of Linux, do different things support different distros? Like Zoom is support on Arch but not Mint, and Steam is supported in Mint but not Arch; or if an app supports Linux, it is on all distros? And if there is differences, do you have different partitions for different types of Linux?
When an app supports linux, it can do so by either:
- packaging it for popular distro repositories,
- giving instructions on how to build the app from the source code
or
- package it on distro-agnostic, package management solutions like flatpak or appImage.
These last ones are sandboxed environments. That means they have their own dependencies isolated from your system, so they dont have to deal with every distros pecularities at the cost of using more storage space. This is very useful for developers and in your case benefitial for the user because you can have both steam and zoom via flatpak on mint, arch or any obscure distro that has flatpak available, without any major problems.
Edit: Formatting
Still waiting for Fedora to get VR support
I’ll probably put windows enterprise iot lts on a vm in case I ever need to use a windows computer.
Hopefully instead of turning into a bunch of e-waste, a bunch of “useless” desktops flood refurbishers, and refurbished desktops become even cheaper. I wouldn’t mind replacing my dying media server.
Thank fuck, it’ll stop asking for reboots.
inb4 reboot to install windows 11
I deliberately did not enable SecureBoot or whatever it is that prevents it from updating.
I’m really excited for when the health authority I’m working for that uses win10 needs to frantically switch every machine to win11… Going to be such a relaxing time
/s
You’re using a consumer version of Windows? Businesses can pay for extended support.
Oh true, forgot about that. In that case we won’t think about it for a few years I’m sure…
I’ve suggested we modify a Linux distro to use instead, but no one seems to want to pay for the setup. Which is fair I guess.
No worries, I was genuinely asking. My gf works at a ~€10b multinational engineering corpo and they use what seems to be a consumer version (it has ads!). I work for a different corpo and we have LTSC version so big features come later once properly tested.
Can’t wait! Cheap linux laptops are abound!
7th gen Intel laptops with GPUs are already really cheap
If I were to buy used laptop, I’d want 8th gen or newer because that’s where intel finally made more than dual core for mobile.
Unfortunately when there’s 11 will install on an 8th as long as it has a TPM.
every few years on Linux Discord groups across the internet
“Hi, Windows just stopped support, you guys got any suggestions?”
“You should definitely try LFS, it’s great and you’ll have exactly what you want!”
“Arch btw! Customize everything and no bloat, hurr durr!”
“NixOS is the future, go for it!”
Mint
This sucks for me. I have to install Windows 11 on my other hardrive for work. I daily drive Linux.
I’d get a whole second machine and a KVM switch, it would save you much trouble
That is actually a great idea.
It’s hell. But at least you can dial boot the damn thing.
work is work
Recently decided to try Linux for gaming. It wasn’t without a hitch or two, but largely fine. A number of games I play don’t even need an emulation tool like Proton.
The only reason windows was lying around was for gaming.
Looks like it’ll only get used for flight simulation.
Wine Is Not an Emulator
(Proton is wine)
Haven’t. Will check it out! Thanks.
Not a lot of updates in 2024 unfortunately. Is it dead?
It is not. It is open source, there will be updates when there will be updates, they are not pressured by board of directors to release something that doesn’t work.
I suggest checking the discord for more information, including endless stream of screenshots, to get an idea about state of the project.
I have edited the comment above to add link
https://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/flightgear/ci/next/tree/
This random git repo I picked from their source forge page seems to have some pretty recent commits. I’m guessing they just have a slow release cycle.
X-plane natively supports Linux, works using proton too.
I’d stoped flying x plane when MSFS came out. Will give it a whirl too.
Same here but for sim racing
Why do you need Windows for sim racing?
Peripherals. AFAIK Fanatec gear doesn’t run on Linux yet.
There are some drivers: https://jugandoenlinux.com/tutoriales/volantes.html
Thanks for this. I’m kinda concerned about attempting this on my current machine. I’ve got it set up as a music studio PC with Steam as a secondary feature. It works great with all my recording peripherals so I’m hesitant to introduce additional complexity to it with these drivers. I’d like to move away from Win entirely but its not exactly a do or die situation for me right now.
My linux install is on its own SDD separate from Win. I only use WIN for simracing and counter-strike so that use case is very limited. Also I don’t think iRacing’s anti-cheat runs on Linux yet? I’ll have to investigate.
This is going to have a much bigger impact on the third would countries.
Most people here are not going to buy a new computer there are tons of people who buy second hand laptops that are old to be able to afford them.
Additionally people are not tech savvy and don’t understand the implication of this. When they see an ad that says to buy a new computer, they are going to dismiss it the same way they dismiss all the other ads online telling them to buy stuff.
