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Consumer grade Linux Mint is impossible to differentiate from Windows/MacOS.
Install Firefox. Install Chrome. Install Steam.
Test it out on an old laptop or computer. It’s trivial. Your life will improve.
Linux definitely has a learning curve but its night and day when you actually own your device and get to decide on what software is allowed to run on your computer.
On top of the privacy, the speed of most linux distros is a huge step up from windows. Windows imo is gradually becoming obsolete in the gaming sphere. the amount of work required to properly configure and debloat a system for gaming was zero in my distro. Install gfx driver, gamemode, steam, proton GE, GOverlay, done. I play popular games such as marvel rivals and warframe at decent framerates. (my system is older).
With windows there was so much nonsense to disable that would hugely impact FPS. Sometimes disabling these things would break other features of the OS. And most of the debloat scripts to automate the process are rife with viruses and issues.
Im convinced that by enshitifying the OS it will fool users into thinking their hardware is obsolete and “cant keep up” but im running a 1070ti and a i7 from like 2018 and its still a decent system that does everything i need. until something breaks im not upgrading.
Modern Linux doesn’t have a learning curve for 99% of people. My wife’s 90 year old grandma picked it up with no trouble.
What’s installing Nvidia drivers like?
This has killed my install and interest in Linux every time I’ve tried it.
Simple in most distros. For me i can legit just go to my gui package manager type nvidia click install. My package manager detects that nvidia-utils and nvidia-settings are required/optional and prompts me to install those aswell. Done. For info on your specific distro lmk ill find it for you
Dope. Looks like I’ll have to give Linux a shot once again. Worked fine on an old ultra book I had, but every time I tried on my desktop I’d fail at the GPU drivers step.
Ive said it before in this comment section but i highly recommend dual booting its a bit of setup if you want it to be smooth with grub but the freedom and compatability is unmatched by any one distro or windows version. With the added benafit of not destroying your probably gaming tweaked windows install
I’ve done two PC builds with Nvidia and it’s actually easier than Windows because my distros (popOS and bazzite) installed the drivers for me. Had to do it manually with Windows
Also its quite a pain in the butt to set up but if your still iffy on making the full switch to linux, “dualboot”! Purchase a second cheap ssd and install linux to that drive configure a software called grub to list windows and linux on start up and then launch into your prefered os. For me this was the best since alot of anticheat games I play are still locked down to windows
I made a new computer in November, and while I didn’t try Mint (I don’t think) I installed 3 or 4 different versions if Linux. In them, I installed steam and Nvidia drivers, but most of my game library said they weren’t playable. If I didn’t have kids I could have spent more time and gotten it working, but is Mint different? Would they have been playable on it?
It’s probably because you need to go to Steam settings and enable Proton for all games. I don’t understand why this is still not turned on by default…
This. Also be sure to go to the compatibility section and select ‘Enable Steam Play for all other titles.’ Otherwise you’re borked.
Just for completeness, I like Bazzite for gaming over Linux Mint, but Linux Mint should still work fine.
You have to change your steam settings to attempt to use proton. Once you do this, steam will allow the games to play. Practically everything will work once you do this.
…shiiiiiiit, I had so much fucking trouble getting games to work (most steam games just wouldn’t even launch) and never discovered this. This is why linux is still unsuitable for the non-technical consumer; I’m a former unix sysadmin, I’ve hand-edited SysV runlevels and bootstrapped gcc and shit, but I’ve been out of it so long that a lot of shit has changed and I don’t even know where to look for solutions other than just googling ‘reddit XYZ doesn’t work’ and hoping I find solutions that are even relevant to the distro I’m running.
Quick question, I’ve seen split opinions on this - I have an SSD that just has my games installed (mostly steam games) under windows, is it reasonable to try to mount that under linux and try to run games that way, or should I just reinstall them onto the linux drive?
Ive tried this and proton seems to overwrite the games data everytime i launch the game breaking it and forcing a reinstall. I found that the best way is to simply have a drive formated to ext4 or ntfs mount it in both linix and windows and have seperate folders for linux games and windows games. Kinda jank but it works
Ugh, that sounds like a pain. My current drive set up is:
- Old 128gb SATA SSD boot drive, just windows.
- Old 512GB SATA SSD that has some incidental stuff on it.
- Recent-ish old 1TB NVMe SSD that used to have all my games on it but is now blank.
- New 2TB NVMe SSD that now has all my games on it.
#3 is blank so I was just going to install linux there, but also I have ~1.8TB worth of games installed from windows onto #4 that I’d rather not have to try to also install onto #3 and keep them separate. Installing dupes on #4 is equally bad, so of the two I think I’ll go wtih just installing games for linux on #3. Thanks for the advice.
Be careful dual booting off a single partitioned drive ive heard windows likes to fuck with linux installs boot files overwriting them on win updates. Might just be best to put linux and its games on #3
By default many games will use steam runtime for linux compatability which just doesnt work. Gotta go to steam settings>compatability> and switch to the later versions of proton (proton is just a translation layer that converts some code of the game to linux compatible code) sadly many games with anticheat are not playable. Check the sites protondb or areweanticheatyet for info if your game is compatible
Try to play games, learn how to set up wine/proton, discover that none of your games work because you have an old GPU driver, discover that you can’t update it because any time you install a newer driver it hard-locks the system and reboots it in super low-res mode with no driver at all, also your sound dies randomly for no reason that you can discover and trawling reddit for 4 hours comes up with lots of solutions, half of which don’t work and the other half don’t even apply, get frustrated, disable dual-boot and go back to windows.
That’s how my last experience with linux (admittedly that was PopOS not Mint, but) went ~6 months ago. I’m currently building up my frustration-tolerance to give it another try at some point probably with main-line Ubuntu because at least then when I go hunting for solutions to obscure problems the suggested solutions are for that distro. I’m honestly not sure what the difference between Ubuntu and Mint is tho.
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All linux distrobutions are essentially just linux with prepackaged apps. all apps built for one distro can be run on another. So in essence there is no difference besides the installation process, gui, and package manager. (Probably going to get flamed for this because this is kind of a half truth but for most users this is how id describe it, For ease of understanding)
Right, but there is kind of a way distros do certain things, where they put stuff, how they organize the file structure, etc. So the difference is 'Oh yeah this is an issue with xyz, go to /etc/marf/gooble/whatever and edit this file to say ‘Tuesday’ instead of ‘Marlene’ and there is no /etc/marf/…
I ran into this problem a lot with PopOS in the couple weeks I fiddled with it (and with every single problem in the brief time I tried Bazzite since it containerizes everything), which is why I was thinking of going mainline Ubuntu since most of the solutions I came across to the problems I was having were answering questions posted by Ubuntu users and therefore the answers were tailored to Ubuntu.
Okay i see what your saying. but im an arch user and often use distro specific tutorials from other distros to troubleshoot issues. After a little while youll just subconsiously translate what theyre telling you to do in your distro specificly.
Also resources like reddit and stack overflow are great for you to reach out and get a better understanding. But if youve ever been hit with the “did you read the wiki?” or “they just link a wiki page” I can understand how frustrating it can be. Many linux users are pompus dicks who thinks every user should be a power user. My recommendation is still to reach out for help, ive had great success with the manjaro forum aswell.
Yeah, but I haven’t messed with linux in like ~15 years except for my most recent attempt, so I don’t remember where things ought to be so I don’t know that if someone says to look in /etc/marf that on my distro it might be in /etc/bloop instead or whatever. And yeah, I used reddit/stack overflow (wasn’t it called stack exchange before? shrug), it’s just like I said I kept running into solutions that I couldn’t make work for me.
all apps built for one distro can be run on another.
Pfft no. They won’t even work on earlier versions of the same distro. Or later. Or any distro where you’ve installed a library or driver thats older or newer than the one needed for the app your installing.
So in essence there is no difference besides the installation process, gui, and package manager.
There are three different package systems (Red Hat, Debian and Arch) and they are all completely incompatible with each other, and earlier versions of themselves. You can use containers like Snap or Flatpack or half a dozen other standards, which again are all incompatible with each other, and all of them except Snap aren’t fully containerised either - they are dependent on specific libraries and drivers in the distro.
I’ve had similar issues with Arch Linux for years. The front panel outright refuses to work on Linux, even after modifying a whole bunch of things.
Your average person is more likely to get frustrated that stuff is broken/doesn’t work, and switch back rather than having to alter module configuration files and things like that to fix it.
Dont use freaking Arch if your goal is to get everything to work out of the box?
Or, here’s a radical idea, don’t release your freaking distro if not everything works out of the box? :P
Dont buy a project car if you dont want a project. Some people like that shit, but its not for everyone.
Yeah fair enough, but also don’t call it a car if it doesn’t drive.
If you are set on using arch i highly recommend using archinstall or fedora and using the kde plasma or gnome desktop enviorment there are no files to configure and shit just works the desktop is also highly configurable. The only time youd be messing with cfg files would be if you are ricing your system to look like something out of r/unixporn which looks sweet but those people put ALOT of time and effort into it, and their desktop enviorments arent really meant for the average user.
Consumer grade Linux Mint is impossible to differentiate from Windows/MacOS.
That sure is easy to say.
In practice, I tried to use mint for the os on a family computer and just couldn’t make it work. I’ve been an IT guy for years and have tons of experience with both Windows and MacOS, but virtually none with Linux. Long story short, trying to make that machine work with Linux mint was just taking up way too much of my time. I just needed to get a few simple features out of it (and maybe 1 hard feature, parental controls). But having very little Linux experience, it just wasn’t going to happen in a reasonable time frame. I eventually had to give up and put the Mac OS back on it (an iMac).
Anyway, mint actually has a lot in common with the Mac OS, it makes a very small set of controls very easy to use. And technically, you can do just about anything else you need to with the terminal, but that can be challenging to navigate.
I’m getting so sick of Microsoft and Apples bullshit that I’m about to switch personally, but from the research i did it sounds like the biggest problem with Linux on the desktop is that there still aren’t standard, unified, unchanging APIs that can be relied upon, so finding third party software and utilities is still a crap shoot compared to something like Windows that can still run binaries that targets it’s 1995 era APIs.
Any software that requires me to compile it from source just to run it on my machine is fine for me, a software developer, and probably fine for my mum that just does word processing and browsing since she won’t be installing things, but seems a little too friction filled for your average enthusiast?
Depends on how fringe you go. There’s a remarkable amount of stuff that can be installed from the Program Manager. The ones that aren’t will take some tweaking but… I remember a time when I was trying to do this very thing in Windows 95. If you want it bad enough, you’ll figure it out.
I’m trying to channel my younger GenX, and if it’s a bit of a struggle for younger generations then I encourage them to embrace it. It’s an unfortunate truth that not everything works like it works on an IPhone, and I can’t overstate how important it is to learn some of the basics of the OS and troubleshooting for everyone’s future.
I’m trying to channel my younger GenX, and if it’s a bit of a struggle for younger generations then I encourage them to embrace it. It’s an unfortunate truth that not everything works like it works on an IPhone, and I can’t overstate how important it is to learn some of the basics of the OS and troubleshooting for everyone’s future.
Lol I’m a millenial software engineer. I grew up using Windows and was able to learn my way around a filesystem perfectly fine without ever having to compile any programs from source.
Don’t put Linux’s lack of stability on GenZ’s use of apps.
Heheh I have full respect for Millenials. Notice I just said ‘younger generations’.
they mention genz specifically but boomers and millenials are falling down the same path expecting software to just download and work, Because of the google/apple/microsoft/sony/nintendo ecosystems we are so used to. But even in these ecosystems learning to troubleshoot is paramount so I expect to see younger people entering the linux sphere in droves.
You definitely are a minority though, most people dont care for this stuff at all. Most will simply give up instead of doing more research and trying different tactics to repair software and hardware.
Gui package managers are great for simple click and install usage similar to windows. but i prefer these since the list of apps is modderated by the repository you choose. So no more googling for a program and downloading a virus because of the 10 fake links google provides to your download. So imo its even safer for users like your mom looking for software is alot less risky.
That’s my point though, Linux is fine for power users and novices, its the middle ground of people who don’t code, aren’t going to learn how to code just to use an OS, but still understand computers enough to try and push them to do more.
There’s a huge amount of people smart enough to know that a piece of software or a few pieces of software can automate something, and can accurately evaluate whether or not to trust the source of an exe file, but who don’t understand what compiling from source is or how they should do that for their distro.
But thats what im saying even a middle ground user would never need to compile from source. Anything youd want to do automatically can generally be done from a script and many things you can think of automation wise has allready been made into a script in bash or python.
Just recently i needed to remove all of the foriegn titles from a list of roms i have on my pc. i found a python script on github dropped it into malwarebytes (because i didnt feel like looking at code, many windows users do this too) and ran the script. I can code but my skills are script kitty chatgpt level. Im essentially the user you are describing
Never install Chrome
Have tried linux with davinci resolve. Not a smooth experience. Only reason im not a full time linux user.
Still waiting for it to be a equivalent option
Sadly anticheat and proprietary software are definitely a huge hurdle that linux is yet to overcome. I highly recomend dual booting off a second drive to dip your toes in again. Many FREE alternative software like davinci exists but if youre already accustomed to a certain program i can definitely understand the reluctance to switch.
Until you actually try to do work on it and play games and vr. Then you find out what a complete nightmare it is to use.
It works remarkably well for a lot of things if you put a little effort into it. Depending on the distro, you might have a little more trouble trying to fix something. For my use case it can do gaming, CAD, office work, and some light programming just fine with some quirks and tradeoffs. Lemmy in general is a good place to ask troubleshooting questions too
Operating SystemsEVERYTHING.FTFY!
Big tech is an asset of the billionaire class
They jam ai everywhere. Because it’s monitoring you and reporting back to them what you say.
I hope there is at least one human that has to listen to the filthy, angry, Klingon profanities I scream, while jerking myself raw to hard core, ball draining, homoerotic, gay porn…
Its time for your ascension ceremony. Weve got the pain sticks ready in the holodeck.
I’m here for it. You had me at something Something Klingon and porn
“So what I’m gonna do is piss and moan like an impotent jerk, and then bend over and take it up the tailpipe!” — users of proprietary OSs who don’t have the self-respect to switch to Linux
Yeah, I’ve seen the same song and dance for the last 20 years. At this point I just shrug whenever I hear Windows users complain about their shitty OS.
Android users “i play both sides so I come out on the bottom”
Into everything
FTFY
I was taking the CCNA course then tests in 2013. I remember how they were pushing their IoT prediction in the courses so hard.
IoT ended up cringe af. To control your vacuum cleaner, it needs to connect to a remote API server hosted in AWS then back to you sitting next to the vacuum cleaner. I could say at the time nobody wants that shit. Now I hate it even more and I skip all the smart products.
I have a similar feeling about LLMs now. They are nice, they solve some problems nicely, they are far from perfect, I dont want them shoved everywhere.
I don’t know what they were teaching you at the course, but home/personal IoT was never the most interesting thing in the field. IoT sees a lot more interest and use in industrial application, for example stuff like logistics, farming, automation, measuring, stuff like traffic signals and smart grids, and so on
I only buy hardware that can operate without a cloud service but most normies can’t host a service on their own network so the SaaS based cloud services are definitely here to stay.
Is this some kind of windows joke I’m too GPL to understand?
Dear purchasers of proprietary bullshit: STOP!
People apparently prefer to fund their oppressors
gonna be real silly in 2.5 years when they shut down the ai backend and leave a gaping hole in the OS architecture
“Ohhhh, that tired old OS was using AI 1.6. We’ve been offering the new OS -now with AI 1.8 - for 7 solid weeks now! We recommend you upgrade now, as we’re shutting down AI 1.6 on Tuesday.”
They will just instruct everyone to throw their obsolete AI pc onto the landfill like they already have been doing with machines that won’t run windows 11
Big tech will do what is best for extracting money customers and investors.
If you really care what your operating system is made of, use Linux.
Cool and true advise. 95% of users or normies will literally not do that.
Linux users are less than 5% of all PC users.
In the near future, probably within 12 months, all the standard features of Windows will be gone. The won’t be any Explorer, there won’t be any Start menu, there won’t be any opening screen.
There will just be a prompt and you say “computer, open yesterdays word file”, like in Star Trek. There won’t be any “apps” to install - you’ll just say “phone, open the order menu for Boise City Chick-Fil-A” and it will navigate automatically to the page.
Sure, if you’re a total weirdo you will be able to install a bash shell and navigate manually, but hardly anyone will do that.
BTW, AI is being introduced into Linux as well.
Or continue, cause I ain’t using those operating systems. All I need now is a proper linux phone.
That’s exactly where I’m at too. And my requirements aren’t all that high, I just need:
- all day battery life
- reliable SMS and MMS
- decent quality speakers and mic
I don’t even need app compatibility, just a decent browser, and those already exist in current phone projects. If you give me the above, I’ll switch and may even find time to help port desktop apps to the phone, or even develop some myself.
Out of curiousity, what does that get you that Pixel+GrapheneOS wouldnt?
All well and good until my mom’s wifi printer stops working again and I need to fix it over the phone. I’d rather like to have an AI agent figure that out for her and fix it itself.
Yeah AI is nice for stuff like this but anyone can use chatgpt in the same way on linux the only difference being one is baked into the system.
Maybe stop using them instead of asking them to do something they are not going to do.
I’m glad I disabled copilot in the registry. the poweruser shit I do to make my computer usable is actually why I’d actually do really well with linux lmao
Big tech‘s response: „Have you tried using wood glue to add texture?“
