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PC Gamer saying this is a good sign though, still one of the most popular special interest magazines that’s not porn
IMO, the hardest part of moving over is relearning a bunch of things you’ve taken for granted. However, Windows has been changing and breaking things at such a rapid pace, that not even my friends who still use it can keep track.
I too, am super brave for switching to Linux from Windows 11.
Joking aside, I love it. My relatively new laptop runs so much smoother on it. W11 always was doing something in the background and making my fan blast even when I wasn’t using it. That’s all gone and it’s a much happier device.
My printer works, my wacom intous tablet works, all my steam games so far work (I haven’t played every single one, but the ones I have played are fine).
Honestly, there was some things I had to troubleshoot at the beginning. I just asked AI and it gave me the terminal commands that I needed to get it done.
10/10 would recommend… if you’re brave.
The biggest problem with Linux has always been windows software imo.
If people don’t need any specific software and can adapt to the Linux alternatives, like LibreOffice… people will see some distros are now easier than Windows to use… and… you don’t have bad surprises on updates
how does steam operate on Linux? anything I need to do to port over stuff?
I hate PCGamer’s website. Everytime I get partway through an article, a pop-up shows asking me to sign up to their newsletter. Now the pop-up alone would turn me off of their website, but what happens is the pop-up scrolls the article all the way back to the top of the page. So I completely lose my reading position.
PCGamer isn’t the only site to do this, but I think it’s one of the more popular ones that do.
The other thing that sites do now that earns an instant DNS block on my pihole, is capturing the back action that prevents leaving the site to show a pop-up that says “wait, before you go, check out these other articles” or something along those lines. HELL… NO!
Yeah, DHTML popups aren’t much different from the old popups that used to plague the internet. The only real difference is that I haven’t seen them used maliciously like the old popups were to be super annoying, but even “good faith” uses were all “hey, stop what you’re doing and do this for me” without any shame that went along with a real person doing that in a store.
I look forward to the day someone gets an AI to block this shit (on the assumption that it’s more complicated than blocking the old style popups without interfering with legitimate DHTML and needs context awareness).
My theory is that all this is the fault of the cookie law. Before that, the design philosophy was that you could not break the flow of a visitor by pop-ups etc., because they would go somewhere else before even looking at your content.
When all the big websites suddenly implemented increasingly annoying cooking consent dialogs, the flow was already broken everywhere. And so now the floodgates had opened for all kinds “subscribe to our newsletter”, “get a welcome 10% rebate” etc., because users no longer has the expectation of an unbroken flow.
And, my god was that law stupid. What we needed was carefully balanced non-negotiable limits on what websites were allowed to do in terms of tracking users; what we got was every website implementing a site-dependent UI for functionality already present in every web browser (“turn off cookies”). The rules got different when GDPR arrived later, both for the better and for the worse. But the flow-breaking pop-ups we will probably never get rid of now that the public has learned to live with them.
End of rant.
So, so brave…
This person’s writing style is, frankly, well, pretty obnoxious.
…yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man…
I read your comment and started reading the article. I started feeling a little self-conscious over my liberal use of Oxford commas, as his sentence structure wasn’t that much different from mine. But then I got to my tenth fucking “, well,” and “, frankly,” and realized what you were upset about. This is, well, quite frankly, highly respectable journalism.
At least it’s not AI
Made the switch to Ubuntu in 2019. The only time I use windows is at work, sadly, but in my main computer, that malware hasn’t been installed for years
I started using linux a few months ago after a longer break. It’s so smooth and i hardly ever use windows. There are some niche things that don’t support linux, and some need a bunch of workarounds. I don’t even think linux needs to improve more, but i do hope comparability is going up
I started to enjoy my Ubuntu install after I gave up on the idea of using my computer for tinkering or work.
I just use it for the browser and steam nowadays. Also I did my thesis fully in Ubuntu with libreoffice but that’s the last professional stuff I did with it, aside from some programming.
Nowadays it just works xd
I’ll go ahead and share my experience with Mint so far. Gaming worked mostly fine which is pleasing.
I couldn’t get many basic features working correctly for my dual monitor set up. Even after putting in the time to research.
I couldn’t get multiple proprietary programs to work for my job.
The customization in settings is extremely limited.
I have to mess around with complex terminal commands I do not fully understand every time I need to do something more than use my browser.
I will try another distro this year, but it is definitely not a foolproof experience.
A lot of things Windows does easily, I took for granted.
My first foray into Linux was Mint. I’m glad I did, because it’s a reasonably friendly entry point, but coming from macOS, Cinnamon began to feel quite cramped quite quickly. The end result is that my server machine is running Mint, but the other computers I have (with the exception of my M2 Air Macbook), are all running Kubuntu with Plasma.
I’m sure that I should prefer Gnome, because I’m a Mac guy, but I just can’t get on with it. So Plasma it is.
Can you give some examples of basic features that weren’t working with your dual monitor setup?
KDE might also help with this btw, as while I didn’t have any glaring issues with dual monitors in cinnamon (on Fedora), it improved overall when I switched to KDE. Used to have to change the audio output to my TV whenever I enabled it, now it happens automatically (plus the option to disable my HDMI audio if I preferred the “keep the same audio when switching to a different video output” behavior).
Only issue was that it didn’t work correctly the very first time, followed by it suddenly working the next time when I was intending to troubleshoot it.
Imo, KDE handles dual monitors better than windows even, especially if your secondary monitor is a TV you enable and disable depending on what you’re doing. Two clicks to toggle it, it handles different scaling seemlessly across the monitors (iirc, windows would “pop” to the scaling setting of whatever monitor they were mostly showing on as you moved them). Mouse cursor visibility improves when shaking the mouse, so it’s easy to find it on a giant screen.
Imo, KDE handles dual monitors better than windows even, especially if your secondary monitor is a TV you enable and disable depending on what you’re doing.
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeh I need an alias to unfuck KDE whenever I unplug/plug back in the cable for my 2nd monitor
alias kdereset='kquitapp6 plasmashell && kstart plasmashell'
The customization in settings is extremely limited.
Give KDE Plasma a try. Sometimes they’re criticised for having too many settings.
Proprietary software not working isn’t a bug, though. It’s by (their) design. The people selling it choose not to make it work.
Regardless, that is a friction they experienced when switching, regardless of who was at fault.
That was exactly my experience giving Linux a try for the first time. I gave up but then decided to give it another try with Linux Mint. I’ve been using it for over a year now and I haven’t looked back. There is a small amount of software that I just can’t get to work on Linux so I have dual boot set up, but I found myself booting into windows fewer and fewer times. And now I’m at a point where I actually dread booting into windows. I’t just doesn’t feel like it’s my machine anymore when it’s running windows.
Long story short, give it time, try a few distros and you will eventually get used to it, at which point you will not want to go back to windows.
If you have the hard drive and RAM capacity, I can recommend WinBoat. It’ll work on a machine with 8Gb of RAM, but it’ll cost certainly a bit of a dog. 16Gb is cool though.
I mostly use it to listen to Apple Music, which doesn’t have any other way of listening to lossless audio in Linux. But the Windows app works a charm.
Been using mint for the last few months after messing with raspian on some pis for a few months before that and the only time i had to log i to windows (dual boot) since getting mint was to play the original dungeon keeper in a network game with my son because for some reason the lutris wine/dosbox install wouldnt start a multiplayer match with the windows installed veraion on my sons laptop. Otherwise i have got everything i wanted working on there and its a much more pleasant experience. It feela like my computer again. Something i havent said since the end of windows XP.
There’s a learning curve to it. I have yet to find anything I could do on windows that I can’t do on Linux. Lots of stuff took me a while to understand, but daily driving arch for 2 years and I actually cant believe how limited windows is and how I put up with it for so long.
Only real exceptions thus far are that you can’t play league of legends or fortnite. And thats because the developers have their servers set to kick any Linux users basically. Not a limitation of the operating system.
Made the switch during Christmas to Cachyos. I am extremely glad I did, and so relieved to finally be free of Microsofts clammy grasp.
I already stopped playing online competitive games long ago, so the anti-cheat thing isn’t really a problem for me. All the games I want to play works fine, even better in fact than they did on Windows.
The competitive game anti-cheat issue is kinda overblown nowadays. A lot of popular competitive FPS games run perfectly fine, anti-cheat and all, on Linux with wine/proton. And the ones that don’t either have incredibly invasive anti-cheat that you wouldn’t want running on your computer anyways, or have server-side “protections” that properly boot Linux players out of the game for some arbitrary reason.
Wow. So brave.
If your job is paid by advertising, yes.
Why, this will only want Microsoft to pay more for advertising, as clearly it’s becoming more necessary to do so.
How are trade publications getting more from Microsoft if their readers move to Linux?
Because losing customers would force Microsoft to advertise more in these trade publications, to swing momentum back to Windows.
Don’t preach to the choir, convince the wayward sheep to return, so to speak.
I doubt loosing your sponsor their clients would allow you to charge them more money, but you may be a better salesperson than I.
I am on Linux and never looking back to Windows (except if I have to use Microsoft Teams for interviews).
I have to use Teams for work and it works fine in a (Chrome-based) browser. I have a Chromium install that I only use for work stuff.
I had several issues using teams on browsers before so I felt compelled to use Windows for the app. But I admit that I never tried using it on Chromium so I will try next time.
If you can handle the browser version, works fine on Linux with Firefox.
Doesn’t Teams work in browsers, though (as a guest at least)?
I’ve been gaming on Linux mostly if not entirely full time since 2014. Back when you had to look to see if there was a Steam icon alongside the Windows and sometimes Apple logo because Proton wasn’t the “everything works” magic it is now.
Anyone complaining about the state of Linux today look like diaper shitting babies. “WAAAH! My privacy invading rootkit requiring multiplayer CoD Fortnite meme slop sippy cup game is specifically designed to not run on Linux. WAAAAH!” Yeah, I remember when hair didn’t grow near my genitals too, but then I stopped acknowledging any of my feelings in public except anger and pretended to like beer out of sheer force of peer pressure, and thus became a fully grown man by the standards of my culture. Get on my level.
What were we talking about?
You’re definitely living up to your username 👌
I always have since before joining this experiment in mediocrity we call the Fediverse.
In an age of enshitification, pretty ok most of the time is to be celebrated
Entering my 12th year as a Linux user, I can’t disagree with that.
You keep up the good fight.
