Already did and it’s glorious! Steam works beautifully and the only final thing that I’m missing is Adobe products.
I recommend, if you want to try Linux, that you try out the ‘Debian’ distribution, and use the ‘KDE Plasma’ desktop environment. It makes for a very Windows-like experience and really assisted me with the transition between OSs.
Outside of Steam, how have you found gaming compatibility? I know Xbox Gamepass doesn’t work as that’s very specifically a Windows app, but how about other standalone games/platforms?
Outside of steam will be a case by case basis. I wouldn’t expect a lot of luck, and it may require that you use a compatibility layer like Wine.
and the only final thing that I’m missing is Adobe products.
I miss Affinity Designer! Bought a license and I like it but no linux port 🙄
I can’t get used Inkscape, it’s so different and confusing for me
Have you ever seen how to draw a circle in GIMP?
I hate you :c that was… Disturbing
Krita > Gimp
Krita and GIMP are tools for different use cases.
I completely disagree. Debian is not beginner-friendly. Go with Bazzite if your focus is gaming.
It is a gaming-focused distribution. It’s also an “atomic” distribution, which basically means it’s really hard to break it. It’s more like Android or IOS where the OS and base system are managed by someone else. They’re read-only so you can’t accidentally break them.
For example, instead of trying to manage your own video card drivers, they come packaged with the base system image, and they’re tested to make sure they work with all the other base components.
I’ve been using Linux since the 1990s, so I’ve run my share of distributions: Slackware, RedHat, Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu, etc. Even for someone experienced, atomic distributions are great. But, for a newcomer they’re so much better.
In what world is a Debian base not beginner friendly my fiancé that could barely use windows is using it just fine
Has your fiancé had to update drivers? Has he had to upgrade to a new release? Has he had to figure out how to install a version of something that isn’t in the Debian stable repositories?
If the only application your fiancé uses is Firefox, then he might go a long time before having any kind of problem. It all depends on how he uses it.
It’s basically a Chromebook for her
If it’s a her, you mean fiancée, fiancé is used only for men. And, it’s basically a chromebook in how she uses it. But, chromebooks are designed so that you never have to do any system administration. You never have to upgrade drivers or figure out how to get to the next release.
She probably hasn’t had to deal with that yet, but eventually the system will have to be updated. Over time, cruft piles up and makes it harder and harder to upgrade and manage. Atomic distributions are designed to be much more like chromebooks. Someone else manages the upgrades and the tricky choices, and then you just install their base image.
Most people won’t budge. It doesn’t matter if Win10 is unsupported or isn’t getting a security update, I reckon a solid 40 of 43% will just stay on it until programs they use stop working.
I play only on Linux, and it works great. Come on over!
Starting to plan my next build and will likely go full Linux
Same. I just gotta figure out what distro I want to run. Nobara, Bazzite, Mint, Zorin, Kubuntu, idk. I get analysis paralysis. I’ve run Ubuntu, Fedora, and even tried Arch once, but it’s been a long while since I’ve been full Linux. I’m definitely done with Windows tho (at least outside of work, but I can’t control that).
I’m using Garuda and it has a setup specifically for gaming. The gamer look it comes with out of the box is ugly in my opinion, but that’s easy to change.I highly recommend it. It’s Arch based, so the AUR and Arch wiki work great with it. It’s really great and (in my opinion) user friendly.
Only semi-related: Why do they always show pictures of Gates when he hasn’t been involved in MS in a long time? Why never Satya Nadella?
EDIT: Also, yes, related to the actual question already living Linux full time and when October rolls around probably gonna back up everything from the Windows side of my dual-boot and wipe the 1TB NVMe Windows is on to use as storage.
Personally, I think this picture of Steve Balmer is so much more iconic and should be used for every single article about Microsoft or Windows:
It’s weird how MS’s putting developers first became a joke. Back in the 80’s, companies like HP and IBM had open warehouses with coders at desks lined up like factory workers. MS was the first big company to give a private office to every programmer.
The approach isn’t what became a joke, it was the absolutely unhinged way in which it was presented in that famous Ballmer stage appearance.
Oh sure, it was crazy. But the sentiment behind it was good. It’s like how Howard Dean got dunked on for his scream.
I was thinking the same thing. He will just forever be known as the guy. Maybe it will change once he dies?
I couldn’t name another Microsoft employee if a gun was to my head. but I can still vividly remember myself in 4th grade reading about Bill Gate’s mega mansion in Popular Mechanics for Kids
Gabe Newell?
He would be also be a reasonable person to include on an article citing Steam data.
I’m somewhat in the same boat but I remember Mister “Developers Developers Developers” Steve Ballmer who was also immortalized by the “Ballmer Peak” XKCD. https://xkcd.com/323/
It’s maybe some kind of circular logic, but my brain doesn’t recognize a picture of Satya Nadella = “Microsoft’s CEO” for some reason.
Maybe your brain would, if it had a chance to connect the two if they posted more pictures of Satya and Microsoft in the same context…
The more people hop onto Linux the faster and better funded support for Linux development becomes. If you’re a single player gamer or play Valve multiplayer games primarily, make the jump to Linux. Get on Mint, get on Fedora, Ubuntu, etc and get off Microsoft’s shitboat. You already took off from Reddit. Wean off all these other money/data leeches
I am going to attempt to switch to Linux, I’m definitely not going to willingly use windows platforms again.
Already prepared everything for the jump. Switched MS Office for LibreOffice, and Outlook for Betterbird. Tested install, configuration and access to backups in a VM. Next vacation I take I’ll go for it. Mint is my choice of Distro, because of Steam/Gaming reasons. With the US being antagonistic, if not outright hostile, right now, and Microsoft having their disgusting Copilot AI Analysis Fingers in everything, it’s the rational choice I think.
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.
Just a small update, I made the switch to EndeavourOS /w XFCE4 about two weeks ago and so far everything works perfectly. Even modern games on Steam w/ Nvidia graphics card. Thanks again.
I gave Linux Mint a try last week when I received the news about the obligatory MS account for W11. Not that I’ll “upgrade” to W11 but anyway.
Very smooth installation experience. The OS and software like Steam, Brave, Nvidia drivers and some audio & video stuff installed through the package control in no time. I could actually work with it.
Half of my game library is made only for W though. Or the small blocker things like GTA V that works well in Mint in story mode, the Battleye thing won’t start of course, so expect no GTA Online in Mint either.
I think I’ll keep Linux Mint and Windows under dual boot and use Windows only when necessary. Or run W10 in a virtual box in Mint 😎.
Dual boot is the way for right now. Proton is huge, but there are still a good number of games with compatibility issues or rootkit anticheats. Personally I advise steering clear of the latter, but that’s neither here nor there.
I use CachyOS as my daily driver and booted up the Windows partition maybe 3 times since setting this up back in February (and most of those times were just to play REPO because Elgato hardware with dual input and output has serious issues with Linux, but I’ve sorted that out now with a workaround)
I was able to run SimTower on Linux. I haven’t tried SimCoopter, but there are so many bugs in that game it likely won’t work lol
Thing is, before battleye, gta online worked perfectly. I played it for years on every remotely popular linux distro, from debian, to ubuntu, linux mint, fedora etc. It’s just the fucking anticheat.
I had read that Steam on WINE is pretty stable. Is it not?
Valve made a compatibility layer for the Steam Deck and Linux called Proton. It uses a lot of technologies, including WINE, dxvk, and more to make Windows games run well on Linux. It basically takes Windows API calls and translates them to Linux with little to no performance penalty.
Steam also has native builds for Windows, macOS, ChromeOS, and Linux now, so you can just install it. Most Linux distros have Steam right in their software manager now.
Typically, unless the game has blocked Linux with something like kernel-level anticheat, it’ll “just work” on Linux now. There is a community database called ProtonDB that has a list of games and how well they do or don’t work.
Hope this helps and feel free to ask any questions.
Switch to Linux. As a big-time gamer, I did it last year and it’s been fantastic. Only issue is if you main games with root kit anticheat…but with enough momentum in Linux direction, game studios will be forced to abandon those dubious detection methods anyway.
Sadly I use way too many programs that only work on windows or Mac that Linux would handicap me. The free open source versions of yhe apps I use are no where near as capable.
My only option I can think of would be running a virtual machine of Win10 on a Linux install so I can still use those apps.
Would you mind sharing a couple of the names of the programs that only work on Windows for you? I’m a bit curious.
I’m not Tyler Bourbon, but it’s Fusion 360 for me. I sound like a broken record at this point, but it’s the only piece of software that keeps a windows install in my house
Hey Autodesk you should put F360 on Linux
FreeCad is getting much more capable, have you tried it?
It’s not like Windows 10 will magically stop booting or something…
Right?
I never understand why people are so obsessed with not getting updates. They usually just break everything and bloat the OS.
“But my security!” OS updates are going to protect you from 99% of the bad actors out there. They do nothing against social engineering. They don’t make you use strong passwords. Most of the security flaws OS updates are addressing are the kinda of attacks that only state actors or organized crime rings have the resources and abilities to exploit.
Governments? Heck yeah they need to be concerned. Large enterprises? Definitely. Small businesses? Eh it’s probably for the best to protect your livelihood even if you aren’t the juiciest target. But for an individual using their PC for gaming, social media, streaming content, online shopping, etc… The cost-benefit analysis is different.
It’s not different from physical security. Theres a reason you don’t need to go through TSA to get on a bus.
For now yes but when a zero day is found 1 guy could literally take down every single 10 install and Microsoft won’t be bothered to fix it
I’m planning on it.
I tried a rest run with Kubuntu on an old laptop I had, and it runs 95% flawlessly. My biggest issue is my new Brother printer that I’m trying to install connected to Wi-Fi. The system sems to know it’s there, but then doesn’t seem to install the drivers. My Android phone prints there just fine.
I assume you tried adding a new printer through KDE? There’s usually no driver needed if all you need to do is simply print/scan.
Does it fail with both options?
I thank you sincerely for getting back to me on this. I wanted to let you know I just figured it out! I thought I’d document it for the next person to come along.
I had tried all of the options in that screenshot, and none seemed to work.
Investigating further, it was a Brother printer, so I needed to download special drivers: https://support.brother.com/g/b/productsearch.aspx?c=us&lang=en&content=dl
Then, arcane magic needed to be performed on the command line: https://support.brother.com/g/b/downloadhowto.aspx?c=us&lang=en&prod=mfcj4335dw_us_eu&os=128&dlid=dlf006893_000&flang=4&type3=625
I had done all that, but I still had a problem. Digging through the script output, apparently I had a bad “libsane” installed with apt. Also, to add to the problems, apt doesn’t recognize the string “libsane” now. We are to use its new name “libsane1” now in apt! So, I tried to reinstall and then reinstall the brother printer drivers, to no avail. Eventually, I had to completely uninstall libsane, and then reinstall it. And everything magically worked.
It’s so easy! 🤨
One thing to be ready to have is the IP number of the printer, which I was able to get in the WiFi options of the printer.
Whew! Test page printed on my test machine! I feel like this was my last major hurdle before adopting Linux on other machines.
Again, thanks for responding!
Thanks for documenting it for future people! Glad you got it to work.
Unpopular opinion but I’m just using 11. I deal with enough problems with Linux at work and as hard as it is to believe, Windows just work and fits my workflow too well. Linux works great on my Steam Deck but the occasional weird quirks it has with certain games/launchers means I can’t use it as my main gaming platform, it’s only fine on the Deck because it has advantages for the form factor.
All games work in 11. You will get the best picture quality for graphics on 11. More DX9 games work in 11 than worked in 10. Path tracing is best on 11. I have some games that are DVD installs, no game store launcher.
There are different Linux programs that address most Windows issues but not all. With Windows, you can install Win 11, install GPU driver, and start playing games. I do avoid using Steam due to their extortion, so eventually I find games that can’t run on Linux.
No way I’m switching to Linux yet, multi monitors support with mixed resolutions and vrr on nvidia still kinda sucks. As soon as someone makes that work I’ll try it out on a separate partition. Buy last time I tried my other monitors had all kinds of issues when I had games open with gysnc
Dual mon with diff res works as expected here. I even have different hz I think
