October 14, 2025...

Its all about teh enjagement.

Them: I make typos for engagement.

Me: I make typos because I don't spellcheck/grammar check and I'm stupid.

We are not the same.

Tale as old as Jeff K

Currently writing from a Mint laptop, works perfectly with minimal setup and no command line whatsoever, the only annoying thing is that the caps lock key behaves differently. Though Linux's reputation is that it can probably be modded out.

I also installed Diodon to recover the cool clipboard function that Windows has.

I could probably get the customizeable start menu, but i actually don't miss it that much

Another recommendation for Linux Mint here. Just live boot off a USB drive and try it out. Maybe dual boot for a while if you’re unsure about just getting rid of windows cold turkey.

I use it daily on my work machine (2 year old Dell laptop) and it feels pretty flawless and polished. Even for basic desktop stuff I like it better than windows, but then all the techy Linux shit it’s still there if you care to use it. I use this “user friendly” distro to stare at plain text in monospaced fonts all day, usually between source code files and command-line stuff.

Ignore everything else, go linux mint.

Any distro will do. I suggest using one that has a complete installer like Mint or OpenSuse and then use KDE Plasma as desktop, which closely resembles Windows.

I can vouch for mint, I picked it up recently after not touching Linux for almost 20 years and it was very intuitive and Windows-like. Haven't dug very deep into it yet but it was at least easy to setup and get the necessities working

MFW I revert to Windows 2000

😎

no longer receive security update

Thats why its dated 2025

They've been doing it since '95. Only this time, the alternatives are so much better

Yeah I've always been a very casual Linux enthusiast (key word is casual) since I was a teen. Setup and things "just working" out of the box have absolutely never been the case, even in 2024, and even though people like to say it does. In an ideal situation on an ideal computer with ideal hardware, you don't have to tweak anything. But for most people, there are going to be some annoying issues and tweaks you have to work through.

If a Linux system has already been set up and tested for the end user, then it is a great alternative. But in my experience, these systems absolutely never work perfectly out of the box and it takes some technical know how to get to that point. Ever since Windows 7, Windows has "just worked" out of the box... especially because it comes pre-loaded on your device.

I have been dealing with some issues with my Bluetooth module in Windows. I had eventually solved the problem, but the fix seemed to have reverted itself somewhat recently. Annoyed, I thought I'd finally commit to a switch to Linux on my daily driver since my laptop doesn't support Win 11. Well, I chose Linux Mint since it doesn't use Wayland which for some reason has poor compatibility with my common Logitech mouse. Everything had been fine but then I found instead of the Bluetooth module crashing like in Windows, which just makes me have to reset the module, the entire system crashes in Linux instead and requires me to reboot it. Frustrating to say the least.

And then, as you've brought up, gaming on Linux is just generally not a good experience unless you have all of your games on Steam.

Linux can be awesome but it's absolutely not for everyone...especially people with less technical knowledge (unless it is set up for them), people who want something to "just work" without any fiddling, or people who do a lot of gaming outside of Steam.

I was lazy and went with pop!_os. Required minimal tweaking, and so far there are very few games I couldn't run

I was lucky that when I moved to Linux some months ago I got used to install my games from Lutris and Steam, which seems to solve most problems and only maybe 1 game of the 15 or so I tried so far wouldn'twork no matter what.

That said, I and to figure out how to do diagnostics and use Winetricks and my little doc of Tips & Trick cover 5 games (out of about 15) so those are the ones that would work only after tweaking.

I still have weird situations like The Sims 3 from Steam not working but the pirate version I tried working flawlessly on first try (so now I know how to install pirated games with Lutris) which is maybe not the kind of thing the publishers would want people to know, but more often than not things just work.

All this to say that it's way better now than before if you use the kind of tools that wrap Wine (or in the case of Steam, Proton which is a derivative of Wine) with install scripts that will do the necessary game-speciric tweaks for you, but even then you'll need to learn how to diagnose problems and do the tweaks yourself if you want a higher that 60% or so rate of success or if you want to hoist the Skull & Bones and sail the high seas from your Linux Galleon.

Really bummed your experience has been like that! :(

In my humble experience, I've gotten almost everything new and old to run via Steam, or my GoG games to run via Heroic. Vermintide 2, Metro: Exodus, Enter the Gungeon, X-COM 2, BattleTech, MechWarrior 5, I even got old stuff like Sims 2 working flawlessly via Bottles.

Trying to install stuff like you would on Windows by running installers manually seems to not be so great though...could that have been it perhaps?

Using front-ends that manage Proton / WINE for you makes the process so much easier.

I ditched Windows entirely because Vermintide kept BSODing my Win10 install, and it wouldn't even let me "refresh" the OS. Fully doing work and play on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed these days and the only thing I'm REALLY missing is VR.

I have yet to read news of it actually happening though

Rarely happens though because who the fuck uses Linux?

"no, wait, not like that!"

I would argue it's even easier, I don't even have to bypass defender and AMSI in Linux, not that it's hard but I don't even have to.

Bold of you to oppose the oppressive Linux lobby here on Lemmy. They are worse than the most militant vegans...

Exactly. Us Linux users, as a collective, tend to shoot ourselves in the foot here because we can't decide on the "best" distro for beginners. If we all just said one thing, with confidence and without arguments, and without saying "it depends...", more would probably make the switch.

No major outlets that the average user would frequent are likely to sell laptops with any Linux distro pre installed. Many non-technical users wouldn't even reinstall Windows by themselves, let alone Linux.

Any of the usual starter distros would be a good choice because once they are in the ecosystem they can find their own path. When a non technical person asks how to get Linux, there is no worse answer than a barrage of information followed by more questions. Just pick one, say it confidently, and assist them to make it happen.

Arch would be a bad idea, as if a user finds installing Fedora too hard Arch ain't doing them any favors.

And there are guides. Youtube "how to install (linux distro)," if it's popular there's already 500 guides.

As for data loss this should come as no surprise: back it up. Preferably on an external hdd/ssd, or your choice of cloud service if you're one of those people. Erasing your entire hard drive and installing a new OS will perhaps unsurprisingly wipe all your data without a backup. Frankly you should already have backups, idk why people pretend data loss is impossible on windows but it has happened to me and I can't be the only one.

It's actually pretty easy with the guided installer currently shipping with arch, and there are actually numerous guides on how to install Arch.

Choosing not to is perfectly reasonable, but it's not for lack of effort from the Linux community trying to make things easier and more accessible.

There's a bunch of beginner friendly distros, it's just that when you want to make things work as well as they did on Windows then you hit a wall.

I'm using Mint (which is as beginner friendly as it gets)... Because my display signal dropped whenever there was load on the GPU on Bazzite (Fedora based) which is also supposed to be beginner friendly...

No easy way to disable the audio outputs I don't actually use. On Windows? Couple of clicks, all done through GUI.

Wifi antenna didn't work, had to install unofficial drivers from GitHub.

I've got a multi display setup and sometimes I want to switch where things are displayed. On Windows I downloaded Monitor profile switcher and it does everything for me, just had to save the setup to a profile and assign a keyboard shortcut (which isn't essential as there's a shortcut to switch it on the taskbar), it's all done inside the program. On Mint I had to create a script to choose what to display with what resolution and create a new keyboard shortcut in a separate program because the alternative was to have to open the file explorer to open the folder where the script it saved to execute it.

Playing games is easier than ever! Except that games that have both a Linux and Windows version fuck up when it comes to cloud saving on Steam because the save game folder isn't necessarily the same (and the Deck installs the Windows version by default so fuck compatibility between that Linux running machine and Linux PCs!) so you still have to force install the windows version even though there's a perfectly playable Linux version!

Don't want to use the terminal? "Everything can be done without it but using it makes things easier..." When people say that they mean that you can browse the web and write stuff on LibreOffice but as soon as you deviate from stuff that you can accomplish with a simple Android tablet you're fucked because you'll have issues you couldn't imagine. If you don't want to use the terminal at that point you need to write scripts outside the terminal and then execute them so technically you didn't do what you needed to do in the terminal but the end result is the same!

If these businesses wouldn't switch to a newer version of windows, what makes you think they'll switch to arch or any linux distro?

Absolutely not, even if we could all work together that would be a horrible idea. Linux is not a Windows replacement and the Linux community doesn't need to be overwhelmed with Windows users asking why a specific feature doesnt work exactly the same.

If you want Arch just use EndeavourOS. Its got an easy installer and a slightly less break-neck update schedule and you get the Arch User Repository for all the cool stuff.

It's scheduled to stop receiving them October 14, 2025.

IIRC it wasn't even a protest, it was a vigil for Gaza, so it was an act of remembrance for those who are suffering. Which makes it an even stranger thing to get fired for.

Most big companies are bad, to be fair.

I would disagree on the basis that Linux upgrades don't require hardware upgrades (unless you have a very low end hardware that's hanging by a thread already)

For example, I don't remember seeing all this fuss about upgrading when people were moving from 8.1 to 10 (but it could just be me on my bubble)

Sounds more like a cure to me

I recall them saying Windows 10 would be a rolling release and it would be the last one you ever had to buy. Could be wrong though. I don't pay much attention because I haven't used it since Windows 7. I don't have a link to back this up, just my hazy memory.

I recommend you cut over at least a few weeks before. Not all hardware is always supported. It's a million times better now than it was decades ago, but sometimes(depending on distro) hardware can throw a sold kink in your otherwise perfect log.

WHOA BUDDY! This is Lemmy. You are required to pretend Linux is made of sunshine and blowjobs here. There has never been a single issue with any distro of the operating system and if you try to claim there is you are literally worse than Hitler.

What? I can't hear you!

They're acting like all the security just disappears lol. My workplace still uses Windows 8 which hasn't been supported for almost a decade so there must be ways to maintain security without Microsoft updates.

Basically Hitler

^^(/s)

As much as you're getting downvoted, I'm not either. I wish I could, linux just can't do what I need for my job + recreation.

*Listens to the band play on as the Titanic sinks.

Common guys!

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When the solution is so obvious, it's hard to have patience with the rest of you.

*Grammar

*grammar

nice comma splice