Microsoft is using malware-like pop-ups in Windows 11 to get people to ditch Google

Microsoft saying “stop using Google” is actually totally fine with me.

But only if they’re saying “go get Firefox.”

Shouldn't Apple be the focus of efforts?

Or in:

• 2000
• 2002
• 2003
• 2005
• 2008
• 2011
• (2022)

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation

In retrospect, DoJ didn't go far enough back then and ignored Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior with BeOS.

It might work if the fine was a couple hundred billion, we can give them a payment plan.

I switched to Thunderbird because of that bullshit. It's getting worse. I'll be looking for a good Linux distro for my next laptop.

linux support really sucks because of the proprietary driver situation.

Stop listening to everyone online. The driver situation "sucks" because of ideologies (which I happen to agree with), but from a functionality perspective Nvidia's Linux drivers are solid.

The same driver you install is the same driver they use in their half a million dollar DGX AI systems. And those systems don't run Windows. Only Linux.

A few others have mentioned Pop_OS! for their Nvidia driver support which is what I'm running too. I think I'm on version 535.93 or something like that. Most of the Ubuntu downstream (Ubuntu, mint, pop_os, etc,.) already include The proprietary drivers in their repos. Pop_OS is known for Nvidia support being a bit quicker than the others.

I'd suggest looking into dual booting (thats what I do, there are a few things that work better on windows). It's super easy to set up, and it's an easy low risk way to see if it works for you.

My gaming rig has an Nvidia GPU as well, and it runs mostly without any problems (I've had to manually update drivers a couple of times) on POP!_OS

I use a gaming laptop with an Nvidia GPU and linux support does not 'really suck.'

The only downside I have is one you wouldn't experience because you're not using a laptop.

Check https://www.protondb.com to check the status of compatibility of the game on Linux

My reason was that I had heard windows 11 was considering ads in their file explorer. Win10 already has enough prompts pushing edge and OneDrive. That, and many of my professors use Linux, and the ease with which they would install Python or C compilers was too much.

The only issues I had with dual booting is an out of sync clock (due to Windows using local time), and Windows wiped one of my Linux drives (I installed Windows second, so unplug any unused drives before installing Windows). The last issue I am still unsure what caused it, however I remember installing Windows and the next time I use Linux the drive is empty.

Do it. It's not as hard as it used to be thanks to systemd-boot existing. I literally reinstalled Windows the other day and nothing happened to systemd-boot. GRUB, is a bit of a mess though.

This is a good way if someone really Like some games not working on Linux. Also it can keep work and fun separated.

I can recommend setting up encryption when installing Linux system to make Windows programs unable to access your files.

Lookin' good!

They're talking windows in general

This goes for both chrome and bing: If a service is free, you are the product.

meirl

So don’t go with a mainstream option.

I want you and your recurrent income.

Slackware

Hi, average user here, I've been daily driving Linux (primarily Ubuntu) for a decade or more. Most of my life in a computer is spent in a web browser, word document, or maybe a spreadsheet. Even at my office job it's the same, except for some proprietary time tracking and billing software. I'd imagine 90 percent of consumers spend the vast majority of their time on computers in the web browser. Most people don't mess around with much beyond that.

I just don't understand what is lacking in the Linux user experience. It's not any different from a Windows user learning to use a Mac computer. Figure out how to connect to wifi, figure out how to mess with the volume, open a browser and that's it.

With the way the average person uses a computer, the Linux user experience would probably melt their brains. No offense to the average computer user, but we have seen time and time again that they are not the brightest when it comes to tech literacy or just don't care and refuse to care since it goes against the grain, so to speak.

That’s probably not going to happen

Edge (and that joke Brave) is chromium and that supports google’s control of the web. Firefox, or Safari on a Mac, don’t use google’s tech.

If we had an actual anti-monopoly/umbrella corporation law that would be badass.

Hell Amazon would tank instantly, since they just operate on pumping AWS profits into their loss leader (Amazon delivery) constantly.

Fuck yeah! Lets do some trust bustin!

what does "Ditto" mean?

Win 10 and 11 are nowhere close to a fully transitioned unified settings menu, they somehow made dialouge box hell worse. its easier to list what doesnt.

• Android
• most Linux systems
• IOS
• TVs
• IOT
• non IOT things like Microwaves
• Chromeos
• off-brand feature phone OS'es
• Microsoft Windows

I do use Linux every day as well. It has its own set of problems, but not the subject here.

Love pop!_OS, Manjaro is a really cool and good fork of Arch that's easy to install if rolling distributions are something you're interested in

I kind of get what you mean.

But I do find it kind of funny to compare the "walled garden" phone to the os that gives you the most freedoms. lol

What else would be the answer, then? Windows is a commercial product by Microsoft. They will never get better unless forced to. They will keep getting worse for profit because, well, that's what they do.

The whole point about an open-source operating system is that you can make it yours, and nobody can take that away from you. And the more people use linux, the better it gets. Commercial closed sources products can never have the same qualities.

I don't get it. If a product sucks, why wouldn't you switch away from it?

"Don't suggest I leave my abusive husband, instead I'll complain about him to my friends until he magically gets better."

Christ, you guys sound like you have Stockholm syndrome.

BeOS is best OS ^^

Only HardenedBSD.

The Linux community is full of elitist assholes who think they're special because they have the ability to install an OS. However, there are also amazing people making amazing tools, completely free of charge. You can't paint everyone with the same brush.

Honestly, I wish our governments would pump money and resources into open source operating systems so that we're not all bound to one OS under the complete control of one company.

My understanding of the Nvidia situation is that they are not respecting the kernel's GPL license, which isn't right. Nvidia has always done awful, selfish things, which makes sense as they are a market dominant company. It doesn't mean the Linux developers have to allow them to break the license agreement. Intel and AMD seem to be doing just fine, it's always Nvidia...

Linux people like security, it's a security concern to give Nvidia's proprietary drivers such low level access

If their calls violate GPL then I don't even know why you're being sarcastic. Not acceptable. Copyleft licenses HAVE to be respected legally. Silly to pretend like the license shouldn't have to apply to Nvidia. If a user wants to install proprietary Nvidia drivers, they still can. But Linux isn't picking a fight, GPL is what makes Linux Linux.

Yeah well said.

I see it here on Lemmy all the time, and you can just see it in this whole comment thread too.

I've been a software engineer for decades. I know my way around Windows, OSX, and Linux systems. I'm not a casual computer user. I AM a gamer though, and jumping through hoops to play games on Linux is not worth my time. Unless there is a native Linux distribution of the game, you're jumping through hoops trying to get it to run through Proton, or whatever other means. Driver support is another thing... Yeah it's gotten better, but sometimes it just like forcing a square peg through a circle hole.

No thanks, I'm very happy with my native gaming experience.

And sure, for dev systems, or servers, Linux is great. All of my professional work is interacting with Linux based systems, containers, etc. I also work on a MacBook Pro, so I understand the tooling for Unix systems is great for that work.

My personal life though, I'm not fighting Linux just to game.

BTW Starfield is great... Check it out lol. I just did a quick search for "Starfield on Linux". First results are something like "Runs on Proton after some tweaks". I'm good.

Peachy. Thanks for the heads up. I haven't noticed anything intrusive yet.

The only machine you wanna be using SteamOS on is the Steam Deck. Use a standard Linux distribution like Ubuntu if you're gonna do it on any other machine. The reason being that the version of SteamOS for generic PCs is horribly outdated, and the one on the Deck is very much built exclusively for the Deck's hardware.

Gaming mostly works out of the box with almost all games on Steam on Linux (SteamOS is not special in this regard) but there is an important caveat; be careful of games that use anticheat software - some work but others do not or may trigger bans. Check ProtonDB for your specific games to see if there are issues.

I use KDE Neon as my daily driver (LTS Ubuntu + latest KDE, which is the desktop environment the Steam Deck uses).

I haven't had many issues. For context:

• I have to remote in to my work computer from home. I do that with Parsec, which I have via a Flatpak. Parsec has no issues and works identically to Windows.

• I also have to use a specific VPN. This VPN requires a separate program on Windows, but in KDE it's baked into the OS.

• Zoom is also a Flatpak. It has a few bugs that don't exist on Windows - namely Zoom likes to steal window focus whenever the host joins or someone shares their screen.

• I also installed Flatpak Steam. I had to use Flatseal to give it more access than it had by default, but that was easy enough. You can go through your OS package manager but since KDE Neon is built on Ubuntu LTS those packages don't get updated frequently.

• Most games run fine. Performance is usually a little worse than Windows, but I can still generally hit 60 - just with more dips than Windows has. Satisfactory and Jedi Survivor are the only games where I have seen noticeable issues compared to Windows. Baldur's Gate runs fine.

• Some games are borked. These are usually games that rely on anti-cheat or intrusive DRM.

• Running Windows programs can be tricky. Wine isn't intuitive to use. I usually use Bottles, but sometimes Bottles doesn't get the job done and I have to fall back to Lutris. Lutris is hard to use but generally pulls through. These are all Flatpaks.

I maintain a Windows installation on an old 2 TB NTFS hard drive. Linux gets my 4 TB SSD, but I've symlinked my documents folders to the NTFS drive so I can share things on Windows and Linux.

Sometimes I need to boot into Windows. Generally this is if I'm having issues connecting to my work computer on Parsec (these issues happened on Windows as well), in which case I need to fall back to RDP to go check on my work computer. My employer blocks me doing that from Linux, so I do it from Windows instead.

Otherwise, I usually boot into Windows to play Satisfactory, because it doesn't run well on Proton. Satisfactory's Vulkan renderer seems to implode on Proton as well for some reason; it causes flickering on X and crashes Wayland entirely. The DX12 renderer works but it just isn't as fast as it is on native Windows.

That said, I rarely boot into Windows. Maybe once every 2-3 months? But not beyond that.

SteamOS is mainly for the Steam Deck not regular PC or laptop. For a gaming distro I would recommend one of PopOS, Manjaro or Garuda.

I suggest grabbing the live image for each of them, booting it, and seeing how it feels without committing to anything. I usually test to see if everything works out of the box on the live mode — music, video, network shares, wifi, any peripherals you might have like headphones, fancy mouse or keyboard etc.

I use a steam deck for about 2/3 of my gaming and I rarely have issues with games. That said, I mostly play indie games, but there is so much of my library that is supported that I'm never going to run out of things to play. Proton has really done wonders for gaming on Linux. Are you wanting to play multiplayer games or brand new releases? Or are you more of the patient gamer type?

I wouldn't run steamos on a full desktop, but you can still get a lot of the benefits just by using steam on Linux. Definitely recommend trying it out.

The malware's coming from inside the operating system 👀

Kubuntu should be solid. Not to hard to install and yeah.

I switched to EndeavourOS a few months ago after using Kubuntu exclusively for almost a decade. I'm never going back to Ubuntu.

For example there is no proper pdf reader that can sign a pdf and add or remove a page.

Xournal++ should be a proper PDF reader that can sign a PDF and add and remove pages. Haven't tried doing the latter personally though. It looks a bit old and might be hard to find, but it's always worked suspiciously fine for me and is still in active development.

The "Adobe Acrobat" brand apparently also has a web app for signing PDFs. This is like, the first web search result for "PDF signing".

I've also tried Inkscape import as vector and then reexport, which works fine for visually signing single pages. Just make sure you render the text to paths on import, instead of converting them to SVG text— And don't actually do this, because it's kinda dumb, so just use Xournal++ or the Adobe website instead, but there are options.

Granted, depending on how your experience with Xournal goes, these options are indeed not as convenient or easy as they should be.

Web3 is really helping linux out.

No! This term refers to, like, three three different things already, all of which have largely been either practical failures or grifts. Prescriptivism is usually just pedantry, but HTML5 web apps aren't even on that inauspicious list.

You can sign and remove pages using LibreOffice Draw

For example there is no proper pdf reader that can sign a pdf and add or remove a page.

Unfortunately, pdf signing is problematic still on Linux, I use it as a daily driver and found a compromise with existing functionality. You can try okular, which is able to sign PDFs without altering them, but has a huge signature block and doesn't permit adding a scan of a signature. My workaround: I created a stamp in the PDF reviewing tools with my signature, I can place that on the document and then sign it afterwards. Unfortunately, that doesn't work for pre-signed PDFs as it will alter the signed version.

Alternatively, LibreOffice Draw can sign PDFs, but also can't insert signature scans (yet, there's an open feature request) and is sometimes not understanding when PDFs change to landscape, in general it's not nice to render a many-pages document in LO Draw and hope that it won't mess up the document upon signing.

For adding / removing pages, I agree - it's a pity there's no GUI application, but I have gotten used to qpdf / pdftk and they are quite powerful and more efficient 90% of the time. Still doesn't excuse no GUI application, but it keeps me able to work.

I use AnyDesk regularly myself and haven't run into an issue aside from the dark theming of my desktop making some text a bit hard to read.

What's the issue you're having?

I use Journal++ to sign pdfs. Works with hand written as well as scanned signatures.

Is it actually something usable? I don't know of many active users of it.

What's so bad about OneDrive?

Mint is for sure a good place to start. I personally run EndeavourOS with Cinnamon desktop and it's been more trouble-free than anything Ubuntu based I've used (shocking, I know).

Mint and PopOS! are the ones I've heard thrown about for "Users First Distro" ever since Canonical decided to do... whatever the fuck it is they're doing to Ubuntu proper.

I'm using Mint now, and have exactly one complaint: I don't like the default Cinnamon Firefox icon so I changed it, but every time there's an update to Firefox it changes back. All things considered, that's nothing to worry about.

Can't go wrong with mint, I've been using it for years.

You'd have, like, five dollars?

If there's little to no need to go through the settings, you probably will miss a lot of them and never know.

Also, I think after a fresh install going through some settings to check out what you have, what you don't have and what you can have is not something only power users should do, but that's a power user's opinion 😅

Been using Ubuntu Jammy for about 6months now. Have had 0 issues with any games on Steam.

Takes some slight tweaking for other games, such as RA2 Yuri's Revenge, but it works.

If you have the patience for the occassional Google search you can switch any time.

How far behind do you think Linux gaming is?

Check protondb, I'd be surprised if you couldn't play 9 out of your 10 most played games.

Fuckin A. Same.

I'm just so confused. I've been running Win 11 retail since launch and before that I ran Win 10 since launch. I've never seen anything like this.