Your Windows 10 PC will soon be 'junk' - users told to resist Microsoft deadline

That's the thing. I love to use Linux for work, but when I don't want to tinker it sometimes sucks for gaming.

Yep. And then there’s gamepass. I vastly vastly prefer working and using Linux day to day, but games, man. Man’s gotta be able to game after a long day at work and I wasted literally a week of after work hours trying and failing to get Starfield to run on Proton.

iGPU+dGPU, esp with Nvidia is pretty bad on Linux. It's pretty flawless these days if you're using only one vendor and it isn't Nvidia.

I would probably rather get a gaming console for the TV to game.

What game was it?

Mediocre UX, mediocre integration of mixed-bag third-party apps, and too many workarounds and gotchas you need to Just Know About.

You're talking about my Windows 10 experience? The european, less spying/advertising version, mind you.

If only there was an OS with an excellent graphical user interface and a direct UNIX pedigree, where you can drop into a full zsh and POSIX user land directly after install at the touch of a button.

True, or I could just not.

I would like to point out that this is exactly the same difficulty of just installing linux, without freeing you from microserfdom.

TPM. Probably switched off in the BIOS or something.

Don't care, don't like what I've seen of 11, happy to wait until I'm forced to change.

Same here, but I moved to Arch because I wanted the latest drivers, at the beggining with GNOME, but then moved to KDE to get the newest Wayland stuff related to Gaming.

I just made this exact switch a few months ago, so, yeah, it happens.

I've been using linux on my secondary machine for a couple of years now and I don't really feel the need to use Windows anymore.
all of my software just works and my workflow is cross-platform (I don't really care about which os I'm using, i can get things done regardless); but as a software developer I'd much rather use linux than spend my time managing like 6 virtual linux/unix-like environments on windows. (wsl, msys2, etc)
All of the games I care about actually work slightly better on linux than on windows. (and a single click away from installing and launching from steam); also Steam Big Picture mode and gamepad support (dualshock 4) is much better on linux than on Windows 10, on windows some features only work over Bluetooth. i use arch btw

Tf do you know about anybody, especially on a FOSS-leaning network?

Yes I am

Did your job give you a work Laptop? If you personally own it then you could just run Windows in a VM.

Linux runs on way more devices than Windows, what are you talking about?

Can't wait for anti cheat to work with Linux ☹️

Gaming is starting to work on Linux

Are you living under a rock ? Gaming is working in linux now.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about banks during my time as a developer, it’s that they’re on the oldest version of windows they can get to run.

This, many businesses will consider Linux for various devices.

It'll likely start as "Oh we can use it to deploy for, this this and this, and avoid putting Windows here and here, to save X dollars" as certain applications in business are not available on Linux, but others will be. It will be a slow transition in the business world. But they will do it.

When asked to choose between convenience and security, a lot of people will choose convenience. Staying on the computer you already have as long as it seems to work fine is very convenient. I still occasionally see computers running Windows 7 for no reason other than that the owner can't be bothered to make a change.

Hey, can you elaborate? I switched my couple year old Windows 11 laptop to Linux a few months back, and no matter what I can't get sleep to work. After doing research, apparently this is a common issue with Linux on laptops.

I eventually got hibernate to work, so I have it do that instead, but regular sleep would be nice...

Uefi isn't the push, the push is tpm 2.0, which I think is a much much larger percentage of "incompatibilities". tpm allows for drm that is much harder to bypass, since the random number generator operates securely in hardware. It's for their benefit not yours.

My Windows install is still in compatibility mode. It's the sole reason I can't upgrade to 11, not that I want to. I can't be bothered to reinstall Windows on UEFI when there's no point anyway. I'll happily stick to 10.

yea it was overkill enough to make me look into if connect supports always opening links external so I can have my ad block lol

how do you manage all your files and settings?

I don't. I just use a separate drive for /home. And since I just prefer KDE no matter which system I'm using, all my files, settings, layouts, panels, etc are exactly the same whenever I switch out the OS.

Typically your personal files and app settings are stored somewhere in your user home folder, eg under /home/bob/. Ideally you've set up your system in a way so that the entire /home/ folder is stored on its own disk or partition at least. That let's you boot up a different distro while using the same home directory. But even if you haven't set it up separately from the rest of the system, you can still manually copy all those files.

Not every single application setting is transferable between distros as they sometimes use different versions but generally it works well. Many apps also let you manually export profiles or settings and reimport them elsewhere later. Or they have online synchronization baked in.

You can have a separate partition for your files so that you change only your OS. Even with windows. This way you'll always keep your files and just need to customize your distro and reinstall your apps when you change between distros

Yeah i kept my files on a seperate drive and just wiped the one with the os. for settings i was trying a different distro and desktop enviroment so those where always a bit different and i started from scratch

It's not like he's compiling Linux from scratch on day one. Arch is pretty well supported and has a package manager.

arch is basic. It's just minimalise by default.

It has an amazing wiki, extremely active and helpful user forums, and an installer (i think now) or at least a massively helpfully customised shell for initial setup.

you can install arch and make it look like mint or whatever easily, then the only difference is pacman and the amazing AUR

Lol i hear this alot about arch users and as a newbie i dont get it. It has been the easiest for me to understand, maybe its the documentation idk i started with endavourOS as well which is a great beginner OS for arch IMO

I started with an Arch-based distro and haven't looked back (EndeavorOS. Though I guess it's kind of like Arch easy mode). I have a family member that has been daily driving Linux for over a decade, so that was very helpful during the transition. But after a week or two, I haven't needed his help at all.

My laptop that previously ran Windows 11 is faster than ever.

Hi, someone that worked on banking stuff in the past.

You are not safe, nothing is even half as secure as it should be and you are most likely just using a web based front end puppeteering a much much older system. The browser you are on is normally the second weak point after your own dumb self and I have not even heard of one case (not saying there are none) of a OS related vulnerability with online personal banking.

It's not as big a deal as you think because most banking hacks are done via browser vulnerabilities rather than OS vulnerabilities. The exception being if you've somehow managed to install a keylogger, in which case the issue is the user and a decent AV should detect and block the keylogger.

As long as you use a browser that gets the latest updates (Firefox, Vivaldi, Chrome), run a decent AV, and don't install dodgy software you downloaded from some dodgy site, you should be ok.

AV is definitely not snake oil. I worked in Enterprise IT and a robust AV alongside other security measures is a must and does catch alot. More than the built in Windows security catches. Plus the AV normally incorporates a virus/malware removal tool which tends to be better than Windows built in tool.

I'm running windows 10 on a first Gen i7-930. I've upgraded my ram and video card over the years but still on a crappy hdd. Windows isnt lightning fast by any means. But it's not unbearable. Perhaps my mind will blow when I finally upgrade.

My pc isn't eligible for upgrade to eleven. Guess I'm sol then.

Great story 👍. Amazing

I could not get CUPS working in a docker container for the life of me. So now I have a stupid little CUPS server.

It does work great, even though it feels like they finished dev in 2003 and never revisited it.

Can you ping me if they tell you? I would also like to know

You can't unless you form a small group like a non profit organization or a business. You can cheat the system legally going the NPO route as long as you find a way to fulfill legal requirements, but you need friends (it helps to know someone in law school too) and you have to do the legal paperwork and share all the cost. You could make a gamer NPO for example. The price to do this will vary depending on where you live. The price for the volume license can vary a lot depending on where you get it from. Where your group is located effects this. In my local it is about $200-400 USD per person.

Your other alternative is the grey market. Its grey because it is legally ambiguous.

Have looked at dual boot before but it seemed like a ( admittedly fairly minor) pita. File sharing/ access across both systems is my main concern. Thanks for your response.

I personally had much better experience with QEMU than Virtualbox (although all my VMs are Linux, so might be specifics here).

Nice, i will take a look at this. With virtualization are both OS able to share files/ access the same files?

And yet Proton/Wine are able to handle unique fixes for some new games to make them work even better on Linux.

Just be aware, Linux is not windows.

As a funny aside, the reverse is also true. My first IT job that involved system administration I kept trying to treat the windows servers like I would Linux servers and that just doesn't work so well. Especially if you're making heavy use of powershell sessions and the administrative capabilities of powershell it can be really jarring when it works like Linux until it doesn't

Steam works in Linux, guy. The functionality of buying/downloading/playing games doesn't change between Windows and Linux. There's nothing additionally complicated about it (aside from occasionally switching from regular Proton to GE-Proton for better performance, and that's 3 clicks).

The problems is the games under it. Most notably game with anti-cheat and Oculus Rift desktop games. Does the Oculus client, revive and games work under linux?

... until the EU and maybe even the US rolls around and slaps Microsoft with an antitrust lawsuit. Sounds like a best case scenario :D

Honestly it is actually a tablet like computer which I use for reading stuff mostly, so I am not gonna pay money for something I already paid money for. I find the idea of having to pay for a new OS after I have already paid for it quite obscene (my main computer is in Linux). Imagine buying a phone and then having to pay money each time for the newer Android version, it is ridiculous. I would install Linux on it but I am not %100 sure I would be able to get some hardware such as touch screen running.

I would say its a more mixed bag for most consumer level end users. On one hand yes, no more updates. On the other hand, no more new vulnerability and day 0 exploits. I think the risk is also mitigated a bit by now using a non standard OS. Unless someone is targeting this user individually who is running anything targeting windows 8 (Most would target the biggest pool of users)?

For an organization, yeah big risk. For some person? eh, just back up often and make sure your two factor etc. is working.

I'd consider myself a nerd but still prefer Windows.

Some years ago I was in a Vocational college for IT and I had to deal with Ubuntu, Debian and Opensuse. I hated every second of it. I also had to deal with iMacs but that's another story.

Just follow the handy dandy Microsoft guide to installing Linux https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/linux/install

But seriously. Yes, it's true that installing a new OS is a level of effort the average person is unlikely to want to put in. But they're going to have to start because I believe the situation this Windows monopoly is causing is far worse than it appears on the surface.

It's estimated that around half of PCs in the world won't be able to run Windows 11 https://www.computerworld.com/article/3657628/more-than-half-of-pcs-cant-upgrade-to-windows-11-report.html

Sure, a good chunk of those machines probably can't even run Windows 10. They'll still be on earlier versions of Windows, even going back as far as XP in some cases.

Because of the "latest Windows" benchmark PCs depreciate only slightly slower than bananas. Part of the reason I got into Linux as a young and poor nerd was because it could run on much older and significantly cheaper hardware. But most people and organisations aren't going to bother trying to resell their computers for the measly sum they'd get when they bite the bullet and upgrade, adding millions of still perfectly usable machines to the ever building toxic soup of e-waste and using more resources than necessary when creating new Windows compatible devices.

On top of that those who are unable or unwilling to upgrade end up with an OS full of more holes than swiss cheese that diminishes cyber security for everyone.

At this point, not switching to Linux (which is really the only viable Windows alternative) and getting the longest lifespan possible out of your hardware in a safe way is frankly irresponsible.

Nah fam, mint's a gamechanger

The installation has always been easy enough for me, but what I struggle with is updating drivers and installing new software. Granted, I'm not the brightest bulb in the box, so there's that. I did really like the insane variety of distros and all the needs they cater to. Like if there's something specific you need your OS to specialize in, there's probably a Linux distro for it.

I switched from Win 10 to Ubuntu this year. The Ubuntu installer was easy as hell. I'd argue easier than windows.

It got tricky when I needed the non-latest CUDA drivers for pytorch fun, but most folks won't be doing development.

Also, most folks don't install windows. They'll give it to their nerd nephew or their local Compu-Hut.

My biggest gripe is Snaps can make for confusing permission bullshit when saving files or using the clipboard, but this isnt a debate about snaps... the installer is great

I disagree with this because for 20 years both the Ubuntu and Debian GUI installer ran like a practical joke from hell. Even Linus himself said he couldn't get it to work. Only Debian really improved while Ubuntu continues to somehow explode every time I try it

Every other distro besides hardcore ones like Gentoo and Arch have pretty basic installers that greatly outshine the crappy windows 8/10/11 setup screen.

Fedora has an auto installer tool so all you really need is a USB and not some magic funky thing called rufus.

There's even entire DE setups dedicated to looking and functioning exactly like windows to the point that the average person wouldn't even recognize nor care to know the difference.

Yes actually getting someone to replace an OS is hard no matter how easy you make it because it involves doing something unknown or new. But by the same token, we used to run DOS and install windows from floppy disks like it was no big deal back before windows owned the desktop market. Talk to anyone who was a college student in the 90s and they'll probably recognize the word UNIX, even in unrelated non CS fields.

Installing Linux has been painless for over a decade, its as easy as clicking next. You're telling me Windows users can handle all the stupid bullshit Microsoft throws at them, but a couple different icons and a different name is really gonna stop them from understanding the basic desktop metaphor that has been in use since the 90s?

It's actually not a big lift for "normies", and I'm considering switching my parents to Linux after Win10 support ends. They don't really know how to use Windows, so I just have to pre-install a Linux that looks similar (probably Mint) and then put Firefox, Libre Office and VLC shortcuts in the same place they expect. As long as Firefox still can get them to youtube and facebook, it doesn't really matter what the rest of the OS can do. I'll have to find an alternative remote support solution though.

https://github.com/hakuna-m/wubiuefi

My 11 year old son does his homework and research on Linux Mint. After that, he sometimes plays some Minecraft or Valheim with his friends or does some drawings on his graphics tablet and listens to music or audio drama on Deezer. What else does your mom, that she cannot use Linux Mint?