I was a pretty casual windows user, like just going along with its slow crapification because that was the path of least resistance. At work though via AWS I was exposed to various Linux desktop experiences and it was surprisingly fine. Then one day I was trying to do some mundane disk admin task that in Windows XP would have been fairly straight forward to root around in the control panel and find what to do. Searched in the windows 11 start bar for ‘disk management’ (or something similar, whatever it was it was exactly the name of the admin component). Did it find it? Did it heck. Instead it popped up bing (fucking bing??) web results complete with ads. Absolutely zero results for anything on the actual computer or remotely useful. I snapped. It’s done. Windows is crap and dead to me. Put Debian (personal preference) on my main boot drive, kept my windows disk just for the games I think will play better on it. That’s it, it’s over. Microsoft finally fucked it up and will have zero view of me except “this guy seems to play games periodically”. Adios you bloated pile of useless crap. You pour shame on our good memories of XP…
The EOL of Win 10 and MS silently installing copilot on my desktop was the final straw for me. I’ve been running 100% Linux now for a couple months with no real issues so far. I expected a few games to give me issues but so far if anything I’ve had fewer issues with games than I did even in Windows. Had a couple hardware problems, although those I’ve mostly been able to solve.
I’ve got it setup to dual boot “just in case”, but haven’t actually needed to which is great. If I still haven’t needed that partition a year from now I’ll probably just reformat it as extra storage and keep a Win10 VM around if I really get stuck on something.
I’ve admittedly not looked much into games on Linux as it wasn’t my priority. I mostly played via steam on windows. What’s the equivalent route on Linux? Is steam available?
Steam is available and runs great. Valve has really put an insane amount of work into making Linux gaming smooth and painless. They have their own flatpak equivalent called pressure-vessel that steam uses by default, and everything that steam supports in Windows is 100% supported in Linux as well. If you check out protondb.com you can put in your steam account name and it will scan it and tell you any games in your library that will have issues in Linux, but outside of a few of the competitive shooters that have super aggressive anti-cheat generally everything either works out of the box, or after some minor tweaks (typically adding a few launch parameters).
Additionally, there’s an excellent unified launcher called Heroic that lets you connect with and use the GOG, Epic, and Amazon Gaming stores, and provides a convenient wrapper around Wine/Proton for actually running the games.
Finally there’s another launcher called Lutris that a lot of people swear by and supports some of the less used stores like Itch.io, although when I tried it recently I ran into some problems getting it to work.
One thing you’ll have to do (which is kind of annoying that it isn’t enabled by default) is go into the steam options and toggle “Enable Steam Play for all other titles”. That enables proton/wine for everything in your library. In the early days of Steam on Linux Valve setup a white list of games that ran under Wine that mostly contains their own titles in it, and for some reason they just never removed that behavior even though that list is unmaintained these days.
I cannot relate to most of your points. I’ve never seen the ads you describe. UI made a huge leap forward after they neglected it for decades, so it almost caught up to the usual Linux DEs (as they were some years ago). System performance is not worse than on my several Linux systems.
I just don’t see the point in switching to Linux now, if you haven’t already done years ago.
Probably. But maybe it is my habit of unshitifying every OS I install. I always decline telemetry, ads and suspecious features since Win10 rolled out. Same on my android phones. Use adblock since I cannot stand seeing ad banners without freaking out.
My point is: Microsoft and Google always offer opting-out. Users are responsible for accepting or declining services like telemetry. If you still cry about this crap: FIX YOUR CONFIG.
The opt outs don’t work. Even if you opted out of the telemetry that only disabled some of it, not all of it, and MS constantly re-enables it with updates. I can’t count how many times I’ve had to uninstall OneDrive, But. It. Keeps. Coming. Back. Windows 10 you could previously disable most of the worst crapware that MS shoveled in. Windows 11 you can’t disable it, they just don’t give you the opt outs anymore. It’s all mandatory. Even worse, they started backporting that stuff into Windows 10 as well. Did you notice when MS silently installed copilot on your Windows 10 system?
Ultimately though, I just don’t want to keep fighting a losing battle against a company I despise. I’m done giving my money to them. It would be one thing if they provided a good service that I enjoyed like Valve does with Steam, but the last time I actually liked a version of Windows was when XP was released. It’s basically been downhill since then. If there was a decent alternative to Android I’d switch that as well, but unfortunately Linux phone just isn’t ready for prime time yet. But thanks to the amazing work by Valve, for gaming systems, Linux is finally a viable alternative.
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I was a pretty casual windows user, like just going along with its slow crapification because that was the path of least resistance. At work though via AWS I was exposed to various Linux desktop experiences and it was surprisingly fine. Then one day I was trying to do some mundane disk admin task that in Windows XP would have been fairly straight forward to root around in the control panel and find what to do. Searched in the windows 11 start bar for ‘disk management’ (or something similar, whatever it was it was exactly the name of the admin component). Did it find it? Did it heck. Instead it popped up bing (fucking bing??) web results complete with ads. Absolutely zero results for anything on the actual computer or remotely useful. I snapped. It’s done. Windows is crap and dead to me. Put Debian (personal preference) on my main boot drive, kept my windows disk just for the games I think will play better on it. That’s it, it’s over. Microsoft finally fucked it up and will have zero view of me except “this guy seems to play games periodically”. Adios you bloated pile of useless crap. You pour shame on our good memories of XP…
The EOL of Win 10 and MS silently installing copilot on my desktop was the final straw for me. I’ve been running 100% Linux now for a couple months with no real issues so far. I expected a few games to give me issues but so far if anything I’ve had fewer issues with games than I did even in Windows. Had a couple hardware problems, although those I’ve mostly been able to solve.
I’ve got it setup to dual boot “just in case”, but haven’t actually needed to which is great. If I still haven’t needed that partition a year from now I’ll probably just reformat it as extra storage and keep a Win10 VM around if I really get stuck on something.
I’ve admittedly not looked much into games on Linux as it wasn’t my priority. I mostly played via steam on windows. What’s the equivalent route on Linux? Is steam available?
Steam is available and runs great. Valve has really put an insane amount of work into making Linux gaming smooth and painless. They have their own flatpak equivalent called pressure-vessel that steam uses by default, and everything that steam supports in Windows is 100% supported in Linux as well. If you check out protondb.com you can put in your steam account name and it will scan it and tell you any games in your library that will have issues in Linux, but outside of a few of the competitive shooters that have super aggressive anti-cheat generally everything either works out of the box, or after some minor tweaks (typically adding a few launch parameters).
Additionally, there’s an excellent unified launcher called Heroic that lets you connect with and use the GOG, Epic, and Amazon Gaming stores, and provides a convenient wrapper around Wine/Proton for actually running the games.
Finally there’s another launcher called Lutris that a lot of people swear by and supports some of the less used stores like Itch.io, although when I tried it recently I ran into some problems getting it to work.
Wow amazing, I’m going to give the steam one a go and go from there!
One thing you’ll have to do (which is kind of annoying that it isn’t enabled by default) is go into the steam options and toggle “Enable Steam Play for all other titles”. That enables proton/wine for everything in your library. In the early days of Steam on Linux Valve setup a white list of games that ran under Wine that mostly contains their own titles in it, and for some reason they just never removed that behavior even though that list is unmaintained these days.
You’re not wrong, but this rant isn’t really going to accomplish anything useful I don’t think.
I cannot relate to most of your points. I’ve never seen the ads you describe. UI made a huge leap forward after they neglected it for decades, so it almost caught up to the usual Linux DEs (as they were some years ago). System performance is not worse than on my several Linux systems.
I just don’t see the point in switching to Linux now, if you haven’t already done years ago.
If you don’t see the point, then Microsoft has successfully boiled the frog.
Probably. But maybe it is my habit of unshitifying every OS I install. I always decline telemetry, ads and suspecious features since Win10 rolled out. Same on my android phones. Use adblock since I cannot stand seeing ad banners without freaking out.
My point is: Microsoft and Google always offer opting-out. Users are responsible for accepting or declining services like telemetry. If you still cry about this crap: FIX YOUR CONFIG.
The opt outs don’t work. Even if you opted out of the telemetry that only disabled some of it, not all of it, and MS constantly re-enables it with updates. I can’t count how many times I’ve had to uninstall OneDrive, But. It. Keeps. Coming. Back. Windows 10 you could previously disable most of the worst crapware that MS shoveled in. Windows 11 you can’t disable it, they just don’t give you the opt outs anymore. It’s all mandatory. Even worse, they started backporting that stuff into Windows 10 as well. Did you notice when MS silently installed copilot on your Windows 10 system?
Ultimately though, I just don’t want to keep fighting a losing battle against a company I despise. I’m done giving my money to them. It would be one thing if they provided a good service that I enjoyed like Valve does with Steam, but the last time I actually liked a version of Windows was when XP was released. It’s basically been downhill since then. If there was a decent alternative to Android I’d switch that as well, but unfortunately Linux phone just isn’t ready for prime time yet. But thanks to the amazing work by Valve, for gaming systems, Linux is finally a viable alternative.