I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

I replaced Windows with Linux about 6 months ago. Then I ran into a game I really wanted to play but it didn’t run well with Proton (not kernel anti-cheat, just bad performance) after all the tweaks so I just reserved to dual booting with Windows 10.

After not using Windows for so long, I came to realize that Windows is just as much a mess as Linux just in different ways. You get used to the quirks so you don’t notice them after a while but they are definitely there.

Most of my games work just fine or even better on Linux. Some of my older games don’t even work on Windows that work perfectly under Wine/Proton which is truely miraculous. The Wine team and Valve have made some incredible contributions to the preservation of games on PC, it can’t be understated.

So I daily drive Linux and play those handful of games on Windows, and I’ll probably stay this way for now and try the proton situation again in a few years.

Why Bedrock? Get the kids a Steam Deck, Prism Launcher, open a local server and boom :) It‘s not iOS convenience but they‘ll sure love to tinker with all the mods you can install.

Is there a secure and good replacement for OneDrive on Linux?

I've really been enjoying Linux since I started using it back in mid 2024.

Although I was trying to shift to Linux slowly at the time, I honestly wish I'd switched sooner.

> I picked CachyOS rather than a better-known distro like Ubuntu because it’s optimized for modern hardware, and I had heard that it’s easy to install and set up for gaming,

Uh what?? I can’t think of a more easy to use Linux one that’s most supported for everything then… Ubuntu..

Throughout my university years, I used Ubuntu daily on both my laptop and desktop. Even when I had to play World of Warcraft with classmates, I used a virtual machine on Ubuntu. Around 2009, I switched to Mac OS, and I was perfectly happy with it until recently.

What I find most annoying is that I have several very old iMacs. Apple disallows their OS upgrading, even though their hardware is still perfectly fine. I've been using them, which means I've been stuck working on Mac OS 10.15, and now I can't install many applications, including some basic libraries, because they're no longer compatible with 10.15. I don't want to just throw away my perfectly good computers, and considering I do most of my work in the terminal, and I'm shocked by Apple's recent UI updates on iPhones(They've got to be kidding), so after 17 years away from Ubuntu as my daily OS, I'm now considering seriously going back to it.

Did this in 91 as well. Going well ever since.

Not a desktop thing (digital out-of-home signage) but we’re dropping Windows like it’s flaming dogshit. Minimal Linux install with X, Blackbox and player software (and management/monitoring stuff obvs) on all new assets and the thousands of extant ones will get replaced as soon as feasible.

Im pretty happy with bazzite after getting used to the atomic fedora underpinning and how it changes the way I have to organize and install some stuff

I can't switch to Linux because I am so dependent on Visual Studio.

Article reads like an anti-Linux post because the author goes on about, "muh mouse buttons" and "how many desktop environments?" Screw that, do something simple like Ubuntu that just works without decision paralysis. The whole piece reads like, "Linux is good if you're smart so git gud" esp. since he makes a point of crowing how it's Arch-based.

How do you do taxes in Linux? Install a windows VM? I don't want to use the web version. With Google docs being good enough, I don't really need windows for anything else. Last time I checked, the tax software didn't run under wine.

What's the better choice among mint and Ubuntu for a software engineering students? Any advice?

I’m getting closer with every update Apple pushes

What's a better choice among mint and Ubuntu for software engineering students?

Very good.

Some advice for Linux newcomers - use AMD, avoid Nvidia. Use something like KDE Plasma for best experience.

this is the tech equivalent of "I'm a strong, independent nerd and I don't need no windows"

I installed a dual boot on my gaming machine last year when the Win10 support ended, and I have also had basically no issues. Something something HDR in certain video games is the biggest complaint I have, which is not all that important and will be higher priority for developers in future as more gamers leave the sinking Windows ship.

Microsoft has really, really fucked up windows 11, and ultimately abandoning it is the only recourse the consumers have.

Welcome to the club!

I hope we can standardize on Linux on the desktop and FreeBSD on the server.

Wish I could. Until Ableton and Creative Cloud are native, I'm stuck with WinBlows.

And you cant gamr so now your gpu is useless

"Continue reading with a Verge subscription"

Well ...

When you think about it, lots of Linux and Unix devices.

I installed Omarchy last year when it come out (Arch distro for devs) on laptop and December I installed it on desktop machine, the powerful one.

Now I can play and work on a same machine for the first time in like 15+ years since I switched to Mac so I can work.

It isn't smooth sailing, I have bluetooth speakers and headphones, switching is not easy experience. Vibe coding, audio dictation works on Thinkpad which is underpowered compared to desktop, but it isn't working there. In fact this is more troublesome issue then headphones.

But for most part I could live with those issues and hopefully they get resolved.

Macs are just annoying, updates are for things I don't care and everything is about pushing me towards some subscription or other. I don't see future there for myself

It's great that we are already in such a strong spot! I'm also excited for how LLM's can help folks administer & setup systems.

There's still a lot of folks who bounce of setting up this or that thing that requires editing some config file. We're really good now about making most things pretty well UI'ee up, but Linux is such a malleable platform (complementary): LLM's decondtrain what users can do from what UI has been built. That's super exciting.

Step 1 of folks being able to use Linux as a desktop is going pretty well these days. With some AI hope, I hope folks get more and more enticed into setting up some devices. Once you're up with TailScale and have a service or two deployed, it can be very addictive to keep going. LLM's can make setting up & customizing the desktop easier, & they can help operate & admin services too. Strong hopes users will have much more agency, with where we are going.

It's quite interesting to see all these people switching to Linux on the desktop and realizing it works. Some of us are using Linux on the desktop since more than ... a quarter of a century.

Everytime I read such an article I'm thinking "duh, of course it works" but apparently people still think it's not the case.

I do really, really, really wonder what's going to happen once battery usage is more efficient on Linux than on Windows. For in every thread about Linux on the desktop, there seems to be an endless flow of comments saying "I can get 11 hours of battery time on Windows, but I only get 10h40 minutes on Linux".

Linux powers billions, if not tens of billions of devices by now: trust me, it can power your desktop/laptop just fine.

I have used Linux my entire adult life. Honestly never really had any issue with setup. Everything just works without having to do anything. Much easier than windows usually.

My gaming PC now runs Zorin, my dev box rund Omarchy. It is time. Commercial OSes are dead.

I noticed the blog post said nothing about working with documents, i.e. the office suite the poster was using. Or - maybe he wasn't at all? I wonder. Same goes for email, although perhaps he was just using webmail.

We use OneDrive/Teams/Office365 at work. I think this will be difficult with Linux. Doable with Mac.

In think MacBook Air + Microsoft365 may be the cheapest startup IT setup that doesn’t require windows itself.

If you need Windows these days just install virt-manager and load the version of Windows you need.

It's really fast and lightweight (my laptop stays cold at idle while running the Windows VMs) with all the HV enlightenments for good computational efficiency.

Installing and using the virtio drivers is key for many useful features such as memory ballooning, fast networking with low computational overhead, and virtiofs which is used to mount a virtual drive in the Windows guest in a way that it's not a "network" drive.

This is a thread that's certainly going to go over well.

There are some valid criticisms of Microsoft, and a great many criticisms that are unfounded or are often misdirected. Or in some cases, the vast majority of folks don't use enough of their operating environments to encounter the same types of problems. After all, it's not like Linux operating systems are "perfect". Especially when you begin to push the platforms beyond the most basic functions, problems quickly become apparent.

Microsoft's largest challenge in the Wintel environment is the diversity of hardware, software, and skill levels involved in making it all work together. And quite frankly, most often people trying to cut corners in places they shouldn't or don't know they shouldn't.

On the hardware front, there's a lot of cheap nonsense out there. And lots of folks clamor for cheaper hardware. For example, my $500 Asus motherboard has a checks Device Manager Mediatek Wifi 7 card in it. Now, the reality is that Intel, widely seen as an incredible network chip manufacturer (both ethernet and wlan), doesn't have a Wifi 7 chip available for 3rd parties (i.e. AMD boards). So in order for Asus to get Wifi 7, they have to look elsewhere.

Mediatek's website appears that they focus on supporting new standards first, often before they're stable or solidified, but simultaneously does not provide a robust driver environment that supports multiple platforms.

At any rate, this is just one example. There are many thousands more. Much of this is driven by consumers either wanting features faster, platform vendors aiming for differentiation, or both clamoring for some middle ground between cost and margin. And Microsoft is stuck in the middle.

Maybe the current driver that Mediatek has released through IHVs doesn't have fixes for certain bugs. Perhaps the IHV (motherboard makers, etc.) doesn't have a robust enough team to want to package and release regular driver updates released by the vendor.

As it stands, Mediatek doesn't offer a driver for this card for Linux, either: https://github.com/openwrt/mt76/issues/927

But again, Microsoft often gets the blame for problems with this type of hardware (vendors that barely support it, etc.) whereas on Linux it's totally acceptable to say "yeah just ditch that and go buy an Intel Wifi NIC" or something and people just accept that as being a totally okay answer. And then suddenly the hardware problem just 'disappears'.

As far as things that are a bit more in Microsoft's control, for example, requiring cloud accounts to log in and use the computer. I still stand by that this is far less important than the shriekers on the internet make it out to be. But it's most often one of the most primary arguments (because there are actually very few to really make).

Google and Apple require you to login with a cloud account on any of their devices and platforms. In fact, I'd wager that the vast majority of you reading this page right now have Google Chrome signed in with a Google Account that's syncing your history, favorites, passwords, autofill, and tabs right now. You effectively can't use an iPhone without signing in with an iCloud account, and Google is just about ready to force that direction as well by disabling the ability to sideload applications in Android. They already long effectively killed rooting devices (although it is possible in specific circumstances).

In fact, every time you visit a Google property using any other browser than Chrome, Google makes sure to tell you that you really should be using Chrome. And any time you visit a Google property using Chrome, they insist you sign in using Chrome (to your Google account, no less.)

So I really don't get the abject hatred for Microsoft on this front. After all, once you light up Windows Hello on a modern system with TPM2.0 and Windows 11 24H2 or newer, you effectively get free software passkey support (pending the web application properly supports it and isn't using an ancient FIDO2 library that insists on hardware tokens).

For the aforementioned Google account: I'm using a Microsoft Account sign-in to my desktop with Windows Hello, with a TPM-protected passkey to sign into the aforementioned Google account. I get SSO to all Microsoft properties, and "soft" passkey support for all of my Google accounts as-needed, with unlimited passkey storage. No USB dongles required (although I have those, too).

About the only other end user facing problem that is well within Microsoft's control is the amount of Copilot and AI nonsense. I contend that Satya Nadella is well beyond what his tenure should be at Microsoft, but can you blame them for having FOMO? I mean after all, the mobile phone and tablet markets were hundreds of billions of dollars that they missed out on. They also missed the mark on cloud platforms where Amazon raked in hundreds of billions. If they flood the zone with their AI products, and AI happens to catch on somewhere eventually, they're well-positioned to take advantage of it.

Microsoft also lost out on being the primary development environment, when they stopped innovating in the computer browser and software development space, effectively handing the keys to the kingdom over to Google. They only partially regained that with VSCode (which was the perfect blend between their full-fledged commercial IDE and the text-driven IDEs used prior to VSCode's dominance such as Textmate).

As far as "ads" on the platform, I don't really have any. But I turn a lot of stuff like the widgets off. At least the widget bar is isolated and isn't annoyingly embedded into the software like you'll find the ample ad-based notifications being spammed at you via mobile phone notifications. And unable to disable them because you also need those same notifications to actually get time critical information (here's looking at you, Doordash).

This is ultimately a long conversation and has many layers to it. But what I've found in reality is that software of all sorts and all platforms isn't as rosy as the people pitching them as solutions tend to tell you. I think it's silly, for example, on Linux that you have to split your engineering between multiple software development stacks to accomplish typical systems administrator goals (Ansible/Python, Bash, perhaps some Go thrown in there if someone on your team wants to mess around, tons of YAML and JSON). Whereas on Windows it's pretty well unified behind PowerShell and .NET.

To be fair, I often encounter situations where available Powershell tooling doesn't exist and I need to call .NET APIs anyway, or if I really want to secure the environment I need to drop the ability to use Add-Type and end up having to create proper powershell modules anyway. But at least the paradigm and language used is mostly the same.

It's kind of concerning to me that Ubuntu has started paywalling some package updates behind Ubuntu Pro. Thinking of switching to Debian.

Do any of the main-stream Linux installers make any attempt at bringing over your files?

I have seen so many ”anyone can switch to Linux” articles, and none of them seem to mention ”all of your files are going to be utterly lost”

Congratulations and welcome to the club!

But please, do not push to make Linux into a Windows Clone :)

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can we just boot to a browser sandbox and call it a day? ditch all the old bloatware. we do not need native apps.

> I reboot, log into Epic and GOG, and start downloading The Outer Worlds, a game from 2019 I’ve been playing a bit lately. It runs fine with Proton, and I can even sync my saves from the cloud. I play it for a few minutes with my trackball, remember I hate gaming on a trackball, and plug my gaming mouse back in. It works fine as long as I’m in the game, but outside the game, mouse clicks stop working again. It makes sense — the bug is on the desktop, not in games — but it’s very funny to have a gaming mouse that only works for gaming.

What is it with mice and OSes?

Windows is the only OS I can seem to configure to get low latency, high accuracy, linear movement with, and it's not for lack of effort.

I struggled for several years to do SWE work on a Mac and no 3rd party program could get it working the way it does on Windows. I tried Linear Mouse and many others. I eventually gave up, went against the prevailing (90%) culture where I work, and exchanged my mac for a windows laptop. I haven't measured it, but I feel more productive simply because I can click what I want to click marginally faster.

Is something in Mac drivers performing non-linear mapping? Why?

Based on the quote above it seems like Linux hasn't even gotten up to par with Mac for mice.

The best litmus test for an OS for me is whether I could play an RTS or FPS competitively with it, even though I haven't played either for years.