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the vibe he talks about where running windows on a machine you built feels like you’re just renting the machine from an AI based company in Redmond trying to constantly upsell you is real shit.
running linux feels like you own a computer again.
This is probably the year I bite the bullet and buy a new SSD to install Linux on. Fuck any OS that puts copilot in fucking notepad.
Tbh I think the biggest obstacle is installing Linux. Once it’s on a computer, I’ve seen people use it successfully, for probably like the last six years or more, but installing it is a whole different story. The graphical installers are pretty good, but for non-technical people, though that’s still very scary.
Even installing Windows is really scary for a lot of people, if it’s not the OS that comes on it from the factory it’s unlikely most people will use it.
Installing Linux is like 10 clicks nowadays. I remember even 10 years ago it was a lot more involved. The gaming focused distros even include GUI apps for common game related workarounds and 90% of the time anything else can be fixed with a couple copy pastes of terminal commands
If you’re technical enough for that, sure. The setup has gotten easier, but messing with install media and boot configs is still technical work.
That’s fair, but you still have to do that with Windows. Only difference is that most OEMs pre-install it for you.
I actually find the Windows installer to be much less intuitive than most distro installers.
That’s a huge difference! Linux is getting traction now because a major vendor (Valve) is selling a desirable device that comes with Linux pre-installed. We should be out there installing Linux for people who don’t know how! You can’t really expect everyone to know computer well enough to flash a new os on common hardware. Nothing is designed with making os swapping easy, friendly, or safe.
Well, I’m glad this unremarkable gamer has seen the light.
yea maybe i should use Linux for web browsing and shit, and only use Windows for games(esp ones that need anti cheat installed). Will i? Eh. “if you want to feel like you actually own your PC” is pretty hilarious though. Every post about Linux has that “there are dozens of us” energy.
I’ve had it with Windows and ascended to the sunlit uplands of Linux, where the trees heave with open-source fruits and men with large beards grep things with their minds.
You can tell the writer regularly posts on r/PCMasterRace
no
Been running dual-boot Linux and Windows for a few years now for the reasons you mentioned. I have the boot menu set to a 1s timeout and to default to Linux so it’s easy if I want to boot to windows on start-up with very minimal impact on my boot time, although I rarely boot to Windows at all these days.
I play a lot of indie games and so some of them have stability issues with Linux, especially if it’s a recent release, because they have small dev teams but generally my experience has been that Linux gaming is really good, better than I expected, even despite my experience being a bit of an outlier on the worse end of the scale. Most of the time performance is noticeably better too.
In terms of “owning your PC” it does sound hyperbolic but every time I boot into windows I get forced to deal with updates on windows’ schedule (wanna boot to windows to run some utility for a quick 5 minute job? Hah, too bad! You get to have forced updates and you will reboot when we tell you to and now you have booted back into windows you have to get more updates and reboot again for some reason) and all the user account control measures and shit. I can’t just run certain programs on start-up without the UAC prompts and I literally have to open submenus just to say “yes, I want to run this program and no, I am not concerned about the risks” or I can disable all the security controls and get ridiculous notifications that I have threats detected with my PC and, when I try to scan for threats it will tell me that none are found and it’s only hidden within submenus that the “threat” is that my UAC settings are lower than recommended. Bruh, I set them lower because I don’t want to have to deal with constant pop-ups making me confirm that I want to run the program that I just started. That’s not a threat and I chose that so I don’t need to be told to attend to the security center to figure out the threat that the security center doesn’t inform me about only to discover that windows doesn’t approve of my user-defined settings.
You get used to Windows being this way and always having mostly useless training wheels on it which dictate how and when you will use your OS but it’s genuinely frustrating to go back to it when you’ve been free from it for a while.
Not gonna lie - my experience with Linux is occasionally that I want to do something but I don’t know how to do it whereas my experience with Windows I that I want to do something and either it won’t let me or it routinely puts up a series of roadblocks to actively discourage me from doing something even when I specifically chose to do that thing. So it’s a choice between two different frustrations but overall my Linux experience has been trading a constant stream of Microsoft-induced frustrations for skill issue frustrations on Linux and the occasional “Why the fuck would in have to set up a hotkey binding for bringing up the system monitor when there should be one pre set upon installation?” type of frustration.
“if you want to feel like you actually own your PC” is pretty hilarious though.
How is it at all inaccurate? It’s been clear for years that various software corporations would prefer you not actually own your hardware (in the sense that you can modify it as you wish and run whatever you want on it). Apple, Google, and Microsoft have all been trying to achieve this (through various secure boot and attestation measures) to better extract profit from either their walled gardens or their SaaS offerings. To them, the ideal computer is one you pay for, but they control. That’s not ownership.
i turn on the computer, i sign in, i dont have to use my MS account to sign in. Nothing is locked down or paywalled yet so yea it’s not really much of an issue from a practical “can i use it” standpoint. You’re talking about a future that might be on the horizon but it’s still not here yet.
If we’re talking privacy issues then that is a whole other situation. But it’s not like i’m doing unabomber levels of opsec. If i use only Tails(Linux) and Tor from here on out, am i deleting my google email? Prob not.
I used O&O ShutUp10++ to turn off a bunch of settings for privacy in Win 11.
“but muh gaaammess”
damn what a good point you made there.
admittedly low effort, but hopefully gets the job done
2010 The year of Linux2011 The year of Linux2012 The year of Linux2013 The year of Linux2014 The year of Linux2015 The year of Linux2016 The year of Linux2017 The year of Linux2018 The year of Linux2019 The year of Linux2020 The year of Linux2021 The year of Linux2022 The year of Linux2023 The year of Linux2024 The year of Linux2025 The year of Linux2026 The year of Linux
The year of Linux has been basically every year since 2003. Virtually every server runs on some form of Linux and with containerization, even the Windows servers are secretly running a bunch of Linux machines though a hypervisor.
The year of the Linux desktop is the one that’s a bit of a meme. X11 has been dragged kicking and screaming into to 21st century, but the general consensus now seems to be it’s time to take it out back and shoot it. Wayland is quickly becoming the new standard.
It will legitimately become easier to develop desktop applications on Linux once this all becomes standardized. The reason so many companies target Windows is because Microsoft has a ton of proprietary but managed apis for building desktop apps. Ones that are not compatible with X11.
im not a hater of linux, btw. around 2012-2014 i was a linux desktop user. tried the switch but had to come back unfortunately due to work related reasons
I still use Windows at work. We use ArcGIS Pro so it’s necessary (me and a bunch of other people in the geodev community are pissed about that and constantly tell at ESRI but they just keep trying to push AI while their software breaks)
Have switched to Fedora on all my home machines. Basically just RDP into my workstation if I need to do anything windows dependant.
2020 or thereabouts was the year of the linux desktop. steamos came out which meant there was a lot of labor put into getting a proper compatibility layer for gaming. DEs were good enough by that point that your grandparents could use them. plus i heard they finally got the graphical installer mostly working, i think. meanwhile microsoft has been over-enshittifying their product with the assumption they have the same captive audience they had in 2008. i just don’t think that’s true anymore
sorry if this just restates the article i didn’t read it
linux is great, but i still need to dual boot windows for some incompatible (art) software :/
and don’t tell me to just use wine it doesn’t work i’ve tried it
How about Winboat? Its just a Windows VM with less hassle. I use it for all the office apps.
i’ll look into it, ty! though im not sure how it’ll run with my drawing tablet and such
Never used wineboat but something to be aware of is VMs usually can interact with peripherals natively (as if they were the host computer) but this is almost always disabled by default as people usually use VMs to isolate stuff.
So you may need to adjust options
if that doesn’t work maybe try libvirt? it’s got usb passthrough so you should be able to mostly use peripherals any way you want. also it’s got a gui like virtualbox so the hardest part is turning on hardware-accelerated virtualization/hyper-v in your bios
i’ll look into it! unfortunately my tablet is not plug and play and requires drivers so hopefully that’s not a problem
it’s just a virtual machine so it probably won’t be a problem. i’ve had issues with some of the more esoteric stuff but tbh it was probably user error
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I know this sounds silly but have you tried running it through steam for proton? Not saying it will work or anything but it might? Might also need to install stuff in wine through proton tricks to get it to work (it’s not that bad, you just pick what thing to download from a searchable list. Just have to know what it needs.)
I have, yea :(
Same but with virtual instruments. Almost no native compatibility and emulation is made basically impossible by the fact that you open them through another piece of software
yea this is the same with the software I use :/ I spent sooo long trying to troubleshoot it in wine but it just doesn’t work
I use Linux for my home server, but I haven’t been able to make it work as a desktop, despite many tries.
Just too much fiddling getting all my hardware and software working right and there’s always been something I can’t get right. If I had more time I could surely get a system to be useable for most tasks, but I’d always still need a windows machine for some stuff. So it hasn’t made the work worth the effort for me.
What courage
