Only semi-related: Why do they always show pictures of Gates when he hasn’t been involved in MS in a long time? Why never Satya Nadella?
EDIT: Also, yes, related to the actual question already living Linux full time and when October rolls around probably gonna back up everything from the Windows side of my dual-boot and wipe the 1TB NVMe Windows is on to use as storage.
I was thinking the same thing. He will just forever be known as the guy. Maybe it will change once he dies?
Maybe, he is indeed looking hella rough in this photo.
Seems he’s using the same orange tan as the other orange guy haha
Didn’t work for Steve Jobs.
I don’t think so. Gates’ shoes are big ones.
You’re right, it’s really hard to fill the shoes of someone who abuses their power and position to try to hook up with women.
Well, I guess that Gates can’t fill their own shoes too
Not that hard unfortunately. I’m sure someone up to the task can fill his shoes no problem
Personally, I think this picture of Steve Balmer is so much more iconic and should be used for every single article about Microsoft or Windows:
It’s weird how MS’s putting developers first became a joke. Back in the 80’s, companies like HP and IBM had open warehouses with coders at desks lined up like factory workers. MS was the first big company to give a private office to every programmer.
The approach isn’t what became a joke, it was the absolutely unhinged way in which it was presented in that famous Ballmer stage appearance.
Oh sure, it was crazy. But the sentiment behind it was good. It’s like how Howard Dean got dunked on for his scream.
I’d take that any day over the unhinged AI focus from all these companies now or Google’s awful documentation from the past few years.
I couldn’t name another Microsoft employee if a gun was to my head. but I can still vividly remember myself in 4th grade reading about Bill Gate’s mega mansion in Popular Mechanics for Kids
Steve Ballmer! Developers developers developers! That’s the other one I know
I’m somewhat in the same boat but I remember Mister “Developers Developers Developers” Steve Ballmer who was also immortalized by the “Ballmer Peak” XKCD. https://xkcd.com/323/
Gabe Newell?
He would be also be a reasonable person to include on an article citing Steam data.
Holy shit I remember that article too!
I could but that’s because a friend of mine works on the legacy rendering code in Excel. He has some traumatic war stories to share.
Because he set the general, evil directions for MS. Like keeping users uninformed and locked in, smearing the competition, sabotaging open standards, taking your control over your hardware and data away from users, etc. All happened during evil Bill’s reign.
Not to mention the many deals with hardware manufacturers in order to avoid competing OSs to have any chance. They managed to kill BeOS and dominate the Japanese market in the 90s
I was wondering why Bill Gates would be talking about Steam users.
I’m here, so I’m more likely to know who that is or what he looks like. But I don’t. I do now because you mentioned him and I looked up how he looks like. Your average Joe is gonna be even less likely to know who that is or what he looks like. So I’m guessing that’s why. Some CEOs just avoid the spotlight. Or maybe I’ve just been avoiding MS news, dunno
It’s a vicious cycle. The media don’t use Satya Nadella’s name or picture much, so people don’t know who he is or how he looks like.
Optics or marketing, it’s the same reason LLMs are all called AI.
Under his watch they did form the anti-opensource and EEE mantra
Already did and it’s glorious! Steam works beautifully and the only final thing that I’m missing is Adobe products.
I recommend, if you want to try Linux, that you try out the ‘Debian’ distribution, and use the ‘KDE Plasma’ desktop environment. It makes for a very Windows-like experience and really assisted me with the transition between OSs.
for newcomers, maybe this is the best combo. Debian stable with KDE Plasma.
Unless you’re using NVIDIA. Didn’t work out of the box for me and required a couple hours of fiddling. Mint worked seamlessly.
PopOS (scroll down to the “Pop_OS with Nvidia” link).
It is tailored for Nvidia cards, is Debian(Ubuntu) based, & super friendly for new users.
EDIT: Here’s a link to the 24.04 release that provides only the Cosmic desktop environment (no X11, no gnome or kde). This is what I use, but it’s in alpha so user beware.
Saving this.
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Wrangling my Nvidia drivers into Mint also took a couple hours for me but I haven’t had problems afterward
Debian is not a good choice for beginners. It’s extremely bare bones compared to Ubuntu or Mint.
Drivers on Debian stable are also heavily outdated
I completely disagree. Debian is not beginner-friendly. Go with Bazzite if your focus is gaming.
It is a gaming-focused distribution. It’s also an “atomic” distribution, which basically means it’s really hard to break it. It’s more like Android or IOS where the OS and base system are managed by someone else. They’re read-only so you can’t accidentally break them.
For example, instead of trying to manage your own video card drivers, they come packaged with the base system image, and they’re tested to make sure they work with all the other base components.
I’ve been using Linux since the 1990s, so I’ve run my share of distributions: Slackware, RedHat, Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu, etc. Even for someone experienced, atomic distributions are great. But, for a newcomer they’re so much better.
As long as you’re running KDE, it will feel familiar to a Windows user. I started with Kubuntu which was great until I had a system update, and it completely shat itself. Wanted to try Bazzite next, but the installer wouldn’t work properly, so I installed OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, and I’ve seen no reason to switch since.
Not having access to Adobe products is a feature not a bug.
If you’re into primarily gaming, try PikaOS. It’s Debian based and uses the same tooling, but it’s on an optimized kernel. Is generally geared toward gaming.
There are other gaming specific distros of course, this is just the “Debian”-related one. I would not recommend the real debian if you’re mainly into gaming. It’ll need manual intervention and/or optimization to get games running, or at least get them running well. It’s not impossible (it even hard if you’ve got but is Linux experience), but just harder than necessary.
maybe give debian testing a go for a little more up to date software :)
I went with Mint but I’m thinking about KDE (or maybe KDE flavored Arch? Idk I’m new) on my second computer. Pretty painless?
So Mint is the ‘distro’, which is actually based on Ubuntu, which is based on Debian. In simple terms, a distro is a bundle of programs and configurations assembled for you. Basically, Debian is a stripped down version of Mint.
A ‘desktop environment’ is a separate program(?) that changes what your desktop looks like, and they can be downloaded on any distro. So you can try out KDE Plasma on your Mint installation! The one that you’re likely using right now is called ‘Cinnamon’, which I personally didn’t like and turned me off of Linux my first time trying to switch over years ago.
Something cool about KDE Plasma is that you can download themes and make your desktop environments look really cool. For instance, sometimes I like to rock this Windows 7 theme: https://www.pling.com/p/2142957/
I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that it generates a new system for you on update and lets you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lmde is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
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Eh Arch can be quite stable if you’re careful, but it could also be a frustrating experience, there’s lots of manual configuration
Outside of Steam, how have you found gaming compatibility? I know Xbox Gamepass doesn’t work as that’s very specifically a Windows app, but how about other standalone games/platforms?
and the only final thing that I’m missing is Adobe products.
I miss Affinity Designer! Bought a license and I like it but no linux port 🙄
I can’t get used Inkscape, it’s so different and confusing for me
The more people hop onto Linux the faster and better funded support for Linux development becomes. If you’re a single player gamer or play Valve multiplayer games primarily, make the jump to Linux. Get on Mint, get on Fedora, Ubuntu, etc and get off Microsoft’s shitboat. You already took off from Reddit. Wean off all these other money/data leeches
It’s not like Windows 10 will magically stop booting or something…
Switch to Linux. As a big-time gamer, I did it last year and it’s been fantastic. Only issue is if you main games with root kit anticheat…but with enough momentum in Linux direction, game studios will be forced to abandon those dubious detection methods anyway.
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Same. I just gotta figure out what distro I want to run. Nobara, Bazzite, Mint, Zorin, Kubuntu, idk. I get analysis paralysis. I’ve run Ubuntu, Fedora, and even tried Arch once, but it’s been a long while since I’ve been full Linux. I’m definitely done with Windows tho (at least outside of work, but I can’t control that).
I’m using Garuda and it has a setup specifically for gaming. The gamer look it comes with out of the box is ugly in my opinion, but that’s easy to change.I highly recommend it. It’s Arch based, so the AUR and Arch wiki work great with it. It’s really great and (in my opinion) user friendly.
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Garuda is great because it comes with a tool where you can select a bunch of packages you may need (but also most won’t, so it’s not built in), then it’ll install them for you. You don’t need to search for what you’ll need because they’re listed with a description for you right on the first boot. It makes it very quick and easy to get set up, while still being Arch underneath.
I play only on Linux, and it works great. Come on over!
Why Gates in the picture tough?
He stepped down as a chairman over 10 years ago and didint he leave the microsoft board like 5 years ago?
I switched to linux full time almost a year ago.
I have been thus far entirely unsuccessful in convincing anyone else to make the jump. Normal people do not give a fuck, will not lift a finger to improve their digital lives. I’ve been telling friends and family about adblockers for YEARS, and not a single one ever bothered to do it of their own volition. If I don’t do it for them, then they just sit through ads like complacent sheep. None of them are going to change operating systems if they can’t even install a browser extension.
Sticking with 10 for a bit, moving to Linux
I am going to attempt to switch to Linux, I’m definitely not going to willingly use windows platforms again.
It’s going to be purchase a new hard drive and then jump to Linux Mint this August.
It’s not an experience I am looking forward to (5080S, I do a lot of modding, and enjoy fangames/indie games which do not always play nice with linux) but needs must - the Linux community in general is very friendly, so we’ll get through it, even if the first 6 months are rough. I’ll keep the dual boot and push the windows partition to 11 if needed by work, that way I can put off rewriting my elderly access database for another few years.
Honestly, Microsoft are committing suicide when it comes to home users. It won’t be sudden, but the wheels are turning, all the IT savvy folks are switching people over (already did my aunt’s potato, mum’s demi-tato is next week). Eventually, a tipping point will be reached and offices will start switching - I hope that day comes before I die of old age!
Linux is fine. Ive been using it since before ubuntu was invented. But Windows has the most goddamn computer games.
IIRC W11 share is barely near W10 and they are already forcing it out and crapton of perfectly usable hardware, if it is not planned obsolescence i don’t know what it is!? Fuck microsoft!
Can’t upgrade because my 4 years old mobo is apparently too old (haven’t checked out the workarounds yet). Installed Linux Mint to give it a try and I am positively surprised so far.
