I still have a dual-boot desktop that I keep a copy of Windows 10 on for one or two bits of software that I can’t get 100% working in Wine, and yeah I’m definitely not upgrading. For one thing I can’t because it’s an older CPU that doesn’t have TPM on it, but also because of the AI thing.
The idea that Microsoft is expecting me to purchase new hardware (which is now ludicrously expensive because of companies like Microsoft going all-in on AI slop) so that I can ‘upgrade’ and make it easier for them to use their AI slop spyware to harvest my info is so preposterously arrogant and evil that I actually find it super funny.
It’s like if someone was going to rob you and they expected you to go purchase and supply the gun they use to stick you up with lol.
I’ve been
hereimproving the whole timeFTFY
It’s probably been good enough for non-gamers for ages. There have been a number of attempts to make wine personable enough to run games for the average user. I think Valve finally nailed it.
Now we just need enough marketshare to break through the kernel game protection bullshit and for Adobe/Autodesk to get on board.
It’s a reference to Game Changer.
i need to go back and watch that
Man MS,…
-W8=> dude, we just want an OS that works
-Voice commands=> please don’t give hackers that kind of acces through our speakers
-Vista=> just fkn work already
-Onedrive all over the place=> nope
-365=> no thx
When will these assholes learn? If this is the straw that breaks multiple camels then good.
Windows users want a menu button in the lower left corner and shit to work after a short installer. How the fuck do you keep messing that up?
🐧
Windows users want a menu button in the lower left corner and shit to work after a short installer. How the fuck do you keep messing that up?
Capitalists are literally Mt Krabbs:
“Squidward! New rule! All customers must fill in this survey about the details of their day before they order!” Drops a giant stack of papers on the counter
Squidward sighs “Why are we doing this?”
“Because then I can sell their information for more MONEY! Hyukukukukuk!”
Also UI that operates near instantaneously. Not waiting for the option I want to pop in.
Also not having online search results posted above the locally installed programs. If I search for “cmd” and hit Enter, I want it to open Command Prompt. I don’t want to do a fucking Edge search for “cmd”, or have it open some internet ad for something else named “cmd”.
So fucking irritating. Why does it prioritize web searches over local programs?!
Because fuck you! That’s why!
Working as intended by the shareholders.
There’s nothing I do with my home computer that warrants that AI is integrated to the OS. I browse the web. Play games. Occasionally I work on some personal projects.
I can never see myself say ” Hey Cortana! I want to play Megabonk!”. I see much less reason for the OS to constantly record everything I do to do this.
Please don’t shove AI down my throat.
Like apparently everyone else, I moved to Linux Mint and have been loving it! It really is easy to use, but I’ve also realized that my technical knowledge is at a point where I really don’t need it to be easy. Like, I’ve always considered myself kinda tech illiterate in comparison to the people I’m around (I’m a software engineer who specializes in JavaScript/React, but I’m around Rust devs and people who set up docker containers for fun) but apparently just being comfortable using the console is far above what the average user will do. I think there was an xkcd about this kind of phenomenon
This is the absolutely perfect way to describe what it’s like listening to Linux fans give advice to newcomers.
yess, that’s exactly the one I had in mind!
Eh. I installed Linux Mint this weekend because I was sick of Microsoft’s bullshit and I had to connect my PC to my router with an Ethernet cable to install a driver for my wifi adapter from the terminal. I am quite tech savvy and was very comfortable with this whole process and it took no time at all, but my wife who knows barely anything about computers would have probably given up the moment the Internet didn’t work when Mint installed. Most people use routers that they rent for too much money from their ISPs and don’t even know you can plug shit into the backs of those routers yourself. The moment the wifi doesn’t work on the new OS even though the password is right, it’s game over for their ability to troubleshoot it. That is why Linux won’t get normies on it anytime soon. After that my experience has been extremely smooth and I have been able to do anything I’ve wanted to do without touching the terminal (although I prefer terminal commands), but that initial hurdle is just way too much to expect from the average person who just wants to get on Netflix and Facebook asap.
I’m not a computer person at all and the most I did with my Windows laptop was gently prodding the drivers to fix themselves. I have experience with basic C++ and Javascript but thats back when I was in high school and I was never really good at it. I would love to move to Linux but honestly yeah the hurdle seems too big. The thought of rendering my laptop unusable for a few days and fucking it up even further to the point of no takesies backsies scares me.
But oh well, I need to save up for a new laptop first before worrying about these things lol
Por que no los dos? Dual boot until you’re comfortable, or as a fail safe for yourself.
Yeah, the average user doesn’t want to do scary console shit. Linux won’t replace windows until people don’t need to type console commands.
Which is kinda sad. The console always feels like a more precise way to deal with a problem. So it’s like people are saying “Using a mouse is too scary, I’d rather use a WiiMote while wearing mittens”
People don’t need to type console commands. They’re just the easiest way to tell someone how to do something in text.
Every computer on every operating system, will inevitably face an issue of some kind at some point. Something you need to troubleshoot.
And if 100% of the troubleshooting is to copy/paste commands into terminal? Yeah. It IS necessary to type things into terminal.
This isn’t a case of “Terminal is the easy way, but you can find help tutorials using the GUI.”
This is a case of every tutorial is “copy/paste these commands into your terminal, and if something goes wrong you better know what the errors are even saying”
So when a non techie sees “python error”, their reaction will be “THERE ARE SNAKES INSIDE MY PC??? THEY’RE CAUSING ERRORS!!!”
You’re about a decade or two out of date with your knowledge here.
Some of my favourite ones from trying to learn this new system include:
invalid argument
Uh… I just typed in a magic incantation that takes up two lines on this text thing.
Which. Fucking. One!?
no such file or directory
The final three words above apply here too. I got this one because a file I downloaded that was supposed to do something had …insert long string of technobabble from SO that included the word shahbang, I swear! It took him over ten minutes to find whatever all the treknobabble he uttered meant and then half a second to fix.
So it’s not even fear that’s at issue. It’s blank incomprehension when the error message is about as useful as those dummy lights in '80s-era cars that just said “ENGINE”.
It’s more than that, too. Even when there are GUI things (like the network manager in my system now) the GUIs are badly designed (because it turns out that UX design is an actual, learnable, technical field!), and, further, inconsistent from one piece to another so there’s little in the way of shared learning. When you learn one of these little GUI utilities you’ve learned … that one … GUI … utility.
At that point you might as well be typing stuff like
ls -laR ~/Documents | awk '{print $9}' | grep -v '^\.' | xargs -I{} file {} | grep -i 'ascii\|unicode\|utf' | cut -d: -f1 | xargs -I{} sh -c 'head -n 5 "{}" | nl -ba -s": " | sed "s/^/$(basename {}): /"' | less -N(Fake command line supplied by long-suffering SO who got a kick out of making something incredibly stupid.)
This is self-fulfilling bullshit. Everyone is saying that typing words is somehow scary, so everyone is scared of typing words.
Average user doesn’t really has more problems with console, either they care enough to google how to fix the problem, and do whatever Internet tells them, or they don’t and they ask for help and kick the problem down the chain. Will the solution involve typing words or clicking checkboxes is kind of irrelevant
I just tried out the long term service branch option, which is fine for now.
I’m glad you’ve had a good go of it. I’ve been very unimpressed with Linux Mint. I expected it to be fiddly, I didn’t expect it to just…not work out of the box. Like freezing up on the initial screens as part of the welcome tour? Baked in features like linking up with Google drive just…not working? Losing sound in games when messaged on discord, the de facto standard for side by side gaming audio? And all of these issues reported multiple times in multiple forums, with like 8 different solutions proposed depending on who you asked, with a healthy amount of “well that’s not a problem, it must be your machine’s fault” when it’s happening to multiple people?
I fixed some of the issues after serious googling, and I’ll get it working fully eventually, but I could never in a million years recommend it to someone unless they shared my desire to go mostly open source with high privacy, or were very tech-savvy. I even thought it would be a scenario like, I play admin and get things set up, then can hand off a working computer to my wife or daughter. Not a chance for the wife, and we are going to really need to keep leaning into programming for the kiddo. Maybe she’ll be a tech whiz who likes fixing things, but if she needs something reliable for school some day it’ll be a Chromebook or (gross) a Mac.
It’s customizable as hell, it’s free and open-source, and it’s helping my computer skills, so I’ll keep going with it for sure. But if I didn’t love learning and problem solving and simultaneously have HUGE issues with privacy and Windows whole direction… I can’t imagine sticking with it.
Linux is written by doctors? It’s all in your head, mate!
I had the same impression with Mint and it was the one my distro research led me to believe I would be the happiest with. I think my first mistake was using current generation parts for my build so I couldn’t get the GPU drivers to load or the monitor settings to detect properly. After troubleshooting for several hours and totally breaking my system at least twice messing with xorg.conf, I updated the linux kernel and that finally fixed it. A week later I realized I was spending 2-3 hours of troubleshooting for every hour of gaming or basic use and I finally made the switch to Fedora 43 Workstation.
Now everything works like I needed it to and I have been installing what I want to use with no more hanging, crashing, or horrendous screen tearing since v-sync doesn’t seem to work very well on X11. My takeaway is that Mint is probably ideal for older hardware but it definitely was a chore to make it happy with an RX 9060 XT and newer stuff which isn’t supported by the default kernel. My use case was more gaming oriented so YMMV.
Yeah, thats Debian for you. Stable and reliable but to achieve that, perpetually late. For more recent hardware you want something Fedora or Arch based. Peronally I switched to Bazzite from Win. Wanted to see what the fuzz is about with immutable distros (and all the gaming stuff preinstalled was another Point). So far it has mostly been great. I just had to adjust to the immutable part. My tryst with Arch on my old hardware was less pleasant…
While the driver situation has become much better, it is always a good idea to check Linux compatibility of new hardware purchases to be on the safe side.
I’m one of them, and currently looking into Linux, if I can migrate my Photoshop tools/brushes/gradients/etc successfully over to another program that is compatible.
My only hang up after that is gaming, and I feel that can be resolved with dual boot to win10.
Why not just play games on linux?
It works so well nowadays
Does it now? I have an Arc B580 and Linux drivers are lackluster at best.
my god linux and intel graphics drivers were so easy for me to setup. Even got HDR running first attempt which is apparently hard. No idea why, may have just been the distro made it easy.
Pretty sure everyone warned that Intel drivers would be iffy regardless of OS and to only buy if you’re okay being a beta tester for Intel.
The linux AMD GPU driver is superior to their windows driver
Except they’re fine on Windows and have been since I got it. But yeah it’s definitely a dealbreaker for moving to Linux, I’m not buying new hardware
I figure that at least a few games I like to play are not compatible with Linux. I haven’t yet gotten the full list of games that won’t run on it but I’d hedge a bet that there’s more than one. One of them which I play a lot, Warframe, is apparently a bit buggy on it. I’m a sucker for multiplayer games and if there is kernel level anti cheat on them it might cause things to break.
Check them here: https://www.protondb.com/
Proton has a constantly updating list of games and how well they work on Linux and the Steam Deck
Man, none of the games I am trying to get running are on there. Bummer.
Thanks for the link! Saving this so I can check it out later.
Gaming on Linux works now. I play every game I care for.
Gaming on Linux is superior, on a lot of games! I dual booted and ran benchmarks on Windows 11 and Fedora, same hardware. Ran nothing but the OS and Steam in the background, (gaming mode on and off), oddly found better performance with gaming mode off, then tried the same thing with Fedora. 5-10% higher framerates in Fedora running Proton.
Tried the same thing with synched Firefox tabs, half a dozen open tabs, telegram and discord running. Fedora sometimes hit 15% higher framerates.
Yeah I’ve been playing Elden Ring with no crashes since switching to Mint.
Are you on an AMD card?
I have a Ryzen CPU with onboard graphics and then an Nvidia 3060ti mobile. Rpmfusion drivers in Linux and Nvidia experience in Windows.
Interesting!
Theoretically, that (Nvidia graphics + IGP display out) is the worst case scenario for Linux.
I used to get worse performance on my 3090, but it’s been awhile. I will have to try again.
I’ve been gaming almost exclusively in Linux since roughly start of COVID. It’s come a long way. I am this close to VR on Fedora, but it’s still not quite working.
Out of curiosity, what games do you see any gains in, and at approximately what settings?
And if I come across as skeptical, that’s not my intent at all. I’m interested!
The only problem is some anticheats and older games. Whenever the boys and I wanna play Battlefield I gotta switch to Windows, but besides that it’s basically fine.
A lot of older games run better on Linux. Lots of older games that don’t even work on Windows anymore
While going for another program, ideally non proprietary, with a native Linux version would be ideal, I would not be surprised if running Photoshop on Linux with wine was a viable option these days. Or will be in a not-too-distant future.
As for games, what the others have said. Unless you’re into a specific multiplier game with a kernel level “anticheat”, then it should be fine.
In fact, I suspect Photoshop, rather than gaming, is much more likely to be the reason you’d have to dual boot.
Don’t know if this is particularly relevant as a comparison to your Photoshop idea, but I have successfully run things like windows version of Cascadeur and Blender through Proton; in the case of Blender, it was for running an older Kenshi modding import export plugin, which only supports the Windows version of Blender.
Literally just set it up through Steam, Proton Experimental.
UI scaling / fonts can be a bit wonky, but for just doing the import/export steps, its totally workable, as… a .blend file is a .blend file, so you can do the other edits in a linux version of Blender.
Or, I could probably use ProtonTricks to add some fonts and font subpixel AA dependencies to get it to work ‘more right’, I remember that being what I ended up doing back when I was still using MO2.
Or, or, you could try Bottles, that would probably be a more sane way to try and set up a more… fully featured, editor type of Windows program, within Linux, it tends to handle those kinds of esoteric dependencies a bit better, has more of them as just part of the default preset.
Holy shit, doing all that for an old Kenshi plugin is just fantastic, you genuinely got a laugh out of me. I did think people who played Kenshi seemed like masochists (or very zen and meditative people) but thanks for the confirmation.
I initially thought something like that, but another comment mentions a bunch of potential Adobe cloud + DRM bullshit that may or may not make the wine/proton approach range from impossible to quite a bit broken.
TL;DR Adobe is probably evil incarnate.
I would not describe setting that up as masochistic, it was actually quite easy, easier than figuring out how to install Windows on the hardware I have, without blowing up everything else.
Dual booting linux and windows?
That’s masochism.
… I actually was a karateka for a decade +, so, perhaps i am some combination of meditative and masochistic, by some people’s standards.
I very much appreciate the extent to which Kenshi is not a power fantasy, the extent to which … it allows you to become OP as fuck and do many incredible things… but you have to actually earn it.
Anyway, yes, the DRM is probably your main problem there with Adobe, … I dunno, find a crack or use Krita or Gimp or other alternatives?
At least personally, I find that those two do everything I need, there are basically only super niche scenarios where linux does not have an at least comparably featured alternative to some windows software.
I recently got a local LLM spun up… on my Steam Deck. Running Bazzite.
Literally so easy I did it without a mouse or keyboard.
… Can you do that on Windows?
heheheheh
Ah it seems you have me confused, I’m not the guy who needs Photoshop.
Interestingly, I have been dual booting Linux and windows for a while in the past. That was way, way back though, around 2010 I’d say. Back then, gaming on Linux was still very much hit and miss (but mostly miss, for me) and I had nothing better to do than gaming after uni so I did not have much of a choice.
I’ll say, maybe it was dumb luck, more likely it’s Windows getting shitter, but dual booting used to be much less of a faff from what I can gather. For instance I never had a windows update torch my boot record to force itself instead of grubby grub. I understand that can be a common occurrence these days.
After that and getting a real job TM, I had much less time for it so I wiped that sad excuse for an OS from my system with a grin and never looked back. Which also means, there’s been a decent chunk of time I only did with whatever was available in Linux as I could not be bothered with wine. So I don’t know how easy things have become, my only exposure is now the odd bit of gaming again but, as you know, Steam just makes it work for me.
+1 for Krita, I don’t need much but it more than fits the bill for me. There are other threads in there though that do mention some stuff is just a lot harder when compared to PS for peeps who are actually good at the stuff.
LLMs (ok ok,not local) now come by default on Windows, without keyboard or mouse, just the mandatory connection to the mothership. So, yay windows?
maybe I should try Kenshi sometime…
Oh.
Perhaps I am confused, though you did say:
I would not be surprised if running Photoshop on Linux with wine was a viable option these days. Or will be in a not-too-distant future.
Thats basically what I was trying to respond to initially.
I’m use lemmy on mobile, and sometimes the sort of thread branches become a confusing rainbow of … wait who am I talking to?
But anyway yeah, I used to be able to dual boot linux and windows fairly easily, but then, MSFT decided that their idea of Secure Boot involves rewriting your GRUB or whatever, and breaking your bootloader / boot sector.
And it would do this via Windows updates.
So thats a rootkit, as far as I’m concerned, fuck em, get off my PC.
IRT local LLMs, that aren’t spyware, that are containerized, that don’t burn down an acre of forest for every 15 minutes their datacenter runs?
Alpaca. Its a flatpak, makes setting up a local LLM about as easy at it could possibly be.
IRT to Kenshi…
Seek not the “wisdom” of Okran, for he is a false god, a cruel god, his “Holy Nation” is an abominable pox, a viscious hypocrisy manifest in blood stained sand and broken souls.
Instead, seek the meek, foster them, and your rewards shall be numerous and unexpected.
… ahem …
Uh yeah Kenshi has as almost much lore and worldbuilding as something like a Bethesda game, but it does have a very unorthodox sort of control scheme.
Its… kind of like playing on old school, SWG/MxO era MMO, but its… singleplayer, and … basically a simulation of a world, more so than a ‘game’ with a coherent main plot.
You just have to go find the plotlines, the people with backstories, the factions with conflicts.
You can be a fighter, a thief, a caravaneer, you can build a town, you can raise an army, and lead them all into battle.
Its unorthodox, if you need a game to handhold you and direct you, you probably won’t like Kenshi.
But if you want a confusing and brutal world that is entirely capable of existing and functioning without you… you might like it.
Ah I did say that, but as an answer to the post above who wondered whether a dual boot would be needed for PS.
So what I heard is true. Yep, shitty practice from MS. In other news, water makes you wet.
No no obviously windows would not support that. It provides some value, and respects the user.
You do make it sound good, I just think I am sadly no longer at a point in my life where I can reasonably dedicate the chunk of time that would be needed to get into it. Maybe I’ll change my mind. Thank you for the enthusiastic write up!
In my understanding, still no, especially not the more advanced filters stuff. PS6 (or whatever the last one you could actually buy was) on the other hand is 95+% functional if you can go back. Not an expert, GIMP is fine for my needs, there’s even a spin with PS-like menu layout if that’s your jam, but happy to be told I’m wrong about new PS.
Adobe shit and AutoCAD stuff are the the last major sticking points these days, Office is in the cloud now. Shame these last two won’t let their cash cows be rented in the cloud (instead of subscribed, you know, a long term rental agreement using your own computer) to my knowledge. There’s always VMs.
Ah, that’s good to know. I wonder why that is. I don’t use these programs beyond the odd very simple image manipulation that could be done just as easily in paint, so I have no idea what people want from Photoshop alternative. However, I seem to keep hearing no single open source program does everything from people who are PS power users.
Don’t get me started on AutoCAD, and just CAD tools in general… Being more involved on that side, from a dev rather than user perspective, I can’t say I think very highly of Autodesk, or the idea of having all these geometry kernels be proprietary, and Autodesk acquiring as many of them as it can. Maths is public, maths research belongs to the public, you can fuck off with gating it.
As for VMs, we are talking about apps that need a relatively good GPU and therefore one would need to do some GPU pass through on their VM to use it properly I believe. Assuming I’m right, that may be more trouble than it’s worth compared to a dual boot (also assuming this hasn’t gotten much simpler than my somewhat distant memory now)
Modern versions of Photoshop are deeply integrated with another software called Adobe Cloud. As in, you can’t even install Photoshop by itself, it needs to be installed and managed via Adobe cloud, which has to constantly be running in the background for Photoshop to work (and it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s some kernel level BS, knowing Adobe). They are also reliant on other Adobe online services for some tools and services, and not just the generative AI ones.
That’s usually what causes a lot of hangups I believe. For example, if you need to connect your Photoshop to your client’s Adobe cloud or share files through it, or maybe connect Photoshop to other Adobe products like Indesign or After Effects, that may not work properly. This even applies to pirated versions of Photoshops on windows, where a lot of the patching comes from blocking Adobe’s constant interference with the program as it’s running, but as a result several tools may end up not working.
As for stuff people want from Photoshop, this is anecdotal from me but I primary use Photoshop to letter things and literally no other program that runs on Linux even comes close to the simplicity and versatility Photoshop gives me for lettering with its type tool. It is just so simple to configure text the way I want to and there are so many ways to modify it. Clip Studio Paint is the second best contender (makes sense since it used to be primarily a comic creation software) but, shocker, it doesn’t run on Linux either.
Every open source tool I tried, Gimp and Krita included, is so many miles behind in this department that I thought I had returned to the stone age when I tried using them for this purpose earlier this year. Krita didn’t even have a live preview of the text I was writing. It was completely unusable for my more advanced needs.
This is why I just tell people who use Photoshop and Adobe that want to switch to Linux to just accept dual booting. It’s realistically the only thing that won’t constantly lead to headaches with the software.
I have to use illustrator for work sometimes. I used to dual boot, now I use winboat. It’s a bit of a pain to set up initially but it works well once you’ve done that
Thank you so much for the detailed answer. I was not aware of that level of BS on the Photoshop front, though that does not surprise me. I guess I’m showing my age a bit by remembering Photoshop to just be a standalone program without any of that “not that long ago”.
Games work better on Linux than you might expect. Check out protondb for specific titles you’re thinking of. Most things I’ve just hit “play” on steam or heroic and they work n
Thanks for the suggestion! I’ll definitely check it out.
honestly, if there would be a 100% office compatibility, photoshop on linux, and proper anticheat support, we would have 40% linux usage
I know it isn’t an exact solution, but people have created a Photoshop-like UI layout and keybindings for Gimp. That could help, should you choose to go with Gimp as the image editor.
I’ve dual booted my gaming rig with Windows 11 and Linux. The only thing I use windows for is Turtle WoW. If that would work on linux, I’d have no reason to have windows. I had it working on macOS, but it stopped working at macOS 26. and the emulation tool that i was utilising isn’t being updated anymore. so it’s unlikely going to work again. If Linux would run my Turtle WoW, I’d be 100% linux on my gaming rig. All my other games work out of the box. Anyway. Linux is the shit! I
I’m still using Windows 11 just from inertia, but I’ve been putting my kids on Linux Mint and Bazzite depending.
I don’t think I can get away from Windows, as a professional .NET developer, but I won’t likely have more than the one Windows laptop at this point. My entire home lab and home infra is Linux of one variety or another. If we count VMs, then I overwhelmingly using Debian.
I don’t think I can get away from Windows, as a professional .NET developer
Because you have to use VS Code instead of VS? You can always deploy to a Windows VM if you need to be sure IIS works. Though everything will just run on dotnet and nginx through a reverse proxy if you want to stay within Linux.
For most cases you can use Rider, which has a native Linux version. It doesn’t do database projects so if you use MSSQL without an
OEMORM you’re gonna want at least VS Code, but other than that it works fine.Of course if you’re a .NET developer in a corporate environment you probably don’t have a choice as you’re already using a Windows VM through Azure Virtual Desktop just so that your company can chain itself harder to daddy Microsoft.
I don’t think I can get away from Windows, as a professional .NET developer,
I understand that .Net is nicely cross-platform, now.
But it’s still simplest to run whatever the boss is running.
You might be surprised by how capable linux gaming has gotten. The only thing really missing is AAA FPS type games. That doesn’t matter at all to me, but its something to consider. Just about everything else plays right out of the box.
Check out winboat
I’m going to drop this here. Both Affinity 2 if you bought it or the Free Affinity 3 works well on Linux.
I’ve started working with affinity and I’m pretty impressed so far. It does have some hiccups importing Photoshop brushes where the brush settings are wiped but I figure I have to look further into that to see if that can be remedied.
I have heard that running Photoshop in Winboat works. Winboat is a Windows container where you can install a whole windows system in to it. I ma not sure if it works with the latest Photoshop but I would assume it does.
Nice! Do you know if the Mac License works with the Affinity 2 Windows version as well?
Worth trying, though the new software is free and legacy affinity features are also free.
Basically if you don’t plan on using Canvas AI it’s free. Otherwise it’s moved to another monthly subscription service.
While I don’t generally recommend it, NVDIA has streaming options for games on Windows. You can even run this from a browser if you wanted, all within Linux. I would be surprised if you couldn’t use this for Photoshop or an alternative existed.
It’s just important to keep in mind this isn’t your computer, its a subscription to someone else’s computer. I just thought I’d mention this because it’s not commonly suggested and it’s nice to know avaliable options.
You can also just get a separate computer with MacOS for Photoshop and ditch the kernal games or maybe play them on Mac if they’re low end, and use Linux for everything else.
Maybe rootkits will be gone soon. 2026 is the year of the Linux desktop.
Huge numbers of Windows users are refusing to upgrade to Windows 11 – and many of them are citing its AI features as the reason why.
Spoiler: They’re not. They’re postponing. Eventually, they’ll almost all give in to the bullying :(
All my remaining W10 machines in the house are just in a holding pattern because I haven’t bothered to move them over to Linux yet. For me (and hopefully many others), its just lack of free time and procrastination. There is zero chance they’ll go to W11 for me personally.
Good luck with migrating over - my personal recommendation for advanced beginners: debian-based with XFCE (if you like lightweight desktop environments similar to Windows 2000)
Oh, I already have several Linux PCs/servers, I just haven’t migrated over kids’ PCs or the HTPCs yet and they keep getting the ever more desperate and annoying full screen BS about moving to W11, getting a MS account, using One Drive, etc.
Good that games run better on Linux nowadays, at least in general :)
Yeah, the kids only play Stardew Valley and other games that I know are 100% fine on Linux. I was mostly worried about school related things, but apparently they are all web-based tools now, so I think that will have no issues.
until some genius comes up with an “app” that is basically a browser wrapper ;) But I don’t want to jinx it.
I feel bad about the people who have no choice but to make a Microsoft account and then not being able to change the default browser app due to Family Safety™
Family safety, with your browsing data straightaway handed to the ICE Gestapo for deportations…
Yup, lots of people are going to take the extra year of Windows 10 updates Microsoft is offering and put off upgrading until next year, but so many writers want to find meaning in people not upgrading as soon as 10 was technically EOL.
it’s really the stereotypical frog in boiling water. Had they shifted from Win 7 to Win 12 directly, people would have pushed back much harder for all the bloat and slop…
True. The only reason my PC doesn’t run W11 is because I can’t be arsed to mess with the drive for that secure boot bollocks.
What’s the reasons not to try a Linux live boot though (Mint seems popular for first timers), and see if you like the look & feel? No need to install anything, but yes you need to disable secure boot possibly (temporarily to boot from USB)
Oh I’ve got a mini PC for Linux, and a Legion Go S for gaming, but I need my main one for work.
Much easier to use Windows than convince thousands of customers to swap and rewrite 20 years of code in something else.
Ah, work. Understood. I migrated my work tasks away from stuff needing windows to avoid that dependency :)
I did advocate for Linux at one point, but any issues quickly became my issues for recommending it, so I stopped.
I can see that happening… People somehow refuse to learn, yet at the same time they run to computer-savy family / friends whenever their windows breaks. I put a dead stop to Windows support for my parents ages ago - I told them “if you won’t let me teach you how to help yourself, then I can’t help you anymore”
Most of my family finally got Android tablets. Most of them never really needed a PC to start with. Email and browsing was about it.
Moved 5 home PCs from Win10 to either Mint or Bazzite this year. No complaints from the family; we’ll not be going back to M$.
Finally converted the last computer in my house from Windows to Linux. My wife was the last holdout and she’s been loving her Linux machine.
I have used MS for years and also interacting with linux based server systems daily. I do stick with windows, but I also disable most of AI related features (I used auto captioning in some cases). While I use AI daily it is a local sandboxed instance. I think they should focus on other areas, but every tech company is FOMO on AI.
I used windows 11 for too damn long before switching to Mint. I feel like I already damned myself.
Wash yourself in the soothing glow of Mint’s DE and be born again!
I still need to use it at work. Sadly.
Work is one area I wouldn’t care what OS is used. Since I don’t consider anything there to be private and its not my hardware at the end of the day.
Yeah, work machines really make avoiding Windows difficult/impossible. And the worst part is that IT’s group policy often prevents individual employees from disabling all of the super invasive telemetry and data sharing BS. So if you want to be able to use the same accounts across work and personal devices, (like using the same browser profile, so your settings and bookmarks automatically sync), then your personal stuff inevitably gets sent to Microsoft. They’ve deliberately built ecosystems where separating your work and personal life takes extra effort, and that is enough to trap plenty of people.
I asked them at work to disable most of the internet. I do talk to copilot when I am bored and ask it stupid or pointless questions. But Google search works (clicking on results are blocked) and i do Google meaningless shit. Google probably knows it is me even if I never used Google at home.
I’m not only refusing to downgrade to Windows 11, my home system got switched to Linux (with the support of my SO) despite me thinking Linux is probably the single least user-friendly system I’ve ever had the misfortune to use.
That’s how bad Windows 11 looks to me.
I’m curious, which distro and DE did you pick?
This question is proof enough that Linux isn’t exactly a user friendly system. You need to be aware of many things you otherwise wouldn’t need to care about in other operating systems.
Personally I like this freedom, but many people prefer to get something that just works without worrying about differences between distros and DEs.
Does the existence of Windows server affect the usability of Windows pro?
Ofc not. So why apply the same logic that one distro (eg arch, nix, gentoo) detracts from the usability of others (eg ubuntu, fedora)?
Going by this logic, linux would never become user friendly as long as one advanced choice exist.
So this is why I asked, I want to contexualize the situation.
Saying that linux is not user friendly is a broad generalization. Some distros are and some will never be by design.
The choice of distro is a real hurdle for new users, I agree.
But this is a meta problem of the open ecosystem, not of any one software distribution’s.
From personal experience, it can be overwhelming even for a seasoned Linux user.
Knowing the difference of Debian, Fedora and Arch based distros. Should I go for Linux Mint, Bazzite or Endeavor? Should I go for a immutable system or not? What package manager is used? What’s a flatpak?
One real example I encountered was that I was trying to install Pop OS on my new PC. Turns out after some trial and error that Pop OS uses an old Linux kernel that doesn’t support my new AMD graphics card. I ended up installing Endeavor instead, despite my not so good experience with using Arch before. Luckily Endeavor has been a great experience so far.
With Windows there’s really only one choice for the typical home consumer.
Windows Home, Windows Pro, Windows Pro for workstations, Windows Education, Windows Pro Education, Windows Enterprise, Windows Enterprise LTSC, Windows S mode, Windows IoT
And there are some other variations for different regions and support levels.
Do you know which one does what? Because I only vaguely do.
Windows isn’t a single thing either. It just comes preinstalled. Most people have never installed an OS, not windows nor linux.
All machines come with windows pre-installed, no one ever needs to worry about different flavours unless you work in IT and manage windows devices.
I haven’t had to worry about which windows to get since windows 98.
Fyi, I’m on Linux mint now.
All machines come with windows pre-installed
I was curious, so I checked the laptop offers in our local shop aggregator (arukereso.hu)
Operating system Number Windows 10 Home 8 Windows 11 Home 677 Windows 10 Pro 23 Windows 11 Pro 1661 Windows 11 S 21 Linux 74 macOS 141 Chrome OS 5 FreeDOS 506 Without OS 6792390 / 3795 = 62% windows
Isn’t that what I’m saying? Windows isn’t prevalent because there is one edition of it, but because it’s the default.
Apparently this is downvote worthy information?
Are you a home user? Choose the home edition. Easy.
When I worked at an MSP I kept running into folks (both businesses and residential customers) using the cheapest PCs they could get and having to work around Home edition limitations. I’m blanking at this moment but there was one limitation that was consistently a righteous pain in the ass… I gotta look up the differences and see if one jogs my memory
Edit: aha! it was the freaking Microsoft account. Its required on Home edition but optional on Pro. A super common issue folks would run into was from Microsoft removing the Windows Mail app and replacing it with Outlook, but the in-place upgrade/replacement would gum up their signed in emails and Outlook would be stuck thinking it’s both signed in and not at the same time. Easiest solution is to simply sign out of all accounts at the device-level and sign back in, because Outlook just looks at and manages the accounts that are signed into at the device-level but you can’t do that on Home edition, so I’d have to spend even more time rooting around until Outlook finally decided that the account that it was failing to sign into wasn’t in fact fully signed in and pop an actual signin prompt
“What do you mean home user? I’m a computer user.”
Aren’t all these versions just the same product with different features locked behind payment options? It’s very different from Linux, where every layer has multiple alternatives written by different authors that can behave very differently.
That’s what an actual free market looks like. It’s not just a choice between Windows and Mac. It does require a little more research, but there is no end of forums and comment chains laying out the difference at many different levels of depth. It also doesn’t cost anything to be wrong a few times about which is best for you.
Mint. No idea what a DE is.
DE (desktop environment) is all the visual interfaces (settings app, taskbars, start menu, widgets etc) and default applications you get. If you aren’t in the terminal, then it’s the DE that you are using to control your PC.
Ah. I have no idea then.
Probably Cinnamon if you’re using Mint
At first I read SO as “shared object” I am depressed now.
I‘ve switched to Linux mint. 95% of my time I am using it instead of Windows and this is just because of that stupid kernel anti cheat software…
My Linux mint partition broke almost immediately :(
The windows boot loader has a tendency to erase the GRUB for booting Linux, borking it as soon as you load into windows. It’s probably because windows is still in dual boot.
Edit: specifically, IIRC, it was windows update that borked it, but it always would auto-update when I opened it, so if you can find a way to guarantee windows never updates, power to you.
So that explains my Zorin install disappearing several times. I just gave up and got a Mac.
Yeah, sorry, I learned that the hard way. I just eventually said fuck it, and now I run 'doze on a VM in my Linux mint.
Yeah I would assume so too but I can’t drop windows and if I can’t rely on dual booting to work it’s not worth messing with. I have a laptop with bazzite on it but that only gets so far.
Don’t dualboot with a partition and you’ll be fine. Give Linux it’s own drive and Windows stops messing with it.
I don’t have enough drive slots for that.
Dualboot might work better with ltsc iot version of windows, which even if you only use Windows you should be opting for anyways over the copilot and account requirement forcing consumer version of Windows that pushes out unstable new features people don’t want to try to boost their stock by showing increased use of AI.
I did that but it is still trying to give me updates constantly.
Linux is a great option nowadays especially if you go for one of the more mainstream distros. Otherwise Windows 11 IoT LTSC is the best of a bad lot.
Why not Windows 10 IoT LTSC?
because it constantly forces more bullshit “upgrades” that take away more and more of your freedom and human rights.
I mean instead of Win 11 obviously… Also, an LTSC version in extended support is unlikely to “force more upgrades”.
Same, just got a new framework 13 laptop, it’s not running Windows, sleep, fingerprint reader, Bluetooth, gpu drivers it all works. Linux now. All the games I currently play just work out of the box, steam just adds proton to the download. I don’t use Microsoft Office apps though, more than happy with the alternatives.
