Statcounter reports that Windows 11 continues to lose its market share for the second month in a row. Windows 10, meanwhile, is gaining more users and is now back above the 70% mark.
One very important detail missing here is that Windows 10 is going to be end-of-support in 2025. You won’t get security updates.
It is going to be shitshow.
2025 is going to be the biggest year of Linux
I think there’ll be some users but honestly? I think you’ll have three general kinds of users. Those that just bite the bullet and upgrade to 11, those that don’t care and will continue to use Win10 for more years to come, and the minority that care enough to try this “Linux thing” out.
It’s not going to be a shitshow at all. Business will mostly move to 11 whether they like it or not and consumers will just use unpatched win10. The exact same way they did with XP and the exact same way they did with 7.
It’s only gonna be a shitshow if there is some earth shattering vulnerability found that a worm can exploit and even then MS would probably just push out an out of band update.
This is honestly going to be a “nothingburger.”
I have lived the time when unpatched windows was the norm. Oh the network worms which roamed freely and created huge bot nets. Sad that Microsoft has forgotten that.
So for all people that are on the fence about switching to Linux: Here’s a sort of review and starter guide from a guy who switched to Mint about 4 weeks ago.
Are you someone who mostly plays non-competetive games (games without anticheat) and browse the web? You’ll probably have a hassle free life on Linux. Steam’s Proton layer does a lot of heavily lifting. Even if games are not officially supported. Turn the compatability on in the steam settings.
If you play VR or competetive games, it’s a different story. VR is dependant on the headset. I unfortunately have all Oculus Headsets, which there is no good controller support for right now from the open source community. Anticheat simply doesnt work on Linux.
Design software From what I’ve read, the affinity suite now can be used through Wine (a program that lets you use windows apps on Linux) However, from my time with Wine, it is hit and miss. One update from either the application or Wine can break everything. So it is not reliable, unless you freeze all updates from both the application and Wine. Wine can be great (working out of the box) but also the biggest pain in the ass with hours of debugging. Stay away if you dislike troubleshooting.
Inkscape can be an alternative to Illustrator if you don’t do heavy design work.
I haven’t touched Gimp for about 6 years (used to be my main editor) but when I switched to photoshop it qas no competition. Don’t know what the state of Gimp is now, will try it over the coming year.
music software Cubase or any of steinbergs plugins outright will not work on Linux (unfortunately my main DAW) However, I will probably switch to Bitwig (native Linux), which looks really promising. I got some VSTs working through Wine (all arturia stuff works great) but have had hours of troubleshooting without luck with others. Use Yabridge as a vstlink for windows VSTs. If you’re a professional musician with thousands of dollars in plugins, I’d be hestitant to switch to Linux. You’ll be dependant on Wine a lot, which is kind of a pain to rely on for professional use.
overall tips Might be a bit controversial, but if you’re a novice: don’t dump all the solutions you find online in your terminal. Actually, try to use the machine as much as possible like you normally would on Windows, unless you want to do Terminal stuff. If you dislike terminals, you’ll only be frustrated by all the terminal advice people give you, which might even break stuff on your machine.
Try to download .deb packages from the official sources.++ Software center on Mint is great, but will moatly be outdated or flatpacks. Flatpacks can work, but I’ve had many issues with permissions and flatpacks (like an arduino flatpack that didn’t give permission to use the USB port…)
Welp, I’m out of time, so I’ll just randomly stop my reviewish/comment here
Anticheats can work on linux given the developers have enabled it. For example brawlhalla has EAC but you can still play it
Helldivers 2’s AC works also
I would highly advice against using Wine. It requires constant root access, just like virus scanners, making your system vulnerable.
I want to make the switch as win10 moved to 11 without asking and 11 sucks donkey balls. It even has ads as notifications, soon it will have ads in the start menu (not that I use it, but wtf Microsoft!). The games are no issue anymore now a days, so that’s fine with me. I just don’t want to switch DAW. I just got a work flow using ableton for recording, editing and mastering my dawless setup. Kind of same story with photoshop, used to the work flow and don’t want to switch. Other than that, I don’t see a reason why not. So maybe it’s going to be a multiboot. I’m definitely going back to win10 but support will stop next year or so, so I have to use Linux by than anyway.
I would highly advice against using Wine. It requires constant root access, just like virus scanners, making your system vulnerable.
This can’t be right. Was it maybe a particular workflow you used that required root access? I know I’ve used wine as part of Steam’s Proton as well as via Lutris and neither app has ever requested privilege escalation. I’ve also run
wine
manually from the terminal also without being root.Maybe it changed recently, but this is what I know about wine. Many Linux friends of mine all advice against it.
I would say: don’t rely on Wine if you’re dependent on the programs it runs somehow. If you don’t want to spend hours troubleshooting programs, then accept your losses.
After days of messing about getting music VSTs to work, I decided to stop troubleshooting any error I have within Wine. If a program works with Wine straight away: lucky me! If something doesn’t work: I count my loss and accept I won’t be able to use that program on Linux for now.
And obviously, don’t install and run andom programs that you wouldn’t install on Windows either. But that’s just common sense.
Well, Windows has windows defender, one of the best defences out there. Wine does not AFAIK. But it does have continuous root access. I didn’t pay for photoshop or ableton as those applications are not within my budget (or anywhere close, I’d rather buy another synth). I do have to take a minimal (trusted sources) amount of risk by using cracks and keygens, something which would be stopped if it would be malicious by windows defender, but which gains full root access through wine without a prompt. That’s the reason why wine is such a vulnerability. Same as virus scanners on Linux. The best defense is root access protection. No virus scanners needed.
Another reason why a switch to Linux would be hard for me is directory opus. Can’t work with regular file browsers, they are cringe AF. Dopus is amazing, it’s the best of windows browser, Linux browser and total commander combined, with everything tweakable to a perfect personalized experience. With a NAS with 29/32TB full, a proper file manager is mandatory. I haven’t found a proper substitute for Linux yet, and the devs haven’t announced a Linux version so far.
I think you’re mistaken there.
Wine is a vanilla Linux executable that runs as the user who launched it. The Windows program it runs thus also runs under that user. That’s possible because Wine doesn’t do anything system-wide (like intercepting calls or anything), it already gave the process its own version of i.e.
LoadLibrary()
(the Windows API function to load a DLL) and can happily remap any loaded DLL to Wine’s reimplementation of said DLL as needed.Here are, for example, the processes created when I run Paint Shop Pro on my system (the leftmost column indicates the user each process is running as):
Also, some advice from WineHQ:
I guess I’m wrong than :)
I’m just saying what my experience was with Wine a while ago and what all my Linux friends tell me. But I guess things changed! Awesome!
Did you know you can edit your posts? Could be helpful for other readers since you were incorrectly posting in several messages that wine needs root access.
Check, will do! Good point :)
About anticheat: it depends which games you’re playing. If they use Valve’s EasyAnti Cheat you should have no problem (been playing dota2, cs2, csgo… without trouble for some time now). If they use
malwarekernel-level anticheat (iirc helldivers 2, valorant, league of legends) you won’t be able to run them in linux and should keep a windows dual boot.Good to know!
Some kernel anticheats work too, I had no issues playing Helldivers and Hell Let Loose, both of which use EAC. Developers have to enable Linux support, which AFAIK is just one checkbox, so you still get games that don’t allow it (like EVE Vanguard), but most of them are OK.
League and Valorant is a different story, those don’t work.
Oh thanks for the correction, I was mistaken. I’m happy I was wrong :)
Games that use Vanguard don’t work afaik, but Helldivers 2 works just fine via Proton.
Helldivers 2 works on Linux.
Losing Ableton and all my VSTs are dealbreakers with Linux for me. Would be fine with the games I play, being all mostly single player indies. I could relearn a new video editing software, and I assume Citrix will work fine for all my work programs, but maaaan I’m not losing my favorite VSTs.
Lack of Ableton Live support is also why I probably won’t switch to Linux. Even though years ago I used to dual boot Ubuntu and quite liked it as an OS, the lack of DAW support is the real deal breaker for me too. Ableton Live is just too good and I know it too well to switch away from it.
@Legonatic@lemmy.world @birdcannon@lemmy.world - you might want to take a close look at Bitwig. It’s a top-notch DAW developed by former Ableton developers. I hear it’s fairly similar workflow to Ableton, but also that it’s better in certain ways. This is without even taking into consideration that Bitwig supports Linux. I don’t have any association with Bitwig, don’t even own it (yet?), but just wanted to let you know.
I think I’ve heard that some VST support may be tricky though. I could be misremembering, but also worth researching.
Nice to know, but it’ll really come down to VST support. I can relearn a new DAW, but I can’t magic up new libraries. I also don’t really wanna have to learn futzing with Linux when I have enough hobbies. As much as windows sucks, it’s convenient that their product supports everything I want out of the box. Once a Linux distro can do the same for my needs, I’m all in.
Affinity Suite through Wine would be pretty big. Do you know if it’s only the newest version that’s “working”?
I got my info from the Affinity Forum
No first hand experience. However, with my short time with Wine, I’m hestitant to rely on it. Any update from either Wine or the software it’s running could break things. Cool if it works, but not something I’d want to bet my work on.
Also in terms of games…I know Steam compatibility is supposed to be great, but if you use other platforms, you might run into some issues. Most of my library is in the Epic Games store (I know, terrible to admit this online…but they give you a lot of free shit), and I just could not get it to work at all the last time I tried Linux (maybe 6ish months ago).
You can change flatpak permissions with flatseal (you’ll need to install it). A lot of them have absolutely braindead defaults It’s really not great to get in the habit of installing random debs from the Internet. Aside from being a massive security issue, you’ll never get updates. If mint repos don’t get updated though, I suppose that’s the easiest workaround
Thanks for the heads up about flatpaks! I’ll look into it.
I believe debs are installed through my Software Manager ? When I said “get debs from official source” I meant that bigger software like Godot, Steam, Handbrake etc I prefer to download from their official website. Most stuff in software managers are several versions behind.
I agree that you shouldn’t be downloading random debs for some small apps made by a random person, for obvious security reasons.
Never rely on Wine, both in Linux, and in the real world.
Okay, this seemed wrong. As the article said, even Win8 didn’t go down in usage over time. So I went and checked the methodology for the source data.
Turns out, this number is based on social media and search engine referral data. Also turns out, they warn that while they do track Bing chat referrals when you follow through a link, they don’t see chat responses where you only read the AI response but don’t click through:
We have no way of measuring the number of queries performed in bing chat. However, we also don’t measure the number of queries to regular search engines like bing or google either. Instead we track search engine referrals.
i.e. If you go to a search engine and do a search for anything and you click on a website result, we’ll record that click as a search engine referral if that website had the statcounter code installed. It’s the click to a website that we measure, not the actual search queries that were performed.
When you do a search using bing chat, and you click on one of the “learn more” websites we can track that as a search referral. So we are monitoring bing chat in the same way we measure the regular bing search engine.
From this data we can see from the statcounter network of webites, that the amount of traffic being sent to websites from bing chat is very, very small. Less than 1/100 of 1 percent.
So from our data we can say that bing chat is not currently translating into enough clicks to our network of websites to change the search share.
Of course you are less likely to click on a source website from bing chat than a regular search, as it is intended to give you the answer rather than have you go visiting websites to find the answer. So that needs to be factored in when using our stats for your analysis.
That is very interesting. That’s a likely culprit for Win11 specifically to have gone down a couple of percentage points in the US and EU (the other territories seem to remain flat), but it’s hard to prove.
It’s also a bit concerning in terms of measuring the effects of AI search in both network traffic and in how search results are consumed. If that’s the cause it does suggest that AI chat users are less likely to follow through to the source info, which seems risky, although it’s also hard to prove what that does to receiving truthful info.
Lots of counterintutitive, hard to parse implications from this one data point, but I’d be surprised if it was as simple as “people have randomly decided to roll back to Win10 (and Win8, which also grows) for no reason”.
I think we just need to move on from this methodology of data collection. Firefox is often cited as very unpopular because it blocks statcounter tracking by default, social networks have absorbed some search volume too. I do think it makes logical sense that people are dropping 11; I did so myself last year. But this data is likely bad, so it’s pointless to try and extract a reason based on it.
Well, a data point is a data point is a data point. You just can’t make all your decisions based on a single one, at least without understanding what’s behind it.
FWIW, the Steam survey has Win 11 growing by 3.5% last month, with Win10 going down by about the same amount (Linux stays at 1.9% there). Neither data source is wrong or bad, necessarily, but you do want to be aware that one is an opt-in survey of gamers and the other is a tracker of search engine referrals.
So the takeaway is that people are probably not deserting Win 11 in droves, but maaaybe their use of online search is being impacted by MS’s integration of AI search or something else changing Win11 users’ behavior around social media or search engines. Or mostly that it may be too early to tell and we may need more sources of info. For all the glee and schadenfreude in this thread, the big teachable moment is that data and stats are nuanced and hard to read and that confirmation bias is a bitch.
Steam hardware survey is another data point.
Looks like in March Win10 usage increases a little. Overall it’s on a downward trend though.
You mean consumers DON’T want ads in every aspect of their OS?
Hmm… I wonder why Linux has yet to rise.
I mean, we only have like 17 months until support for Windows 10 ends, it’s not like it’s that long.
It saddens me as Windows 8 was absolutely awful and the first step towards the mess we have now. Windows 10 was better but still inconsistent in loads of areas and still felt faffy to use.
If you ignore the ads and bloat ware in Windows 11 it’s not that much better than 10, the UI feels more consistent but still more painful to use than Windows 7.
We have no “good” versions of Windows to use, they are all bad and getting worse, I would love to jump to Linux but that has its own raft of inconsistencies and issues, just different ones.
I have Windows 11 for work and I find the new package manager
winget
as a Godsend. I am doing all program installations and upgrading over it and it works pretty well. Also the terminal is a very nice addition.Incredible how it took them 30 years to implement that…
They are. Both are also available for Windows 10.
I tried to install winget on Windows 10 but that was not possible if I am not wrong. I think the terminal is available but not winget
winget exists in windows 10, I can’t remember if it is a powertoy or in the ms store or a feature flag thing but it is usable in windows 10.
That’s it, they need to roll out ads in BIOS
don’t give them ideas, lol
Creating an image of this and posting it on Lemmy = guaranteed XYZ upvotes.
Who wants to do it?q
Would technically be doable in UEFI… But I’m not mad enough to bring this shit to the world
Anyone who does should be trialed for crimes against humanity.
Considering they allow to install application on the bios command (Armory Crate, that kind of shit), consider it already done.
Call down Satan.
*edit: Calm. but you know what? Call the man in red. He prolly should be taking notes.
Want to change your boot order?
You’ll need to watch a 30 second ad, or subscribe for ad free BIOS for just 1.99/month
The funny part is that windows will change your boot order back without your consent.
If they are gonna put advertisements in the bios then ill flash my pc with libreboot
Sponsored product recommendations cannot be loaded without an internet connection. Please configure a wireless/ethernet adapter and connect to the internet to continue.
BaaS??! Oh FFS. It’s too real.
Thankfully no results from any actual BaaS companies yet
Key word: yet 😅
Nah you’ll have to download a half-english app, sign up on a website you haven’t heard before, request BIOS access code, wait up to a month and then you can do that
Don’t give them any ideas. They are watching the forums 😂
Aren’t there already? With vendor splash screens and all the graphics in the BIOS settings menus? Why don’t I get paid every time Asrock gets to display their logo on my monitor at boot?
I’d be happy to upgrade my laptop to Win11 but Win11 doesn’t like it. I’m not buying a new laptop just because of Win11’s dick moves. Win10 works perfectly well on it.
I recently moved my media PC to Linux Mint. I had Bluetooth issues with windows despite my hardware not that old and ‘Windows 11 ready’. Zero problems on Linux. I play the same games thanks to Steam Proton library. I use Mac for work. So I finally did it. No more Windows. I tried to switch 5 years ago. But today Linux is polished. And mostly works as expected. You still need to open terminal a few times to change some settings. I’m happy. Highly recommended.
I switched from Win10 to Arch and now I do have problems with bluetooth, because my mouse officially only supports Windows. Think I will just force my mouse to support Arch (or the other way around). Still way better and faster than Windows.
Now I’m a bit curious how a mouse could theoretically be windows only?
IIRC bluetooth mice use basically the USB protocol but through bluetooth instead of a cable.
It says officially so and I couldn’t connect so far, I’ll let you know if I manage to connect it.
What mouse is it?
https://www.rapoo-eu.com/product/mt350/ Ok, Windows, Mac, ChromeOS, iOS and Android, I will probably get to fix it if I have some time.
This one should work via bluetooth, some pages online indicate so, and it would be very rare that a bluetooth mouse does not work on linux.
And it should absolutely work via the little usb dongle that came with the mouse, as for example my logitech wireless mouse even works in my uefi/bios with the usb receiver.
I sadly don’t have the right USB-port for it, but I’ll try fixing it without the dongle. Which pages?
Whenever I try switching to Linux, there is always something that doesn’t work right and takes forever to finagle with to fix if it’s even possible. I’m primarily a Linux Mint fan (daily drove it on my aging desktop until it died of old age), but I’ve also dabbled in a few other noob-friendly distros like Ubuntu (was really into it when everything was still organs and brown lol) and Pop OS.
Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love using Linux to breathe new life into older systems, but it just isn’t a good option for me personally if my device hasn’t gotten sluggish yet.
As an example, I have an aging laptop that started blue screening a bunch. It doesn’t support the Win 11 upgrade due to it’s processor not meeting minimum specs. So I thought it was finally time to see if Linux would improve it.
First of all, I had a hell of a time installing various distros without having them boot to a black screen after installation completes. Took absolutely forever to finally sus this out on the various distros I tried. Then I find that the couple extra buttons on my basic Logitech mouse don’t work. These are essential buttons for me that I use constantly. I go through a million troubleshooting steps before finding out that it’s a Wayland issue, so I switch back to Xorg and everything is cool. But then I start running into lag issues which never occurred on my Windows install.
Finally got tired of the whole ordeal and switched back to Windows. Did a bit more troubleshooting and seemed to have resolved the blue screen issues and now it seems to work perfectly and much better out of the box than Linux. It’s not an old enough device a Linux refresh to be worth it yet.
I get that Lemmings are die hard Linux fans, and I think Linux has some fantastic use cases…but for many users it actually isn’t a good alternative. I find it works best when you want to breathe new life into older hardware or if you have every component specifically built to work for a particular Linux distro. But when basic features don’t work properly without hours of troubleshooting (if you can ever get them to work at all), it’s a little hard to just recommend it to your average Joe whose Windows/Mac computer works just fine.
This “everything just works” Linux experience a lot of people talk about on Lemmy/Reddit has absolutely never been my experience, even though I’ve been a casual Linux fan for over a decade now.
To comment on the first paragraph, that is just a skill issue. Before I switched to Linux I was pretty adept at Windows, but some things are hard to figure out because it’s hidden behind layers of bullshit. Running commands that obscure what exactly they’re doing, just because some guy on some forum said it worked for him, is how you get around on Windows and that knowledge is something you build over many years. Knowing where specific settings are or what values to use takes time. The same counts for Linux. If you stick to it, that knowledge will come with experience.
Just remember the dism and sfc scannows, registry hacks etc the average Joe doesn’t know about. Your learnt it, you didn’t start using Windows with that knowledge. The same will happen with Linux.
This. I have dabbled with various Linux distros over the past 15+ years out of curiosity. I have, without fail, had to spend days troubleshooting and fixing various problems of all kinds. Sometimes it was WiFi drivers, sometimes it was GPU drivers, sometimes it was power management issues, and most recently it’s soundcard drivers and poor audio control/quality issues. I always installed Linux as dual-boot so I had my normal Windows install to fall back on but I just couldn’t see myself able to fully switch primary OS over.
Nowadays I couldn’t switch over even if I wanted to because numerous programs I use for my work are not supported properly or at all. Linux has indeed come a long way over the years in terms of UX and software compatibility, but not everyone uses their computer just for games. There is a lot of creative and productivity software (and devices!) that have limited or zero Linux support and many FOSS alternatives are not sufficient. I hate Adobe as much as the next person and Photoshop is a bloated pile of trash, but part of my soul dies whenever a Linux fan tells me I can just replace Photoshop with GIMP. GIMP is clownware.
Another major issue I had was the community itself. When troubleshooting the issues I’ve had over the years, one big problem that kept popping back up was how toxic and condescending the Linux community can be. On more than a few occasions my requests for help on forums were met with passive aggressiveness and hostility because I “should have known better” or something along those lines. The most recent example I can think of was someone asking me to post a debug log to troubleshoot an issue I had and I had to ask him where to find the log. He told me the folder it would be in but not the folder path to get there. When I asked again where to find the log, he just told me that “maybe Linux isn’t for you”.
You know what? Maybe it isn’t. It sure isn’t for most people and I can’t see that changing soon.
Another major issue I had was the community itself. When troubleshooting the issues I’ve had over the years, one big problem that kept popping back up was how toxic and condescending the Linux community can be. On more than a few occasions my requests for help on forums were met with passive aggressiveness and hostility because I “should have known better” or something along those lines. The most recent example I can think of was someone asking me to post a debug log to troubleshoot an issue I had and I had to ask him where to find the log. He told me the folder it would be in but not the folder path to get there. When I asked again where to find the log, he just told me that “maybe Linux isn’t for you”.
I had almost exactly this same issue years ago when I tried Mint. I was trying to get something to work (I think install games on Steam? Something like that) and it would just do nothing, no message, etc. When I asked for help, I was told “This is super obvious” and after trying their suggestions and having them all fail, was told “just go back to windows.”
Ok, done?
(It also doesn’t help that there is a huge difference between ‘you can use the terminal’ and ‘you have to use the terminal.’ I’m an 80’s kid, I grew up with DOS, so I understand how to navigate terminals, I just don’t want to constantly.)
I’ve had similar experiences. Never posted questions myself, but I’ll be Googling for help and find forum posts that are as toxic as you describe.
It’s been bad enough that the Linux elitism on Lemmy leaves a bad taste, even if I haven’t seen as much of the toxic parts here. I know I’m not the only person of my friends group that feels this way about Lemmy’s Linux crowd.
I’ve been exclusively Linux for years, and all the crap now going on with AI and ads being shoved into literally everything makes me happier than ever with that decision.
But you’re absolutely right. Linux is “it just works” in a relatively narrow use-case.
Just going on the internet to browse and play some Facebook games (my parents). It’ll absolutely work out of the box.
Doing some light creative work (design, writing, etc…) No tinkering needed.
But from there it becomes a scale from “probably work fine” to “hours of work and extra repositories needed”.
Video editing or 3D modelling with an NVIDIA card because CUDA, it SHOULD be easy to install, but there’s a chance it won’t be. You take your chances.
Gaming through proton? Single player games, yeah. I’ve literally had 95% work out of the box because Valve is awesome. But I don’t play online multiplayer. If you need to play nice with anticheat software, good luck.
I too get frustrated with the fundamentalist Linux base who think its the right fit for everyone. Because it absolutely is not, and its okay to admit that because admitting that drives the motivation to improve it.
Windows just sucks at handling Bluetooth. It’s ridiculous that you can’t change audio codecs, or choose between handsfree and high quality audio. You have to let windows guess at both
I switched recently to Nobara after having a great experience with my steam deck. However, I’ll probably add windows as a dual boot option since CS2 doesn’t run properly (like 16fps…).
CS2 linux version has some issues. Sometimes forcing steam to install the windows version and to run it via proton makes things better.
I dont have CS2 because, well, the obvious reasons. But I do have the original Skylines, and its linux version is also a festering pile of rancid dogshit.
Running the windows version via proton made it run smooth, stable (well, as stable as can be expected with a few hundred mods…lol), and without headache.
so yeah, install windows version and use proton. Overall better experience probably.
Honestly, i think thats my advice about gaming on linux in general, to generally avoid the native version. Personally, I’ve only run into two games that the native version wasnt shit, and that was Stardew Valley and Rimworld.
CS2 is Counter Strike 2. Cities: Skylines 2 is C:S2
Thanks for the tip. I’ll definitely try that.
I just got a steam deck, and needed to install FF14 (non steam) so I was mucking around in desktop mode… yeah. I’ll prob be getting a spare drive for my tower now to try out Linux. I’d love nothing more then to cut ties to windows.
I tried to get nobara to run a few times but sth was always broken. I’m now on Bazzite after testing Linux Mint a few months. Bazzite seems to be the more polished fedora based gaming distro.
How was it broken?
Using Bazzite, myself. I have a weird issue with rebooting, though. Tends to freeze at the boot screen (grub doesn’t show up at all) then the whole boot/login process becomes a slideshow. This doesn’t happen if I manually turn my PC off and turn it on, though. Really odd problem that I haven’t had on other distros.
I like Bazzite as a whole, though.
That sounds awful. Have you tried disabling energy saving options (like automatic screenlock/sleep)?
I’ll have a look into that. For work I use Mint and really like it, however wanted to have a gaming distro that already delivers everything that I need and since I already used ProtonGE it was a natural choice for me. But i already had some issues with it probably due to NVidia drivers. Seems to be better now with the latest kernel
I think I get slightly better performance on Bazzite than on mint. Mint e.g. still has the 535 Nvidia drivers as recommended (we’re at 550 now). On Bazzite you’ll probably have to enable x11 until the new update with explicit sync drops mid May. (At least I had a ton of flickering on Wayland with my rtx 3060)
Yeah, on Windows Heroes of the Storm was using 10gb on my gpu and stuttering massively
On Linux (Lutris) it just works
Yeah in college I tried to switch for nerd cred and it sucked, but over the past year I switched and while I’ve had some hiccups, I honestly think it’s more a result of me going with an arch based distro than a Debian one. I’m thinking I may hop soon, but I assume it’ll be a massive pain
I thought Arch was more tricky, than Debian
It is, it’s trickier and less supported
My friend, have you checked out the arch user repository? What do you mean with less supported btw?
I may yet try it in the next few years. I think one large frustration I anticipate (among others) is keyboard shortcuts. I’ve become very experienced with those on Windows, and my brief efforts at Linux (eg, on my Steam Deck’s monitor hookup) have not come across enough matches for them.
I can absolutely see value in enduring the pain of a large switch though.
If you ever do switch I suggest something with KDE, I love keyboard shortcuts and I find anything other(Windows the most) extremely lacking in that field.
Funny, one of my longstanding frustrations with windows was that I didn’t get a say in my keyboard shortcuts. Namely the fact that the shortcut to swap keyboard layouts has historically been very easy to accidentally hit.
As someone who uses all 3 (work-issue MBP, personal dev laptop on fedora 40, overbuilt gaming-oriented desktop on w10 with a dual boot Ubuntu partition I haven’t used in ages because WSL lets me do what I need to most of the time), it’s really not that bad. Then again, I’ve had a trifecta like that for well over a decade at this point, so maybe I’ve just fully acclimatized to switching machines and OSes for different primary activities all the time.
Linux mint keyboard shortcuts mimic those of windows tho, Linux mint is the best choice for windows refugees, this is one of the things majority of Linux community is agree about. Edit: in Linux mint you also can change keyboard shortcuts with gui tools already pre installed
The only reason I still even use Windows is because of destiny 2. That’s pretty much the only game I play. If there was a good stable way of doing this on Linux I wouldn’t even use Windows at all.
In fact the only computer in my house that even has windows on it is my gaming rig.
How many % of these 70% can’t upgrade to windows 11 due to hardware limitation?
That’s me. I have a pretty decent computer but it can’t run win11. Ill be buggered if I’m getting a new PC just to make win11 run
I built my PC 2 years ago with brand new parts (at that time) but still have hardware limitation message lol
I’m in this boat. My current setup’s motherboard is from just before TPM and SecureBoot were around.
Probably a fair share. The hardware requirements aren’t unreasonably high but a lot of people (like myself) are running hardware that is 10+ years old because why not? Still works fine, if you don’t need that much power.
Not that I’d run Win 11 anyways. Tried it, was a pretty but nonfunctional mess, downgraded to 10 at first and upgraded to Linux later.
It’s so wild how Windows boasts about backwards compatibility but doesn’t support hardware from 2010. It’s literally a fully functional 64 bit system but it doesn’t have SecureBoot so it won’t let me install 11.
They absolutely are unreasonably high. My barely overclocked 6700K is sufficient for virtually every new or slightly older game I throw at it, but somehow it’s not enough for the OS?
Regardless of OS, I’d like to see actual user numbers with stats like this because a percentage oversimplifies the landscape.
Have people moved away from (uninstalled) Windows 11 or have people just bought computers with a different OS/older version of Windows on it. To me, these tell a different tale.
I’m just surviving the latest windows update that I did not as for, agree to or want.
Fuck Microsoft! My otherwise fast computer is barely crawling, super slow, unresponsive. I can move the mouse but not much else. God fuck that company so good it never comes back up! Please! And free Ukraine… And free Gaza.
After trying Windows 11 for a while, I just gave up and installed Kubuntu on my computer. I still use a Windows VM for some things, but I make sure to firewall the shit out of it lol
I switched to Nobara. I still got to dual boot 10 for a few games but I’m in no rush to get the install set up. I tried 11 and its just pure ensitifacation.
I’m actually scared to dual boot. I’ve heard too many stories of Windows updates messing up the bootloader
I haven’t switched or started dual-booting yet because I haven’t had time, but I’ve read the recommendation that the best way to do dual or even multiple boot is to have separate physical OS drives and select which one to boot from with the BIOS boot selector. Smaller SSD drives are pretty cheap these days, especially if you get them used on ebay or whatever. I picked up a Samsung 240 with 0% wearout for like $20 bucks.
Kubuntu is a very solid choice!