I haven’t owned a Windows machine in over a decade. If someone wants help, this is my response because I have not kept up with the changes, for lack of any need or desire to do so.
“Can you help me with my computer?”
“If it is running Linux or BSD, or you want it to, sure. If not, I’m not the guy for the job.”
IDK. I’m to the point where I don’t touch anyone’s phone or computer, because if I glance at it from a speeding car, I’m suddenly responsible for everything that suddenly “now doesn’t work” in their entire house, probably including the dishwasher.
Proton or Valve won’t magically make anti-cheat working on Linux. I do most of my gaming now on Linux, but for specific games I still boot into Windows.
I use a tablet for gaming, Linux for almost everything and a windows vm for de-DRM’ing books I boiught so I can read them the way I want. Windows vm is just for when I have no other option.
Serious question. I’m planning on switching from windows to some distro, but it will be the first time I’m daily driving Linux. Are there any solid beginner-friendly resources for getting started? I’m familiar with simple bash commands, but that’s about it
As someone who recently did a switch to get used to Linux, if you’re planning on gaming then Nobara is supposedly the beginner friendly gaming distro. I switched to Nobara and my only issue was screen flickering that I fixed by switching from Wayland to X11 (that was as simple a choosing the other option on the login screen). Everything else just works and KDE looks similar to the windows layout so it doesn’t feel too unintuitive either.
My two gripes that I can’t do anything about are the lack of HDR support (supposedly that’s finally in the works) and no Linux support for some online games (The Finals in my case, but maybe if Linux numbers go up they’ll finally flip the switch), neither could be solved by having a different distro.
If you just want to game and want it up and running without tinkering too much I recommend Nobara.
Raspberry pi os was built for education, it’s a fork of debain and can run on computers that aren’t raspberry pis. They also have a digital bookshelf with many ebooks that can also be downloaded without the OS as they’ve been released as creative commons.
be confused by all the options in the installation process, look up every unknown word, try to do everything manualy, fail
start installation process again, choose all the defaults, works!
trying to install a programm with terminal, fail because not in sudo list, look up how to get into sudo list
update in terminal doesn’t work, have to remove some lines in /etc/apt/sources.list - look up how to use the text editor nano, look many yt-videos about Linux filesystem (what to those folders mean? Everything is a file?)
try to resize a partition (can’t remember which), can’t, because I didn’t choose LVM in installation process - install Debian again, and do all the steps above again
I think I had to reinstall Debian 5 more times after that, just because I didn’t know what I was doing and it was an easy reset for me.
Very frustraiting at times, and a very rewarding feeling when something worked. Made me love tech again, 10/10 would do again.
Also, get the updated kernel out of the backports repo as the main repo is pretty far behind in my opinion. I needed 6.5+ to get the hardware compatibility for some stuff and then I more or less had an out of box experience. I also highly recommend having your /home on a separate partition or drive. This way you can keep your user files if you ever want to change or reinstall the OS.
Don’t feel bad about messing up the install. Everyone fucks it up a few times. The best one I did was forget to make the user account AND did not set a root password. Thou shall not install things at 2am…
I would only think them to work better on Linux because the software you’re using isn’t made by the printer company. Their software sucks. The hardware sucks, too. They’re made to be shit because a perfect printer isn’t profitable.
Since I've moved in South East Asia, I have discovered that:
Almost every single printer that exists has a conversion kit available on Taobao to use big ink bottles
There's not a single firmware that hasn't been hacked, nor a single part that hasn't been cloned
Therefore, most printer manufacturers have a specific line of durable products that allows the use of third party ink because if they don't, other people will bank of their product maintenance and they won't sell much.
The only reason we in developped country get scammed like we are, is because of IP laws and governments that allow manufacturers to abuse them with no consequences at the expense of the customers (and the planet).
Look up your printer model number on Alibaba. Or better yet, on Taobao (but if you don't speak Chinese it's a bit complicated). Your options depending on the printer you have are going to be :
Print heads conversion kits (a replacement of the complete print heads module with tubes feed from ink bottles attached outside your printer)
Refillable ink cartridges
Counterfeited Compatible ink cartridges that cost a fraction of the official ones while having 10 times more ink in them.
Now depending on where you live and the local laws it may or may not be legal to import those. In the country I live in there is no law against it. In most South East Asia the law doesn't care about that and if it does, law enforcement doesn't. :)
I just made the switch a few months ago and I’ve only seen memes about audio, never anyone actually asking how to fix audio and I also never encountered issues with audio myself. my usb audio interface works just fine, although it’s not really professional. what’s the big deal?
I will have to keep a Windows install due to I'm a developer, and Windows is still more relevant for games (also GUIs for debuggers - is there any for GDB?), so no big deal.
windows is hell for development tho???
I spend most of my time in WSL2 and MSYS .
unless you’re developing specifically for windows using win32 api, but i think all software should be cross platform these days.
i use vscode/codiums built-in debugger gui but I’m pretty comfortable with gdb too
I don’t do a lot of native development (I’m primarily a Java guy) so I can’t vouch for it however upon a quick search Seer looks like an interesting GDB GUI.
I used Linux for about a week, every game ran way faster (60 instead of 20 fps on ultra detail) - but all games were very unstable and crashed frequently (despite the clear performance advantage.)
I also had troubles getting the low latency kernel working properly for music production. I just could not figure it out. Something to do with WineASIO, JACK audio and pulseaudio. FL studio worked flawlessly, though some fonts were missing (‘easily’ fixed using winetricks and installing them)
On windows, all I had to do was install the focusrite drivers.
So for now, until these apps and devices have native support, I unfortunately am stuck with windows :(
A lot of these problems could be attributed to my computer specs, it’s a bit older:
8gb ram (plan to upgrade to 16 which is the laptops max), GTX 1050 ti, 2.8-3.4ghz i7
Most probably: wrong driver + background windows updates + background windows telemetry + background windows downloading ads + background windows Superfetch (SysMain) + background trial version of McAfee with windows
Win 7 worked pretty well on my 2010 desktop [Care2Quad 4GB DDR2] until a few years ago, when I just switched to Linux and didn’t care to look back.
Yeah but unconfigured windows currently is the winner since it actually works, though I’d like to prove that wrong and properly configure Linux , however I’m in no hurry since I’ve had to format my drive twice already
Gaming on Linux can still be considered difficult in general. The main reason I don’t have any difficulty is because the few games I play are well supported on Linux, giving me few to no crashes. Playing Elite Dangerous (Epic version) on wine seems to be causing memory leaks over time, making me have to restart every 5 hours, but Linux supported games I get from GoG work perfectly for normal scenarios normal => Single monitor 60FPS.
Apart from gaming, Linux has been a charm. But I am one of those ppl who likes programming and creating my own solutions for problems (which fits well with Linux), so I can’t say the same to someone who just wants “a solution. Any solution”.
I also had troubles with Deep Rock Galactic and a native application as well. Maybe a poor configuration.
But the real thing keeping me from the switch is not being able to figure out how to properly use my audio interface for low latency real time production 😮💨
DRG is the same IIRC. I do not know the state of Vulkan drivers on Nvidia, but if you crash they are probably the issue. For low latency audio check Archwiki on proaudio. Got a Focusrite for christmas I am going to setup myself. Should be doable.
I have a fairly “bleeding edge” laptop with an RTX3000 series GPU and an AMD CPU/APU and I have been surprised at how well it runs on Linux.
Not only is my battery life consistently better but it handles the GPU switching flawlessly and performance in games is also consistently noticeably better than what I experienced running Windows on the same hardware.
Even in just the last year or two the advancements in Linux support have been downright incredible! (At least in my personal experience)
Of course I’m using Nvidia’s proprietary drivers, but I was in Windows too and my experience has only improved by switching to Linux.
I tried installing it on my 3 years old (at the time) Surface Book and while some things worked they certainly didn’t work as well as in Windows. I messed around with a specially crafted Linux kernel for the Surface devices and that was a bit better but the wifi routinely stopped working after resuming from sleep. The touchscreen worked but not with the pen. The device also consumed huge amounts of battery life when sleeping. Would not recommend.
I remember in 2008 when I was in university trying to use Linux on my laptop. I had to run a script at the command line to connect to my uni’s wifi, because the UI always failed to connect. Then I had to keep wpa_supplicant running in a terminal window the entire time.
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