I’m not sure which programs you’re using so hopefully something here can help but here’s some stuff I’ve read/done:
For MS Office, I believe you can just use it in your web browser or use LibreOffice as an alternative.
If you use anything Adobe-based, you’ll probably have to keep a Windows partition around or find an alternative. I haven’t seen anything for running Adobe in WINE or WINE-based tools and I’m not sure if Adobe functions in a virtual machine or not.
Most gaming-related issues can be dealt with via Proton (Steam’s compatibility tool). I’ve successfully gotten just about every game I play to run in Proton, with the only issues being EA’s launcher (the game still launches though).
If you have any specific programs that you have questions about, feel free to ask. Hope this helps!
I recently reinstalled Linux. 5 minutes download, 5 minutes USB write, 15 minutes install including setting up an encrypted drive, everything works out of the box. Installling the graphics driver for my RX 7800 was “hard” because it was two steps instead of one, and that added an additional 5-10 minutes. Now I’m having convenience and productivity beyond all coworkers who constantly battle with windows problems, but hey, windows is windows, it always has some issues, it’s fine.
Over this past weekend I installed Windows 11. 1.5 times the size. Took about 7 minutes to download, 20 minutes to write to usb, fine.
Then the nightmare started.
First try: boot windows installer, go to install, about 3 minutes later I get an error about windows installer needing drivers. Wut? Search the internet, turns out that windows installer won’t work if Linux partitions are available on the system. WTF, can’t just ignore them? Nope, I gotta screw out the m.2 drive. Fine.
Second try: boot windows installer, go to install, about 3 minutes later I get an error about windows installer needing drivers. Wut? Search again, find that windows installer can have driver issues if it sees a mix of m.2 drives and other devices. Fuck me. Open up the other side of the computer, disconnect the other drives. fine.
Third try: boot windows installer, go to install, about 3 minutes later I get an error about windows installer needing drivers. Wut? Search yet again and it turns out that windows can have issues if it’s using a mix of usb 2/3 port and device. Try a various different USB ports, keep running installer until find one that is accepted. Fine!
Thirteenth try: boot windows installer, go to install, about 3 minutes later I get a new error, turns out that you can’t use Linux ISO writers for windows installers, apparently Microsoft fucked around with why because we gotta make shit hard for non ms users, right? “Luckily” I had a virtual box install, rewrite the usb there.
Fourteenth try and hours later: boot windows installer, go to install, about 3 minutes later I get a new error. My AMD Rhyzen 5 64GB 3000MHz system with an AMD RX 7800 XT and 1TB m.2 dedicated to windows doesn’t match the specs for windows 1, it can’t run windows 11. That’s what it actually said. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK! Search again, about an hour later I figre out that Microsoft finally started implementing the evil TPM system and it was disabled in the BIOS. Go to bios, enable it, now I can run the installer.
The install the requires 4 reboots just for the operating system, took about another hour to do so, it asked me loads of times if Microsoft could please please please sell me more shit that I don’t want, it required me to connect it to Microsoft services even though I don’t want that and finally I had a desktop. Installing graphics drivers took about another hour and a reboot.
Then I didn’t wanted to use Microsoft’s shit browser, at the least I prefer google to spy on me rather than Microsoft. Go download gogle Chrome, immediately get bombarded with “please no please use our shitty browser, you get the Microsoft experience ™!!!”
Welcome to the fucking Microsoft experience! It took me over 6 fucking hours to complete. I could have installed Linux arch in LESS time, a version known to be finicky and HARD.
Why does anyone pay money for windows? It’s insane. Their shit doesn’t work because Microsoft never cared a single shit about good software. They care about money and so their marketing department is doing the heavy lifting. Just lie to people, tell them that their shit is all superior and the “best experience”
I run into trouble with Linux sometimes, but NEVER this level of shitty incompetence and sabotage.
I could have installed Linux arch in LESS time, a version known to be finicky and HARD.
I recently had to install arch 3 times since. First time I fucked up, second try the system fucked up and third time worked. With me trying to fix the system this took me 2-3 hours. Most of them trying to fix the second install. The third time I used the installation script(which didn’t worked in the beginning) which made the install easy as hell taking about 10 minutes configuring the install and about 5 minutes installing everything. Later I just had to install gnome which were about 10 minutes total.
And yet Microsoft in 2023 still is stuck with “this computer cannot run windows 11” when all that was wrong was that TPM was disabled in the bios. Just say you need TPM and that I need to enable it, why is it impossible for Microsoft to ever give a clear and concise error message?
Everytime I install windows again for some reason, its always a fucked up hourlong shit. And after installing then comes the disableing of unnesessary bullshit it comea with.
Linux just works, I use Ubuntu because Im just a normal user, and I don’t know why people even use windows.
Same, I don’t have a clue why people actually use and PAY for that shit. It’s like buying a new car. You get into he agency, get in, want to start and drive away but right out of the gate the battery is empty. Okay, let’s charge it? But yeeaaahhh, the great 12v standard that works everywhere doesn’t work for windowagon, you need a 15.9v because that way microshit can sabotage those people that just want to get from a to b without having to deal with their bullshit.
I would check out something like universal-blue.org. It is fedora silverblue but with fixes that make it more usable (like codecs by default). It also ships distrobox right out of the gate so you can use that for apps that aren’t in the fedora repos, copr , or flatpak. You also don’t have to layer packages if you install via distrobox so I think it ends up being pretty handy for stuff that you want that isn’t available as a flatpak. Finally there are many different images for all different desktop environments so you can switch between them just by using rpm-ostree rebase and the link to the different image.
Depends. Steam and Proton handles most games and if not, I’ll check Lutris. FWIW, some games like Doom and RollerCoaster Tycoon (the Sawyer, 2D era) have open-source remakes that work on modern machines.
For regular software, I will try it in WINE and if it provides a good enough experience for daily use, I’ll keep it there. If it doesn’t, for any reason, I’ll stick it in a Windows VM. For instance, Exact Audio Copy will work fine in WINE provided you get .NET 3.5 installed for the MusicBrainz metadata plugin, but MusicBee has severe enough problems (font redirection problems, lag when scrolling, can’t drag tabs) for me that I just use it in a virtual machine or another PC. (I actually have another rig I’m considering using as a “jukebox” machine, since I have macOS on it and use it for Apple Music, so I’m compartmentalising my music to one machine if that makes sense)
One of my computers has windows on one of the ssds because I have to use windows for work software once every week or so for about 20-30 minutes and there are a few other windows programs that I need to use occasionally.
Basically I use Windows for a couple of hours a month and Linux the rest of the time.
That doesn’t work for me as they give me error messages:
<span style="color:#323232;">j@j-HP-Notebook:~$ sudo apt remove virtualbox-dkms
</span><span style="color:#323232;">[sudo] password for j:
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Reading package lists... Done
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Building dependency tree... Done
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Reading state information... Done
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Package 'virtualbox-dkms' is not installed, so not removed
</span><span style="color:#323232;">0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">j@j-HP-Notebook:~$ sudo apt-get install make gcc build-essential linux-headers-'uname -r' dkms
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Reading package lists... Done
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Building dependency tree... Done
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Reading state information... Done
</span><span style="color:#323232;">E: Unable to locate package linux-headers-uname -r
</span><span style="color:#323232;">j@j-HP-Notebook:~$ sudo apt install virtualbox-dkms
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Reading package lists... Done
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Building dependency tree... Done
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Reading state information... Done
</span><span style="color:#323232;">The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> libqt5help5 libqt5sql5 libqt5sql5-sqlite libqt5xml5 libsdl-ttf2.0-0
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove them.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">The following additional packages will be installed:
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> libgsoap-2.8.117 liblzf1 libvncserver1 virtualbox virtualbox-qt
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Suggested packages:
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> vde2 virtualbox-guest-additions-iso
</span><span style="color:#323232;">The following packages will be REMOVED:
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> virtualbox-7.0
</span><span style="color:#323232;">The following NEW packages will be installed:
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> libgsoap-2.8.117 liblzf1 libvncserver1 virtualbox virtualbox-dkms virtualbox-qt
</span><span style="color:#323232;">0 upgraded, 6 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Need to get 0 B/46.5 MB of archives.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">After this operation, 43.0 MB disk space will be freed.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
</span><span style="color:#323232;">debconf: DbDriver "config": /var/cache/debconf/config.dat is locked by another process: Resource temporarily unavailable
</span><span style="color:#323232;">(Reading database ... 642834 files and directories currently installed.)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Removing virtualbox-7.0 (7.0.12-159484~Ubuntu~jammy) ...
</span><span style="color:#323232;">debconf: DbDriver "config": /var/cache/debconf/config.dat is locked by another process: Resource temporarily unavailable
</span><span style="color:#323232;">dpkg: error processing package virtualbox-7.0 (--remove):
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> installed virtualbox-7.0 package pre-removal script subprocess returned error exit status 1
</span><span style="color:#323232;">dpkg: too many errors, stopping
</span><span style="color:#323232;">vboxdrv.sh: failed: modprobe vboxdrv failed. Please use 'dmesg' to find out why.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">There were problems setting up VirtualBox. To re-start the set-up process, run
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> /sbin/vboxconfig
</span><span style="color:#323232;">as root. If your system is using EFI Secure Boot you may need to sign the
</span><span style="color:#323232;">kernel modules (vboxdrv, vboxnetflt, vboxnetadp, vboxpci) before you can load
</span><span style="color:#323232;">them. Please see your Linux system's documentation for more information.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Errors were encountered while processing:
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> virtualbox-7.0
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Processing was halted because there were too many errors.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
</span>
I’m not sure what you mean but it doesn’t matter because VirtualBox still isn’t working and I’ve decided to uninstall it and try some alternatives that people have mentioned.
Yeah, they could do a better job by having a big button directing people to buy it at the website, but if you go to the “Buy” option in the top bar you’ll find it among all of their other offerings.
€1100 with the current F39 release discount and €1000 with the extra €100 discount for Fedora contributors
That’s incredibly overpriced for the spec and what you’re getting. Ouch. Why can’t somebody make a decent laptop that’s actually remotely cost competitive with a bog standard Windows laptop that I can just randomly buy at my local store?
Umm, check Lenovo, they are our partners at Fedora as well and have decently priced Fedora-preinstalled hardware as well. The thing with smaller companies is that they have smaller reserves and less stock than the tech giants like DELL or Lenovo.
This is a laptop with a 2 generation old processor and no real GPU being sold for about the same price as a Lenovo laptop with a Ryzen 7 + 4060 GPU in it. I think Lenovo scammed you.
This isn’t a jar of honey it’s a mass produced electronic device that’s only made in a select few factories in the world with some custom branding on it. Lenovo has just given them some old stock which they’re trying to flip. Very different scenario to a mom and pop store entirely.
How do those compare to NixOS and blendOS in your opinion in terms of usability, flexibility and stability, considering an (at least mostly) tech-literate audience?
Given I’m still on Manjaro, would you recommend I consider NixOS, Fedora Silverblue, or blendOS?
Device Tree Source. It’s a text description of the hardware. The kernel uses it to load and configure drivers. It’s the most critical set of information for supporting any particular board.
What software are you using that is keeping you on windows?
FWIW, the last version of windows I’ve run was WinME circa 2001ish… I’ve been on Linux since '99 or so. You can certainly get by for day to day stuff. The only thing holding you back is going to be pretty niche.
In addition to all the sound advice you’ve been give so far, you should have a support contract in case you run into problems and ideally, contract someone to set up your laptop so you have proper encryption, backup etc. You have to consider both meeting the business deadlines, and ensuring the confidentiality and availability of the data. If you want to do this yourself, contract someone to validate your configuration.
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