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Microsoft is reportedly banning Palestinians in the U.S. for life for calling relatives in Gaza
(www.windowscentral.com)
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2024
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This is the final nail in the coffin for me. My next PC is going to be a Linux machine.
Your current PC can become a Linux machine by lunchtime. What are you waiting for?
The last time I used a Linux PC was around 2012 with something called "Egyptian Hax" that my sister set up because she wanted me to play NetHack, so a guide would be a great start. I'm aware that WINE has gone through some vast improvements, but beyond that I don't really know where to start, what distro would be good for me, or anything else.
Edit: not getting mocked for admitting my ignorance would be a huge encouragement as well, tbh. It's hard not to be resentful when a community is hostile to new members. Calling someone a slur for not already being a part of the in group is a great way to keep people from joining. 👍
Start with Linux Mint. It should be a very pleasant and straightforward experience right out of the box, and is just in general very beginner friendly. I recommend to create a live USB (basically, download the ISO from the Mint website, then use something like Balena Etcher to put it on a USB stick). You can then boot off that stick, and try Mint out to your heart's content, without risking your Windows install or data at all.
Can I ask, what are the programs you wager you'll have to emulate through wine?
I'm saving this so I can look at it again this weekend.
I'm not one for making bets unless I know something that I suspect someone else doesn't, but I wouldn't be surprised if most of the games I have on steam need wine to run on Linux. My understanding is that wine is a compatibility layer, hence the name, correct?
Ah, good news in regards to gaming, esp. Steam gaming!
Steam invested quite a bit of energy into "Proton", essentially a new kind of compatibility layer. If you remember tinkering around with wine and winetricks from years ago, that's basically gone nowadays.
For most games, just go into the Steam settings for that game, and under "Compatibility", check the box.
Then click download, and play. That's it for most games 🎉
Also check out protondb.com - it's basically a community-sourced database cataloging how well Steam games work on Linux.
Good luck on your Linux journey, and feel free to ask questions if something comes up! :)
And if you've been letting Steam store your save data, you should find that your save files for most games will still be available in Linux! Mileage will vary per game of course, but jumping between OSes has been pretty seamless for me!
I got a steam deck last fall and so far the only game I've run into that doesn't work with my windows cloud save is Dark Souls 2
Don't let the gatekeepers put you off. The Linux community is quite helpful if you can get past their garbage. Every guru was once a noob 👍
Write down a list of the software you use (e.g. web browser, office suite, notepad, image viewer, video player, … ). Download Linux Mint from here and use Balena Etcher to write it into a pen drive. Switch off your computer, plug in the pen drive and switch on. DON'T INSTALL YET. Run Linux 'live' for a couple of hours, see if everything (speaker, printer, webcam, all the software you listed above) is working correctly.
Once you have confirmed that all is well, copy your files into an external hard drive, confirm that everything important has been backed up, and then install Linux from the pen drive. (You can have both Windows and Linux on the same computer, but then Windows should not be given internet access or it will 'update' and mess up everything. This can be repaired using, for example, this software, but why bother?)
Saved. I'll look at this Sunday if I have time (I'm making that PCM developed by NightHawkInLight to use for a few planned events).
Ty very much!
I'm also going to recommend Linux Mint, its a really friendly beginner distro. I'll presonally recommend you do Linux Mint Debian instead of normal linux mint ~~since regular linux mint is Ubuntu based and really loves snaps.~~
The default user env is cinnimon which is going to look a lot like Windows 10 making the transition easier. If you want to install steam its literally a command line away from installing and then its ready to go. That and Steam personally pushing for Linux as a viable gaming platform there are a lot more games now that work out of the box now on steam.
Mint doesn't use snaps at all by default. It has a regular .deb repository supplemented by Flatpaks.
Really? I swore I've been told that the regular mint uses snaps since ubuntu loves them. I haven't used mint since snaps were a thing eitherway.
I'm saving this to note down that the flavor I'm most likely to want is "Cinnamon". I didn't really understand the rest, but thank you!
Would you like an eli5 for some stuff you'll see in the linux community/forums/etc?
I'd personally be happy to give you a quick rundown of some stuff.
Don't listen to people who mock you for asking a question. They are never the people whose advice is worth listening too. Start small. Get 8gb or bigger thumb drive. You can even use an external SSD. USB C would be the best. Follow the guide below or find a guide of your own. Start with Ubuntu. It isn't perfect but it is the most popular distro out there. Be aware this installation is going to be laggy due to it being on a slower thumb drive. This will allow you to see that it just works. Games might be slower loading due to the thumb drive. I use steam daily and only have seen a few games I couldn't play. Everyone was due to the ham-fisted drm the games had implemented.
https://itsfoss.com/ubuntu-persistent-live-usb/
Alternatively you can install a second hard drive in a PC and use both safely without fear of problems. I've been running linux as my daily driver for over ten years. I still have a windows installation that I can boot into if needed. Usually for firmware updates that only can be performed in windows. Currently I haven't needed it in over a year.
I may look into Ubuntu if I have time this weekend. How does it differ from mint?
I've heard about it, but nothing of substance.
Installed? Sure, you can do that by lunchtime.
Getting it set up? Making sure all your drivers are working right? Troubleshooting issues? Finding alternatives to programs you need that don't work on Linux? Especially for someone who has never used Linux before? That will take much longer.
By lunchtime? Yes, yes, yes, no, no are your answers.
If only I could install it on the Surface Pro X...
Damn, they worked so hard to gain goodwill in the last few years and it seems they've set out to destroy it in record time.
WSL and WSL2, Android Apps, working with Qualcomm to get their ARM computers to a credible state, the new Powershell and the push to open source so many things...
And in the past 12-18 months they've been crashing and burning, either backtracking on those things or by starting new initiatives to become scummier and scummier. TPM, Copilot, the ad situation, abusing their position of power with office/teams, the giant safety holes in the Recall feature... But it seems every day there's something new in the news. It's never ending.
https://github.com/linux-surface/surface-pro-x?tab=readme-ov-file
That's a nice project, but the last update was from 2 years ago and it needs way too much work to be close to usable. Windows 11 might be getting ads but at least audio works...
Yeah I kinda figured that, just did a quick Google search and found that.
I've got a dell xps15, awesome Linux experience no issues with any hardware. Also think pads are great as well.
The problem I have is that this covers a very niche use case for me. I want it to be a tablet - lightweight etc, but not be constrained by mobile apps. I don't want iOS' version of lightroom, I want to have Darktable and Rawtherapee and a full fledged Visual Studio code, and well, you get the picture.
I don't need a laptop because I also have a MacBook Pro - I went this way because Apple's processors are too far ahead to ignore. So I can take AMD but my opinion is that intel's offerings are just not competitive and I'm not buying any of them.
This leaves me with very few options - I'd be keen on buying an AMD-powered Ubuntu tablet but they don't seem to exist.
And also my surface works perfectly fine, so spending a non-trivial amount of money and ewaste just to change OS seems rather silly. I'm sticking to that one for now.
I have no recollection of this.
I'm not surprised that you can't, but I'm still disappointed.
Why wait? Install it now. I would recommend Mint as a beginner distro.
Why do people keep recommending Mint as a starter distro? Maybe if your computer is a toaster, but it lacks tons of modern features. Seems like a one way track to people thinking Linux sucks. Fedora KDE edition is a way better beginner distro for a halfway decent PC.
I use Mint and I like it. It does everything I need it to do.
What keeps people away from Linux, or at least it helped keep me away, were people arguing with each other about distros like a mini-OS war within the OS wars and it makes the whole thing sound like it's a lot more trouble than it's worth.
Most people's computers are "toasters" because most people's computers are used for things like web browsing, word processing and maybe a few games. They don't need the modern features, they need something that works better than a Chromebook and isn't super bloated.
Do you know what also keeps people away from Linux? Being told that Linux Mint is a good distro for beginners, and then going to the Linux Mint website and finding that there are three different flavors, Cinnamon, XFCE, and MATE, and not knowing what any of that means because you're a beginner. Beginners don't benefit from incomplete information that requires prior knowledge, and every time I see "use Linux Mint" without any clarification on Desktop Environments, I see a jerk who doesn't know what "beginner" means.
As someone who did exactly this, the differences are spelled out pretty clearly for "Linux beginners". System reqs and included features all there to read...
I remember when I was first learning linux, I found this super evangelistic website explaining how totally easy it is to use linux nowadays (this was about 15 years ago, so that was a fucking lie).
They gave some basic task as the first example of something you might need to do, and they said, no shit, "It's easy! Just open up the terminal and type..." and I closed the website.
Not because I couldn't do that instruction, I was working in IT and I already maintained multiple linux servers, but because of how utterly unhinged that instruction was. I didn't know if their information would be useful, but I did know that I couldn't trust their judgement anymore. You cannot tell people an OS is "easy" and "for everyone" then transition straight into "open up the terminal" in the same goddamn breath. They didn't even explain how to open up the terminal, because of course it's different everywhere and they wanted universal instructions.
I really, really want to make linux work for me. I have four linux machines in my home, although three of them are raspberry pis, and i have tried it in laptops and on my main machine many times over the years, always finding it more trouble than it's worth. But I have never seen any indication that the community has ever moved on from, "It's easy! Just open up the terminal..."
Statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged.
Yeah, I think one of the issues is that a knowledge gap is a very hard thing to bridge. Part of that is the classic thing that "we don't know how much we don't know". But there's a similar thing with knowledge, where people don't know how much they know.
Like with the terminal, once you get comfortable with it, it is really easy to get things done, but you really have to have a certain kind of disposition to get to that point, even with the right kind of help - like with your dad, if he's not interested to learn you can't make him. You have to already be deep into the ecosystem before you can say "it's easy", and by that point you are so far removed from the average user's experience that you can't understand why they can't just do what you do. And unfortunately, the people most expert at using linux and therefore developing it are also the people deepest in the ecosystem.
There's an empathy gap that's hard to bridge, but it's not impossible. Like if you've ever finished The Outer Wilds, it's an incredible game that is only gated by your knowledge. It's a unique experience that you can't repeat. The only way to attempt to experience it again is to sit down and watch another person's playthrough of it. I've done it multiple times, and each time is a unique and difficult experience, because you already know the answers, and they are so painfully simple once you know them. It's a real struggle of empathy to actually be able to enjoy it.
You can do a similar thing with other freeform puzzle games like The Witness. It's just that The Outer Wilds is unique in that it shows you in stark contrast how vast the gap is between knowing and not knowing, and you have to bridge that gap constantly in order to engage.
So that's my ramble on that subject, but that's what I think is happening. I think apart from people willing and able to bridge that gap, the solutions to this issue involve more resources dedicated to improving the ecosystem and making it friendlier, and also just more uptake making the system stronger and exposing its weak points as people learn it, making the empathy gap less of a problem. As we are, proprietary systems have sucked up all those resources and market share, which has starved open source. It's a slow climb out of that hole but I have to believe that eventually there will be a critical tipping point.
Because the UI is similar to windows, so it will feel more familiar to (ex-)windows users
Which UI? Linux Mint comes in three flavors: Cinnamon, XFCE, and MATE.
Nobody has suggested a specific flavor, and those desktop environments vary quite a bit.
True, I meant cinnamon, which (IIRC) was the default/suggested to you when you went to the website.
It isn't default or suggested. It says that it is the "most popular", but my point is that if you're making a beginner choose a desktop environment before they even install Linux, you're setting them up to be overwhelmed.
who are these adult humans who can't face choices? I don't really understand how or why they even chose their PC in the first place.
It sounds like such people will be a lot better off with android or mac, or windows or chromebook. If they want to do games get a console.
It's sort of like if a person has no enthusiasm for or interest in cars, they might be better off with a rental.
if you really want to make another version of something like chromeos for this audience, there is nothing stopping you. But the free/foss open source world is always going to have choices that bamboozle these people who can't look at the mint website and pick one, or just resolve to test all three.
Noted, thank you!
The next version of Mint is in beta right now and will likely release within a few weeks. Might want to hold off until then.
I just switched one of my PCs to Linux mint. I am not that smart with computers. I have never used Linux before. I have no experience in changing operating systems. All I did was buy a flash drive stick and used my phone to go to Mints website and follow their directions. That was a month ago. It was a great decision. Mint is amazing and im glad I did it. I am currently getting ready to switch both my wife and my gaming computers over to Mint as well.