68
End of Windows 10
(endof10.org)
Reasons to switch:
- It's waaaaay cheaper
- A new laptop costs a lot of money. Repair cafes will often help you for free. Software updates are also free, forever. You can of course show your support for both with donations!
- No ads, no spying
- Windows comes with lots of ads and spyware nowadays, slowing down your computer and increasing your energy bill.
- Good for the planet
- Production of a computer accounts for 75+% of carbon emissions over its lifecycle. Keeping a functioning device longer is a hugely effective way to reduce emissions.
- Community support
- If you have any issues with your computer, the local repair cafe and independent computer shop are there for you. You can find community support in online forums, too.
- User control
- You are in control of the software, not companies. Use your computer how you want, for as long as you want.
Hexbear-related reasons to switch:
- Still can use hexbear
- Hexbear requires a web browser (firefox) to use.
- Don't have to pay for it.
- You'll receive updates and features for your operating system free of any personal charge to you till the end of time. You can donate directly to volunteers and workers to make your computer better (better yet non computer related things)
- using Windows for Windows's sake or Apple for Apple's sake is liberalism and supports USA/piSSrael
- TBH they copied from us (KDE, GNOME) anyway. Their innovation is being a monopoly and advertising to you.
- Makes you smarter (it's like reading theory but with computers)
- Using Linux makes you big brain because you'll learn you can do a lot of things for free that you'd have to waste your soul on.
- Using Linux makes you big brain because you'll learn you can do a lot of things for free that you'd have to waste your soul on.
Decades spent on the puter and I'm still a newb, anyway can I download Mint and then run windows in a virtual machine to play some games? I'm addicted to windows abandonware and I'm pretty sure I'd need to run it in a virtual machine if I was on linux. How about for emulators like duckstation and pcsx2?
Most emulators are free software and work on Linux and have worked for a long time. As Android and Raspberry Pis have become quite popular as emulation systems, the free software emulators, which are easily portable to these ARM+Linux system, have taken off as the most popular emulators in general. Anything that's also available on Android or RetroPie will work on Linux for sure. There's an emulator for every popular console that works on Linux about as well as it does on Windows.
DOS games you can run in DOSbox. Pretty sure compatibility is 100%. This is also how e.g. GOG makes these games run on Windows, because modern Windows can't run these games either without emulation.
As for old Windows games, it is worth trying Wine, the Windows compatibly layer. Volunteers have successfully been trying to get games (especially games actually!) to run on Linux since the 90s. Twenty-something years ago I was gaming on Linux playing Starcraft, Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Diablo 2, Warcraft 3 and god knows what. Anecdotally, some old Windows games that no longer run on Windows will work fine in Wine. A prominent example is The Sims 2. There's a video out there of some millennial Sims streamer and housewife instructing her thousands of viewers on how to install Linux in order to get that game to run better.
Steam comes with a version of Wine, called Proton, so 90%+ percent of games on Steam run somewhere between fine and perfectly fine. Not everything though, you should check on protondb.com.
Playing in a VM is a terrible idea btw, the performance will suck. You don't need to and don't want to do that.
Other people covered what you can do more or less, but I'm going to spend a moment being an annoying nerd about terminology.
A virtual machine is essentially a full system emulator. It emulates a full PC, the CPU, memory, BIOS/UEFI firmware, along with various bits of hardware like a USB bus, mouse and keyboard, VGA display, SATA disks, a network interface, etc. You install a real copy of Microsoft Windows (or other operating systems) onto it. It has the greatest compatibility with Windows software, but usually the lowest performance and integration.
Most modern CPUs have built-in support for virtualization, so we're not talking orders of magnitude slower, but graphics performance in particular will be very limited because Windows will be using a VGA driver* with no acceleration. Some virtual graphics "hardware," like Spice, have Windows divers available, but the performance (while better) is still rather limited. These mostly provide convenience features like dynamically changing the size of the guest display when you resize the VM window.
The most common way Windows software is run on other operating systems is with compatibility layers like WINE (if ports are not available). These load Windows PE executables as native processes and implement various Windows APIs with much better desktop integration. Instead of being trapped inside an emulated VGA display, the Win32 / MFC / .NET APIs used to create a window will actually create a native window, receive native input events, share the clipboard, access the same filesystem, etc. Network connections are established directly without emulating an entire fake PCI network card. Graphics APIs like DirectX, OpenGL, and Vulkan are implemented on top of the native graphics stack and enjoy full performance, instead of being bottle-necked by a software VGA driver going through something akin to VNC.
*
It is possible for the virtual machine to give the guest OS direct access to a GPU in the host machine, allowing the guest OS to use the GPU vendor's driver, but this requires you to have an second GPU dedicated exclusively to the virtual machine, and it will drive a separate physical display. Those full-speed graphics are going to an HDMI cable, not a window on your desktop. You also need to be at least a level 16 wizard. Here's a summaryIt is cool tech, but even when it's working correctly it solves one problem by creating four or five other problems. You don't want to do this.
chances are you've already benefited from collectively owned software and haven't even realized it (silicon valley loves piggy backing open source)! Using a libre operating system just means taking onus of that fact and using it for your own ends from top to bottom. Really it's just a gateway to being being even cooler.
While this is possible. Chances are that most of your games are already playable through Valve's efforts with proton. You can use apps like bottles to run them or just use Valve's Steam client itself. Linux is nowhere near the state it was in only half a decade ago.
I can tell you from experience that I have been able to play modded fallout new vegas on Linux with mod organizer 2, so you just need to give it a shot. Protondb is a community database for games and there are always people willing to share their experiences on getting it to work with linux.
Both are supported nearly on every Linux distribution. If you install Linux Mint, it's as easy as going to the software center and downloading them from there.
If you're fine fiddling and tinkering, Lutris for Linux has been able to run a few things from Windows that I wanted to play... so far Transformers: Devastation, Planescape Torment, and Space Rangers have all run like a champ. Its a bit odd to get a game installed. Its like WINE but with less terminal style commands.
Dosbox works like a champ and lots of abandonware dos games have been repackaged in their own dosbox wrapper.
Retroarch is .... a thing that can sometimes work for console games. Its... a chore to use.
Ooof, my general experience with Linux users is that if they say "works flawlessly" they mean 2 weeks of fraught driver installs and using commands taken from the necromomicon.
So I hesitate to think what "a chore" would be
What are you talking about? I haven't had to fuck with drivers on Linux in like a decade, and even then it was because I had one of those weird gaming laptops that had two GPU's. "Works flawlessly" to me means just that: install it from your distro's package manager and it's ready to go, with perhaps a smidge of configuration if necessary. Retroarch is "a chore" in the sense that it took me like an afternoon of tinkering to get working, and most of that was because I simply didn't understand the core concept of how to get controllers working.
"Two weeks of fraught driver installs" my ass. And "commands taken from the necronomicon", really? Are you that afraid of the command line? I'd say you owe it to yourself to give Linux a shot. You've got the wrong idea about it, and about those of us who use it.
I think they were specifically referencing my comment about Retroarch, which is has a very messy interface.
Yeah, I came in too aggressive, definitely.
But I dunno, it pisses me off when people (who have never used Linux) are so, so certain it's impossibly difficult. Because it makes using Linux seem like a scary choice, when it's really not that scary. Horror stories about weeks of driver hell just aren't true, and haven't been in literal decades and yet we still have people who will never try Linux because someone on the internet made a snarky comment about how hard it is.
So that's the emotional place my comment was coming from. It was supposed to be basically a "please don't talk like this about Linux, it's false and you're scaring people away". But I didn't express that well, especially because of my aggressiveness right out of the gate. The internet has been getting to me recently, I think I need to take some time off and touch some grass so I don't immediately jump into every internet conversation with aggression.
This still happens, but it is limited pretty much exclusively to when you buy exotic hardware that was literally released yesterday (not completely impossible if you are choosing a brand new laptop to install Linux on), that no Linux users have had the chance to even test yet. Drivers get tweaked, new device IDs get added to udev so the correct driver can be assigned to the device, and there is a delay before these bleeding edge changes appear in stable distributions.
Sometimes "gimmicky" features like individually addressable keyboard LEDs or treating two wireless video game controllers as one input device (i.e. Nintendo Joycons) take longer or are considered out-of-scope for kernel development (where device drivers are implemented).
I replaced my 12 year old laptop recently. The new one had been on the market for about 6 months, and for the first week or two the amdgpu driver would crash intermittently (though the fact that the GPU driver can crash and just gracefully land me back at the login prompt with no required reboot is pretty awesome, all things considered). The problem fixed itself just by updating. This was on Fedora, where updates get moved along relatively quickly.
That said, I didn't even bother running Windows on it, so who knows? Maybe they have driver problems too :)
Perfectly understandable and never stop advocating for Linux.
A lot of things where pretty straight forward when i moved over to Linux but with the piles of old stuff lying around. It has been a way better experience now (or like a year ago when I moved all the house computers over) than when I tried a Linux box around the 2010's.
But there are a still few things that either don't work with Linux through any means that I could find, behaved wildly differently for reasons that i can only speculate about, or there were so many different and contradictory explanations of installing/troubleshooting that it took way too long to figure things out. So the frustration and anxiety is real.
So I've got Retroarch on one machine and OpenEmu on an ancient miniMac.
Functionally, they do the same thing, an all in one console emulator platform. OpenEmu works in a way that makes sense to my brain. The menus flow in a way that makes sense, getting a game assigned to an emulator makes sense to me. Retroarch... has an incredibly complex (or maybe just messy) series of menus with a whole fuckton of options that can be tinkered with, but I find it difficult to remember how to get to games if I stop using the emulator for a while. So Retroarch's problem is not about getting it to work in the Linux environment but just remembering how to navigate the very cluttered menus to find and play games that I've downloaded.
How old is your abandonware?
DOS - DOSBox works on Linux, it'll be exactly the same
Early windows / win32 - WINE works incredibly well, you just install it and then it can run Windows. File menus will end up a bit goofy because they try to point you at My Documents instead of ~
Early 2000s compatibility dead zone - There's like a 60% chance it still works on Windows and a 70% chance it works on Linux through WINE.
Post dead zone - WINE works incredibly well again.
Modern games and Steam games - Proton works incredibly well and you'll barely notice you're using it.
If you are wondering about compatability for a certain game, search for if it runs on the steam deck. If you can run it on a steam deck you can run it on any Linux install.
https://www.emudeck.com/
use wine instead, it lets you run windows software without a vm
Most emulators have native Linux versions, but there are some weird ones that don't like BigPEmu, which is the only functional Jaguar emulator and Model 2 Emulator, which is closed source, hasn't been updated in literally a decade, but is somehow still the the best Sega Model 2 emulator out there.