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.
You must log in or register to comment.
Totally agree, but the thing that keeps me from jumping to Linux is that I only have one computer (runs Windows 10), I haven’t installed Linux elsewhere, and I don’t want to lose my files or anything when I switch. Is that something to be concerned about?
Ideally you would have a way to back up your files. If you want to stay on win 10 you will need to reinstall the ltsc version and should back up your files just in case.
You can install Linux to an external HD and boot off of it that way, then you don’t risk any data loss with partitions or reformatting. From there you can copy files over. After that you can swap out the HD, install Linux over the internal HD, or install Linux to dual boot with windows.
I have NOT tried this but according to https://massgrave.dev/change_windows_edition you can change the windows edition. I would not try it without backing up my most important files, regardless. I don’t use Windows so the opportunity for me to try it doesn’t exist, but the option is good to keep in mind.
if you use a computer you owe it to yourself to learn how & start using Linux. stop using games as a crutch, that’s G*mer behavior. I don’t care if your favorite game won’t work with Proton. pick a new one that does there are literally so many and you’ll end up liking it more because your computer will actually respect you.
i mean FFS the steam deck runs on modified Arch. doom (the new shit), KSP (is native), animal well, rdr2, even halo all run great. I run pathologic 3 off an old thinkpad with a thunderbolt eGPU. a better world is possible.
a friend of mine just installed windows 11 on their new PC and it fucking hurt to see
Me in 2013: Fuck em-dollar sign for taking out the start menu. I guess I’ll give Linux a shot. But there’s no way em-dollar sign would fuck up Windoze even more.
Me in 2025:
Proprietary software is a complete infringement of human dignity and freedom. Desktop Linux is also better now than it has ever been. In fact, given the direction of the latest versions of Windows and macOS, it is in many ways a better experience than those. I won’t lie and say Linux is unequivocally better in every way, though.
somebody motivate me to clean the back room so i can set up my PC tinkering station so i can install the extra hard drives and finally get PopOS loaded with partitioning
yeah i have to do all that in that order
also i want to spell it like Pop! OS
You’ve got a back room and you’re not using it as a cool-ass hackerspace?
That’s you, drops of water and you’re on top of the mountain of success. But one day you start sliding down the mountain and you think wait a minute; I’m a mountain top water drop. I don’t belong in this valley, this river, this low dark ocean with all these drops of water. Then one day it gets hot and you slowly evaporate into air, way up, higher than any mountain top, all the way to the heavens. Then you understand that it was at your lowest that you were closest to God. Life’s a journey that goes round and round and the end is closest to the beginning. So if it’s change you need, relish the journey.
no more half measures walter
c l e a n
t h e
b a c k
r o o m
motivates you
GOOD Post. I to believe linux makes you smarter but I can’t say it without coming off pretentious.
in case anyone wants to stay on windows 10, you can download the LTSC IoT version and have updates until 2032.
If you have to stay on windows for some reason, this is the way to go. There is also a win 11 ltsc version without all the recall and copilot shit.
But if you aren’t reliant on proprietary apps that are locked to windows for a job or creative endeavor, just try linux for a while first. If you know enough to get ltsc installed and registered, you can get linux installed.
It’s also significantly less bloated.
Edit: Instructions on how to get it are here: https://rentry.co/windowsltsc
yes, no ads, copilot, cortana, games or apps
what is ltsc lot?
long-term servicing channel, Internet of Things
If i could get my fighting games and simracing stuff working I would switch, but the simracing stuff is like…pretty niche and already barely works lol. Im sure plenty of fighting games would work.
I’m not even considering switching until iRacing actually works on Linux. Happy to see the in the list of steering wheels that my Moza wheel is now compatible, though.
Direct drive wheels on linux are still awful with compatibility and missing effects from what I have heard last december. There was a matrix server with people looking for testers trying to make the simracing experience better.
I recommend checking https://github.com/JacKeTUs/linux-steering-wheels to check for the level of compatability with wheels.
EDIT: Looks like a lot of it has been bumped up to gold and platinum. It was just g29 and thrustmaster in the past.
good to know that moza is compatible
Yeah if it wasn’t for gaming and the general setup headache I’d have switched years ago but I have 30 years of documents arranged using windows file system conventions and I’d rather not spend 3 weeks tinkering with sound drivers.
I know windows sucks… BUT I want all my games to work and not have to troubleshoot stuff. (Could I troubleshoot stuff “probably”?)
But I wanna be lazy not smart. Are there distros that do that yet (be gentle im drunk atm)
Bazzite
games dont even work on windows tbh. theyre designed too and still dont.
if you try to play a game from like 2009 you always have to do some bullshit to get it working on modern windows (if you even can)
I cant say I have had problems (I can recall of) gaming on Windows in the last 15+ years . On the few occasions I play older games like Dawn of War 1 it didnt pose any problems …but I can see if one plays a lot of older games (which I dont) modern windows is probably a subpar experience.
there has not been a more fun time to use linux than today (and every day after today).
The caveat are games that require kernel level rootkits for their “anticheat” functionality. These are usually massive multiplayer games that have some emphasis on microtransactions and in-game gambling (think your league of legends and apex legends/fortnite).
yeah, the distro is Mint
here, try it in your browser - https://distrosea.com/start/linuxmint-22.1-cinnamon/
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
and then run windows in a virtual machine to play some games?
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 summary
It 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.
use wine instead, it lets you run windows software without a vm
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.
Wine sounds pretty good.
-
Decades spent on the puter
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.
windows in a virtual machine to play some games?
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.
How about for emulators like duckstation and pcsx2?
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.
