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I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

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Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#511

Post by AviationAtom »

while_true_ wrote: post #71
0xperke wrote: post #44

For all who switched to Linux: which distro did you choose and why? Fedora: wanted to have the newest kernel and updates due to new hardware - so far i am really satisfied; the only issue i have is that the printer does not work everytime… as a workaround i print with my iphone instead.

Debian stable with KDE Plasma. Plasma is similar in feel to Win 10, but far more customizable. It's the first Linux desktop I've used that feels professional and polished. Short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZ6bojRSIw0

100%. I run this combo on my 12 year old Chromebook and it's a very solid web browsing and thin client system. Audio works, Wi-Fi works, Bluetooth works, everything just works, and works well.

Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#512

Post by AviationAtom »

lifetimerubyist wrote: post #54

I replaced Windows with Linux about 6 months ago. Then I ran into a game I really wanted to play but it didn’t run well with Proton (not kernel anti-cheat, just bad performance) after all the tweaks so I just reserved to dual booting with Windows 10. After not using Windows for so long, I came to realize that Windows is just as much a mess as Linux just in different ways. You get used to the quirks so you don’t notic…

I saw a gal say that a Windows VM worked solid for gaming, after passing through a GPU.

EDIT: I hunted for the link, to deliver it to you! https://astrid.tech/2022/09/22/0/nixos-gpu-vfio/

Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#513

Post by jm4 »

MarsIronPI wrote: post #268
g947o wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android does have a cost. While the OS itself is free, any manufacturer that wants to put Play Store, which is almost every company outside China, needs to pay Google a license fee, which effectively pays for Android. Of course there are also ads everywhere in Android and Android apps that helps pay the bill.

Wow, so the only OSs with no money in them are the FOSS ones. Makes sense, though. (No, at this point Android hardly counts as FOSS anymore.)

Someone has to pay for it because it’s expensive to develop. There’s a ton of money in Linux just like there is in proprietary operating systems. There are like 4000-5000 kernel contributors and most of them are doing this work on some company’s payroll. There’s an enormous amount of resources going into Linux to the point where a proprietary OS couldn’t possibly keep up.

The real genius of Linux is the economic model, getting companies to buy into it and actually delivering value far in excess of what it costs anybody to contribute. It’s winning precisely because the value proposition cannot be matched.

Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#514

Post by AviationAtom »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #361
greenavocado wrote: post #25

If you need Windows these days just install virt-manager and load the version of Windows you need. It's really fast and lightweight (my laptop stays cold at idle while running the Windows VMs) with all the HV enlightenments for good computational efficiency. Installing and using the virtio drivers is key for many useful features such as memory ballooning, fast networking with low computational overhead, and virtiofs…

How does this work compared to VirtualBox?

KVM/QEMU is the only logical and sane choice on Linux, unless some tooling you're using requires VirtualBox. The key is to optimize and tweak all your host and guest settings, installing the guest tools too. Once you have it optimized it purrs.

Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#515

Post by o2xda2s »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #261
themafia wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and ensuring they don't fumble the ai/agent transition They've already fumbled it. > the way they did with mobile. It's the exact same way they fumbled with mobile. They were very late to the party and decided to buy their way in. It _never_ works.

MS was almost two decades early to the mobile party, and still fumbled it. Because they didn't have the usability insights around touchscreens that others pioneered. Also could never name things—they named it Wince.

I had a wince device before the iPhone existed 2005 ish.. An o2 XDA 2s ... There was flash for the OS ... All your files were stored in ram... Internet was a 56k dialup speeds... The arm CPU was anemic.... Wince also had issues if left on too long.. I.e. phone stopped giving audio in a call ... All in all was cool, the slidenout keyboard I miss but terrible software ... The lack of durable user files made it a fail.

Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#516

Post by AviationAtom »

dummydummy1234 wrote: post #404
TacticalCoder wrote: post #277

It's quite interesting to see all these people switching to Linux on the desktop and realizing it works. Some of us are using Linux on the desktop since more than ... a quarter of a century. Everytime I read such an article I'm thinking "duh, of course it works" but apparently people still think it's not the case. I do really, really, really wonder what's going to happen once battery usage is more efficient on Linux…

It is a bit of a pain to set up though, especially for a laptop - I just switched to fedora+ gnome, and going through configuring the power settings to allow for suspend-then-hibernate was annoying. Figuring out the luks + page file + hibernate resume configuration is non intuitive, and is only viable for me to figure out due to my Linux based day job. Probably could have gone bazzite and had things just work, but I…

Try KDE Plasma on Debian 13

Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#517

Post by t_mahmood »

rickdg wrote: post #295
herczegzsolt wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are sensitive to these issues, unfortunately you need to go with a mainstream linux distribution and use near-default settings. It's great that you can customize everything and use your own window manager, compositor, etc ... but these issues are the price you pay. It is unfair to compare this to Windows, where you don't even have these customization options. Specifically for the network manager applet, it is…

I use ubuntu and the default remote desktop just stopped working since 24: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/rdp-stopped-working-after-upg... With Linux, you just have to be prepared to hit a bug and find no help coming anytime.

I had one client who's explorer didn't load, we tried different file browsers, all that used explorer as backend failed to load, only double commander (forgot the exact name, it's a dual pan file browser like midnight commander) that worked. And we couldn't find any solution online, at the end he was stuck with it for over an year, as it was not possible to reinstall.

On Linux everything is mostly decoupled, so this is not working not going to break the other thing, and I can replace it with something else.

People forgets that you're not working with a black box, unlike Windows

Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#518

Post by t_mahmood »

ajcp wrote: post #405
peanut-walrus wrote: post #7

I've been a Linux admin for 25 years but up until a few months ago my personal computer has been windows (gaming desktop) or Mac (laptop). I decided to give desktop Linux another shot and I'm glad I did. I was prepared for a lot of jankiness but figured I have enough experience to fix whatever needs fixing. Surprisingly, this has not been the case at all, the PC has been not only as stable as Windows or Mac but also…

The only reason I haven't gone over to Linux is gaming with my RTX card. Interested to know your gaming setup and distro. Any stability/compatibility issues?

Not the op, I've been gaming on Linux for over 10 years I think, I have an rtx2080, and using Arch Linux, Nvidia support has gotten better by a lot.

Steam performs exceptionally well. Initially there were issues, but I haven't face any for really long time now.

I don't play mp games though. So that part I can't say much.

Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#519

Post by jm4 »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #56

>I picked CachyOS rather than a better-known distro like Ubuntu because it’s optimized for modern hardware, >First challenge: My mouse buttons don’t work. I can move the cursor, but can’t click on anything. Maybe should've picked Ubuntu? I suspect this is the Linus (tech tips, not Torvalds) strategy of picking up an obscure distro for content purposes. Can't really have an article if everything just works, right

It’s not exactly obscure. It’s Arch with a nice installer and binaries with compiler optimizations for the latest hardware. It’s not a crazy choice if you have very new hardware. It feels exactly like Arch because it is.

Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#520

Post by utbabya »

rsyring wrote: post #10
peanut-walrus wrote: post #7

I've been a Linux admin for 25 years but up until a few months ago my personal computer has been windows (gaming desktop) or Mac (laptop). I decided to give desktop Linux another shot and I'm glad I did. I was prepared for a lot of jankiness but figured I have enough experience to fix whatever needs fixing. Surprisingly, this has not been the case at all, the PC has been not only as stable as Windows or Mac but also…

I've been running a Linux desktop for about 13 years. There are still "moments" where you have to work on it and it can be more opaque than Windows/Mac. But you have the control to do what you need to do, which is one huge factor for me in Linux's favor. I moved my immediate and mostly non-tech family to all run Linux including an aging relative who needed a locked-down Firefox install to keep her from falling victim…

I managed to get around ~7W idle on a 2024 dgpu/igpu laptop, with room to further optimize. From my limited casual checks (nowhere near proper benchmark), it's better than windows.

But yes it's an area that still requires tweaking, which is a cost I don't want to incur. Also just within this year I got a regression (later fixed) because of a bug in nvidia-open driver so it stopped going into low power state giving me a toaster on the go. These are still very obscure to root cause and fix.

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