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I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too

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Re: I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too

#561

Post by cosmic_cheese »

a456463 wrote: post #459
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ThinkPads run the gamut. Their flagship line is nice. In most regards, I enjoy my first gen X1 Nano — good keyboard, screen (even if it annoyingly requires fractional UI scaling), body feels solid despite being lightweight, soft touch plastic makes it feel nice to hold. Trackpad is just ok but the trackpoint makes for that. It likes to spin up its fan doing the most insignificant things though (even plugging in a ped…

Are you running windows on this?

It dual boots Windows 11 and Fedora, and I’ve played with other distros in the past. They have minor edges over each other in various ways but none offer a major concrete advantage over the others in any category (except harassment/junkware, which any distro has a major upper hand over Windows 11 in, but Windows 10 accomplishes that almost as well).

Either there’s simply a hard limit on how good this hardware can be in terms of thermals and battery life or neither Lenovo’s tuning of Windows nor any Linux distro has gone far enough in properly leveraging power management and the like.

Re: I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too

#562

Post by Aurornis »

voxleone wrote: post #299

It’s worth acknowledging the real challenges raised in this thread: desktop Linux still has rough edges for some use cases, hardware support isn’t always perfect, and niche professional software may lack native support or require workarounds. But these obstacles are not intrinsic technical limitations so much as ecosystem and investment gaps, areas where community projects, standards efforts, and wider adoption could…

> But these obstacles are not intrinsic technical limitations so much as ecosystem and investment gaps

For people who are trying to get their work done now, in the present, this doesn’t change anything. We all know that Linux could technically run the same productivity apps and games if every company put enough investment money toward it. However even some of the apps I use which had a Linux version have announced that they’re sunsetting Linux compatibility due to low demand.

For all of the people whose work lives inside of text editors, web browsers, and terminals switching to Linux is easy. I think these threads become biased toward people who fit that description who don’t understand why everyone can’t just switch over.

> Viewed through the lens of digital autonomy and citizenship, the question isn’t simply “Is Linux perfect?” but rather:

That feels like a strawman argument. Most people don’t choose their OS on ideological grounds. The reasons people don’t use Linux isn’t because it’s not “perfect”. People use Windows because it works, it’s familiar, and their software runs on it. All of these calls to make OS choice about ideological wars isn’t convincing or even relevant to people who haven’t already switched to Linux.

Re: I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too

#564

Post by mystifyingpoi »

rasur wrote: post #111

Gaming is all well and good, but I'd be interested to hear of experiences with moving and using Audio apps (Ableton Live, Cubase and other Steinberg apps, plus many VSTs) from Windows to Linux. I see Wine, YABridge and LinVST mentioned in searches, but while I've got plenty of Linux experience, I'm time-poor and would prefer to make computers make noises rather than spend my time making things work. I have Reaper whi…

> I'm time-poor and would prefer to make computers make noises

Then Linux is not for you at this point. I don't mean to discourage you - for me, Reaper works, Scarlett works, ffmpeg works etc. But there are quirks. Reaper has horrible scaling on 4k screen, which I believe can be resolved by forcing UI scaling, but this requires change every time I switch from laptop to external monitor, so I just live with tiny buttons. Scarlett works, but requires JACK, and I never got it working properly with Pulse/Pipewire (outputs get duplicated sometimes), also control software doesn't exist, aside from one opensource reimplementation, which works but looks horrible.

If you don't have time, just don't.

Re: I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too

#565

Post by Aurornis »

freeopinion wrote: post #552
bachmeier wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Viewed through the lens of digital autonomy and citizenship, the question isn’t simply “Is Linux perfect?” but rather: Do we want our fundamental computing environment to be ultimately under our control, or controlled by private interests with their own incentives? As a user of Linux as my main desktop OS for more than 20 years, a user of Linux far longer than that, and a promoter of FOSS before that was a term, th…

I think Arduino and RPi demonstrate that there is still a relatively strong attraction for tinkering. In the past, freedom meant a lot to tinkerers. My sense is that this is not so true today. Perhaps I am wrong. It may be that few people respect licensing enough to care. As long as somebody (not necessarily the producer) has made a youtube video of how to hack something, that's good enough. This was probably always…

> I think Arduino and RPi demonstrate that there is still a relatively strong attraction for tinkering

Raspberry Pi is an interesting example because it is constantly criticized by people who complain about the closed source blobs, the non-open schematics, and other choices that don’t appease the purists.

Yet it does a great job at letting users do what they want to do with it, which is get to using it. It’s more accessible than the open counterparts, more available, has more guides, and has more accessories.

The situation has a lot of parallels to why people use Windows instead of seeking alternatives: It’s accessible, easy, and they can focus on doing what they want with the computer.

Re: I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too

#566

Post by wilsonnb3 »

mjr00 wrote: post #485
bachmeier wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Viewed through the lens of digital autonomy and citizenship, the question isn’t simply “Is Linux perfect?” but rather: Do we want our fundamental computing environment to be ultimately under our control, or controlled by private interests with their own incentives? As a user of Linux as my main desktop OS for more than 20 years, a user of Linux far longer than that, and a promoter of FOSS before that was a term, th…

> Most of the world does not care. I suspect that is more true today than ever before. There are now adults that grew up in the age of social media that have no idea how local computing works. Yep. I was amazed when I was talking to a friend who's a bit younger (late 20s) and told him about a fangame you could just download from a website (Dr Robotnik's Ring Racers, for the record) and he was skeptical and concerned…

To be fair, downloading and running random executables from the internet is a genuinely terrible security model when the OS (like Windows, Linux, or (to a lesser extent) MacOS) does nothing to prevent it from doing anything you can do.

Re: I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too

#567

Post by yxhuvud »

ordu wrote: post #257

> After a Windows update (that I didn't choose to do) wiped that partition and, consequently, the Linux installation WHAT? How people could tolerate a software that wipes partitions without asking? I mean, I can see that it can be handy if OS managed partitions by itself without asking a user what to do, but if it leads to removing user created partitions, it is a no go. A long time ago I tried to install Mandrake Li…

It is a known and fairly common dual booting people gets hit with in that windows update rewrite the dual booting setup, it is possible that the author misunderstood what had happened and that it could have been fixed by just fixing the boot setup.

That should of course not be necessary, but it could have saved a few hours of setup if that was the case.

Re: I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too

#568

Post by Aurornis »

mjr00 wrote: post #485
bachmeier wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Viewed through the lens of digital autonomy and citizenship, the question isn’t simply “Is Linux perfect?” but rather: Do we want our fundamental computing environment to be ultimately under our control, or controlled by private interests with their own incentives? As a user of Linux as my main desktop OS for more than 20 years, a user of Linux far longer than that, and a promoter of FOSS before that was a term, th…

> Most of the world does not care. I suspect that is more true today than ever before. There are now adults that grew up in the age of social media that have no idea how local computing works. Yep. I was amazed when I was talking to a friend who's a bit younger (late 20s) and told him about a fangame you could just download from a website (Dr Robotnik's Ring Racers, for the record) and he was skeptical and concerned…

> and he was skeptical and concerned at the idea of just downloading and running an executable from somewhere on the internet

Ironically, being concerned and skeptical about running random executables from the internet is a good idea in general.

Re: I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too

#569

Post by throw-qqqqq »

jdthedisciple wrote: post #414
voxleone wrote: post #299

It’s worth acknowledging the real challenges raised in this thread: desktop Linux still has rough edges for some use cases, hardware support isn’t always perfect, and niche professional software may lack native support or require workarounds. But these obstacles are not intrinsic technical limitations so much as ecosystem and investment gaps, areas where community projects, standards efforts, and wider adoption could…

Will these issues with Linux ever be overcome? I want to switch but I just don't feel confident yet, and I wonder how long the "yet" will remain.

> Will these issues with Linux ever be overcome?

As a Linux user forced to run Windows at work, I only see issues with Windows ;)

> I want to switch but I just don't feel confident

Live distros make it very easy to dip your toes and try, without committing to anything.

IMO Linux has much better UI options because there are so many choices and freedom.

You can likely find something that looks/works EXACTLY like you’ve always dreamed of - but maybe you have to try a few options to find it.

Re: I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too

#570

Post by raziel2701 »

I bought a thinkpad X1 carbon refurbished for about ~$300. I wanted to travel abroad with a laptop I wouldn't mind getting stolen if it happened. During the installation of Win11 it asked me to create a microsoft account, fuck that. I installed linux mint. Very nice experience overall, so nice to not get assaulted by ads in the start menu. Pleased to see the nightlight functionality (I googled f.lux for linux and that's how I discovered it) is built-in, and with flatpack I installed vlc, qbittorrent and obsidian. Firefox setup was straightforward. And that was it. This is a laptop for youtube and movies, I used the pre-installed libre office calc for small budget things and list making. It just worked for me.

The things that bother me about this laptop are primarily hardware related coming from using a mac laptop (which is the laptop I would mind getting stolen). Trackpad on X1 carbon is definitely not as good, battery life not as good. And opening the lid momentarily reveals what you were on before the lock screen comes on. This last one tastes more like a software issue. I had another issue with the hdmi port being finicky, but that's hardware again.

Overall very happy with this setup, linux mint is in great shape. I do wish there were fewer distro choices for people considering making the switch. It does introduce choice paralysis. I had to set aside my ego and pipe dream aspirations of being a "hacker" and went with a distro that seemed to be simple and straightforward to setup. Mint definitely is easier to install than windows, hands down, no need to create a microsoft account and you don't have to deal with all the slop features it tries to shove down your throat.

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