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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

#691

I have... I switched to Bluefin, which is a branch of Universal Blue, which is flavour of Fedora. Sounds complicated, but in fact is the best thing to ever happen to Linux. I get all the ease of use of something like macOS but pre-built with tools for development like distrobox, and then I can just build my dev environments and get shit done in no time, without having to worry about breaking updates or nuking the who…

I am curious. Does the flatpak Firefox allows access to all folders?

Heya, not by default, but you can allow it.

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

#692

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are thinking about it way too hard. Windows 11 is a dog. Constant hardware problems, slow, and frustrating UX. Is any desktop linux perfect? No, but its better than w11 right now.

> Windows 11 is a dog. So, man's best friend? Anyway, while I agree about the slowness (now that I've experienced Linux snappiness and done the benchmarks), it's the constant nagging / dark patterns that seals the deal for me. Microsoft would still have me as a happy customer and MSVC user if they hadn't bricked their OS after Win 7 and shoved AI, MS account, ads etc down everyone's throats. On that note, even more h…

I’ve got this older laptop I just set up for dual boot with a Linux distro. Before installing GRUB, I stripped down Windows 11 using Chris Titus’s utility, though you can accomplish the same thing manually, as you probably know, to kill all that Microsoft telemetry garbage. Windows runs beautifully now, no lag whatsoever. Linux, on the other hand, locks up constantly. And it’s not a hardware issue. Plenty of RAM, confirmed all the drivers loaded properly. Ironic?

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

#693
post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is Microsoft Office? Do you mean Microsoft 365 Copilot?

You forgot the "App" :) I'm still astonished at how dumb that rebrand is...

The "app" isn't even capitalized, which is my favorite part!

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

#694
post #86

These articles... I'm not sure who are the target audience, because I am definitely not and I don't know anyone who is. Specific OS is not the important, anything with modern KDE is good enough to replace Windows 10/11. But do I (and all my colleagues) need Microsoft Office (Word, Excel at least) and/or Drawing software (Adobe or something) and/or god forbid Visual Studio 2026, and some other corporate software to ma…

Krita and Inkscape have successfully replaced Photoshop and Illustrator for me. There isn't any good video editing options and lightroom still beats Gimp.

For me the biggest sticking point to windows is cad/cam software, lightburn and anything proprietary needed for hobby equipment. I'm glad though that 3d printer software has always had equal Linux support (as long as you don't use Bambu).

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

#695

I have... I switched to Bluefin, which is a branch of Universal Blue, which is flavour of Fedora. Sounds complicated, but in fact is the best thing to ever happen to Linux. I get all the ease of use of something like macOS but pre-built with tools for development like distrobox, and then I can just build my dev environments and get shit done in no time, without having to worry about breaking updates or nuking the who…

How does bluefin compare to Linux Mint? I ask because I always thought mint was Linux for babies.

I think bluefin is more of a distro for babies in the sense that it really protects itself leaving the user with very limited capacity to break things while mint, also an awesome distro is more of a nice drop in for users that want to feel familiar with their desktop environment and traditional configuration

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

#696

I’m so close to the switch myself for silly reasons. I don’t like windows due to their creepy business practices and negative design patterns in their OS so I’m very bias against it. Forcing copilot is just the latest in their creepy practices… For more details on why I came close to switching: I use my win desktop as a host for ai services such as Comfy UI for stable diffusion generation since it is a beefy platform…

Running ComfyUI or _any_ AI stuff on Linux is a night and day difference in terms of ease of use and performance when compared against that of Windows users. Python on Windows is suffering

You just making stuff up? ComfyUI just works on windows.

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

#697
post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ironically, being concerned and skeptical about running random executables from the internet is a good idea in general. I agree you shouldn't run random executables, but the key word is "random". In this case, Ring Racers is a relatively established and somewhat well-known game, plus it's open-source. It doesn't guarantee it's not harmful of course, but ultimately for someone with the mindset of "I should never run…

> plus it's open-source Open-source only matters if you have the time/skill/willingness to download said source (and any dependencies') and compile it. Otherwise you're still running a random binary and there's no telling whether the source is malicious or whether the binary was even built with the published source.

> Open-source only matters if you have the time/skill/willingness to download said source (and any dependencies') and compile it.

Not really. The fact that an application is open-source means its originator can't rug-pull its users at some random future date (as so often happens with closed-source programs). End users don't need to compile the source for that to be true.

> Otherwise you're still running a random binary and there's no telling whether the source is malicious or whether the binary was even built with the published source.

This is also not true in general. Most open-source programs are available from an established URL, for example a Github archive with an appropriate track record. And the risks of downloading and running a closed-source app are much the same.

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

#698
post #694
post #86

These articles... I'm not sure who are the target audience, because I am definitely not and I don't know anyone who is. Specific OS is not the important, anything with modern KDE is good enough to replace Windows 10/11. But do I (and all my colleagues) need Microsoft Office (Word, Excel at least) and/or Drawing software (Adobe or something) and/or god forbid Visual Studio 2026, and some other corporate software to ma…

Krita and Inkscape have successfully replaced Photoshop and Illustrator for me. There isn't any good video editing options and lightroom still beats Gimp. For me the biggest sticking point to windows is cad/cam software, lightburn and anything proprietary needed for hobby equipment. I'm glad though that 3d printer software has always had equal Linux support (as long as you don't use Bambu).

Kdenlive is good enough for my video editinf needs

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

#699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem I see with most people is that it just doesn't occur to them that there are alternatives. They're so used to a shitty experience with Windows and MS apps, and to them there's no such thing as os" and "hardware", in their minds they're lumped together. So they shrug, say "meh, computers, I just can't understand them," and go on their merry way rebooting Windows for the 10th time that day. Now, don't get me…

> I need to install a bunch of drivers from HP with dubious names, like sp1234 This is just how HP names their software deployment packages. Lenovo will have something like "u6chp70us17" or "83wo12ww". You go on your product's page, download the driver, install it. I understand complaining about a device that doesn't work out of the box, but about the name of the driver installer? To be honest I've never seen an Elit…

I have two similar laptops, 840 g8 and 845 g8. The first is intel, the other amd.

The intel one had some kind of new touchpad, which doesn't work during the windows install. It was apparently some new thing introduced with intel's 11th gen, don't remember the specifics, but apparently other models had the same issue. Windows needs to connect to the internet to fetch drivers once installed, even 25h2 which I installed two weeks ago. Bonus points for the AMD ethernet dongle not being recognized, even though it's some random realtek, so I have to type my wifi password (my AP doesn't support wps). The AMD one works, even though the touchpads seem similar.

For a long time, the AMD's webcam didn't work. There's some USB doohickey that wasn't recognized (showed up with an exclamation point in device manager), and even installing all the drivers from HP's webpage didn't solve it. It solved itself somehow after some windows update two or three years later. Out of the box, it did have the webcam working, but the display brightness was somehow limited to "pretty dim". I was ready to write it off as just another crappy enterprise pc panel, but then I rebooted it into the bios and the thing burned a hole through my eyes. Installing windows manually fixed the backlight. Sleep on windows more often than not hangs for some reason, even now, 5 years in.

The intel had a long-standing issue with 4k output over its usb-c ports. At one point, installing the gpu driver from intel fixed it, but windows update would helpfully update it to an older, borken version. Nowadays we have 5k panels at work. I can only get 5k if the driver is initialized with the monitor connected. So if the screen goes to sleep, it won't run at 5k anymore when it wakes back up. Newer models don't seem to have this issue anymore.

Fortunately I'm only an occasional windows user, so don't care all that much. Everything worked perfectly under linux since day one, so apart from the comically bad display quality, I'm generally a happy camper.

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

#700
post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Ironically, being concerned and skeptical about running random executables from the internet is a good idea in general. I agree you shouldn't run random executables, but the key word is "random". In this case, Ring Racers is a relatively established and somewhat well-known game, plus it's open-source. It doesn't guarantee it's not harmful of course, but ultimately for someone with the mindset of "I should never run…

How do they know they’ve found the legitimate Ring Racers download and not some scammer who managed to get their search result above the real one?

Nothing wrong with downloading and running programs you trust, but there needs to be a good answer to that question.

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