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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

#711

Post by ordu »

yxhuvud wrote: post #567
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.

It makes sense. Yes, if OS rewrites the booting setup sometimes, it is kinda tolerable.

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

#712

Post by aeroevan »

comprev wrote: post #311
iinnPP wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As another anecdote in favor of Universal Blue's approach. My mother (who can't use a computer but to check email or regular websites) has been swapped to Aurora and has nothing but positive feedback. Been 90 days with zero issues.

When my dad (83) was looking to replace his ancient Win7 Dell PC I convinced him to buy a MacMini since he's had an iPad for a long time, and more recently an iPhone. Initially he was concerned about the "new" interface after using Windows since 3.11 days, but within an hour he was happy doing his usual "basic tasks" (email, basic Excel, Word for letters, printing, etc). He was amazed both his printers (colour/scanne…

Chromebooks are also pretty good if google sheets/docs would suffice for excel/word.

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

#713

Post by scrlk »

myself248 wrote: post #681
scrlk wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Thinkpads are the last major holdout ThinkPads were one of the last major holdouts, they went to the Control-Fn layout in 2024.

Whoah. Is that the end of it, then?

It seems so, even niche manufacturers like Getac have adopted Control-Fn for their newer models.

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

#714

Post by marcosdumay »

xattt wrote: post #473
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…

> … desktop Linux still has rough edges … My personal pet peeve is the GTK/Qt divide. Theming has an extra step, as you have to pick a matching theme for the other toolkit apps you inevitably end up using. KDE/Qt has excellent scaling support, but GTK apps (OrcaSlicer for example) end up having blurry text or messed up text labels if you run a non-integer scaling resolution. The Wayland transition almost seems akin t…

On your first point, the KDE configuration GUI does a really good job at setting the GTK theme.

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

#715

Post by flexagoon »

odie5533 wrote: post #236
flexagoon wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the people who barely use the computer are the easiest to move to Linux. As Mental Outlaw said, "to a normie, an OS is just a bootloader for Google Chrome". If all you do is check emails, it doesn't really matter what OS you have installed. Switching to Linux hasn't been an issue for those users for a long time - it's usually gamers, users of professional software, or IT people with deeply established wor…

Laptop battery life suffers greatly on Linux. When their Google Chrome bootloader is out of battery all day, it matters which OS they installed.

Laptop battery is mostly an issue of inefficient CPUs nowadays. I don't know about other distros, but at least Fedora's default power saving settings give a battery life very much comparable to Windows. Which is obviously still nothing compared to macbooks or even snapdragon laptops.

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

#716

Post by marcosdumay »

sedatk wrote: post #702

It’s astonishing to me that Microsoft is letting go of all these users because someone drew something on whiteboard that looked like “force Microsoft Account on all users -> ??? -> Profit”, and has repeatedly done the same with Teams, Ads, Bing, OneDrive, use of WebView in essential components etc. I’m not only saying that as a former Windows engineer, but as someone who actively uses Windows, OneDrive, Office, etc.…

> someone drew something on whiteboard that looked like “force Microsoft Account on all users -> ??? -> Profit”

The problem is not what people have drawn on the whiteboard.

The problem is all the long-term decisions and actual values that aren't there anymore.

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

#719

Post by doodlesdev »

lenova wrote: post #190
doodlesdev wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do CachyOS optimizations actually make any difference whatsoever? I know they enable certain optimization flags whenever building software, but that doesn't directly equate to performance improvements unless you're actually benchmarking and testing it. I've seen some benchmarks in games and it seems there is literally zero performance difference (sometimes it loses to Fedora, even). I'd always recommend upstream dist…

> Do CachyOS optimizations actually make any difference whatsoever? I know they enable certain optimization flags whenever building software, but that doesn't directly equate to performance improvements unless you're actually benchmarking and testing it. I switched from Windows 11 to Kubuntu a year ago, and then gave CachyOS a shot after hearing praise for it. I'm on a laptop with an AMD iGPU, and CachyOS's `znver4`…

That's actually pretty great!

Have you observed any changes in your day-to-day usage, such as faster compilation times? If it's actually decently faster I might try it instead of playing with Gentoo to get better-optimized compilation flags.

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

#720

Post by mjr00 »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #705
mjr00 wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course this is true. But you can keep going down the rabbit hole. How do you know there isn't a backdoor hidden in the source code? How do you know there isn't a compromised dependency, maybe intentionally? Ultimately there needs to be trust at some point because nobody is realistically going to do a detailed security analysis of the source code of everything they install. We do this all the time as software devel…

The problem is that on Windows or your typical Linux distro "how much you trust" needs to be "with full access to all of the information on my computer, including any online accounts I access through that computer". This is very much unlike Android, for example, where all apps are sandboxed by default. That's a pretty high bar, I don't blame your friend at all for being skeptical.

Right, which goes back to the main point; "total control of your computing environment" fundamentally means that you are responsible for figuring out which applications to trust, based on your own choice of heuristics (FOSS? # of downloads/Github stars? Project age? Reputation of maintainers and file host? etc...) Many, maybe most people don't actually want to do this, and would much rather outsource that determination of trust to Microsoft/Google/Apple.
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