This is probably a good place to ask, but when ditching windows for Linux, what’s a good distro to go with? Preferably one that has a good WINE interface.
I’ve seen a lot of people move to Mint or Pop_OS or Kubuntu. They’re Debian based so updates are pretty stable.
I personally ended up with EndeavourOS using the KDE desktop environment. I have a steam deck, so this felt very similar to me. This is Arch based so sometimes updates break things, but I’ve had more success here.
Also remember that no distro is problem-free, but neither was Windows. The longer you commit, the easier it gets.
EDIT: If you’re hesitant to fully commit at first, I also recommend dual booting with Windows. Over time you’ll use it less and less until one day you feel like reclaiming the disk space.
If you’re hesitant to fully commit at first, I also recommend dual booting with Windows. Over time you’ll use it less and less until one day you feel like reclaiming the disk space.
I have a 10 year old laptop that I had to get rid of the hard drive for and am installing an nand drive and want to use to re-familiarize myself with Linux on it. Especially since my main desktops are too old to upgrade to Windows 11(not that I’d want to anyway) and I figure going Linux now will save me from scrambling when the pooch gets thoroughly screwed after Win 10 updates end.
I tried doing a dual boot to Mint awhile back, I did the mint backup at the start like it suggests, changed some things, broke it, restored from the backup thinking it was great id already made one, and broke the WHOLE pc.
I had to pull the battery on the BIOS to get it to go beyond a black screen when turning on.
It was terrible.
It seem to recall at the time recommendations about not doing dual boot, and if you wanted to dual boot, remove the main OS drive when you install Linux. Then put it back in.
I’d personally recommend Linux Mint Debian Edition. After distro hopping for a bit, it has personally been the best one for working right out of the box, both for my games and for my peripherals.
I like the UI, it’s about at my tech level/needs. I have little to no complaints about it, which is as good as it gets.
This is one of many comments I’ve seen on several posts that have recommended Mint. I’m currently playing around with Ubuntu, just because it’s the one I’m most familiar with from back in the day, but since the drive I’m using is temporary I might do a wipe and then load Mint and see how that operates.
In my experience, experience with one distro is experience with them all. 90% of what you are familiar with will be either similar or completely the same. So definitely give LMDE a shot.
IIRC, Zorin OS handles that the best. Furthermore, it’s actually a distro that targets beginners (like e.g. Linux Mint does). So, overall, it’s a great pick.
Of course, don’t just expect that all your Windows software just works on Linux with WINE. Instead, search if they’re somehow available on Linux and/or work through WINE. If that’s not the case, then ensure that an alternative is available that you’re willing to use instead.
Finally, ensure that the distro you choose, actually works great with your hardware.
Well this is the funny thing that has occurred in the last 24 hours. I have been playing about with basic Ubuntu and I installed Wine on it. But when I tried to come up with a Microsoft dependent application to test it out on I came to the realization that there are no applications that I use that are exclusive to Microsoft. Nearly everything I use is either web-based or has a Linux port.
Hell, even MS Office is web based nowadays. I think Windows truly has become obsolete, or at least out moded. That is for casual desktop users such as myself. There may be enterprise programs out there that still rely on Windows architecture.
Edit: P.S. the Ubuntu was really just a test for the machine I will be working with. I think I’m likely gonna stick Mint on it and give that a try after a new hard drive arrives for it later this week.
I’m not sure I consider myself a “veteran” since I still used Windows most of the time back then, but I used it in the late 90s. This is all anecdotal from my perspective, but the late 90s Linux experience was pretty rough on the desktop side, especially installing it. I actually rarely saw Debian in use, it was usually Red Hat for the sane people or Slackware for the lunatics. There were a few notable Linux game ports, but generally speaking, gaming wasn’t something most people did or even expected to do in Linux. I think I had a small handful games that weren’t terminal roguelikes: Doom, Quake, Tux Racer, and Alpha Centauri ( this one might have been early 2000s, hard to recall ). I can’t say I personally saw anyone openly using it at the university level in almost any form when I attended, I saw a lot of Unix though. Everyone I knew that was using Linux was younger and did have a slightly hobbyist leaning, with the more serious people usually using OpenBSD or FreeBSD.
I first used Linux in the late 90s, and it was just something that worked better on an older box. I installed Red Hat on an old 286 and the fun part was honestly getting it to work and learning about computers. Then one day I realized that I was spending all my free time working inside on this thing, but I was living on the water, in the Florida Keys, with access to boats and jet skis and pretty much anything. That had been my dream my whole life and all of a sudden I was living it. And I didn’t even have to be at work, right next door, until 10am. I was on a break from school then, and that’s actually what caused me to change my major from CS. I didn’t think it would be helpful to spend my whole life indoors!
Now I’m a physics teacher and I sometimes teach my 9th graders how to use Python for simple things like graphing. I love my life and I’m really thankful I keot computers as a hobby rather than as my profession.
It was a struggle. You went to buy some device and you had to check it was not one of those windows-only ones. Modems were particularly bad, for example.
You had to read the how-tos and figure things out. Mailing lists and newsgroups were the only places to find some help.
You had to find the shop willing to honour warranty on the parts and not on the whole system, as they had no knowledge of Linux at all. But once you found them, you were a recurring customer so they were actually happy. You might even have ended up showing them memtest86!
You would still be able to configure the kernel and be able to actually know some of those names, compilation would take several hours but it was a learning experience.
You could interact with very helpful kernel developers and get fixes to test.
You could have been the laughing stock of your circles of friends, but within you, you knew who’d have had the last laugh.
And yes, Loki games had some titles working on Linux natively, Railroad Tycoon was one. Too bad they were ahead of the times and didn’t last much.
compilation would take several hours but it was a learning experience.
the first time i put gentoo on a g3 imac back in 2004; it took 3 days to compile everything and the computer got so hot that it warmed up the entire room like a space heater. lol
This was me, you’re talking about me. 😂 In the 90’s Linux was barely getting started but slackware was probably the main distro everyone was focused on. That was the first one I ran across. This was probably late 90’s, I don’t remember when slack first came about though.
By the time the 2000’s came around, it was basically a normal thing for people in college to have used or at least tried. Linux was in the vernacular, text books had references to it, and the famous lawsuit from SCO v IBM was in full swing. There were distro choices for days, including Gentoo which I spent literally a week getting everything compiled on an old Pentium only for it to not support some of the hardware and refuse to boot.
There was a company I believe called VA Linux that declared that year to be the year of the Linux desktop. My memory might be faulty on this one.
Loki gaming was a company that specialized in porting games to Linux, and they did a good job at it but couldn’t make money. I remember being super excited about them and did buy a few games. I was broke too so that was a real splurge for me. I feel like they launched in the 90’s (late) and crashed in the early 2000’s.
I think you need to qualify that having used or tried Linux in college was normal in the 2000s for someone in computer science or engineering, or basically my fellow undiagnosed autistics and autistic adjacents. In my experience it was fairly normal in college for most people to have trouble operating a basic word processor, and they would not have had any idea what Linux was at all.
Maybe, but I took some business courses too and even some of them had at least tried a Linux distro. I think it was more widespread than just turbo nerds and cs majors. Hell one of the biggest Linux guys I knew was an anthropology major.
Linux was in use on some university machines although I lot of them were still running Sun hardware OS. The main distribution I used at the time was Slackware.
The thing that sticks with me is video card support. Back then (before Nvidia, 3dfx, etc) you had VGA cards that had one of a number of chipsets on, but it would be paired with a video timing chip and a RAMDAC. Buying a card required knowing which combination of parts it used and which combinations had support in XFree86. Then writing the configuration required knowing the video timings supported by your monitor. Not just frequencies, but blanking periods and such like.
I remember a really smart, very nerdy family friend telling us about Linux around 1997/98 and this was the experience he described. It sounded interesting but also like a crazy amount of work.
Weirdly, I think it all got me my first job. I interviewed at a graphics card manufacturer and the interviewer placed one of their cards on the table and said “tell me what’s on that card”.
I picked it up and pointed out all the components because I knew them all by their part numbers that were written on them. I hadn’t seen them before, but I knew they were options in XFree86. Then add in that the regular array of chips was likely VRAM and the chips with the same logo on them as was above the door where the companies own video processors.
I didn’t know how any of it worked, but he didn’t know that. All he saw was a fresh graduate that just effortlessly identified some quite esoteric components of a design he’d personally made.
I started with Suse 5 when it came out, as something I was interested in fucking about with. I didn’t have internet access at that time, but I did had a couple of books about it (the distro came with a book as well). It was a couple of CDs and a boot floppy disk (booting from CD wasn’t really a thing).
I used it for years for software development and simple tasks like Word processing. Getting my printer working on the thing was a chore, as was basically anything. Especially without internet solving issues was sometimes simply impossible. My scanner simply didn’t work. Getting the desktop environment to run was very hard, I struggled with it for a long time. And once I got it working properly, I got a new videocard and it broke the whole thing again.
The system was very painful to use, it was super cool, but almost nothing ever worked right. And trying to fix shit usually made it worse. But once you did get it working right, it was simply awesome. And the feeling of accomplishment was awesome after finally getting something right. For software development on the terminal it was pretty awesome though. Back then I did almost everything in text mode, as I was used to DOS before that. Going into Windows was something you did only sometimes with Windows 3.11 (and even 95) and I did the same in my Linux environment. The desktop environment used up a lot of memory and was pretty slow, so I preferred the console. It was only later booting into the desktop became the norm (around the Windows 98 era).
I used Suse till version 6.1 (still have that box). I bought version 7 (still have that box as well), but never really used it.
Back then I used Debian to create small internet routers for my friends. I got an old compact computer, put in a floppy with Debian, a couple of network cards and created small NAT boxes like that. This was before NAT routers were the norm, people just had internet on 1 machine, connected directly. But as computers became cheaper, a lot of folk had more than 1 computer in the home. With no real way to share the internet connection between the different computers. Microsoft created the Internet Connection Sharing feature, but that was pretty slow, disconnected often and ate resources on your “main” PC. So my little boxes worked great, I helped people setup a home network, connected my magic box to get every system online. Also helped them setup some port forwarding for the stuff they used.
Because I used Debian a lot, I switched over to Debian for my main rig when Suse 7 released. Used Potato, Woody, Sarge and Etch a lot. Switched around between Debian and Ubuntu in the Lenny and Squeeze era. Have been using Ubuntu ever since, never really had a reason to switch. Debian compared to Suse was so nice, I really liked the way Debian did things. It made a lot more sense for me in my head compared to Suse.
As I fucked around with computers a lot, I always had both Linux and DOS/Windows machines running and even had a couple of dual boot systems. For any kind of gaming DOS/Windows was required back then and I did love to game. I do think Windows 10 will be my last Microsoft OS, since Windows 11 absolutely sucks (use it at work, I hate it). Work stuff has become less and less of an issue to get stuff done on Linux just as well as on Windows. And gaming has come leaps and bounds due to the work on the Steamdeck.
So hope to fully ditch Microsoft in the near future, even though my first ever computer in 1984 ran Microsoft firmware with Microsoft Basic being the default user interface.
Did you ever dual boot Linux and windows, and also have VMware installed in both so you could boot the other one from inside whichever you had booted? Because I spent an insane amount of time screwing around with that for as excruciatingly slow as it was back then.
You have several long and comprehensive answers so please allow me to add an emotional one:
Fucking compile error in hour six of what you estimated to be a four hour compile job because of a mistake you made that you found within 5 seconds after the error!!
Fucking why doesn’t this compilation start I can’t find my mistake for hours?!
Where does this module come from?! What do you mean “root kit”? Learning was fun!
I recently tried to compile Crossover’s Wine from source. I went through many compile errors, fixed dependency issues and started over etc. In the end I think I compiled vanilla Wine imstead of Crossover (there are different source tarballs) because O365 still refused to install lol.
Not a veteran, but… During the 90s, while still in primary school, a friend of mine bought a Chip magazine with a CD attached and instructions inside the magazine how to install a mysterious thing called “Linux” from said CD. It was supposed to be something like Windows 95, but new, better and it had a Penguin on it, so we decided to try it.
We followed magazine’s installation guide to the letter (or at least we thought so) until the installation stuck at error saying KERNEL PANIC!!! and wouldn’t let us finish. We didn’t understand English much back then, but we found the panicking kernel hilarious. Anyway, we figured it’s been enough h4Ck!nG for that day and got back to playing Diablo 1.
Loki distributed alpha centauri if I remember correctly? Awesome game. The windows version is actually easier to run on Linux than the original Linux release nowadays.
From my perspective, anything pre-ubuntu was a colossal ballache for a desktop system. I played around with suse, mandrake, etc prior to that but getting things working often felt like a chore.
Everything was harder back then - even when using Windows. But you had to be a real masochist to run Linux.
Computers were still quite new that most people had no real use for them beyond “work things”. Only nerds really used them for anything else. “Do you have an email address” isn’t a question you ask today.
“Kids these days” don’t realize how easy they have it when it comes to just general comparability. There weren’t a lot of standards yet and vendors had proprietary drivers and offered no support AT ALL for “lye nux”. You had to do a ton of research and fiddling to figure out if there was any support for your specific version of a specific chip used by any peripheral you used. And then to discover that you had to patch your kernel to add a driver that somebody had bodged together. So now you were running your own fun custom-kernel so you could get full-duplex rather than simplex audio! But it works!
Like - lets say today you want to buy an external IDE drive controller to plug in some old drives to for backup. You to to Amazon, search “USB external IDE enclosure” and buy the cheapest one you find. It probably works unless it’s defective. In '95 USB and Firewire were in their infancy so you would probably buy a serial or parallel port device. You would need to find whether Linux supported the specific version of the thing you wanted to buy, what tools there would be for it, etc. There was no standard “bulk storage device” driver that you could rely on or hope the vendor would implement. Even if you were an early adopter and got a USB or Firewire device it might have some “basic” functionality that works with OSS drivers but you couldn’t use all of it.
Vendors back then also shipped their own software with things, not just drivers. It was always just the absolute worst crap that was buggy as shit. But it would do a lot of the heavy lifting in working with their device. Like any Creative Labs audio player you wanted to get working. Sure it used USB but it didn’t just mount as storage device, you needed to use the worst GUI ever put before mankind to use it (under Windows). Under Linux you had to find a specific tool that would support pushing/pulling media from it. These days it would just mount as a drive automatically and you’d use standard desktop tools to interact with it.
Even with DOS/Windows you’d buy a game and as you came home from the store with it in a box wonder “will this work on my computer and how long will I need to mess with it?” I had to configure a specific CD-ROM driver to be used by DOS just to run Tie Fighter vs. X-Wing for example. Had a special boot floppy just for that game since that driver didn’t work with literally anything else I had.
Hardware just generally didn’t “auto configure”. “Plug 'n Play” was still very much in its infancy and you often had to manually configure hardware and install special drivers just for a particular card or peripheral.
IRQ 7 DMA 220. I probably just triggered some folks. If you were setting up a “Sound Blaster or compatible” then you had to know what interrupt it used (7) and what address it was on on the direct-memory bus (220). And you hoped there wasn’t a conflict with something else. If there was then there would be a DIP switch you could use to change the base memory address or IRQ from the default. But you were telling your software where to find the card.
USB was a f’ing game changer for peripherals. Serial and parallel ports were so slow and obnoxious to use. Before that there was no real way to “probe” the bus to discover what was there unless you knew exactly what you were looking for (there’s no lsusb for serial ports). So you just guessed at the driver you need and “modprob foo” hoping it worked.
It’s amazing what 20ish years of just developing standards has done.
If you want a taste of that world I highly recommend LGR on YouTube. He’s mostly Windows focused but look for videos where he tries out “oddware” to see how often he has trouble getting things to work on period hardware using the vendor-supplied software even. Then multiply that by 100x for Linux. :-)
Do you think it’s worth getting a Sound Blaster card today? I’ve read you can get better sound effects in game. Can’t the on board audio chips do that now?
I gotta be honest, I haven’t used a dedicated sound card since the Vista/7 era when EAX stopped being a thing and onboard sound could handle 5.1 output just fine. The last one I had was a SoundBlaster Audigy.
These days the main uses for dedicated sound interfaces are for when you need something like XLR in/out and then you’ll probably go with something USB.
I wasn’t that into computers at that point in my life, but it was definitely a time where “computers” was a hobby, in the same way that restoring old motorcycles was/is a hobby. Sure, you might take it out for a spin every now and again, but a lot more time is spent tinkering than simply using.
I’m constantly amazed by how much better the end-user experience is today, even just from 10 years ago. The installers are better, the pre-configured software and settings are more thoughtfully chosen, and now we’re at the beginnings of meaningful Linux gaming for non-hobbyists.
We truly stand upon the shoulders of giants, and I look forward to the future.
Gaming has been the biggest change in the last 10 years or so. Mostly thanks to Steam. It’s easier to game on Linux these days than it is MacOS! It’s crazy.
Even if you were an early adopter and got a USB or Firewire device it might have some “basic” functionality that works with OSS drivers but you couldn’t use all of it.
Scanners and printers are one area of computing that have always sucked the most relative to other things. They’re better these days but they’re still the one thing I expect to fail on a regular basis.
I remember buying a bunch of old HP ISA 100Mbit NICs to turn an old computer into a router/server combo. Naive as I was I put them all in and nothing worked. Turns out they were all configured to use the same IRQ (since they likely came from independent machines), and that caused them to overwrite each others settings… including the MAC adress. Thankfully I found some nice hacker that worked with these cards before and published a little C tool to rewrite their EEPROMs. I contacted him if he sees a chance to resurrect the cards and that saint indeed hacked the necessary features into his tool so I could rewrite the MAC adresses, change the IRQ one by one and ended up with a working network. Good times.
This. However from about the release of knoppix and ubuntu things started looking and feeling a lot more like they are today. – I credit that to Knoppix for X & filesystem work and Ubuntu for setup and everything desktop.
So even though late 90s it was tough, it was nothing like mid 90s. But by around 2004-2005ish the install and setup was substantially easier however the reputational damage still exists to today.
I remember spending a lot of time in XFree86 config files, re-configuring it trying to figure out what works best on my monitor, and then the migration to XOrg. All good times.
There was however a substantial amount of hype around Linux. It wasn’t quite what it is with AI. But you couldn’t read a magazine without encountering it in some way, but it was the type of hype were everyone knew of it but few people had anything to do with it.
Another thing that hadn’t been mentioned is that there was a new distribution cropping up every day or so. (It felt like at least.) But this seems to back up that statement: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Linux_Distribution_Timeline.svg
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