There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

lunachocken ,

404: Not found

tombruzzo ,

OK, who did you guys bully over basic tech support questions?

buddascrayon ,

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.

EndHD ,

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.

buddascrayon ,

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.

NotMyOldRedditName ,

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.

Olgratin_Magmatoe ,

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.

buddascrayon ,

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.

Olgratin_Magmatoe ,

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.

Aqler ,

Preferably one that has a good WINE interface.

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.

buddascrayon ,

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.

Madiator2011 ,

Where do they get data from?

DieserTypMatthias ,
@DieserTypMatthias@lemmy.ml avatar

From cookies.

Catsrules ,

What kind? Personally I wouldn’t trust any kind with raisin.

laurelraven ,

What about peanut butter? Or are you more of a salted chocolate kind of person?

Catsrules ,

Both are very trustworthy.

DieserTypMatthias ,
@DieserTypMatthias@lemmy.ml avatar

From analytic cookies.

Tixanou ,

They get the data from user-agent strings, so it may not be 100% accurate

chepycou ,
@chepycou@rcsocial.net avatar

@Tixanou @Madiator2011 Plus they are basing themselves off of a sample of websites, so it's like polls it's made to be representative but cannot be 100 % accurate

dan ,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

User agent strings are frozen these days, at least in Chrome. They still have the browser major version and OS name at least, but Windows will always report Windows 10, Android will always report Android 10, MacOS will always report 10.15.7, and Linux is just “Linux x86_64”: www.chromium.org/updates/ua-reduction/

User agent strings are essentially deprecated and nobody should be using them any more. They’ve been replaced by User-Agent Client Hints, where the site can request the data it needs, and some high-entropy things (ie fields that vary a lot between users) can prompt the user for permission to share them first.

laurelraven ,

Oh nice. Googie once again deciding for the entire Internet what it should be using and forcing it down everyone’s throats.

dan ,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

User agents were commonly used for the wrong reasons - fingerprinting, sites that block particular browsers rather than using proper feature detection, etc. so I’m glad to see them slowly going away.

woelkchen ,
@woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

Shit started hitting the fan when everyone started faking Netscape’s “Mozilla” user agent. Then “KHTML, like Gecko” and after that every fork kept the originating name in the string and extended it.

dan ,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

There’s a good explanation about that here: webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

The issue is that a lot of sites used the user-agent to determine if the browser supported particular features (e.g. show a fancy version of a site if the user is using Netscape, otherwise show a basic version for Mosaic, lynx, etc). New browsers had to pretend to be the old good browsers to get the good versions of sites

This is why getting rid of the user agent is a good thing. Sniffing the UA is a mess.

anticurrent ,

Statcounter numbers are to be taker with boulders of salt. you can look at many metrics and especially when you filter by country. you will see a lot of erratic unexplained changes. jumping down and then a few months lather up by sometimes up to double digits.

thingsiplay ,

uMatrix prevents me from loading this statcounter website. :-( Can’t lookup how they measure things. In the comments people assume the stats would be counted by just looking up the user agent, which is a naive approach. I don’t think agencies dedicated to stats are doing it this simple. They have way more possibilities to track and to look what browser you are using. The stats are more accurate than you probably think. They do not need to know the exact version of browser you are using, just which type and maybe what operating system you are on.

If a script for Windows does not work on Linux and fails, then they know you are not on Windows in example.

owiseedoubleyou ,
@owiseedoubleyou@lemmy.ml avatar

Why are you still using uMatrix in 2024? Wasn’t it discontinued 3 years ago or smth?

thingsiplay ,

It’s still useful with all its functionality. Even if it does not get updates, it still blocks most stuff and I can enable or block stuff too. Plus the blocklists it uses are still updated, as they act independently from the main addon. There is no better alternative in my opinion. I use uMatrix + uBlock Origin.

tisktisk ,

Question: Why is BSD so low? (And why/what is unknown?)

mostlikelyaperson ,

Because it’s not overly popular as a desktop os, you are far more likely to see it in certain appliances and server applications etc, none of which will show up in a pagevisits based statistic.

Cube6392 ,

Less hardware support than Linux without enough substantially better about it to make it anyone’s clear preference. Which isn’t to say it doesn’t have advantages over Linux. Just that the average BSD user is going to be able to easily swallow their pride and run Linux if things went wrong with a BSD install (trust me, I’ve literally done this, these people do exist)

OneRedFox ,
@OneRedFox@beehaw.org avatar

The BSDs got screwed over by a lawsuit in the 90s that made a lot of people hesitant to use them (coincidentally leading to the creation of the Linux kernel). Inertia carried it from there and Linux ended up getting more hardware and software support, which is the primary reason that people pick Linux over the BSDs now.

istanbullu ,

There really isn’t a compelling argument for BSD other than interest and hobby. It doesn’t have the industrial use case Linux has.

TheDuckPrince ,

If only linux gaming and thermal became more and more robust, in few year I will switch too with pleasure. Adobe suite can still be a problem but not for me anymore at least.

bouh ,

Playing on Linux for a year now. I wouldn’t say it was flawless, but a lot has to do with me learning how to do it correctly. Like using steam and heroic game launcher, trying a different version of Proton or wine, and it’s beginning to be very easy now that I have the right recipe so to say.

TheDuckPrince ,

Good to know, the main problem is that a good % of gamer doesn’t have time to a tryhard with different version of things, drivers… I have skill to setup a linux gaming machine but I don’t have time to do this. If Linux gaming becoming more and more straightforward (not as windows but similar, starting from gpu driver), more and more ppl could ditch at least windows second partition.

bouh ,

I must be clear that the problem is not that it rakes time to do the things if you have the right recipe to do them. It takes time to find it when you make a mistake.

The good way is simple: you need a system that’s well updated, so debian stable is not ideal and that was my first mistake. You need to use Proton on steam, or heroic game launcher for gog. And that’s it.

The setup for these things is straightforward, simply follow a guide for your OS.

Things got better and better in the last 2 years, and they’re still improving. I would argue that today Windows is not better. People learned how to install graphic drivers on windows, and any setup on Linux now is not harder than that.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • [email protected]
  • random
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines
    •