That was the consensus the last time I brought it up (in response to Windows 11 being so shitty). I asked if the transition would be smooth for my non-tech savvy family members. So far no problems; kids run Minecraft and Roblox just fine, Steam handles much of my games and my scanner and printer works, wife made the switch to Libre Office and doesn’t miss Chrome. The only problem I have is getting a driver to work with my ancient Brother HL-5170DN that still is running like a tank for 20 years.
Edit: Had a job for a big print, got a driver to actually print proper, now it just duplicates everything, lol. I miss having projects like this since exiting the professional IT career.
All distro with a good installer using kde plasma, mate or something similar to windows are great, mint, endevour, Ubuntu or even mocaccinoOS. Driver issues should not be a thing for almost all distros, Debian or slack maybe but just becaus.
Great to hear, but I’d recommend against manjaro. While it appears to just be arch with an installer and some more preset, it has its own repos that are behind the arch repos. This causes a huge amount of issues that normal arch doesn’t have.
While I haven’t tried garuda yet and installed arch on my own, it seems like it actually does what people think manjaro does: Make arch easy and keep the benefits.
People often claim that Manjaro holds packages for a couple of weeks for “stability” but I’ve never seen the benefit. They tend to just update packages after Arch does and it doesn’t seem like they do any particular stability testing that the Arch community hasn’t done already.
They also tend to break the AUR occasionally for funsies, so that sucks.
EndeavourOS, Garuda, and any of the other Arch derivatives that use the Arch repos and drop some of their own tooling/customization on top should be a better experience for most.
Garuda appears to have some security issues unfortunately, see here.
To quote:
Garuda: They use Chaotic-AUR which automatically and blindly compiles packages from the AUR. There is no verification process to make sure that the AUR packages don’t suffer from supply chain attacks.
Their complaint about chaotic is the exact same that is mentioned 4 paragraphs before as coming from AUR in general, and they also mention the same thing can happen with other distros / package managers… It all loops back around to not blindly trusting everything in the repos. Which loops around to not blindly trusting anything on the internet in general.
Also I’m pretty sure you can use Garuda and avoid chaotic and use standard AUR instead, if you for some reason trust AUR fully but don’t trust chaotic at all. I’d have to double check that about system level packages, but it’s definitely possible with anything you seek out to install after the initial install of the OS.
I bought a hybrid AMD/Nvidia laptop in 2021, installed Arch, the Nvidia dkms driver and flatpak steam and everything I wanted to play just worked. Getting gaming up and running is so much easier now thanks to valve’s work on proton.
You are not the ppl that calls just windows a PC are you? Cause I just refuse, my personal computer is my PC, and fuck Microsoft and they attempt to kidnap my PC
From what I remember Linux does t like writing to NTFS formatted partitions, that was the case a few years ago, but maybe that changes since the new NTFS code was merged into the kernel “recently”.
@Silejonu@Natal@pete_the_cat then, how is it that usb keys and drives work with both windows and linux, once they have been formatted? Is there a different filesystem involved in that case? I, for one, didn't have issues writing on a USB drive, is that an uncommon scenario?
Reading/writing multimedia files (videos, pictures, audio, text documents...) on an NTFS partition works without issues. The issue arises when using one as a system partition (to install video games on, or worse, the whole Linux install). I don't know exactly what's causing issues, but my guess is metadata/permissions get messed up on NTFS when used on Linux.
What is it you want to know? “why do you use Linux” seems like it assumes something about what you might want to know.
Like, why Linux and not MacOS/Windows? Or, what are the Linux specific stuff you use it for? And when you say “Linux”, I’m sure you don’t mean the kernel, but likely Linux kernel + some package manager + some window manager?
The answer to a lot of these things are true statements for me, but will come across as incredulous. They are:
Gnome is a more consistent user experience over both MacOS and Windows. Gnome 9/10, MacOS 4/10, W11 3/10.
It is the actual “just works”. (the list is looong)
It’s much more usable for power users.
Are the main ones. I cannot think of a single thing either MacOS or W11 does better, that isn’t “well, you can run X software on it”, which is a fair argument and likely a valid deal breaker for many use cases/professions. But also not really the fault of the OS. And there are many, many reasons why MacOS and W11 are a pain to use.
Even being on Linux isn’t enough for Linux users, now. Gotta have every piece of software they approve of and none of the ones they don’t. On top of it you have to use it for the same reasons, too.
Fucking Christ, you guys make me want to never mention that I use Linux.
I’ll try and keep it short with a bullet list, as I can tend to be long-winded about everything.
Helped recover files on an old laptop in the Win XP days (how I got started).
Breathed new life into older hardware that was too crappy for Windows.
Thought it was neat, novel, fresh, etc.
Free. Why pay for or pirate Windows?
FOSS and, specifically, FOSS alternatives to paid software I’d otherwise have pirated.
Less targeted for malware.
Windows 11 says no to my aging, but plenty capable, computer (the last holdout on Windows til Win 10 hits EOL).
Reasonable, optional telemetry.
Not having to reboot (possibly more than once) during updates.
Fun to learn.
There are some reasons to like Windows, but it’s harder to justify with the direction Microsoft is, and has been, moving.
EDIT: To actually answer your question about Steam and Linux… because I have a Steam account that I’ve had for many, many years with 1000 games that predates me moving to Linux in a more serious capacity. While I could move to GOG (and have), I’m not just going to throw away my game library. But also, Steam working to make gaming more mainstream on Linux is a net positive for Linux in general. That was always the reason many people gave for why they wouldn’t switch - that, and proprietary software that won’t run on anything other than Windows or maybe Mac.
I’m on Ubuntu 22.04 using lutris. I also have my game installed on an ext4 partition. Too many different variables there to try to make any general assumptions on why it isn’t launching for them.
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