As all the cool kids keep saying, now is a great time to try out Linux.
No, I’m not recommending a distro for you, that is what DuckDuckGo is for.
DuckDuckBuntu?
Ubuntu is actually falling down the ad hole lately. It’s not great, even if you leave out the technical issues that the distribution leans into these day (snaps, amongst other things)
deleted by creator
Oh god, what did they do? Do they show ads on the gui?
In the system update dialog, you’ll see something like:
You’re not getting 53 critical security updates! Join Ubuntu Pro to keep yourself safe!
Ubuntu Pro is a subscription service.
This is seriously at the level of Norton “AntiVirus”, and it’s truly absurd and nakedly predatory.
Wait, they’re withholding security updates unless you pay? Hope they go bankrupt.
does kubuntu have the same issues? kinda want to go for a debian or ubuntu based kde distro and kubuntu is always highly recommended.
Kubuntu is just an Ubuntu spin, so I’m gonna say yeah, probably. If you really like Deb flavored distros these days, just go with the OG.
way too difficult to set up, i don’t have a lot of free time so i need an “out of the box” distro
deleted by creator
i currently use mint and only want to switch because cinnamon has this weird thing when you have a game running, window resizing is laggy. i often have btd6 running when I’m working so it bugs me. kde doesn’t suffer from that.
Seconding LMDE, been on it for a year on my study laptop. Literally never ever had a problem so far, and being an “out of box” distro there’s minimal work needed to daily drive.
Q4OS is debian with KDE and it’s made for ex-Windows users
never heard of this one. definitely going to try it!
Debian is honestly pretty trivial to set up these days.
If you’re open to trying Fedora, I’ve been running F40KDE and Kinoite on two of my main personal laptops and I love them
i have tried fedora and nobara a few times but they randomly make my hdd unmountable and it’s difficult to get it back. even after installing a different distro.
Not sure I’d want to see that, tbh. It would only introduce more avenues for DDG to make questionable choices when they’re already on thin ice.
Mint or Fedora. KISS.
Removed by mod
Can you only get hard by trolling? Or are you just really seriously lonely and depressed?
I blocked them, they seem to have a serious boot licking fetish.
To bad, your missing out on the revealing dialogue I had with him IMO.
Removed by mod
AIDS? So sexual frustration is definitely a key part of your pathology. Interesting.
Tell me, how often do you think about close female relatives of yours? Are you mostly imagining hurting them, molesting them, or both?
I’m betting it’s both.
Removed by mod
DuckDuckMint
Actually to find a good distro and instructions on how to install them i recommend using an ai chatbot.
Majority of people have never created a bootable media but its easy enough ai can guide them step by step.
Or just use one of the hundreds of guides the AI was trained on.
I love how they make people choose their distro rather then “ubuntu or bust” they still used ubuntu for their guide but yk it doesn’t matter that much
Eh, just look up a reputable YouTube channel and guide. Chatbots can randomly make dumb mistakes that a total newbie won’t recognize, potentially causing them a lot of headache.
And no, I’m not one of those diehard anti-AI people. My work has its own custom GPT model and I utilize it almost daily for menial tasks. But even having it generate script boilerplate and whatnot, I sometimes notice it writing stuff that won’t work and/or does it in a really verbose/weird way.
You cant ask a youtube channel what distro best suit your specific usecase.
Also realistically no one wants to sit trough a video to check out a strangers recommendation for linux.
I do get that people are worried about the incompetence of AI but this topic and procedure is so bog standard i have more faith in chatgpt doing it then a human.
If you dont believe me, try it.
Ask chatgpt/claude/gemini “How to make a bootable linux media from windows” you will have to spend a long time trying before you find it fails on something this boilerplate.
You don’t need to ask, as there are tons of well made videos giving great breakdowns of the most popular distros and the pros/cons of each while also showing demonstrations of a user session within them. To me, that’s far more informative than a broad, generalized typed paragraph. However, I will concede that I’m more a visual, hands-on learner, so this is subjective.
And I agree, creating a boot disk is very simple and straightforward. The likelihood of GPT/Gemini getting it wrong is low. Especially Gemini/Copilot, as they basically just regurgitate the top tech site articles in this context and will cite the links it used (e.g. stack exchange, Tom’s hardware, etc). But like I said above, it can still happen, so why not just look up the source material for something so simple? I doubt any time is really saved by using AI in this instance. Not to mention, if you’re more of a visual person, it’s nice to see someone else give a demonstration.
To each their own, though. Neither method is necessarily the wrong/better one.
It’s crazy how different people are. The idea of sitting through a video to do something like this is so painful to me. Like I find it useful for physical things where seeing the motion can be helpful, but I still generally find doing things that way awful. Please, please, please just give me written instructions for things. Especially if I’m going to need to refer back to it a few times (e.g. there are multiple steps that take a bit of time).
It depends on the context for me. Repairing/replacing something on like my lawnmower or car? Video all the way. A simple CLI command/process? A quick write-up is often preferred for me.
You quickly can skim text for relevance to your needs/situation, hard to do that with a video.
Do chatbots provide accurate and safe instructions for all steps? Or will it mix different instructions for different scenarios?
Ai is not that good unless it’s like hugginchat where it scraps sites for info and stuff
Can you run windows games on linux without it being resource intensive like using a vm or something?
Gaming in Linux on a windows VM isn’t viable for most systems. Most games run really well through proton with little to no effort. Some even run better on Linux than on windows. You just can’t play a lot of the most popular competitive online games because it flags their anti cheat.
deleted by creator
It definitely depends on the game and the particulars of your own system.
The answer to the question is a resounding “you’ll have to try it for yourself”. It could be flawless, it could be a nightmare, there’s a lot of variables.
Most of the time, yeah. Check ProtonDB for the particulars regarding any particular game. Games with intrusive DRM or anticheat probably won’t work though.
Yes, some on steam, others on wine/bottles/lutrix/etc
Many distros nowadays have decent support forngaming accessories and a mix of Lutris and Steam/Proton have given me a near seemless experience on Linux. Smooth enough for my partner to hop ship to Bazzite for their ROG Ally.
Sometimes there are small quirks, like controllers on Bazzite just work™ but on Vanilla OS 2 my xbox controller wouldn’t be recognized by Steam or games wirelessly (wired worked) but my DS5 controller worked flawlessly (including the trackpad that I never got to work on Windows).
Most of the Steam library will work well and ProtonDB is a great resource for compatibility. Furthermore there are Decky plugins for setups like Bazzite and Chimera that embed the ProtonDB rating into the Steam game page.
No, I’m not recommending a distro for you
Don’t worry, everyone else does
DuckDuck OS
Removed by mod
I once ran the windows Troubleshooter to get an old scanner working, and the final page told me to but a new scanner!
I plugged it in to a mini PC I use as a backup server and the scanner worked fine with Linux.
And another recommendation issue: I noticed that my Windows laptop has a “reduce your carbon footprint” settings section that tells me to reduce power settings, screen brightness etc. but it’s completely lacking a “stop giving me AI search results in Bing” section.
Switching from Windows to Linux on my Framework laptop makes my battery last 2-3 times as long. They should just have a switch to Linux recommendation to reduce your carbon footprint.
Are you using a framework 13? While I find the battery life to be usable, if it’s that much worse on Windows I’m not sure I would have gotten a framework if I used windows lol.
Yeah. 11th gen Framework 13, so one of the first ones. Since I got it I had to use Windows exclusively because of some client work, and battery life was pitiful. 2-3 hours perhaps? Once that project finished I swapped out the SSD and put on Ubuntu with KDE. I was expecting the batter life to be worse, but it is demonstrably better. I now get more like 6 hours, albeit with my power plan on efficiency.
I have one of the newer AMD models and I find it has about 2-3 hours of batter life, though it spends most of it’s time suspended for my use case. I use Fedora and have the “balanced” profile selected. I don’t mind the poor battery life since the processor is leaps and bounds better than the 6th gen 2 core Intel I was using before.
Win11 also says that showing seconds in the taskbar “reduces battery life”/“increases power consumption”
The only time that would make a difference is if you’re staring at a blank page and the only thing causing the screen to update is the clock. Theoretically the GPU could go completely to sleep, except for having to draw the updated clock every second.
But there’s a reason battery life is commonly measured as “hours of video playback”. If the laptop’s not actually doing anything you may as well turn it off and get weeks of battery life.
My god. It really does!
Oh no! I left notepad.exe open. That cursor was flashing on and off for hours! I’m sorry everyone!
Are you saying you use Bing for searches? If you don’t want that then why not use a different search?
Big company recommends users turn functional hardware into e-waste so they can boost quarterly profits.
when microsoft feels threatened by the recycling community being noticed, they add more technical constraints. Chromebooks are the gold standard for an intentionally non recyclable machine, neck and neck with apple.
The bullshit of chromeOS to be capable of running on the shittiest hardware but having an artificial lifetime for devices is stupid. To google’s credit, they did increase that limit to 10 years, but that was only recently.
It’s still functional hardware though…
Yes, and they’re encouraging people to throw it out. At least some users think to sell on the secondary market, but third party buyers can only get so much out of EOL Windows machines and there are only so many linux users with an interest in buying up old hardware.
I myself have a couple of used laptops, but don’t need any more hardware for a while, so it’s not like I’m able to buy up any. I fear much of it will rot in a landfill.
if they were selling the eol computers for a few dollars I would probably buy a dozen.
yup, its an “oh, you concider it garbage? oh well, more for me then!” situation.
“and OneDrive”. Yes, it is essential to have OneDrive.
And it’s essential to have a always on network connection 24/7 if you turn it off we will delete all your data/j
My PC is getting old and I might replace it in about a year whenever I can get an OK GPU for a reasonable amount of money again.
I’ve built my own PCs since the late 90’s and this will be the first time I will not install Windows on a computer I built. Get fucked Microsoft.
I already did this 2 years ago and I still don’t miss Windows. I want my OS to just work, and that means not having big companies intentionally blocking updates and bullying consumers just so they can profit from artificially induced OEM license sales. It’s pretty wild how quickly Linux has fit the bill in recent years, and how Windows no longer does.
Only hurdle on Linux right now is the transition from X11 to Wayland. Proton doesn’t have good support for it yet so I occasionally have to load an X11 session for some games to run. I can imagine that getting worked out eventually.
Microsoft could have simply dropped official support for older machines and then literally done nothing and that would have still been better than what they did. At least then those machines would still receive security updates beyond next year, provided they could still run the latest version of Windows.
For the record, if the arbitrary CPU block is bypassed, then it’s possible to install Windows 11 23H2 on a Prescott era Pentium 4 or Athlon 64. The true requirements did change for 24H2, but even then you can install that on a 1st gen Intel or a Bulldozer era AMD system. Microsoft can go suck a dick.
I’ll also add the audio stack in Linux at the moment is a hot mess. I’m currently trying to resolve a problem that seems to exclusively plague the rear mic input on my system and nothing else and this shit is fucking obtuse. It’s ridiculous how many competing audio frameworks there currently are.
There are only 2 current audio frameworks, right? PipeWire (most current, best compatibility from what I’ve seen) and PulseAudio (dominant for a long time but now being replaced by PipeWire)
Sort of kind of. The actual drivers are still ALSA which both pulse and pipewire build on top of. Then there’s JACK which is older but basically tried to be Pipewire before Pipewire. Lastly there’s WirePlumber which is an automation/scripting thing built on top of Pipewire. So depending on what you’re doing you end up having to wrangle with a minimum of Pipewire and ALSA, and might also need to mess with WirePlumber and Pulse (as Pipewire exposes a Pulse API).
Just install wireplumber, plus the pipewire modules for alsa and pulseaudio (pipewire-alsa and pipewire-pulse, respectively). These 3 will run any audio application.
Wine (which Proton is based on) has had support for Wayland since version 9.0 (about half a year old). Admittedly it’s not even enabled by default, but it works and I’ve played Path Of Exile through wine’s Wayland backend. There’s talks to ship the Wayland driver along X11, but not enabled by default yet, since there’s still some issues before they consider it on par with X11 backend. Proton might take longer, since I don’t think Valve will enable that before they add Wayland support for the Steam client.
Headline in another universe:
“Microsoft aiming to push population into switching to Linux.”
And aswell as mac
I feel like people concerned about the expense of a new computer aren’t generally going to look at Macs, but I’m not too familiar with their longevity/support; is it a good length of time?
oh but many people cannot install linux easily its only rlly installed by people who know about tech mac might be their only option but idk how your gonna use mac for gaming ik also people are gonna still stick to windows 11 cause microsoft
Removed by mod
Devices running an unsupported version of Windows will still function, but Microsoft doesn’t provide the following: Technical support of any issue
Oh, you mean the support forums? I don’t think those have ever helped anyone
they helped me learn how infuriating it is to try and go back in my browser history after visiting a microsoft help link
Oh man, fuck that shit into the sun.
You mean running sfc /scannow isn’t the solution to all life’s problems?
Just run DISM afterwards and it’ll be fine…
have you tried reinstalling? /s
Literally no one in those forms ever actually works for Microsoft anyway so you’re just talking to people who you could talk to anyway on any other forum.
Man I really don’t want to switch to Linux but Microsoft has ended things forever with Recall. There’s just no way to stay with microsoft long term.
Just go for it! Did it recently and the overall experience is actually getting impressed multiple times.
I switched, it’s magic on fire with Linux.
Except for a couple if things, so I also now have a game-box running windows.
Best of two worlds IMO. It also shows how hellish windows is.
If a game won’t support Linux I won’t support it. There are thousands of games out there.
Hit me up with a Diablo 2 on linux, photoshop & 3dsmax 😭😭😭
Lutris works for Diablo 2. At least on my system.
why dont you?
Effort
I just installed Windows and never saw anything about recall. Use at least 3 different Windows machines a day and never seen recall. Maybe I’m just a lucky one?
Its not fully released yet and also, it will only be on a select set of PCs to start. But eventually over the years it will be on most new windows PCs.
Companies promote their recent softwares. Is this a new thing?
“Promote” here masking what they are actually doing …
Fixed it for you:
Company renders 60%+ of computers running current software incapable of running new software due to niche hardware requirement, abruptly ends support for current version next year, and tells users to throw away their computers and buy new ones.
Oh, and they’re promoting their cloud storage option. Which may or may not have anything to do with their data harvesting? I don’t really know on that one.
“Abrupt” and “current” are pretty generous for windows 10 tbh. This has been a known deadline for several years at this point, and windows 11 has been out since 2021.
Absolutely fuck microsoft with a cactus, but this is hardly new or surprising at this point.
By “abrupt,” I mean that Windows 7 ended service updates just last year, and Windows 10 will end next year. And by “current,” I mean that Windows 11 overtook 7 as the second most used version of Windows in 2022.
We’ve known that they’re ending support for 10 next year for a few years, but that end of life timeline is very short compared to previous versions of Windows. If 10 had the same end of life timeline as 7, we’d be seeing service updates for 10 ending in 2030. And 11 may be the newest version of Windows, but it is by all means not the most used version and is most likely not the version currently being used by most people that this article is relevant to.
How is it an upgrade/update if you need to replace the hardware?
I still for the life of me can’t figure out what’s so great about secure boot and tpm. All it’s ever done for me is prevent me from booting a legitimate OS, or a bootable flash drive with iso images on it (like ventoy). It’s also pretty good at giving me a headache trying to figure out how the keys work and how to register them.
I just turn them both off and live in ignorant bliss.
Secure boot and TPM are tools for (among other things) making sure nobody (E.G. a virus or worm) has tampered with your OS and bootloader. You can for instance use both on Linux, it’s just by default they come preloaded with Microsofts configuration for loading Windows, and the technical knowledge for how to reconfigure it is a bit arcane.
It’s an excellent security tool, it’s just abused by Microsoft to discourage competition.
Until the next security hole you can’t fix with an update.
It’s not for you, it’s for them. Secure boot means it only runs their operating system, not yours. Trusted enclave means it secures their DRM-ware from tampering by the user who owns the PC.
Secure boot means that only the intended bootloader runs, it can be any one, but it just needs to be the intended one.
Secure boot works with Linux.
It works for now on x86-64, yes. For now. As always, we are one “think of the children” crisis away from lobbyists taking that option away.
What? I think you maybe just don’t know what purpose secure boot serves.
It’s not a tool to vendor lock computers, it’s a tool to establish a chain of trust to protect the boot process by only allowing cryptographically signed images from executing. Anyone can sign things for secure boot by simply creating an x509 certificate and importing it. If vendors wanted to prevent you from running a different operating system, they would just lock it down completely as is done in many devices like mobile phones and proprietary electronics.
^ this People are very ignorant about what secure boot actually is.
What do you mean? I remove all vendor keys and enroll my own secure boot keys. This way only my install with my bootloader signed by my keys will boot.
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
If I upgrade my machine, I am keeping TPM disabled. I don’t want Windows 11.
First thing I did when I heard it was required for win 11.
Don’t TPMs just deal with cryptography code the same way a SIM card does for a phone? If you have one, What’s wrong with using it?
Platforms like Windows and Chrome can also use it for remote attestation, i.e., verifying you haven’t bypassed security controls and locking you out if they think you have.
I keep mine enabled because it’s good for secure boot and secrets handling.
You can use them with Linux to Auth as well
Because people aren’t broke enough.
You still have room on that credit card. Stop eating avocados!!!
/s
Removed by mod
meanwhile you can run linux on a potato
✋ no thanks
