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- cross-posted to:
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- zocken@feddit.org
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Imagine gaming with no windos OS…. The future is better!
No need to imagine!
I’m waiting for a MS vs Steam lawsuit where MS tries to sue over the usage of the Windows api
They would have a hell of a time trying to say they want to control API usage after letting everyone and their mother use it free and unrestricted for decades. But I wouldn’t put it past them to try.
SteamOS will let you pay games from GOG, right?
Because they’re DRM free, they’re super easy to install too! Another install method is Heroic
Yes you just have to sideload the client. I believe Lutris makes it easy but I don’t use GOG myself.
Heroic makes it even easier
I’m legitimately curious how many half-baked ad-filled second-to-the-punch products will be too many for Microsoft before they finally capitulate.
I hope to see this before the EoL date set for Windows 10 and a bunch of people throw out perfectly good machines to but something that works with Windows 11.
Personally, I won’t use Windows 11 on my home machines. But my concern is that I install a distro this year and want to switch to SteamOS later, but would have to start over with customizations, etc. in the new distro. I wish SteamOS was available now for gaming rigs!
I think it should be available just in time for Windows 10 sunset later this summer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdR-bxvQKN8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebmp2FIrTlE
my concern is that I install a distro this year and want to switch to SteamOS later, but would have to start over with customizations, etc. in the new distro.
I wouldn’t sweat that at all.
I switched distros last week, didn’t like the new one as much as I thought I would, and switched again a few days later. It’s not that big of a deal. Install some apps, reload your files from a USB stick. It’s not a major commitment.
A good way to keep this easy for yourself is to keep the files you actually care about like pictures, game saves, documents, etc all on a separate partition. It makes it very easy to make a backup for distro hopping.
You can nuke your OS as many times as you like, and everything will be exactly in the same place.
If you want to be slightly fancier, you can use a btrfs subvolume and not have to worry about sizing partitions correctly.
@cadekat @Olgratin_Magmatoe doesn’t ext4 have this feature or am I missing something?
I don’t believe it does, but I could be wrong!
Steam is terrified of the Microsoft store. It’s part of why they’re moving to linux
thats exactly why Valve start Fighting Against Windows, UWP And Microsoft store.
Sure, but Valve is terrified of the Microsoft store for a subtly, but importantly, different reason than why Microsoft should be terrified of Steam OS.
Microsoft should be terrified that Steam OS will destroy their monopoly by making it so users no longer have to use their product.
Valve is terrified that Microsoft will destroy their monopoly by making it so users no longer can use their product.
So in the end, consumers win?
In this case, between Valve winning and Microsoft winning, a Valve win is good for consumers.
Valve does have a better history
Those are two orthogonal things, but they do both point towards Valve being the better choice between the two. But if there were a Valve vs. Microsoft duality where the choice that’s better for anyone that’s not the two of them is to side with Microsoft, I’d be disappointed with Valve, but I’d choose the Microsoft route.
I don’t think that’s likely, as Valve have repeatedly made choices that are better for the consumer even when they’re not better for Valve, but I’m not ruling out the possibility.
As long as SteamOS doesn’t fail, yes. If SteamOS draws enough gamers for there to be a healthy amount on Windows and SteamOS there will be competition between the two OS-s, which will benefit everyone. If SteamOS does draw away the supermajority of gamers then we still benefit because the open source nature of Linux makes it much harder for Valve to have total control like Microsoft has.
We shall see, there has been a rise recently
People use steam because it’s better than alternatives, if it dies consumers will lose
Oh I was thinking competition on the market. But yes, Valve is great
Microsoft could also be terrified of how shitty Windows 11 is. I have to think back to Millennium Edition to compare to something this disastrous, but Satya doesn’t care about Windows, Surface, or XBox. Microsoft’s future is M365, Azure, and D365. Big fat high margin Enterprise Agreements since everyone is locked into their proprietary shitty office formats. And they get enterprise problems with audit, identify, access control like few other businesses.
What I don’t know understand is why companies refuse to sell off businesses that they know will die off from their neglect. A shame, except for Windows.
There is nothing to be terrified of for MS, windows can implement mandatory rectal scans to log in and linux wouldn’t break 20% market share.
Linux is already over 15% in India
windows can implement mandatory rectal scans to log in
I for one would swap back to Windows from Liinux if this was implemented!
Windows 98 was supported until almost a year after Windows XP’s release, so nobody really had to use Millennium Edition. Windows 10’s support is ending in October and no new version has been announced.
Microsoft always follows the pattern of good OS, bad OS, good OS, bad OS. We just have to wait for Windows 12 for a good one.
It’s true:
3.0 - aka the Windows Protection Fault release 3.1/3.11/WFWG, now with far fewer WPFs 95 - I lost nearly a year of life waiting for it to reboot, again. 98! Second Edition TBF ME - Lets remove stuff and cause cause problems XP - SP2 - I can login before my PC is taken over by RPC calls from the Internet! Vista - UAC up the Longhorn ass 7 - took long enough 8 - 1.5 half complet OSes 10 - erased 1 OS, completed the other 11 - I am still waiting for file Explorer to open. Where is fileman.exe? It’s so laggy, why does the context menu draw out one row at a time.
10 sucked ass. It’s the reason I stayed on Windows 7 way longer than I should have.
I did the same, and when I switched I just switched to Linux rather than another Windows version.
Then again I’ve been playing with Linux (and using it professionally on the server side) since the 90s, so am not at all representative of most people out there.
10 was good?
I liked it just fine. You have to admit it was good compared to 8.
I actually liked 8.1. 10 was fine until they started hiding all of the classic control panel settings and stuff behind their new ones and we got a total fustercluck of windows, buttons and options.
I’m absolutely amazed how they still don’t seem to be able to rid themselves of the old control panel. The new settings menus still lack so many features. They’ve been around for almost 10 years now. What’s going on there?
Year of linux desktop, amirite?
Jesus, news outlets love hyperbole, don’t they. We are not even at 5% market share.
He specifically didn’t say that. Instead of criticizing that they aren’t nuanced enough you should read the nuance they actually wrote:
Let me be clear: The odds of a massive, immediate shift away from Windows PCs aren’t great. This isn’t a “year of the Linux desktop” rallying cry. But if there is a Linux desktop that exists today, it’s the Steam Deck. And that makes SteamOS a bellwether for greater proliferation of non-Windows devices (if not necessarily “Linux” specifically) in a huge range of form factors.
Then the title is misrepresenting what they are saying (i.e., clickbait). The title “Microsoft should be terrified of SteamOS” reads as ‘SteamOS would threaten Windows dominance on desktop space’.
Bro, just admit you only read the headline before coming down to comment.
I don’t know how long it’ll take desktop Linux to reach 10% market share. Could be a couple of years, could be decades, could be never. But once it reaches 10%, I give it 5 years before it’s over 80%.
I just installed Linux and holy shit it is so much easier and more straight forward than a windows install. Really wish I would have done it sooner.
I had issues with drivers, like I would have to find them somewhere on the internet, trust a random stranger to download and install them. And even then some things required me to launch drivers manually every single time I wanted to use my hardware.
I had issues with games, constant crashes or some games flat out not working. Some even crashing the entire system occationally.
I had issues where my pc would randomly turn on. Going to sleep was funky and would break the system requiring restart. I had to find drivers for my audio systems to get them running.
I had to run around confusing settings and tweak them through different control panels made by random people that largely overlapped to fix basic issues.
Thankfully those issues were solved the moment I installed linux.
Guessing your machine uses the one-two punch of Nvidia + Broadcom / Realtek?
It’s funny because while some of it has to do with work to make Linux desktops better, a non-trivial amount of it is how worse Microsoft has made it to deal with Windows.
Creating an offline account to install windows is worse than installing 99% of the Linux distros out there.
Because Windows is a data-mining and advertising tool these days, more than anything. So they want to make sure you have a MS account on day 1 and that you have to opt out of all of their services 34 times over before they let you use the damn thing.
Yep, and then have to opt out all over again the next week when an update decides you need to verify you really mean to opt out again…
And if you managed to not have an MS account when you installed, interrupt your login and say “you cannot proceed like you have been doing for the past year without adding an MS account now”, and then look up how to get out of that dialog without doing the MS account…
Yep 100% this kind of shit drove me away a couple years ago. It had nothing to do with Linux getting better and everything to do with Windows getting worse.
Also, some (most) annoyances with installing Linux, still, is primarily due to Microsoft managing to fuck things up in subtle ways.
Which distro ? I’ve been rocking Bazzite for a year, and holy mother of christ, it requires less maintenance than my smartphone.
I’ve been using Bazzite too. It’s kind of so stable it’s boring.
I’ve been rocking endeavourOS.
It’s really nice, but I hear great things about bazzite. I’m going to have to take bazzite & steamOS for a spinI installed EOS and I’m liking it.
If you like endeavourOS, CachyOS is really good too. It’s also Arch based and includes a really fast custom kernel. It also has lots of gaming enhancements whatever that means. I’ve been trying to spread the word, not a lot of people seem to know about it. I hear Bazzite is pretty good as well. I definitely need to try it out.
Bazzite for the win!
Ive been looking at Bazzite, but Ive tried to make the jump to linux for a while but always run into dumb issues and go back to windows.
Is it ‘it just works’ or is it actually dad gamer easy?
If you know how to flash an iso to a thumb drive and press F2 at the bios prompt to boot into the installer, everything else will be easier than that. It just works.
If you plan using Steam, gaming will be super easy. There’s also a good store to install new programs. Everything worked out of the box.
That’s actually what I went with too. I considered Mint and Pop!OS but really my PC is a gaming machine with a nvidia card. A friend recommended bazzite and its exactly what I was looking for.
Is it me or is it really something truly extraordinary? In the sense that it requires zero maintenance, it just works.
I’m also on a gaming/graphics workstation rig with nvidia and fedora runs games windows can’t run no longer and overall is more stable when gaming. Only issue is vr and games that are intentionally disabled on linux via anticheat. But they’re slop anyway other than delta force, which is unplayable due to hackers.
Yeah. Windows install and Linux install quietly switched which was the difficult shitty experience sometime when I wasn’t watching.
As a long time Linux enjoyer, this is honestly the easiest way to get it into the mainstream. People have already seen the success of the steam deck which only reinforces that Linux can be used for gaming better than ever before. As long as people stop using Windows I’m here for it.
Eh, I don’t really care if they stop using Windows, I care that they start using Linux. Dual boot if you need, but more market share for Linux increases the likelihood that devs will support Linux directly.
more market share for Linux increases the likelihood that devs will support Linux directly.
I’m starting to wonder if that’s true. I thought so do but now I’m wondering, especially with compatibility layers like Proton, and even Wine before that, and plenty of tools like Electron, Unity, etc helping to be cross-platform, if the lack of support is rather due to bad habits instilled by years of Microsoft partnership with manufacturers (and thus driver support) implying that drivers must be kept secret and thus Linux support is “bad for business” and that then cascades down to developers then users.
I think it’s more that devs see Linux support as a liability. Linux market share is low, and supporting Linux opens them up to Linux specific cheats, so they’ll need to spend resources on Linux specific mitigations. Why do all that for ~2% market share, most of whom seem content not playing their games?
I don’t think we need to jump to conspiracy theories. If Linux adoption gets to 10% or so and still see this issue maybe the conspiracy theory carries some weight.
For sure. I’m doing the dual boot life these days because as much as I want every game to work on Linux there are still some that don’t. And some games just work better on Windows. But at the same time that’s why more devs supporting Linux is what we wanna see.
I’m always curious tochear what games people aren’t able to run in Linux. Which ones are you unable to run?
openSUSE, Mass Effect Legendary Edition does not boot on my setup, but on ProtonDB, it says gold. Just using Proton did not work for me, so I don’t know what extra BS people did to get it running, but yeah. That’s a recent one I’ve run into.
Not super familiar with openSUSE, but you could get protonup-qt and install Proton-GE.
I tried that too, as I did have the GE option under compatibility when trying different versions. It just won’t install EA’s shitty app. I feel like on one of the Proton versions, it did “install” and booted up, but then just showed a black screen with nothing afterwards. I shut it down to try again because I know how finicky these things can be, and then the EA app was saying t wasn’t installed. I gave up after about an hour and went back to Windows. I work way too much to be able to sit there and tinker with this crap when I get off from a 10 hour shift…
I mean, use the tool that fits the job. I could probably help point you in the right direction. Is it from steam, or straight EA play app?
It’s mostly the problems with anti cheats. The one that comes to mind is Helldivers. I already hated the anti cheat for that game but it’s impossible on Linux. If I was still into Apex Legends I’m sure Easy Anti Cheat would cause some issues but I’m not sure. If Easy Anti Cheat doesn’t work then there are a lot of games to add to that list like Halo and The Finals. I can’t name a lot off the top of my head but Easy Anti Cheat is super popular with devs of online games.
Proton has modules for EasyAntiCheat. I have played Halo on Arch. I don’t know about Helldivers, or Apex. But I absolutely know anticheat is an issue on Linux. Well if you ask me it is more so that these Kernel level anti-cheat mechanisms need to die.
(iirc) Apex worked great up until recently, when they started deliberately banning Linux players.
Helldivers or Helldivers 2? HD2 runs very well in Linux.
Helldivers 2. It kept crashing so I figured it was because of the anti cheat. Perhaps it was just user error and I need to try again.
If linux breaks 5 or 10% marketshare on hardware surveys, developers will start thinking about the 300-600 dollars they lose every 100 sales simply from disabling anti-cheat on linux.
When most/all multiplayer games start working on Linux that’s when Linux can really start taking off.
They do. We’re already there.
The only titles that don’t work are the ones with kernel level anti-cheat, and that needs to die anyway.
As someone who almost exclusively plays multiplayer games - we are def not there. I agree with you that kernel-level anti-cheat needs to go and games should focus more on AI-based (behavior and pattern analysis) anti-cheats instead. But, it’s simply not fair to to say that “we’re already there” when almost 50% of the largest (most played) games out there don’t work on Linux.
We are not there. Is it Linux’s fault? No. But we are absolutely not there, yet.
I’m curious, what games have you tried that don’t work in Linux?
Perhaps I’m just lucky but it rarely happens to me these days.
RUST, VALORANT, PUBG_BATTLEGROUNDS, DELTA_FORCE, BATTLEFIELD_2042, TOM_CLANCYS_RAINBOW_SIX_SIEGE.
You probably don’t play multiplayer games as much as I do.
I have a Windows PC to play Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, and more recently Marvel Rivals. We’re still not quite there yet, although it was pretty cool that Baulders Gate worked on Linux.
I don’t know about Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, but Marvel Rivals worked fine out of the box for me.
For context:
CPU: Intel 9900k
GPU: RTX 3080ti
Distro: EndeavorOS
Display: WaylandBoth of those games are marked gold on protonDB, so you shouldn’t have to use windows to run them if you want (although marvel rivals apparently needs
SteamDeck=1 %command%in the launch options): https://www.protondb.com/app/3107230 https://www.protondb.com/app/2767030Interesting… thanks for this. I’ll need to look into protondb more; had not heard of it prior to this.
I was a part of the pre-EA access group for Pantheon so my game isn’t a part of Steam. Is this a Steam specific thing?
Proton is certainly “cleaner” to use with Steam, but you don’t have to use Steam to use proton. I’d recommend adding the executable to Steam as a non-Steam game for simplicity. Otherwise you can use Lutris or find a tutorial online to run that specific executable with proton outside of Steam
I appreciate the info, and willingness to discuss this. I think you’ve been able to identify my point of reluctance around all of this now; it feels like work. When I’m done with work, I don’t want to do more work in order to get my games to play. Might explain why I bought a PS5 in May too.
Maybe I’ll give this some investigation on my next holiday / day off. That way it’ll feel only “kinda” like work.
That’s a fair point, linux has gotten a lot better with stuff ‘just working’ but when it doesn’t, it requires some research and tinkering.
I was figuring something out the other day and it dawned on me that the reason I’ve become so enamored with linux is that it’s a hit of nostalgia from getting things working in the 90s. (Also I’m a nerd and I think the way computers work is fascinating lol)
It’s the year of the Linux Desktop!!
(2025 is “The year of the Windows 11 PC refresh,” allegedly)
Wait. Since when has Microsoft’s Windows team been drinking from the same copium jars as us Linux users have for years?
That’s hilarious.
As a Mac user I too want SteamOS to succeed, because it will indirectly result in more games that are compatible with macOS via game porting tools and wine.
Honestly windows is just annoying to deal with. I don’t like the ads, and I don’t like my start menu bar being reorganized. I run it in a VM and managing my install keys is a huge pain with their login system.
Linux is awesome, it’s neat watching its developer friendliness result in snowballing market share.
compatible with macOS via game porting tools and wine
How is moltenVK going by the way, assuming you follow that? I originally thought macOS gaming was dead when they ditched OpenGL and declined to support Vulkan, but maybe with layers of shims peoples still make it work.
No idea, I don’t really follow that
If a SteamOS desktop system gets established, it would be time to add productive software to the ecosystem. Like a web browser, email, libreoffice, maybe some other tools. There are good free versions of all kinds of productivity software, and having them nicely packaged for a system like that would add a lot of value to the SteamOS driven family PC.
FYI, if you switch to Desktop mode on SteamOS, all those applications you listed are available via the included app store that taps into Flathub. SteamOS also ships with Firefox out of the box. I have them all installed on my SteamDeck already.
Wonderful!
A real corporate productivity suite for Linux via SteamOS would be a wonderful thing.
Linux is awesome, it’s neat watching its developer friendliness result in snowballing market share.
Why not ditch MacOS? Mac’s are just as bad as Windows, just in different ways.
Apple has been progressively neutering root on a path to make a laptop as much of a walled garden as iOS. Not to mention the entirely soldered RAM and SSD and then charges ridiculous premiums to get more
Why not ditch MacOS? Mac’s are just as bad as Windows, just in different ways.
Eh, I disagree. Yes, macOS isn’t great, but calling it “just as bad” is a bit disingenuous. If I had to pick between Windows and macOS, and installing Linux wasn’t an option for whatever reason, I’d take macOS in a heartbeat because it doesn’t spy on users anywhere as much as Windows, most Linux stuff works seamlessly (macports or brew, take your pick), the built-in software is actually pretty decent.
That said, I very much dislike macOS as well (I use it for work), and there’s no substitute for me for Linux.
Doesn’t MacOS phone home every time you run a new or changed executable? https://eclecticlight.co/2020/10/27/xprotect-what-do-we-know-about-it/
Edit: might be that it phones home for each executable if last it run was more than 12 hours ago, given this: https://www.howtogeek.com/701176/does-apple-track-every-mac-app-you-run-ocsp-explained/
This does annoy me.
I’m working on a program that uses ctest and compiles a folder of test executables, and it takes seconds to test the first time vs hundredths of a second after.
Yeah, a second isn’t a lot of time, but it means I can’t accurately benchmark performance easily.
Doesn’t Windows as well?
Regardless, Windows recording literally everything I do is worse than logging the apps I open.
No?
For me it strikes the right balance of usability and security.
I’ve been a Mac user for almost 20 years now. I’ve had periods using Linux on desktop, but not for some time now. I’m very much a macOS power user.
The things I use my computer for: desktop publishing via Affinity, photo editing, programming, some app dev, playing mostly older games, and I do a lot of data analysis. There are a few macOS apps I could not live without: Automator, Preview, and I use Apple Numbers a surprising amount (I like that it’s table based and not sheet based).
I also find the right usability and hardware quality makes a huge difference for me. What stopped me before was Linux high DPI support and trackpad quality, but that was years ago.
An example of why I like Mac: I have a script at work that spits out Google cloud buckets in gs: format and I can’t change the script. I set up a simple Automator workflow so now I can right click the url and format it as a link to the bucket viewer in my browser instantly.
I have a ton of these little workflow improvements that I’m sure you could do with Linux but already work well for me.
Mac’s are just as bad as Windows, just in different ways.
They’re absolutely not.
Not to mention the entirely soldered RAM and SSD
Hate to tell you this but this is the direction of the entire industry. Look at the new Ryzen “AI Max” chips. Integrating CPU/GPU/RAM on the same chip just leads to crazy increases in performance and efficiency. As usual Apple paves the path to erosion of consumer choice.
Apple has been progressively neutering root on a path to make a laptop as much of a walled garden as iOS.
I agree it’s a very bad thing in general but it can also be disabled with some simple terminal commands. MS goes out of their way to constantly break any solutions consumers might find to make their systems suck less.
Integrating CPU/GPU/RAM on the same chip just leads to crazy increases in performance and efficiency. As usual Apple paves the path to erosion of consumer choice.
CUDIMM is the socket-able answer to this and it’s rolling out. What’s the excuse for soldering SSDs?
but it can also be disabled with some simple terminal commands.
For now, Apple’s not stupid, they know if they move too fast they’ll piss off too many people so they’re doing it slowly step by step.
CUDIMM is the socket-able answer to this and it’s rolling out.
Rolling out where? As far as I know it’s only ever been installed and sold in a single device. Can’t tell ya why but it is.
What’s the excuse for soldering SSDs?
I don’t have an answer for that one.
For now
If that ever changes I’ll change my argument. I don’t think Apple really cares about the small fraction of users that will bother to mess with it.
Rolling out where? As far as I know it’s only ever been installed and sold in a single device. Can’t tell ya why but it is.
We’re only about 4 months in ATM, it’s quite early
Nonetheless, it’s technically sound so even if it does flop, it will have been for primarily greed reasons rather than because soldering was superior
Ah, I was thinking of CAMM, which came out >2 years ago.
Well, yes and no. The main point of compatibility that games should be working towards if they want to run well on macOS is to have ARM versions that work better with Apple’s M-series chips. SteamOS/The Steam Deck are still built for x86 processors which Apple has since stopped supporting.
It’s not impossible to bundle the games in an emulation layer, but it is a bit more involved than something like Proton/WINE, which are just compatibility layers and not emulators, and it comes at the cost of performance.
Rosetta 2 seems pretty good still. It’s not free translation, but it’s viable.
I don’t expect macOS to be the best platform for games, I just want them broadly playable.
Yeah a lot of the proton work is going into
https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/
Which there’s a cool user friendly experience with
A lot of that work is going directly into
https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/
So there is certainly overlap, though as you said, architecture emulation is a different beast
That’s the thing though. I bet you Valve is already prototyping an ARM based Steam Deck. It’s the logical next step to improve performance and thermals/battery at the same time.
Not SteamDeck, but there is evidence that Valve is working on x86-ARM emulation for a stand-alone VR Headset.
managing my install keys is a huge pain with their login system.
It’s often easier to activate it with other means even when you have a real key.
That would be nice, having good competition solves a lot of problems. Plus if steamOS gains enough traction more large game studios may start to specifically support it.
if steamOS gains enough traction more large game studios may start to specifically support it.
Do they have to though? Isn’t “just” running on Linux (mostly done by avoiding weird tricks, say a Windows build from Unity often works) enough?
Anticheat doesnt usually work, and often it takes tweaking to get windows games working perfectly. It’d be nice if everything just worked.
I’m at an uncomfortable crossroads of knowing enough to hate Microsoft, but not knowing enough to trust myself with switching to Linux. I’m like just barely tech-literate enough to wander into places like Lemmy, but beneath some surface level shit I’m probably one of the dumbest motherfuckers here when it comes to not setting my devices on fire.
So… a ‘Linux for dummies’ sounds exactly like what I need!
Bazzite is exactly that. You can’t break it unless you read and study how to break it, intentionally. Flash it to a USB drive, boot to the installer, done. You’ll never worry about drivers, updates, ads, spyware, telemetry, that will be a thing of the past.
beneath some surface level shit I’m probably one of the dumbest motherfuckers here when it comes to not setting my devices on fire.
Well… if you actually want to learn, as we ALL did, get yourself a device you can literally set on fire. By that I mean a RPi 3 (probably going for 10 EUR nowadays) or a 2nd hand laptop. If you can’t find that easily, try a virtual machine, if you don’t want to bother give a whirl (with a ad blocker…) to https://distrosea.com and come back, risk free.
It’s honestly empowering to learn and it has been relevant for decades (basically since the UNIX days) and STILL is relevant today in the time of the “cloud” where all such commands are still used.
Well, there are a lot of newb-friendly distros these days. Some options:
- Linux Mint (any spin) - one of the easiest to get help with online, with minimal compromises
- Fedora - also pretty easy to get help w/ online
- Bazzite - great if you just want to play games; it’s about as close to SteamOS as you get w/o an official release
Any of those should be pretty friendly to users new to Linux, and they go roughly in order from fitness as a regular desktop (top down) to fitness for gaming (bottom up), but any of them can handle gaming and desktop stuff pretty equivalently.
Bazzite is freaking awesome. I started my Linux journey with Arch, then tried Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Mint, Zorin, Endeavour and more. Bazzite has been on my PC for a year and it’s been the best experience I had with PCs in my whole life. I freaking love it.
It does look nice. My main concern is the read-only root, which seems annoying to deal with for non-gaming stuff. I’m a dev and sometimes need to install new dependencies and whatnot. But I’m sure there’s a good workflow for that as well.
Aurora (KDE) or Bluefin (gnome) have dev editions. They are based on ublue like Bazzite, but are more dev oriented.
I’ll have to check it out.
I’ve also considered trying the openSUSE MicroOS versions as well (Kalpa for KDE and Aeon for GNOME). I use Tumbleweed on my systems right now, so that would be a natural transition.
I was the same as you about 6 months ago. I installed Bazzite and never looked back. Sure, there might be some quirks but overall my pc works much better. I can even finally use Steam Link reliably!
I feared making the plunge as well but it was so seamless tbh. Got Linux Mint and it just feels like a newer version of old Windows. Not sure how it’s with other distros, but I find it to be precicely Linux for dummies.
I’d say the difficulty to getting used to new environment was on a similar level to getting from Windows XP to Windows 7. If you can dual boot I recommend just trying it - the water is fine.
This is accurate really. Linux Mint is excellent for people who want to get away from Windows and learn Linux because it looks similar. Bazzite, however, especially the KDE version, honestly looks better than Windows at this point, imo.
In addition to making gaming much much easier, it also has an atomic code core, meaning that all the stuff you will eventually break on Linux Mint by playing around with different programs… and eventually lead to a new Linux user re-installing… is almost non-existent. Programs are installed in their own space with their own dependencies, meaning that they don’t encroach on any other programs using similar drivers, configurations, etc. When those programs are uninstalled, they’re just gone.
So if you can finally game on a Linux distro, not worry so much about borking a linux distro, and it looks and feels both modern and intuitive at the same time…
Why not put in on a spare laptop or something and get some hours in? Microsoft needs some serious pruning and unfortunately they seem immune to criticism that doesn’t come in the way of lost revenue.
Some things that may help you get started:
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All of the risk in changing your computer operating system comes from the potential loss of data. Everything else is replaceable/recoverable, including your original Windows install if needed. You can avoid this risk by backing up your personal data to an external drive, which frankly everyone should be doing anyway because hard drives are consumables.
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You can try Linux with no risk by running it as a live OS. This loads the operating system files into RAM from an external device (typically a USB drive) and makes no changes to the system hard drive. This lets you test your computer’s functionality in Linux without making permanent changes (does my graphics card work? wifi? audio? etc). The mainstream Linux installers do this already for the installation process, but you can just load one up to try things out without running the installation process.
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You don’t have to completely switch off of Windows. It’s fairly easy to install Linux as a dual-boot on an existing Windows system. As long as you have some free space on your hard drive to dedicate to Linux, you can just keep your Windows install and have Linux too. You can even access your files in Windows from the Linux install. All of the mainstream Linux installers have the option for setting up dual-boot during the installation.
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I think one of the biggest hurdles for switching over is knowing what software to use in Linux (how do I edit a document? watch a movie? read a pdf? etc). There are options for basically anything you might want to do, but if you don’t know what you’re looking for you might feel a bit lost. I recommend alternativeto.net for this. You can search for software like Microsoft Office and filter for Linux to get a list of compatible software options that do the same job.
I’m probably one of the dumbest motherfuckers here when it comes to not setting my devices on fire.
I know exactly how you feel. I have wrecked so many OS installs I’ve lost track. I have friends who tell me I have tech problems like no one else. I seem to stumble into edge cases on a higher-than-average basis.
My point is, when I say that everything is recoverable, that’s from experience. I’ve done it enough times to know there’s very little chance of actually making a computer unusable, though it’s relatively easy to lose your data if you’re not paying attention to what you doing - so backups. Always backups.
If you try this a couple times you’ll start to see your computer as something that you have control over, something that you can completely wipe and bring back or rebuild into a different system as you please. Feel free to reach out if you’ve got questions.
You can avoid this risk by backing up your personal data to an external drive, which frankly everyone should be doing anyway because hard drives are consumables.
This is super inconvenient. Better method is to set up a server w/ Syncthing and use that to just sync your Home directory remotely.
Better method is to set up a server w/ Syncthing and use that to just sync your Home directory remotely.
Sure, just set up a server, very convenient. Dude, this advice is for people who have never installed an operating system before.
Like, yeah, if you’re talking about keeping a living backup that is up to date within 30 seconds because you’re doing accounting as a home business and you can’t afford to lose the last 5 minutes of work, then yeah self-hosted file syncing is great. It’s absolutely a better long-term solution for personal data management. But for most people this level of backup fidelity is unnecessary, and a USB drive is a thing you can just buy and start using with no setup effort.
Syncthing can be installed on anything, very easily. All you have to do to make it a “server” is to make sure its connected 24/7.
and a USB drive is a thing you can just buy and start using with no setup effort.
USB drive will be super slow and will be hanging out of whatever it’s attached to. There are many other better options.
This would imply that you have at least two machines. In that case they could just install Linux in the other machine to try it out.
Foa people dabbling in Linux for the first time, with the anxiety of losing their data, it certainly sound like they don’t have 2 machines to run syncthing. Otherwise, why wouldn’t they just copy all their important data to the other machine to avoid the data loss risk?
And sure if that is the case Syncthing is a good solution, but it doesn’t sound applicable in this situation.
In that case they could just install Linux in the other machine to try it out.
I mean if you’re “just trying it out”, you could just use a live USB. You’re probably not saving anything valuable to it anyway.
it certainly sound like they don’t have 2 machines to run syncthing
Can’t understand any reason you would think that.
why wouldn’t they just copy all their important data to the other machine to avoid the data loss risk?
That’s…what I’m suggesting? Syncthing just automates the process.
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