Steam OS 3.8 … Any moment now 😁
lol there’s already a fix: run
start ms-cxh:localonlyfrom a CMD line in the installerHi another recent Linux adopter jumping in on a “fuck windows” thread.
Seriously, it’s not hard to shift. If you’re use to macOS, get Elementary. If you’re used to Windows, try Mint. Your machine will probably be fine for either. Setup/testing it out is trivial.
I’m a long time Linux user going back to the linux 1 kernel days. The only reason I still use Windows on my home PC is for gaming. I know Linux has come a long way thanks to many contributors like Valve, but how stable are the AMD video drivers and how well does it work for playing AAA PC games? The last time I built a new PC (2023) I tried running Linux w/ Windows in a KVM virtual machine and direct GPU passthrough, but that was such a nightmare to get set up and working, I just wiped it and installed Windows 11. I game on it and run Hyper-V VMs for Linux, which works quite well actually but feels like a sin.
I have a very extensive steam, gog, and battle.net library with all kinda of games from wolfenstein 3D to Baulders Gate 3. The only game I haven’t been able to run is Ground Control 2, but that doesn’t work on windows 10 (possible a USB device issue). Unless you play a game with an anti cheat that explicitly deny Linux (the only one I know off the top of my head that does that is Fortnite) you are most likely good to go. I’m quite a performance/fps snobb, and I haven’t found any game that runs worse on Linux either.
I play the DMZ mode of Call of Duty a lot. And Cyberpunk 2077. Recently started playing Reka. Heard of any issues with those?
I’m team red with a Linux distro for my new computer I’m building so I’ll report back ha
Does the dualboot of Mint cause any issues for Windows? I only tested it very briefly on somebody elses machines where I needed to wipe windows and install Linux
What about Manjaro?
What about EndeavourOS?
What about Arch?
I tell people to make a live usb to test it first.
Can recommend ventoy. Then simply put the iso’s from the main distributions with different DE’s on the stick
We no longer own our products. We just pay to use it until they decide you can no longer use their service. What happens if they mysteriously shut down your account without warning?
That is what happened to a guy and he had to get court involved and then he found out his account was flagged for CP by their algorithm because he had a video of his 19 year old ex. False bans do happen. I couldn’t find that story again sadly to share.
Also, make sure you always have back up turned off or have one drive not installed on your phone. If you’re a parent, be careful what photos you take of your children because if those get backed up to cloud, their AI will kill your account because it can’t tell between CP and normal family photos.
I actually want to own our products than make accounts to use.
We no longer own our products.
This is a popular saying but its not as clear cut. You have choice. You can own the products you use or buy. So why don’t you?
Yes, the software we used yesterday is no longer a one time purchase today. However, you still own the software you bought yesterday and you have choice to buy new software which you will own or you can subscribe to a service providing the updated version of the new software. Example:
I can still use a purchased copy of Adobe Lightoom from 2010.
I can buy a new license for Affinity Photo today and use it forever.
I can pay to use Lightroom as a service.Imo, the only price you pay is the trek you take into unfamiliarity brought on by using new software.
This happens on the Google side of the fence as well - this article immediately came to mind.
I’m glad I started self hosting so I still have a “cloud” convenience while still owning all my data and being the sole person responsible for it.
Nothing’s stopping you from nuking your Windows install and installing some Linux distro though, at least on a normal PC. Surface products tend to be more locked to Windows though. I haven’t ran Windows as a main OS in years and don’t plan on going back, and Windows has gotten so user-hostile lately that I don’t even trust it enough to dual-boot it anymore, LTSC included.
(so far LTSC has dodged most of MS’ worst atrocities but it’s only a matter of time before that version starts getting compromised in some way too, so I don’t trust Windows outside of a VM, period, anymore, at least if I virtualize it, whatever stunts it may pull are isolated to that VM and won’t affect the host generally)
LibreOffice better step up their games and make their office suites better. Outside of very niche and specialized applications like CAD or video editor, the average Joe will just need a good office suite to do stuff.
Most people just use the online office 365 thing.
What issues did you have with LibreOffice? I didn’t spot any problems when I used it
Depends on what you do with it. In accountancy we and most of our clients work with Microsoft Office desktop. Also things like templates based on CRM work better with actual Word.
Edit: Libreoffice is also a bit annoying since the settings aren’t in the same layout so helping others becomes harder. Not sure if they implemented it since I am not that well versed with it as with Excel, but I belief they don’t have a PowerQuery alternative?
oh LibreOffice works great for me in general. Only for some documents with macros that were created in MS Office, I have problems running them. Eg: I once received a MS Word document that has some preprogrammed drop down list - so you click to extend the list and choose your items. The document opens fine, but I couldnt get the drop down feature to work. For Excel, documents with lots of VBA codes, I need to go in and do some manual changes.
In general, for 99% of the tasks, LibreOffice is fine. But it is that 1% which makes me still open up my Windows VM for MS Office.
After their shenanigan with subscription only models, we still see MS Office being used a lot. It shows how strong MS grips on the Office area is.
You are correct that 365 is used for most people. I used to use it too…For me, I prefer to be able to access stuff whenever I want. I live in an area with very shitty internet (both Wifi and 4G). Once, a client and I had to wait 5 minutes because Office Online takes too long to load up a spreadsheet. Offline for me is just a peace of mind.
Funny how corporations think taking away consumers freedom and privacy is a good idea.
Have fun losing customers.
“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”
-Benito Mussolini, 1932
Its a good idea for their shareholders, who don’t think beyond the next quater. Pretty sure most of them don’t have object permanence.
It’s not a big deal. They’re removing the bypassnro.cmd script, which is just this:
@echo off
reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\OOBE /v BypassNRO /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
shutdown /r /t 0
You can still use shift-F10 at the same point, type those two lines (not the @ECHO OFF), and it will achieve the same result.
Their intention is clear. I wonder for how long this workaround is going to stay.
Sure, but when are they going to remove that registry option?
You’re doing the lord’s work
“Hi, I liked XY development tool having a proper GUI on Windows where can I find a non CLI…”
“LEARN TO USE NEOVIM!”
“LEARN TO USE GDB!”
“DO EVERYTHING FROM THE COMMAND LINE!”
not
LennyLinux!
Man, Microsoft advertising for Linux Mint YET AGAIN?! They are so gracious.
Why is everyone reccommending linux mint all of a sudden? What happened to ubuntu and fedora?
Mint is ubuntu with the icky stuff removed and given an extra layer of polish. Still loving it here.
Ubuntu added telemetry and forced snaps
And Ubuntu Pro popup ads. Linux Mint is, from a compatibility standpoint, Ubuntu without the crap.
So out of curiosity, why Mint over, say Debian? Has Debian added telemetry etc as well?
Mint had had a Debian version for some time
In addition to what the other guy said, Mint is also more focused on desktop. A bunch of apps are pre-installed that one would expect on a desktop OS. Additionally, the default Mint UI, Cinnamon, feels very familiar to a Windows user. It has a start menu, task bar, tray, etc.
Debian is in the same family, and is more oriented for servers. It is super minimal out of the box, which is perfect when you want it to sit in the other room and perform specific tasks. However, you can install all the same programs, even the Cinnamon UI on Debian.
Really the difference is the out of box experience, but they are otherwise pretty similar.
Debian is a stable distro and therefore tends to have less up-to-date packages.
Ahh so Mint is kept up to date like Ubuntu/Fedora and doesn’t have all the telemetry and pop ups for Ubuntu Pro. Thank you!
Ubuntu and Fedora have different “up-to-date”. Ubuntu is patching old code to work / feel modern and Fedora is updating as fast as possible to new Software.
I think Ubuntu is unnecessary doing double work, but I guess they have to, since they have drifted too far from upstream…
I’ve been using Debian on my desktop for five years now so this information might be a bit outdated, but I have recently installed Mint on my server.
In my experience Mint (and Ubuntu) have been more beginner friendly with installation and initial setup. I remember trying to install Debian on my MacBook which just crashed on bootup whereas Ubuntu worked out of the box. Mint draws from Ubuntu’s repositories which are more up to date and has more packages in it. Being able to rely on apt for installing packages has meant an easier user experience. And the last thing is that there’s just more information out there for troubleshooting Mint problems than there is for Debian in my experience.
That’s what I find. I could be wrong about some of the details
Oh wow that’s a great explanation, thank you! I have a bit of experience with Ubuntu and a fraction of that with Debian but absolutely no experience with any other Linux distro, so I appreciate your reply!
I run Ubuntu Server for my home lab and had a RaspberryPi running Debian for a short while as well but it was all CLI so I have almost no experience with the GUI. I was quite surprised to hear about pop ups for Ubuntu Pro.
I personally found setting up Debian for the Pi to be fairly straight forward and about as difficult as converting an old windows laptop into an Ubuntu Server…server, so they might have made Debian a bit easier to get up and running.
That being said I can’t recall if I got that particular installation specifically for the Pi so that might have an impact there.
I genuinely appreciate your explanation! :)
Corporate distros and all
mint user here, I want my distro devs to work faster on fixing keyboard layouts on wayland.
I’ve used the unpatchable Win11 account loophole, that exploits a functionality of your pc, where you wipe your boot drive, and install NixOS on it
That’s a neat trick!
Are they trying to kill windows on purpose?
The sad thing is they know the large majority of users will comply. Most people put familiarity and convenience above their own privacy and general well-being.
Once valve drops better nvidia support into the kernel, and steamos starts coming pre-loaded on laptops and pre-built desktops it’s over for their consumer division.
There’s nothing special about SteamOS. Linux has been available as an option from several manufacturers for years.
What we need to see is a major studio pushing for Linux like valve has been doing.
Imagine if call of duty or fortnite had a Linux promotion to have a penguin hat. That would help
There kind of is though. I’m not here to argue it’s enough to unseat windows but it is markedly different
From a technical standpoint it’s just another linux distro with some nice tweaks for gaming but from a human perspective it has brand recognition, familiarity, a known company behind it. Those things do really matter for adoption. No idea if that’d be anywhere near enough, I’m not inclined to make predictions, but it does have explicit advantages over consumers hearing they can get a laptop with Ubuntu or fedora on it
Yeah I agree. I just don’t wanna see more apps made exclusively for the steam deck with SteamOS and winderp. So I feel it’s important to highlight it’s just another Linux distro.
https://youtu.be/5KYQRk_SIB8 this is what pulled my attention to the matter.
That’s very fair! I was concerned by that video too, though I would point out that if I remember right, the games in that video don’t work on non-steamdeck devices including if you install steamos on a laptop or desktop
From my understanding of this video. That’s because they intentionally locked the game to work on the steam deck.
What we need to see is a major studio pushing for Linux like valve has been doing.
That’s it. That’s literally what makes it special. You, me, and half the fediverse probably aren’t going to use steam os unless maybe we buy a steam deck.
The fact that there’s a multi-billion dollar company throwing money at both it and proton is what makes steam os special. Its what’s going to give Linux a unified brand name that every machine can put on their case badge.
Normal people and the companies that sell them computers need that unified brand name. Why on gods green earth, I don’t fucking know, but I know that they do. Its how you get them to use shit.
Call of duty is a Microsoft game now.
No it’s not, multiplayer games with anticheat that hard-locks you into Windows and productivity software with DRM that hard-locks you into Windows is still a thing, if that were to stop being a thing, then Windows’ dominance on the desktop might finally be threatened, but until then, sadly, no.
The fact that Facebook still exists is proof of this.
Also, I will not be surprised if they audaciously disable Win 10 Home edition for security purposes once end of life is reached.
They already said they are going to charge $30/year for patches. They want recurring revenue from ads in 11 or from you paying yearly for 10.
I’ve still got a windows XP computer that I fire up once in a while for the LOLs. it continues to remind me that support ended in 2014, but it keeps working.
I also have a Windows 8.1 tablet that continues to work, and receive Windows Defender updates.
They won’t disable anything, stop spreading FUD, that’s Microsoft’s job.
Games. Most of the games I play don’t play well with Linux.
I keep a Linux laptop for banking that only connects via ethernet cord while I’m banking. Which is nice, I don’t worry about key loggers now.
What games do you play? I’ve been gaming exclusively on Linux since Windows 7 went EoS, and especially since the Steam Deck came out, I’ve had very few problems. That said I don’t play competitive stuff, which is what tends to have anti-cheat rootkits.
Yeah. Gaming isn’t the issue for a long time. Productivity is. Rantmode
Proper CAD for Linux? Nonexistent, even worse, some manufacturers intentionally make sure you can’t use a VM either until you massively pay extra.(Looking at you Dassault) FreeCAD is a shitshow (and that is entirely the communities fault) and no professional competitor has shown any incentive - even though there is a increasing market for Linux in some professional capacities. And the current projects to get bottles/wine/etc. to work are maintained by a single guy (bless him) who tried to do it for multiple systems at once and seems to have given up mostly.
Graphic design? While the situation is a little bit better,it’s still a shitshow. No, GIMP and Inkscape are not sufficient replacements for Adobe or even Affinity. They are “good enough” for most things,but they are not nearly ready for production use in any professional capacity.
Office? Yeah. Sadly equally bad. I really really really hate Microsoft and Office. But: They are inherently good at what they do. Not because people get used to it - but because they work. I used LibreOffice since back when it was still StarOffice. (And have used Lotus before that) But we as the open source community still rather fight about ribbons (even though they became the standard everywhere) than get LibreCalc halfway production ready or make proper collaborative working possible. Or get a proper fucking search into thunderbird.
And this is the problem: OSS is so damn up its own ass, that it does not see the bigger picture. We can fight about the kernel allowing Rust, having Ribbons, which is the proper workbench in FreeCAD or about packet managers, distro flavours,etc. In the end what will happen is that the other side will be alienated, excuse themselves from further contributions and, and this is even worse, a lot of possible future contributors will also not contribute. And wow, someone was right and can think he (and it’s almost always a he) thinks he knows the only truth.
While the actual truth is held by the others. The ones that don’t even are bothered by the whole fucking discussing because they make the money, they influence millions and they are the ones setting de facto standards. And yes, that will mean we will need to adapt.
Including adapting market standards. When 95% of the world does a thing “that way”, it’s simply preposterous to claim “your way” is the right way, even it’s for historical reasons. (Easy example: CTRL C / CTRL V)
Same goes for adapting software. If 10% of the development power of Libre Office,GIMP, etc. would have been used to further Wine/Proton to get people to be able to use their industrial standard software we would have seen much much much larger adoption rates,both professionally and for private users.
Because that is literally what happened in gaming. Once Valve basically put massive efforts into allowing Windows games to be played on Linux - and not into developing native Linux games all of a sudden Linux gaming went ahead. Because it is a advantage for your game to work natively and well on a steam deck.
This is even more relevant for production software. If a CEO/CIO has reached a point where his main production software runs on Linux and he has deployed Linux in his company his next software contract for other software will go towards the company who runs better in their environment.
Rant out
(Nothing personal,mate, I just spent the last two days to get fucking CAD to work on Fedora…)
Blender at least has gotten to the point where an indie flick made with it actually won some Oscars and other big awards, so that pretty much put it on the map as a viable Maya or 3DSMax alternative, so there’s that.
Yeah, Blender is one of the few points where it works. QGIS is the other.
Do you play exclusively esports games or something? It’s rare I encounter a title that doesn’t work just fine on Linux. It seems I barely need to tweak any settings anymore.
I do play eSports games
companies do things like this when they feel they have the power in the business/customer relationship and there’s no regulations to stop them.
I don’t know what is going on at Microsoft. I’m starting to think that they are trying to pivot to a completely different business model. In addition to this Windows 11 crap and XBox seemingly being given up on, they appear to be losing their embedded market as well. In the past, if you saw any screen in an industrial setting, there’s a good chance that there was the embedded Windows version behind that screen. Lately, all the new products are moving over to Linux.
They are, and have said they are.
Subscriptions are the wave of the future.
What advantage embedded windows gave to a manufacturer for it to be worth paying license fee for? I kinda feel this part is difficult for Microsoft to compete at
It was because developers historically were familiar with Windows and would just default to making a Windows product. You want a POS interface? Your developer is probably going to hand you a .exe and not a .deb. Then your next move is to tell the hardware division to put that .exe into production systems, at which it is too late for the hardware division to argue you just chose the more expensive option without thinking.
This is changing, particularly as many platforms make it trivial to compile for different OSes.
I wouldn’t say that, more just abusing a monopoly.
Yeah, they probably want to kill it and switch people over to a cloud service with a monthly subscription.
They have done that for years, and every time there is an army of geeks and gamers who look for registry hacks or PowerShell scripts to install Windows anyway. If even those geeks do not want to spend 5 minutes looking for doc on how to install Ubuntu (which is a billion times easier to use than Windows), you can be sure Windows will never die.
Tried Pop PS recently. Night and day difference.
You can still skip it with MicroWin and also Rufus. I’ve tested it just recently.
Did you try that with the latest beta build?
No with the latest ISO from windows 24H2 I believe
Why the fuck is a Microsoft account so important to Windows that running it without one is considered a “loophole”?
Because we need your data silly 😊
My guess is that’s it’s easier to neatly package your data up for when they go to sell it.
They want to make money off of services, every service they offer requires a Microsoft account to purchase and use. Everyone that they force to make an account during setup is one step closer to paying for a Microsoft service.
There are obviously tradeoffs (less sales of these versions of windows and some users pushed away from Windows altogether among others), but the motivation is clear.
because microsoft is shifting focus from selling you a product, to selling you as a product
And they need a unique account to track every single click and thing you do on your PC, and the web, and everywhere else to facilitate doing that with greater control and ease.
Its literally what, and for the same reason, google has done for the past decade+
Microsoft will sell it as a safety thing - your essential stuff is backed up to your Microsoft account, so in the event that your computer is compromised or damaged, you can wipe and start over with your important stuff restored from your Microsoft account.
Which is not a bad idea in itself, but the rest of the data harvesting and telemetry makes it yuck. I use pihole to block access to Microsoft telemetry servers.
Uh
Who’s ready to talk Linux
I’m liking Linux Mint and Kubuntu personally.
Especially Kubuntu for my main desktop PC, Linux Mint for my little clunker PC I use to run my 3D printers.
Same, I just loaded kubuntu on another new system
Unfortunately the “horror” that is windows persists almost as much as the horror of Linux. Which is a bunch of fanbois crowing about their distro without any explanation at all. But why do they do this? Because that’s how they got into it, and that’s how the people that got them into it got into it.
Which fucking distro should I use?
- Well, really it’s just preference.Then I choose arch.
- Uh, wrong try again lol.Fair enough, Which fucking distro should I use?
- Well, really it’s whatever works for you.Okay, I didn’t like the feel of that one.
- Well, you were using the wrong desktop environment.😐😑😤😠… …Which fucking desktop environment should I use?
- Well, really it’s just preference.🤬. 🤬🤬, 🤬. 🤬.
- Look clearly you don’t know what you’re doing just use Ubuntu, or Kubuntu, or Lubuntu, or Xubuntu, or Fubuntu, or Poobuntu, or Schmubuntu. And with cinnamon obvi.Well how do I know? The site for each one uses the exact same bloviated claims. They’re all feature rich, and lightweight, and extended support, etc. Do I have to install them all to find out?
- Yes but that’s impossible. So just use mine, it works.Until it doesn’t. Then you need to hit up Linux self help forums, to get help from Linux bros, who are the most detestable group of unhelpful, impatient, and pretentious neckbeards imaginable. “Did you try searching first?” “Just use our discord!” “Just use [my fucking distro!]”
😖🤯👺
FML
I typed 6 words. Are you alright
Lol, thought I was replying to a different comment, my bad 😆
Please accept my apologies 🙏
I’m not unhinged, more or less
Been there. Accepted
To answer your questions though, I suggest the non-Cosmic version of Pop!OS. (and switch to wayland if it’s not the default yet- not sure, I’ve had this install for YEARS) It’s a good blend of “just works” and “up to date enough” to run anything, and I recommend steering well clear of Arch. I’ve been using Linux for a decade and I’ve always found a way to whoopsie it into a broken state. That’s a “me problem” yes, but if I can fudge it up that easily and I have experience using it, I think it’s unsuitable to recommend to anyone.
Most people live in a web browser- does it really matter if the desktop environment isn’t riced enough or isn’t windows-ey enough? That said, it takes actual hackery to make any version of Windows usable these days, so I’ll forgive a distro not being “absolutely elite” for someone’s preferences. Let’s not compare Linux forums to Windows forums, where no-one has ever, I repeat ever received ANY useful advice besides reinstalling their Windows, am I right?
Lol, touche. Unless you include how to “unbreak” every single windows update, but even those resources are growing ever more seldom. Thanks for the explanation. I think I remember hearing about pop during the great steam Linux supportathon a few years back. I held off since the video card support wasn’t quite ironed out of something like that and haven’t checked back.
I am! Looking for a distro that I can use AGI32 on. It already crashes consistently on Windows for large projects and I reckon it’ll do worse on wine.
I also use substance painter a lot but I reckon moving into a FOSS alternative will be a good move for that. Wean myself off Adobe dependency. Unless it works in wine but I’ve been told anything Adobe or Autodesk can’t run in wine.
Oh wow I looked up AGi32 and that thing seems like a mess. I feel sorry for you.
I get that it might be hard to migrate some really nastily written software, but… In the year of our lord 2025, it should not be acceptable for any sort of simulation software that requires an expensive paid license, to be 32-bit only.
Agreed but the alternatives are not much better for me. I also use Dialux Evo which is much, much better at rendering but it’s extremely Euro centric and you can’t easily make a template for Australian standards. There’s Relux which I tried using but I didn’t want to pay for yet another license just to practice and get better at using it.
Unfortunately, for us Australian lighting designers, there’s not a lot of options. It’s a gag in the industry where if you hear someone yelling “FUCK!!” out of nowhere, AGI has crashed.
Sadly, steam VR and fusion360 are still tying me to windows. :(
No they don’t. Steam VR is native on Linux, and most of fusion 360 can run in wine. Good news for you!
Steam VR runs on Linux natively, doesn’t it? I switched to Linux a few weeks ago but haven’t tried VR gaming on it yet.
It does, but performance seems a lot laggier than Windows.
I’ve been using Linux full time for a while now, and only recently installed Windows on a secondary drive, just for those two things.
Before, on Linux, it was a bit of mixed bag. Sometimes it would start up without issue, other times sound wouldn’t work, etc.
Using corectl is a must, and make sure you have a stable steam install. (iirc the steam I installed didn’t come with half of the 32 bit libs it was expecting). I’m rocking a 7900xtx, so it’s not exactly low-end, and half-life alyx was giving me a lot of stutters.
I have quite a different experience, can’t tell if it is placebo or not, but my vr experience is slightly smoother in Arch Linux compared to my Windows 10.
i play VR via Proton using ALVR (steamvr) or Wivrn
But i havent tried playing Alyx on linux yet
I can imagine the frustration of lag in vr.
