I like the optimism of Linux users thinking there will be a massive flood towards their favourite Linux distro.
When the obvious path the majority of gamers will take is just … not upgrade anything and stay on an unsecure OS until their next major PC upgrade.
Most users don’t care about security as long as it allows them to do with their computer what they want.
If Microsoft didn’t push people to a new version, you know too many would still be rocking Windows 8.
If Microsoft didn’t push people to a new version, you know too many would still be rocking Windows 8.
You mean Windows 7
You mean Windows XP.
Yea, as someone who games on linux (ArchBTW), I don’t know if its really there yet for mass adoption, I was helping a younger sibling troubleshoot their dying PC and they even suggested I install Linux on it for them. With a fresh Linux Mint iso on my Ventoy USB, the voices raged at me to convert another penguin. But sadly I knew, deep down, they are not ready to deal with the issues if something goes wrong, a software has no Linux support, or if they ever want to mod their games.
Those kinds of people probably wouldn’t be able to deal with issues in Windows either. Just teach them how to install the OS and start firefox. If it completely breaks at some point tell them to install the OS again.
Windows had to force updates because so many people just didn’t update
Anyone that is on 10 still isn’t going to go to Linux
When I was young and dealing with Win 98 and XP before all the service packs updates had like 10% chance of bricking the OS and would give me anxiety so I’d avoid them. Even with Windows 7 had an update that made explorer.exe refuse to start. It hasn’t happened in many years, maybe they got their shit together but I still have anxiety about updates even though I’m savvy enough to fix issues now. Just because I can doesn’t mean I wanna.
I dual boot and still use Windows 10. And everything I’ve seen from Windows 11 just seems like trash to me. My mother got a new laptop about a year ago and I came along to help her set it up. With her previous laptop, I opted to not do the free update to Windows 10 because people were complaining about it at the time (and I was still on Windows 7), so she ended up stuck with Windows 8.1 for years. So this time I did opt for the free update to Windows 11 and it feels like a huge mistake so far.
Her machine is now slow and struggles to get things up and running. And every single fucking time she tries to use it, it decides to run virus scans and download and install updates all at the same time. And these updates often seem to take an entire day. The last update took two days where she could barely do anything on her laptop because it was slowing things up so much.
And that all makes the frustration add up when you come across the other fucking stupid things they’ve done. So now when you right click on the desktop there’s a few seconds where Windows needs to get its shit together to show you the new useless menu that’s been slapped on top of the old useful menu. Then you need to click ‘show more options’ for the actual useful menu. Then another few seconds for Windows to get its shit together to load that menu.
And I don’t want to load a bunch of stuff like classic shell or winaero tweaker because she’s old and just wants to play hidden object games and solitaire. So I’m going to have to come running every time something happens that she doesn’t understand. So I prefer leaving it vanilla.
But fuck Windows 11. It’s absolute fucking garbage based on my experience so far. I was going to hold out for the inevitable Windows 12 because Microsoft seem to love using their paying customers as beta testers with every second OS they release but now I’m not so sure. Hoping there will be some sort of hack to keep enterprise updates coming or something.
I’m still on 10. I’m waffling between installing bazzite on my laptop, building a new computer and installing bazzite, or just using my steam deck as a daily driver. But none of the options include using windows.
Anyone that is on 10 still isn’t going to go to Linux
Eh, there’s a few of us. I intend to at least give Linux a solid try before I swap to Win11.
My thoughts are that at that point I realistically have to swap anyways. It’s just a question of whether I’m going to Win11- which I’ll have to customize to my preferences and generally figure out, or Linux- which I’ll have to customize to my preferences and generally figure out.
I’m on the tech savvy side of things, and I still find Linux intimidating so I don’t think this will be a mass migration to Linux or anything.
I’ve considered Linux a couple times in the past, but generally stayed away because my PC is primarily used for gaming which didn’t have the best support then. Things are kinda different now- support is generally better.
Still on 10 here, turned off the TPM chip, got kubuntu on a second drive, just hoping proton can get the other 70% of my vr library to recognise before EoL
You mean 7, right? Most people skipped 8, and that’s why Microsoft made the update to 10 free.
I know someone that is deathly afraid of tracking by Microsoft to upgrade their pc from Windows 8. They won’t spend the time to learn linux, as they use a proprietary app specific to windows for what they use. I point out Win8 has the same kind of data collection and they dismiss it with a head-in-the-sand response.
Just like skipping Vista was the way to go. We need to skip Win11.
No they’d still be running XP if they could.
Yeah, I stayed on xp until I got a new pc during 7, then I stayed on 7 until I got a new pc during 10. I’ll probably stay on 10 until whatever is after 11 comes out, even though I know better, because I just don’t care enough.
I’m surprised 0Patch hasn’t been mentioned in this thread. There’s really no reason to stop using Windows 10 after EOL if you can still get security updates.
Only reason my new rig has windows is for some specific peripherals that just dont seem to have good solutions for linux (logitech g600 MMO mouse, and an NZXT kraken cpu cooler display). The mouse gets completely jacked up and has all the side buttons rebound to numpad by just using it in my experience. Had to reload the mouse firmware on windows to restore basic functionality.
The user experience was honestly vastly superior on Fedora KDE, and my next GPU will be AMD so i can give it another shot on linux
i’ll upgrade to some baby Linux distro once the end of life hits, i am lazy
(i’d also need to set up a dual boot as i’m cursed to need Adobe apps and those are famously allergic to Linux)
Don’t do dual boot. Windows will purposefully fuck up your MBR so Linux disappears every update and it’s a bitch to fix.
Run that shit in a VM. It’s 2025 you will get good performance.
nope, adobe apps are allergic to VMs too, less so but still. believe me i’m not hyped about having a whole dedicated OS just so i can run 4 programs, but dual boot is my only option
since i’ll set all that up past end of life for win10 i won’t be getting any security updates so i can safely just disable that option altogether, which will hopefully make the two OS coexist peacefully
I think the dual boot problems are generally associated to using the same drive. If you have one drive for each you can use BIOS to control boot order instead.
neat! i do hope i’ll have saved up for a proper PC by then so having two drives won’t be much of a hassle (currently i have a laptop)
Many laptops support a second drive
i feel oddly unsafe when my entire digital life is running from an external drive. backups sure, but the main thing? makes me nervous
Many laptops support a second internal drive.*
That’s been my experience as well. Dual boot, separate drives. Never had Windows touch it.
Switch to GPT, makes Things easier. You can do that from inside Windows without Reinstall or anything. Also Install Linux in another Drive, then you got No issues.
I’ve been dual booting with Grub for a year now and the only issue I ever had was accidentally installing Grub to the wrong drive at first
Maybe it’s because I run the LTSC IOT version but so far I just pick which OS at boot and go, defaults to Linux after 10s of inactivity
so whats the solution about adobe product,
are there any alternatives to use on linux?
of course there are alternatives, but they are all compromises, here’s a couple of reasons why:
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Adobe aggressively patents every new feature they come up with, so every other software has to reinvent the wheel each time
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adobe has a huge head start with the software they already have & they make bank on the subscription model so the development (though subpar for how much money they make) is constant and steady
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to replace say photoshop you need more than one program. photoshop is a beast, it’s RAM hungry but for a good reason, you can edit photography, draw traditionally, paint with oils, watercolours, do calligraphy, do pixel art, create collages, do photo manipulation, create designs, fill out digital forms, make your file into an editable pdf, sketch, hell you can even animate if you’re feeling masochistic! you can bascially change any image into any other image you can possibly imagine, it’s incredibly versatile and powerful. other software focuses on niches (because they can’t afford to try to compete with adobe), doing one thing but doing it really well, no single program can challange photoshop, even if the main feature it offers is better than what photoshop can do. same goes for After Effects, Illustrator, and i’m sure others but those are the main ones i use (Premiere Pro recently-ish got outmatched by Davinci Resolve which is a huge win)
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if you plan on making money with your art you’re basically required to at least be competent working with Adobe apps, it’s the industry standard, and it’s not looking like that’s going to change any time soon. look up any digital drawing course, 80% are going to use photoshop, 15% procreate, 5% krita, corel, and other software (disclaimer, those numbers are vibes based and do not reflect the actual %s)
so yes, there are alternatives, but there is no photoshop-but-different-brand or after-effects-but-we-rearranged-the-ui. To replace one Adobe app you often need several programs which slows down the workflow significantly
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fuck Windows, I am done with M$
when do they roll out that pay for support instead of being forced to windows 11
With
end of lifethe year of the Linux desktop fast approaching.For whatever reason, Windows 11 won’t let me upgrade. And I still have decent hardware. So when support runs out, I’m switching to Pop!_OS.
If they want to buy me a new laptop, go for it.
The only reason I’m still on windows 10 is because I’m dreading the weekend of head banging against table I’m going to have when I do the switch to Linux before October… Not looking forward to getting it all set up and working
If you’re switching over with gaming in mind, then using Bazzite or Nobara will make it so you have no head banging. Bazzite has everything you need for gaming all ready to go, and since it’s an immutable distro, it’ll be difficult for a newbie to fuck up on accident.
can it run some emulator? like nintendo or ps or ps2?
Bazzite was a 15 minute experience for me, from first boot to playing X4 foundations and sea of thieves.
Take the leap.
Once you get it all setup and proud of your work, make a fucking backup image, because a single update that changes an obscure library in some forgettable package that was part of your install will break everything and you will be pulling your hair out kludging a CLI script to unfuck some other binary that was unimportant, but now has affected another thing that was crucial for a graphics card or network adapter to function.
i dont know what you are using but the general linux experience hasn’t been like this in years. and even if there is a problem now and then a bit of googling generally is all it needs. the one thing you cannot get around is malware like kernel level anticheats. that’s windows only.
having a backup is good advice no matter what system you use
I don’t know, the last time I tried Linux the fucking Nvidia driver fucked my system a couple times before I said fuck it and went back to 10.
Going to try again with my amd card at some point
AMD support is baked into the kernel, so you really don’t have to do anything unless you’re on bleeding edge hardware and the drivers are in a version of the kernel your distribution doesn’t ship yet.
That’s fantastic news! Nvidia drivers are literally the reason I’ve abandoned Linux easily a half dozen times.
Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, can’t control what support Nvidia offers for their own products, but he often shows his opinion of them:
This is why I really don’t want to have to use Linux, but Microsuck just can’t stop with the fucking greed and I’m absofucukinglutly not running anything with recall… :(
You’re either running Arch/some other bleeding-edge system without Linux experience (do not recommend) or you haven’t tried Linux in 10 years.
I promise you I’ve been using Linux likely for longer than you’ve been alive, and have used every permutation of Linux, from old school CLI-only shit, to fringe PowerPC YellowDog, to modern Ubuntu/Debian.
Make a dual boot system. You can continue to use win10 while getting comfortable with linux. If something breaks just reboot.
I was dreading trying Linux as well and it was nowhere near as bad as I anticipated. Did full transition (I got new SSD for dual booting to try the waters) to it much faster than I ever anticipated.
I mostly just use the PC for gaming though so mileage may vary.
Steam runs pretty smooth on Linux. Am currently using OpenSuse. Steam runs smooth. Games run smooth with one or two exceptions. For those exceptions I have a dual boot Windows 10 that doesn’t need Windows Update for anything I ask it to do.
Steam does, but that doesn’t necessarily mean your games will. I spent like an entire day getting comfortable and customizing some distro to finally fit my liking, only to later on realize that proton just doesn’t fucking work for shit on it.
Did you install Steam for Windows in Linux or Steam as a flatpak or something? My experience on many PCs is install Linux, install Steam from the distro’s repo, flip the compatibility switch in Steam settings, and only customize bits here and there because I’m busy gaming or doing work.
This has nothing to do with steam (as much as you can separate the two). Even through Lutris it Proton work. Even plain wine was janky but technically worked.
I have to say, in general this doesn’t happen too often. But if you are afraid of this scenario specifically, my advise is either use a separate partition for the home folder (this is where all user installed things go, as well downloads, documents and pictures by default) and make a backup in some other drive with something like timeshift, or use something a bit more advanced namely immutable distro. I will give a bit of advise here: immutable distros can be extremely unintuitive, so if you want to try and understand it, go for a VM and take a weekend playing around. For gaming, bazzite comes to mind for this specific case.
If you have a spare drive on your PC I’d recommend trialling Linux on that. With that setup, you will have it dual booted with your existing Windows installation. It should help with the transition since you can just boot into Windows if you still need it for anything. That will give you time to get accustomed to Linux while still having that Windows safety net for a while.
Also if you later find that Linux isn’t for you then it’s easy to undo that, since all you will need to do is boot into your Windows drive instead.
I went with that strategy when I made the jump 4 years ago, and later dropped Windows entirely when I built my new PC a few months later since I realised I didn’t need it at all.
If I modify my existing PC to dual boot from the same drive into Linux, can I easily and safely delete Windows once I have migrated my files into Linux?
Yep, you can delete your Windows partition once you no longer need it or any data within it. Then once you update your bootloader (usually GRUB, some distros do this automatically when updating the system), Windows will disappear from the boot options.
Then you can either create a new partition in its place to store data on, or extend an existing partition to fill the empty space.
I’d recommend also backing your data as a precaution in case something goes awry.
Just one piece of warning for dual booting, if the EFI portion for Linux and Windows is on the same drive Windows could decide to nuke the Linux bootloader with any update…
It’s not too difficult to create a redirect to the windows bootloader in Grub or similar, which is the solution I went with in the end.
Do you have a separate computer that you can use to do a “test run” of using Linux? If not, I would at least play around with Linux in a virtual machine before committing to the bit (and I say this as someone who has been using Linux laptop / Windows desktop for 6-7 ish years now)
When you make an installer USB stick, it also doubles as a live preview (for most? all? distros).
So you just boot into it and you can play with it before running the installation.
Yeah, this was my strategy. Used Mint on a secondary computer until I got more comfortable with it, then made the plunge on my main computer. Made the transition so much easier, as I was able to learn the differences at a relaxed pace.
I might make the plunge soon as my desktop is just slightly too old—but, at the same time, I need Windows for a few things for work so it’s a little frustrating 🫠
Gaming wise I’m completely able to use Linux, but I also don’t really play competitive games with anti-cheat so it is not exactly surprising.
Just get another disk or partition and get it running on that. If it goes fucky, boot into Win and game, try again later.
Honestly, just install Kubuntu 24.04. Install it and forget it. It’s super stable and has great support. Whatever people argue about the Snap packaging system, that will be almost invisible to you as the end user.
11’s been fine for me. I know this is a hot take around here but if any readers are dreading it because of things you’ve read, just try it out.
Also, “end of life” doesn’t mean your computer bursts into flames, it just means you stop getting patches.
People around here are super excited about it being this momentous occasion, I guarantee the people that have lived with the “Activate Windows” watermark for a decade don’t care about the “patches are over” pop-up, either.
I mean, Windows 7 has more users than Linux Mint in the Steam survey.
Tried it on my laptop and work computer. Absolutely hate it. I refuse to upgrade my gaming PC to it. I’m planning on swapping to Linux Mint whenever I feel motivated.
It’s not the usability that’s the issue, it’s the spyware.
Windows 10 has had more or less all of the same spyware backported to it.
People said the same shit with windows 10 vs 7/8. I swear every other update is the same cope over and over again.
I’m not worried about functionality, I’m worried about ads, AI, and privacy. Win11 is actively hostile on all three points
There are two things that hold me to Windows (10) as my daily driver: MS Office, and support for a virtual file synchronization a la Nextcloud (which I presume piggybacks off of what MS built for OneDrive.)
My secondary laptop, my 4 year old’s laptop, my gaming device (Steam deck), homelab, are all on Linux. It has been fun to learn Linux and it’s what I intend for my kid to grow up on.
Eventually, when I get a new laptop (current is 8 years old and I’m really hoping Framework gen 2 has a touchscreen) it’ll be Linux first… And I hope Nextcloud gets that virtual file sync going by then because a network share/WebDAV connection will make me sad.
and support for a virtual file synchronization a la Nextcloud (which I presume piggybacks off of what MS built for OneDrive.)
What’s a virtual file synchronization?
I may be pulling out the wrong term, but:
The Nextcloud application on Windows shows the entire contents of your Nextcloud account in Windows Explorer, as if they were on your hard drive. They are indexed in search. When you access a file, it dynamically downloads that to your hard drive where it stays and is kept in sync with any changes on the server and the server is updated with any changes to the local file.
Maybe on demand file sync is a better term.
Ah, like the Android app. I think the Linux Nextcloud version has an experimental option for it but I never gave it a try.
I assume the partial sync is not sufficient for your use case? I usually only sync the folders I need on that machine.
M$ ended win7 support in January 14, 2020. Steam did not end win7 support until January 1 2024. M$ ending support for their OS does not mean Steam will do so anytime soon. Considering how small number of their users has updated, there’s a good chance Steam will keep supporting win10 for many more years. By that time I know I will no longer be using Windows.
Yep, that was the only reason I finally pulled the trigger. What makes me laugh is it wasn’t even about windows, it was because of fucking CHROME.
You are not wrong here. However, this is a double edged sword. By running windows 10 after a good while (let’s say, after 1 year of eol) you are risking for malware that is going to be non patched on windows 10. Of course, if you use the PC mostly for gaming and get stuff mostly from the usual places, I really doubt you get anything. If you work with documents however with macros and stuff, or you might have questionable internet hygiene or foreign external devices like usb on a frequent basis, do not get close to an out of date system
And even then, the only reason Steam ended support for Windows 7 was because it’s an Electron (Chromium) application. They decided to upgrade their version of Electron, probably to take advantage of newer security fixes in Chromium, which forced them to drop Win7 support because Chromium already had ended support for it.
There’s a decent chance M$ continues supporting Win10 after “End of Life,” just like [ checks notes ] every single “mandatory” update they’ve ever attempted.
Already begun the switch to linux on smaller pcs. Moving to some larger ones this summer to verify initial impressions… big gaming pcs going in fall.
Well… BYE Felicia
