Microsoft is bringing annoying Windows 11 Start menu ads to Windows 10

Not much to be done with a work machine, but for personal use, I believe the more people moving away from Windows the better.

Lucky for me I only use my windows work laptop to remote into Linux.

I can’t stress strongly enough how badly I am opposed to ads.

100%. Every time consumers tolerate something, it will get worse. On the other hand, it seems so simple to tell people "just don't buy a product that does X", but in practice, it's almost impossible to get people to stop giving these companies money.

PopOS is pretty great. There is a polish to it that I haven't seen in some other distros. Which is why it remains on my main gaming rig even though I have considered distro hopping for a while now.

Can't you make an script and make it autoload on start?

Chicken and egg. Linux is roughly 4% of the OS space. If more people would get on board, it would become a better tool. I use both. Windows because I have to. Linux because I want to.

screen capture

OBS (same as is popular on Windows).

video editing, audio extraction and editing

I basically never do that sort of thing, but if I needed to I'd start out with Kdenlive and Audacity, respectively.

See also:

https://itsfoss.com/best-video-editing-software-linux/

https://itsfoss.com/best-audio-editors-linux/

disc imaging

For a task that basic, most of the time I just use dd.

photo editing

GIMP and/or Krita.

Was in the same place, got FOSS soft for almost everything so now I run Mint on my main PC and on my laptop too, with a little 100€ used think centre running photoshop (I'm starting to figure out krita/gimp but pixel editing is a bummer there IMO) and 3dsmax for when I need them.

Edit: no internet connection for that box ofc.

Yea, it’s definitely not for everyone yet. But the average user (who needs a browser, a file manager and maybe an office suite) has no reason to stay on windows besides the convenience of being installed already.

You know that you dont have to pay for a Windows license right? You can permanently activate it (and any version of office) with a script. I found some article a while ago talking about it, some official Microsoft tech support used it because they were frustrated with Windows, so it's legit

https://massgrave.dev/

I do computer repair/tech support for just a small business. I haven't used Windows on a a personal machine in a looong time, but that script helps me when I get stuck at work

You can mount and sync your OneDrive files with rclone, which I think is much nicer than OneDrive, but maybe not easy to set up if you're not comfortable with command line interfaces.

Yess yesssss let the linux flow throughhhh youuuuuuu. Manjaro XFCE here. Play with the distros in Oracle Virtual Machines and find the right one for you. Linux desktop is seriously worth the effort. Check out Yakuake as a Quake style drop down terminal to get to hacky stuff. Learn everything about Linux. It's fun!

if you don't feel like setting up a vm, use distrosea :] free website that sets it up for you in-browser

Yup, they already caught me once with that one when I was in a hurry and I had all these damn green check marks everywhere. I was so disappointed thought I had avirus. I will never use one drive just because of that.

And LTSC has a 10 year life cycle.

Already run it on my laptop, and used to dual boot. I'm just trying let proton mature as much as possible before migrating my desktop for good.

Followed by smug mentions of cheap OEM keys and massgrave repo. Yeah, that ain't gonna fly for work laptops, guys.

Obligatory PS mentioning that I do use linux everyday on my personal machine

You DO get a choice. You can shift to any other operating system in the world. I did go to Fedora with KDE.

I do, unfortunately there are no efficient alternatives.

I always love when people pretend to be mystified that someone has trouble running programs on Linux when I, a non Linux user, see plenty of examples of people having trouble getting programs to run on Linux scrolling through "Everything" on Lemmy

Cannot be done with Mint? I've OS hopped every few years - currently running Windows 11 at work and Mint at home. I much prefer the Mint install. That said, I'm a video producer - and video production just isn't there yet on Linux. CUDA's a pain to get working, proprietary codecs add steps, Davinci's linux support is more limited than it seems, KDenLive works in a pinch but lacks features, Adobe and Linux are like oil and water, there's no equivalent for After Effects... I don't doubt that there are workarounds for many of these issues. But the ROI's not there yet. I'd love to see a video production focused distro that really aimed for full production suite functionality. Especially since Hackintoshes are about to get even harder to build.

The way your comment reads, you've been using Windows 3.11 these past decades. 😂

Also, almost every older game, like Deus Ex or Giants: Citizen Kabuto, I can run separately under Wine. The only game that doesn't quite work is NOLF 1. No music. (I can't seem to get DirectMusic working properly in Wine yet).

Aside from pirating, if you got Windows with a new pc/laptop, then you paid for Windows in the price of the device.

Mint is great for beginners IMO

I mean, there's a LOT more to it than just, "a different way of clicking on things". Let's be honest and help define proper expectations. You will be messing around in the terminal a lot. Even for installing simple programs, you'll at minimum be copy-pasting a bunch of commands from the developer's website straight into the terminal to install most stuff. There are package managers, to help alleviate some of the pain, but there are multiple ecosystems and each one has it's own contributors, meaning that overall development and technical knowledge is gated behind silos.

I love Linux, but let's be honest, it's not exactly user-friendly.

I think it's now overstated how "different" Linux is. I switched to Mint about a year ago and there is basically zero learning curve right out the box.

This is the most sane run down I've seen on Lemmy in regards to Linux. Thank you for this.

uses busybox so I can um actually your um actually

lol... apparently 4chan has entered the chat.

I've gamed on Linux for the past 5 years. If you use Steam, most stuff works out of the box after you enable a single setting. Now that the linux gaming community is growing it's easier to find workarounds for the games that don't work. The only games that are hopelessly broken right now are games with intrusive anti-cheats that don't support Linux. You can head over to protondb.com and check compatibility status for your games, including workarounds when necessary.

If you don't use Steam, then I'm not sure. Last time I played non-Steam games there was more troubleshooting and tweaking required but it's been a couple of years and I don't know the current state. It's worth noting that Valve's compatibility layer, Proton, is open-source and based on other open-source projects. There's work currently being done to port the functionality outside of Steam. Hopefully, this will mean that in the future all launchers will behave similarly.

But that's just the software side of things. Don't forget to check how your hardware works on Linux as well.

Since Valve released the Steam Deck, which runs on Linux, there is an increasing number of games that are compatible. In some cases you can also emulate windows, or just keep it on your computer and use a dual boot system (even tho Microsoft messed up big time with this kind of installation recently)

somehow I guess it's still not common knowledge yet but basically everything that doesn't need a kernel anti cheat will work. or maybe not newer dotnet crap but usually those aren't games. mods and cheats are hit and miss and require some setup, but mostly work anyway. for most games protondb lists what works with and without tinkering but even some of the stuff listed as not working actually does in my experience. pcgamingwiki info is still usefull for a lot fixes to known problems on all platforms.

amd graphics should work out of the box but sometimes the newest cards have issues for a while after release. Any modern distro will not need extra setup as long as the maintainers aren't too far behind.

nvidia requires manual intervention for most distros but some have installers that default to nvidia graphics. expect some jank, there's a lot of weird shit that can go wrong with kernel modules not matching the kernel version among other things.

other hardware can also be problematic and people like myself who have been selecting hardware specifically for linux compatibility may give the idea that nothing is wrong.

I recommend nobara or bazzite for gaming setups that will require little to no addititonal work to play games and most hardware that is possible to work just working out of the box or with a guided config.

If you want to go with a non gaming oriented distro (trust me don't unless you do it on a spare comp or vm for experimentation), then debian, or mint debian, one of the easy arch installers even, but don't do ubuntu. Weird shit will inevitability happen eventually and the old guides and crap ai articles with outdated information from the mail order ubuntu cd days will make it way too confusing to fix unless you are a web search sorceror.

All I do is watch some vids and game. I have only come across one game I can't get to play and it's flight simulator x. If steam says it'll play on steam deck, you're 100% golden. If it says unsupported, do a quick web search for protondb and search the game there. I've played a few that steam said wouldn't work and they do. As far as how well they play, it's been awesome, no complaints. I'm a linux newbie and don't know shit and it's been painless. I did try mint and nobara, and had issues trying to get mint to play games, and nobara worked good but after a week I lost my sound and I liked the way the workspaces works much better with popOs

Only issue I've had is helldivers 2 being slightly finicky and needing to delete the config file occasionally. Otherwise 10/10

P r o t o n

I also only game on my home PC and I've been using it for over a year now with Linux. I play CS 2, WOWS and Battletech mainly but check protondb.com for your games. My kids are also using Linux and they also were able to play everything they wanted.

There are a few AAA games with cheat protection that won't work. Other than that: It's awesome and you feel the freedom instantly!

It's a complex issue and kind of depends on your games and your hardware and your software. In general, you can definitely count out major competitive multiplayer titles that rely on aggressive kernel-level anti-cheat software, since that is essentially spyware and it's incompatible with Linux. Furthermore, very new titles often pose problems, as the primary target audience is always Windows. Linux compatibility is seldom considered by big publishers, and as such the FOSS community has to pick up the slack. With the release of the Steam Deck, Valve released a custom version of Wine called Proton, which acts as a compatibility layer between Windows and Linux specifically for Steam Games, but even that kind of is hit and miss. There's a website called protondb that is trying to categorize game compatibility but even good rankings (gold / diamond) usually require some small amount of fiddling with settings.

Overall, if you want to have a single-click to launch games experience, you're sadly still bound to Windows most of the time. But if you have the patience to experiment and learn new things, there's way more tools and possibilities than ever before. Just be prepared to troubleshoot some things.

It depends on the games

Do you play older or newer games? Do you play competitively?

Either way you should checkout protondb

I don't think it's most yet, but it's improving fast thanks to the Valve Steam Deck. Bazzite is probably the distro to look at for a machine that's primarily for gaming; it's based on the Steam Deck OS, but works on more machines. There are some high-profile games like Fortnite that won't run on it, but a lot of stuff will, especially if it doesn't rely on any fancy anti-cheat stuff.

Pfblocking?

OpenShell is the best.

It's pretty insulting to anyone who's ACTUALLY been in an abusive relationship to claim that looking at an ad is the same thing as being beaten at night.

Fair point. I convincing the IT department at the past couple of jobs that I need it for productivity, and they can firewall it if it makes them feel better (I'll let them know run updates are available, and they can push the update).

While I appreciate the sentiment, I'm not walking on eggshells while using my own (or my company's) computer. If/when they'll break it, either the community will overcome, or I lose the tool. Until then, though, I'll keep using the tool that has proven benefits to the end users. I mean this will no disrespect to you at all, fuck Microsoft.

Or just use Hyper-V since it's natively available and one should refrain from touching Oracle with a ten-foot pole. I know it's just a means to an end but better to avoid bad vendors if at all possible.

linux ftw

Microsoft don't hold back from the ads and crapware in the Pro versions of Windows. The Enterprise versions tend to be where you get some control over it.

Remember when you payed for software and then it was yours forever?

Well, I may be a random idiot, but I'm not stupid enough to keep paying for something that doesnt work on not-windows.

So you keep feeling weirdly haughty about it, i guess, you clearly need it for some reason.