This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I always “Recall” how shitty windows is, whenever I see the word mentioned.
if you don't know how, ask, Lemmy is covered in Linux users
I'm building a new gaming PC and it's going to be a Linux build and if it doesn't work the way you guys keep insisting it will, I swear to God.
My last experience with Linux was with Ubuntu about 10 years ago and I can't say it was a particularly great experience I'm hoping that in the last decade it's improved its user experience.
I was in a similar boat and have found modern Linux to be somewhere between Windows XP and Windows 10 in terms of convenience and having it "just work". However, I reckon I've spent less time troubleshooting than I would spend raging at the bullshit Microsoft keeps trying to shove down your throat in Windows. On balance I'm counting it as a win, and I suspect you will too.
Please update this if you fun into the usual brick wall of hand modifying config files or self-compiling some obscure git pull just to make basic things like audio and network work.
Just keep in mind that there are some very different options within the Linux world and different people here will push you towards different options. The two most common and most different options are Bazzite and Mint.
While both of them can definitely work well, in my experience Mint still leaves a lot of new users unsatisfied with it. I'm yet to see any windows user complain about Bazzite, so that's my recommendation.
Either way if you try one and it doesn't live up to your expectations, there's still a chance the other might.
I'm migrating to Linux Mint, 99% of steam games work as well as on windows. Those who don't are mostly multiplayer games that insist to have some shitty kernel anticheat.
I'll still keep windows on dual boot when I need it, though.
My last experience with Linux was with Ubuntu about 10 years
Dont forget to put on a suit and say thank you once you try a modern Linux distro
AMD or NVidia?
Most games that I play work well on Linux with AMD. Most who have problems seem to have Nvidia. Anti-cheat stuff can be an exception though so best to ensure what you enjoy works.
If you can check hardware compatibility before hand, it helps. An up to date kernel like Fedora, OpenSuse TW or Arch can help. Wine recommends up to date kernel.
All of my devices except my work one are now Linux.
I have an old surface go 2 that good a massive new lease on life from using arch plasma. Double the battery life and everything. It could no longer get updates from MS because there was no longer enough space on the main drive to download and install the next update.
Then I have an old retro gaming pc that used to be for XP gaming but I ended up sticking bazzite on it for a test and it's stayed that way and because of that when I built my girlfriend's latest PC we decided to go bazzite desktop for her. And after getting past a few growing pains at the beginning that made it look like we made the wrong decision (due to an old 10xx gtx gpu - now on 3050) she's been enjoying it and now it's just standard.
Then I have my proper gaming PC that I use like a console so I put bazzite-deck on it as soon as I got an AMD card. And I've never felt better. HTPC console like gaming on windows was a fucking arse-on, even with steam big picture mode, because it doesn't get all of the cool bells and whistles that let you control basic system settings right from steam like you can on steam os and bazzite deck.
For work I've started moving away from visual studio to VS Code (i know it's still MS but I do C# .NET work and rider is too expensive, I don't want a subscription for an IDE) to allow me to easily transition to fully working on Linux if the opportunity ever arises. Whether it be with my current employer and me convincing them to let me to install Linux on my laptop or with a future company. We'll see which comes first ;)
Now it's time to get and decouple from Google. Currently figuring out with android auto maps app I want (waze won't run for some reason, my current winner at the moment is tom tom amigo). Then it's on to getting a password manager, then a new browser (preferably way more lightweight than chrome) and potentially a Google pay replacement(?).
Any suggestions and opinions from anyone here - even though this is tangentially off topic - would be greatly appreciated.
VS Code (i know it's still MS but I do C# .NET work and rider is too expensive, I don't want a subscription for an IDE)
VSCodium is a thing too if you want to un-Microsoft even further.
I use it for C# development on Linux and it works well.
getting a password manager
Bitwarden and Keepass are usually the go tos, depending on your use case.
then a new browser
Firefox or if you want to decouple from Mozilla as well, Librewolf works pretty well.
potentially a Google pay replacement
I'm not aware of any open Google Pay replacements other than taking a card with you.
As soon as you get rid of Google on your phone, you get rid of Google Pay.
I used vscodium for a bit but their latest C# Dev kit is locked to VS Code proper :(
I even made a cool bash script that would download and install ms vs store extensions and all of their dependencies before hitting this roadblock (to get the ones not available on open vsx).
Thanks for the password manager suggestions, I'll look into them when I get a chance.
I've been looking into firefox forks too.
I would like to keep contactless via my phone as I don't ever really carry my wallet with me anymore these days so maybe Google pay will have to stay. Bit annoying that it won't be able to be used on whatever browser I end up going with though :(
So reading more into it, it's (currently) only on the bogus copilot+ PCs they were peddling? I'm happily on bazzite, but this is good news for my stubborn mates that haven't touched copilot+ shit.
Oh give it time it will appear after an update on everything else, "accidentally".
Yeah. My entire windows machine is locked down specifically to combat the copilot ms365 plague. I'm also using Bazzite and generally loving it. But I have a work machine for work things and some of my programs require windows to work.
This comment is critical of Microsoft because the company name was mentioned in the article.
Naive
Would be interesting to see how microsoft kills windows in the long term and then be shocked as to how this happened
Kind of like how they fucked up and let zoom become the pandemic program everyone used despite skype being so established it had already become a verb like google? M$ really racking up those wins recently
Zoom was so bad, too. It was so unreliable, it was missing basic features, the UI was unfriendly.
They've improved on each of these things slightly since then.
But it's a testament to how bad Skype was that Zoom was found to be preferable.
Zoom was already everywhere in the business world before the pandemic.
Seems like Skype was only for personal users who were not very techy and wanted to make free calls overseas.
laughs in Linux
There's nothing to laugh about. The maniacally evil thing about recall is, that it doesn't matter what you do to keep your devices clean. If you interact with someone who doesn't keep his devices clean, which is 100% of us, you're on recall
Good thing I have no friends to interact with then! Take that, Microsoft!
