Jut put my Mother on mint. Her windows 10 pc is reaching EOS, and I finally convinced her that having to buy a new computer every several years is unacceptable.
Linux doesn’t run what I need, getting some form of LTSC is my only option.
You can get the LTSC ISOs directly from Microsoft, and activate with https://massgrave.dev/
Thanks for the link, that is where I will be going to do just that.
I would use Linux if I could but sadly I can’t.
or a distro using kde plasma.
I love this absolute fantasy Linux folk have come up with
Yep, people are so stubborn they would rather risk their entire online presence than learn that penguin hacker thingy with the white text. Also the Walter is wet
I do some e-wasting for a number of big companies and have piles of old laptops. I’ve taken to giving the laptops to people that need computers and the ones with Linux don’t taken. I literally can’t give away Linux computers. They can buy their own windows licenses.
Microsoft added a CoPilot icon to my Windows 10 Taskbar yesterday. It looks to me like they’re not going to take “no” for an answer.
They also added a “it’s time to upgrade to Windows 11” full screen message on my login screen (with the option to decline in tiny text).
That was my thoughts, too. So, now I’m running Mint on my gaming PC and the one hooked up in my living room for streaming. I tried Kubuntu, and liked it, but KDE Wayland was giving me issues. Installing a different desktop environment just introduced more problems, so I went with a different distro with the DE I wanted, which was Mint with Cinnamon. Now, life is good.
People will keep using Windows 10 even if Microsoft will not fix any vulnerability
What flavor do you recommend?
what are the opinions on Bazzite, Garuda, Trisquel? are these ideal for those coming from windows?
They’re certainly somewhat more exotic choices.
Bazzite is currently seeing a hype wave, because it’s strongly inspired by what the Steam Deck does. But that also means, it’s somewhat built like an OS for a console (or in fact like Android), in that it’s a transactional/atomic distribution.
This means, you can’t easily make changes to the OS itself, only to the applications you install and of course your personal files.
It certainly makes it more difficult to break, but it’s still a relatively new thing in the Linux world and particularly you might still run into some limitations when trying to use it as a full-fledged desktop (depending on what you’re looking to do with your PC).Garuda Linux is based on Arch Linux, which is what we refer to as “bleeding edge” (as opposed to “cutting edge”), because you get the newest version of all the software on your PC just a few days after it got released by the respective developers. Sometimes, those newest versions will have bugs.
You’ll find folks who’ll tell you they’ve been running Arch since they were two years old and never had a problem, but ultimately, why risk it?And yeah, Trisquel is also getting basically a hard no from me. It’s a distribution for purists. For people who want nothing to do with the corporate world, who’d rather not be able to do something than rely on proprietary software.
If you’re coming from Windows, the chances of you even really knowing what that means are basically non-existent, so I doubt it’s what you want…on desktop, i’m coming with windows, but i do have good relations with the linux kernel, as i am an android custom rom user for 2 years now, i’ve been on PerryRice kernel, now on Helios. And there are 114 user apps on my phone, and 32 are closed source, so that means 72% of my android is open-source. And my phone is also rooted and has a custom recovery installed. I use my phone for everything, Windows only for gaming and homework. I already daily-driven Tumbleweed in Virtualbox for a little bit more than one week and it was pretty good, i could handle it mostly, despite many people saying it is hard to use for a beginner. But i’m still very new to linux and if something seriously breaks, i doubt i could fix it by myself, so it would be good if the desktop enviroment didn’t delete itself, the boot won’t corrupt, and no update would brick my system (ik how to solve bricking on android, but desktop is an another story). So out of Bazzite and Garuda, which is more suitable for me?
Oof, so I came to Linux also with a history of Android Custom ROMs. And well, I had quite a bit of frustration, because my phone was so much more capable and customizable than my (Windows) desktop.
In that regard, Linux has been an absolute fucking delight. And it kind of took Android’s place, in that I now prefer tinkering with my desktop and am frustrated with how incapable Android is.If that sounds like something you’d be interested in, I have one recommendation to make:
You want something with KDE Plasma as the desktop environment. It’s extremely customizable, extremely feature-rich. Other desktops, as well as more minimal GUIs (“window managers”), can be fun, too, but for starting out, I would recommend KDE.If your Tumbleweed looked like this, that was KDE:
Well, kind of the default for both Bazzite and Garuda is KDE, so this doesn’t tell you terribly much. 😅
But I’m coming at it in this roundabout way to tell you that I’m on Tumbleweed and well, therefore I’m probably biased, but I don’t really see why you’re looking for something else, if you liked Tumbleweed.openSUSE has the best implementation of KDE (by some fine details, but still). It’s got a really nice snapshotting system (btrfs for the filesystem + Snapper).
Garuda seems to have adopted that from openSUSE, although I don’t know, if it’s quite as fully integrated in Garuda.Those snapshots will save you, if your system should ever break.
Basically, if your filesystem and bootloader are still intact, there’s a pretty easy way to rollback: https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/leap/reference/html/book-reference/cha-snapper.html#sec-snapper-snapshot-boot (should work the same on Garuda)But yeah, I would kind of recommend against Bazzite due to it being a relatively new concept (with the caveat that I haven’t dabbled around with it yet; I simply wouldn’t know, if it’s actually already very mature).
I should also say that I actually lied, I’m not on Tumbleweed, but rather Slowroll, which is a semi-official flavor of openSUSE. It’s essentially Tumbleweed, but you get one big upgrade once per month and only security updates in between. While the snapshots can easily rollback the breakages, eventually I got mildly annoyed at having to do so once or twice per year on Tumbleweed, when a bad update made it through, so I’m trying out Slowroll. Might be an option for you, too.
And finally, if you feel like I’m coddling you a lot less in this comment than in the last: Yep.
Since you’re dicking around with Android Custom ROMs, you’ll be fine, no matter what you choose. I mean, Linux will still be a humbling experience, because it has no qualms showing you how much you don’t yet know about computers, but it also loves to teach you. The most important ‘skill’ is having fun when tinkering with technology, which you’ve got.A lot of the newbie recommendations, and that people tell you Tumbleweed is hard to use, are like that, because we just don’t know who’s asking these questions. Some people want to get away from Windows, but have no interest in learning. And then, yeah, I’ll also sometimes recommend Linux Mint, because its keyboard shortcuts are exactly like Windows, even though it actively got in the way of my desire to tinker, when I initially switched to it…
yes, i had the same desktop, just different stock background. My only problem with kde is that even at 1920x1080 buttons are irrealistically small. And i plan to use a linux distro on 2k display, maybe even 4k. Propably there is a way to make them bigger but idk. And i’m considering Garuda, or maybe Bazzite as a secondary option, because these are preconfigured for gaming out of the box and i really don’t know what to tweak on a vanilla distro to make it game-ready. And Garuda is also very loud about their btrfs implementation with zstd backups (ik a lot about compression algorythms, can even use some of them on paper to manually compress data like a lunatic, and zstd is a very decent algorythm, especially if we measure compression/time ratio). Slowroll actually sounds good because my custom rom is set to major releases every second week (maintainer is Tejas Singh, you propably heard about him, he is a prominent figure in the custom rom genre). And on linux, i should be able to edit custom shortcuts, macros and stuff, right? Also, i tried Tumbleweed in vm for a week and it had a little learning curve but i took it very well, only had one issue when i couldn’t install anything because the same package conflicted with an another from a different repo and stuff, but a simple reboot solved it.
Bazzite is probably fine
the first two can be, but i don’t recommend trisquel to those coming from windows
is it hard? or why?
it’s not hard, but it only specifically consists of free software. that can be confusing and some hardware won’t work
some hardware
You mean nvidia stuff or could be others? there are open-source alternatives for everything that can be considered general use
including, but not limited to nvidia. network cards might be another issue. yes i know that there are open source alternatives and i most definitely choose foss where i can but people that just came from windows aren’t likely to care.
i saw on a hardware website that only a select few of devices run well with these distros. What about Peppermint? i heard that is relatively privacy-oriented but doesn’t extend this philosophy on drivers, and instead tries to provide a lightweight, bloat-free webapp-based system. How good is it?
peppermint is fine, you can use it
God I hope there will be a good enough solution for professional audio stuff when Win 10 is done. This and when will the new proper CAD software.
It sucks ass, but I don’t see how one will be able to change to Linux in those spaces on a professional level. All my private stuff is on Linux systems, though.
If you have the budget Siemens NX CAD CAM FEA runs on Linux (Redhat and SUSE, also works on OpenSUSE). However the GUI version is NX 12 or prior releases, newer versions are headless…maybe that will change with Linux Desktop gaining percentage steadily
Try downloading and installing Tiny11.
This sounds good, thank you for the hint. Does this also prevent all ai bullshit and recall and stuff?
Yes and yes. It also bypasses the windows login.
Whatever version of Windows that allows group policy changes will let you turn off all the annoying stuff, that’d probably be your best bet for now.
I’m currently using Ardour on Arch with some packages from the pro-audio group, but I wouldn’t exactly call my setup “professional”
praying for valorant to get a mac port before they kill win10. the second we get that port, i am nuking windows from my drive
I don’t think they are going to support Mac. If you want to play Valorant you need to have Windows on bare metal. The company ships mandatory malware and there is nothing you can do.
I’ll go Linux when I don’t need any more windows based software, and there’s been almost 0 progress made in that sector in the last 5 years.
Between games that don’t run on Linux (Apex, CoD, any other shooter) and professional tools such as Lightroom and photoshop, there’s no way to switch to Linux without needing to boot back to windows multiple times per day.
I guess it depends on your use case. I haven’t owned a Windows PC since 2016. Linux all the way for me. The games I play run on it, the applications I need run on it, and it works well for me without tinkering getting in the way. I can even use it for work these days and I have far less VPN flakiness than both Windows and Mac colleagues.
For my use case the year of the Linux desktop is here, and has been for a while.
The average user cares less about their OS being EoL, than that they have to learn a whole new OS that works “completely” different to what they are used to.
This just objectively isn’t true. The XP EOL date actually forced users hands. There WAS refresh cycle in 2014, the only reason it didn’t turn in to the uprising it is seemingly turned into, is because Microsoft kinda got lucky, and this refresh cycle purged Pentim 4-s and Celeron M-s and Pentium D-s, and old Athlons, all of which were ewaste from new.
I’m a Linux noob so I put Mint on my PC. I like it a lot, very smooth and clean looking.
i have been using mint (cinnamon) too for like a year and a half. every now and then i try another distro and a few more, but i always land back where i started. it even looks pretty with the “sweet dark v40” gtk theme.
Remember when Windows XP reached EoL the first time in 2009 and people abandoned it? Yeah, me neither, but I remember Microsoft groaning and extending some support for a few more years, until the final EoL in 2014. I expect the same to happen to 10.
Maybe they’ll drop the fake requirements from 11 so people can actually upgrade to 11 from 10.
Huh, and i just installed it on my secondary computer (laptop). Maybe i should setup a dual boot on my main one soon and disable network communications in the windows partition, and then migrate ny files slowly until i can confidently get rid of that partition.
Mount the partition in Linux and migrate it all?
I personally thought I’d miss parts of windows, but the consistent bombardment of bing search results when I wanted to search my computer for a filename, application or just fucking anything drove me to curbstomp all my windows installs.
That and the ever changing settings menus, having to delve through shit sandwiches to end up in an antiquated but familiar window to change a setting was a fucking nightmare.
Honestly, if there was a bit more KISS happening within windows I’d probably have not moved OS - but Microsoft’s never ending desire to change what really worked for so many years drove me to where I am.
You do you, I’m not here to convince anyone to migrate OS, but having some level of semblance and control - for me is such a relief. Probably some of the ASD + ADHD coming through but I’m sure there are many typical folks that feel the same way.
