As all the cool kids keep saying, now is a great time to try out Linux.
No, I’m not recommending a distro for you, that is what DuckDuckGo is for.
Ubuntu is actually falling down the ad hole lately. It’s not great, even if you leave out the technical issues that the distribution leans into these day (snaps, amongst other things)
does kubuntu have the same issues? kinda want to go for a debian or ubuntu based kde distro and kubuntu is always highly recommended.
Can you run windows games on linux without it being resource intensive like using a vm or something?
Gaming in Linux on a windows VM isn’t viable for most systems. Most games run really well through proton with little to no effort. Some even run better on Linux than on windows. You just can’t play a lot of the most popular competitive online games because it flags their anti cheat.
Running software designed and compiled only for XYZ system is always going to incur overhead when translating or emulating to ABC system.
Game authors and publishers who only build for Windows are giving users a big middle finger and essentially saying “You must suffer through Windows in order to enjoy our product hassle-free lol”.
What worked for me (which may or may not work for others) was to wean myself away, at first with only playing games that were built natively for linux.
Then moving the line in the sand to only DRM-free native linux builds.
Then advancing to only open source games.
These days, I just don’t even play games and I find that it really frees up what kinds of things I want to do on my computers, such as daily driving exotic CPU architectures (and also I have so much more free time for actual meaningful pursuits like learning new skills).
Many distros nowadays have decent support forngaming accessories and a mix of Lutris and Steam/Proton have given me a near seemless experience on Linux. Smooth enough for my partner to hop ship to Bazzite for their ROG Ally.
Sometimes there are small quirks, like controllers on Bazzite just work™ but on Vanilla OS 2 my xbox controller wouldn’t be recognized by Steam or games wirelessly (wired worked) but my DS5 controller worked flawlessly (including the trackpad that I never got to work on Windows).
Most of the Steam library will work well and ProtonDB is a great resource for compatibility. Furthermore there are Decky plugins for setups like Bazzite and Chimera that embed the ProtonDB rating into the Steam game page.
Actually to find a good distro and instructions on how to install them i recommend using an ai chatbot.
Majority of people have never created a bootable media but its easy enough ai can guide them step by step.
Or just use one of the hundreds of guides the AI was trained on.
Eh, just look up a reputable YouTube channel and guide. Chatbots can randomly make dumb mistakes that a total newbie won’t recognize, potentially causing them a lot of headache.
And no, I’m not one of those diehard anti-AI people. My work has its own custom GPT model and I utilize it almost daily for menial tasks. But even having it generate script boilerplate and whatnot, I sometimes notice it writing stuff that won’t work and/or does it in a really verbose/weird way.
You cant ask a youtube channel what distro best suit your specific usecase.
Also realistically no one wants to sit trough a video to check out a strangers recommendation for linux.
I do get that people are worried about the incompetence of AI but this topic and procedure is so bog standard i have more faith in chatgpt doing it then a human.
If you dont believe me, try it.
Ask chatgpt/claude/gemini “How to make a bootable linux media from windows” you will have to spend a long time trying before you find it fails on something this boilerplate.
I dislike AI but I think you’re unfairly downvoted. I find it helpful for ensuring I’m taking care of necessary steps in a common, low-stakes procedure. It’s useful to generate sequences of terminal commands as well, though it’s important to check and understand what you’re doing.
People are right to be worried and skeptical about AI
I honestly have gotten to hate how incompetent it often is because i do regularly try to squeeze something actual intelligent from it.
But other then that its like you said. Its very good for Low stake, common, boilerplate procedures and providing clear personalized instructions for non-techies. (and forgetful nerds).
Credit where credit is due & can’t argue with results.
I once ran the windows Troubleshooter to get an old scanner working, and the final page told me to but a new scanner!
I plugged it in to a mini PC I use as a backup server and the scanner worked fine with Linux.
And another recommendation issue: I noticed that my Windows laptop has a “reduce your carbon footprint” settings section that tells me to reduce power settings, screen brightness etc. but it’s completely lacking a “stop giving me AI search results in Bing” section.
Switching from Windows to Linux on my Framework laptop makes my battery last 2-3 times as long. They should just have a switch to Linux recommendation to reduce your carbon footprint.
Are you using a framework 13? While I find the battery life to be usable, if it’s that much worse on Windows I’m not sure I would have gotten a framework if I used windows lol.
Yeah. 11th gen Framework 13, so one of the first ones. Since I got it I had to use Windows exclusively because of some client work, and battery life was pitiful. 2-3 hours perhaps? Once that project finished I swapped out the SSD and put on Ubuntu with KDE. I was expecting the batter life to be worse, but it is demonstrably better. I now get more like 6 hours, albeit with my power plan on efficiency.
Win11 also says that showing seconds in the taskbar “reduces battery life”/“increases power consumption”
While it sounds ridiculous, there is a reasoning for this even nowadays:
Any periodic activity with a rate faster than one minute incurs the scrutiny of the Windows performance team, because periodic activity prevents the CPU from entering a low-power state. Updating the seconds in the taskbar clock is not essential to the user interface, unlike telling the user where their typing is going to go, or making sure a video plays smoothly. And the recommendation is that inessential periodic timers have a minimum period of one minute, and they should enable timer coalescing to minimize system wake-ups.
Found 1 test that seems to confirm battery life is slightly worse (2%) with seconds enabled. But this is true only when nothing is going on on screen. If you would actually work on PC, I imagine difference would be practically nonexistent.
All that said, I use seconds on my private and work PC. Was pissed when MS initially removed this as an option.
The moment I heard about the option was the moment I literally searched on how to enable/install this single KB-Update just so I can use it :P
Regarding the battery: That would be like leaving the desktop on at all times and just doing something else. This could be appropriate for an e-ink display. Maybe a PC should embed what form-factor it is in the bios like android phones do (e.g. phone, tablet, phablet) and the display report what type of panel it is (e.g. e-ink, TN, IPS, VA, QLED/OLED hybrid).
You can actually see those specs with AIDA64 on a phone. Very neat
The only time that would make a difference is if you’re staring at a blank page and the only thing causing the screen to update is the clock. Theoretically the GPU could go completely to sleep, except for having to draw the updated clock every second.
But there’s a reason battery life is commonly measured as “hours of video playback”. If the laptop’s not actually doing anything you may as well turn it off and get weeks of battery life.
Big company recommends users turn functional hardware into e-waste so they can boost quarterly profits.
when microsoft feels threatened by the recycling community being noticed, they add more technical constraints. Chromebooks are the gold standard for an intentionally non recyclable machine, neck and neck with apple.
Yes, and they’re encouraging people to throw it out. At least some users think to sell on the secondary market, but third party buyers can only get so much out of EOL Windows machines and there are only so many linux users with an interest in buying up old hardware.
I myself have a couple of used laptops, but don’t need any more hardware for a while, so it’s not like I’m able to buy up any. I fear much of it will rot in a landfill.
Microsoft recommends you remain ignorant about how awesome Linux is.
Linux sounds good but I never see it discussed on this website. How am I suppose to use Arch if nobody else does?
If only someone was here to tell me something by the way, it arches my back not knowing.
Ppl that still use Windows even after all this shit has been rammed down their throats will not have a good time on Linux. You still need to be able to do basic trouble shooting. I installed win 11 a few months back and it took me three tries on installation to get all the garbage out of it.
I think the best bet is an entirely new system from the ground up that has an open architecture that every company can equally implement that from the ground up and is as simple as possible. Like the computers we had in the 80s, but with better graphics. You want to play a game, you boot into it and it’s the only thing running. No anti cheat needed.
I think the best bet is an entirely new system from the ground up that has an open architecture that every company can equally implement that from the ground up and is as simple as possible.
This keeps getting said by people who don’t understand operating systems. Even if you build something from the ground up, you still end up with an operating system very much like Linux and Windows. The choices that were made for each OS were not random. The principles of I/O, user input, graphics display, filesystems, etc, are more or less universal concepts across all OSes.
What you will accomplish is making an OS that no one will use. Linux, Windows, and macOS already fill every market that can be filled. Microsoft tried to become a third player in the mobile market and their product died pretty quickly.
Google has been trying to build Fuschia into a new OS and they’ve asked back their ambitions (from what I recall reading).
… And FreeBSD! Hardware support is rather fine except for wifi, and that can be set up using wifibox packages (technically it’s running a lean Linux VM with wi-fi passthrough, but by today’s measure the footprint is negligible).
So clean, orderly and patient.
I can’t use facts and logic on what is optimized for what, but it feels more responsive than Linux too, with the same desktop setup. I guess Linux with a different scheduler would solve that.
Username doesn’t check out. Angry alright, but nothing autistic here, just your average boomer-level rage.
“and OneDrive”. Yes, it is essential to have OneDrive.
