I’m likely going to because windows update is embarrassingly bad if you have 32gb as your goddamn boot drive.
Don’t and done. No problems, highly recommend it
OK, really good article and I like Libreoffice (although I prefer Only office) and Linux. I browse on it, game, watch videos, do pretty much everything. I am also a technical person, who can create a VM in 10 mins, add a required boot parameter, etc.
Now. I want to send this article to my colleague/friend who’s not technical at all. In the blog post I read
Start by testing Linux and LibreOffice on a second partition of your PC (for individuals)
“Second partition” literally means nothing to most people. I know: just learn, just read. But most people will not bother, or they will simply not understand the tutorials. That’s the unfortunate reality.
I think Linux and Libreoffice can become mainstream if a regular Joe/Jane can buy a laptop from Walmart with a distro and office apps pre-installed and use them like Microsoft Office. Before that time all this Linux and FLOSS stuff is limited to technical, or at least curious people willing to put some effort.
P.S. My relatives are on Linux and Onlyoffice, because I installed it for them. And it’s so much easier and more rare for me to manage and troubleshoot than Windows. But I cannot see them installing it by themselves.
Im seeing these posts twice a day at this point. So someone like myself who is totally ignorant on Linux, I have some questions if anyone can lend advice?
I’ve been on PC windows for over twenty years now. And I use it mostly for video software like davinci resolve. Adobe software workflow. Unreal engine. I use clients harddrives and often times my own for working off of. And often times will send those harddrives to other people and their computers to finish the work. I also occasional play games on steam and Xbox App.
With that said, is it even possible for me to switch over to Linux and keep using all the same software and workflow I have for high end video production workflow?
I mean, if whole EU countries can do it, so can you.
What?! I’m still working on my spreadsheet comparing 7 and 8!
OnlyOffice is way better than LibreOffice.
I’ve been a full time dev since 2012 and needed a Mac, I had barely used windows over that time but beforehand ran a PC service business.
Anyway, Ive been using Linux as a daily driver for the past 6 months for reasons.
… The other day I got a new cheap laptop I needed to setup for run a single application.
Holy fuck what a shitshow.
It took me 2 hours just to get to the desktop. Shit didn’t work, bullshit login screens, ads everywhere.
It was a massive pile of dog shit.
After battling to get the system setup for the rest of the day I gave up, chucked Fedora Kinoite On it… Took 30 minutes from creating boot media to getting a desktop going, chucked the app I needed to run in a Flatpack, chucked it on a USB, and it was up and running.
No bullshit.
Just works.
Truly the year of the Linux desktop.
I’m guessing the cheap laptop was running Windows? You didn’t mention, it sounds at first like you’re saying you were using Linux on it.
What ads were everywhere? Why did it “take 2 hours to get to the desktop” - you mean, that’s how long it took to install or something?
Sorry answered it elsewhere, yep windows 11.
The forced update took forever and failed and then it also fucked out with the Microsoft account. It was legit 2 hours from boot to seeing a desktop. I wanted to skip the updates and the Microsoft account.
The start menu is full of ads for software I don’t want. If I buy software off you, stop trying to upsell me.
I really need to stop putting it off and install Linux on my PC and laptops
I recently jumped on pure Mint after buying a new desktop PC with no OS pre-installed. Within a week I was dual booting it on my laptop too. It’s so much faster and efficient. Battery feels like it lasts 50% longer.
And the control is amazing.
I was very skeptical of Linux, as I had a shitty experience previously with OpenSUSE where nothing worked. Mint is the way to go tho, been so smooth.
I dual booth Win11 and Fedora Desk 42. It feels gross starting windows but there are 2, TWO! Apps that don’t have Linux version that I still need.
When Linux wizards figure out a way to use win apps without the intimidating complexity of installing Wine or virtualization, more people will switch.
intimidating complexity of installing Wine
I would give that a shot. The full guide is install ‘wine’ and ‘winetricks’ the same way you install any other software you use. Then in winetricks, select ‘default prefix’, then ‘run arbitrary executable’, and point it to your .exe installer. After that, you just open the program like any other program on your system.
You generally don’t need to do more than that and might let you forgo ever dual booting again.
I’m between living locations and can’t carry my desktop around.
So I grabbed an old laptop and put Linux mint on it. It’s been near perfect. Extremely smooth experience.
It detected my printer and auto installed. I installed steam and played Terraria without issue. Small performance problem but I don’t have a GPU. Even works good with my docking station.
My only complaint is the audio device doesn’t switch automatically when I dock/undock.
I’d recommend making a USB and boot into it for a test drive.
Awesome, thanks for the insight. I was actually looking at Linux Mint myself. I need around 4Gb on a USB to boot it, correct?
That might do it. I don’t own anything smaller than 16 GB sticks. I used Rufus on windows to make my stick.
Haven’t booted windows in over a month now. If I want to play pubg or bf1, thats about the only reason I need windows. And I do a lot of gaming, just not aaa multi-player. But I am enjoying computing again just like when I was younger and computers were interesting and fun and not corpo ad stations on your machine.
How many laptops do you own lol?
I end up with all the “broken” laptops my family replaces after they buy new ones.
I’ve got like 9 laptops. Active ones are my Linux one, work one (windows 11) and my wife’s school one (windows 11). We both have win 10 desktops still.
2, though they are both quite old
The end of windows 10 support is approaching. Windows 10 will go on for a while yet.
It’s not all quite as rosy.
Yes, Linux is much more capable now than it was 10 years ago and it’s much more capable of being used as a main system. I myself have been using Linux as my main system for a few years now.
But it’s also a fact that a lot of stuff might not work (even if it works for someone else) and that some things are still more difficult than they should be.
For example, on my laptop cannot wake from sleep since kernel 6.11. I have manually sourced a 6.10 from an older version of my distro and keep holding it back, so that I can use my laptop as a laptop. For someone without technical skill, this would mean that their laptop just can’t sleep any more. Hibernate also doesn’t work.
Another example is that LibreOffice still makes a lot of formatting mistakes when it has to open word documents. And sure, everyone could just switch to odf, but it’s not quite as easy to make everyone else switch to odf. It makes it really hard to use LibreOffice in any kind of professional environment. Wouldn’t want to make a powerpoint presentation that then looks like shit when it’s played on a different PC.
Lastly, Nvidia sucks, but it’s also close to the only option for laptops with dGPUs. When I look for laptops with dGPUs available in my area on a price comparison platform, I find 760 laptops with Nvidia GPUs and only 3 with AMD, all of which are priced at least €500 more than comparable Nvidia devices. So if you want to go for a gaming laptop, Nvidia is pretty much the only option, and under Linux it really sucks. Steam games generally work ok for me, but trying to use Heroic Launcher to play anything from my gigantic library of free Epic/Amazon/GoG games, about 10% of the games I tried actually work. And even with those that work, my laptop sometimes just decides that a slide show with 3 FPS is good enough. That stays even after reboots and resets, and after a few days it returns to normal. Only to go back to slideshow mode a few days later.
If you just use your laptop to run a browser, I can recommend Linux 100%.
If you want to do anything else and don’t have any technical skills and/or don’t want to spend hours fixing things that should just work, I can’t fully recommend it.
I read posts just like yours ten years ago.
I guess you aren’t wrong. There are a lot of advances but stability and small but really annoying bugs remain a huge pain point.
I am a developer and Linux is my native environment in production systems. I wanted to use Linux on my laptop but sleeping / waking up never worked well enough. It could not switch from integrated video card to a discrete one ending up always using the discrete one which drained the battery in 30 minutes. All in all, it was usable but the details didn’t work so I gave up. That was years ago and eversince no customer really allows Linux…
No thanks, I value my time.
Ironic
Can’t wait for the “The end of Windows 11 is approaching…” article in a few years. Keep me posted.
Windows 12, with AI even moreso integrated.
Nah, there’ll be a new boogeyman by then.
The big thing to consider is what software do you really NEED, what can change, and what can you do without. Then the change is easier.
Then there’s the learning curve of new software. Wheee
Also 0patch, which will continue to provide security patches for Windows 10 indefinitely.
