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Joining Club Penguin
2 months ago
General
Hello!
Well I have been a Windows user my entire life. Just always was the most comfortable option, and comfort is a very strong motivator for me to not make any changes to my processes. But you can only pile so many annoyances onto the other side of those scales before they do tip over. I migrated my laptop over to Mint Xfce last week and my Desktop to Bazzite today. For the time being, I am still keeping a Windows partition on both of the machines just in case, but I ultimately want to get rid of that malware in due time.
I am certainly not a tech expert, probably more of a slightly advanced computer user. But it really wasn't hard to find the right tutorials for the installation, and despite the OS having a reputation for being complicated, the modern versions really aren't. At least not for the bread-and-butter everyday tasks that are about 99% of what I use my computer for. So if you're currently on the fence about switching, here's my gentle little nudge for you.
Also, regarding my laptop, this thing is old! I bought it second hand from a co-worker and it was slowing down for even the most mundane tasks. I was only ever planing on using it for writing or surfing while lounging on the sofa or in bed, but even that was slow to the point of frustration. But now suddenly, with a lightweight OS running on it, it's suddenly super fast and responsive. Still won't use this thing for gaming, but writing stories on it is suddenly fun now! I was about to just trash the thing cause it couldn't even keep up with basic tasks as it was...
I am going to explore more of this now! I love discovering new tech toys <3
Well I have been a Windows user my entire life. Just always was the most comfortable option, and comfort is a very strong motivator for me to not make any changes to my processes. But you can only pile so many annoyances onto the other side of those scales before they do tip over. I migrated my laptop over to Mint Xfce last week and my Desktop to Bazzite today. For the time being, I am still keeping a Windows partition on both of the machines just in case, but I ultimately want to get rid of that malware in due time.
I am certainly not a tech expert, probably more of a slightly advanced computer user. But it really wasn't hard to find the right tutorials for the installation, and despite the OS having a reputation for being complicated, the modern versions really aren't. At least not for the bread-and-butter everyday tasks that are about 99% of what I use my computer for. So if you're currently on the fence about switching, here's my gentle little nudge for you.
Also, regarding my laptop, this thing is old! I bought it second hand from a co-worker and it was slowing down for even the most mundane tasks. I was only ever planing on using it for writing or surfing while lounging on the sofa or in bed, but even that was slow to the point of frustration. But now suddenly, with a lightweight OS running on it, it's suddenly super fast and responsive. Still won't use this thing for gaming, but writing stories on it is suddenly fun now! I was about to just trash the thing cause it couldn't even keep up with basic tasks as it was...
I am going to explore more of this now! I love discovering new tech toys <3
People have perfectly good hardware, but Microslop makes Windows the 4000kg elephant it is, making your computer feel terrible!
I've had Arch Linux running on my laptop for almost a year now (10 months), and every time I use the machine, I have to remind myself it's normal that the fan doesn't spin if the CPU's under 44C, which somehow, it can maintain that low temp while chatting on Discord, x3
This thing is perfectly good and usable now! Not a powerhouse of course, but it fulfills it's purpose and then some! What the fuck was it even doing while doing nothing under Windows!?
You know, Windows things :3
Just three years prior I had tried to do the same, and with the same machine, but failed at the nVidia drivers with seemingly no way to proceed. Last year everything Just Work[ed](TM).
It is time.
... I was angry at Windows 3.11, at Windows 95, at ME, XP (before SP2), 7, 10 and I always put up with them. But hacking Windows 7 and 10 until they were and stayed comfortable to use was, up to that point, the worst exertion a Windows had ever asked of me and I realised I would never be able to reproduce this particular installation on a different machine...
Well, and then Windows 11 arrived... - somewhere along the way, setting up even non-Ubuntu Linux from scratch had actually become faster and easier. Even though I must admit selecting a nice GUI frontend has been surprisingly hard. At least I can.
That was my biggest reason for switching too. More and more Windows just feels like you constantly have to fight your own system in order to somehow keep it at bay. It demands constant vigilance to not accidentally walk into one of the traps the system sets for you, or to stay on top of re-disenabling the latest privacy violation feature they snuck in under the hood. I already have to have my guard up for anything I find on the internet, I don't want to have to deal with having to mistrusting my own machine as well.
I know it was not just mine, where every couple of months the WMI event system would become corrupted and spew errors from nowhere into the logs, which would just as miraculously disappear when rebuilding the whole thing... until a few months later.
The CompatTelRunner would periodically crawl every single .exe and .dll on all the disks. It is supposed to manage a database and not re-read the whole thing, but I never ever saw that working.
More and more services are set to run automatically at 01.00 am or 03.00 am and to be automatically re-run if the time slot is missed... so everything tries to run at once, when turning on the computer in normal daylight.
Windows Defender started out as a reasonable anti-virus system with (like most of its competitors) in the beginning negigible performance impact.
Well, I can only say, it caught up! Had to eventually - not in the beginning, but years after switching to it - exclude e.g. programming directories for my IDEs to not lag horribly.
At some point in the Windows 7 lifecycle they did something that made C-style file access horribly much slower than it used to be. E.g. git for Windows and Subversion both dropped in disk access performance really hard, for no discernable reason. They are still slower than they used to be.
(Namely, when first starting out with git, I was amazed how it could operate on seemingly arbitrarily large repositories at super-human speed, whereas svn needed a couple of seconds. Nowadays, even on almost empty repositories, git is the one taking seconds and svn may need several tens of them.)
And so on and so on and so on. Like so many other people, I can only assent: Windows XP (well, the latter half of it) was the high peak, until which things actually did seem to improve at large. Since then, the trend goes only downwards.
Quite a few nice features actually were released after it! - But those only seem to rot away faster and faster.
E.g. the Photos application was and is bad for viewing images, but it used to be a decent budget diashow composer. Nowadays we need the Legacy Photos application for that, because the up-to-date thingy lost this one thing it did better than the preceeding image viewer.
The application model itself is a good example in itself: When I first read about that, I was elated. Tiny, single-purpose programs that can be installed and removed on a whim? Yes, please! ... But now most of these "apps" start slower than most traditional programs and most of them cannot be removed without an administrator console - only to respawn anyway at the next Windows update. Like in particular the Photos app, most also have features all over the place, whereas they generally underperform in their advertised core functionality, compared to software their elder by decades.
... Ah, but I am rambling! I better stop now.
I won't say I don't have any ridiculous shell scripts for minor gripes and automatic nonsense, or never deleted my graphics drivers and had to fix them on a black screen via commands in blocky white text BUT I do like to use my computer "in the normal way" at a surface level 99% of the time. If you ever have a question or want a tip about changing weird, small things that nobody else has fixed because nobody else thought it was a problem, send me a Note! I've made some admittedly insane edits to get my computers, MM-MM, just right.
But yeah, I mostly just do "normal" stuff on my PC, and for all of those things there seem to be more than reasonable, freeware, linux-compatible solutions, ready-made and easily available. I don't usually tinker too deeply with stuff like this. And hey, I was surprised to see how well Linux seems to be accommodating of us casual users nowadays.
Now though? Every update Windows gets a bit worse. I even shelled out for the extended updates for Win10 to avoid upgrading to 11. This post is definitely making me reconsider. I have a laptop I can experiment with...
But yeah, if you already have a laptop that's suitable for experimenting, I'd say give it a go. I was pleasently surprised by how seamless the learning curve was once I was done with the installation. Modern Linux distros seem to come with a lot of very easy in-built features already.
- If you do not like WYSIWYG and its assorted issues: I used TeXStudio on Windows and also use TeXStudio on Arch now.
On Windows I used MikTex as the backend and on Arch texlive, for basically zero changes in behaviour.
Other stuff, in no particular order:
- Discord, Telegram, TeamSpeak have Linux versions at least in some distributions.
- KeePass 2 has a Linux version at least for Arch.
- GIMP, Thunderbird, VLC are native Linux programs to begin with.
- Steam has a Linux version, GoG Galaxy runs... acceptable... in umu-launcher.
(umu-launcher is meant to run games, but can actually run many other Windows programs as well!)
- (If that is something you are interested in) Buttplug.io Intiface has to be built from source, but works fine.
- Everything JetBrains has a Linux version.
- Everything Java will most likely work out-of-the-box.
- Everything .NET will most likely work out-of-the-box, if it is neither too new (post .NET 4.6) nor too old (pre .NET 8).
- Everyything Python will most likely work out-of-the-box.
Personally, I use CLI tools a lot, and this is more comfortable in all the common Linux shells than it would be in Windows (unless you run e.g. Bash under Windows, which you can do). cat, grep, less, nano, sed are probably the ones I use the most.
iwctl for WLAN (probably not relevant, if you are not also on Arch - most distributions go with a heavier solution like NetworkManager, which has a GUI).
As for other apps, many distros come with an in-built "App Store" (for freeware programs, you don't actually have to pay money in there) that gives you suggestions for what you may need and let's you install them seamlessly. Most apps are stuff I've been using for years in wondows already, but they work under Linux as well. Like Firefox, Notepad++ and Steam. I'm afraid I haven't gotten much further yet. I only installed it on my main PC today and am still very much exploring things myself.
Sounds like Zsar has a lot of ideas though, I think they have a lot more experience than I do x3
I never had anything I couldn't do without that would keep me on Windows and so happy with my decision.
Hope things work out for you.
Edit: Whoops, accidentaly posted this commetn twice. Ignore the hidden one below, that was me messing up!
To be fair, none of that applies to me as a private person, at least not with consequences that severe. But damn, do I certainly want no part in this anymore!
Some of it has been incremental stuff over years. Right back around 2010 Microsoft changed the options for telemetry collection - removing the option to turn it off entirely. The only options were 'full' or 'basic.' There was some anger at the time, but not that much because telemetry isn't that intrusive. We can see now it was Microsoft testing public acceptance, because it's just gotten worse year-by-year since then.
It's lots of little things, and a few big ones. The manipulative, dark-pattern interfaces. The inability to say no. My own desktop, for example - it's a Win 11 which was updated from 10, so it isn't logged in to a MS account. Every few boots it will interrupt my login with a full-screen dialog warning that my data is at risk because I have not set up backup with a Microsoft account. There is an option to ignore this - but it's a box deliberately made small and in a color that doesn't stand out, while the box to set up an account is larger and in high contrast blue. And that option isn't "no," it's "Ask again later."
I can only do that much because this is an upgraded OS - a fresh install, or a new computer, is mandatory MS account. You simply cannot log in without one, short of hacking the installer. Further, though Windows 11 enables full disk encryption by default, it sends your decryption key to Microsoft and associates it with your account for 'recovery' purposes. So it's a half-effective encryption: If anyone can guess your MS account password or otherwise obtain access, they can decrypt that stolen laptop too.
Every aspect of Windows 11 is just annoying. There are adverts on the start menu. If you try to search for a program it'll auto-search the Microsoft store. Office keeps defaulting to saving to your OneDrive, and documents auto-backup there by default, in an obvious effort to make sure you use it and can be up-sold to a premium plan.
And Copilot. FUCKING COPILOT! It's in everything. It has a dedicated key. Sometimes it just launches for no reason. There's even a copilot button in notepad. Windows is constantly pestering you, urging you to use it, because anyone MS can get using copilot can be potentially up-sold to a 365 subscription.
Windows 11 doesn't feel like you are using your computer any more. It feels like your computer is using you, constantly trying to trick or manipulate you to get access to your data and your money.
I do note though that most of this doesn't apply to Pro edition. The screwing over is for the individual computer-owners. Businesses do actually have a way to turn the worst of it off using AD and GP, because without that capability it would actually be impossible to use Windows at all in a business environment and every office would be looking at moving to something else - maybe Apple, or chromebooks, or even linux. Even MS won't risk that. Yet. We all know it's coming - the day when they'll declare user accounts a legacy technology and turn Windows into a subscription service for businesses.
Dotfile just refers to a file whose filename starts with a dot. (ie .xinputrc, .bashaliases)
Dotfiles are usually used as plain-text configuration files because a file starting with a dot is hidden by default on most Linux file explorers.
Ricing refers to using themes and backgrounds to get the whole computer looking pretty, and flakes are...a nix thing. I don't actually use nix so idk that one lol
Not familiar with labwc either.
However, I suppose one good thing about the push for everything to be web or mobile first is that your choice of desktop OS no longer matters so much as far as being able to get important things done.
I personally run Bazzite on my main computer since I use that one for gaming, and Bazzite was built specifically for gaming and Steam-compatability. On my old laptop I use Mint Xfce since that one is very lightweight and works well even on old hardware, and I don't need that laptop to do all that much. From a usability standpoint, I'd say if you are familiar with Windows you'll instinctively know how to do 95% of everyday tasks on either of those systems, and the other 5% are things that can be searched up without too much fuss.
One thing that doesn't run out of the box is connecting my tablet to my PC to transfer files to it. I'm sure there's a way to make that work that I just haven't found yet. And one potential problem that I heard of is that some Linux systems might not work with games that require very invasive anti-cheat software. Apparently some Linux versions just won't grant those games those kinds of permissions. So that's something you might want to look into first if you're interested in playing games with expansive anti-cheat software.
Many anti cheat plugins fully support Linux builds, actually.