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If people don’t need any specific software and can adapt to the Linux alternatives, like LibreOffice… people will see some distros are now easier than Windows to use… and… you don’t have bad surprises on updates
how does steam operate on Linux? anything I need to do to port over stuff?
The biggest problem with Linux has always been windows software imo.
I hate PCGamer’s website. Everytime I get partway through an article, a pop-up shows asking me to sign up to their newsletter. Now the pop-up alone would turn me off of their website, but what happens is the pop-up scrolls the article all the way back to the top of the page. So I completely lose my reading position.
PCGamer isn’t the only site to do this, but I think it’s one of the more popular ones that do.
The other thing that sites do now that earns an instant DNS block on my pihole, is capturing the back action that prevents leaving the site to show a pop-up that says “wait, before you go, check out these other articles” or something along those lines. HELL… NO!
Yeah, DHTML popups aren’t much different from the old popups that used to plague the internet. The only real difference is that I haven’t seen them used maliciously like the old popups were to be super annoying, but even “good faith” uses were all “hey, stop what you’re doing and do this for me” without any shame that went along with a real person doing that in a store.
I look forward to the day someone gets an AI to block this shit (on the assumption that it’s more complicated than blocking the old style popups without interfering with legitimate DHTML and needs context awareness).
This person’s writing style is, frankly, well, pretty obnoxious.
I read your comment and started reading the article. I started feeling a little self-conscious over my liberal use of Oxford commas, as his sentence structure wasn’t that much different from mine. But then I got to my tenth fucking “, well,” and “, frankly,” and realized what you were upset about. This is, well, quite frankly, highly respectable journalism.
…yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man…
At least it’s not AI
Made the switch to Ubuntu in 2019. The only time I use windows is at work, sadly, but in my main computer, that malware hasn’t been installed for years
I started using linux a few months ago after a longer break. It’s so smooth and i hardly ever use windows. There are some niche things that don’t support linux, and some need a bunch of workarounds. I don’t even think linux needs to improve more, but i do hope comparability is going up
I started to enjoy my Ubuntu install after I gave up on the idea of using my computer for tinkering or work.
I just use it for the browser and steam nowadays. Also I did my thesis fully in Ubuntu with libreoffice but that’s the last professional stuff I did with it, aside from some programming.
Nowadays it just works xd
I’ll go ahead and share my experience with Mint so far. Gaming worked mostly fine which is pleasing.
I couldn’t get many basic features working correctly for my dual monitor set up. Even after putting in the time to research.
I couldn’t get multiple proprietary programs to work for my job.
The customization in settings is extremely limited.
I have to mess around with complex terminal commands I do not fully understand every time I need to do something more than use my browser.
I will try another distro this year, but it is definitely not a foolproof experience.
A lot of things Windows does easily, I took for granted.
Can you give some examples of basic features that weren’t working with your dual monitor setup?
KDE might also help with this btw, as while I didn’t have any glaring issues with dual monitors in cinnamon (on Fedora), it improved overall when I switched to KDE. Used to have to change the audio output to my TV whenever I enabled it, now it happens automatically (plus the option to disable my HDMI audio if I preferred the “keep the same audio when switching to a different video output” behavior).
Only issue was that it didn’t work correctly the very first time, followed by it suddenly working the next time when I was intending to troubleshoot it.
Imo, KDE handles dual monitors better than windows even, especially if your secondary monitor is a TV you enable and disable depending on what you’re doing. Two clicks to toggle it, it handles different scaling seemlessly across the monitors (iirc, windows would “pop” to the scaling setting of whatever monitor they were mostly showing on as you moved them). Mouse cursor visibility improves when shaking the mouse, so it’s easy to find it on a giant screen.
The customization in settings is extremely limited.
Give KDE Plasma a try. Sometimes they’re criticised for having too many settings.
That was exactly my experience giving Linux a try for the first time. I gave up but then decided to give it another try with Linux Mint. I’ve been using it for over a year now and I haven’t looked back. There is a small amount of software that I just can’t get to work on Linux so I have dual boot set up, but I found myself booting into windows fewer and fewer times. And now I’m at a point where I actually dread booting into windows. I’t just doesn’t feel like it’s my machine anymore when it’s running windows.
Long story short, give it time, try a few distros and you will eventually get used to it, at which point you will not want to go back to windows.
Been using mint for the last few months after messing with raspian on some pis for a few months before that and the only time i had to log i to windows (dual boot) since getting mint was to play the original dungeon keeper in a network game with my son because for some reason the lutris wine/dosbox install wouldnt start a multiplayer match with the windows installed veraion on my sons laptop. Otherwise i have got everything i wanted working on there and its a much more pleasant experience. It feela like my computer again. Something i havent said since the end of windows XP.
There’s a learning curve to it. I have yet to find anything I could do on windows that I can’t do on Linux. Lots of stuff took me a while to understand, but daily driving arch for 2 years and I actually cant believe how limited windows is and how I put up with it for so long.
Only real exceptions thus far are that you can’t play league of legends or fortnite. And thats because the developers have their servers set to kick any Linux users basically. Not a limitation of the operating system.
Made the switch during Christmas to Cachyos. I am extremely glad I did, and so relieved to finally be free of Microsofts clammy grasp.
I already stopped playing online competitive games long ago, so the anti-cheat thing isn’t really a problem for me. All the games I want to play works fine, even better in fact than they did on Windows.
The competitive game anti-cheat issue is kinda overblown nowadays. A lot of popular competitive FPS games run perfectly fine, anti-cheat and all, on Linux with wine/proton. And the ones that don’t either have incredibly invasive anti-cheat that you wouldn’t want running on your computer anyways, or have server-side “protections” that properly boot Linux players out of the game for some arbitrary reason.
I am on Linux and never looking back to Windows (except if I have to use Microsoft Teams for interviews).
I have to use Teams for work and it works fine in a (Chrome-based) browser. I have a Chromium install that I only use for work stuff.
I had several issues using teams on browsers before so I felt compelled to use Windows for the app. But I admit that I never tried using it on Chromium so I will try next time.
If you can handle the browser version, works fine on Linux with Firefox.
Doesn’t Teams work in browsers, though (as a guest at least)?
Wow. So brave.
If your job is paid by advertising, yes.
Why, this will only want Microsoft to pay more for advertising, as clearly it’s becoming more necessary to do so.
How are trade publications getting more from Microsoft if their readers move to Linux?
I’ve been gaming on Linux mostly if not entirely full time since 2014. Back when you had to look to see if there was a Steam icon alongside the Windows and sometimes Apple logo because Proton wasn’t the “everything works” magic it is now.
Anyone complaining about the state of Linux today look like diaper shitting babies. “WAAAH! My privacy invading rootkit requiring multiplayer CoD Fortnite meme slop sippy cup game is specifically designed to not run on Linux. WAAAAH!” Yeah, I remember when hair didn’t grow near my genitals too, but then I stopped acknowledging any of my feelings in public except anger and pretended to like beer out of sheer force of peer pressure, and thus became a fully grown man by the standards of my culture. Get on my level.
What were we talking about?
You’re definitely living up to your username 👌
I always have since before joining this experiment in mediocrity we call the Fediverse.
In an age of enshitification, pretty ok most of the time is to be celebrated
Entering my 12th year as a Linux user, I can’t disagree with that.
You keep up the good fight.
our university put linux mint on all the desktop computers this year.
Compsci labs or everywhere?
the department where i am. don’t wanna say which one because privacy concerns.
Wir petzen schon nicht.
Cool. Which university is that? How did it go?
they put linux mint (cinnamon edition) on computers. people more or less used it normally, i’d say most people barely bothered that it’s not windows. essential software that we needed to use was pre-installed (with neatly visible icons on the desktop to click on), and web browser was installed too. that covers basically all use-cases.
one colleague asked how to do screenshots. i showed her.
That’s the main reason, Linux is still not as widespread as Windows - marketing. If you’d ship all of the sold PCs with a pre-installed Linux, nobody would give a shit.
And why would they? The vast majority of ALL computer users just use functions (email, office, browsing) instead of programs. Oh, I know, I know. If you ask, you always hear Word, Excel, Outlook. But to me that are just synonyms for the tedious everyday tasks most users perform. And if you’d stop training people to repeat tasks and klick buttons and instead train them to understand what they’re actually doing … sigh
To take it a bit further, I found at least cinnamon and KDE to be familiar enough that you can use your “discover how to do things on windows” skills for figuring out many things.
And once you get a handle on the repository software, it can also be easier to find and install new software when instructions direct you to a terminal command that doesn’t exist. KDE even does a search and says what needs to be installed when the command isn’t found. On windows, you need to download shit from some random website (which always sketched me out that someone could take advantage of that trust by making their malware behave as expected) and their search can fail to find something already installed on your machine, let alone figure out what you want to do if the name is a common word.
For everyday computer use, the experience is pretty similar. Unsurprisingly so because that’s how they designed Cinnamon. Funny though, your colleague didn’t think of typing “screenshot” into the search bar of the start menu.
Let us know, I’m very curious. At our school (cal poly pomona), our comp sci professors were upset Ubuntu got put on their lab computers and they were upset because IT didn’t give warning and some didn’t know how to use it.
That sounds like the dumbest possible way to go about this.
If you’re curious about migrations, there will be several talks at this years FOSSDEM from people sharing their experiences migrating whole organizations /municipalities to FOSS.
I only have one problem with my linux mint distro: Sometimes cheats for video games don’t work.
Like I like to use savegame editors for Cyberpunk 2077, but they don’t work on linux despite all my attempts, and PINCE (Pince Is Not Cheat Engine) works for almost all games but just not for some.
And that, ladies and gentlemen (and all those in between or neither) is when I finally found a reason to actually code after tinkering on-off for decades: I want to make those save game editors for linux! That is something that legit doesn’t exist but needs to.
Seriously, all the lutris & co mess is obsolete now.
Open Steam > add non-steam game > properties > compatibility > force proton 10 > profit
Worked for all the cough responsibly ripped .exe’s I’ve thrown at it so far
I still use bottles to have a persistent virtual drive for things like modding tools.
Most things work perfectly in Steam though.
Yeah. I also use Bottles for GOG / itch games that don’t have a native linux version. And I’m pretty happy with how it works. Things install smoothly and easily, and it has a very nice menu for the games I’ve installed. Here’s what it looks like:
However, there have been some hiccups along the way that might have caused less patient people to give up. In particular, it took me awhile to work out that although I could tell bottle to launch a windows .exe from anywhere on my computer, it would only actually work properly if I first move the exe into the virtual drive - which deep inside a confusing directory structure. (The “troubleshooting” menu option goes directly into talking about this issue; but even finding that menu option isn’t totally straight forward, especially if you’re just launching the exe from a file browser or something.)
Anyway, the upshot is that I like bottles; because it is easy to use but also very transparent about how it works and what it is doing, which I like. But I wouldn’t say it’s the best option for everyone.
do steam games run on linux already or something? Like do you only have to do that for non steam games?
do steam games run on linux already or something?
Oversimplification coming, but…
Most (modern) games can actually just run on Linux already, because Linux is where the best cross platform developer tools are.
Today, if a developer wants to publish their game to Windows, Mac, Android, Playstation, Nintendo Switch and XBox - the odds are strong that the developer is actually (possibly unwittingly) writing a Linux native game and then using an engine to port the Linux version to the other platforms.
The reasons for this are complicated, but mainly boil down to Linux being the simplest target to reliably build developer tools for - because every part of Linux is open and public.
Like do you only have to do that for non steam games?
If a game is purchased through Steam, Steam launcher knows enough to choose the best available version of the game for the operating system - whether the best version is the Windows executable running under wine/proton, or a native Linux executable.
Lutris has allowed me to use battle.net though which I don’t think steam can do, afaik. I’m happy to be proven wrong, though
I also had no(*) trouble installing Battle.net in Heroic Launcher, FWIW. Steam probably shouldn’t be much different.
(*) ok, well, not any more trouble than Battle.net usually is on Linux. The point is after prodding at it for awhile it eventually finished installing and updating and started up properly and has worked fine ever since.
I run battle.net through Steam. Works just fine.
Personally I prefer having Battle.net in Lutris (or something else like Bottles) even if you can run it through Steam. I just dislike using a launcher to open another launcher and Lutris avoids that.
I can understand that the Steam method would be a little easier for some people, but using Lutris for something as popular as Battle.net is really easy too. You just click “Add” and search for “Battle.net” and it does the rest automatically, even downloading the installer. The only thing to be aware of is that you should close the launcher when it gets to the point you are asked to log in which completes the installation, but Lutris tells you that as well.
how did you do it? mine does not start after installing.
I added Battle.net-Setup.exe as a non-steam game and set the compatibility tool to Proton Experimental. This seems to have worked for me. Running on Garuda.
‘Works fine’ is not true yet, currently.
Especially annoying on steam deck. Is this a Linux issue? No. It absolutely is not.
If I have an .exe from the high seas that still needs to be unpacked/installed how do I deal with it?
Just started using Linux for playing, currently playing Dispatch (highly recommend it), used Lutris to first install the compacted .exe and then run the launcher .exe. Is there a better way to go about it?
In heroic, you can add the game and while adding it, click “run installer first” and then install the EXE and copy whatever cracks needed. I needed to do that with a few games that are literally not available anymore on stores.
Lutris had been so janky for me the past 10 years and many of the installer scripts literally don’t install any dependencies anyways that I switched to heroic last year and I no longer have games that work completely fine and then next launch they don’t work.
Hell, I’ve got a game I legally purchased on CD back in the Win XP days I’d like to play, and the farthest I got is installed but fails to run.
This may or may not help. But I’ll give you the basic steps using wine only and no Proton magic to run a game from disk:
- Create an empty folder to be your wineprefix (emulated system folder) or use the default.
- run
WINEPREFIX=[full path to new folder] winecfgcommand in terminal (justwinecfgif you will use the default prefix). - mount your CD so that you can see it in your file browser. (Might be simply clicking that device in the file browser when a CD is in the drive bay)
- In the winecfg set drive D: to point to the folder where you mounted the CD.
- run the CD installer with wine… e.g
WINEPREFIX=/some/path wine /media/something/cdrom1/setup.exe, install the game to C: - run the game with WINE on the same prefix and with the CD inserted and mounted (if there are resources on the CD or basic DRM) e.g.
WINEPREFIX=/some/path wine '/some/path/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Cool Game/coolgame.exe - if that works, you might be able to create an image of the disc and mount that instead of the physical CD, you’d then rerun winecfg and set D: to the correct folder where the disk image is mounted.
So, I’m actually very drunk right now and my eyes just slid right off all that, but I want to set my default misanthropy aside for a second and genuinely thank you for taking the time to write up some genuine helpful tech advice. That’s really cool of you to have done. I might try that day after tomorrow.
Definitely do not recommend trying to set up a winecfg environment while drunk. The two kinds of wine do NOT mix.
You know what they say about wine and beer…
Thanks, I need to give that a try. Most of my non-Steam games (“Deus Ex”, “Giants: Citizen Kabuto”) run just fine under Wine, using the default settings. The only one that doesn’t work is NOLF 1. (Everything works except music).
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I’ll take whatever positive press Linux can get at this point. More people switching over is a good thing.
