When Microsoft finally pulls the plug on Windows 10 its successor will be four years old, and for three of those, it was never the OS of choice amongst Steam users
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What was your experience like?
TLDR; Overall, great. Had some growing pains but Linux feels faster/snappier than windows.
I’m a developer and a self host “enthusiast”, so I was already a little familiar with Linux, but I ended up hopping from OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, to Kubuntu, to Arch Linux (using KDE Plasma).
I had issues with Tumbleweeds package manager, and overall it felt clunky. They have stricter security than other distros and it caused some weirdness with Dolphin and some other utilities/packages.
Kubuntu was fine but then I came across an article that Valve was going to be directly collaborating with Arch, so I said screw it and jumped to Arch.
I absolutely love Arch, but it definitely has a learning curve. I found a gentleman on youtube (OldTechBloke) that walked through installing it and has a Gitlab repo with all of the commands to install. I took that and used it as a starting point and modified it over the past ~8-9 months to suit my needs (I’ve installed it on two other laptops now as well)
The biggest issues I’ve had have been related to Nvidia, and oddly enough, my Gigabyte motherboard. I had to enable several kernel parameters so “sleep” would work correctly. Luckily the arch wiki is incredibly detailed.
For a regular user, I would recommend Kubuntu or Linux Mint.
Edit: Also, I dual booted for a while but I’m at a point now where I haven’t been on Windows since like… February. PUBG and Tarkov are the only things keeping Windows around on my PC.
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Win 11 wasn’t even the primary choice among Windows users.
Rest in peace, Windows 7
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I have Win 11 at work and I hate it so much for so many reasons I don’t even know where to start.
I know it’s the trend right now, but I hate rounded corners for one. I like having my whole desktop real estate to be used. And the shrunken floating taskbar is a GUI ergonomic nightmare. I want to just throw my cursor into a corner without looking and click with the confidence that it will open my start menu.
Speaking of which, my task bar keeps freezing every day I use it so my system tray and even the time is never accurate.
The start menu is a fucking mess. I really loved the Windows 10 start menu with its tiles and groups. Now you have to manually pin everything, it’s all small icons and you can’t have them in groups. You have to create sub-folders to put the icons in, adding an extra click for nothing.
I hate that it comes with an integrated AI and I hate that it has this privacy nightmare “recall” feature or whatever the fuck that takes sreenshots of your monitor to feed its AI.
I went 100% Linux last fall with Kubuntu. I added a tiled menu and even added Windows 10 style window decorations to complete the look and feel.
With the latest advancements in Steam, Wine and Proton, which has been able to play every game I threw at it so far, it’s become such a powerful OS.
I’ve never been happier!
I’ve just ditched my win 10 partition for a mac mini purely to run some cad software. As a KDE user I find it hard to articulate my hatred for what the fuck is going on with macOS design philosophy.
Not having used win 11 since its first release, it’s funny how much of the above frustration I’m going through with the mac, both suck beyond suck now it seems. The base mac mini for £600 would be an amazing deal, if it was running Linux.
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Using windows 11 got me to switch my home PC to Linux at the start of the year so I have them to thank or that. My work PC just got updated from W10 to W11 and so far it’s so much worse than I was expecting, purely based on performance/buginess alone. I have no problems with most the features but it all feels one step forward two steps back when the whole system seems to be much less responsive
It’s insane how many stupid little problems there are with it. Especially on functionality that has existed for years/decades. It’s like they just change shit for the sake of changing it and then the changes aren’t tested properly to make sure they work. Absolutely ridiculous coming from such a massive company. It’s clear they give zero fucks about the user experience.
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I’ve just ditched my win 10 partition for a mac mini purely to run some cad software. As a KDE user I find it hard to articulate my hatred for what the fuck is going on with macOS design philosophy.
Not having used win 11 since its first release, it’s funny how much of the above frustration I’m going through with the mac, both suck beyond suck now it seems. The base mac mini for £600 would be an amazing deal, if it was running Linux.
Isn’t there a Linux distro for Mac?
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Using windows 11 got me to switch my home PC to Linux at the start of the year so I have them to thank or that. My work PC just got updated from W10 to W11 and so far it’s so much worse than I was expecting, purely based on performance/buginess alone. I have no problems with most the features but it all feels one step forward two steps back when the whole system seems to be much less responsive
I’m not on Win11, but I read somewhere that disabling the animation effects makes the system much more responsive.
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Go to www.massgrave.dev and check the tutorial for upgrading your existing Windows 10 install to Windows 10 IoT LTSC 2019. You’ll have security updates until 2032 I think.
Wow, that looks pretty simple too, thanks!
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Super simplistic view: Malware detection is kinda like having a motion sensor in your house. Doesn’t do much to prevent but can help you catch something. If it notices right away it might prevent something being stolen.
Firewall is like having locks on your windows and doors. It helps keep out the curious and respectful, but not the dedicated.
Security updates aren’t necessarily for either of those things. It might be that someone discovered a way to steal your keys, or cut open a window bypassing a lock, or sneak into your basement, or crawl through the pet door. Patches “fix” those vulnerabilities. The longer software (Windows in this case) goes unmaintained the more of those are discovered, revealed, and generally accessible for people to use and exploit your system.
Highly recommend trying a live Linux USB just to poke around and see if it’s as much of a hassle as it seems at the time.
Thanks a lot, you rock!
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How do you get third party protection? I’ve no desire to switch either but I don’t want to go without malware protection.
This looks like a nice solution. I have not looked into it or tried yet: https://massgrave.dev/windows10_eol
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Isn’t there a Linux distro for Mac?
Dunno, not that professional engineering software supports
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Since my work “upgraded” to windows 11 the task bar is the bane of my existence.
We all run a laptop docked with two monitors. In windows 10 I would set a monitor as primary, drag the task bar to the laptop screen. That would result in the most real estate for the software I use with out clutter.
Can’t fucking do this is 11. It’s either primary or all monitors for task bar. Someone suggested auto hide the task bar. Holy shit even that has been fucking ruined in 11. It turns off randomly and frequently. Plus notifications seem to over ride the hiding.
what, you could move the taskbar across monitors in 10??
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Which also means you have roughly 6 years before they make you switch again…
windows 12 now runs in the cloud! requirements: always available internet, with low latency and high bandwidth, and ignorance over privacy