• I’d like to try Linux with minimal commitment and no setup. Give it real test drive with some of my most important tools.

    If and when I decide to make the switch, I want to have access to my normal windows machine. I’d keep it around if I need it. But prefer if it went away slowly. I want to work with and communicate with windows users with neither of us having to jump through weird hoops.

    I want my printer to work.

    Problems will come up, but I don’t want it to dominate my time.

    I’m sure most of you will say not to worry, but until I’ve logged some real hours, I will.

    • NutWrench
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      617 hours ago

      I recommend downloading a Live Linux distribution and booting it from a USB stick.

      This let’s you try out linux without making any changes to your Windows setup. It also lets you make sure linux detects all your computer’s hardware. If the live session works fine, the it will detect all that same hardware when you install it for real.

    • Emotional (he/him)
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      316 hours ago

      I installed Linux on a secondary hard drive in case I needed to get back on Windows for anything. So far it’s been a few months and I haven’t needed to, so I’m considering having Windows in a virtual machine or just getting rid of Windows instead.

  • Rolling Resistance
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    519 hours ago

    Debloating windows is not a one-time adventure, it’s what you’re subscribing to do every now and then.

    source: am recovering windoholic.

    • NιƙƙιDιɱҽʂ
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      18 hours ago

      OneNote re-installing and re-adding itself to my startup after I absolutely turned it into swiss cheese was my final nail in the coffin.

      Windows now lives in an image file that I can boot into using Linux as a thin client to start up a Windows VM for the occasional time I need to do some heavy Excel work. Absolute trashware.

  • Eyedust
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    131 day ago

    I walked this path at first, too. For me, it was more like my stubborn battle with Microsoft than not wanting to learn Linux (I had already learned Debian some time ago).

    I’ve flip flopped back and forth, but after the recent bs with screenshot and OS-side ads (for a PAID software, mind you) I haven’t even given Windows a second glance anymore.

    If you’ve got the knowledge to truly debloat Windows, you have the knowledge to set up Linux.

  • NutWrench
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    217 hours ago

    Plus, once you get done de-bloating Windows, the next Windows update will undo all your hard work and reset everything back to “allow all bloatware and spyware.” It’s a battle you’re never going to win unless you ditch Windows completely.

  • @pulsewidth@lemmy.world
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    41 day ago

    Lost four installations at my house, and I have Microsoft certifications professionally so I’m fairly invested.

    Likely to be another few as I move the rest of my immediate family over to Linux slowly also.

    • @PoliteDudeInTheMood@lemmy.ca
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      621 hours ago

      Yup, with ya brother. I have Microsoft certifications dating back to NT4. I’ve never been bothered by anything Microsoft has done, with the possible exception of WinME. I have done thousands of installs for friends and family. When MS started actively preventing me from installing W11 to “older” hardware and requiring a login, I started looking into Linux. I had run Slackware in the 90s so figured Arch couldn’t be that bad… It was actually easier than I remembered.

      That was 2 years ago. This past weekend my Dad had somehow been force upgraded even though I had group policies in place to prevent upgrades past 22H2, and he wasn’t happy with the result. Brought Linux Mint, booted from the USB and asked him to do everything he normally does on Windows. Almost all of his activities are browser based so I installed it and have yet to get any calls asking questions.

  • @MyNamesTotallyRobert@lemmynsfw.com
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    2 days ago

    GUYS. Linux is stupid because there’s no way to get LEGO Star Wars Skywalker Saga NPC Spawner mod to work. Maybe it fails because there isn’t a way to get DirectX SDK installed in protontricks but some mods work without this anyway. I’m going to go back to Windows Vista as GOD intended. Or maybe Windows Longhorn.

    Thanks in advance.

  • @rustydrd@sh.itjust.works
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    2 days ago

    Guys, I’m a Linux user, too, but can we stop having these fake arguments, please?

    Many such cases

    I never met anyone in real life who said the stuff shown in this meme. The handful of comments here are few and far between.

    Spent two weeks debloating

    The folks who care enough to debloat are either already on Linux or would spend maybe 1-2h to make a few fixes, before they get something they are okay with.

    Just install Linux

    For those who stick with Windows, it’s often more than “just switching”. They may need certain software, they may not be tech-savvy, they may be insecure about whether they could handle the occasional hiccup on a system that is completely new to them. All valid reasons for hesitation, and “just switch” is about as helpful as “just cheer up”.

    Because learning Linux would take time.

    I’ve used Linux for 15 years now, and I’m still constantly learning new things. Linux is so much more usable now than it ever was, and I also think more people should switch. But suggesting that you “learn Linux” in two weeks’ time is just silly and dishonest IMO.

    I wish we as a community could stop with this sense of superiority and actually acknowledge people’s humane struggles to help them make the move.

    • simple
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      412 days ago

      I wish we as a community could stop with this sense of superiority

      Not possible in a Linux community. They have only three jokes:

      • Fuck windows

      • I’m so smart for using the superior software stack (and everybody is an idiot for not switching)

      • and my personal favorite: constantly trying to trick people into using FOSS software by telling everybody they’re as good even in cases where they’re clearly not (bro please use GIMP it’s actually really good bro as soon as you understand its archaic 1998 user interface it’s just as good as photoshop bro please)

      • @squaresinger@lemmy.world
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        92 days ago

        and my personal favorite: constantly trying to trick people into using FOSS software by telling everybody they’re as good even in cases where they’re clearly not (bro please use GIMP it’s actually really good bro as soon as you understand its archaic 1998 user interface it’s just as good as photoshop bro please)

        This. So this.

        But coming from a position of nativity, it’s even almost understandable. For someone with a software development background, Linux is easily on-par with Windows and for many stacks even a lot better. There are a few cool pieces of software that don’t exist under Linux (e.g. Sourcetree) but there are decent replacements that are maybe a little bit less convenient.

        So if you are a software developer and a very light user of stuff like Office, graphics/audio/video editing and similar stuff, you might actually believe that the FOSS alternatives in these areas are also decently good enough.

        I mean, for me GIMP and LibreOffice are totally good enough, because I do next to nothing with these tools, and for the one children’s birthday party per year that I make, GIMP and LibreOffice are totally enough.

        The actual hubris here is to think that my noob-level experience with these tools allows me to judge whether these tools are good enough for professional use.

    • @iopq@lemmy.world
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      92 days ago

      I spent 1-2 hours debloating Windows and it turns out Windows update doesn’t work unless you turn back on the Windows firewall service.

      I forgot how I disabled it in the first place, so I gave up and installed Linux

      • @Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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        32 days ago

        Why the hell would you even want to disable the firewall?

        Do you like insecure devices? Do you also never update? Are you also still on Windows XP or something?

        • @iopq@lemmy.world
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          32 days ago

          Why the hell would you even want to disable the firewall?

          I’m behind a firewall on my router, why the hell do I want to enable it?

          • @Honytawk@feddit.nl
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            321 hours ago

            To protect you from infected devices on your network.

            Like your mom’s phone full of bloatware and suspicious apps that connects to your wifi.

            • @iopq@lemmy.world
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              15 hours ago

              I don’t have infected devices on my network because I don’t run Windows and I don’t live with my mom

    • spirinolas
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      2 days ago

      I hear you. I have 3 machines: my main rig, a light laptop and a server. The main rig is on Windows 10 LTSC and the server is on Linux (goes without saying).

      When I bought the laptop I decided to use it only with Linux as a way to squeeze it’s resources but also as a way to figure it how realistic it would be to use Linux exclusively. After starting on Mint and hopping to Arch I ended up on Debian and I’m quite satisfied with it. But I also realized it would never work on my main rig. Lots of stuff and software would just not work the same way. Would it be usable, yes. But it would be mostly workarounds instead of the perfect setup I have built.

      Linux will definitely get there. It’s improving fast. But telling people that don’t know better to just switch only to find out half of what they did will now have to be done with workarounds and hassles is dishonest and does not help Linux at all. When Linux is perfect those people will already be burned and resist it needlessly.

    • @Rekorse@sh.itjust.works
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      2 days ago

      To be fair power users tend to be terrible with social skills. But you are right that this is essentially just linux users bragging that they learned something difficult. Power users also tend to be awful teachers so that might be part of the frustration on both sides.

  • @some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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    292 days ago

    Learning Linux is nothing. Most people will never need anything outside of the GUI. There are distros that are very close to Windows in the GUI.

    Oh well. Same people think switching to a Mac will take effort.

    • @Blackmist@feddit.uk
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      82 days ago

      Thing is the people that never needed Windows, also didn’t really need a PC…

      Gamers seem to be an exception, and while WINE/Proton are good, they’re not infallible. I can’t even get WINE running unless it’s running as root, which I don’t really want to do, and it took a lot of faff to get it to even do that. Wasn’t even anything complex, just a basic Win32 app I’d done as a test.

      • @utopiah@lemmy.world
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        82 days ago

        while WINE/Proton are good, they’re not infallible.

        Just finished the latest trendy AAA game (Clair Obscur) thanks to Proton and Steam… 45hrs of (amazing) gaming and I didn’t tinker with a single option.

      • @dubyakay@lemmy.ca
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        32 days ago

        I’ve installed Fedora workstation the other week and it came with some apps like NPP that ran in wine by default for those that are transitioning away from Windows.

        • @Blackmist@feddit.uk
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          32 days ago

          Yeah, it would be nice if Ubuntu just ran it out of the box as well.

          So many things are great and just work and honestly just surprise you with how painless they are, and then you hit the snags, and then you’re in a world of trying to run things gathered from various sources, only to find that doesn’t work in your distro, only worked in 2016, or requires a package that isn’t obviously named from the command you’re trying to run.

          I’m still not sold on snaps either. I finally got Firefox to see my integrated N150 “GPU”, but I’ve no idea how to make it use it for video decoding. I’ve no idea if the Snap version even supports that.

          I’m surprised at how clunky it gets when at 100% CPU as well. Even the mouse lags. Maybe there’s a way to save a little bit of resources for user tasks, but I’ve no idea what that would be.

  • Ann Archy
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    332 days ago

    Linux takes a long time to learn and is often quirky and strange in unexpected ways- life long Windows users already know how horrible Windows is and its quirky strange behaviors.

    We stick with what we know. Unlearning behaviors is doubly hard when replacing them with something better.

    • @Wiggles69@lemmy.world
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      122 hours ago

      There is such a massive amount to unlearn. I’ve dabbled with Linux several times and everytime i keep running into the same issues: literally everything is different, and I have to Google literally every step of every task I want to do, there are at least 14 ways of achieving every task, I don’t understand what the differences are nor any implications of choosing are completely opaque to me. if it doesnt work I have no grounding to understand what went wrong or how to articulate my problem when trying to find help.

      Im not unsavy, i can program, i understand how to use a command line, I managed to set up a raspberry pi at work that boots into Firefox in kiosk mode to display a Google sheet of daily tasks. I can even remote into it if I need to do things.

      Except now Firefox gives a notification that the version installed is no longer supported, and when I click update I get a rather obtuse message saying that update isn’t available for this flavour of Firefox on this flavour of Linux, googling the message sent me down a confusing network of rabbit holes that just got less and less understandable to the point that once the thing stops working ill have to just nuke the whole thing and start from scratch because that will be easier in the long run.

      So no, I don’t feel like having this sort of problem on my main desktop at home thanks.

    • Omega
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      22 days ago

      It’s not that deep in terms of Linux, while I think it seriously is hard to learn for most it’s not so hard to take more than 1 month to use it just as good as you could with windows

  • @vga@sopuli.xyz
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    2 days ago

    Fun coincidence, when I was about to write a supporting comment to this thread, my Fedora 42 running on X1 Carbon hard froze without any apparent reason and I had to hard reboot it.

    • Communist
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      52 days ago

      Usually that is a oom situation in my experience, check out earlyoom

      • @vga@sopuli.xyz
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        Possible, I guess, although I have 32GB RAM + 8GB swap and I wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary at the time.

        Both the hardware and software are kinda cutting edge, so I think an honest crashing bug is more likely.

  • @PraiseTheSoup@midwest.social
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    2 days ago

    I just did a fresh install of windows 11 last week, after my attempt to switch to Plasma on Debian Fedora did not go very well. While it’s absolutely true that some de-bloating must be done right after install, it took me like 15 minutes. I spent at least that long just finding the three different goddamn places I had to go to change the wallpaper in Plasma.

    *Edit: wrong flavor of linux

    • Rolling Resistance
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      119 hours ago

      You spent more than 15 minutes changing wallpaper in Plasma? I smell bs because it’s really simple.

      Right-click on desktop:

      Pick an image from the list, or add your own images (“Add…”):

      After you click “Add…”:

      The last windows I used was 10, and I remember the process being very similar.

    • @dropped_packet@lemmy.zip
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      112 days ago

      The problem is you used Debian which is missing bug fixes for KDE, and is on a frankly ancient 5.27 - I have had nothing but an awesome experience on KDE 6, with both VRR, and HDR, working under Wayland.

      Recommend trying a rolling release

        • @dropped_packet@lemmy.zip
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          42 days ago

          With the CLI guided install the barrier to entry is also super low now. The only thing I’m still battling is GPU video acceleration with Firefox.

      • Whoops, I was actually using Fedora. I had to go check the kde website, as that is where I got it from and thought it would be weird if they recommended something so out of date.

        • @glitchdx@lemmy.world
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          11 day ago

          fedora kinda sucks for people new to linux. I’ve used it a few times in the past and hated it each time.

          Finally actually made the switch to linux permanently a couple years ago with mint and it’s a much nicer experience overall.