Boy, the good ole days are gone when it comes to Windows. I am posting just to help anybody that doesn’t know. This is like a creepy wire tap. If you are actually using Windows 11, make sure to disable and or reduce telemetry in Windows 11 (Privacy). If that actually helps, I am sure there are more ways they send data back but the video link is a simple how to for the telemetry. Here is more info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wtg_s1GQiMU
ITT: a lot of people trying really hard to justify their use cases for Windows.
Mine is simple: I’m used to it and my favorite games I play only run on linux with specific modifications that I have no time to figure out on a system I am unfamiliar with.
Time is the constraint. As a teen I would have simply taken the time to figure it all out.
Now as a family dad with very limited time I simply need something that works for me instantly out of the box with functionality that is at least familiar. Not just for the OS but any software on it.
Bazzite is pretty good for gaming. Most things I’ve thrown at it have “just worked”. The games that tend not to run on Linux are live-service games requiring kernel-level anti-cheat. I don’t play any of those, so it’s not an issue to me, but I know it is a deal breaker for some. I had one game that required me to use a different version of Proton than the one that came pre-installed, and that was as simple as installing the flatpak for it, then selecting it in the game’s configuration menu in Steam.
Mine are star citizen and path of exile 2
Those have KLA?
Well, there is no need to justify a decision for personal use. But keep in mind there is plenty of corp software that literally can not run on Linux. Believe me, I tried.
Shove it in VMs?
I got a new laptop for work, i could use linux for it, everything i do is within a browser, but it took me an hour tops to set up in windows 11 (well maybe a couple while i fiddled with settings, fuck you windows 11), jumping over to linux seems like an impossible task for me, who has never done it before
but i am planning to get a linux os running on my old laptop (8gb ram) that i use for torrents and streaming (browsers), i ran proton vpn. Give me a recommendation, maybe a tutorial i can follow, if you’re so determined, give me the nudge i need :p
There are so many options, but since I assume it would be your first linux, I’d start with something that just works at once and does everything you say you need in your comment. Zorin OS will just work at once (I might not prefer this dist myself, but I’m 20 years in the linux game… this is a distro that just works really well for first timers, and it’s a good distro).
As the other user said, get Mint Cinnamon on a USB. I moved to Linux last year (now on Bazzite KDE) and it wasn’t the leap I expected, more just a small shuffle. Everything is roughly where you expect it to be and works how you expect it to, but like actually where you’d expect and working how you expect. Like if Windows 10 had been designed just for usability without corporate interests clogging everything up. The only reason it may take a while to customise to your liking is that you can customise far, far more of it straight out of the box.
There are plenty of options, which is great, but also a cause of choice paralysis. Linux mint. Just start with Linux mint. It works. You can try it on a “live USB” before installing completely.
Look, I hate Windows; literally the only device I have that isn’t Linux is my work laptop, and I purposefully leave it at the office. But this thread isn’t the place to bring up Windows hate. Someone’s trying to do a good thing with what they have, and, idk, doesn’t seem the time or place to get converts ig.
The Windows 11 cope…
My reason is really simple: replacing Windows with Bazzite or whatever would be a lot of effort. If W11 ever bricks itself or does something hideously invasive (that I can’t disable or opt out of) then it becomes less of an effort than maintaining the status quo, and thus switching becomes the obvious choice.
It’s very very easy to install Linux. Only moderately difficult to dual boot
I’m aware of that. What all the linux fanboys here are failing to understand is that wiping out an old OS and replacing it with something new that you’ll have to learn how to use is something that takes effort and currently is unnecessary.
W11 currently works okay. I can still easily disable the annoying things and push off nonessential updates. I don’t need to replace it. Yet. If that changes, then I can go through the process to replace it. But there’s no reason for me to do so yet.
Linux fanboys proselytize more aggressively than evangelists do.
Linux doesn’t even require installation, they use LiveCDs that you can use as temporary OS’s. They are also used to permanently install them if you’d like to do that.
There’s a guy at my local library that brings his own OS to use on the public computers, and just saves stuff on removable storage.
We all have our limits - yours is a fair point of ease vs inconvenience. I think that is the market dominant force. That being said with how far any distro has come since I started messing around in 98… It’s close to being that easy.