Linux: oh cool, an OS update! :swole-doge:
Windows: oh no, an OS update! :cheems:
Windows users can't do this one neat trick!
:: Proceed with installation? [Y/n] nWhat are you referring to? You don't usually even get OS updates in Linux, and it's a lot more likely to just break stuff that Windows is.
Huh? For Fedora, a new Linux kernel update is out like every other day, and I don't recall an update in past five years breaking anything.
Again, very fast. Linux 5.18 released in late May, 5.18 came to Fedora two weeks later. Wasn't even aware until looking up now that we shifted to kernel 5.0 18 months ago, so I personally had zero problems.
I've used linux off and on for years now, but recently made the complete (no dual boot) switch over to Pop!_OS and I will never go back to windows. Not sure how long it's been this good, but everything just works now. Music production and games (like seemingly every game because of steam proton) both run straight up better than they did on this same tower. Anyone still using windows really needs to give it a shot regardless of past experiences.
like seemingly every game because of steam proton
I've been using Linux exclusively for like 20 years, have followed wine development - including contributing a few patches - for almost as long, and since Vulkan, dxvk and proton arrived, it's like game compatibility has sped up x20. It's insane. I've played AAA, graphic-intensive Windows games that just came out through wine+dxvk with similar performances as on Windows. This was unthinkable even 5 years ago.
The large amount of Unity games has also helped - both because developers can usually port them very easily on Linux and because even if they don't, they usually instantly work perfectly through wine. It's amazing.
Mind you, Valve may have helped, but this is still largely the result of almost three decades of thousands of volunteers all over the world working on wine for no financial incentive. Imagine the kind of projects we'd see if everyone had their basic needs taken care of and much more free time to dedicate to such pursuits (and not just software but art, books, research...).
Oh yeah, don't mean to minimize all the community effort over the years, but for a tech moron like myself being able to just check a box in steam and have everything work is great. In the past I had tried to use wine with little success and would always spend way more time tinkering than actually playing anything so the only games I would play on linux were the few with native support. Same kind of thing used to be my main hangup with linux in general due to everything being just a bit too difficult to be worth it, but yeah now it's just easy as hell to get set up with everything I use a computer for.
Oh yeah, don’t mean to minimize all the community effort over the years
I know ! just trying to convey how incredible it seems after decades of steady progress. I was on Linux when basically the two only mainstream native games available on it were Neverwinter Nights 1 and Doom 3. That was it. Wine was hit or miss, almost only worked for very old games, and using it meant having to compile it and patch it yourself, and spend hours to make a game work. We've come a long long way and it's awesome.
Yeah it really is great. :rat-salute: to you and all the other contributors over the years!
Reaper
I've used it professionally on windows for years previously and so far haven't had any issues with performance, hardware inputs, or plugin compatibility. Everything works pretty much exactly like I'm used to.
The only thing keeping me on windows is producing music. I'm used to FL Studio, but wouldn't mind switching if I can have a similar work flow on another DAW. I'll Def look into it. Thanks!
It is QUITE different from what's going on with Windows or Mac, but there is a rich ecosystem of audio programs developed on top of the JACK audio system. There are a lot of rough edges in there, but it's all free and you can plug MIDI and audio from one program to another to another and it's very neat. You can synchronize DAWs like LMMS or Ardour with midi sequencers, drum machines like Hydrogen, synthesizers, effects racks, and so on.
As a power user, I'm never sure what to recommend to newbies for Linux, based on this I'll check out Pop!, sounds promising.
More like "Windows is better! No, not the most recent one, or the one before that, or the one before that. Those are bloated and full of unnecessary bullshit, or just awkward to use and difficult to customise. NO not that one either, if you install that and connect to the Internet your identity will get stolen. Yes that's right, the one from 2009"
I'd genuinely argue that XP has a better user experience than modern Ubuntu. Give me that but with decent security and I'd be happy. As someone who has a dual boot, Linux is just genuinely super finnicky and inconsistent for me. I actually had an assignment in a networking course a while ago where I needed three Ubuntu VMs and they gave me a disc image. I used the same one for all 3, and yet all 3 had completely unique issues independent of one another - 2 wouldn't boot until I did some really obscure nonsense. What I'm trying to say is that Ubuntu sucks. I've heard good things about Mint. I can never go full Linux unfortunately because I have a lot of software that would never run on Linux. Hopefully Steam OS breaks up the Microsoft stranglehold on gaming.
Ubuntu has the issue of being led by the "Self Appointed Benevolent Dictator For Life" Mark Shuttleworth, who is essentially an off-brand :melon-musk: down to being churned out of an all-boy's private school during Apartheid in South Africa.
There has to be a desktop environment for Linux that mimics xp by now right?
Making it "look like" something doesn't actually make it that thing. Everything still behaves differently (and way worse). There still isn't a Linux desktop environment that doesn't suck.
Try KDE Plasma or Mint, Ubuntu is just one distro after all and Gnome isn't everyone's cup of tea
I used the same one for all 3, and yet all 3 had completely unique issues independent of one another - 2 wouldn’t boot until I did some really obscure nonsense
In the classic motorcycle world, that's called "character"
I get you though, Linux can be finnicky. I'm still using Windows 10, but I have played around with Mint and it seems to work pretty well for me. Only things holding me back is gaming, which shouldn't be as much of a problem now because of Steam OS (not that I play that many AAA games anymore these days), fears about my audio equipment not working, and the need to buy another HDD to properly back all of my stuff up before I start officially switching things over.
GNOME is way better. Way more polished and cohesive and feels less like some kind of GUI builder software suite.
It really has improved. I was skeptical in the past, but Linux runs better on my shitty laptop then windows. It even plays my old windows native games better than Windows lol
I got you fam
If you have anything that is not located under
/homethat you have to access often, the trick is making a symbolic link to your home directory.To do this, use the following command in the terminal:
ln -s /{target_directory} /{directory_to_link_to}For example, to access /bin from /home/username:
ln -s /bin /home/usernameThat way it's almost identical to just having it installed in your home directory and you no longer have to remember where it is actually located. This should still persist after reboot. If you want it to be entirely identical for any reason, you can use mounts instead, either with
mount --bindto make it temporary or editing/etc/fstabto make it permanent, but symbolic links would usually suffice.
I need to get into Linux, where do I start? Just partition one of my drives?
Unless you have a computer which is already toast, I'd recommend grabbing a virtual machine like VirtualBox and install it on there (On Linux there's a thing called QEMU/KVM which is way better, but that doesn't help you now). It's a good way to see what the process is like and try out different flavors without making permanent changes to your machine. If you like it, you can use something like GParted Live to resize partitions and make space to set it up natively. Ideally, the best time to do it is when you run out of space and need to buy a larger hard drive anyway. Then you can just allocate some of your new space for it instead of constricting the filesystems you already have.
Either way, if you have 50-100GB to spare, that should be enough. I have 1732 packages installed on my Gentoo system (an absolutely absurd amount) and it's taking up just over 100GB. Spanning everything from graphics and video production to GIS to 3D modeling and CAD/CAM, ham radio, gaming, flight simulation, virtual machines and emulation, software development, web and database servers, all of the development libraries needed to compile it all from source code and all of the documentation needed to incorporate any of these components into a sudden whimsical project. I have my steam library, music, and personal files stored on another drive, and that will grow as usual for whatever it is that you do.
Personally, I recommend Fedora for beginners. It's very polished and up-to-date. The biggest nuisance about it is you need to enable a 3rd party repository for common non-free graphics drivers and multimedia codecs, but this takes all of five minutes once you have it up and running.
it's not easy easy, but a lot of people do it so there's a lot of help online. this theme on xfce and some windows xp icons will get you pretty far. https://www.xfce-look.org/p/1479483/
edit: i'm pretty sure someone made a script that changes most common linux builds to a windows-looking machine. maybe on here or maybe lemmy? edit2: it's in this thread lol
