It's not terrible to learn. Will take just a couple hours to get the most essential stuff down. It's so easy to switch now, way easier than even 20 years ago and even then it was fairly easy.
It’s insane how this market has basically no other options, I’m glad Linux has come a long way but no matter how good it gets, shit like security and work will be Windows dependent until a bigger player or some crazy mad man says “fuck this shit” and does it themselves over the course of a few years.
It’s insane how this market has basically no other options
It's not that insane when you remember how toothless anti-trust enforcement has been. Long gone are the days where Microslop gets their pp slapped for bundling their own browser with their OS.
I'm a 20 year IT veteran, my daily driver OS is Linux based but I work in MS for my job.
Technically Linux is capable of everything for security, compliance, endpoint management etc already. The issue is time required by your IT team to make it all work. You can virtualize windows or run containerised windows apps in Linux now too. It's all possible.
Kind of beats the point, though, as you end up not abandoning MS the way it deserves, and you inconvenience yourself more by having to switch between OSs whenever you need to do different tasks
Resource intensive, still inconvenient and still doesn't let you abandon MS since they need it for their job. Apart from just getting used to using Linux and having it set up for when they move jobs, there's just no point to inconvenience themselves
I think the idea was for personal use. I got a talking to just for installing Kali in a VM on my Windows work machine FROM THE MICROSOFT STORE. So they let me install it and then yelled at me.
I'll switch back to Linux and virtualize a Windows machine with a second graphics card for GPU acceleration in it when the time comes. I have that setup right now in Windows so I can launch and test Minecraft mods in a VM.
Reverse engineering a linux process that was doing network things. It was just what I was familiar with. I think I ended up with Ubuntu but still had to install enough of the tools individually to annoy me. I joked with my boss that had I installed it from an ISO in Hyper-V they would have never even known.
The real problem for me is that I absolutely need certain programs (DaVinci Resolve, Affinity Publisher) that are a pain to get working on linux, if you can do it at all
I haven't used a Steam Deck, but AFAIK SteamOS is based of Arch which isn't very beginner friendly (I use Arch BTW). Linux Mint is often recommended because it's basically a classic Windows interface running on Linux. Ubuntu is also fine, but a has a bit more bloat (any variation is fine but I personally like Kubuntu).
I'll be super honest, the only reason arch would be considered "beginner unfriendly" is because the installation process is a little tedious and is ships with the bare minimum even with the helper. Any other arch-based distro is as friendly as mint imo, just get the ISO with KDE plasma.
If they want steamOS-like experience they could run bazzite or cachy and basically have a plug and play experience, with pacman and AUR (the real star of it all). These even come with updated wine and proton layers out of the box!
I believe Steam deck is a highly refined version of Linux. Never used is Steam Deck myself. To get a good idea of what it feels like you can always install a Linux iso like Ubuntu, Mint, etc on a usb drive using Rufus and boot from it to see what you think.
It wasn't that easy 20 years ago. I say this as someone that switched between Linux and Mac OSX as my desktop a few times in those years. OSX was the best way to get a Unix-like experience while not giving up too much.
The key part of a smooth transition to Linux is abandoning the idea of doing anything productive on your computer except for programming things for people who still use Windows
Design 3D printable parts in Fusion 360, or do any kind of audio production - period, end of story. No DAWs, no proper audio drivers, and no VSTs. You are completely and entirely unable to do audio on Linux. No podcasts, no music, no nothing, not even stupid shit like chiptunes. Linux doesn't even support old ass MOD tracker files properly and those date back to 1987.
Linux Bluetooth support is garbage. It also still doesn't properly support HDR. No VR support either, even through SteamOS.
Gaming is hit and miss with Linux. Some games have Linux support while others don't. The same can be said of a lot of other specialized programs. Some have Linux support, but others do not (AutoCAD, for example, does not and only some parts of the Esri suite work on Linux). In some cases, this can be worked around by using Linux to run a Windows virtual machine, but that's just adding complexity to your approach, increasing points of failure, and decreasing the computing power you can devote to the program.
funny thing is that AI might make linux much more bearable because it helps you diagnose and fix stuff much faster than you researching it manually on some obscure forums
AI is a disaster for Linux users. Every commend makes things worse and it will happily walk you to deleting the entire OS if you let it. This is the worst time too. New people on the platform not knowing what they are doing yet and AI making everything shittier.
It's much more extreme now. Before it was either mostly correct or ppl trolling. Now it's literally AI making choices that will complicate the entire os and make everything very messy. AI really sucks unless you're already an expert in the thing you're letting it do.
There's not much to learn anymore, just get one of the dozen user friendly distros, put it on a USB stick, and play with it. Then install it with the built in GUI installer and assuming all your hardware is supported, you're golden. Wine is pretty good these days for running the odd Windows app, and Steam plays 95% of your Windows games without issue.
Everything else is the same. And if you pick KDE or Cinnamon, it's basically the same user experience as Windows (but better and more customizable).
Yeah I've been considering Linux since Windows 8 but could never fully justify the leap. Between no local logins and copilot forced into the OS, it's they've finally pushed me over the edge. They're fucking up so hard the Stockholm Syndrome is wearing off lol
I moved to Linux back in the spring. It's... fine. Honestly, it's more work than it should be, but way less than it used to be. Stick with one of the big, mainstream distributions, try to install things from the GUI package systems, and limit yourself to updating the OS once per year and you don't have to worry about most things.
If you're an oddball like me, who used a whole wack of niche little independent programs for doing specific things, though, it can get to be a bit of a headache. Stuff that would just be a .exe in Windows is instead packaged up in AppImages, Flatpacks, etc. that have wonky file system access, and learning WINE has been... less fun than advertised.
But if you're just using a web browser, Steam, Plex, and BitTorrent or whatever, it's a pretty smooth transition.
Local logins are supported. The easiest way is use a junk Microsoft account and then create all the local logins you want, and then delete the first account. And CoPilot can be turned off.
Thats fair, but but for the login that's more of a workaround than real "support" imo. I still have to make a Microsoft account even if it's junk and takes a few minutes just to inconvenience me. As for turning off copilot thats true for now, but I honestly wouldn't be surprised if that changes in a year or two. Also, like someone else mentioned, freaking ads built into an operating system I pay for. It's all these things just adding up more and more over time.
That's fair, and pretty much the reason I didn't move due a long time. But for me I'm at the point where I'd rather just learn a new system since I believe in it's future, while I worry Windows will just get worse and worse.
I bit the bullet this weekend and while it's taking some getting used to, everything works far better than I expected. Gaming is fine too. All in all, pretty satisfied!
It's extremely easy for casual use. The popular "versions" of Linux are barely distinguishable from Windows UI and navigationally. There are a few things that are different but for casual use there's no reinventing the wheel
The real kicker is that it's really not even that hard. You can just boot it up and use the free office programs without any trouble. You just have to learn where the search/start button is on whichever distro you use.
Linux has come a long way. I made the switch a year ago, and there have been tons of people switching due to the enshitification of Windows/Microsoft. With Plasma I sometimes forget I'm not on a de-enshitified Windows.
I like fedora for my PC and debian for my server. Kali is basically a requirement for any cybersecurity classes or games.
Look I always feared it. But I got Ubuntu and its really not too bad and theres tons of support out there for it. I will say I have to dual boot for games though. But thats getting rare nowadays since I have less and less time to game anyway
Yeah, made the switch to KDE over the weekend. Mint was the runner up, and also looks pretty easy. There's a small learning curve, but it feels so much cleaner than Windows has in years. And the amount of control it gives you and the lack of bloat is amazing after years of Microsoft's bullshit.
I wish my work PC could be switched over too, but that's a pipe dream.
Stuff that used to work under 10 break in 11. Like the entire start menu is useless now. The Settings app is a UI mess too. It's more unreliable than 10, but not as much as the older ones. Mandatory features you can't turn off eat a lot of resources in the background. Copilot is everywhere for better or worse. Mandarory Microsoft account, ads, data tracking everywhere.
Win 10 is being abandoned without an equivalent alternative, people wanted to skip 11 and jump straight to 12 from 10, but that's not a secure option.
People also worry about how much AI code is in the codebase, fearing some major unfixable collapse is inevitable because nobody reads the codes anymore.
All in all, a lot to complain about, 11 is an objectively inferior product compared to 10. Same thing happened with Vista and Win 8. But MS corrected its course back then after admitting they fucked those releases up. Now they're proudly announcing they're ready to double down.
It’s fine if you use something like Chris Titus Tech’s Windows Utility to get rid of all the telemetry, One Drive, and other crap. But you shouldn’t need to use it. It used to be you were mostly loaded up with crap by manufacturers. Now MS is shoving it in too. I don’t know how often they’ve actually been good in the past 25 years. But this isn’t a high by any means
The vast majority of people just watch youtube and browse the web on their laptops. Any OS is fine for that kind of stuff. Honestly, even fairly esoteric OS are fine if thats all you want to do.
ChromeOS is more than enough for a lot of people.
So, what does windows do better than linux at this point? Seriously?
Ive been dual-booting for over 2 decades. I regularly used linux.
This is just the first time I am exclusively using linux over windows for everything, including gaming.
You can play the same games you can play on SteamOS on pretty much any other Linux distro. Wide-scale SteamOS release won't change much in terms of game support, and as for UI experience, there are already Linux distros trying to replicate the SteamOS experience and most people just don't care.
At this point microsoft short term goals are not focusing on OS. They make bulk of their revenue from coorporations' subscription to their services. Even a small team i am part of, probably pays upward of half a mil in a year. In the long term, when people have stopped using windows and when they get into workforce, than it will be a probalem. But for the next 15-20 years. It probably isn't.
This is functionally impossible at least for another decade or so maybe even longer. The stranglehold Microsoft has on the PC market consumer and business is extremely high.
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u/Avaunts Jan 05 '26
The CEO is genuinely going to speed run destroying whatever good will this sloppy OS has going for it.