Bullshit and too late, bitches
don’t believe it. ms is in for the long game.
LOL, I won when I installed Mint.
Cheers
Won? They will do it again. The only winning move is not to play their game. Choose Free Software.
Genuine question: What do you recommend? I want to replace Windows 10 on a 8-year-old midrange laptop with something that works reasonably well in terms of performance with a connected 4K monitor.
I’ve already tried Ubuntu, but unfortunately the experience has been marred by bugs such as poor performance, visual glitches, windows jumping around when attempting to move them, and DPI settings not being able to be applied per screen.
I am more impressed you got windows 10 to work well on 8 year old computers ngl. I had an HP pavillion around that age and it had torturingly low startup speed.
Definetely try mint-cinnamon and mint-xfce4, latter one uses xfce4 which has very good performance.
A lot of experienced users will find linux run without bugs for them but that’s because it’s an OS that gets better as you learn more.
In my case battery life was 2 hours on windows and 1.5 hours on linux. But once I past the skill-curve I tweaked it to be 6 hours because I knew how to find what caused the problem and fix it.
Either that or there is the IT-guy effect going on where once an experienced user shows up the aura just makes computers work normal again lmao.
Linux is definitely the route. A lot of people use Mint or Ubuntu. But they are usually running out of date drivers.
I’d recommend looking into distros based on Fedora Workstation. It stays up to date but not as much as Arch so that it’s stable.
My recommendation is any of the Universal Blue images that fit your need. They are based off of the Fedora Atomic image with added quality of life features.
I’ve had more luck with Mint, thanks to its Windows-adjacent GUI and user-friendly on ramp. Still encountered a few issues (a couple of peripherals that didn’t support Linux drivers). But on the whole, it’s improved system performance over Win10 and synced smoothly with my workstation.
If you identify your laptop (including model number) someone who has the same hardware might be able to make a solid recommendation.
It’s a HP Pavilion Power 15-cb091nd.
I can’t say I’ve had those issues myself, so my recommendation may not be valid in your case. I’d say maybe give Fedora with KDE Plasma a try, and try switching between X11 and Wayland sessions if issues persist.
I personally don’t like Ubuntu, but that’s mostly because of Canonical making the occasional sketchy decision.
On the whole, distro choice doesn’t matter quite as much these days, as most distros should work fine out of the box. Whatever issues you have should technically be solvable with a bit of troubleshooting.
Sometimes Linux just doesn’t play well with your setup. Good luck, and I hope you find something that works for you!
The only thing they’re rethinking is how to repackage this so people accept it. They learned a lot from this, but I promise you it wasn’t the right lesson.
Thats bad actually, the free advertising to linux was a good thing. Now Windows users will slip back into apathy.
Windows will continue to degrade as Microsoft fires more of its professional staff and turns to “Vibes Coding” for increasingly delicate systems development. They’ll keep pushing out the OS as a vector for unwanted third-party advertisements. They’ll keep ratcheting user control of the OS away from the hardware owners. And they’ll keep injecting bloatware into their applications and services.
This isn’t the end of enshitification. It is a brief retreat and regrouping by a company that has invested tens of billions of dollars into the AI sunk cost.
I hope you’re right because I am enjoying Microsoft’s failures and I would like them to continue.
I wish these were proper failures. They’re such an entrenched monopoly, a whole lot would have to change before a $3.2T company sees any kind of tangible penalties.
I read “a major shit”
common freudian slip when talking about windows
Oh, and only now am I re-reading it to see that’s not what it actually said…
It mostly looks like a mild slow down of user-facing release and rebrand of unpopular features.
It is not a retreat. The marketing team is just trying to figure out how to reframe things that caused public backlash.
Too late! That and requiring TPM and SecureBoot made me switch. I love it.
My first thought exactly
Microslop Microslop Microslop. Microslop?
Microslop.
Too little too late. I’m already over to Linux now. Shit’s been going downhill even before this whole AI craze went off the rails. I hope Microsoft Windows crashes and burns
I hope Microsoft Windows crashes and burns
Understand that they’re not doing this because of user feedback; they’re doing this because shareholders got cold feet about the whole thing after the backlash (so indirectly it’s still down to user feedback, but not really)
I haven’t won until Microslop is a company that is used in past tense.
Microslopped
I won when I ditched windows.
Yeah, it a temporary measure due to people leaving. Microsoft will not change. Linux is far better
I have one gaming PC and it’s on windows 10 till kike October or so of this year when security updates go away. Waiting to see if steam OS officially drops for PC so I don’t have to switch OS more than once. Already have it running on amd processor and GPU for an easy Linux switch, and been running Linux on my laptop for a while now.
I really do suggest using Bazzite if you don’t want to wait for steamOS.
I previously used Mint, haven’t had to install an nvidia graphics driver or new kernel since moving to Bazzite and I’m now learning distrobox so I can make my usual bad computing decisions in a safe space. Its a very stable base, and with container tech layered on, you can have all the fuck around you want with minimal find out.
But I do want to wait.
Is it true? I’ve been lately looking out for a new atomic distro but I’ve heard it seems it’s not developer friendly with the sandboxing and extra efforts to get apt/rpm working. I am relatively new to Linux and stuck with Mint for now so I can’t add anything to it.
Depends what you want to do.
On distrobox, I installed a containerised version of Ubuntu that can interact with my host, sort of like WSL on windows. Anything I put in it remains isolated so I can’t install packages that break my system - and I can use apt to install whatever in want rather than rpm.
You could develop in a VM or container like distrobox, and tbh, the host can be whatever you need it to be. You dont actually have to move off Mint.
That being said, I dont see why you couldn’t just develop on Bazzite/atomic distros of your choice using flatpaks for IDEs. I believe it has c++ installed and you’d be able to layer whatever language you needed onto your atomic distro of choice.
Watch your mouth, buddy!
Lol. All sorts of typos. I should proofread.
This has been a common sentiment, enough that I’ve thought of making a video about it.
Running a desktop OS, catering to everything people need from their PC, from printing to fringe drivers to VPNs to package management, is a big task. I have long doubted that Valve is personally interested in taking on that task. They write SteamOS for the deck and machine, since their only real responsibility is playing games. People who try to install that OS for other things will see some Flatpak friction - but that’s fine, it wasn’t built for that.
I’d strongly recommend looking at some other distributions with broader group support. My recommendation is CachyOS. Bazzite has worked great for others, but as a general desktop user I sort of bounced off of it - installing some unusual apps ended up getting a lot of friction against its emulation layers. I believe both are based off the same sort of origins as SteamOS, so that may be the safest thing.
I think you personally don’t know what you’re talking about and are just guessing at what Valve wants.
If we’re speculating, I’ll speculate that you’re completely wrong and that most things that are up and running on Arch are going to run on SteamOS. GabeN has dumped a massive amount of time and effort into making Linux Arch viable and good for gaming. He also has enough clout that it will quickly become the most popular distro, or at least one of the most popular. To say it won’t get much compatibility for things like printer drivers is just silly.
If it has an AMD GPU you can just install it now, no waiting. But it’s not good at much more than just playing games, if you want a more general purpose machine I’d install something mainstream like Mint, Ubuntu or Fedora.
It does have amd, but I’m in no big hurry. Couple online games I won’t be playing after the windows dump and I’m not interested in dual booting. I have a laptop running Linux for work\office things already. The desktop is just gaming and media.
Best comment.
I am very thankful to Microsoft, without them I wouldn’t have made the switch to Linux.
I really loving it. So much better, faster and powerful + no Spying.
When I started using Linux in 2009 it had around 0.6 percent market share on desktop. Windows had 95%.
Today Windows is measured below 68%, and Linux has been measured above 4% by statcounter.com.
These things move faster the more people make the change. Linux only reached 1% in 2013, 2% in 2021, 3% in 2023, and 4% was somehow first measured already in 2024. For every single person making the switch it becomes easier for others to do the same, and companies consider Linux support to be a little bit more important. One can only wonder at which percentage of market share it will be offered as a mainstream alternative when buying a new computer, but it seems pretty clear that we’re getting there.
I guess my point is that we all won when you ditched Windows. Thanks for that.
10% market share is when I expect it to be impossible to ignore and I think we’re gonna get there fast like you alluded to.
But…mainly for games. The corporate crowd will stay on Windows because they benefit from propping up other corporations. PC/laptop manufacturers will still push Windows for the same reason
The corporate crowd will stay on Windows because they benefit from propping up other corporations.
I wouldn’t be so sure. An interesting indicator of the shift that many of you wouldn’t see is how many vendors of management and security software have put out Linux versions in the past 12 months. I’m talking about stuff like RMM (Remote Monitoring & Management), EDR / MDR (Endpoint Detection & Response / Managed Detection & Response) client side DNS filtering software, and other things.
This tooling is for managing and securing endpoints used by companies, either by internal IT or by MSPs. These vendors wouldn’t be making and releasing these tools unless they were being asked for them AND there was going to be stead long term demand.
Turns out that once a companies stuff is in the cloud its users really don’t need MS Windows anymore so as long as you can centrally manage and secure it Linux makes a perfectly fine endpoint OS.
There is one last major bit once you have RMM and EDR in place - centralized identify. Until Okta, Ping, Azure, and Google all have a pam module that allows for remote identity management without depending on LDAP, enterprise endpoints are restricted to desktop/server machines (or orgs where you can get a waiver and only have local login).
Yep but…
Here’s Microsoft - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/identity/devices/sso-linux?tabs=debian-install%2Cdebian-update%2Cdebian-uninstall
Google has a variety of IDM methods including Ubuntu Authd and Secure Cloud LDAP. There’s also 3rd party tools like JumpCloud, ScaleOrange, etc.
Okta appears to have ASA and OPA although I’m not familiar with either of them. Ping has PingID and Ping Federate, although again I haven’t used either of them.
So depending on your cloud and needs the IdM / IAM is either available NOW or it will be very soon. 😀
Ohh that’s super exciting. I haven’t realized Microsoft made one.
Okta’s offering was garbage last I attempted to poke it. And 3rd party IAM tooling can be completely hit or miss (and let’s not even start about LDAP over the web…)
I dunno if it’s exciting but I do have and use an Entra joined and InTune managed Linux Mint laptop with a full security stack loaded as described above. It works.
I don’t understand how my coworkers are using windows. Like, they routinely have issues where it randomly reboots or gets sluggish. And it’s just flat out unfit for software development, unless you’re targeting windows specific stuff. They can’t even run our code locally.
Maybe some of the problems are janky security stuff to try to lock it down
Total market share is irrelevant. What matters more is total users.
If you make a product and there’s a million people on a platform who could buy it, the costs to port that product (and support it) need to be low for it to be worthwhile.
If the total number of people on that platform increases to 10 million, now the cost to port/support becomes more like a minuscule expense rather than a difficult decision.
When you reach 100 million there’s no excuse. There’s a lot of money to be made!
For reference, the current estimated amount of desktop Linux users globally is somewhere between 60-80 million. In English-speaking countries, the total is around 19-20 million.
It’s actually a lot more complicated than this, but you get the general idea: There’s a threshold where any given software company (including games) is throwing money away by not supporting Linux.
Also keep in mind that even if Linux had 50% market share, globally, Tim Sweeney would still not allow Epic to support it. I bet he’d rather start selling their own consoles that run Windows instead!
For reference, the current estimated amount of desktop Linux users globally is somewhere between 60-80 million. In English-speaking countries, the total is around 19-20 million.
That sounds about right when comparing Microsoft’s claim of “1 billion” Windows devices. 5% of a billion is 50 million(not a perfect comparison as 5% Linux is total including MacOS/others from statcounter but you get the idea). So 50 million to 100 million Linux users globally sounds about right.
PC/laptop manufacturers will still push Windows
it will eventually hit a wall because of this. most people can only conceive of using whatever came with the computer.
It will be really interesting to see the figures at the end of 2026, when Windows 10 has truly reached end of life, and a whole bunch of people are going to be forced to choose.
You can buy laptops and PCs with pre-installed Linux at Germany’s biggest computer retailer now.
Some OEMs with some models here in the USA also offer it. HP and Dell offer it. I think Dell gives Fedora and Ubuntu? And it takes off ~$130 USD or so from the price, so it’s the full Windows license cost.
Personally if I have that option I’m taking it and just reinstalling whatever I want anyway, but it’s nice having that option.
Also if I’m going to spend $2k+ on a new laptop and they don’t give me a non-Windows/blank OS option then I’d go to support and request a special product link. Otherwise I’ll find another brand or buy used.
Tuxedo laptops seem like they have a solid build.
Nice design and I think they are based in Germany.
They even provide their own OS which is based on Ubuntu.
Yes, very happy with mine. Started it up to see the preinstalled version of Linux and then restarted it to install Arch btw instead, but it’s a great wee machine, exactly what I wanted and will be replacing it with another like it when the time comes.
My M1 MacBook Air is still alive and kicking (although I dislike being an American brand - bought it before the whole American mess).
But if I was in the market looking for a laptop, definitely would be a Tuxedo.
Dell sells PCs pre-configured with linux as well.
I had no idea - that’s really cool!
Germans also seem to be privacy oriented people, I can imagine this combined with recent developments could have a real impact.
I wish you were right, but that growth does not appear fast nor steady.
0 to 1 percent: 22 years
1 to 2 percent: 8 years
2 to 3 percent: 2 years
3 to 4 percent: more unstable, but between 1 and 3 yearsI would say it’s an encouraging trend.
I had the opposite take as that guy. I already knew that Linux usage in desktops was growing, but I’m pleasantly surprised seeing the dramatic acceleration behind it! I’m being optimistic here, but we could reach the point that we start going up a percentage point in a matter of months in the next few years.
Yup too late I’m never coming back.
I switched to Linux in December, and it was a remarkable feeling. I don’t think I had really noticed how oppressive or depressive Windows had become (and I hadn’t even switched to Win 11, just using win 10), or how much I was actually personally affected by, but that feeling of suddenly being free when I booted up my linux was quite surprising and exhilarating.
It was like a massive weight had been lifted off of my shoulders.
I won when I ditched your mom.
-Dad.
