Linux

It bears repeating, so: fuck Microsoft and Windows.

Linux is a lot better than the last few times.

It might just be 'good enough' at this point.

many people will go back, but of these, i’m sure many will also come back eventually

i’ve tried a bunch of distros in my last 2 years with windows. many didn’t satisfy my needs at the time, so i stayed on windows.

but now, it’s been over a year since I definitely switched to linux, and over 6 months since i nuked (accidentally, but shhh) my windows partition. and i don’t plan on going back anytime soon.

I’ve looked at Linux for years but it was always so intimidating to me. I finally installed it when my pc was being aged out of windows 10 and honestly it’s really fun to play around with even though I’m not super tech savvy. It’s easy enough to find a solution online if I run into any problems and everything is free!

But this time Linux actually plays video games right out of the box. No trickery. Just install steam and the rest of the experience is smooth as butter

I was one of those nomadic users, every year, since 1998 with Mandrake Linux.

I have always been in love with the idea of an open source OS, but if I couldn't game and work on it, it wasn't ready. Every year, until Valve made it easy to game on Linux.

I made the switch when Proton was released and never looked back.

My point is, every time users go back to Windows, they have their own personal reasons, but those will some day not be the truth anymore.

Desktops only frankly became remotely useable to normal people with recent revisions of things like kde...

Between that and software actually finally started becoming remotely reliable in like 2022-2023 for your avg windows user.

Comparing the past to now is not reliable fair.

More progress towards making things normal user friendly have happened in the last 3-5 years then the last 20.

Anecdotally, I was tinkering with it earlier this year and finally stopped being lazy and flipped my main PC over. After I talked about it enough in my friend chat, three more friends followed suit and a fourth is going to soon. It's not just the end of supporting Windows 10, it's all of the repeated bugs, glitches, and AI garbage Microsoft has been pushing everywhere so aggressively. People who would likely only rate themselves as "mildly" tech savvy are sick of it and willing to make a move, I feel.

I'm ok with that. You hit a point where a community sustains, and is good. Lemmy is a great example of that. Often, when it grows past that, it can become.. unsavory.

Good luck. I jumped ship 10 years ago, you get used to it to the point Windows starts feeling weird.

Don't hesistate to reach out when you're stuck

I'm really enjoying the learning curve with Linux because it's a valuable skill to master. On the other hand, every time I've had to "go under the hood" with Windows, it's been to keep it from doing something awful to me.

I remember someone on Discord server I used to be on kept telling people to "use Linux" which back then, I thought it was some scary OS for people who's tech savvy and wrote him off to be annoying. It was few years when I have my own laptop as early birthday present that I find Windows 10 annoying and remembered Linux exist so I run up a virtual machine and watch so many videos on YouTube about it. Then, I made USB-Boot and installed Linux Mint.

Far from perfect but I feel so much more comfortable using Linux over Windows, feels so much more smoother

Of

Windows 10 didn’t “die”

Microsoft isn’t offering support for it, but their help was barely useful to begin with.

There’s a few small hoops to jump through to enroll in the Extended Security Updates program, after which Windows 10 devices will continue to be functional and secure for at least another year.

Ultimately, I’m all for folks going out and dabbling in Linux. Unfortunately, most consumers are interpreting this situation as a requirement to rush out and buy a new Windows 11 PC and that’s bad.

That's the beauty of Linux- there are so many distros to choose from.

Something for everyone.

And if enough people don't like the existing options, you are always free to fork what exists and make something that fits your needs better.

Being simple to use out of the box is NOT a bad thing on its own. We are simply used to seeing the proprietary profit-driven version, which is the path to enshittification. When something works great out of the box but you still own your machine and have access to any damn thing you want that's hidden from view by default, that is just a good product.

I've been an engineer in electronics and software for over 20 years. I have a masters in software engineering. I currently work on C and C++ code every day for embedded systems, including one that's embedded linux. The terminal is my comfort zone. Screens full of super-legible monospaced text please my eyes.

I run Linux Mint Cinnamon (btw) on every computer of mine, even my work machine, and I don't care who knows it!

I recommend it to anybody of any skill level who will listen.

It doesn't have to. KDE is a great example here. Out of the box, it's extremely simple to use, as well as familiar in look and feel to Windows. But if you want to - it gives you a lot of customization options. So it doesn't seem to lose out on anything due to being simplified by default.

And frankly, a lot of Unix software could use a similar approach. I know it's not that simple, but it helps the users greatly - particularly new ones, but experienced ones too. Perhaps this wave of Windows refugees will in some way lead to progress in this area.

Depends on what you feel lost about, if it is the basics in general then I would suggest you start of and read about the basics here https://labex.io/linuxjourney they write about the very basics in a very simple way. I think they did a good job, they start of with what Linux is, what distros are to commands from the most basics as how to navigate in the terminal to more advanced combinations. They also have vms where you can try out the commands if you haven't switched yet.

If it is a cheat sheet as in commands then i would say it is better to make your own of the commands you care about but you can start of by using other ppls list like this one https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/linux-unix/linux-commands-cheat-sheet/ but it can be overwhelming for you so use the linuxjouney first. Also it is very important to learn how to look up how to use the arguments in the terminal with man or -h to make it faster and less painful to use.

If you are lost about programs then there are a lot of good GitHub pages that links to useful programs and cli tools, you just need to search for awesome Linux list

Examples:

https://github.com/luong-komorebi/Awesome-Linux-Software You can use their web pages version too https://luong-komorebi.github.io/Awesome-Linux-Software/ https://githublists.com/lists/awesome-lists/awesome-bash

Here is one for distros https://github.com/kolioaris/awesome-linux-distros

Here is an example for customizing https://github.com/fosslife/awesome-ricing

When looking for programs is it very important that you know what distro you are on, what desktop environment (like kde, gnome, xfce) and what window composition you use (usually Wayland or x11, x11 is older and is more compatible).

So in short start of at https://labex.io/linuxjourney

Then look up distros here https://github.com/kolioaris/awesome-linux-distros

For new ppl do I think Ubuntu based is best because almost everything has a Ubuntu version, when you feel ready can you test out other distros. I haven't tried bazzite, I started of many years ago on debian (a few random ones like arch and mint) and then pop os for many years and now cachyos, I liked my journey but that doesn't mean it is correct for others.

I would suggest to have all of your data you care about on a separate disk or have automatic backup of it so you can break your os without care. And if you start customizing would I suggest setting up a GitHub repo and commit your changes everytime you like what you see so it is easy to go back if you regret something.

I hoped this helped on your journey, I didn't want to overwhelm you so I hope I kept it simple enough :D