Big agreement with commenter Bekenstein Bound here, windows has gone off the fucking rails into enshittification and they are extremely fucking due for a market adjustment. You know what the biggest thing keeping me away from linux was? Getting used to a new UI. Smart phones that change UI every two minutes have taught all with a tiny shred of tech savvy to overcome that flavor of hesitation. I wonder…
The other side is program incompatibility. Most of the programs most of us use are exclusive to the windows-mac oligopoly. But I wouldn’t be surprised if win or mac could be emulated more safely and effectively than running the original dogshit OSes themselves, as a bare bones nested thing to run those exclusive programs, or at least pirated versions. Anybody know the subject enough to offer opinions on this one?
On a related subject, I’m earnestly wondering how long the US government is going to be able to continue using windows. The OS has gotten so fucking rotten that at some point, crucial systems absolutely need to be on more reliable software.
Still have trauma from Win 11 defaulting to uploading my entire shit to a cloud the second I started up. I “disabled” it, but still have to live with daily reminders they want me to do this. Fucken hell.
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I suggest making two lists of the software you use.
One list is what you want to use, such as a browser , an email client, a word processor, a spreadsheet, a photo catalogue, a photo editor, a pdf reader, a movie player, a movie editor, etc.
For most of these, you can be sure that any flavor of LINUX has choices that many people use successfully.
The second category is utility software that you currently use to try to fix Windows, including antivirus software. For this category, you don’t even want analogous software, unless it comes with the LINUX distribution.
The third category is if you have any special software, such as something that you use for your work. This might be necessary to run under emulation or something. I don’t know.
But I think your analysis will be easier when you think of the software in these three categories. Most of what you do is in the first two categories. And only for the third category might you care about the software having the same name as on Windows or Mac.
Put another way, maybe you tell yourself that you most need Microsoft Word to write with. The answer is that you need a word processor, but it doesn’t need to be called Word.
You will use a different application, but the controls will be similar to some previous versions of Word that you used to be comfortable with using.
Good luck.
OK. That turned out to be three lists, not two.
But the point remains that 95% of what you actually want to do is stuff in the first category that lots of other people do just fine using common LINUX applications. It will work for you too.
Under Linux you got Wine which supplies the Windows API to run native Windows software directly in the Linux Desktop. Whether a specific application runs well under Wine is a bit of a gamble, personally I didn’t have much luck with it, but some of the stuff I tried was pretty exotic or close to the hardware.
My solution is to run my computer under Linux and have Windows installed in a virtual machine that I start up whenever I need to run something Linux does not offer. Of course this means you need a computer with a bit of power and RAM, on my 10 year old 16GB desktop PC Windows does feel a bit sluggy, and you are dealing with two completely different systems and might find it annoying to switch and transfer data between the two.
For me this works because I hardly ever need Windows and I’m a nerd who really likes tinkering with stuff.
Also: Still running Win10 on the VM, 11 wouldn’t work on my setup and I don’t want it anyway. Having to deal with it at work is quite enough, thank you!
I plan to continue running Win10 even after it’s not longer supported as I really don’t do much with it and believe the risk from security issues would be low – I hope this optimism will not bite me in the ass in a few years.
I got into Linux about 25 years ago when I was trying to find a better job. The area I lived in was basically a collection of small midwest towns. A friend and I saw a listing from Microsoft offering to teach business skills at a seminar. We went, expecting to learn useful things. Instead, they introduced us to Clippy and tried to sell early Microsoft Office to us. I think we sat through more than an hour of this hoping for something useful. It never came, we had to GTFO.
We both stumbled our way through learning Linux after that.
Linux will generally run on any old hardware. This is very useful for trying it out. If you don’t have an old system laying around that you can erase the hard drive on then you can also try it out from a cdrom or usb drive. Then you just have to figure out how to get your hardware to boot from it.
I recommend getting familiar with Linux first. Use it for email and web browsing and chatting. Your custom software that doesn’t have a Linux version you’ll keep using on Windows during this stage.
Once you feel comfortable with doing these tasks on Linux and getting around then it’s worth looking into which software from the Windows world you might be able to make work on Linux. I’ll cover two approaches.
The simplest way here is to use Crossover by Codeweavers. It’s a paid software version of the wine project which is a compatibility layer that allows some Windows programs to run well on Linux. I recommend it because it has a 14 day trial (which is why you want to already know how to get around before trying it), the company made a considerably more polished setup aimed at regular users, if you do buy you’re funding them working on the wine project and releasing their code to it for free, and any version you buy can be downloaded from their site even years later (I have some that go back to 2008). Use the search function on their site to see if your stuff will work well. You generally want 4 or 5 stars for a relatively painless experience.
I would imagine you could find a way to use the setup you create in the 14 day trial with the base wine software which is free. But it would take some tinkering.
Link:
https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover
The other way is about gaming. Steam makes some things work for you in Linux because they would like to sell their Steam Deck hardware product which runs Linux. They seem to be calling it the proton compatibility layer. To use it install the Steam client. Click on your game in the listing so you see the “Install” button. If it’s green, just install and see if it works. If it’s greyed out or it doesn’t work after you install it, you’ll want to click on the Manage button (the small gear on the right side under the game’s picture on the game page). From there click Properties, then Compatibility, and check the box next to “Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool”. It will default to Proton Experimental which is fine. Now you can close this part and go back to the game page. Install if needed and play. In my experience the games that don’t actually support this (the ones with the greyed out install button when you start) will sometimes have updates that break the compatibility layer. But later on, a Proton update can cause it to start working again.
Neither of these options will work perfectly. Don’t expect that. Also note that software with frequent updates especially over many years (like an MMO for instance) will introduce more chances for this sort of thing to break. But it can work and be a very useful option to have.
It’s worth noting as well that for one of the biggest compatibility issues, games… Steam has been actively contributing to WINE (Wine Is Not an Emulator) and has developed its own branch specifically for handling games. This is part of how so many otherwise Windows-only Steam games can still run on the Linux-based Steam Deck.
Also a lot of things built to be cross-platform, such as Firefox and Thunderbird, actually do their core development on Linux or the like and then get ported to Windows afterward, for the simple reason that you get your Mac and many other ports practically for free at that point since both use POSIX, and Windows also has POSIX support to make porting outside applications easier. As long as you use a UI framework that already has cross-platform support, building to Linux to start with makes broad multi-platform support easier than building to Windows initially.
And, while the UI differences between Windows and Linux have long been cited as one of the reasons to hesitate to move… how many significant UI redesigns has Windows forced people through?
Ubuntu: If you can copy an .iso file to a usb stick as an ISO (youtube can show you that one if you don’t know how to make a bootable usb stick). It litterally boots in to a version of the OS so you can see what you’re gettting. It comes with Web, Office, etc. You install it by using it a bit, deciding you want it and clicking install.
Gaming and a few work places insisting on the 2 or 3 office formats that don’t quite work (Word .doc files just don’t always format correctly between the two worlds for example) Gaming is almost there thanks to Valve’s recent interest in Steamdeck / Steam OS and a bunch of folks liking it enough to make PC similars.
Go straight Ubuntu if you don’t mind a Mac – like destop or Kubuntu if you prefer Windows style. IF gaming is your main thing and you have a spare rig to tinker with ARCH is awesome, but a steeper learning curve and need for room to tinker with it (IE NOT on your work/life depends on it being stable)
Yikes! Now that is what I call a privacy violation! Imagine having to explain to some cop that shows up one day that the “murder plot.txt” file you had in My Documents is for a mystery novel you’re writing and you’re not actually planning to kill anybody …
in a sense, this post was engagement bait. not clickbait because we don’t have ads, but it’s just fun to see people go off. and on a more serious note, it does give me a lot of useful info about finally giving M$ that middle finger.
bekenstein – u kno it, comrade.