I will continue to enjoy my incredibly straightforward and to the point Linux desktop that’s somehow gained a new AI-free feature by doing nothing.
Don’t you want a bunch of pop-ups nagging you to use their AI gimmicks, though?
Damn it! I’m in.
Would you be able to point me toward a good thread about “beginner-friendly” distros that works well with games?
I honestly have no idea what to trust when it comes to this
Bazzite is specifically for PC gaming and is a very friendly starter distro.
Bazzite, definitely.
Pop!_os worked fine for me out of the box. The UI is a little mac-like (dock on bottom, spotlight like search when you hit the super key) by default.
Steam just works. Heroic launcher just works. It’s simple.
I’ve also used mint, but had slightly less luck with its install working out of the box. All issues fixed eventually but there was some head scratching.
Linux nerds tend to have opinions and it’s easy to lose sight of what it’s like as a beginner.
But ultimately it’s pretty easy to switch distributions. They’re all free.
Linux Mint has been able to run games for me. Look up the steam proton virtual windows tool
Don’t go onto specialized distro. Just use the main ones like Mint (which is based on Ubuntu, which is based on Debian). I would say that Debian is the best one, but it needs to read some docs if you have a Nvidia Graphic card (but if not, it should be easy and super stable). Bazzite, Nobara, etc, are based on distro that are quickly changing (Fedora or Arch), which are really nice in their own way, but as a beginner, you need stability first!
Try this : https://www.linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=325 It is Linux Mint, but directly based on Debian instead of Ubuntu!
I don’t agree that Debian is a good choice for a gamer - it sacrifices performance and features for stability, which is not ideal for gamers, who probably want to run the newest drivers and featuresets. Don’t get me wrong, I really like Debian, but as an server os, not for a gaming machine. Something based on Arch or Fedora is a lot better for the rapidly changing environment we are talking about, they can adapt much quicker than Debian.
I have a been using it for 2 years and I was playing games without any problems. Thus said, I agree that they need to setup nvidia drivers if they are unlucky to have one.
I’d say especially for beginners it’s important that Nvidia GPUs work out of the box. Someone coming from Windows would likely not think highly of an OS that needs extra steps for something that just works on Windows, and there are enough Linux distros offering just that.
I installed Mint a week ago and it has played all of the 13 games I tried without any effort from me, except one which ProtonDB told me to change the compatibility mode in the steam properties then it worked great.
I would say see the ProtonDB entries for some games you like to set your expectations.
Pop_OS! and Bazzite were the first two I tried when I made the switch. They were advertised as working right out of the box, which they did not for me.
When I was trying Nobara, I learned I had to run something in the command line to get gamemode to work properly with Steam. Ever since then, Nobara has worked for my gaming needs.
A few tweaks are needed here and there, but it’s literally copy and paste from protondb.
Distribution are basically a bunch of presets, nobara is just fedora with a few gaming defaults, bazzite is immutable fedora, popos is ubuntu… If you can pinpoint the problem you probably could’ve fixed it in both bazzite and popos without moving around; there’s thousands of different pc configurations so ymmv across distros.
I haven’t done much gaming but Steam seems fine on my old laptop running Mint.
Like others said, bazzite and pop os, though I’ve never used either. I use mint and never had a problem.
Though it should be pointed out that some MP games that use a kernel level anti cheat can’t be played (battlefield 6 for instance).
But I also wanted to mention, you can run Linux from a USB flash drive. So of you want to try out one of them without actually installing it, you easily can. If you don’t like it you don’t install. If you do, then you go for the full install. Easy non committal trial so to speak.
I Will get down votes but none works well, most work fine given you spend enough time tinkering. Pirated games are a waste of time to get running and there will be some distros that already come with stuff set up to be " plug and play ", but it never is.
Would you recommend an alternative?
If you have an Nvidia GPU, i can warmly recommend Nobara (a Fedora spinoff) to you. https://nobaraproject.org/download-nobara/
Then you install Docker because may Linux apps come distributed only as Docker images and find out that Docker has its own AI built in called Gordon.
Then Lemmy dogpiles me for, “What do you expect for running corporate software.”
Only Docker Desktop has the AI feature. You can install the Docker engine and CLI tools without it on Linux. Or Podman, a similar alternative.
Nobody expects new Linux users to use the CLI though. For a normal user that just wants to run their software they will encounter this crap.
I use it and I have not encountered this. You’re referring to the desktop GUI maybe?
Yes, Docker Desktop which if you follow the guide for Network Proxy Manager and other docker apps you end up installing. You’d have to already know that Docker Desktop has AI to avoid it and find a work around install.
If the default is getting Docker AI when you install popular apps in Linux, at that point it’s not different from knowing that the default is getting Copilot in Windows and then following online guides to remove it.
I assume you mean Nginx Proxy Manager? I’m surprised that you would even run that on a desktop with a GUI, seems far more fit for a headless system. Of course, nothing stops you - it’s your system.
As a general note I’d recommend docker CLI / compose, most applications will assume you’re using that and have instructions tailored for it (which is helpful if you’re new to docker).
To be honest I didn’t even know docker had a desktop app for Linux, I’ve only seen folks use it on Windows and macOS.
I’m surprised that you would even run that on a desktop with a GUI,
???
The install guide says you need docker compose and links to the docker compose install guide. The link provided for docker compose installs docker desktop. Docker Desktop is a program that shows your running Dockers and allows you to start and stop them.
But fuck me for being a simple man that Read the Fucking Manual and followed the directions provided.
No need to be so hostile.
Installing docker desktop is fine but if you are on Linux and in any way comfortable using the command line I’d definitely run without the desktop part. Just docker and the composer addon is enough.
That nginx proxy manager recommends desktop for Linux environments which most of the time don’t even have a GUI is a bit bizar tbh.
No need to be so hostile.
It’s frustratingly hypocritical that Linux users rightfully dunk on Microsoft for it’s AI yet defend Linux platforms despite the AI.
When it’s the default in Windows, Microsoft is evil. When it’s the default in Docker, you should know better and figure out how to install it despite the official online documentation telling you to install Docker Desktop to get Docker compose installed.
Ok, guys. I’m reading some of these replies which are saying the amount of outrage is out of proportion. I have to disagree with that. I don’t want an AI running on my PC that is monitoring and learning about my shit. I didn’t want that data saved even locally, let alone the monetization of that data. I don’t want to be paying for power of a device that is turning me into someone else’s paycheck.
Can you turn it off? I believe you can. But I also believe that doing it manually would be incredibly annoying since that does go with a lot of past practice. I also get it would reactivate itself after major updates, like how Edge keeps reinstalling.
Are there other solutions to my Microsoft issues, yes. Chris Titus Tech comes to mind.
But overall, the Windows ecosystem does not feel right to me anymore. Could other people still use it, yes. Am I going to stop them, not intentionally. But my Arch gaming PC runs games better than the same machine running Windows. I’ve always entertained the idea of a full switch, still have a Windows 11 dual boot and haven’t officially done it yet, but with this the moment feels right. At least for me, hopefully you can understand that.
I had dual boot with win10 for a while, but when they had that ‘bug’ that was wiping peoples linux partition I dropped Windows completely. As dar as I’m concerned Linux and other FOSS in general has reached a point where it meets the majority of my needs. Same goes for local storage vs needing anything through the cloud or streeaming.
Every hang up I had eventually got solved. Except with modding games, I sorely miss Vortex or Mod Organizer and there’s no alternatives I know of besides doing it all manually.
That wasn’t a showstopper for me though. VR, HDR, Video Games were. These three are solved well enough for my tastes this year to drop my dual boot.
Fortunately on the modding front, the community’s already been cooking:
I‘m using it for Stardew Valley and it works pretty well. Still early days and a bit clunky to use though. Not any power user features to speak of but I guess that isn’t their target userbase for a mod manager.
Vortex works on linux though, This is the guide I used.
Is it just Bethesda games with these post-deploy scripts? I assume this:
https://github.com/pikdum/steam-deck/
Is forcing the Windows version to work somehow, but is it every game on Nexus or just Bethesda titles?
I have no idea, I only tested it with skyrim, and it worked well.
Nexus Mod Manager is working fine under Linux. It’s still under development, but i’ve been modding Cyberpunk 2077 to hell and back with it.
You’re stretching it to say that when the Linux version has extremely limited game support.
It’s literally just CP2077 and Stardew Valley.
https://nexus-mods.github.io/NexusMods.App/users/games/
Researching more, I found LIMO:
https://github.com/limo-app/limo
And some more ideas here:
Hopefully LIMO works because the other ideas look like a brittle PITA.
I think we have a bit of a degree of “Yep, that’s Microsoft alright” mood as a whole because it’s accepted that things are going to get worse for their users perpetually, so I personally stopped giving a shit because I already left before win10 EOL anyway. I’m guessing there’s a similar mood among others who already saw the writing on the wall.
Do yrself the favor and cut the cord.
The cool part is that 100% of the “AI features” they’re advertising are either not running locally or not AI at all
I think that if someone (even ai) is analyzing my documents, then they are bypassing my permissions and looking despite the fact that it is supposed to be private. Basically if ai is looking at my files, I don’t care if it isn’t running locally, it is bypassing my permissions to my automated stock trading algorithms. I know security isn’t exactly Windows strength anyways, but accessing my files without my consent or knowledge is a nail in the coffin for me. Granted, you can disable it, I might point you in the direction of winutil by Chris Titus, but I would bet money that a Windows update will re enable it without consent or permission.
It’s off by default.
Edge keeps reinstalling because it powers lots of other things in the OS. Removing it breaks other things, which is why so many people on here think that Windows 11 is “broken” or “buggy” - they run random “debloat” programs and completely fuck up their OS.
For now.
Also fuck edge for so many reasons, like ring zero access. It’s "used by (not “powers”) other things in the os by design so that they "can’t " comply with EU rules(and more).
If you don’t need to do 3D work, you can still use a virtual machine with kvm, it is really fast! (then ditch Windows :) )
If you mean CAD, I found that FreeCAD works nicely as a parametric 3D modeler with some nice macros and addons, with the perk of also running on Linux
E: added info
I’m not too into 3d modelling stuff myself, but I understand Blender is pretty good, too.
Have Win 10 and was a Windows die hard since I was a kid.
Been running Linux on another drive as my default boot for a year and a half in anticipation of this horseshit and was only hesitant to delete Win because my Fanatec sim racing hardware wasn’t supported on Linux.
Welp, turns out hid-fanatecff is a thing. Installed the kernel driver and boom, working Fanatec peripherals. Even my Moza shifter is plug-and-play.
Bye bye Microsoft.
Is there any use for a HP Reverb G2 on linux?
Fully supported by Monado looks like.
Idk how recent that Monado support is, but I couldn’t get the reverb G2 to work on Linux at all a couple years ago.
A couple years IRL is like 100 years in Linux time
Yeah, peripherals lol. All my sim stuff is working brilliantly in Linux, however I still have some audio production stuff I need Windows for. Unfortunately, due to the need for minimal hardware latency and all that, Wine and VMs aren’t an option. Also a lack of drivers for some midi devices sucks.
Really? I run my home studio in Nobara Linux without any latency issues. I use Reaper as my DAW. Are you using
yabridge?Wine can actually beat native in latency, since it’s a pretty thin translation layer and windows is … windows.
I’d give it a shot just in case.
I work in IT and far be it for me to tell you what OS to use on your own computer.
The only thing I want to die right now, is the AI bubble. Just pop already. Holy fuck what a worthless endeavor this has been.
+1000. one of my coworkers keeps thinking he’s saving time with AI-generated code but what he’s really doing is pushing the thinking downstream when we have to pick apart the absolute garbage that gets generated.
PR feedback gets turned into AI prompts and the cycle continues. It’s exhausting
Yeah, it’s BS. I scrutinize PRs to let peers realize that it’s often not worth the time when they have to redo basically everything the agent wrote in the first place. There’s been some truly lazy PRs…
The logic behind the voice controls sounds pretty questionable, but it’s supposedly backed by data showing that users spend billions of minutes talking in Microsoft Team meetings, according to Mehdi — so they’re already used to talking on the computer, right?
Do they really reason like this? Oh my. That’s stupid. And here I was thinking Microsoft employs clever people.
Four Horsemen of Apocalypse
- The country where a lot of tech countries are headquartered in, elects a wanna-be dictator
- Android restricts “sideloading” (aka: non-approved install)
- Windows has mandatory AI
- Mandatory ID Verification
deleted by creator
Stop SERN, Prevent WW3, Find the Steins;Gate Seikaisen (Worldline)
El. Psy. Congroo.
Microsoft literally wanted me to convert my desktop to e-waste as it lacks the magical TPM chip that Win11 demands.
I said “fuck that” and pulled the Boot SSD, kept the existing non-boot drives for data, and put in a brand new SSD, encrypted it and installed Pop OS in one shot.
Not only was it easy, I lost literally zero critical functionality vs. what I had with Win 10. There is a Linux app equivalent for everything I had before. I had a few driver issues but most were auto-discovered including obscure ancient printers and scanners on my network.
it lacks the magical TPM chip that Win11 demands.
How old is it? TPM 2.0 has been standard equipment for nearly ten years now. It’s disabled by default on some systems.
Intel Core 8th gen and above, and Ryzen 2000 series and above, should all have TPM 2.0 built into the CPU (fTPM)
Does it really matter? I’ve been using my i7 from 2016 and it’s still going strong.
Depends on if you use any security features that require a TPM. If not, the older chips are fine, or some motherboards allow a separate TPM chip to be added.
For example, my employer requires TPM 2.0 for both Windows and Linux systems, since they store most encryption keys and certificates on it - including WPA2-Enterprise key for wifi, 802.1x key for wired Ethernet, SSH keys (in some cases), LUKS key for full-disk encryption on Linux, Bitlocker key on Windows, etc.
For home use, if you don’t use any of those features (or require strong encryption for them), the main thing you’ll miss out on is support for Windows 11, which is fine if you’re using Linux.
In a way, I see the lack of windows support as a positive.
Sure, but there’s Linux features that use TPM too, although you probably don’t need them in a home environment.
Why did you have to replace the SSD?
In case they had to roll back, and so they can pull data
I didn’t “have to” but, a few reasons…
-
Swapping the drive created a pretty easy rollback path that was just “put original drive back”
-
The drive was ~10 years old, and was in the range of recommended replacement for an SSD with the amount of TBW and age it had.
-
Original drive was kinda small and a new larger drive was available for not very much money.
-
Arguably sometimes drivers for older devices are more likely to have been ported to Linux at some point then conpletely new devices.
It’s not TPM. Older Intel CPU’s have unpatchable hardware flaws.
It’s insane how much extra time, effort and sanity you can retain simply by switching to Linux. I initially switched a few years ago, then fully shortly after. Using my PCs has never been better and I had no issues with gaming. The only games that don’t work are some of the live service ones I’ll never be interested in.
One of the best decisions in my life, right up there with deleting all social media. Life keeps getting better, relatively speaking, but of course rich pedophiles just can’t tolerate us having a good time.
Switched everything to Bazzite as a start. Easiest switch after figuring out Windows sabotages boot drives.
I may have pirated all my Windows but man it feels good to be off that ride. Spoofing corporate licenses for the authenticator was such a hassle.
They do what to boot drives?
If you’re dual booting, Windows may at any time eat the other partition or, more often just its GRUB, leaving you unable to boot into Linux.
Even if you’re using separate drives, the Windows bootloader may still affect your other drives. On one of my old laptops, I had Pop!_OS and Windows on two separate SSDs. After installing Windows on the second drive, it put itself as the first boot device and broke the option to change boot order inside the BIOS. It worked, but only sometimes, and Windows would keep setting itself to the top upon every boot. Might not have been intrinsically a Windows issue, but never happened with other configurations.
I’m trying to move to Linux so that’s terrifying.
Windows can automount USB drives, so a flash drive can get inadvertently formatted, (or something to do with the bootloader, i don’t know the technical details that well.) Point is the automounting can break a flash drive that isn’t formatted for windows.
yay! hi mint!
I am also newly minty fresh.
Although up graded anyway because the games I play aren’t an Linux.
The only downside is gaming.
I made a portable flashdrive for Linux for anything I want to keep privet and left windows for exclusively gaming.
Depending on the games you play, thanks to Valve with Proton and Steam Deck, most games are actually already playable on Linux. The only exception is newer multi-player online games with kernel-level anticheat. I haven’t done any gaming on Windows in years pretty much.
While there is quite the push thanks to Valve, they built upon the work of others, mostly Wine (which I think they fund nowadays) and DXVK (they hired the dev after a short while). So they’re definitely not freeloading, but the main lifting has been done by Codeweavers and Wine contributors through their massive work over the years, plus the quantum leap that was DXVK.
I’m not trying to shame Valve here, they definitely go beyond what they’d be required to by license, but I feel it’s also not fair to call them the reason most games work under Linux when others have poured literal years of work into making it possible.
I assumed you knew I was talking about the DXVK dev given that he’s literally an employee of Valve, as you mentioned. Either way, I’ll now be more detailed with my comment.
Of course all the contributors to Wine deserve credit too, and I do have an active Crossover license, but Valve are the ones who explicitly made a push for gaming on Linux and focused specifically on the gaming aspect. Wine covers everything, not just gaming, Proton is specifically for gaming. It’s doubly true given that they want to sell more units of the Steam Deck so they can get more people into the Linux and Valve ecosystem. Not that you don’t know that, but it’s worth pointing out regardless.
I’ve been daily driving Linux since before Proton was even a thing, and the difference between gaming then versus now is not even comparable, it is infinitely better now and keeps improving. I no longer have to hope that a new game will work or that I can somehow manage to get the right set of libraries and flags to get it to run, if a new game comes out and it doesn’t have a kernel-level anti-cheat, I can expect that it will work out of the box just fine without any tweaking because I have seen this happen multiple times now. I’ve even started getting into Mac gaming to get some of that tweaking and configuring thrill back that I used to get from Linux gaming, having to tweak and configure things to get them to work properly or to work even better.
Games work great in Linux!
And that’s not like “oh, about 3/4 of my favorite old games work without too much trouble.” It’s more like opening steam and “holy crap, half of my old favorites have native Linux versions and everything else just works using proton.”
Remember, the Steam Deck and the general shittiness of Microsoft has directed a lot of Valve’s resources towards gaming on Linux.
If you want to play some brand new AAA multiplayer thing with rootkit type anti cheat, then maybe you’d be stuck dual booting into windows.
I’d argue that those games could be abandoned, because there is SO much choice out there that I am certain I already own copies of dozens of games that I will never play. But if it’s a matter of playing what your friends are into, then yeah make the computer adapt to the human needs and not the other way around.
Even some Windows rootkits work well with proton. For example Helldiver 2 with nProtect work perfectly since release.
If someone, totally not me, were in possession of exe-files of games outside a platform like Steam, Epic or whatever, would it be possible to run them on a Linux distribution? Say something like a Steam rip or a GOG rip. Said someone has tried researching but didn’t find any conclusive answers
Absolute truth. I haven’t run into a single game that doesn’t run on my second-from-top-of-the-line gaming PC I built last year under Linux. I know they exist because I see articles about a developer removing Proton support for odd reasons, but it hasn’t impacted me yet.
MS has largely made their own OS irrelevant by putting the Office Suite in the cloud. If you need Excel but don’t want Copilot throwing all your screengrabs to Redmond a box running Ubuntu or Mint or Bazzite or MacOS (a legit option for some people with niche applications that cater to the Apple crowd). MS is following the same playbook with the Xbox brand. If everything is an Xbox then why would you harness yourself to a crappy MS branded one?
Steam has a native Linux client and every game I bought on Windows runs just fine on Linux.
All my older, non-steam games, like “Deus Ex” or “Giants: Citizen Kabuto” run great under Wine, using the default settings. Also, there are Linux versions of DOSBox, for older games.
There is also the Lutris project. I play Guild Wars 2 and Elder Scrolls Online with no issue. AND they have install scripts for many games on their site.
basically my current setup too. it took me just a couple of months on Win11 to straight up give up on Windows because it’s just not very good
Gaming is not the issue for me. All my games work fine. The problem is using some cheats that I did for some games like cyberpunk 2077. I cannot get PINCE or cheat engine to work on it.
Windows is becoming so trash that a bunch of my not-that-tech-savvy friends have been hitting me up asking about gaming on various Linux distros. (Just a few years ago it was all “Linux? Haha nerd”.) And the non gamers are switching to Mac at a remarkable rate.
And things have progressed so well that even for the non-technical crew, after installing Mint and showing them how to use ProtonPlus to install and select Proton-GE, they’re pretty much off to the races without much further hand holding.
Crazy to me that windows is finally worse than MacOS
We live in wild times
Oh wow, you’re right.
I moved to pop!_os on the 14th and I am not looking back
Don’t downgrade to Windows 11, update to Linux
Linux is the only viable solution to this mess. And no it is not as scary as it seema
Finally got my last PC switched off Windows. It feels good.
The malware has been dewormed.
