Let me just say this:
If you’re here on Lemmy, you are the target Linux demographic.
If you:
- Are concerned about the reach of Big Tech
- Embrace the community
- Wish to regain agency over your digital life
- Enjoy the unobstructed experience tailored to your needs
- Care about digital hygiene
- Are open to something new
…then both are meant for you.
I love how simple to install it is compared to windows and does what you tell it to. I’d compare the feeling to windows XP.
deleted by creator
Pop in a bootable usb and check.
On the order of an hour, unless you’ve got some especially exotic or crummy hardware in there.
deleted by creator
Maybe twenty years ago.
Quickest, easiest, and safest way to find out is to boot to a Live USB stick and see how it goes. Doesn’t touch your hard drive at all.
i have had way more trouble with drivers on windows than on linux
For me it’s pretty much plug and play with Linux mint. Had some problems with vr and integrated graphics but just disabled them in BIOS and runs fine. You can try dual booting mint and see for yourself, just make windows portion smaller through windows and install mint in the empty partition. I’m not that tech savy still but I can search online. Feel free to ask anything but today Linux might be easier than windows to understand how to use unless the develepor actively dislikes Linux. Currently using cachyOS and I enjoy it but it is for more advanced users. Just need to know few basic konsole commands and find name of the package you want to install. I’m still very dumb in most things Linux but there are tutorials and forums that most likely have people with same or similar issues you might encounter.
It really depends on your devices and what you want to do with them.
What I’ve noticed so far is that the generic drivers on Linux seem to cover more functionality (eg, my mouse didn’t show battery status on windows without the proprietary drivers but it shows up in Linux), but if it’s not covered by that, then odds are support will be more limited or none on Linux unless it’s commonly owned.
Though depending on what kind of data your devices are dealing with, it might not be that bad to get it working. Like audio data is just a time series of amplitudes (though codecs can complicate that if you’re dealing with some digital format), input devices are usually some combination of button press events and axis updates (and controller vibrate is pretty much just a lower bitrate audio signal). Video can be more complicated, but there’s likely software that can understand whatever stream of data it gives off. But this all depends on patience and skill, and if you were the type to gravitate to something like that, you probably would have already switched.
Zero. Either works or it doesn’t. More likely to just work. The not just work situations happen when it’s hardware too recent or some manufacturer that has fucked bad like doing weird things in their hardware for cameras or sound or something like that. That happened in the older days, almost 99% happening with anything nvidia related. Eventually one starts to know which hardware is good and which manufacturers suck and you start buying things that work from the start in later years of living.
When the PC I’m installing a Linux distro on has the GPU driver built into the kernel I agree it’s such a breeze and I love CachyOS, otherwise it can get painful.
Sorry I’m recently traumatised by my oldest computer that has a GTX1060 in it and I want to rant lol. It’s retired to workout room duty, so I wanted a stable distro on the Stremio “you pass the butter” PC that I can neglect for long stretches of time.
I tried LMDE first because I was hoping to avoid the Canonical fork that is Mint prime. Installing non-free drivers on reboot just dumped me to TTYL. So then I decided after failing for 30 minutes to fix that to cut my losses as I figured it’d take less time to just install a different distro than troubleshoot Debian’s issue. Wrong. Very wrong. Fedora the installer application would crash every time in live USB mode I opened it and I tried different DE’s to see if that was the culprit. Nope. I tried OpenSUSE but it crashed loading live USB mode and shat out a kernel panic about my MSI B250 motherboard for the corei5 7600 it has installed, so that wasn’t even Nvidia’s fault. Only distro to do that. MX Linux installed then crashed to a broken unresponsive ttyl mode if you tried to run a program…like their non-free Nvidia driver installer. Sigh. I figure most of this is to do with nouveau.
Anyways, only Linux Mint worked. Fuck!
Linux is infuriating at times, like when you have a nice mouse or capture card that requires special software or drivers, but compromising my values for the sake of convenience feels pathetic when Windows really isn’t that much better. I use Windows when I must and nothing more.
Linux can be frustrating when something goes wrong, but at least you know it was by accident (either a bug in the software or a mistake on your part). In contrast, when proprietary software goes wrong it’s often due to some megacorporation deliberately trying to fuck you over, and that’s what’s really infuriating!
Yeah, the only issues I have are virtual mics to filter background noise on Discord. I have a program that does it, but I lose control over playing music as well (I have a solution through Helvum, but I have to do the specific audio paths every boot for Firefox -> Discord, and I can’t individually control the volume. Plus the path dies every time I pause the music).
But it was equally as frustrating to get it set up on windows with virtual cables as it has been to try to get virtual cables to work on Linux, so it’s a push there. Everything else has been basically as easy, give or take some of the learning curves of a new OS, and can be attributed to user error.
Dual boot has been nice. Both work how I want them to, 95% of the time, and if one is giving me issues in the moment, the other is likely to work. I do use Linux wayyy more rn tho.
I can’t figure out Discord push to talk on Hyprland because of the X11 stuff. Regarding capture cards, I only record on Windows, anything else on that OS feels slow. There is a delightful snappiness to Linux, and adding animations don’t seem to cause any chugging.
Also opening power shell terminal is awful,
1 hold super 2 press x 3 release super 4 press a
It loads slowly.
Windows does not want you accidentally being productive. Bleh.
Proud Linux user since 2019.
Never broke an install to the point of non return, except when my SSD literally died
PSA: Never buy WD green SSDs
I had an SSD die on me a few months ago (boot sector got corrupted). It took forever for me to figure out what was wrong… It was a Samsung SSD, but since it was 13 years old, it’s hard to say it was a quality issue.
My SSD literally broke electrically and prevented the system from POSTing. It only lasted ~18 months
Jesus, that’s ridiculous!
So, what is your distro, if I may ask? :D
Kubuntu before the SSD broke, now Debian Unstable.
Yes, if you go and see my old post I’ve had a tricky issue with Apt, but I fixed it.
I wouldn’t really reccomend Debian Unstable because it has some problems with dependencies in Apt, but it usually works if I compile software from source or install on Flatpak.
If you are courious, I ditched Kubuntu because it was pushing snaps over dpkg and do-release-upgrade had some issues, my friend managed to nuke his install TWICE by doing a release upgrade
Damn, Ubuntu is so much crap these days.
Also, quite a few folks run Debian Unstable and derivatives, which is a curious trend.
My favorite thing about Linux is the opennes of it.
It feels like a modern version of a Commodore 64. They give you a CLI, a manual, networking and a software repository out of the box and they just tell you: “Go do whatever you want. Learn how the kernel works and make cool stuff”
