Nope, will probably avoid 11 as long as I can though. I have an Mvidia card (drivers are notoriously troublesome on Linux). And I need professional design software for work (as in, industry standard: Adobe or Affinity).

But I put 11 on my laptop to try it and I hate it. So many terrible UI changes, UX noticeably worse. Like they changed stuff just to say they changed stuff.

I considered going Linux for personal use and development, and then using another machine or dual boot for Mac for design software. But i learned about the Nvidia issues after I upgraded my card :/ and swapping to Mac's walled garden after avoiding it for decades is.... a sign of how bad W11 feels to use.

[–] ohshit604@sh.itjust.works 1 points 6 minutes ago* (last edited 2 minutes ago)

drivers are notoriously troublesome on Linux

I dunno man, Debian makes it pretty easy.

Prerequisites

x64 Kernel headers:

sudo apt install linux-headers-amd64

Debian 12 Installation

Disable secure boot & add ‘Contrib’ repository to sources list:

sudo deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ bookworm main contrib non-free non-free-firmware

Install Nvidia driver

sudo apt install nvidia-driver firmware-misc-nonfree

Restart system.

Bonus points for optimal performance follow CUDA doc & OptiX doc for Ray-Tracing & utilization of Nvidia cuda cores.

[–] solarvector@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 19 minutes ago

Might be worth testing Linux with a separate drive. I know people still have trouble with Nvidia, but there are a lot of people (myself included) that just had to install the drivers and have had zero issues thereafter. Mine is a slightly older gaming laptop.

I have a desktop with an AMD card that I tried to put Linux on and couldn't get the drivers to work. I'm going to try again in the summer and hope they've caught up.

[–] Jeffool@lemmy.world 1 points 3 minutes ago

Considering I'm unemployed and job hunting, and Windows says I can't upgrade my current (old) PC, and I regularly play Warzone with friends? No, probably not any time soon.

Maybe if I get a job with a six digit salary in a city with a reasonable cost of living (or remote) so I can jump out of debt before 6 months? But I'm not holding my breath.

[–] TheTimeKnife@lemmy.world 8 points 1 hour ago

I switched a year ago and I love it. All my old games run better on linux than windows at this point. Proton is fucking amazing.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 15 minutes ago* (last edited 11 minutes ago)

How to give it a go:

Get a 256GB SSD and install it on your computer alongside the existing drives.
Install a gaming-oriented Linux distro such as Pop!OS, Bazzite, SteamOS or similar, on that drive (don't let it touch any other drive - those things generally have an install mode were you just tell it "install in this drive" which will ignore all other drives)
Unless your machine is 10 years old or older, during boot you can press a key (generally F8) and the BIOS will pop-up a boot menu that lets you choose which OS you want start booting (do it again at a later date if you want to change it back). If your machine is old you might actually have to go into the BIOS and change the boot EFI (or if even older, boot drive) it boots from in the boot section of the BIOS.
Use launchers such as Steam and a Lutris since they come with per-game install scripts that make sure Proton/Wine is properly configured, so that for most game you don't have to do any tweaking at all for them to run - it's just install and launch. In my experience you still have to tweak about 1 game in every 10.
If it all works fine and you're satisfied with it, get a bigger SSD and install it alongside the rest. Make one big partition in it and mount you home directory there (at this point you will have to go down to the CLI to copy over your home directory). You'll need this drive because of all the space you'll be using for games, especially modern ones and launchers like Steam and Lutris will install the games in your home directory so having that in it's own partition is the easiest way to add storage space for games.

As long as you give a dedicated drive to Linux and (if on an old machine before EFI) do not let it install a boot sector anywhere else but that drive, the risk exposure is limited to having spent 20 or 30 bucks on a 256GB SSD and then it turns out Linux is still not good enough for you.

When NOT to do it:

If you don't know what a BIOS is or that you can press a key at the start of boot to get into it.
If you don't know how to install a new drive on your machine (or even what kind of drive format it takes) and don't have somebody who can do it for you.
If you don't actually have the free slot for the new drive (for example, notebooks generally only have 2 slots, sometimes only 1).

[–] andybytes@programming.dev 1 points 16 minutes ago

Windows is a weapons contractor that is entangled in the domestic markets. Linux is not. Windows is spyware and anti consumer. It is time to at least be familar with Linux. Try it on a old laptop or something. Linux is free.

[–] WasteWizard@lemmy.world 8 points 1 hour ago

Already prepared everything for the jump. Switched MS Office for LibreOffice, and Outlook for Betterbird. Tested install, configuration and access to backups in a VM. Next vacation I take I'll go for it. Mint is my choice of Distro, because of Steam/Gaming reasons. With the US being antagonistic, if not outright hostile, right now, and Microsoft having their disgusting Copilot AI Analysis Fingers in everything, it's the rational choice I think.

[–] stormdahl@lemmy.world 1 points 34 minutes ago (1 children)

I've been on 11 since before it was officially released. Honestly never had any issues with it, but I'm interested in hearing what sort of issues anyone else might have had? Are we talking about privacy concerns, bugs or performance issues?

[–] solarvector@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 15 minutes ago (1 children)

Privacy, UI/UX, admin controls, ads, pop ups or notifications, nagging about online services, AI, forced account creation, not working with older hardware.

[–] stormdahl@lemmy.world 1 points 6 minutes ago

I mostly just use my PC for video games, movies and music production, so that hasn’t really affected me.

Regarding UI I think it’s been horrible since Windows 8. I really miss 7!

[–] flemtone@lemmy.world 5 points 1 hour ago

Steam OS, Batocera, Bazzite, Linux Mint.. so many great distros for gaming alone.

[–] CatZoomies@lemmy.world 5 points 1 hour ago

Already upgraded to Linux Mint - https://lemmy.world/post/24365609

It’s been going great! Everything works as I expected. I now have full confidence that I will never switch back to Windows. It really does feel liberating having an OS that doesn’t track me.

[–] Surp@lemmy.world 7 points 2 hours ago (3 children)

Unfortunately not. Even as an IT person I can say I just wanna come home and boot up my games without hassle. Sure alot of things have been done with proton etc but still a massive amount of games don't work without Soo much dang tweaking. I don't have time for that especially with a job/being a single parent. I am highly interested in steamos though.

[–] Kinperor@lemmy.ca 2 points 57 minutes ago (1 children)

I had the same outlook before switching to Arch Linux, but honestly gaming on Linux is actually the lesser of my hassle. I can genuinely just grab msi files or exe files for games and feed them to Steam to get them playing via Proton. There's only one (1!) game that I can't play, and I'm 99% certain it's a problem with my hardware, not my OS (Monster Hunter Wilds seems to hate my GPU and crash all the time). But even that was fixed with a mod (up until the latest update).

With that said, I've had a lot of hassle handling other things that are upstream of gaming so it's not like you're unreasonable in wanting an OS that is mostly stable. Then again, I made the decision to use Arch Linux, there's distros that are simpler afaik.

[–] lagoon8622@sh.itjust.works 1 points 51 minutes ago

Is Windows actually stable though? I used to have to use it for work, it's a disgusting OS. Now I use Ubuntu for work, also disgusting, but it's much better than Windows

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 40 minutes ago* (last edited 34 minutes ago)

I thought the same, especially since I had tried Linux on my main several times since the 90s (my first dual boot was with Slackware).

Then maybe 8 months ago I did the transition, and installed Pop!OS since I'm a gamer plus I have a NVidia graphics card and didn't want to go through the whole hassle related to that (Pop!OS has a version which already comes with those drivers).

Mind you, I did got a separate SSD for Linux and meanwhile added a new one, which is where my games directory is mounted and upgraded the root one to something a bit bigger,

So, this time around, what did I find out in about 8 months of use:

Once, I did had to boot into CLI mode and have apt do some failed upgrades, which included doing some kind of rebuild thing (you get instructions of what command to run when apt fails). This was due to a upgrade of the apt itself, I believe. All the other times it just boots to graphics mode (I'm using X rather than Wayland) or if it fails to start it (happened only a handful of time) you just reboot it.
In general even though I've done things like add and change hardware components, I have done little tweaking via CLI and some of it I did it because I'm just more comfortable with it or wanted so obscure options (for example, I wanted to mount the drive shared with Windows with a specific user and group, so I had to edit fstab). Except for the more obscure stuff there are UI tools for all management tasks and one doesn't have to actually do much management and things almost always just work (for example, I changed graphics card - whilst staying with NVidia - and it just booted and worked, no tweaks necessary)
As for games, I use Steam for Steam Games and Lutris for all other game versions including GOG. Both have install scripts specific for each game, that configure Wine appropriately, so you seldom have to do anything but install, launch and play. That said in average I have had to tweak maybe 1 in 10 games. Further, about 1 in 20 I couldn't get them to work. If you do install pirated games, then there is no install script and you do have to do yourself the whole process of figuring out which DLLs are missing and configure them in Wine using Winetricks (curiously, I ended up having to install a pirated game because the Steam version did not at all work, and the pirated version works fine). Note, however, that since I don't do multiplayer games anymore, I haven't had problems with kernel-level anti-cheat not working with Linux.
Interestingly, for gaming you have safety possibilities in Linux which you don't in Windows: all my games launched via Lutris are wrapped in a firejail sandbox with a number of enhanced security restrictions and networking limited to only localhost, so there is no "phone home" for the games running via that launcher (Steam, on the other hand, is a different situation).

I still have the old Windows install in that machine, but I haven't booted into it for many months now.

Compared to the old days (even as recently as a decade ago), nowadays there is way less need for tweaking in Linux in general and for gaming, even Windows games generally just install and run as long as you use some kind launcher which has game-specific install scripts (such as Steam and Lutries), but if you go out of the mainstream (obscure old games, pirated stuff) then you have to learn all about tweaking Wine to run the games.

If you have a desktop and the space to install the hardware, just get a 256GB SSD (which are pretty cheap) and install a gaming-oriented Linux distro (such as Pop!OS or Bazzite) there, separate from Windows and you can dual boot them using your BIOS as boot manager: since the advent of EFI, booting doesn't go through a boot sector shared by multiple OSs anymore, so if you install each in their own drive then they don't even see each other (you can still explicitly mount the Windows partitions in Linux from the Files app to access them, but otherwise they have no impact whatsever on booting and running Linux) and only the BIOS is aware of the multiple bootable OSs and you can get it to pop up a menu on boot (generally by pressing F8) to change which one you want to boot.

For the 20 or 30 bucks of a 256GB SSD it's worth the try and if you're comfortable with it you can later do as I did and add another bigger one just for the directory with you games (or your home directory, though granted to migrate your home like this you do have to use the CLI ;))

[–] gigglybastard@lemmy.world 4 points 2 hours ago (2 children)

that's also my excuse, but then again, i don't even game that much. and i'm on rtx 3070 which will be getting too old soon for new games and new GPUs are just too expensive.

And god i hate w11. i mean it's not that different than w10 but things just don't work!

my logitech mouse stutters for no fucking reason, 10 year old games lag for no fucking reason. the whole windows lags after being waken up from sleep after a few days, i could go on and on. none of these problems existed on w10.

[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 2 points 31 minutes ago

rtx 3070 which will be getting too old soon for new games

[–] stormeuh@lemmy.world 2 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Why not dual-boot with steamos in that case? Sure, some things may not work out-of-the-box now, but work is constantly being done and at least won't regress like the step from W10 to W11.

[–] gigglybastard@lemmy.world 1 points 33 minutes ago

honestly, i'm just lazy. I would need to clear out one of my drives, i have three of them, 256gb, 512gb and 2tb. I keep windows on the smallest one. I would need to clear out the 512gb one and just get it done.

might get it done when w11 pisses me off a few more times :D

[–] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 7 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Been on Linux for like 15 years now

[–] zhyl@feddit.uk 2 points 43 minutes ago

You walked so our games would run 🫡

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

If you use Windows as mere game launcher, you better have a application firewall set to whitelist Steam only anyway.

[–] taanegl@lemmy.world 5 points 2 hours ago (3 children)

I have no idea. I rely on music software that doesn't have a Linux port. This sucks, because that software cost money, and if I can't get it running reliably on Linux I might have to... either that, or get a Mac :/

[–] TrumpetX@programming.dev 1 points 43 minutes ago

What music software?

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[–] ulterno@programming.dev 4 points 2 hours ago

Upgrade

to Linux

[–] MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works 9 points 3 hours ago

My gaming pc has just switched over to bazzite (as I use it like a console/htpc). Been wanting to do it for ages but needed to get an amd card beforehand for the best experience. Windows really started to grind my gears in the last few months too.

[–] Frieren@lemmy.world 5 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Made the upgrade last week to Linux mint and I’m loving it. Got my Arr stacks and stuff setup as dockers and it’s never worked so well. All the connection issues I’ve had on windows is now gone.

The interface is nice and not bloated. And I’m not being tracked which feels liberating.

[–] Mouette@jlai.lu 2 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Welcome :), if we're being honest lot of the tracking still happens on Linux once you open your web browser but it definitively feel nice to be liberated of the one at OS level and a solid start for caring about online privacy

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