I was really considering getting a new laptop and now I want it to be a Debian laptop. :^
How do you choose a Linux OS?
Personal preference really but Debian is pretty much just Ubuntu without the bloat. You can also try a lot of them on a live disk without installing (Mint is a good option too).
While this article is about upgrading to Win11, not necessarily a clean install, I found the best way to bypass the requirements is to make an autounnatend with Schneegans.de . Make a Win11 installation USB, generate an autounnatend to bypass the requirements, remove bloat, allow offline install (local account instead of Microsoft account), and a couple other little tweaks like dark mode etc. Drop the xml on the root of the flash drive, and boom.
Or… You know… Install Linux.
Rufus can do this too
I guess it’s a good thing I am switching to Linux.
Mint. There you forgot to finish your sentence.
I’m installing Mint! I also had an eye on EndeavourOS, but I’m thinking I can first switch to mint and once I have some time in it switch to the more involved EndeavourOS tweaking process.
The thing that most grabs me about mint is the polish and refinement, its a no frills shit just works vibe. For instance install bazzite or most other distros even silverblue etc. The program names are wacky and navigation isn’t intuituve as much. Not to say those are bad but mint seems easily labelled. Thought out and navigatable. Having almost everything you need pre installed with next to zero bullshit.
Cinnamon seems the best. I just booted up XFCE yesterday. Good but not cinnamon good. Games worked on my all AMD system out of the box. No tweaks needed for 98 percent of games. It’s been so smooth that half my family has joined. Due to Windows upgrade bullshit nobody has looked back. Windows gets used maybe once in 6 months to go play multiplayer games. Even then I could easily ditch it. Never going back.
Making Win 11 even harder to install is a bold move from Microsoft. Most average users are content with using the OS that comes with their PC and upgrading it when necessary. But if the option is to either buy a new PC or fiddle with registry settings in hope that Win 11 will work, I think a lot more people will start looking at Linux instead.
Nah, just us tech heads that are willing to put in the effort (and I’m not, Linux on the desktop has a long way to go, and I use Linux for all sorts of services).
99% of users can’t be bothered to understand the concept of a web browser, and that there are different ones. Switch them to any Linux distro and they’d freeze like deer in headlights.
Source: decades of providing support.
And yes, dumb move my MS, not sure what they’re trying to do here.
Linux on the desktop has a long way to go
What do you perceive is missing? I’ve been using Linux exclusively since 2006 (while supporting Windows users at work), there’s never been a time when I felt like I was missing a particular Windows feature. Mostly I just find Windows’ lack of user-friendliness to be extremely maddening.
To be fair, if you’ve been using Linux exclusively for nearly 30 years then yeah, you wouldn’t be missing any Windows features because you don’t daily it. That’s a no-brainer.
I’m a daily Windows user but I do sometimes dabble in Linux both out of curiosity and also for challenge reasons. I used to use it for my school laptop(s) and at one point I had a 2nd desktop rig running it. I can gladly say it has come a long way and improved in many ways since the early days, but it still has a ways to go. Unfortunately one of the biggest obstacles is the Linux community itself which is both resistant to change and exceptionally hostile to new users.
About two years ago I was troubleshooting an audio driver that refused to work and I was asking in several Linux communities for assistance. The responses ranged from standoffish to indifferent to several people outright saying “If you can’t even figure this out then maybe you shouldn’t use Linux lmao”. And I agree. Maybe I shouldn’t. Because I was tired of spending so much time screwing around in a terminal while talking to people that think I am trash for struggling to use the operating system they claim is so good.
Linux can be an extremely polished, smooth, and effective experience but that experience is like the frozen surface of a lake. Once something goes wrong and you break through the surface - you are screwed unless you are highly experienced already. That has been my experience, at least.
Ugh that’s terrible about the experience with the audio driver, and unfortunately I have to agree… there ARE some really elitist linux communities out there. My last bad experience was on Digg, I was trying to ask a question about changing the resolution on the console from the grub config. The admin of the group was so hung up on insisting that I couldn’t have a “real” server because I had a monitor connected to it, that he wouldn’t even let anyone else try to answer the question (and it’s actually a simple setting). He actually deleted the post because he was so disgusted by the idea that my rack of servers has a kvm switch attached.
The communities here on lemmy have been so much better with helping people out. Yeah there is definitely still hardware out there that is impossible (or nearly so) to get to work under linux, but those are usually the “software” devices (like the 56k modems we saw just before broadband become widespread). I’ve also run across issues trying to get a soft keyboard to pop up on a 2-in-1 Dell laptop (where you can flip the keyboard to the back and use it like a tablet), but I didn’t really poke at that for long. On the other hand I’ve run into similar issues on Windows over the years, trying to reinstall it on a machine and discovering even the manufacturer no longer has the drivers for the hardware they sold, so I don’t feel like linux is unique in this problem.
As far as fixing problems goes… Have you ever had Windows break so badly that you had to burn an install disk, boot up to a command prompt, and perform a series of cryptic commands trying to get the system up and running again? I’ve had to deal with that both from viruses and from Windows breaking itself. Meanwhile linux has such tools built in from the boot menu, and yeah the commands are still cryptic to most people, but at least you don’t have to visit pirate bay from another machine to get back online.
Have you ever had Windows break so badly that you had to burn an install disk…
As a programmer, yes under Windows 3.0 I could crash the computer so hard that the only way to recover was to reformat the hard disk. It got progressively better in later versions and everything from Windows 2000 has been virtually uncrashable.
My most recent hard crash was when I had a VM, two Minecraft instances and Firefox all open at the same time and Windows ran out of memory (so I upgraded from 32GB to 64GB). It does make me wonder why some of that didn’t get swapped out though.
Oof how much space do those Minecraft instance take up??? My biggest usage is from Firefox, usually takes about 10GB of memory on my 16GB systems, but I run a lot of heavier stuff like building 3D models in the rest of the available space. I’m waiting on a replacement motherboard so I can upgrade to 32G though.
5G for HermitCraft S9, 10G for Enigmatica 6 Expert (looking at Working Set in Resource Monitor). I’ve rebuilt impulseSV’s iBuy as an autocrafting tower in my E6E world, and I needed more detail than I could glean from the videos.
Firefox is a bit more tricky to work out because it’s split over multiple processes but if I kill it while watching Resource Monitor the Available Memory jumps by about 9G, with 56 tabs open.
