I’ve been doing that since 2013. I run Arch btw.
me too, but only since late 2022
Here is my operating systems timeline:
You make an excel to track your operating system of choice for the year but don’t include the distro?!? For shame.
Ok, Ok, Ok, I added it now.
what’s between 1994 and 2001? MS DOS?
No, I just didn’t have a computer. I bought a MTX 80C and later a Ford Fiesta mk3, I also bought some Technics SL-1200 so I sould pretend to be a DJ:
In the end I just didn’t have the need nor time for a computer.
I rate A+ now, very good.
Ok of I really think hard I might get some pcs and os’s that I used since I can remember. But who has such a detailed list of os’s they use?
Are Raspberrypis included, do work pcs count?
In my case work and private OSses align quite well in the timeline, Raspberry Pi’s I didn’t put in here.
You can include them if you want to
A hwhat
An extra large, it seems. I don’t get it either.
2024 ain’t over, you might switch to TempleOS…
Did you stop using a computer between 1994 and 2001? I feel like there’s some interesting story in there.
Yes I did stop using computers during that time. While I had my Amiga in school only nerds had PCs, so I didn’t get one, even though I was programming on my Amiga with AMIGABasic and so on. I guess it was mostly because I started doing normal teenager stuff once I was 16 like motorbikes, cars, playing music, going to the clubs, etc. so there was no time and no desire to use a computer. Only once everyone seemed to have internet at home I started feeling left out a bit. for some months I started usincgcomputers in Internet Cafes and then decided to get a used PC.
I actually feel bad for you using Linux before most stuff had measured. Font anti aliasing, font name, screen tearing, drivers, flatpaks etc.
I use Manjaro BTW
Me a few months back when I accidentally formatted the Windows drive I was keeping for dual booting just in case.
“Guess I’m a full timer now”
Me accidentally installing Fedora on BOTH my hard drives…
I heard you liked Linux so much, I installed Linux on ALL your harddrives
Imagine a 1tb drive partitioned into 16gb parts and a different distro on each. I have ALL the Linuxes.
Where can I learn such power?
Distrobox
So serious question - are you supposed to dual boot window / Linux for some reason?
When I got frustrated with Windows - I wiped my hard drive and just installed Linux mint having literally never used Linux in my life. I didn’t like mint so I tried pop_os (someone here recommended it, thanks again!) and I see zero reason to go back to Windows now.
What is the point of going back to Windows when I can run everything i ran before on Linux now?
My games work better and I’ve found so many free open source alternatives to everything - it’s been really eye opening just jumping in. I’m glad I did.
Edit - I should have clarified Windows other than work, I understand Windows is the life blood of the corporate body - good points on forrnite / valorant / destiny - I don’t play those so I didn’t know.
My Windows install does two things
Piracy/modding for consoles when there isn’t a Linux app available < I could probably use Wine
Figuring out tech support for other people when they refuse to use Linux
Maybe some sort of software that runs better on Windows when you can’t run it through a tool similar to Wine. Even for that subset of software doesn’t work after running it within a VM gets smaller too.
I dual boot purely as a way to help me separate my hobbies. Windows is where I play my games. Linux is where I stay on to my work or work on my personal projects. Separating the OS’s is basically just an organizational set up and it works for me.
Funny, it’s the opposite for me haha. Windows on work laptop. Linux on play laptop.
One of the biggest things stopping me is that my partner loves to play fortnite so i play it with them a lot, is there anything to allow you to play EAC games? Iirc epic said they don’t want to account for security across every Linux distro
Basically the only road block I’ve seen is a lot of games using anti-cheat software just refuse to allow Linux. Some of it even has an option to allow it to run under proton and the devs don’t enable that option so it’s blocked. It’s basically them saying they don’t trust the Linux community not to cheat.
Then you get into the root-kit anti-cheat stuff like valorant uses which wants to load before the os and then control and monitor everything the os does and what hardware is connected… I’ve stayed away from the invasive as fuck anti-cheat games for years even before my move to Linux, so nothing lost there.
The Finals uses anti-cheat software and runs flawlessly on my machine. Such a shame these other developers won’t follow suit.
Heroic Launcher makes Fall Guys work fine for me and it uses EAC. It looks like Fortnite doesn’t work with Heroic’s EAC implementation; however you can play it in a browser window through Xbox Game Pass (no sub required).
is there anything to allow you to play EAC games?
Steam has EAC available under Linux, you just install it just like it is its own game.
The developer has to specifically allow it though. Epic themselves don’t let EAC for Fortnite run on Linux because they don’t trust it as much as the rootkit version that only runs Windows.
The developer has to specifically allow it though.
True. But then that becomes a vendor problem, and not a Linux problem.
My point is that Linux went from 0% support for any game that uses EAS, to 100% support for any game that uses (and enables) EAS. There’s many more games that you can now play on Linux that you could not before.
It’s almost at the point where Wine can run more games than Windows. Most games from the Win98 to early WinXP era just run fine on Wine and don’t even show a title screen or glitch and flicker on Win10.
It is hard without a transition period. Sometimes you have to do work stuff on your computer.
For me it is Visual Studio that holds me back. Maybe Microsoft Teams as well. Yes, work.
Since I am a power user it will take. Especially now Wayland is very much work in progress. I have some problem with keyboard bindings, text expander. Pidgin and Hexchat works but thinks they are located left top for right click on tray icon.
I used to dual boot for some work tasks and to play games. With OnlyOffice and Office365 in a browser, I can do everything I used to need desktop Window apps for. With Wine, Proton, and Proton-GE I can play all of my games in Steam or Heroic Launcher, so I don’t need Windows for games anymore.
There is still a usecase for people who need Windows for specific usecases; but for most people the only obstacle is learning curve (and don’t come at me with Mint, Ubuntu, and ElemntaryOS you’re lying to yourselves).
There was def a learning curve - but I kinda just forced myself to do it. I’m still figuring things out - but I have solved every issue I’ve run into so far - so I feel good about that.
It’s quite rewarding, IME. I’m never going back.
If you program hardware some tools are only available on windows. Easier to just use windows in that case.
What hardware do you mean specifically?
Rockwell Automation has entered the chat
Oh my, you just gave me a rapid fire slide show flashback.
But I’m in a much nicer software engineering job now. I am most certainly fucking not an automation/controls engineer!
Or just use it in a virtual machine
I’ve never been a fan of dual booting myself. The computer just ends up spending all of its time in one OS or the other. Plus Microsoft doesn’t seem to like to play nice with your bootloader.
I just started using Linux on secondary computers. Once I had gotten things down so the experience was smooth on those machines, moving the main desktop from Windows to Linux was pretty seamless.
Finally switched (again) full time to Linux early last year. With the current state of Steam proton I have finally 0 reasons to go back. If a game doesn’t work natively on Linux, I refund and move on. There’s so many games out there, I have no reason to go out of my way for any one.
I personally run a Windows VM inside of my Linux-only machine
If a program gives me issues w/ Proton, I have actually found that installing inside windows and moving over into a wine directory works surprisingly well for some products (cough, adobe)
Huh, interesting, never thought to do that. Been missing Photoshop. (GIMP just isn’t the same)
I’m sorta, kinda, mostly illiterate, when it comes to what you are doing with adobe. Are you just installing like normal and then copy/paste the Adobe folder from the programs folder into a wine directory?
There’s like literally 3 games that are preventing me from dropping windows entirely.
Which ones?
I cannot, for the life of me, get Hogwarts, Forza 5 and Immortals of Aveum to run with wine.
Have you tried using Proton through Steam? It’s possible to load in external games and programs.
Even pirated games work if you run the installer through Steam.
Good to know, but none of this worked for me
Uhm aveum, and hogwarts works with proton for sure, because I played them with my Linux desktop. Aveum had some issues, but should work OOB now.
Forza I don’t know :/ Weird
Stange, on Steam Immortals of Aveum is marked as “Unplayable” on the Steam Deck.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2009100/Immortals_of_Aveum/
The most common reason for this is some DRM that doesn’t work on Wine/Proton. So looking at the store page I would guess that this is the culprit:
Incorporates 3rd-party DRM: Incorporated 3rd-Party DRM: Denuvo Anti-tamper
But I guess you get what you deserve. Don’t buy EA games and your life will improve.
As you can see here is gold on protondb, it is unsupported on deck only because it’s a really heavy game, and the deck does not have enough horse power to play well, but on my beefy desktop it works.
But yeah, the denuvo anti-tamper for sure does not help the performance.
Ah interesting and good to know. Usually I see games that perform poorly marked as playable but with caveats. I guess it just performs so bad that it is effectively unplayable.
Holy shit never thought I would run into a user in the wild who actively seeked out Immortals of Aveum
Haven’t even played it yet, but it looks pretty lol
Yeah that’s basically I’ve heard is the only thing going for it i heard. Glorified unreal engine 5 tech demo.
I had the same issue with forza for a long time. as far as I can tell, the only fix is to get an AMD GPU. I uprgaded my 1070 to 7900xtx and now forza runs like a dream. never tried those other two games though
Immortals of aveum is working and, got the other two as well! Windows is gone!!
Hogwarts via steam’s proton runs flawlessly.
On my duel booted system I still have windows. But I haven’t had to use it in a couple weeks and at this point might just delete it and go fully into Linux only. Just a few windows only apps that are making me unsure. Might try windows vm.
Honestly if I played any games that had anti cheat I would run a windows vm in QEMU/KVM. Go the GrapheneOS route and sandbox the spyware (cough Google and Microsoft cough)
Some anti cheats can detect that they’re running in a virtual machine and if they do, you’ll probably get banned for some reason.
Isn’t GrapheneOS a mobile OS? How would it work on a pc?
I think they mean that sandboxing Windows in a VM is akin to how GrapheneOS can sandbox Google apps, not that they would use Graphene on a PC.
Happy to be corrected though!
I like the idea that Linux and Windows have a duel every time your system boots and the winner gets to start up.
I have a Windows install that I haven’t booted up in 2 years. I didn’t really use it anyway. I just had one thing to finish there, but I am lazy.
I only used it for a few weeks after getting that laptop while waiting for Linux kernel 5.8 which would finally support that hardware as nothing older booted up.
Daily driving linux since i accidentally started formatting my windows drive while installing NixOS. Best mistake of my life.
Is this the new “I use nixOS BTW”? just sneak it into a nomal conversation like nothing happened? Legend.
I’d tell all the NixOS evangelists to shut up, but they’re immutable.
Oh they are bunch of flakes alright.
I dual… Just kidding, been running Linux since 2008. I’m done being old Billy’s dumpster raccoon.
It felt so great when I finally wiped my Windows drive back in the day. Suddenly I had an extra drive to distro hop to my heart’s content without having to wipe the previous distro 👌
Oh god… I just switched yesterday. Borked my windows partition while at it, so linux-only it is. The pain I had yesterday… Out of the box, WiFi was busted, fan curves were busted, RGB was busted, HiDPI’s is still busted, evdi is also still busted, solved surround sound just a few minutes ago. But hey, five problems solved in a day with two left to go is still much better than windows where a single damn bug in AMD software kept me going nuts for months with no fix in sight.
It gets better too. I suppose it depends on your distro and hand ware mix as for what works out of the box.
Eg. my pure AMD Rog Zephyrus laptop worked with Fedora pretty much “out of the box” once I enabled 3rd party drivers.
It’s kinda like switching to stick shift— it’s touch weird, but once you’ve daily driven it a bit the system is second nature.
Huh, stangely, I too have zephyrus laptop, but it’s a duo one, with quite unorthodox display setup, too. The wifi indeed automagically started working after install, audio required some pactl trickery as it has two sets of speakers connected to separate audio outputs, evdi might require some actual coding, since there’s no way to run one of the screens without it, and both synaptics and manufacturer-provided drivers look pre-alpha and don’t even compile… For the rest, https://asus-linux.org/ is a godsend. For HiDPI, maybe got any tips? I have a small 4K main panel, and a couple of big FHD displays. It looks like my options are to either leave dpi unchanged and have everything too small on main panel, or set it to 2 and have everything too big on secondaries, or to use gnome, not sure which is worse… Is there like a daemon, that can dynamically change the window’s DPI value, like windows does, that I don’t know the name of?
HiDPI was painful to setup for me. What DE are you using and are you on Wayland?
I’m on awesomeWM, it’s on Xorg, but I’m not dead-locked on it, though, hoping to try hyprland some day when I have time to screw around.
I’m unsure. I use Gnome (for ease honestly) and Fedora with Wayland, so (iirc) dynamic display stuff is a wash and I haven’t even explored yet since I just use the clamshell.
I may not be the most helpful for you :/
Once I’d tasted Linux Mint in 2019, I just gave up on Windows altogether. Linux and BSD all the way!
It is a fantastic feeling when you just finally say fuck it and run Linux only as your daily driver.
Personally I do see how windows can be useful, but for 99% of the things I need to do on a PC I can just do on Linux. For (most) anything else, I can just use windows running on a VM in linux.
Do you know an alternative to Sony Vegas for Linux?
Davinci resolve? Its Linux support is a bit obtuse, but it works.
Took a sip of Ubuntu and now im addicted to arch. Dont do linux kids🙏🙏
There are three things holding me back from making the switch full time, I use a stream deck from Elgato for automating a lot of tasks, I stream VR titles from Steam, and I have an Nvidia graphics card.
Thank you for giving me 3 huge reasons not to switch, cause I’ve been a bit tempted lately.
I switched to Pop_OS and it’s honestly been great even with an Nvidia card. Haven’t found a game that it won’t run, only thing I’m missing is lack of gsync/HDR support
I can’t give up my Stream Deck plugins. I don’t trust that that Linux port thing supports all the plugins I use.
Have you tried Boatswain for your Stream Deck?
This looks really fascinating. Looks like this may have some more features that I need for my Stream Deck compared to other ones for it on Linux. Might have to hope on a Live USB and check it out. Thanks for sharing!!
There are three things holding me back from making the switch full time, I use a stream deck from Elgato for automating a lot of tasks
Maybe this can help you out?
I did take a look at that once before and it didn’t quite have all the features that I use daily on my Stream Deck, but thanks for linking to it! Maybe I should take a look again since it’s been a year or so.
