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2mo ago

End of 10 is a campaign to move people over to Linux with Windows 10 support ending

www.gamingonlinux.com End of 10 is a campaign to move people over to Linux with Windows 10 support ending

Windows 10 is close to being dead now, with support ending this year. So why not try out Linux? Instead of getting a whole new system and having to deal with the increasing amount of AI junk and adverts in Windows 11.

151 comments

Download a new OS // Download the operating system you want to install. Search for Linux distributions for beginners to get some suggestions.
I feel like it's better to actually list/suggest a few beginner distros than to tell people to look it up.
- Linux Mint (XFCE desktop) is the best for beginners coming from Windows, in my opinion. Linux enthusiasts will fawn over KDE because of customization, but they ignore that the vast majority of people don't want to spend months tweaking pixels, widgets and animations, they just want to use the computer.
  
  My point is that the site should be recommending a few newbie distros, instead of telling the newbie to search it. Specially because the choice of a distribution isn't that meaningful in the long run, but newbies struggle picking one.
  That said I agree Mint would be a good choice. Not sure on Xfce; I'd probably recommend Cinnamon instead, as it looks a bit more modern (even if myself would rather use MATE or Xfce than Cinnamon).
  
  Why do you suggest Mint over Ubuntu?
  
  Realistically, the best distro for a Windows user is one that runs all their existing Windows software (both applications and games) right out of the box.
  Does any distro even come close to doing that?
  
  As a newer Linux user I think the priority in communication should be use Mint and then have some general information about how Linux isn't Windows, with some key differences and how to do things. I know that's more complicated than just saying it, but a "simple" get started guide would ease transition a lot.
  
  Mint looks pretty dated tho. I would go with Kubuntu because it looks pretty similar to Windows and is sleek and modern even without any customizations
- Yeah, I agree. Especially since there's SO much information out there that'll come up if they try to search, and lots of it isn't good, and tons of it is conflicting with each other. It's best to make it as easy and simple as possible. Like just suggest Mint or something.
- I think it doesn't actually matter what distro you use.
  It's like whether you're wearing red socks or blue socks. As long as you're wearing socks, so you don't get cold.
  
  Myself mentioned a bit below that the choice of a distribution isn’t that meaningful in the long run. But I still think that some distros should be recommended - otherwise the newbie simply says "Hannah Montana Linux, Justin Bieber Linux, Ubuntu Satanic Edition... bleeergh I can't choose, I give up".
- I recommend Gentoo for a beginner.
  What better way to understand your new OS than by compiling it from scratch?
- Zorin OS is going to be the best for windows refugees. It is so far ahead in this area that it isn't even remotely close.
  I don't know why people keep trotting out mint. Mint has far too many issues to be a serious suggestion.
  
  Mint has far too many issues to be a serious suggestion.
  Would you mind elaborating on that?
  Edit: Note that I've been a Linux^[Including the likes of: EndeavourOS, Fedora Atomic, Nobara and Zorin OS] user for a couple of years now, so no need to dumb down the answer for me. Just a heads-up*.
  
  I was just on Zorin OS web page and I like what I am seeing.
  Have to set some time aside this weekend to seeing dual booting it

the copilot nonsense really irked me, but it was then they had the gumption to force this absurd recall bullshit on everyone--that's when i said i'm done, no more windows, no more M$
it's obviously a "feature" they sold to senior executive board members so that middle managers could spy on their cubicle drones, but to have the gumption to try and convince the world that this was something we wanted? get fucked microsoft
- It’s more than that. They want training data for their LLMs. With enough training data, they can train these models to do office knowledge work themselves, removing the need to employ cubicle drones at all.
  
  I wonder what will win out, the sociopathic need of managers and execs to gaze over heads in cubes like it's their kingdom - e.g. "return to office" mandates that saved no money and made no sense other than to control people - or the sociopathic need of the business to cut costs so low that the stability of the entire company teeters on a house of cards, be it AI or something else.
- That's what free software advocates have been telling everyone for decades. When you use proprietary software licensed to you, you have no agency in what becomes of it, they can force you to accept changes that you don't agree with, violate your privacy, take what you thought you owned from you.
  People give up freedom for convenience and treat those that don't as crazy misguided idealists, thinking they're fools for using less convenient and sometimes powerful fools for pointless principles only they care about... Meanwhile, if everyone was just a tiny bit like the crazy idealists, these companies wouldn't be able to abuse their position because a modicum of resistance from everyone would be an overwhelming force for them.
  Some will say it's dumb being idealist about computer software, but aside from computer software being serious fucking business, the practices of these companies are what birthed disposable, unrepairable electronics, privacy erosion, robber AIs and so on. Do you think a tech industry dominated by free software supporters would have allowed the rise of people like Bezos, Zuckerberg or Musk?

Dabbled with Linux over the years but have finally made the jump to using it as my primary OS. I tried a bunch of distros and settled on the elegant simplicity of Mint. Every game has worked just.. fine.
It feels genuinely refreshing to know nothing will change without my consent, I know I will not login one day to find a surprise cortana/copilot/clippy icon in the taskbar or an ad for Avowed waiting for me. I can't believe that is even considered a 'pro', but here we are.
- AMD or NVIDIA user?
  
  AMD. I think if I had nvidia I might've gone for Pop OS, I heard that has good support for them out the box.

I feel like eveyone should reccomend Fedora KDE edition, its close enough to Windows for new users and modern enough to not push people away.
- People have their gripes over the "big corporation" side of this but I also daily drive fedora KDE and I love it. My only complaint is 2 things.
  Wireless shuts off after long periods of sleep. Suck if I'm torrenting my Linux isos.
  Very rarely it'll freeze up and I need to hard restart.
  Both of which could be a me issue. But besides that it's a beautiful, easily and highly customizable system. Highly reccomend as well.
  
  I also have issue number 2 with fedora KDE (kinoite). It's happened like 3 times in the past several months

Ive been seriously looking into making the switch. After some reading I decided Mint would be the easiest transition and downloaded the ISO to try it out with a USB boot. Im sure its a fluke, but since I have dual monitors the display was messed up and whenever I tried to fix it the entire GUI went away on both monitors and wouldn't recover. I had to force power off the machine and ive been hesitant since then to make the actual switch. Id hate to brick my machine right off the bat, just trying to swap display sources.
- I’ve heard that happen with mint before. Try a bit more modern distro like fedora or openSUSE maybe?
- Please give it another go. I think you're right, thrt was a fluke.
- I had a bit of trouble like that too.. Tried Ubuntu and my 2nd display would have static bursts going through the middle horizontally. Couldn't figure out a fix, tried out Fedora and had no problems.
  
  As a long time Fedora user, it's difficult to convince other Linux users of how reliable it is. I've used it on multiple computers for I think about a decade and I've rarely had problems, certainly fewer than I had with Windows.
  Last week I finally parted with standard Fedora to try out an immutable version, right now it's Bazzite... I've got to say it's very cool, for some things it may be better for beginners, but for most I'd say it's better to stick to the normal ones.
  I think it's better with KDE, though, especially if you've got multiple monitors with different pixel densities.
- Mint is the one everyone touts, but mint is pretty shit tbh. Check out Zorin OS. I have a funky triple display setup and it handled it like a champ. Also UX/UI on Zorin is fantastic. There is GUI for everything.

As a 15 years old pc user who likes to play games with a 15 years old nvidia graphics card. The only thing that's preventing me from fully migrating to linux is the fact that nvidia doesn't support my gpu anymore, so no proprietary driver, unless, I use a 6 years old kernel version.
The only choice I have for modren distros is the nouveau drivers, which lacks behind alot specially when it comes to gaming. I now have a dual boot setup running Popos and windows, but still I can't be fully free from Windows, having to reboot every time I feel like playing something. I hope in the near future I get less broke to buy a new computer or maybe the new nvk drivers will supports my gpu which is unlikely.
- Which graphics card?
  
  Quadro 2000M, it's a miracle that it support dx12 games.
- Dualbooting is great. Whole idea of linux is "you can tinker in any way you see fit" and putting multiple OS on a single computer is one example.
  Fact that you did this at 15 is impressive btw. Willing to mess around with computers is a real skill. Half the CS students in my college had hard time setting up a fedora VM by themselves for UNIX class.
  You are already ahead of actual college students in this field lol. You learnt more about computers thanks to old GPU.

I'm going to be migrating to Linux and using Mint. I'm just paranoid about doing something wrong and accidentally walking into a security vulnerability. So I want to set aside time to properly learn things and understand what I'm doing but I'm just busy AF these days...
- Take it slow and do it the right way, don't let Lemmy pressure you if you're making slow but steady progress. It's a learning curve for sure
- I have four pieces of advice
  btrfs file system for easy backup and recovery
  Encrypt your drive
  use an ad blocker everywhere
  use virus total to scan anything you might be wary of, and if you really feel like you need an AV, they do exist for Linux.
  I usually prefer Debian based systems, but when I finally ditched windows 3 weeks ago, I switched to Manjaro, and I'm loving it. You got this!
  
  What's wrong with EXT4 ?
  
  If you are worried about disk space don't use backup on btrfs though it fills up yr drive I never encrypt my drive but maybe you should Manjaro is great though!

Been on linux for almost half a year now. Don't miss a single bit of windows, thanks to steam proton. Also thanks to microsoft for pushing me over.
- I'm a very recent convert. I downloaded mint a couple months ago after seeing that my entire steam library was rated as highly compatible on protondb. At first I planned to dual boot but I didn't have any reason at all to use windows and finally just took the plunge and made Mint my daily, and sole, driver
- As much as people complain about electron (some valid, some not) Linux has benefited quite a bit to the cross platform availability of local applications.
- what distro do you use? im looking into moving from windows, but currently use apple devices to sync my music to my phone so im on hold for now
  
  Been on CachyOS for a couple months now. If you want to go Arch, I highly recommend it. No issues with NVIDIA drivers or any of my other hardware. The only thing I need Windows for anymore is Solidworks.
  
  I tried Mint initially, but it had some issues with Wayland and some other small issues, so I ended up settling on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed after a friend recommended it.

Is it necessary though? Microsoft have already been campaigning pretty hard to get people to switch to Linux. Telling people their perfectly good PCs won't work anymore because the operating system is expiring, and they can't even "upgrade" to Windows 11 is a pretty powerful message.

With no Adobe CC on Linux, I'm stuck on W10 for the foreseeable future. Otherwise I'd have already switched.
- As you can't ditch it for alternatives, I suggest:
  KVM, kernel-based VM for better performance. See this vid about setting it up: https://youtu.be/BgZHbCDFODk Licenses (and cr=cks) should work, judging by the Adobe forums, but you'd have an overhead with Windows running, so you'd greatly win by stripping everything off from it, up to disabling system services or even their Explorer DE (like some gamers did with Win Aero in W7 times, killing it while the game was running).
  Wine (Proton) directly or via Bottles\Lutris\Steam increased it's emulation capabilities and performance in the previous years. It works for highly demanding games, talks OK with my various discrete v-cards, skips the Win10 overhead, shows CC apps not unlike other programs, but it can cause random bugs, apps not communicating right to each other, and activating it may be not as straightforward. Before starting to rely on that, it's better to test your exact worklfow, tools you use, etc.
  You'd be probably drown in a question of what Linux distro to choose, considering there's stuff like AV Linux or Pop_OS being recomended for media design. But you'd easily hop from one to another as you go, so it's better to install something as simple as Mint first, and try Adobe workarounds there before moving next.
  If you have specific hardware, I'd say that Wacom-like graphic tablets work like they should (tried several pieces, adapted some touchscreen devices, nearly out-of-the-box on modern Linux), but for something else, like controllers that need to talk to your programms in some special way, you'd better google their compatibility or try it yourself. Making a passthru of inputs to VM or taking it's inputs by Wine wouldn't usually be a problem, problems start when this piece needs a specific Win\Mac-only driver, and they can, especially if they are old, have a temper of a feral ghoul. I know that there are a lot of linuxoids creating in different kinds of media, so I'm pretty sure there are some answers on the web, at least for the same manufacturer, series or kind of hardware.
- Are you able to run windows in a VM for your software?
- With no Adobe CC on Linux
  How's this?
  
  Nice, that's big. Thanks for the link.

My laptop is about 7 years old now, I think I will do this actually, thanks for the tip comrade

How can I convince the GF to switch? She only plays The Sims and the occasional hentai game; her Skylake i5 and 1050ti are more than adequate for those tasks. Yet she refuses to try Linux; won't even let me install LTSC to buy some time.
I think she just wants an excuse to buy a new laptop. She's the kind of person who replaces her shower curtain every six months, rather than do the sane thing and simply wash it. I'll never understand such a wasteful mentality.
- Bazzite and don’t tell her it’s Linux?
  
  She's not stupid
- There is nothing wrong if someone doesn't want to switch to a new OS. That being said, isn't her buying a new computer better? Old one becomes unused then.
  Putting lightweight linux on an unused old computer and seeing it become better is like the standard procedure. You could even make a custom rice for her.

I am trying Linux but it's not going well. I still might stick with it but it's more because of Windows getting worse than Linux being better. Right now it's come down to an evaluation of which things I want to not be able to do anymore because Linux doesn't support everything I currently do or the alternative is ass or will require an inordinate amount of research to get set back up.
- I used to have the same issue, and booted up a Windows VM for anything I couldn't get working on Linux, like syncing my Polar watch. Now I'm down to only using the VM when doing a firmware update of my Gardena robotic lawn mower, which is like once every second year.
- Using mint or ?
  
  I've used both Mint and Bazzite. Bazzite I'm attempting as a daily driver now because it has all the gaming shit baked in already and I don't know wtf I'm doing with that so it gave me a head start. However, Freecad runs like absolute dog shit on it, as well as every other system I've tried it on, so I need to keep windows around for Fusion360, I also can't figure out how to program my G602 from it even though according to the docs I found Solaar supports it. I'm almost certain my headset won't work on it. When I did my taxes it wouldn't open PDFs from my network share because the PDF program doesn't understand SMB. It already lost my Secure boot key once and I had to reinstall the OS to fix that even after turning Secure Boot off. I still need to figure out the best way to run VMs on it and I have numerous other peripherals that I haven't even tried yet because it's honestly exhausting to keep running into problems when I'm already stressed out from work and every other fucking thing going on in my life.. I was able to get my media downloading stuff all running in Mint with only one issue that took me a couple hours due to gpodder not just having a fucking setting for the download directory and the documentation couldn't just SAY how to export the path you want but over all that was pretty painless.

This weekend I want to make a point to finally begin the transition to Linux...

Switched to Mint recently. So far it's been smoother than I expected, but still had some crazy rough patches. Luckily, helping me through this junk seems to be one of the things AI excels at. I'm set up mostly how I want to be and it's been mostly working well enough so far. Mostly.
- Mint's popularity is unfortunate because it (the last time I checked) defaults to X11, which gives you a desktop built on technology from 1984.
  
  It's actually comments like this which will scare people the hell away from trying Linux.
  
  I'd be more worried about the lack of HDR support. Shame they killed off the Plasma edition. To anyone considering using Mint you can install Plasma on top of it with ease and get a modern desktop that supports HDR. If you don't have an HDR monitor then Cinnamon is great.

Might want to have some people a hit more coherent on which version of Linux so they don't get frustrated. Some people are jumping to distros that I've never heard of and getting annoyed it's not windows. Like yea no kidding Justin Bieber OS isn't getting updates. And your 3k series Nvidia isn't working. Switch to Hanna Montana DE like the rest of us.

Alright, I need to move my main desktop to linux. Help me decide which distribution. Note that I already run a desktop-less server on Debian, a raspi on their flavor of deb and have a laptop I rarely use on fedora (installed it to test the waters, but Mint would probably suit its use case more).
My main desktop PC is on windows and I wanna switch but im not sure which distro to switch to. The thing needs to be gaming ready for 2024 hardware. Debian is too slow to update for such a use case, I dont jive with Ubuntu philosophy, Arch is... im just not that kind of guy... so Im leaning on Fedora but I kinda dont like that it has 100 updates every time I boot it up. Is there any in between? Stable and quick with updates, but not when updates can crash the thing?
Edit: thanks for the recommendations, I'll probably check em all out!
- I know you said you're not an Arch kinda guy....but I highly recommend Garuda.
  Takes away most of the rough parts of running Arch, and comes in more flavours than you can shake a stick at. The forums are highly active, and Devs/admins/mods are very quick to respond to question/issue posts.
  Edit: I've only had one single update related fuckery in the 3ish years I've been running it, and it was through personal error.
- Peppermint is worth checking out. I don't game but Debian and some extra on top. Lightweight

Zorin OS is the distro for windows refugees. Nothing else even comes close.
- Why? Never hear of it. What makes it better conpared to other popular distros? And how does it serve the need of Windoofs refugees better?
  
  UI/UX is head and shoulders above the other distros, especially mint.
  Every time someone recommends mint to a new user I cringe. Mint has a ton of issues. Not the least of which the fact that it commonly completely breaks itself on an update.
  But Zorin is so much better because everything has a GUI element. All settings, absolutely everything. On my bare metal Linux machine with my quite complicated setup I didn't have to touch terminal once. It was a wonderful experience.
  I did end up having to set an env var for Wayland eventually (via terminal), but I blame that on AMD graphics and sdl being stupid.
  The UX provided by Zorin is so far ahead of the other distros it isn't even a contest.
- Zorin OS has done great work with making GNOME more usable/accessible.
  KDE was fairly seamless for me, my workflow basically didn't change from Windows. It's still a bit messy, but they are getting there.

Switched to CachyOS a couple months ago and haven't looked back. Everything works right out the box including NVIDIA cards. Recommended it to a coworker to check out and he switched from Windows a month ago.

Tried using Alma on my rig at home (since I'm using it on my servers), and I'm already going to be looking for a new distro. Went back to it after a week or so not having the energy to deal with it and apps like Firefox and steam wouldn't launch.
Need to find a decent OS to run in its place so I can stop booting to Win10
- Fedora is the obvious answer for you. It's upstream from your upstream. It has the same tooling you're used to, but newer packages. A less obvious answer is to embrace the atomic/immutable future and look at Fedora Silverblue or the stuff that the Universal Blue community is putting out. I switched from Silverblue to Aurora-dx and I've been extremely happy with it.
  
  Funny you mention that, Silver blue was the first thing I tried (because I've used fedora off and on for over a decade) and something about it just didn't work for me, but I don't remember what. Didn't try the regular version tho.
  In the end, I want something I can game on and dev with (which is the easy part, since VSCodium is multiplatform). If Steam doesn't work, the install is getting torched (which is why Alma is getting the boot).
  I'm a sys admin by trade, so the OS should require minimal troubleshooting because I'm sick of doing that by the end of the day.

Peppermint is always left out. That is the perfect on for just working, stable and easy to move to from windows. It's also lightweight and fast.

Microsoft Access and Publisher, the Adobe suite, VR. That's just the tip of the iceberg of why I can't completely abandon Windows, yet. I do have a handful of older PCs running Mint though, and I'll be switching over more. But not all of them.
- Ok, I really need to know what you're using Access for in 2025
  
  Old nonprofit, old files, continuously maintained for about 30 years now. Tiny staff, not many resources to work on migrating the files. It's just not a missional priority.
- Publisher is being discontinued soon and will be removed from Microsoft 365 installs
  
  I've never used 365. I use a 2019 purchased version. I refuse to pay subscriptions. But my job has a lot of graphics that were created and are still updated in publisher. I'm sure I can find an alternative, but recreating hundreds of files will be terrible, and it will likely all fall on me. And that's only like 5% of my job.
- For VR, https://lvra.gitlab.io/ is a pretty good resource for the state of VR support on Linux currently. Check their supported hardware table.

You know what? Just because of this I am going to proprietary BLOB even harder
- *nvidia drivers in Linux: "why not both?"
  
  There are a vast plethora of reasons to hate Nvidia

Honestly I don't mind 11. It's miles better than 10 ever was IMO. However with that being said, Linux is better. I have to dual boot Windows 11 on my computer because unfortunately there's no way I can use my Elgato Capture Device on a Linux machine.
- I downvoted you for not minding Windows 11 🐵

Jeez. Pathetic losers. On Linux for 15 years never thought of going back.
And u know what? It was harder back in the days nowadays all software is in the browser anyways so what are u even missing.
- It's funny, you're using Linux for 15 years, but you're still 15 years old...

151 comments