Linux@lemmy.mlbyworkgood@lemmy.dbzer0.com
8 days

what things would i lose or gain if i switched to linux?

English

im currently using windows 11 on msi gf63 laptop. if i used linux i would use ubuntu,bec it seems like the easiest thing.

i game,i use brave browser,i pirate games and software. i also like that my hoarded pirated binaries of games and software will work even years later on windows without too much effort.

i use an hp printer,and need to be able to use it on linux.

i expect to be able to use the laptop and not think about the os too much,meaning i wont distro hop or try to customize it too much. im fine with the terminal,my goal of using linux is being far from malware.

72
    • يا ليتني كوري شمالي @lemmy.ml
      7 days

      As a first step, see if you can get by by just using FOSS software on Windows. If you can, then you will lose nothing, swapping your “app launcher” is inconsequential if the programs you use are the same.

      Wine/Proton are very good when it comes to game support, so you should be alright there. You can always check protondb and winehq to confirm the support status of the game you want.

      I recommend a boring and stable distro like LinuxMint. It is based on Ubuntu but even better imho.

      • Admetus@sopuli.xyz
        7 days

        This is most important, if OP isn’t using any ‘enterprise’ apps, they should be able to function on FOSS, wine or proton apps.

    • TrippinMallard@lemmy.ml
      7 days

      If switching from Windows or Mac and you want to keep similar UI for easy transition, check out ZorinOS. A friend of mine recently installed Zorin OS Core w/ nvidia drivers and is enjoying it so far.

    • ryrybang@lemmy.world
      7 days

      I just switched from Win 10 & 11 to Fedora KDE, about 2 weeks ago. Total Linux newbie. Not looking to hack my OS or anything. I’m relatively computer literate, but not at all a programmer. I just want an OS that works and mostly gets out of the way. And obviously doesn’t spam me with ads or steal my data or lock me into a subscription.

      So far: Fedora and Plasma have been wonderful. But…

      • Computer feels slightly slower. I’m surprised by this.

      • Fedora or Mint…“it just works” isn’t exactly true based on my experience. “Most stuff mostly works okay” is more like it.

      • I had a service keep crashing upon boot: xwaylandvideobridge. Trying to read people’s reports and diagnose was frustrating. I ended up removing it (which I had to look up and figure out how to do). Not sure if I broke anything or not, but it seems like things are working.

      • Boot time is definitely slower compared to Win11. Not slow, just slower. Like 35 seconds. I tried to figure this one out using stuff like “systemd-analyze” but that was also annoying / frustrating. Trying to interpret the output and then trying to interpret what the tech people are saying in the forums. Plus my specific output I was getting from those programs didn’t look right or make logical sense (like it was adding up a bunch of processes as 11 seconds, but then saying each of those processes itself took 11 seconds, which I guess is possible if they are running simultaneously, but not sure).

      • Weird stuff with youtube / video codecs. Firefox would glitch/hang/freeze playing youtube, especially if god forbid you try and do something radical like scroll back in a video. I seriously thought my video card was self-immolating. I finally just figured this out after much suffering. I think there was something about cisco h.whatever codecs, which I installed. But those are apparently terrible. Then I followed this not newbie-friendly fix after trying to figure out how to remove the Cisco ones: https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/Multimedia?highlight=(\bCategoryHowto\b). Not sure why this kind of stuff doesn’t work out of the box. Having one of the biggest websites glitch using one of the biggest browsers is…not…great.

      • HP printer: finally, some good news! I have an HP laser printer and had to print some stuff off last night (a PDF and Word doc). Plugged in the printer, it recognized it correctly, I added printer, it added itself smoothly. Then ctrl-p worked flawlessly.

      • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
        7 days

        Hey, first of all welcome. Now, I’ve never used Fedora, but I wanted to give you some answers to your points:

        • Computer feels slightly slower. I’m surprised by this.

        I’m also surprised by this, KDE is very snappy so it shouldn’t feel like that. I have a gut feeling from this and some other things that you might have an Nvidia card, if so which driver are you using? I know the community shits on the proprietary drivers (with reason) but they provide the best experience (except when they don’t).

        • Fedora or Mint…“it just works” isn’t exactly true based on my experience. “Most stuff mostly works okay” is more like it.

        That’s true, but that’s also true for Windows. One thing we forget is the amount of knowledge we have acquired from years of just using the system. To me, every time I have to use Windows it’s a chore, nothing works out of the box, everything needs some tweaks, I can’t do anything, everything is complicated obtuse and weird. But to you it’s not, because you’re used to it, and since most stuff works and the ones that don’t you are familiar with troubleshooting it feels as if everything works. I feel the same thing happens to us on the Linux side, we say everything works because to us it does (but also you’ve had some issues I have never experienced before).

        • I had a service keep crashing upon boot: xwaylandvideobridge.

        That is apparently needed to share your screen on certain apps like Discord. From what I read there are reports of people saying this crashes for them and it has to do with them running out of VRAM (which would also account for your computer feeling slower). And apparently there’s a bug in newer Nvidia drivers where there’s a memory leak that could cause this. If you’re using Nvidia proprietary drivers check the version z maybe trying to update to the latest or downgrade to 550 or before it fixes this.

        • Boot time is definitely slower compared to Win11.

        This is because Windows hasn’t powered off in a while, it hibernates. Even when you ask it to power off it doesn’t, this is a known pain point for Linux because Windows doesn’t close NTFS drives properly unless it powers off completely, so you are locked out of your shared drives.

        I never tried to use systemd-analyze, but my guess would be that they’re counting the time from when the service starts until it’s done, and most of that time is waiting for hardware or other services, so if you have one service that takes 11 second and 5 services that take 0.1 seconds but depends on your first service they would all say 11 seconds. If you send me the output I can try to read the docs and see what I can come up with, a quick look told me that you can also run systemd-analyze critical-chain <unit> to get a dependency list which might give you more insight on all those that took 11 seconds.

        • Weird stuff with youtube / video codecs.

        Never had that issue, never heard of Cisco codecs either. You’re correct that this is not newbie friendly, it’s related to why GPU drivers are an issue in some distros. Apparently from the link that you send that is a description on how to switch from an open source implementation to one that depends on the proprietary Nvidia drivers. This is the sort of thing your distro should do automatically when you switch to a proprietary drivers for the GPU, and why I like to recommend certain distros that (at least back when I started) took care to do these things when you selected the proprietary driver.

        HP printer

        Yeah, all of my printers have been HP, the most I had to do was install a package for HP (hplip I think it was called) and they have all worked flawlessly.

        • ryrybang@lemmy.world
          6 days

          Thanks for reading through this. No Nvidia card. it’s AMD Ryzen 7 CPU with integrated Radeon Vega 10 GPU. 20 GB system memory with 2 GB allocated for the video card. I didn’t install anything for graphics, I just let Fedora do its defaults.

          I looked up the codecs to get the specifics. This was the first thing I found when having Firefox + YouTube issues: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/openh264/

          Installed that and it wasn’t any better. Then had to figure out how to remove it and try the rpmfusion stuff (whatever that is).

          Here’s the output of systemd-analyze critical-chain:

          The time when unit became active or started is printed after the "@" character.
The time the unit took to start is printed after the "+" character.

graphical.target @12.832s

└─sddm.service @12.832s

  └─plymouth-quit.service @12.727s +98ms

    └─systemd-user-sessions.service @12.681s +20ms

      └─remote-fs.target @12.659s

        └─remote-fs-pre.target @8.131s

          └─nfs-client.target @8.130s

            └─gssproxy.service @8.044s +85ms

              └─network.target @8.037s

                └─wpa_supplicant.service @8.002s +33ms

                  └─basic.target @4.810s

                    └─dbus-broker.service @4.627s +137ms

                      └─dbus.socket @4.607s +1ms

                        └─sysinit.target @4.596s

                          └─systemd-resolved.service @4.452s +143ms

                            └─systemd-tmpfiles-setup.service @3.827s +613ms

                              └─local-fs.target @3.814s

                                └─boot-efi.mount @3.692s +119ms

                                  └─boot.mount @3.552s +118ms

                                    └─systemd-fsck@dev-disk-by\x2duuid-e61e388b\x2d6938\x2d4f16\x2d9746\x2dce2c084d3f44.service @3.206s +170ms

                                      └─dev-disk-by\x2duuid-e61e388b\x2d6938\x2d4f16\x2d9746\x2dce2c084d3f44.device

          And here’s the output of systemd-analyze plot > plot.svg (had to covert to jpg to allow the upload):

    • pelya@lemmy.world
      8 days

      You lose:

      • Your corporate shackles

      You gain:

      • Limitless bragging rights
        • Auli@lemmy.caEnglish
          7 days

          You loose battery life if on a laptop. Battery life is not as good as on windows. And Apple laptops have insane battery life. I wish ARM laptops where a thing for Linux.

          • tomenzgg@midwest.socialEnglish
            7 days

            The spec.s may not be enough for you but I’d be remiss to not point out that MNT Reform does exist, regarding ARM laptops. So, at the very least, there is something (which may be comforting).

          • mexicancartel@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            7 days

            I have to input my experience here.

            On what basis are you saying your batter life is less on linux? Do you use power profiles? Which distros you tried? And what kind of laptop is it?(processor is H/U/HS? Have dGPU?)

            For me battery life is far better on linux than on windows. On linux(Fedora, with KDE), with balanced or power saving mode, doing the most basic stuff(say opened a pdf document and a browser and looking at it, without much interaction) my laptop, with dGPU and H processor takes like 7watts, giving more than 7hrs batter life for my 51Wh battery.

            Windows on the other hand, without any tasks, only settings app open, showed less than 2 hours battery remaining at 80% charge. I didn’t test how long it takes to drain that much battery explivitly, but I belive this number is based on power usage in watts. Which tells me it is using more than 20W power. The reviews for my laptop before buying also said they get around 4 hours in medium usage.

            I suspect that previously, the time before power profiles daemon, everything is by default in performance mode because it was aiming PCs, but now it goes so low with power saving modes. The 20W in windows is probably bloatware running in background.

            Now, recently I came to know you can “remove” pci devices in linux so that power gets disconnected from the dGPU. Now whenever i use without it plugged in, i use it by removing gpu and it runs in 3.6-4.2W at idle(i.e, open pdf without touching anything, or using vim and compiler in a terminal) which gives me 12 hours of battery life atleast! Theese numbers are unimaginable in windows for my gaming laptop.

            This is not just one exception, since my only friend who use linux also reported the same behavior. Windows uses wayyy more battery than linux. And he was even comparing power saving mode in windows vs perdormance mode in linux and linus still wins by 3-4 watts.

            I wish more people check theese, since I belived “linux has bad battery life” argument beforehand and only when I compare with windows i found i am gaining a lot of battery life on linux

          • pheusie@programming.dev
            7 days

            I agree with this in general. But, I’d like to add that well-supported hardware (like a ThinkPad) may do equally well on Linux and perhaps even better.

            • BigJohnnyHines@lemmy.ca
              7 days

              Compared to windows on the same machine maybe. It won’t be anywhere near a Windows arm or especially Apple arm machine. They’re nuts. Linux still worth the battery hit anyway for many people.

      • eldavi@lemmy.mlEnglish
        7 days

        Your corporate shackles

        i came here to say this, but you did it better. lol

    • Malix@sopuli.xyz
      8 days

      Depends really on the games and software you require.

      For games, check:

      In general, indies and singleplayer games generally work fine. Battlefield/Fortnite/etc hugely popular multiplayer stuff with kernel-level anticheats generally doesn’t.

      I’ve only ever set up few printers to work on linux, and they’ve been bigger office printers. And they’ve all worked with minimal effort. Absolutely no idea about home printers.

      • Classy Hatter@sopuli.xyz
        8 days

        I’ve only ever set up few printers to work on linux, and they’ve been bigger office printers. And they’ve all worked with minimal effort. Absolutely no idea about home printers.

        Most (all?) printers and scanners released in past decade and some supports driverless printing and scanning. As long as you have printing related systems installed on your computer, most printers should be just plug and play. Especially those that are connected over network.

      • TabbsTheBat (they/them)@pawb.social
        8 days

        Absolutely no idea about home printers.

        I have 2, a samsung and a canon :3 both work OOTB. Can’t speak on HP printers, but chances are OP can find that with a web search of the model

        • frankPodmore@slrpnk.netEnglish
          8 days

          Wine works well for me on Manjaro. Once it’s installed and run for the first time, it’s been seamless. I think every now and then you might find a game that requires an additional patch to run.

        • Malix@sopuli.xyz
          8 days

          The daw/music software? Just wine. used wine to install the app & vst plugins, then just using the “start menu” shortcut for the app to run it. I did have to use winetricks to install dxvk on the prefix (without it, some plugin ui’s did not work properly), but after that it works fine.

          as for “does it run good” - well enough for me. Some of the guitar/bass amps and instruments I use seem to use noticeably more cpu than on windows

          • workgood@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            8 days

            i never play any online games only pirated ones. i do have fitgirl call of duty tho,would that work?

            would you recommend i get linux?

            • Malix@sopuli.xyz
              8 days

              I don’t know, I don’t play cod. See the links from previous replies for that.

              as for should you get linux, only you can answer that once you’ve done the research

    • Quazatron@lemmy.world
      8 days

      You try it and see if it fits you. This is not a religion. You use what works for you.

      • workgood@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        8 days

        i did try it its nice. i just didnt use it long enough to know if i would lose anything. so can you tell me?

        • Thorry@feddit.org
          8 days

          You are the only one who can answer that. Things will change, but if you qualify that as a loss that’s up to you.

          In my experience with Linux, where there is a will there is a way. If you want something to run badly enough it will simply work.

          Personally I still play Dark Souls and Dark Souls 3 a lot, including mods, randomizer etc. I’ve even used cheat engine on those, for example to spawn items at the start of the game to do challenge runs. That’s old software and primarily designed for Windows, it runs just fine on Linux tho.

        • Quazatron@lemmy.world
          7 days

          The Linux onboard ramp is as shallow as it has ever been. Just pick up a usb stick, shove a Linux distro on it and boot it on your PC or on an older machine you don’t use anymore. Use it to do what you do usually. Things will be different. Resist the urge to shove random software from the net in it to solve problems. This is not windows. Don’t reinstall even if you fuck up your system (and you will, multiple times). Ask questions and fix it yourself. Learn. Level up. Use the huge software repositories that are built in the system. Use flatpaks for the other stuff. Persist. Things will eventually click. One day you will feel at home. Then you have won.

        • db2@lemmy.world
          7 days

          Nobody’s ever going to start a war in the middle east to murder a bunch of people because they think that’ll make Tux return.

    • Marcomunista@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      8 days

      Ciao, first of all, there are games that use kernel-level anti-cheat software that will not work. The good news is that many companies, seeing the growth of the Linux market, are taking remedial action. For example, EA recently announced that it will adapt its anti-cheat software for Linux. For pirated games, you can install fit-girl with bottles and use bottles to run the games as well. Technically, they should work even after years, because bottles creates a container with all the dependencies it needs to run and is isolated from the rest of the OS. It probably won’t be easy to learn how to use Linux tools right away, but it’s mostly a matter of habit, so first of all, be patient if some things don’t work right away. If you have problems, you can always ask the community. For simpler problems, AI can also be useful.

    • jdnewmil@lemmy.ca
      8 days

      If you are invested in Windows software… don’t run Linux. Being able to run Windows software is like a “patch” to get you by until you find a Linux equivalent. Pretending you can have your cake and eat it too will just leave you disappointed.

      Linux has amazing software… but in most cases it feels very different from Windows. If you learn why it is different then you may start to appreciate Linux for what it gives you rather than what it takes from you.

      • workgood@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        8 days

        im not invested no. all of software i use is generic and can be replaced by linux apps easily. what i really want to work is my browser (brave) and my pirated games.

        so what will i gain or lose with linux?

    • BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world
      7 days

      im currently using windows 11 on msi gf63 laptop. if i used linux i would use ubuntu,bec it seems like the easiest thing.

      Ubuntu is popular but I wouldn’t necessarily say easiest. Something like Linux Mint would probably be simpler.

      i game,i use brave browser,i pirate games and software. i also like that my hoarded pirated binaries of games and software will work even years later on windows without too much effort.

      My child, you’ve come home.

      i use an hp printer,and need to be able to use it on linux.

      Stop using HP printers. That being said if it was made in the last 5 years it’ll probably work on Linux out of the box.

      i expect to be able to use the laptop and not think about the os too much,meaning i wont distro hop or try to customize it too much. im fine with the terminal,my goal of using linux is being far from malware.

      I’m a big fan of immutable distros like Bazzite and Bluefin. They’re so stable they’re almost boring. As far as malware goes I would say standard rules apply: scan random binaries before execution, run normal operations as non-root/unprivileged users, patch regularly.

    • gila [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      7 days

      broadly, gain flexibility, lose familiarity. just try it and see.

      one thing i’ll spell out, you’ve likely never had to consider the logic by which windows loads dll versions. essentially, if you put a modified dll file in the same folder as an executable, when the executable calls for it that modified dll will be loaded instead of the system’s builtin version. game and software cracks sometimes rely on this principle. but on linux via wine/proton, that isn’t the case. so you’ll need to configure wine/proton to do a “dll override” in some cases (i.e when your game/software crack utilizes a modified dll). the process is pretty straight-forward, the main thing is knowing you need to do it.