The other potentially obvious question is why bother using an OS that’s out of support when Linux is so good?
I left Windows 11. The last straw wasn’t Microsoft accounts or Windows updates. I actually thought the OS was fine, most OS updates actually added great new features, and anything I considered an annoyance was easy to disable permanently.
Toss your Windows 11 ISO into Rufus and disabling things like Microsoft account requirements is a trivial process.
What I actually rage quit Windows over was AMD graphics drivers and a couple of my video games crashing.
What caught me by surprise is just how little I’d miss it. I thought I’d need to dual boot or run a Windows VM for little random things. Nope, I just don’t need them.
I didn’t expect to find an OS with more software that I tend to like better. Like my email client, where I moved from Thunderbird to Evolution and for the most part I find that to be a step up in user experience.
> The other potentially obvious question is why bother using an OS that’s out of support when Linux is so good?
I'm in the process of setting up a Linux desktop to replace my Win10 one, and for me it's these (if anyone has suggestions for migration or replacement, I'd love some opinions!)
- Lightroom. If anyone knows how to either run this under Linux, or migrate an entirely catalog of photos (plus edits) to something open source (including the Negative Lab Pro plugin), that would be amazing.
- MusicBee. There just does not seem to be a good music manager for Linux that can replace MusicBee. I rarely use it as a music player, there are dozens of great options for Linux music players, but MusicBee feeds my Airsonic instance, and I have not found a good way to manage music graphically in a way that maintains this setup.
- Games. This is really getting better and better each year...but I regularly play Microsoft Flight Simulator and haven't even tried to get that running in Linux yet (anyone have good experiences getting this working?)
> - MusicBee. There just does not seem to be a good music manager for Linux that can replace MusicBee. I rarely use it as a music player, there are dozens of great options for Linux music players, but MusicBee feeds my Airsonic instance, and I have not found a good way to manage music graphically in a way that maintains this setup.
For a traditional "all batteries included" collection management music player try Strawberry and Quod Libet. You should also look into the MuiscBrainz Picard tagger, it's a bit unwieldy to use but is very powerful once you learn it's wonky workflow.
I used Quod Libet as my main music player for a year or two, but I found it lacking and iirc sometimes laggy (it is written in Python!). Updates also seem to be infrequent.
Hadn't heard of Quod Libet, that's a good recommendation!
It seems that various MS Flight Simulator editions run on Proton. Focus on recent ratings, as the overall score reflects often reflects old versions of Proton.
https://www.protondb.com/search?q=microsoft%20flight%20simul...
> - Games. This is really getting better and better each year...but I regularly play Microsoft Flight Simulator and haven't even tried to get that running in Linux yet (anyone have good experiences getting this working?)
It's a major step up in power but the steam deck has really pushed the wine/proton environment to near parity. The only things that really don't work through it reliably is anti-cheat stuff that I really don't want on my machine anyway.
I can't speak for the experience with nvidia drivers but it's pretty amazing how far it's come.
For games, my tip is that if you happen to be in CachyOS or some similar distribution, make sure you use the bore kernel for gaming.
I switched from the standard kernel to the bore kernel and went from a pretty disappointing experience in terms of performance and stutters to a really great one.
Musicbee works fine in Wine (in my experience). It's annoying I have to use it that way, but I'm not expecting it to be ported any time soon.
For me, I can't switch to Linux because of my accounting software; it's only on macOS. They are very few Linux business accounting software programs suitable for sole proprietors. GNUcash is too hard to set up. Online accounting software is not good, because one is giving ownership of one's financial data to another entity, who could deny access at any moment.
I've had five clients who have lost access to their Microsoft accounts permanently due to insufficient, or old, recovery information. SMS can't be used anymore. I've been thinking about recommending Yubikeys, but when older people don't even want to use password managers because they don't trust them, that's a hard sell.
The biggest problem is Microsoft changes the rules and requires all of these features, but doesn't tell any normal users of the changes nor the addition of the features.
Namely, it's the "blockers" one hasn't found suitable replacements for.
You mention clients losing access to Microsoft accounts, which is a requirement for running Windows 11.
So it’s the same risk whether you choose online accounting software or Windows accounting software.
I’m aware that bypassing the Microsoft account is presently trivial, but I figured I’d point out this food for thought.
Love Linux, but Nvidia drivers are still shit on it. I'm not willing to take a performance hit for the convenience. Which I guess is a little ironic, given you left Windows over AMD driver issues.
The last time I had instability on a Nvidia card in Windows turned out to be a faulty card I had to RMA.
It is funny isn’t it? I imagine maybe a clean install or some other intervention might have helped me. The instability only affected two specific games at least on a regular basis and it was kind of a new thing.
But yeah, switching to Linux with an AMD card is basically an upgrade compared to Windows.
(My card is a 9070XT)
I would guess because "so good" does not equate with 100% and presumably the user's needs fall in that 5%.
Linux has been usable for non proprietary software for decades now. The fact that people are refusing to jump ship even when Windows actively undermines them and itself speaks volumes of people's aversion (or inability) to switch OSes.
Oddly I’m like mostly using proprietary Windows software on my Linux machine these days (games).
I also think the AI era goes very far in eliminating those 5% problems. I have a mostly non-technical friend who set up an old laptop with Linux for the first time and he told me that he’d never have been able to do it on his own without AI. Anytime there’s an issue, his solution is just a quick question or copy/paste away.
Where to install it? There was wubi, but iirc it was discontinued?