Get off American monopoly tech. The desktop is the easiest.
A GNU/Linux desktop has endless advantages and doesn’t include the anti-features.
Linux, in some form, runs a lot of your life already, even if you don’t know it.
If your a tech, you really should deeply know Linux/UNIX anyway.
I’d still be on 7 if they didn’t non-consensually update my machine.
I walked into my room one day and my computer was in the middle of downdating from 7 to 10, without ever asking me. I held my breath and unplugged the thing from the wall. Luckily nothing happened and it booted back into 7 and I went in and removed every single notion of any update I could, short of physically opening my HDD and removing the physical sections of the platter. Ended up switching to 10 at 11pm on the night 7 ended support. Eh.
Yeah, i also removed all the update bullshit, multiple times. It updated while i was at work.
There’s actually an ESU bypass for Windows 7 that provided updates until January 2026.
Use Linux, get freedom
Even I, a long long long and ooooold ms-fanboy finally ditched win11 in fear of the copilot shit hole that’s coming.
And now I regret not having switched years earlier. Everything is a lot better now, and those things that are worse are just worse because companies hate Linux (looking at Logitech et al).
And when even I left windows (I do have every certificate from them, sold hundreds of thousands of licenses and whatnot) that tells something 😔 sadly so, I might add.
Long story short: fuck copilot.
I know that isn’t the point of your comment, but what issues do you have with Logitech hardware on Linux? I have just mice from them, but honestly an embarrassing amount. I just use Solaar and I can configure all I need? I also have always only used the onboard memory (so I can move them between computers), and don’t really use macros though…
Solaar only let’s me do DPI for mine. I have to set that fucker up in a VM with lghub and use onboard profile and input-remapper. Without mapping the extra buttons in lghub to something, inputremapper gave me nothing to work with)
So far I have not needed my scripts or macros yet, so that is a problem for later 😁
(G502 x plus lightningsomething btw).
piper manages logitech mice and it’s quite good!
Yeah but not mine sadly. G502 x plus wireless
Copilot is not the problem. If Copilot was just one more program (like Notepad or Paintbrush), I wouldn’t have an issue with it. But Microsoft (and other companies) insist in putting it every-fucking-where. Like in Notepad? WHY?! So yeah, fuck Microsoft.
Like in Notepad? WHY?! So yeah, fuck Microsoft.
It’s the equivalent of a drugs dealer that starts throwing their product in people’s faces just to get more people hooked, but the product is so nasty almost everyone runs away screaming.
Yes totally. They’re a company, they want to make money. Sure, fine. But if things stop being optional (or at least uninstallable like fucking onedrive) then I get pissed.
When I want AI, I start one. But in settings? In notepad? In my coffemachine and nutsack-warmer? Noooooo.
Mmmmm, not according to massgrave. You get 4 years more.
2032 is the cutoff for IOT LTSC, so 6 years actually.
With security patches?
Best thing about ltsc is you only get security patches. All the amazing features people get like copilot and more copilot and yet more copilot is stuff ltsc doesn’t get.
I need a new PC for Windows 11. So I thought I’ll wait as long as possible. The later, the less expensive a good machine will be. 🤦🏻♂️
…SSD and RAM prices are not gonna get better unless the AI bubble pops. I wouldn’t wait to get at least those two things.
Windows is being re-written from the ground up to be ‘agentic’. This means that Copilot is not going to be a feature of Windows, Windows is going to be a feature of Copilot.
Oh, and Copilot is going to be writing the code too. Microslop brags that 30% of their code is AI.
Hey hey, let’s be honest here, bragged, it’s been 9 months or so by now. Who knows how much of windows is vibecoded at this point, it might be as high as 50%.
By the way microslop is doing emergency patch after emergency patch, vibe coding windows isn’t the brag they thought it was.
Maybe the new stuff. The Windows NT core has 22 years’ worth of code.
And following decent coding practices there shouldn’t be a ton of code there (not saying a small amount, just little enough that AI would be able to compete in volume in this amount of time), just because less is so often more.
If it’s a matter of quantity over quality, LLMs are fantastic at that. I can totally see them bloating the codebase by letting loose a few LLMs and have them do whatever.
Windows is being re-written from the ground up
I know they say that but you know there’s still Windows 95 code still in there so I don’t believe them at all. It’s just smoke and mirrors for the shareholders.
Code? There is still win 95 UI in windows 10
But they so generously extended their
blackmail ultimatum datesupport!! Why won’t people switch? It’s so weird. Don’t they know that MS CEO Satya Nadela ($1.1 Bil) has their best interest at heart, always?The only reason I’m still in Windows is because I use Clip Studio Paint as my main art program (and while it is on Wine, the compatibility is extremely poor) and I also play certain FPS games with anti-cheat that’s incompatible with Linux. If those two problems are solved (which is one thing I’m banking Valve to do with SteamOS) then I’ll ditch Windows permanently. Until then, maybe the next time I install I’ll use Win11 LTSC which doesn’t come with any of Microsoft’s AI bullshit (or even the Microsoft Store at all) with the only downside being new versions taking 3 years to arrive instead of one.
BTW: If ya’ll are in Windows 11 against your will and want to remove all AI features, check this out. Essentially it’s a script that will delete all AI from your system. I would recommend reading the documentation, but all you need to do is open Terminal/Powershell as admin and run this command:
A far better script for all in one Windows debloating and software installation (literally avoid opening Edge at all) is this, it can also handle removing copilot:
Honestly my video game addiction is the reason I’m still on Windows. I play league and they only support Windows now. I’ve tried dual booting but it’s just not a smooth experience. I’m going to end up on Windows to play league at some point and sometimes I want to squeeze in a cheeky game during the day and not just at night.
I haven’t figured out a solution that works for me yet but I’m open to ideas. I also don’t have a solid solution for playing TFT or league on my steamdeck besides dual booting Windows and that’s not going to happen.
Not dual booting will cure your League addiction.
I’m pretty much in the same situation you’re in. I use Clip Studio Paint and a 24-year Photoshop user, and finding a suitable alternative to both is a crapshoot. I’m gonna try GIMP and Krita again, but I’m not optimistic…
When GIMP’s version 3 came out, it got a lot of great reviews. I can’t tell you what’s different or better, but in using it myself since then, it doesn’t “feel” as daunting. Very subjective, but definitely try it out again; it might work for you this time around.
Going from Photoshop to GIMP 3, it’s just not the same. I have a lot of respect for the project, but there are so many rough edges that it’s demoralizing at best.
Here’s an example: in Photoshop, I select an object with the smart select brush (not available in GIMP), copy and paste it and it ends up on a new layer. I can drag the new layer around and draw on it. In GIMP, I paste a rectangle and the layer bounds are exactly locked to the paste area, so if I do something like feather the edges or try to draw on it I get a block of pixels. Without looking it up, can you tell me how to make the active layer size match the canvas size? And if I drag that layer, will it move the pixels or will it offset that layer and force me to rerun the “layer to document size” process?
Not that Adobe hasn’t done a ton of Enshittification, but CS6 was pretty great for me.
GIMP has always been kinda ass tbh. I used it back then to make gifs and that was the only thing in that program that wasn’t a pain to do.
Affinity is much more usable than the gimp. I hear good things about it with crossover (commercial wine). If you’re willing to spend a bit of money (not an exorbitant amount).
I’ve tried Affinity, it’s got a few dealbreakers.
No ability to save a workspace or have it be cohesive across projects. Searched online to see if there was a fix for it and there’s not, you just have to set up your desired workspace for every single new project you start. Controls are not intuitive, i.e. right click does not bring up brush size menu. Can’t select parts of the drawing and just flip horizontal/vertical, you have to put it on a new layer and do a bunch of extra stuff to flip it. Also tried to import my PS brushes into Affinity and a lot of them had broken or mangled textures or just, did not operate the same and no amount of finagling could restore them to how they were.
I really wanted to like it but it’s still got some kinks that need to be worked out.
I miss WinXP. Simply the best, imo.
That’s not how you spell “Windows 7”.
XP properly started the rubbish which keeps piling up in Windows 11. Remember the online activation, for example?
Still, Windows XP was much more user friendly/user respecting than 11 is.
It was your computer, and it was friendly.
One of my random Linux boot-up sounds is the WinXP boot theme.
Does anyone has an easy way to put windows 98 sounds on Linux? I would love to have it for one day (and probably revert after, just enough to deal with nostalgia)
On my gaming PC I never signed up for any sort of Win10 extended support but it still wants to update regularly. Did they just give up and give the extended support to everyone?
Put Linux on an old gaming laptop. Thing runs much better on Linux than Windows ever has.
There is currently an ongoing isssue with Chromium/Electron rendering being almost-unusable with VRR. It was first reported almost a year ago. Microsoft doesn’t care enough to fix it. But hey, at least you get Copilot so it can tell you what registry tweak you have to add to fix it yourself!
Huh? I’m having no issues with vsCode, and while I haven’t used Discord in ages I didn’t have problems with it either. Both are electron. Got any links about these issues handy?
It’s this one:
https://lr.ptr.moe/r/Windows11/comments/1kgp7ar/cause_and_solution_to_windows_24h2_related/
i have win 11 on one of my laptops and I saw this issue. I do a lot of alt-tabbing and it made me go crazy because almost every time that happened, i’d have to minimize my browser and open it again or the webpage (and the browser ui) wouldn’t render correctly.
I’ve got till 2032 I’m good. Then I’ll switch to Linux which will hopefully by then be better than windows at running windows games.
We will all be dead by then, give bazzite a try.
Ummm… Yes, Proton was already mentioned in this thread so I won’t repeat it. But I’m curious which problems you have with games on Linux or did you just repeat what was true 5 (?) years ago.
Don’t get me wrong: I tried gaming on linux when proton wasn’t even remotely in the pipeline and it was
horribleimpossible. When I first heard about proton I tried again and ran into issues with the first game I tried (Europa Universalis 4, the new Paradox launcher was broken at the time) so I jumped ship again. Then I tried again in early 2025 and haven’t looked back since then. There hasn’t been a single game I tried that didn’t work (although some games needed some tinkering but that’s where protondb comes to rescue). There is one game I’d like to play (The Crew 2) that doesn’t work because of it’s anti cheat. But apart from that: Great experience!You see, I get where you might be coming from but maybe don’t way until 2032 and give it a try again?
Well Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 has weird distorted music. Apparently it’s due to .wma files and possible to convert them to MP3 (or use some weird fan patch of Proton) but that sounds like a lot of effort for something I was hoping would just work out of the box.
I’m sure there’s a cli program to just do batch audio conversion, but in favor of simple and least amount of hassle, it wouldn’t be that much work with fre:ac. You should be able to just open up the game’s directory in your file browser by going to the game properties in Steam, clicking “Installed Files”, and then clicking the browse button in the top right. Drag the wma files into an open window of fre:ac, make sure mp3 is selected for the output in your preferences and click convert. Or if you installed it in Wine, just browse to where you installed it, then continue the same once you have the wma files. Then just replace the wma files with your new mp3s, and you’re done. Honestly, you’ll probably spend more time waiting for your package manager to install fre:ac than you’ll spend on everything else in this process. Not as easy as just running out of the box, but really not as bad as it might sound at first.
I’ve been gaming exclusively on Linux for a few years now, and I can say Bethesda games, and specifically modding Bethesda games. That shit works a well as can be expected on windows, and if you keep the mod list light, can actually run better than vanilla.
I will say, the free Fallout 4 creation club content good enough as far as light modding goes, and runs extremely well.
Skyrim on the other hand, would honestly probably be fine if their creation club had half the mods that I want to play with.
Not who you originally asked, but I am aware of an example where Windows is still better than Linux for a specific game: Guild Wars 2. Not because of anything directly in the game, but there is an insanely useful overlay program called BlishHUD that runs as a separate process. On Windows it just works; on Linux it is a pain to get it to mostly work.
But overall things have clearly shifted from gaming on Linux being a joke, to being possible but a huge pain, to being ok-ish but a bit clumsy, to finally being sometimes even better and on average equal. There will always be differences, and Windows currently still has the benefit of being the default. Maybe that too will change one day.
GW2 gamer here too, I’ve been switching over to Linux over the past few months and this is on one of my to-do lists(figure out HUD/overlay software for GW2).
Another hurdle I’ve had is getting mod support. For example, Tale of Two Wastelands. The standard installer is exe only and it runs via proton but it doesn’t use all CPU threads to decompile the game assets. Takes over a hour to do. Luckily someone was able to build something that fixes this for Linux, takes 10 minutes or so depending on your CPU: https://github.com/SulfurNitride/TTW_Linux_Installer
So I’m sure something is also available for GW2
It already is actually. Proton driver’s are great.
And if your favorite games don’t work on proton because it’s something like apex or league that is a personal failing on your part
What?
People who don’t switch to linux because they are addicted to bad games are bad people.
No
yeah
Mandatory reference to Protondb, which lists how well every game performs on Linux. 84 % of the top 100 games on Steam are rated as gold or platinum.
Yeah, it’s very well done. Only issue is anything with kernel level anticheats, need windows. Fuck that, so many great games besides gtav and call of duty.
So i lost my lol addiction, is that a negative?
Depends on what you’re doing with your spare time. Do you feel a load was lifted off your shoulders or left on your face?
Some games with Kernel level anti-cheat still have linux support, though. It‘s always worth checking because some game devs actually care about Linux when you would expect the don‘t.
I don’t play too many of those, so have t checked
Windows LTSC?
Win10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021 is the good one.
Updates till 2036 right?
That’s the biggest reason I’ve not switched. Gears of War is one of my favorite franchises, and games like that still need some time, it seems.
I made a conscious decision years ago to not buy any games that do not support Linux. This had the advantage of when I actually switched, all my recent games had full support ready to go. Plus it helps that I also don’t support anti consumer corporations such as ea or ubi or epic. No Tux, No bux.
My office jumped ship at XP, it was that bad. We went to Linux because getting work done was actually more important.
So many things finally caught up, we did a lot of server client things with the Linux stack for field offices.
Now they call it the cloud. Which means it isn’t your server.
XP started the enshittification and it continued year after year…
XP started it?
In the micorosft line? Yes. Windows ID started here, telemetry, pushing their software, licensing schemes that only put you in control if you had a corporate key and so on.
Fair point.
I think people hate win11 outside of Germany too. Lookup how to switch win 10 to iot ltsc (aka alphabet soup) I did this quickly and easily with the only issues being desktop icons rearranged (take a screen grab reference Prior if you care) and unfortunately my automatic updates don’t work for some reason (I’ve seen rumors about drive parti on issues maybe being the reason) but I can download and install updates manually still until 2032.
