Won? They will do it again. The only winning move is not to play their game. Choose Free Software.
Genuine question: What do you recommend? I want to replace Windows 10 on a 8-year-old midrange laptop with something that works reasonably well in terms of performance with a connected 4K monitor.
I’ve already tried Ubuntu, but unfortunately the experience has been marred by bugs such as poor performance, visual glitches, windows jumping around when attempting to move them, and DPI settings not being able to be applied per screen.
Linux is definitely the route. A lot of people use Mint or Ubuntu. But they are usually running out of date drivers.
I’d recommend looking into distros based on Fedora Workstation. It stays up to date but not as much as Arch so that it’s stable.
My recommendation is any of the Universal Blue images that fit your need. They are based off of the Fedora Atomic image with added quality of life features.
I’ve had more luck with Mint, thanks to its Windows-adjacent GUI and user-friendly on ramp. Still encountered a few issues (a couple of peripherals that didn’t support Linux drivers). But on the whole, it’s improved system performance over Win10 and synced smoothly with my workstation.
I am more impressed you got windows 10 to work well on 8 year old computers ngl. I had an HP pavillion around that age and it had torturingly low startup speed.
Definetely try mint-cinnamon and mint-xfce4, latter one uses xfce4 which has very good performance.
A lot of experienced users will find linux run without bugs for them but that’s because it’s an OS that gets better as you learn more.
In my case battery life was 2 hours on windows and 1.5 hours on linux. But once I past the skill-curve I tweaked it to be 6 hours because I knew how to find what caused the problem and fix it.
Either that or there is the IT-guy effect going on where once an experienced user shows up the aura just makes computers work normal again lmao.
I can’t say I’ve had those issues myself, so my recommendation may not be valid in your case. I’d say maybe give Fedora with KDE Plasma a try, and try switching between X11 and Wayland sessions if issues persist.
I personally don’t like Ubuntu, but that’s mostly because of Canonical making the occasional sketchy decision.
On the whole, distro choice doesn’t matter quite as much these days, as most distros should work fine out of the box. Whatever issues you have should technically be solvable with a bit of troubleshooting.
Sometimes Linux just doesn’t play well with your setup. Good luck, and I hope you find something that works for you!
If you identify your laptop (including model number) someone who has the same hardware might be able to make a solid recommendation.
It’s a HP Pavilion Power 15-cb091nd.
LOL, I won when I installed Mint.
Cheers
don’t believe it. ms is in for the long game.
The only thing they’re rethinking is how to repackage this so people accept it. They learned a lot from this, but I promise you it wasn’t the right lesson.
Bullshit and too late, bitches
I won when I ditched windows.
Yeah, it a temporary measure due to people leaving. Microsoft will not change. Linux is far better
I have one gaming PC and it’s on windows 10 till kike October or so of this year when security updates go away. Waiting to see if steam OS officially drops for PC so I don’t have to switch OS more than once. Already have it running on amd processor and GPU for an easy Linux switch, and been running Linux on my laptop for a while now.
Watch your mouth, buddy!
Lol. All sorts of typos. I should proofread.
I really do suggest using Bazzite if you don’t want to wait for steamOS.
I previously used Mint, haven’t had to install an nvidia graphics driver or new kernel since moving to Bazzite and I’m now learning distrobox so I can make my usual bad computing decisions in a safe space. Its a very stable base, and with container tech layered on, you can have all the fuck around you want with minimal find out.
But I do want to wait.
Is it true? I’ve been lately looking out for a new atomic distro but I’ve heard it seems it’s not developer friendly with the sandboxing and extra efforts to get apt/rpm working. I am relatively new to Linux and stuck with Mint for now so I can’t add anything to it.
Depends what you want to do.
On distrobox, I installed a containerised version of Ubuntu that can interact with my host, sort of like WSL on windows. Anything I put in it remains isolated so I can’t install packages that break my system - and I can use apt to install whatever in want rather than rpm.
You could develop in a VM or container like distrobox, and tbh, the host can be whatever you need it to be. You dont actually have to move off Mint.
That being said, I dont see why you couldn’t just develop on Bazzite/atomic distros of your choice using flatpaks for IDEs. I believe it has c++ installed and you’d be able to layer whatever language you needed onto your atomic distro of choice.
This has been a common sentiment, enough that I’ve thought of making a video about it.
Running a desktop OS, catering to everything people need from their PC, from printing to fringe drivers to VPNs to package management, is a big task. I have long doubted that Valve is personally interested in taking on that task. They write SteamOS for the deck and machine, since their only real responsibility is playing games. People who try to install that OS for other things will see some Flatpak friction - but that’s fine, it wasn’t built for that.
I’d strongly recommend looking at some other distributions with broader group support. My recommendation is CachyOS. Bazzite has worked great for others, but as a general desktop user I sort of bounced off of it - installing some unusual apps ended up getting a lot of friction against its emulation layers. I believe both are based off the same sort of origins as SteamOS, so that may be the safest thing.
I think you personally don’t know what you’re talking about and are just guessing at what Valve wants.
If we’re speculating, I’ll speculate that you’re completely wrong and that most things that are up and running on Arch are going to run on SteamOS. GabeN has dumped a massive amount of time and effort into making Linux Arch viable and good for gaming. He also has enough clout that it will quickly become the most popular distro, or at least one of the most popular. To say it won’t get much compatibility for things like printer drivers is just silly.
If it has an AMD GPU you can just install it now, no waiting. But it’s not good at much more than just playing games, if you want a more general purpose machine I’d install something mainstream like Mint, Ubuntu or Fedora.
It does have amd, but I’m in no big hurry. Couple online games I won’t be playing after the windows dump and I’m not interested in dual booting. I have a laptop running Linux for work\office things already. The desktop is just gaming and media.
Best comment.
I am very thankful to Microsoft, without them I wouldn’t have made the switch to Linux.
I really loving it. So much better, faster and powerful + no Spying.
When I started using Linux in 2009 it had around 0.6 percent market share on desktop. Windows had 95%.
Today Windows is measured below 68%, and Linux has been measured above 4% by statcounter.com.
These things move faster the more people make the change. Linux only reached 1% in 2013, 2% in 2021, 3% in 2023, and 4% was somehow first measured already in 2024. For every single person making the switch it becomes easier for others to do the same, and companies consider Linux support to be a little bit more important. One can only wonder at which percentage of market share it will be offered as a mainstream alternative when buying a new computer, but it seems pretty clear that we’re getting there.
I guess my point is that we all won when you ditched Windows. Thanks for that.
10% market share is when I expect it to be impossible to ignore and I think we’re gonna get there fast like you alluded to.
But…mainly for games. The corporate crowd will stay on Windows because they benefit from propping up other corporations. PC/laptop manufacturers will still push Windows for the same reason
I don’t understand how my coworkers are using windows. Like, they routinely have issues where it randomly reboots or gets sluggish. And it’s just flat out unfit for software development, unless you’re targeting windows specific stuff. They can’t even run our code locally.
Maybe some of the problems are janky security stuff to try to lock it down
The corporate crowd will stay on Windows because they benefit from propping up other corporations.
I wouldn’t be so sure. An interesting indicator of the shift that many of you wouldn’t see is how many vendors of management and security software have put out Linux versions in the past 12 months. I’m talking about stuff like RMM (Remote Monitoring & Management), EDR / MDR (Endpoint Detection & Response / Managed Detection & Response) client side DNS filtering software, and other things.
This tooling is for managing and securing endpoints used by companies, either by internal IT or by MSPs. These vendors wouldn’t be making and releasing these tools unless they were being asked for them AND there was going to be stead long term demand.
Turns out that once a companies stuff is in the cloud its users really don’t need MS Windows anymore so as long as you can centrally manage and secure it Linux makes a perfectly fine endpoint OS.
There is one last major bit once you have RMM and EDR in place - centralized identify. Until Okta, Ping, Azure, and Google all have a pam module that allows for remote identity management without depending on LDAP, enterprise endpoints are restricted to desktop/server machines (or orgs where you can get a waiver and only have local login).
Yep but…
Here’s Microsoft - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/identity/devices/sso-linux?tabs=debian-install%2Cdebian-update%2Cdebian-uninstall
Google has a variety of IDM methods including Ubuntu Authd and Secure Cloud LDAP. There’s also 3rd party tools like JumpCloud, ScaleOrange, etc.
Okta appears to have ASA and OPA although I’m not familiar with either of them. Ping has PingID and Ping Federate, although again I haven’t used either of them.
So depending on your cloud and needs the IdM / IAM is either available NOW or it will be very soon. 😀
Ohh that’s super exciting. I haven’t realized Microsoft made one.
Okta’s offering was garbage last I attempted to poke it. And 3rd party IAM tooling can be completely hit or miss (and let’s not even start about LDAP over the web…)
I dunno if it’s exciting but I do have and use an Entra joined and InTune managed Linux Mint laptop with a full security stack loaded as described above. It works.
Total market share is irrelevant. What matters more is total users.
If you make a product and there’s a million people on a platform who could buy it, the costs to port that product (and support it) need to be low for it to be worthwhile.
If the total number of people on that platform increases to 10 million, now the cost to port/support becomes more like a minuscule expense rather than a difficult decision.
When you reach 100 million there’s no excuse. There’s a lot of money to be made!
For reference, the current estimated amount of desktop Linux users globally is somewhere between 60-80 million. In English-speaking countries, the total is around 19-20 million.
It’s actually a lot more complicated than this, but you get the general idea: There’s a threshold where any given software company (including games) is throwing money away by not supporting Linux.
Also keep in mind that even if Linux had 50% market share, globally, Tim Sweeney would still not allow Epic to support it. I bet he’d rather start selling their own consoles that run Windows instead!
For reference, the current estimated amount of desktop Linux users globally is somewhere between 60-80 million. In English-speaking countries, the total is around 19-20 million.
That sounds about right when comparing Microsoft’s claim of “1 billion” Windows devices. 5% of a billion is 50 million(not a perfect comparison as 5% Linux is total including MacOS/others from statcounter but you get the idea). So 50 million to 100 million Linux users globally sounds about right.
PC/laptop manufacturers will still push Windows
it will eventually hit a wall because of this. most people can only conceive of using whatever came with the computer.
You can buy laptops and PCs with pre-installed Linux at Germany’s biggest computer retailer now.
Some OEMs with some models here in the USA also offer it. HP and Dell offer it. I think Dell gives Fedora and Ubuntu? And it takes off ~$130 USD or so from the price, so it’s the full Windows license cost.
Personally if I have that option I’m taking it and just reinstalling whatever I want anyway, but it’s nice having that option.
Also if I’m going to spend $2k+ on a new laptop and they don’t give me a non-Windows/blank OS option then I’d go to support and request a special product link. Otherwise I’ll find another brand or buy used.
Tuxedo laptops seem like they have a solid build.
Nice design and I think they are based in Germany.
They even provide their own OS which is based on Ubuntu.
Yes, very happy with mine. Started it up to see the preinstalled version of Linux and then restarted it to install Arch btw instead, but it’s a great wee machine, exactly what I wanted and will be replacing it with another like it when the time comes.
My M1 MacBook Air is still alive and kicking (although I dislike being an American brand - bought it before the whole American mess).
But if I was in the market looking for a laptop, definitely would be a Tuxedo.
Dell sells PCs pre-configured with linux as well.
I had no idea - that’s really cool!
Germans also seem to be privacy oriented people, I can imagine this combined with recent developments could have a real impact.
It will be really interesting to see the figures at the end of 2026, when Windows 10 has truly reached end of life, and a whole bunch of people are going to be forced to choose.
I wish you were right, but that growth does not appear fast nor steady.
0 to 1 percent: 22 years
1 to 2 percent: 8 years
2 to 3 percent: 2 years
3 to 4 percent: more unstable, but between 1 and 3 yearsI would say it’s an encouraging trend.
I had the opposite take as that guy. I already knew that Linux usage in desktops was growing, but I’m pleasantly surprised seeing the dramatic acceleration behind it! I’m being optimistic here, but we could reach the point that we start going up a percentage point in a matter of months in the next few years.
Yup too late I’m never coming back.
I switched to Linux in December, and it was a remarkable feeling. I don’t think I had really noticed how oppressive or depressive Windows had become (and I hadn’t even switched to Win 11, just using win 10), or how much I was actually personally affected by, but that feeling of suddenly being free when I booted up my linux was quite surprising and exhilarating.
It was like a massive weight had been lifted off of my shoulders.
I won when I ditched your mom.
-Dad.
Thats bad actually, the free advertising to linux was a good thing. Now Windows users will slip back into apathy.
Windows will continue to degrade as Microsoft fires more of its professional staff and turns to “Vibes Coding” for increasingly delicate systems development. They’ll keep pushing out the OS as a vector for unwanted third-party advertisements. They’ll keep ratcheting user control of the OS away from the hardware owners. And they’ll keep injecting bloatware into their applications and services.
This isn’t the end of enshitification. It is a brief retreat and regrouping by a company that has invested tens of billions of dollars into the AI sunk cost.
I hope you’re right because I am enjoying Microsoft’s failures and I would like them to continue.
I wish these were proper failures. They’re such an entrenched monopoly, a whole lot would have to change before a $3.2T company sees any kind of tangible penalties.
I read “a major shit”
common freudian slip when talking about windows
Oh, and only now am I re-reading it to see that’s not what it actually said…
The title of the article is very misleading. Microsoft has not said they’ll be removing AI features already deployed on Windows. All it says is they’re reevaluating AI features going forward and streamlining the experience whatever that means. It sounds like they’re looking to rename unpopular unwanted feature like Recall instead of scrapping it. The whole thing is just a PR move to placate the disgruntled masses. Also they said nothing about intrusive ads, telemetry, or rapidly declining stability of overall system. Recent update literally broke windows explorer, task bar and start menu. One thing for certain, Microsoft will not stop using Copilot to develop their software in house. That would be admitting Ai tools are useless and that would sink Microsoft stock even further than it already has.
You mean a company founded on lies, by a good friend of Epstein, is misleading the public! It’s not like he’s trying to treat us for his std…
One thing for certain, Microsoft will not stop using Copilot to develop their software in house.
You’re wrong, but I think you’ll be OK with that because the reality of the situation is actually hilarious:
https://www.theverge.com/tech/865689/microsoft-claude-code-anthropic-partnership-notepad
“Turns out Copilot sucks so let’s just use our competitor’s superior product but that’s no reason we can’t keep foisting the inferior garbage on the masses!”
Honestly it’s good engineering practice to not be stuck in your own product.
You want them to be using only copilot?
It’s called dogfooding and it’s what you’re supposed to do to improve your product.
It mostly looks like a mild slow down of user-facing release and rebrand of unpopular features.
It is not a retreat. The marketing team is just trying to figure out how to reframe things that caused public backlash.
My first thought exactly
I am kinda glad they went to shit so quickly. If it were slow, I probably would never have gone fully Linux. Now, I have all 5 of my machines free of corporate spyware. I am having fun again configuring and learning. Thanks microslop! I needed the push.
Which distro has been working well for you? So for I have Mint and Bazzite on my list to try. Also do you have any pointers?
I’m using mint and loving the experience so far. My kids find it easy to use and even my wife, who was a bit worried having to switch to a new environment, came to realise that it works just as well if not better then windows.
Badass, appreciate the info!
I’m using CachyOS currently. It’s fast, so far stable and suits me.
Best pointer I can give you loads them all onto a USB with Ventoy and test them all on the live environment. What works for others may not work for you so go ham, break shit and have fun while exploring
Fedora workstation can be a real nice no trouble install.
Personally love to add pop-shell extension to GNOME - if you use big monitors, it’s an awesome autotiler.
Good info as I have a huge monitor and has been part of my worry from a compatibility standpoint.
I use Mint on my laptops and I know it is not for everyone, but I started with Debian stable on my gaming desktop with an ARC B580 and upgraded the kernel, installed drivers, and added packages one at a time so I could see the difference. Debian stable on my server for many years, so I have some experience.
What makes you say Mint isn’t for everyone? UI is weird?
Oh, I think Mint is one of the most accessible distros. I use Cinnamon desktop environment and that is very nice for new users. I was referring to starting with Debian stable, it is pretty baseline with no frills. Great for a server, but you will need to research what additional packages and repositories you want to get from it what you want. I just like how almost all software made for Linux has instructions for installing on Debian, that is not the case for most other distros.
Why would anyone suddenly trust Microslop? Trust is gone.
It’s amazing that America somehow is destroying trust in itself from so many different directions right now, almost seems like a planned demolition, but I think it’s more of a chaotic tragedy of errors due to horrible judgement. It’s like the whole country got drunk on “American exceptionalism” (ie hubris) over the last 20 years, and here comes the hangover of the century.
It was absolutely planned, if not expressly planned for destroying trust. Planned for maximizing revenue, minimizing costs, for oppressing and dividing the population to exploit them and prevent a challenge to their corrupt systems, and so forth.
Thinking all of that can be controlled would fall under hubris IMO. The powers have done nothing but stoke resistance and rebellion against their hierarchies, or perhaps I’m just taking the bait…?
Reading too much into it. It is simply their self-interest (the wealthy) conflicts with your self-interest. They are just grabbing as much money as they can and creating as many distractions along the way to confuse and obfuscate.
I think you over-estimate the wealthy. These aren’t terribly intelligent people, they just have enough money to force what they want. The other commenter is correct, it’s largely just hubris and them believing they’re gods because they had the money things that aren’t terribly complicated but are otherwise out of reach for normal people. Everything they do that’s a trick is only clever to to those who are easily fooled. No one intelligent is confused, they just lack power to do anything especially with so many of the aforementioned fools supporting the rich.
I think this is it.
I think, for example, that a lot of the conspiracy theories that exist around 9/11 being planned from the “inside” are the actual conspiracy that’s meant to mask the fallibility of the ruling class by creating stories about them being all powerful in the wake of a weakening attack.The one complex thing the rich do have the power to control is the stories we’re told. The stories we internalize establish our place in the world and convince us of our rolls. They project a virtual reality of illusions around us, through algorithms and media, because “control is an illusion” is a double entedre.
while fucking themselves over in the long term.
they are proverbially pulling the copper from the walls so they can support the system as it is for a bit longer.
Also there’s a big part of this that is intentional sabotage and manipulation by a wide network of chaos-creators that mostly seem to lead back to Putin. When a former-KGB kleptocrat steals and controls everything in the world’s largest country and becomes effectively probably one of the world’s richest men, and then starts playing 4d chess with all the world’s other richest men, I guess it turns out you can probably cause a lot of chaos and quite possibly completely destroy the international global order.
I’m willing to bet that is one of Putin’s goals, but it’s not his only goal, and just because he’s evidently accomplished it with gusto still doesn’t mean Putin is actually capable of accomplishing all his other goals of building or being part of any sort of new world order, because this chaos only destroys and tears things down. He’s got destruction down to a science, and I’m sure he thinks he can leverage that to create what he wants in the world, but he’s failed at that and will continue to fail. But he has proven he can fuck things up pretty badly for the rest of us, whether we want to admit it or not, so, personally I’m willing to give him credit where credit is due.
The real question is, are we going to accept that what came before is irretrievably broken, and if we are willing to do that, what are we going to build in its place? Because with chaos comes opportunity, but those opportunities are few and limited. The chaos will continue, and the chaos can worsen. Significantly. If we’re going to turn this around, we have to be smart about it. There are a lot of paths that lead to very bad places, and only a few that have good endings. And you’d better believe that Putin and other forces of chaos are still going be trying to sabotage those too, even more aggressively as they realize their own dreams will never come to fruition.
I think we’ve got to start by rooting out all the elements of corruption that have allowed this to happen, or else anything we try to build in its place will be built on quicksand. What exactly those are? I have a bunch of opinions, but that’s where the debate will start to happen, and I think we’re going to need to start having those conversations before we can really address this. We need to establish our philosophical foundations and values, agree that we all value human life, that we value all lived human experiences, and that all humans are created equal, and I think we can go from there to try to define and refine exactly what those things mean and how we’re going to implement those values into building a civilization that we actually want to live in and that other people want to live in too, where we can all agree on these things and find ways to pursue equality and happiness for all.
It’s not the whole country, it’s the perfect storm of the absolute worst people who spent the last few decades working to seize power combined with the death throws of late stage capitalism. The political and economic elite in America (and most other countries) have merged and corrupted each other beyond redemption, but the ultra capitalist systems of the US means there are few if any effective checks to their power. In a properly functioning country the government checks the power of corporations via regulations and laws and in turn is checked by the will of the public but in the US the incessant corporate propaganda has convinced a depressingly large chunk of the population that government regulations are inherently bad and that everything works better when corporations are free to do whatever they want. That combined with the absolutely blatant bribery and corruption in US politics means that corporations control the US government rather than the other way around.
The whole thing worked for a little while while the corporations were at least pretending to somewhat care about consumers and things like anti-monopoly regulations, but now that Trump has shown the government is very loudly and publicly for sale to the highest bidder they’ve all gone mask off and are just doing whatever they want. The problem of course is that they’re also run by morons that either don’t see the cliff they’re all collectively racing towards or just don’t care because they’re planning to bail out with all the profits while the greater US economy burns.
Ultimately this is the sprouting of the seed that was planted back in the 50s from an amalgam of the cold war anti-communism propaganda and the latent racism that was never properly dealt with following the civil war.
True. I guess a lot of it is also the fallout of Citizens United.
america is fine. the problem is the us.
I’m Canadian. When we say “Americans” or “America” we mean people from the US.
which is weird, because canadians are also americans.
the us doesn’t own the continent.
It’s a bit tongue in cheek. We’re like that.
my country too, feels just like some capitulation
The same reason they would any year.
History shows Americans will.
They trusted Microsoft after they were successfully sued by a DoJ (when it used to investigate corruption and monopolies) for being dicks, but David boies rejected breaking up the company in 2001.
Too little too late. I’m already over to Linux now. Shit’s been going downhill even before this whole AI craze went off the rails. I hope Microsoft Windows crashes and burns
I hope Microsoft Windows crashes and burns
Microslop Microslop Microslop. Microslop?
Microslop.
