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Skip today's Windows 11 update: it breaks cursor styling, resets wallpaper, and more
(www.windowslatest.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Other than “at gunpoint,” why are you still using Windows?
i'll get downvoted for this but I don't care. I was on linux for years and this past week I switched back to Windows on my secondary drive. I still daily drive OpenBSD.
to be blunt I switched back because of the linux community. I got tired of it. the constant in-fighting, the near daily drama, the elitist mentality especially on support forums or chat channels, people leaving projects for one reason or another, the advocacy for FOSS but as soon as someone with a lot of money and questionable ethics starts handing it out then political opinions quickly start changing. Suddenly getting 10mil from a facist "isn't so bad and helps Linux". With Windows at least I know who I'm getting in bed with.
And as far as Windows being horrible...I don't see it. I've been back on it for a solid week or two now after several years away and I just haven't experienced what was constantly shoved down my throat from the Linux Community about how bad it is. I don't have onedrive, i'm not being hounded to set it up, i don't see it. I don't have copilot, I don't have AI, hell I don't even have any ads in my start menu. where is it all? Things work. The boot time is faster than any Linux distro I previously used. zero driver issues, things work and believe it or not the games I play now perform better on windows. It's like I was drinking the kool-aid about how bad windows is when currently I don't see it. I haven't even been hounded to update anything yet. It's got winget and scoop now so I can install stuff on this thing just like I would with any Linux package manager. I don't have to deal with protons or any of that.
I will say though maybe it's a hardware thing. When I had an ASUS Rog Strix laptop it was a miserable experience on Windows and on Linux it was better. On my Thinkpad it's the opposite. and on OpenBSD my Thinkpad absolutely swims.
Don't get me wrong I still like Linux, I just don't like what surrounds it. I'll probably go back in a year or two but right now Windows works for me and works well. for my dev work OpenBSD is perfect, it stays out of my way. All my stuff works on that, all my stuff works on Windows. But frankly the Linux community being so divided and clearly consuming the kool-aid opened my eyes and turned me off from it. I just no longer can take what linux users say about other operating systems seriously when I'm just not currently experiencing any of that with OpenBSD and Windows.
That's why I'm on Windows.
Pirated games and modded games
I've never had issues with games from gog on Linux. I played new games like cyberpunk and older games like heroes of might and magic 4. I've played modded mount and blade bannerlords, the Japanese mod, no crashes or such. I played pirated uncharted 4 without issues as well. My point is, if this is truly the only reason you're still on Windows, I think you should give it a try. I haven't looked back for a second
You can pirate and mod games on Linux no worries. I pirated WWE 2k25, and I've modded both Minecraft and Kerbal space program.
I bought my pc before nvidia was trash and so that’s the card I’m stuck with. Do any Linux work well with nvidia cards yet?
Having used KDE Plasma 6 on Wayland with an RTX 3080 and an AMD RX 6800, they both work equally well. I can't attest for other environments.
I never had an issue with a GTX 1660 Ti on Arch. It's been 5 years.
Older cards (in my case, the 970 M iirc) are slightly more annoying because Nvidia doesn't support them anymore. So you can't just install the generic, up to date, Nvidia driver package. You have to use Nvidia's website to find the latest driver that supported them, and then install that one through your distro's package manager.
Afaik, Nvidia supports all cards from the 16xx series upwards in their driver, as of right now.
Since joining the fediverse, I'm convinced the biggest deterrence for more people joining Linux are its users.
True, People can be obnoxious. But you should still try it at some point, there is something to the hype.
I have tried it, and I had more issues with my previous laptop on Mint than I have currently on Windows. Still I'll look at it again once I need a new one.
Edit: So I guess in my case the users didn't deter me, since I wasn't really interacting with the community at any point. I think it's probably more of a threadiverse user thing than a Linux user thing. And yeah I can be obnoxious myself, I just don't expect it to yield results.
I mean you don't have to wear thigh high socks to use Linux. But they sure do look mighty cozy.
Just that first thing
I tried installing Linux but something went wrong and it didn't work.
I know better than to ask for basic computer help in a Linux community.
don't give up :)
at first i tried to get Bazzite (didn't even install), then Mint (apparently it doesn't work well on dual monitors), and what finally worked was CachyOS, and i've been cruising on it for a few months now
The Linux community seems to me more open than ever before. Possibly due to the influx of new users who's job is not to administer Linux systems.
I wouldn't be too afraid to ask questions. Linux systems are nowadays quite simple to setup and you shouldn't have much problems with getting a simple question replied to.
All it takes is one asshole during the trial phase to turn someone off from the community entirely. Especially a non-technical person trying to come from something like Windows. And there are a lot of vocal ones across the various Linux communities. Especially in the discussions on GitHub, which is where you end up for support on nearly every piece of software not from a massive corporation, unless it's a simple solution or a very common issue.
The number of times I have posted looking for assistance with an issue, or a small suggestion, and gotten some variant of "fix it (or add it) yourself, it's FOSS" over the last couple years is a bit ridiculous.
Most of the community is great and super helpful. But the assholes are prevalent and very vocal.
I have a 60TB disk pool with DrivePool software and have no place to put my data and create a Linux based pool. I have to wait until I can afford a new 20TB disk as a temp storage.
Unless there is an easy way to convert a DrivePool to mergerfs etc.
How much data do you have, and are the drives identical? Usually I do in-place conversions by taking some drives offline, creating a degraded raid on them, migrating the data, then wiping the remaining drives and bringing them online in the new raid.
Works for zfs pools too, but you can't create a pool with missing drives, you have to create a temporary block device then mark it offline, then replace it with the real drive once it's free.
Heh wow its been awhile since I checked my storage. Lol I forgot I added a bunch last year. Its actually at 116TB now with 13 free.
Wow! I thought my NAS was loaded, but good lord. What are you storing?
Linux ISOs 🏴☠️
I run my family's Streaming Service.
Me too, but my library must not be nearly as impressive.
Some of the more high quality 4k releases (even 1080p ones) just gobbles up storage. I had to settle for the more optimized releases since I just have a 8tb external drive. Wanted to build a nas but man they are expensive, both a good nas and even the basic hard disks. Can't wait for the bubble to pop.
I'm scratching my head here. Are they just being sloppy and inconsiderate?
The biggest video file I have is a fan edit of the hobbit trilogy. It's 4 hours of 720p at 8 gigabytes. Why?
I'm just starting to experiment with Jellyfin, and I'm considering shrinking that down. I'm good with whatever format fit 90 minutes onto a 700MB video file that could be burned to a CD.
Raw bluray rips can easily be over 100GB. I tried for a minute before I decided 1080p was sufficient.
Compression will almost always compromises on quality. You can often notice the artifacts on scenes with lot of moving particles and such. So if you can afford the extra storage then that would definitely be the better option. At what stage do you consider them good enough is a very personal choice and the difference in quality often diminishes a lot as you go up. If you are happy with smaller releases then that's perfectly fine too.
Those are rookie numbers.
If I understood right, it's just software joining together multiple NTFS drives. When you open in another os it's just a normal NTFS drive
You could take two drives and create a raid1 (right? Or yolo without redundancy?) btrfs array. Move stuff from one drive, when it's empty, format it as btrfs and add it to the array. Repeat for every drive.
But....
With this much data I wouldn't risk if you don't have experience with btrfs via cli
Heavily modded Skyrim
I use it for work (AD admin, kind of have to unless I want to change careers while I'm halfway to retirement), and at home I use it for a machine that's dedicated to running simulator games (I can get the peripherals to work in Linux for the most part, but a lot of the setup for them is Windows only and since it's only used for that, I'm currently just sucking it up there... Though I'll need to keep something around even if I switch that system since some of them can only be programmed via Windows, like my VKB flight sticks)
Ancient Nvidia GPU (GT1030), I tried but I can't really be bothered to spend another week scouring forums to find kernel options and drivers to hope that the specific combination will stop making the taskbar blink or something
I've always used it as my primary driver, so I know very well how to get the most out of it and customize it to my standards. Some of the software I use has no acceptable replacement on other OS. I don't experience even a fraction of the problems that are reported online.
And you are entirely unbothered by the invasion of privacy?
It's a bother but it can be limited somewhat via toggles and DNS blocking.
Not all of us just use our computers as a hobby, I don't have the time to figure out Linux and make things run in wine or proton, and fixing things that break from updating that software is annoying.
That's funny, not having time to deal with shit (like stopping Windows from spying, serving ads, and otherwise abusing me) is exactly why I use Linux.
Unlike Windows, Linux 'just works.'
That takes a few minutes, it's not like Linux doesn't have stuff I've gotta spend time to fix too.
The majority of the time you just click play in steam, heroic, or whatever. It's no worse than windows.
I don't do any tinkering on my desktop.
Majority yeah but the stuff that doesn't work can be a serious time sink to fix.
This is true on Windows too
Not really; usually when something doesn't work as you like on Windows youre SOL...
It can be, but I never really run into any issues. Part of it is I'm more familiar with windows than linux I'm sure.
My linux desktop experience hasn't been as good, I run it on my laptop since that's more just a web browsing device than anything and it's not critical if it breaks. The last 2 times I've updated Fedora it has broken the bootloader and that took me quite awhile to fix, I can't figure out why it keeps happening as it's a really standard install and doesn't make any sense.
I also still can't get HW acceleration working in any browsers, flatpak or directly installed, which has been extremely frustrating since I've never had to do anything on windows for it to work. There are no clear guides with one fix either, and it's not something I should have to be fixing myself, it should work out of the box.
I'm hesitant to leave 10 because there are a few games I play that don't support Linux, and I like em too much to quit if 10 still works. However, once support officially ends forreal, I will say goodbye to those games o7 11 will never touch my outers.
At work tho they had to upgrade to 11 in the office, and since it's retail the office isn't really that important but 11 is so poorly designed the computers barely run anymore
Have you tried using Proton to run them? It's super easy to set up through Steam if you have the exes.
Which games, out of curiosity?
Legacy windows projects development. I switched to Linux and run windows as virtual guest with minimal usage though.