Most people lock their phones with biometrics which can be legally compelled from you.
If you use a password you can refuse to provide it.
If you’re living in a world where the police are willing to literally drug and torture you then your digital security requirements are beyond the scope of what you can get from social media and you should assume that everything you do is publicly known.
Agreed, my malware collection would never be this big if I couldn’t use Windows.
Yes, if you take memes as literal implemented public policy it can seem like a silly thing.
I’m not going to defend the position that every grandmother and office worker should dump Windows for Linux because it’s a dumb position.
I’m not sure why you would built an entire argument on top of that premise.
Rebooting Windows doesn’t remove the advertisement, data collection, AI integration or TPM requirements… which is driving people to switch to Linux.
I’m not talking about the average user. I’m talking about how the software is useful to me and other people like me.
The average user needs to be coached on how to double click or to open a PDF. Holding a conversation about any software or technical topic from the point of view of an average user is a fools errand.
I’ve read “just recompile the kernel” together with “just switch to [distro_x]” more times than I can count to… :D
Sure, ignorant people exist. If someone posts about a Windows problem they get the same generic advice as well.
The difference is that even given access to an expert, in Windows you’re limited in how much information that you can get about the problem. If you’re lucky you get an error message that matches an article in a knowledge base which will contain some rote process that allegedly solves the problem. You usually don’t get logs and you have no ability to debug (because the source code is proprietary). If that fails you can open a support ticket and hope, eventually, that someone competent can solve your problem.
Given access to an expert in Linux, you can trace the problem down to a specific line of code in a specific library and know the name and email of the person who wrote it.
In both cases, if an average user was involved they’d immediately give up and post on Reddit about how their computer is dumb.
Someone coming from Windows would just use the proprietary drivers. It isn’t like they’re not used to using proprietary software.
The open source drivers (Arch: ‘nvidia-open’, not ‘nvidia’) have different problems but installing a completely open source system is an advanced task. If a user just wants to install a driver with the least effort then they’d just install the nvidia package and not the open source drivers.
It isn’t a dealbreaker it’s just a thing to know. Anybody who’s at the point of trying Linux will have had to wade through a sea of people informing them of Nvidia issues, anti-cheat issues, etc.
The trade-off is that you can use an operating system that isn’t shoving ads in your face, spying on you and forcing you to get a new PC with a TPM.
For some people that is the dealbreaker. They often find that giving up HDR for a few months, not playing Apex Legends and typing into a terminal is a small price to pay for being able to trust your operating system to be working for you and not for shareholders.
Of course it isn’t practical for all purposes, the people that believe that are either ignorant or a caricature. I was addressing the specific task of gaming.
In that task, it is very workable. There are some caveats but the fact that the Steamdeck exists and is popular is testament to the state of gaming on Linux.
I have no desire to Google search how to do basic things on a computer.
That’s not because of Linux, but of your unfamiliarity with it. You needed to struggle to learn to do basic tasks in Windows when you were learning it and now you don’t. Windows didn’t change, you just learned
I’d need to use Google to do basic tasks in Adobe’s software, but that doesn’t say anything about the quality of the software, or it’s usefulness… only my lack of familiarity. If I had experience with their products then I wouldn’t need Google.
Not according to my, completely malware free, waybar-git-real!
It is enough, provided that you have your system configured correctly. Which, in this case, is designating a graphics card to use. Without that it defaults to using CPU rendering.
Most people don’t want to deal with the headache of configuring their systems and would rather use something more automatic.
That’s what Proton does for you. If you’re using Proton then it can assumed that you’re gaming and so defaults can be set to support that.
Whereas people use Vulkan for many different projects and so it chooses safe defaults and depends on further configuration by the user (which Proton does for you).
Native Linux games work just fine (I play native Rimworld every week or so), you just have to configure your system manually.
Or just use the preferred method of running Windows games via Proton. You’re going to be doing it anyway in order to game on Linux and so it is often more work to run the native version than it is to run the Windows version and let Proton handle the automatic configuration.
Finally, an opportunity in life
Gotta get on your grind, as the kids say these days
Arch and Mint are the two most-used distros (Arch with double the Mint users) behind SteamOS(Steamdeck).
Installing Arch from the install medium is daunting for people so I’d recommend EndeavourOS. It’s Arch but using a graphical installer and sane defaults for a desktop PC.
It seems intimidating because there’s a lot of new terms and workflows seem to always involve the terminal. Learn to love the power of the terminal, don’t be one of those “I use Linux but am scared of terminal commands” people.
If you’ve figured how to use wine then you’re capable of searching your way to any solution I’m Arch (it’s probably on the Wiki).
It’s 2024, if you’re not exploiting CI systems to inject your malware into the dependency chain for large open source projects, what even are you doing with your life?
Snapshots are one of the features of copy on write filesystems like ZFS or btrfs.
It looks like Ubuntu has btrfs support, so you could do things like configure the package manager to automatically snapshot before a system upgrade.
https://blackstewie.com/posts/install-ubuntu-24.04-with-proper-btrfs-setup/
That looks like a current guide for setting it up
Being able to segregate “production” and “development” environments is very valuable.
This is a best practice that pretty much everyone, eventually, discovers on their own.
Timeshift is a good piece of software doing a tired trick.
The new hotness is copy on write file systems and snapshots. I can snapshot, instantly, then do a system update and revert to the previous snapshot also instantly.
Instead of using symlinks files, like Timeshift, the filesystem is keeping track of things at the block level.
If you update a block it writes a new copy of the block (copy on write). The old copy is still there and will be overwritten unless it is part of a snapshot. Since the block is already written, snapshots don’t require any data to be copied so they’re instant.
Once you finish the system update, all of the overwritten blocks are still there (part of the snapshot) and reverting is also just a filesystem operation, theres no mass data to be copied and so it is also instant.
It does use disk space, as allocated blocks AND snapshotted blocks are stored. It uses less than Timeshift though, since Timeshift copies the entire file when it changes
ZFS and btrfs are the ones to use.
Disable IPv6.
Windows and some printers just choke on IPv6 for some reason. I was having sporadic issues with network printers and windows until I disabled IPv6 for other reasons and noticed a noticeable decrease in printer error metrics.
It’ll also affect SMB shares
VRR works as long as you’re on a recent Wayland version.
HDR isn’t a driver issue.
With X11, it ain’t happening.
Wayland current supports HDR, however there isn’t a protocol for applications to communicate with Wayland to configure themselves correctly. Some applications, like MPV, you can use an environmental variable to get HDR output (but not dynamic HDR, like HDR+ or Dolby Vision) and you can configure the parameters in the config.
Gamescope, the compositor that Valve uses for the Steamdeck, supports HDR for gaming. It works well for some games and completely fails for others.
Luckily, there’s a Wayland color management/HDR protocol that is staging for an upcoming Wayland update so you won’t need to depend on Gamescope to use HDR.
DLSS works in the games I’ve seen.
In my group of friends (all Linux gaming), I’m the only one with an NVIDIA card. I don’t have more problems than the other folks, I just have different ones.
The biggest gripe I have, HDR and color management, are getting fixed in Wayland soon. In the meantime I use gamescope to get HDR and apply color correction filters with reshade.
Linux at least gives us useful logging and the software packages have documentation that is accessible without paying for a Microsoft Support contract.
The Linux community support can actually fix your problems without boilerplate copypasta and doesn’t cost anything but you’ll get the customer service that you pay for.
Very strong lobby and social media messaging operations.