2024 is the Year of Linux on the Desktop, at least for my boyfriend. He’s running Windows 7 right now, so I’ll be switching him to Ubuntu in a few days. Ubuntu was chosen because Proton is officially supported in Ubuntu.
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it is kinda wild that people abandon Windows 7 because of Steam and not because Microsoft stopped patching it several years ago
Ubuntu was chosen because Proton is officially supported in Ubuntu.
I don’t think Steam actually recommends any distro since some time anymore
People don’t care about security until they get hit. Source: working in IT for 10 years.
And then suddenly they care a lot and do all the wrong things for wrong reasons because they know shit
“I don’t worry about missing security patches. I just have 5 anti-virus tools running simultaneously, they keep me safe.”
Or those people who actively avoid patches in general, because “they make my device slow”
I mean, they do make your device slow. That why tools like InSpectre exists. For some old cpu’s like my notebooks one it can be up to 20% performance impact, so if you not planning to use it with internet (or at least as main access point via browser) ever again, why not get yourself free performance?
Even IT people don’t give a shit about security until it’s way too late. Source: getting out of a job where the median age of a server is around 3-4 years old with no updates and runtimes hard installed outside repositories.
I think this is just kind of a side effect of capitalism.
If it’s costing them in the short term, and the results aren’t evident or won’t be seen until the long term, they almost always won’t do it.
No, it’s education.
Definitely. You see it across all aspects of life: basic misunderstanding of risk everywhere.
Nvidia gpu drivers wont even install on win 7 anymore. That by itself causes huge performance issues on new games that have driver optimizations.
Probably the same story for amd drivers
Isn’t SteamOS based on Arch? Did I miss something?
the way SteamOS works is extremely different to how a regular Arch Linux runs so I wouldn’t really conclude anything from that
it just shows how little the underlying distro mattersIt’s based on Debian.
2.0 is debian based. 3.0 (the version on steamdeck) is arch based
it is kinda wild that people abandon Windows 7 because of Steam
There’s this certain subsection of Win7/8 diehards that absolutely confuse me. It’s one thing to keep using them on old systems, but I’ve seen a few people posting about their brand-new PC, equipped with RTX 4090s and 13th gen I9 processors, who are adamant on running those outdated operating systems as their only OS. Such a waste of money.
Nah I think it’s just that windows 7 and 8 was and still is quite literally one of those ones where it hit the sweet spot between good UI and UX and actually having huge range and compatibility straight off the bat. Plus everything was pretty smooth back then, but hell, nobody ever says how many viruses and dumb apps were floating around for Windows 7x32 and x64
I mean that’s true, but what what I was specifically referring to was those using top-of-the-line hardware, which you can’t properly utilize on those systems because the CPU scheduler isn’t optimized for modern CPUs and you can’t really make good use of the GPU either due to the lack of DX12. With that hardware you need Win10+ or a somewhat recent version of Linux.
It’s almost certainly a very small percentage of the already small percentage of people still running Win7/8, but I’m just stunned everytime someone brags about such a crappy setup.
To be fair, steam reports less than 1% of users using windows 7. It’s not as big as we think.
But steam has > 100 million active users. Even if it is less than 1%, it still is a huge number
Nah. It’s more, year of the piracy comeback
That also helps linux. Tried watching something on someone else’s peacock account logged into Linux, and got an error. Checked Google to see if it was available. A free site had it, in better quality streaming too! We ended up using her computer, but I was kind of amazed.
Linux mint tends to work quite well on steam with proton after initially setting everything up
I’m pretty sure that this is because steam uses chromium as its backend and chromium new version doesn’t run on windows 7. It’s still not good because there are some games that won’t run on newer systems and therefore 7 is required for preservation.
As many of you pointed out, yes I agree proton is the answer if possible. YMMV
This is the actual reason. Steam officially said that: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/4784-4F2B-1321-800A
This change is required as core features in Steam rely on an embedded version of Google Chrome, which no longer functions on older versions of Windows. In addition, future versions of Steam will require Windows feature and security updates only present in Windows 10 and above.
There’s a bit of controversy regarding Ubuntu that I don’t need to get into but Fedora and Pop!_OS are also really good for Proton support. Ubuntu will work fine but I just prefer not to use it. Maybe you could let him try out the live environment for a couple distros to see what he might like in terms of UI.
And Mint as well
I second popos and mint. I love fedora but if he is a gamer you want something that will just work (navida built in or a very easy one click mechanism to get it). If he has to research PPAs and installing rpmfussion it will get all too hard very quickly. Also do some expectation setting before hand, research what games he plays work on linux, better he finds out now rather than after 2 hours of pain or getting band for “hacking” because of proton triggered an anti-cheat thing.
Edit: I run fedora on all my machines except my gaming rig which is popos. Fedora works too but popos is hassle a free experience.
Fedora more or less just works. I followed, like, 5 simple steps on the top Google result for “installing nvidia drivers fedora” and that was all it took. No further configuration or fiddling required.
I’ve done it. I agree it can be done very easily. But is relying on all new users entering the right question into google and google returning a correct answer for their distro that is not 7 years out of date the best strategy in the long run?
Any distro that does not offer a option during install or on first boot to just install this stuff with a promt is not new user friendly.
All of those are still ancient systems. Arch or opensuse tumbleweed are the only systems that are reasonable for a desktop because they’re rolling releases
Fedora is still pretty frequently and recently up to date with respect to packages and kernel, not sure you’d be losing much over arch.
But the debate to me is also not that important, I’ve been running fedora and have at some few occasions gotten some instabilities due to updates (mostly Nvidia with Wayland) so I can totally understand someone wanting stability and reliability over bleeding edge).
I don’t know about vanilla Arch, but on Manjaro each update breaks at least one thing. I never had issues with Mint. I wonder if I’d still get more stability from Mint if I installed Plasma on it. Anyway, I already got used to AUR and not having to deal with version upgrades. But I still wouldn’t recommend Arch-based distros when stability is needed.
This hasn’t really been true with arch for years. As long as you update reasonably frequently. I haven’t had a breaking issue in ages.
What were the issues you had that broke things?
Usually LibreOffice has issues. That could be because I use libreoffice-still as opposed to fresh. Then there’s often file and dependency conflicts requiring manual intervention. The latter is usually documented here, I think, if it’s expected. Oh, and protonvpn is absolutely broken every single time.
A little unrelated, but how come we’re successfully federating with yiffit.net? We currently have broken outgoing federation. I checked sh.itjust.works, lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, lemmy.dbzer0.com and none of those show content from us anymore.
Lol 0.06% usage in November 2023
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
There are more linux users than windows7 users.
0.69% (nice) on windows 7 64bit. That’s 0.75% total or 0.91% including windows 8 which is also dying. This is slightly under half of the linux user base according to these statistics
Missed that indeed. Weird sorting 😅
I think the 1.91 also includes the stream deck, but for some reason it isn’t included in the list (it is included if you select only Linux). It is about 5.5x Arch so around 0.8% of the total installs.
So the discontinue versions are around the same number as Linux desktop installs.
Why are some Linux distros in scare quotes?
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RIP Windows 7, long live Linux Mint Xfce
I would recommend creating a Ventoy USB drive and download some live ISOs of your choice. Then boot them and let your BF try them. Because then he can choose a distro by his liking to the overall experience.
Why not Linux mint? It is way more use friendly.
Also why on earth is anyone using windows 7 in 2023. I stopped using it to move to Linux back in 2016
I do, in VirtualBox. I have a 20 year old printer, and the drivers don’t work in newer Windows versions. I mean, at all. The installer crashes, and automatic driver installer only gets the scanner working.
Anyway, I don’t use Windows. It works on Linux. Kinda. In Linux Mint, I just can’t use high DPI, but I can scan, print, and see “remaining ink” just fine.
Manjaro is another story. Only “Normal Grayscale” works, hp-toolbox doesn’t even show the color cartridge. So I just use Windows 7 with the drivers as the heaviest printer driver ever.But when I have to use Windows (e.g.: at school), I prefer Windows 7. Windows 10/11 have really weird control, and they are SLOW. Also, when installing Windows 10 onto school computers, nobody bothered to install drivers.
I like the ThinkPad T440s laptops that are in one class. But after upgrade to Windows 10 they have some battery charging issues, and some of them just fail to boot from time-to-time. I use the last one with Windows 7 because it just works.You really should not be using Windows 7. If you need to for old software make sure it is isolated and doesn’t have network access. It is very insecure at this point.
my boyfriend. He’s running Windows 7
You saint.
did the same transition when switched to Lemmy. Very wise decision to take.
Kubuntu for that win7 similarity. (It’s still official ubuntu)
Or just try Fedora KDE.
You should try plain Debian and KDE Plasma (the desktop it’s one of the options of the shelf, you just pick it with the installer). I have been doing that and it’s great, even with old hardware. Ubuntu is way too much bloated. And of course proton works like magic.
Like others already mentioned, I would suggest Linux Mint as well. It’s better Ubuntu than Ubuntu and similarity to Windows UI would make his transition much better.
