Fuck Micro$oft
It’s time to switch to Linux! Because it’s free as in freedom.
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What is the point of this “revelation”? When did Microsoft claim that windows were free in any way?
Yes, they called themselves the “most open operating system”. Which in fairness doesn’t imply all the “free” FSF freedoms, but at least being unable to work around restrictions or reverse-engineer to me definitely contravenes “open”.
That said, this is just beating a dead horse; literally anyone with a brain who knows what Linux is knows that Windows is less open.
When did we start bending over for every company out there
I don’t know, tell us, when did you start?
As a Windows “normie” for a long time I used to roll my eyes when people said try Linux. But getting ads in Windows when trying to do a simple admin thing was the last straw. I followed instructions to install Debian on a spare drive and gave it a go and do you know what, it was fine. It made me realise 90% of what I do is in a browser anyway, so why did I have a hang up about having the exact same browser experience in a slightly different operating system?
Using libre office instead of word was a bit of a shift but, again, for the majority of what I wanted to do I it was fine. Libre office works with words .docx format. In fact, I noticed that for a quick document or spreadsheet I’d been using Google docs so much that this wasn’t affected at all.
Gaming was a concern, as this was something I (lazily) believed just didn’t work on Linux. But I was totally wrong. Not only is steam available on Linux, but even very recent titles work fine run through a Linux based windows emulator. I guess the important thing is that far more of this was automated than I thought it was going to be. There’s a stereotype that you’re going to be buried neck deep in obscure command lines trying to get basic things working but in my experience I didn’t have to do any of that, it all just worked.
Bonus was along the way learning that those “obscure” command lines were not actually that obscure and were actually convenient. Typing “sudo apt install vlc” on the command line and having VLC installed and ready to use about ten seconds later was amazing. (I know package managers are available for Windows, I’m just referring to the ‘norms’ of each platform)
Linux based windows emulator
Wine is not an emulator. It’s in the name.
I’m really just joking, but it’s a translation layer which has much less overhead compared to an actual emulator. That’s why you can get performance that is so close to Windows, and sometimes even better since the OS itself takes up fewer resources as well.
those “obscure” command lines were not actually that obscure and were actually convenient
Yes, let the darkness flow through you.
Lol
I followed instructions to install Debian on a spare drive and gave it a go and do you know what, it was fine. It made me realise 90% of what I do is in a browser anyway, so why did I have a hang up about having the exact same browser experience in a slightly different operating system?
That’s how it’s done people. Alright let’s go 2025 Year of the Linux Desktop (Again)! Chop chop! Let’s move out!
Using libre office instead of word was a bit of a shift
Btw, you can change the look under Appearance > uh, “Benutzeroberfläche” in german.
I’d been using Google docs so much
Just so you know, Google owns your documents, not you.
For what it’s worth, if you want an office suite that’s perhaps not as feature-rich as Libre Office, but has an appearance and UX like MS Office, as well as better compatibility with MS Office out of the box, there’s always OnlyOffice.
It’s especially good if you’re putting it on a parent’s PC who’s only used MS Office before.
Never even heard of it, I’ll have a look thanks
can we get another red rectangle around the whole picture please
It’s not free as in free beer either?
It is if you don’t pay for a license but at this point I don’t even want to use it for free.
I mean anything is free if you pirate it.
You don’t have to pirate it, you just download it off their website and don’t activate it. It’ll work, but you can’t change your desktop background.
And you get an annoying watermark. And an even more annoying operating system, so it’s not really worth it.
That’s basically pirating it but worse lol. You still are violating the license but also get an annoying watermark.
Windows is Free, as in free to gargle deez nuts
Sorry Microsoft, I actually had a served all rights already. Nobody else has rights. That’s just how it is and I work around all limitations.
Do you have a few minutes to talk about our Lord and Saviour, Linus Torvalds?
You mean GNU/Linus?
It’s called windows because they are always looking in at what you’re doing. It’s “open” so they are now public about looking inside your windows.
They were stealing my data from my desktop as it was syncing to their cloud. Seeing those sync icons when I had one drive disabled made me switch to linux about the time they were taking about the AI tech screen shots. F that, I’m out.
Been on Linux for a while now and it’s been great.
Aye so you can spend your Free™ time getting stuff to work aye sounds great mate
Edit - ha ha Linux users ITT
“Sudo reinstall mouse driver so I can downvote this guy’s comment come onnnnnn!!!”
Yeah, like the constant driver issues. I had to reinstall the OS and it wouldn’t even recognize my hard drive, just told me there’s no drive.
Or when it refused to use my dedicated Nvidia GPU and only used the integrated one.
Or when my sound stopped working all of a sudden.
Oh, right, those were all Windows!
Yes, but didn’t you appreciate the targeted ads you were getting while trying to troubleshoot? Think about all of the trash you won’t know about if you use anything other than Mac(i)OS/Windows!?
Heh, they didn’t really stand a chance, I block them on network level, device level and I also used some software to block all the annoying shit on Windows itself (OO Shut Up or something like that). But the huge empty spaces where something was very obviously missing told me pretty exactly where I would see the ads.
People always say this as if you don’t spend time doing stuff on Windows.
I use Linux specifically because it saves me all the time it takes trying to get things to work properly in Windows. Printers, USB drives, multiple hard drives, encrypted volumes - all of these give me less trouble in Linux than in Windows. And when it comes to software, the usual experience in Windows is to click on the icon and then wait around a minute or two to see whether it registered, then go and check the Task Manager, kill the process if necessary and try relaunching, etc. On Linux you click the icon and the program pops up.
Okay, anyone who’s saying this either tinkers way the hell too much without the know-how to back it up, has never used Linux for more than a week, or should probably be using this as their daily driver.
- Software is, in the vast majority of cases, obtainable through a GUI package manager, versus going out onto the Internet and finding whatever you trust to give you a valid version of the software. Software is updated all at once and without even being forced to reboot (save for some niche cases). With two (2) clicks and one (1) password, every single piece of software on the OS is up-to-date. It’s like a half-step up from an app store in difficulty.
- I have never once in two(?) years using Linux had to fuck around with software drivers. Whereas trying to connect game controllers to Windows was a fucking nightmare, and it feels like I would have to go mucking around with audio drivers every time Windows decided my headset didn’t want to work anymore.
- Windows 10 has, at least once, completely shit the bed to a point where I spent most of my day trying to get my desktop working again. Zero catastrophic issues with Linux.
- Windows 10 placed itself into a state where it couldn’t update at all because Microsoft fucked up and pushed an update that enlarges the recovery partition without regard to the users whose recovery partition is bordered on the right and can’t be enlarged.
- Linux’s install is extremely fast and trivial, whereas Windows’ is full of dark patterns, makes you sign up for a worthless account just to use your desktop (lol), and can be completely fucked if you replace too much hardware in your own PC.
- The shell experience if you actually do need to get some kind of even light power user work done is way less intuitive than Linux.
- Customizing Windows is the biggest pain in the ass imaginable. I had to go into the registry on Windows 11 just to give me the basic tools present on Windows 10’s context menu. Go try to uninstall Internet Explorer. Go ahead, I dare you.
- Whereas Linux has extensive, crystal clear, and highly specific guides for basically any problem you’ll ever fall into (see: the Arch Wiki), Windows has support forums where you pray someone has the same issue as you, and if you find it, 90% of the time it’s a canned response with fuck-all to do with the issue, terminating the thread. So then you go searching your issue appended with the term “reddit”.
I use Manjaro KDE with Wayland on an Nvidia GPU, and it works right out the box. I then have maybe half an hour’s worth of personal customizations which are not at all necessary to use. Something like Linux Mint is what I would recommend to my grandparents any day of the week over Windows.
