515
Lots of PCs are poised to fall off the Windows 10 update cliff one year from today
(arstechnica.com)
A better use case for linux desktop could not have been invented.
this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
515 points (98.9% liked)
Technology
58673 readers
4571 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
My biggest worry for this is, there's probably dozens of black hats out there that have found some very large exploit for Windows 10, and are holding off on abusing it until the day Microsoft ends support.
Currently, my plan is to make a partition for Linux Mint, set up dual boot, see how much of my daily computer obsession I can execute through there, and then try to slowly transition while slowly moving stuff from Windows. (I am vaguely worried I'll run into that Windows issue where files accessed from outside the OS login are security-restricted. That has even screwed up my Windows reformat fixes)
Mint's sweet I switched from 10 a few months back. Biggest difference is getting use to the different file system, only 2 games have been unplayable (didn't try to make them work tbh).
might be better to separate drives, windows has been known to fuck up Linux partitions recently.
Just keep regular full system images (as you should be anyways, as part of your 3-2-1 backup plan), and you'll be fine as you can just restore an image if everything gets broken.
My what now?
This sounds like something I should be wary of, but it's the first I'm hearing of it. Any other info?
Microsoft took a big bite out of GRUB, which is the utility that your motherboard uses to dual boot OSes. A Windows update basically borked it and set Windows as the mandatory default OS. It basically makes it so your motherboard can’t properly identify your Linux install(s).
Luckily, you can fix it directly in Windows Command Prompt. But still, it’s a dirty trick that Microsoft has been using recently. Windows has historically been a bad neighbor for other OSes, (for instance, the Secure Boot Module is basically an attempt to make booting other OSes difficult,) but this was the first time in recent history that they have outright prevented another existing OS from booting.
I haven't booted into Windows since
It typically happens during updates. People have reported their grub screwing up. If you’re able I would honestly suggest separate drives
load more comments
(1 replies)
PR nightmares will keep significant exploit fixes coming. Microsoft isn't that stupid.
NTFS file reading and writing is reasonably well supported under Linux, though exFAT or native filesystems are preferable. Actually finding software that will understand your files is one level removed, and getting equivalent or even the same software running is another level still. e.g. reading MS Office documents - LibreOffice is pretty good at that. For games, Steam and Proton have a lot of that covered.
If all you do is on websites, most if not all of the usual web browsers are available and work indistinguishably.
That said, I will leave you with these three words: Backups. Backups. Backups.
load more comments
(5 replies)
With the different distros of Linux, do different things support different distros? Like Zoom is support on Arch but not Mint, and Steam is supported in Mint but not Arch; or if an app supports Linux, it is on all distros? And if there is differences, do you have different partitions for different types of Linux?
When an app supports linux, it can do so by either:
- packaging it for popular distro repositories,
- giving instructions on how to build the app from the source code
or
- package it on distro-agnostic, package management solutions like flatpak or appImage.
These last ones are sandboxed environments. That means they have their own dependencies isolated from your system, so they dont have to deal with every distros pecularities at the cost of using more storage space. This is very useful for developers and in your case benefitial for the user because you can have both steam and zoom via flatpak on mint, arch or any obscure distro that has flatpak available, without any major problems.
Edit: Formatting
Yup. The big downside to flatpak is that, as you said, it takes up more space.
To make a Windows comparison, imagine needing to install Java separately for every single program that needs it. Flatpaks tend to be orders of magnitude larger than technically necessary, simply because they’re sandboxed and come with everything they need to run, even if you already have it installed.
Distributions are all of the same operating system, they differ in the set of applications and installation management tools. Except for those with different libc than glibc, things will generally work everywhere. Maybe with some effort.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Hopefully instead of turning into a bunch of e-waste, a bunch of "useless" desktops flood refurbishers, and refurbished desktops become even cheaper. I wouldn't mind replacing my dying media server.
Thank fuck, it'll stop asking for reboots.
I'll probably put windows enterprise iot lts on a vm in case I ever need to use a windows computer.
I'm really excited for when the health authority I'm working for that uses win10 needs to frantically switch every machine to win11... Going to be such a relaxing time
/s
load more comments
(3 replies)
Recently decided to try Linux for gaming. It wasn’t without a hitch or two, but largely fine. A number of games I play don’t even need an emulation tool like Proton.
The only reason windows was lying around was for gaming.
Looks like it’ll only get used for flight simulation.
load more comments
(12 replies)
Still waiting for Fedora to get VR support
every few years on Linux Discord groups across the internet
"Hi, Windows just stopped support, you guys got any suggestions?"
"You should definitely try LFS, it's great and you'll have exactly what you want!"
"Arch btw! Customize everything and no bloat, hurr durr!"
"NixOS is the future, go for it!"
True, i daily drived arch for 8 years and argued with one who advised arch to windows refugees, some people seriously think that arch is good for people who haven't used true Linux not one bit in their lives
load more comments
(1 replies)
This is going to have a much bigger impact on the third would countries.
Most people here are not going to buy a new computer there are tons of people who buy second hand laptops that are old to be able to afford them.
Additionally people are not tech savvy and don’t understand the implication of this. When they see an ad that says to buy a new computer, they are going to dismiss it the same way they dismiss all the other ads online telling them to buy stuff.