this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2024
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[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I gave Linux a try 2 or 3 times back when I was in school. It was a horrible user experience and games wouldn't work back then.

Now that games on Linux are a thing, I would love to give it a try once more. But now I have a full-time office job and a family. When I'm off work, I just want to fire up the PC and have everything work, which it does with windows. I also have the Pro version of Windows 11 and don't experience all of the ad horror that everyone here is talking about.

If I gain back the free time and mental capacity, I'll give it a try.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (2 children)

It's not like it's difficult to switch these days. Try something like Bazzite or Nobara and gaming should work out of the box.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Bookmarking this comment, never heard of those distros!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

They are gaming and content creation specific distros designed to work out of the box for those use cases. Lots of patches and stuff to improve performance and compatibility for gaming. Some hardware compatibility stuff is added too, such as bazzite having different images for laptops.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Keep in mind it's still a drastic reduction in security by default.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

What are you talking about? Windows isn't very secure to begin with. Bazzite in particular is one of the more secure Linux desktop distros as it's immutable and comes with SELinux enabled by default. It's secure enough to actually cause me problems lol.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

It's a real challenge to get a fully encrypted system with secure boot (easier now but still hit or miss with Linux) and tpm.

What you're describing is the user level security model which is as you said restrictive enough to be annoying, and more controlled than windows.

Edit: undid autocorrect from user level to user never 🙄

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

I don't use or particularly believe in secure boot.

I have a fully encrypted root partition, with automatic unlocking using the TPM. Wasn't even that hard to setup either. Bazzite makes it fairly easy to enroll a secure boot key if you really want that, as do some other distros. Nothing you are describing is that difficult.

A lot of systems use AppArmour instead of SELinux, as this is easier to work with while still providing enhanced security.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

It's not hard to set up if you already have sufficient baseline technical knowledge to feel comfortable copy-pasting the right commands from the Internet with hope that you don't brick your computer (which ironically fedora or opensuse kinda did although I eventually found out how to work around the failure which makes my laptop permanently unable to use an older version of Linux lololol).

Arch was really easy to set up, I followed tutorials for fedora from fedora which never worked, and opensuse worked until a power outage then never again. So easy. So simple.

Secureboot with shim is the easiest, the arch (/standalone) way seems to work better and more securely since it's my own keys, but again depends on feeling a lot of unearned confidence. Some distros like Ubuntu and suse include mechanisms for secureboot, others do not, hence hit or miss.

Tldr I know what you're telling me, and from my pov and experience none of that changes what I said for the average "go on, try Linux, you'll like it" user.