this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2024

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I finally nuked windows (lemm.ee)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

73 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I have been daily driving a dual booted laptop for the past two years. After a year of distro hopping I settled with fedora + kde and never looked back. I really liked the auto nvidia driver config and it made everything so pleasant to work. Since the last 8 or 9 months I decided to do gaming using bottles and proton ge. I cannot afford to buy games and bottles is a God send at that. Now I realized that I had not logged into my windows partition in over 6 months. So I logged in to check and it told me it needs to download 8 gigs of updates. That sent me into rage and so clean installed everything to be fedora. I have 250 gb of storage locked in limbo because of windows( I have a 512 gb ssd so it was a lot) and today after everything was setup, the os took only around 20gb minus the games. Never felt happier.

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[–] [email protected] 79 points 9 months ago (3 children)

So I logged in to check and it told me it needs to download 8 gigs of updates. That sent me into rage and so clean installed everything to be fedora. I have 250 gb of storage locked in limbo because of windows

Sounds like you took your time, got comfortable, found a distro you liked, and generally did it all the right way. Now watch as with each new headline you see about Windows or MS you become happier and happier with your decision. There's no better advertisement for Linux than the behavior of MS and Windows. 😁

Congrats on dumping Windows. One of us! One of us!

[–] [email protected] 30 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Early 2000s, Microsoft starts putting sketchy telemetry into XP: 🙂

Late 2000s, MS ramps that shit up even more with Vista and 7 while the bloat rises to never before seen levels with the architecture change to 64 bit: 😁

Early 2010s, MS includes actual fucking ads into the OS: 😆

Early 2020s, MS jams AI into it because it's the thing to do and everybody else is doing it after nobody really asked: 🤣

[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago

Fuck Microsoft.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Exactly. Plus I was super creeped out by the news that apparently Microsoft tries to decrypt files I have stored encrypted on my one drive and by default sets up my home directory to be on one drive. What the fuck

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

holy shit, if that's true then I'm so nuking windows off my machines

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/05/microsoft-is-scanning-the-inside-of-password-protected-zip-files-for-malware/

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

wow.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Congrats, and welcome to the club!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

Thanks. I was already part of the club. Now just I burnt the access card to the other club

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I remember when I did the switch in 2008 and never looked back. I had a similar experience where across a few years I have been trying different distributions and finally settled on Lubuntu. Years have passed and different machines as well. Now my main driver is a Steam Deck with his Arch based OS and a secondary pure Arch on a sd card for more specific tasks.

Linux made my life more comfortable and relaxed, without even mentioning secure. My family uses Linux now, Windows is long dead.

We are free.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I actually set up Linux on my family machine 1 year ago and they don't even notice since all they need is a browser and vlc. So they have been daily driving Linux longer than me :)

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago (1 children)

using bottles and proton ge

I don't think it'll make much of a difference, but according to the git repo, you should be using wine-ge instead. Also Lutris is another option that does the same thing, but has easy install scripts for GOG, Epic Games, Ubisoft Connect, and EA App.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

My process flow has been Steam, if not Steam then Heroic, if not Steam or Heroic then Lutris. I have yet to find a game unplayable.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Feels good to ditch Windows don't it?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

It's like a brick off my chest

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

Hell yeah! Welcome, from an admittedly also new full-time Linux user.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

For anyone wondering what Proton GE is, it's Proton on steroids: https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom

For instance, even if you have an old Intel integrated GPU, chances are you can still benefit from AMD's FSR just by pushing a few flags to Proton GE, even if the game doesn't officially support it, and you'll literally get a free FPS boost (tested it for fun and can confirm on an Intel UHD Graphics 620).

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

We all just bask in the brilliance of a glorious eggroll.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

My laptop is the same except, I keep a Windows partition because the RGB keyboard controller is only available in a Windows app. That Windows partition exists in a post apocalyptic dystopia where Windows belongs; it has never, nor will ever see the internet. It is blocked my my network firewall. Windows is like a less than useful bootloader options tab.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Not knowing which keyboard laptop combo you have, but have you looked at openrgb? Works nicer than the stock tool I was using in my experience!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll look into it. I'm a bit skeptical because the changes made in Windows are persistent, the secondary function keys give quick access to some of these features (but only 3 course brightness PWM settings for RGB), but mostly because there is a device on the USB device tree that is unknown to the Linux kernel on mainline-fedora.

Maybe there is some kind of kernel configuration option that just needs to be added, but the bootloader rejects custom keys generated for secure boot. Without my own keys I'm stuck with the shim and can't run my own signed kernel. It might be possible to set the keys by booting into UEFI with Keytool, but my motivation hasn't carried me that far into the problem yet. I could be wrong and the unknown USB device could be unrelated, and openrgb could work. Thanks again.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Congrats! Hope you keep having a great experience with linux 😁🐧

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

I genuinely do. I can't even imagine why anybody would use software whose source code isn't visible. Not cool.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (5 children)

Not sure how Bottles and not buying games directly relate (other than Bottles also being able to play pirated games obviously), but anyway.

I switched to Linux on my main computer as a "New Year's Resolution" and so far I'm not missing much. I did cross-grade from an RTX 3080 to a Radeon 7800 XT because 95 % of the problems I experienced were related to Nvidia and their crappy drivers, but after that I had little issues in general.

I also use Fedora + KDE. KDE on Wayland seems to be the most reliable way to get VRR (FreeSync) working with multiple monitors. I installed it onto a new SSD I bought for this purpose, but I'll transition more and more SSDs over to the Linux install as time progresses. The only reason I booted into Windows again so far was to check out some application's configuration so I could replicate it on Fedora's side. I didn't even bother to install the Radeon GPU driver under Windows.

I could complain about smaller issues, but these are mostly related to third party software where the Linux version has some weird quirks (or where there's straight up no Linux version, mainly games).

Overall very solid and I assume it only gets better with time.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

The main reason I used fedora was because of hassle free nvidia (as muchjh as they can do until nvidia open sources everything and not just the kernel modules).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

For me it has been that I have bought the games at some point and the versions offered on GoG or steam haven’t been the full versions pf the game so I’ve used wine bottles. Proton is a godsend

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

All these posts about Linux have me curious, especially because I just updated my hardware and have enough parts leftover to make a new PC. My main PC still has to run Windows because I use Ableton for music, but you guys are making me want to make the 2nd PC Linux just for shits and giggles. Especially if it plays well with Nvidia, my old card is a 2070.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

"Working well" is relative. You can make Nvidia work, but there are some caveats. Currently, there's driver 535 and 545, and both have different quirks. Neither works particularly well with Wayland, certain applications can flicker when they need longer to draw than the display's refresh rate.

So, when I tried with the 3080, I eventually gave up and used X11. X11 has a technical limitation though, and it prevents VRR to work with multiple displays. That's because X11 combines all displays to a single virtual "screen", so a full screen application on one display can't set the refresh rate of that display independently. This isn't a problem with single monitor setups though.

As I tested Baldur's Gate 3, I found that choosing Vulkan in the launcher resulted in about half the performance compared to Windows, and DirectX 11 (which ironically gets translated to Vulkan by DXVK) had graphical glitches like black boxes instead of houses etc.

Knowing all that and if you're willing to experiment with driver versions, it's not that horrible, it's just not as straightforward as AMD Radeon on Linux (or Nvidia on Windows for that matter).

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Also checkout Heroic Launcher, Epic gives free games every week, there's plenty of fun to have with those too.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

so clean installed everything to be fedora.

It may not have been necessary to do a complete reinstall. If fedora uses LVM or BTRFS for your partitions (which it likely does) then you could have just formated the windows drive and added it to your "pool".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I actually did everything on Ext4 and had a separate home partition which was only 30gigs. So that was the main gripe in the previous install I had I thought to rectify it.

Alas I didn't use btrfs this time also and did Ext4. Maybe I should have enabled snapshots. Who knows. I may just be an adventurous dude.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Are you using LVM? It's a layer that sits under ext4 that allows for partition management similar to btrfs. You can find out if you're using it by running sudo lvdisplay and you would see some logical volumes listed.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

nice

i remember nuking my windows dual boot about 2 years ago

pretty similar story: i discovered almost all my games work with wine, so i didn't use windows for a few month. eventually i didn't see any point in keeping it around.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

I got really close yesterday, I'm a gamer and it's just... ach... anyway... I'm so close. I clean installed Windows and Linux yesterday and designed my dual boot system around giving Windows as little space as was necessary (a small partition on the drive where I keep the OSs and a 500gb Nvme drive). That way I keep a little Windows and everything else is Linux. Other than Librewolf ('cause no flippin' way I'm using Edge) I'm only allowing games on there. No work, email, social media, just gaming.

Anyway, good on you for nuking Windows, I can see myself going full Linux in the not-too-distant future as so much is now working on Linux these days - and not just working, but working really well; some games I get a better experience than on Windows (Warframe, BG3 for example).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

What video games do you play, BC they mostly all work on Linux

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Welcome to the party pal

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Thank you. Drinks on me!!!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

One of us!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

One of us!!!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Welcome to the Penguin party - you are free now :) And thanks for sharing your OS adventure.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Man, I had fresh imaged windows 11, and windows update nuked my bios. Never again.

I installed endeavor, but the lack of a GUI for installations bothered me. Installed kubuntu last night.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I'm curious, how did it nuke your bios?

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