should I completely jumpship to linux when windows 10 ends support/am ready or dualboot ltsc and linux

Mwa@lemm.ee to Linux@lemmy.ml – 208 points –

Which is the better option + spinning a vm is possible and ltsc the only issue is I have to repirte a windows license for ltsc(and according to Microsoft ltsc was mostly designed for embedded systems) thanks for any help and I decided to post it on the linux community bcs I couldn't find a suitable place to post it and this is related to linux but man I love linux tho and if I go with the jumpship method I have to sadly leave some games behind like roblox (it's fine due to some moderation issues bad games etc etc but ngl its a fun game ik sober exists but i kinda dont wanna use a android emulator to play roblox i could use it since its our only option for linux and also i need to wait some time for my affinity subscription to end orrrr i try running it on bottles/wine again)
Edit: I have delete roblox due to 2 reasons one to ease deleting windows and their management
Edit 2: i might test first If I ever boot into my windows disk to see if I need it anymore

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Jump the ship, I did 6 years ago, before even proton was a thing when games worked witha lot of thinkering.

Nowdays you habe so many great games working you won't mind a couple of games not working because of all the other playable games.

Oh yeah true I can run most of my games I play daily fine( including proton and native but gmod has some hiccups on native linux tho) on my dualbooted partition or in this case separate hardrive (excluding roblox like mentioned in the post)

same here, same time period. everything works. one have to be aware there's no adobe or autodesk and linux is not windows same as osx is not, and it will not look or behave as windows. beside specific issues for some users, for me it works flawlessly.

one thing cannot grasp is willingness of so many to dual boot.

No autodesk, but if you have the budget you can use Siemens NX (version 12 or before) on Linux. They have install media for SUSE or RHEL. I found it more performant on Linux than the W10 install

6 years ago Proton was a thing. It worked out of the box with Steam games like it does today. Yes not everything was gold rated on protondb but it worked fine. I've been gaming on Linux since 2018.

Proton came into existence in the later part of 2018, I jumped to linux about half a year before proton came out, so probably closer to 7 years now.

should I completely jumpship to linux when windows 10 ends support

Nah, there's no need to wait.

I'd recommend dual booting right now so you can transition over a longer period. Also make sure your chosen distro supports dual-boot. Technically any distro can dual-boot but if it doesn't support dual-boot you'll have to put in some extra effort to make sure both can boot safely and easily.

need it for some apps but its possible i can switch on march 2025 a whole few months before windows 10 ends support

When I left for Linux I had to give up League of Legends. I sucked it up, & after a month, I was fine without it & it was better since I knew it wouldn’t be worth the effort even trying to install it on Linux.

Another point for Linux

I am happy Arcane is good tho. Knowing the characters makes it a more fun & engaging. They built some good art & lore.

Arcane is a fantastic series, eagerly awaiting the next season. Even my sister is into it (and as far as I know she has no clue what League of Legends is)

i am trying to give up roblox preparing for 4 months to a year why a long time you might ask bcs am currently waiting for the 6 month trial to end.

LoL is addicting & sucks your soul out; Roblox does this while making child labor on their platform on how the games are built & monetized inside their platform. It is pretty gross.

And the 6 months is for affinity but yeah ruben sim explains what's wrong with roblox pretty well

Why wait? Start using Linux friendly software in your day to day workflows. Then start to dual boot Linux with your current system and start using it more and more. By the time windows 10 reaches EOL you will know if you still need a Windows install or not.

I am already dualbooting I discovered most of my software I need work first I need to get rid of affinity suite since it's a trial and then I can get rid of roblox if I start becoming bored of it for multiple reasons(rubin Sim explains this well)

So, why wait for windows 10 EOL? If you are already mostly on Linux and are planning on getting rid of the last bits anyway? If you really need to you can always reinstall windows on a second disk or in a VM later on if you really need to - no real need to preemptively do that if you dont plan on using it.

I have windows on another disk bcs I still need windows for some stuff ATM and win10 eol would be the prefect time and bcs I have affinity 6 month subscription that is pushing me back from wiping windows I can also get more disk space with a raid config + I don't want win11

I was in the same boat as you but I just kept using Linux more and more. I left my Adobe subscription with a bit of time left because I wanted to get better with darktable before the time ran out in case I needed Adobe but I ended up not

even if i didnt wanna use Linux i wouldn't buy adobe

That's good

true i heard of their evil practice

Yeah in order to get out of my contract after they restarted it without telling me then trying to charge me to get out I had to complain to the BBB and finally they retracted the charge. But it was what I learned how to edit photos on and had my whole photo library in light room so I held me back from switching to Linux before. I started trying to find an alternative before wiping my windows drive in case I wanted to edit something real quick and needed lightroom. It's good to have that buffer so you don't switch and are learning everything all at once while feeling frustrated because you just want to do one thing

I remember my friend was canceling his subscription they kept offering him deals

on second thought i can possibly leave windows once affinity subscription ended but its not a guarantee

While it’s a pain to setup, Affinity does work in Bottles and a specific build of Wine. Not easy to do, but it’s possible.

I tried it but it was buggy

Pretty stable from my testing, outside of a few crashes when I was asking too much of it.

That said Inkscape/gimp/kirta are good alternatives if you are in the market.

inkscape i used to used for svg,krita for art and stuff,and gimp its kinda annoying to use only using it for a few seconds and yep there is no ctrl + z undo (i hope gimp v3 fixes this) + I kinda like free software bcs i dont need to pay for it.

I might try this again fully in bottles on second thought, i will try testing if i ever switch to windows till November.

The longer you wait, the more distros we'll have to argue about when you ask for suggestions

I’ve been a dual / triple / god knows how many OS booted since the 90’s.

Windows has gotten into bad habits lately - it’s not staying in its lane. Meaning it hasn’t respected other boot partitions for a long time, and recently there seems to be a lot of people having problems with windows nuking their linux installs.

My strong recommendation is to buy a second hard drive if you dual boot. Then windows can be “over there” - I’ve never had a problem dedicating ssds to the OS. My second recommendation is to do this now, why wait until you’re forced into something? You’ve got a year to learn Linux and get comfortable with it.

oh yeah speaking of other drives its better since gparted doesnt let you merge it somtimes into one linux disk causing you to reinstall

I took a more aggressive approach, I bought a second drive, but I just took the old one out (laptop). I made a windows recovery USB too and just stored them together. My laptop doesn't get firmware updates through FW update so a couple times this year I have swapped the drive back in, booted up the windows partition and updated the firmware through their stupid tool.

Even on the vendor site, this laptop only has .exe files for firmware

As a counterpoint, I've had Ubuntu's installer and grub's updater overwrite and break Windows' boot files several times, but never had the opposite happen (I've had both destroy themselves, though). Thankfully, I know how to rebuild the necessary parts of a Windows install, so it's never been a catastrophe, but it's irritating to see what's always been the source of the problems I've had be held up as infallible. Possibly this is a problem unique to Ubuntu - I'm happy to blame Canonical - so maybe it could be entirely sidestepped with other distros.

Why wait? Dual boot, get cozy, still have the ability to go back to Windows if needed, find alternative apps, and soon enough, you won't need the Windows partition :) Worked for my partner, my brother, and myself

You should set up dual boot now so you don’t get surprised by differences when support ends and you feel the need to switch to an ltsc sku or use Linux.

Don’t wait, prepare!

Keep a hold of windows for a little while so that if something critical comes up that you can’t figure out you have a fallback.

ok prob 4-months/1 year i will keep a hold of windows

A good project between now and then is to investigate the iot sku. It has everything “unnecessary” cut out because it’s intended to be installed on refrigerators and has a much longer support window (2032?) for the same reason.

Support should be in quotation marks. Yes it has security support but applications will stop supporting all windows 10 SKUs long before that

Maybe industry specific stuff like photoshop or something.

Web browsers and normal stuff will keep on trucking as long as the os has a valid root certificate.

the iot sku would be helpful on those edge cases i needed to use windows

The alternative route I took is maintaining a mac computer for when I need to “be normal”.

was my idea but macs are quite expensive

Maybe not as expensive as you think. The classic getting into the mac game choice is the 2012 mbp 12”, which can run a supported macos with opencore legacy patcher and costs <$200 with 16gb ram and an ssd.

The next best starter option is probably to make the big long leap to a first gen m1 air which can be had for ~$400 if you keep your eyes open.

Those are both expensive to me lol, but not the multiple thousands for a new computer.

ohh

If you go the cheap m1 route, get the most ram you can find in it. The m series have ram built into the chip, so you can’t upgrade it later.

Also if the previous owner says it’s getting slow then nuke the ssd with the dd command after you have confirmed ownership is transferred. You’ll have a longer process to reinstall the os from first principles but it’ll fix slowness from the ssds old blocks having never been rewritten.

yeah heard of mac soldering the ram

Oh this is entirely different than soldering the ram to the motherboard (which is really common on pc laptops now too, it’s harder to find one with sockets now than it’s ever been!).

The ram is inside the cpu. The processor isn’t “just” a cpu (although you can’t call even the old pentium “just” a cpu, they do so much nowadays!), it’s got the video card, bus controllers, ram and all kinds of other stuff built into that one IC!

It’s a SoC, System on a Chip, just like the processors that run phones and tablets and stuff.

Ohh that what is a soc

I switched a year or so ago and never looked back. there will be issues you need to overcome though. so better start with dualboot before windows 10 is eol

Every sane person will recommend Linux only. However not everyone can use it. WMs decrease performance so you'll need good hardware. Dualboot may delete one of your OSes. It's a matter of if it's worth it or not. I personally don't see a problem with running Windows only for gaming. Though if you're paranoid about privacy then it may not be a good idea if your Linux partition is not encrypted (if there are backdoors, someone can mount your Linux partition remotely and read it etc etc). If you still want to keep Windows, buy a second physical drive to avoid the OS deletion risk.

I already have a second physical disk but windows 11 only being supported and maybe ltsc in October 2025 it might be more important for linux, I can agree not everyone can use it but paired with a lightweight wm it can be good.

I already have a second physical disk but windows 11 only being supported

The drive doesn't work under Linux?

No it runs fine I can access the drive via ntfs-3g

I think you didn't understand me. I said that if you want to have both Linux and Windows on one computer without a WM, install the two operation systems on different physical drives because having them on one drive may result in Windows fully deleting your Linux system and data.

I thought you said smth about wm being too heavy but I use kde it's much easier somtimes to have some kind of gui separate disks are much better lol

Dualboot definitely, don't belive anything other than that, taking slow the only good way

plan to wipe windows in the future anyways bcs win11 sucks

Why wait? There's no need for Windows, unless you're running some super-specialized app. The new versions of Windows already have telemetry and privacy issues, so why just go with minimal security options that MS is selling you? You can do almost everything in Linux just as well, if not better, than Windows does at this point. Start with Linux Mint, which is the most Windows-y distribution and you should be golden.

i already use linux as a dualbooted os, Ngl i agree but i got affinity i need to wait for it to expire (it was 6 mounths)

Basically there's your answer. Hang onto Windows until then, move your workload over as much as possible, and then jump ship.

Yep this is my plan

I use Photopea on the browser when I need something that the Gimp can't do.

Start using it now in a VM. Linux has gotten very user friendly over the years but it's still a completely different system with different design philosophies. Ease into it now and test the water with different distros

If you switch to single boot Linux you can always install Windows in a virtual machine later in a pinch.

Yeah I can spin up some ltsc vm without gpu acceleration sadly I don't want win11 no thanks 🤮

I would almost recommend GPU passthrough if you have a dual GPU system and can figure it out. It definitely takes a bit of tinkering, but I like the results: I now have both a Windows 10 (maybe will become 11, maybe 11 LTSC) and a Hackintosh VM. It's not as good if you only have one graphics card, through. If you're up for it, I used this tutorial. If it's an AMD card, though, make sure to check my issue for any steps relating to that.

As for dual boot, get a second drive if you can. I find it helps me avoid a lot of the misery, although I very rarely actually boot up Windows anymore - just a VM if I really have to (which I do for MATLAB because my university is ridiculous and I figure if I'm going to use an evil programming language, I might as well use it in an isolated, evil environment).

I'm a fan of dual booting AND using a passthrough VM. It's easiest to set up if your machine has two NVMe slots and you put each OS on its own drive. This way you can pass the Windows NVMe through to the VM directly.

The advantage of this configuration is that you get the convenience of not needing to reboot to run some Windows specific software, but if you need to run software that doesn't play nice with virtualization (maybe a program has too large a performance hit with virtualization, or software you want to run doesn't support virtualized systems, like some anticheat-enabled games), you can always reboot to your same Windows installation directly.

I can see that. I nuked my Windows partition years ago, though. Honestly, if I find a software is jerk enough to block virtualization, I don't find it worth using.

Fair enough! I think it's more common for games to do that, but sometimes I had trouble with software on Windows that used virtualization elements themself. I probably just didn't properly configure HyperV settings, but I know nested virtualization can be tricky.

For me it's also because I'm on a laptop, and my Windows VM relies on me passing through an external GPU over TB3 but my laptops' dedicated GPU has no connection to a display, so it would be tricky to try and do GPU passthrough on the VM if I were on the go. I like being able to boot Windows on the go to edit photos in Lightroom, for example, but otherwise I'd prefer to run the Linux host and use the Windows VM only as needed.

Yeh, I think it has to do with some CPU topology crap. I have it working pretty well, luckily - I once had an old Virtualbox VM with MacOS that I needed, and I was able to boot it in my Windows VM.

With Lightroom, you're right on that. Honestly, the state of FOSS image editors is a bit ridiculous, especially considering how good FOSS vector editors like Inkscape are these days compared to their commercial, proprietary counterparts.

Yeah there's a good chance you're right. Maybe something to do with memory management as well.

Long term I'll probably end up switching back to Darktable. I used it before and honestly it is quite good, but I currently have a free license for CC from my university and the AI denoise features in LR are pretty nice compared to the classical profiled denoise from Darktable. It does also help that the drivers for my SD card reader are less finicky on Windows so it's easier for me to quickly copy over images from my camera on there instead of Linux. Hopefully that also gets better over time!

Interesting, I’ve never heard of softwares that don’t support virtualized systems, I mean how would they… know?

I don't know exactly, but it's apparently a thing. Some game anti-cheat software such as Easy Anti-Cheat will give you an error message saying something along the lines of "Virtual machines are not supported." Some are easy to bypass by just tweaking your VM config, others not so much.

if i ever considered gpu passthrough should i get a gt 710 alongside gtx 1650

Something like that. In my setup, I passthrough my RX 580 (my nicer card) and have my RX 550 (a dirt cheap one I got for ~$85 on sale) stay connected to the host.

I jumped ship a month ago. Never really used Linux outside of some small school projects.

And my god have I had lots of issues with stuff that didn't work or it was missing some packages that I had no idea how to get.

I have a colleague that have used Linux for +10-20 years. So having somebody to ask for help is very valuable!

But all the games I normally play is working so I don't regret jumping ship.

What distro you where?

Iam using mint, because it seemed like a good "beginner" distro

Oh

? It is a perfectly adequate distro?

It's a easy to use distro, when I was a beginner I loved everything was setup.

Something I did that helped make the jump was buying a separate drive to put linux on and removing my windows drive. It makes the act of switching back to windows take more effort, but didn't remove the possibility altogether.

I also got an enclosure for my M.2 and can use the windows drive as a super fast thumb drive and use that to transfer the files from the windows drive that I care to keep on linux. (none of it is critical, not worth doing proper back ups)

Jump ship. Just know, windows will pull you back in, especially if you work in corporate/office work. I was doing my work from home on Linux for two years straight, then my work mandated windows 11 for everyone. It’s been a nightmare. I just want my xfce!

You can always consider the experience of using Linux as a "game" itself and DU ET NAO!

...no really. Do it.

prob 4-months/1 year

My experience : jump ships. Dual-boot is unpractical. I dual-booted my PC at first, but that makes you remain on what's comfortable, and that's windows. Swallow the hard pill and leave windows behind. If you're already working mostly with OSS software (surf with Firefox, use LibreOffice, etc) than it's not that hard.

I had a dual boot machine for a year or so when i first used linux. Never actually went into windows the whole time

I used to use softwares like libreoffice,firefox and photopea when i was on windows anyways so yh.
I decided i want affinity got the 6 month trial found out its quite useless but not bad, photopeas can do 90% of it.

As long as you have your windows license key you can change your mind later so really you can do whatever. I'd recommend giving 100% linux a try if that seems fun. Obviously you're gonna want to back up any interesting files that you have on windows either way.

full linux right?

No better way to learn and get used to it than ripping off the bandage and being forced to deal with it. That's what I did. Been Windows-free for ten years. If you still have a Windows partition around, it may be too tempting to just go back to it when things get a bit hairy.

As far as games, yeah, it sucks that I can't play some games, but I've filled that time with more productive hobbies. I can program C and C++ now, self taught on Linux.

But the more people that jump ship, the more developers will target Linux, so it's just a matter of time now before you can play anything again. It's definitely a 1000x better environment now than when I switched back then.

if you only play mostly indie,singleplayer they should work fine in my opinion and apps find the alterntives?

I tried dual-booting Win10 and Arch for a few months. It was problematic.

I had to set the clock every time I switched because one expected the hardware clock to use UTC time and the other expected local time.

NTFS on Linux is not good. The driver works, but there are fundamental differences between NTFS and Unix-like filesystems that makes cooperation difficult (e.g. NTFS uses ACLs instead of the user/group ownership and user/group/others permissions of Unix). Windows also places additional restrictions on the filesystem (e.g. NTFS supports file names that contain :, Windows doesn't) that can completely bork the volume if violated.

But the worst offender, and what made me nuke Windows entirely, is Windows Update. It completely fucked up the boot partition, deleted the bootloader, then died and left Windows unusable.

These are all issues that can be solved, if you know how to solve them. My advice is to go cold turkey and delete Windows from your life.

Ohh yeah the time thing is soo annoying but solvable and idk if windows updates delete bootloaders on separate disks

I think a two disk dual boot is safe. I've had that setup for a while and Windows hasn't broken anything yet (though I only use it maybe once a month).

I wish I could switch to Linux but sadly I can't (one of the main things I use a computer for won't work on Linux) so I'll be using windows 10 beyond eol and forever into the foreseeable future and I don't see native instruments making a Linux version any time soon. I email them at least once a year asking about it in the hope they one day fucking do it!

Ltsc is possible it is for embedded systems tho

I have no idea what LTSC is but I shall have a bit of a search around after work to see if it is something I can benefit from. Thank you :)

yw but ltsc you can use windows till 2034 or smth

Cool, thank you. I may try a Linux distro again soon and try to get Traktor DJ working but the last time I tried (admittedly quite a few years ago) the audio latency was far too high for DJing with so I had to return to windows.

I am aware of mixxx as a DJ software and I periodically try it out to see how it is advancing (my last try being a few months ago) but it is just not there yet for me. Hopefully one day!

i never used or heard of Traktor DJ but i was getting affinity working on wine (compile the custom wine version) it was way too buggy and no opencl hardware acceleration support.

All advice here seems to focus on linux, but I'd say rip that bandaid off first. Go cold turkey on roblox. That shit is the worst cancer to come out of something that was fun initially.

Not in four months to a year. Yesterday. Learn to control your impulses first and the rest will fall into place, whichever way you go.

It's also bcs of affinity btw idk why i didn't mention it

Better just start dual booting. If you begin to use Windows less and less, you can throw away that Windows partition and expand your Linux partition.

Alr I was planning to expand it with raid (i have 2 ssds one with windows and one with linux) I got help with raid in another post tho and windows I only see my self using it for roblox and affinity suite 6 month free trial

You need to plan ahead for that, and executing it is risky for data loss.

Doesn't hurt to try. I weened myself off Windows by using linux every single day and fiddling around for a few hours. Eventually it just clicked and i very rarely boot up Windows nowadays for apps that will not run on linux. Good luck!

I seen people erase windows since it's useless

I chose the dual boot option when I decided to switch a year ago, and I found myself rarely using Windows eventhough it is installed on my laptop. I might have only boot it up 3-4 times since the switch, for GFN not working properly with ALT when running through browser. The dual boot just make my disk partition needlessly complicated, and I'm going to reinstall it yet again, without Windows.

I feel you. I installed dual boot and basically just never bothered to boot Windows again because the stuff I need works.

I find my self only using windows for roblox and use affinity for 6 months till March 2025 (and roblox is easy to quit it has some issues with mods and stuff)

You'll never be wrong by making it dual boot - if you won't need Windows, hooray, but if you will - it's still there, always has been.

If you need Windows for some applications (e.g. Fusion, Call of Duty, etc.), dual boot it , but only the LTSC versions of it. Here are the links for the LTSC versions of Windows. I know that they're not from the official source, but I checked them and the checksums match. Otherwise, use Linux.

These folks that I linked to are also responsible for Microsoft activation scripts. So if you want to show your middle finger with your wallet to Microsoft, you can do it with that script.

best answer here fr but i changed my mind i might use linux when i dont need any windows only apps.

Doo Eeeet, Doo EEeet Now!!!

Seriously though, I vote VM under linux. Spin it up for whatever you need, use it less and less, no regrets...

If you have a laptop and a desktop put it on the laptop fully rather than dual boot

Until proton came out I kept dual booting but I always ended up booting into windows because I didn't know how to do x on Linux

When I just wiped windows completely and put it on my laptop I distro hopped for a bit but never went back

Ended up switching my PC over too after about 6 months and I no longer own any windows machines, nor feel the need to besides the odd firmware upgrade of a peripheral or something

Eh, you've already dual booted and "used linux more and more," unless you can think of a reason why you'd really need windows, and since you're already comfortable with linux, you might as well switch fully if you think you're ready.

i am gonna be fully ready on april 2025 ngl

Depends on your needs. If you use any proprietary production tools like Photoshop, you may still need to keep Windows on the side. As for myself, unless the user really gets used to Linux, gains some experience, I do not advise to switch to Linux fully. I've seen so many people who did this and returned back to Windows.

i am getting rid of softawre that do not work on linux soon, and most of the apps and games i use work on linux.

That's a good. You may still keep Windows on the side to use just in case. And you may use Linux all the time until you get really used to it. Then you may totally remove it sometime. I advise you to keep it until you're really sure.

Whats the point of keeping windows if 1. Windows 10 is ending support next year 2. If I get rid of all the non linux software it will be useless

Windows 10 ending support just means that you won't get updates. Your Windows 10 installation won't vanish instantly. Keeping Windows is when you change your mind or have a problem with your Linux installation, to have a backup system.

Yh ik I cannot live without updates

My recommendation would be dual-boot until you get everything you need working and have had everything working for a month or two under Linux. Then do a full image backup of the Windows partitions with the Windows backup utility and keep it around just in case. After that spin-up a Windows VM for any edge cases you might come across and enjoy Linux.

Jump ship. If you can make do without windows, do so. It takes away so much of the frustration, and you just learn to let it go when devs won't make linux-compatible binaries: after all, it's basically them telling you they need to be able to spy on you, so why use their app?

Using Rufus (https://rufus.ie/en/) and a fast USB thumbdrive, such as Kingston DataTraveler Max - https://www.storagereview.com/review/kingston-datatraveler-max-review, you can make a "Windows To Go" installation.

Now you have a Windows install that you can boot directly from the thumbdrive when the need arise.
Perfect for booting up if your bios can't updated directly from the usb drive and forces you into Windows, or to run that one software you can't replace just yet and that refuses your attempts to run with wine.

Just make sure that it's an ssd usb thumbdrive or it's gonna be too slow to be any use.

windows to go can be useful at times but man i dont wanna use win11 as my windows os ik a project called live11 tho

Can always use the Windows 10 LTSC 2021 iso to create the Windows To Go. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/download-windows-10-enterprise
Getting a proper license is gonna be impossible as a private consumer though, or well you can probably find someone selling the product keys online for cheap but that isn't a real sales channel and it could suddenly become deactivated by Microsoft. I can find sites illegally selling them for as low as $14 when doing a quick search.

The real way to get the license is to sign up for their Volume Licensing Program.
Windows Enterprise LTSC is available in the per-user and per-device model, depending on the Volume Licensing program through which it's acquired.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/windows-licensing#windows-desktop-offerings-available-through-commercial-licensing
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/vlsc-faqs-home-page

how about perment activation on hwid there is a program that does that

dual boot, you never know when will you be forced to use windows again

  • and for those who suggest VM, there are situations where its a hassle to make thing work or its impossible all together ( updating bios is one of those )

I think you can update your bios using linux there is a software for it

not necessarily, for example some laptop oems do not use the standard format and you cant just extract them from the exe so you have to use windows

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Jump ship with us all! 😁 At this point, the very few games that I am leaving behind are only the ones that use anticheat systems that do not work with linux, and I don't think I'll really miss letting a game company rootkit my macine...

I would go the VM route first, and if you run into any troubles then you still always have the option of installing a 2nd hard drive for bare-metal windows dual boot later. If you do need to dual boot, I don't recommend partitioning one hard drive. Windows isn't good at sharing.

If you're new to linux and unsure about what distribution to install, there are plenty of better sources online with distro recommendations. I tend to use Debian on server/headless and Fedora for desktop/laptop. But I will say, picking an option with the KDE/Plasma desktop environment will probably be the easiest transition. It should feel and look pretty familiar to what you are used to with Windows and many distros offer an installation for KDE/Plasma.

ngl most of the games that don't work on linux are owned by frauds companies or have issues with management and waiting for affinity subscription to end as well i wanna get rid of the other windows ssd i can get the most space with raid

If you’re new to linux and unsure about what distribution to install, there are plenty of better sources online with distro recommendations. I tend to use Debian on server/headless and Fedora for desktop/laptop. But I will say, picking an option with the KDE/Plasma desktop environment will probably be the easiest transition. It should feel and look pretty familiar to what you are used to with Windows and many distros offer an installation for KDE/Plasma.

I have used linux in the past and currently using it i have been using linux more then windows

Throwing out another idea: I upgraded an aging laptop and put mint on it and it's my main right now, but I can get on the newer windows computer if I need to. I rarely need to now, though things will come up and its nice to have an out. Recently it was getting my printer working which I so rarely use. Didn't have the patience, just needed the doc printed, flipped to windows.

It's a little sad to me. I watched windows rise to its peak with windows 2000 and slowly fall. Been using it since 3.1, and had dos-only for a little while before that. It's time to say goodbye. Been on and off with Linux since the early 2000s but this is my first real big push to use it outside of work or projects. Linux has come a long way from those days.

what printer brand your on?

It's a Canon. If I just sit down for a bit with it I'm sure I can get it working, but sometimes you just want it to work right now.

oh brother people say it works and hp there is a software for it and idk about canon but there is prob no linux support like their cameras.

Cups takes some playing with to get right but once you have it setup and saved, the thing should work whenever

ohh yeah cups i forgot ik its used by the hp software

I jump shipped to arch when I first started out. But I had experience with Linux vms for school already

I'd say dual boot. Jumping ship from windows to linux without it is very hard, especially if you enjoy playing a windows-only game or rely on windows-only software. A virtual machine can work for some basic software, but you need to do GPU passt trough to the VM to be able to game at all, which is a... let's just say not insignificant amount of messing around and configuring stuff.

I can quit all the windows software it's not hard for me

I'd still recommend dual booting, just in case...

hm around 24 people recommend to fully delete windows, 8 recommend dualbooting, yeah i counted it.

That’s not a good sample though. This place will shill Linux all day long and are biased in that direction.

I am contemplating the same, but the amount of time I’ll have to put into figure out if I can use my 4060TI with it, or what games I’ll be able to play etc and configure it how I want it is not a small amount of time or research.

I disagree with dual booting at the early stages. I like dual booting (or even better a VM if that covers you) once you've figured out what works and what doesn't (assuming something vital is in the "doesn't" category); but, if you are trying to decide if it is right for you, I don't think it does you any favors to be able drop back into old habits so easily. My recommendation is drop a bit of money on a second hard drive, pull the windows drive out and install just Linux. See if it works for you, if your "must-haves" are running painlessly or not. You still have the safety net if things go REALLY badly of just popping in the old windows drive and changing your boot options in the BIOS, but you will be less tempted to just boot Windows every time you use the computer - until you really have to.

For a start, in practice you aren't likely to actually reboot and load into a different OS very often. You can't really give something new a fair shake while you are still spending most of your time somewhere else. Minor things, like how you like your system to look/work will just push you back to windows because it's easy and you won't ever look at the options to find out that it can do what you want (and likely more). Second, there is the pesky windows updates that likes to fuck with the boot loader.

This is really only advice for an enthusiast that really wants to try Linux. I know some will disagree - everyone's experiences are different, but it is definitely my preferred methodology and helped me make the leap.

Dual boot and give it a shot.

Yeah I did I was using linux more and more

I left windows years ago. I only need it for a couple really restrictive apps, so I dual boot, but I only boot in every few months.

I stopped playing games that use aggressive anticheat as well. 99% of the games I was playing work great, all I lost really was Fortnite and destiny 2, which is worth my sanity dealing with Windows nonsense.

I e been telling people who switch to; think of it like moving house. When you move to a new house, the bathroom isn't in the same place and the kitchen is different, it's up to you whether the new location is better or not. If you expect your new house to have all the same rooms in all the same places as your old house you'll always be disappointed the whole time. Linux is a different house, pick a house that suits your needs and you'll be happy.

  1. LTSC + WSL (Better than VM)
  2. Dual Boot
  3. Linux only

I was dual boot now I might go linux only if I slowly find windows useless or in 4 months.

The way I'm handling it is I currently dual boot with 2 separate hard drives. Linux is primary boot. there is no bootloader, I used the bios boot selector to load windows. Windows typically fucks up boot loaders or shared partitions so I have neither. I hope to have found a good distro that does everything I need by the time windows dies,

Windows is dropping support for dual boot?

No?

Ah I read or as of, thought op said dropping support of dual boot

Honestly I'm considering just using Windows server 2022. I've got it running on my dedi and it's great. I don't see any reason not to just install it on my pc too.