Recently I had a hiccup with my main SSD drive. I have a dual boot Win/Kubuntu setup. Linux was crashing hard and Windows was giving me blue screens. After I resolved the issue (cooling/loose connection, idk) my Linux was doing fine, but Windows was giving me blue screens. I think it was doing an update when it crashed.
After a couple of hours messing with my recovery USB and booting in safe mode, I was able to fix the bad update and reboot normally.
I tried to open Firefox and it couldn't find the executable. Looking into the Program Files Mozilla folder, I found the .exe files had been renamed to .exe.sig??????
Then looking for the Edge browser, I suddenly found out that Microsoft Copilot AI had been installed!?!?!?!?!?!?
What the actual fuck???
I never wanted that trash on my PC! That's one of the reasons out of the many that I didn't want to use Windows 11.
And it's a weird fucking coincidence that Firefox was fucked. I couldn't even rename the files to .exe because they wouldn't execute. Looks like they were encrypted or some shit? What the fuck is Microsoft pulling?
It's a happy coincidence because you know what? I've been thinking about going full Linux install since all my games and Windows applications work with Steam, Proton and Bottles now.
I really don't see any fucking reason to keep using Windows. Fuck this shit and fuck Microsoft.
Edit: Oh and that's on top of all the other bullshit like forcing users to create a MS account to install Windows 10 now and having to jump through hoops to have an offline installation. And also defaulting to having all your user folder documents into their fucking One Drive cloud.
I'm done.
I hope you feel better after venting all that frustration, @cyborganism@lemmy.ca. Sounds like you went through hell, but you've been forged from fire now. 😀
I am getting ready to make the switch, but I am methodically prepping in advance of the end of life support for Windows 10. I'm currently prepping all my programs and everything I use my PC for and doing research into all the compatible programs I need to make them work, including all my workflows. My goal is to gradually cut over to a Linux install once I'm fully comfortable, which includes which distro to pick. Pop OS didn't work out great for me when I tried it two years ago: too buggy, ran poorly, etc. So Linux Mint, endeavour, or another distro that's popular with gamers might be right for me. My goal is to use a common, well-supported distro that won't become hostile to users. I hear you can distro hop, which sounds scary as hell to me, but apparently is quite trivial. That is also part of my research!
Good luck with your switch!
Same. I'm practicing setting up Bazzite in a VM with all my required software before I switch. Gotta be able to VPN into work, because I don't think they care how I feel about Windows. 😅
If you need any gaming distro recs, Bazzite is based on Fedora Atomics (immutable), and I already use it on a spare laptop. The maintainers are also pretty cool. Garuda is based on Arch (mutable). Both have many sane defaults already set up for gaming, and I like both.
A couple other popular ones are:
Good luck, yourself!
Good grief I’ve heard of none of those distros! Man I got some learning to do.
Nevertheless, VM is the way to go. Thanks for the helpful suggestions, I’ll add them to my research.
Here's an article that talks about the state of gaming in Linux, if you're interested in seeing what people are using.
https://boilingsteam.com/linux-distro-july-2024/
Seconding Bazzite (or in general, UniversalBlue distros), but went a step further and created a dual-boot setup. Relatively hassle-free, aside from some minor, (probably) NVIDIA-related hiccups.