2024 is the Year of Linux on the Desktop, at least for my boyfriend. He’s running Windows 7 right now, so I’ll be switching him to Ubuntu in a few days. Ubuntu was chosen because Proton is officially supported in Ubuntu.
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it is kinda wild that people abandon Windows 7 because of Steam and not because Microsoft stopped patching it several years ago
Ubuntu was chosen because Proton is officially supported in Ubuntu.
I don’t think Steam actually recommends any distro since some time anymore
People don’t care about security until they get hit. Source: working in IT for 10 years.
And then suddenly they care a lot and do all the wrong things for wrong reasons because they know shit
“I don’t worry about missing security patches. I just have 5 anti-virus tools running simultaneously, they keep me safe.”
Or those people who actively avoid patches in general, because “they make my device slow”
I mean, they do make your device slow. That why tools like InSpectre exists. For some old cpu’s like my notebooks one it can be up to 20% performance impact, so if you not planning to use it with internet (or at least as main access point via browser) ever again, why not get yourself free performance?
Effective immediately employees must update passwords every week, and cannot match any past password.
Managers will receive hardware security dongles to make their logins easier. Employees may feel free to register their personal hardware security dongles on site but off the clock.
Even IT people don’t give a shit about security until it’s way too late. Source: getting out of a job where the median age of a server is around 3-4 years old with no updates and runtimes hard installed outside repositories.
I think this is just kind of a side effect of capitalism.
If it’s costing them in the short term, and the results aren’t evident or won’t be seen until the long term, they almost always won’t do it.
No, it’s education.
Definitely. You see it across all aspects of life: basic misunderstanding of risk everywhere.
Nvidia gpu drivers wont even install on win 7 anymore. That by itself causes huge performance issues on new games that have driver optimizations.
Probably the same story for amd drivers
I don’t think Steam actually recommends any distro since some time anymore
The way steam works for package maintainers is basically “ok we need at least kernel xyz+, graphics drivers, valve already packaged the rest”. Supporting it is trivial unless you insist on replacing libraries steam includes as runtime with your own versions, which you shouldn’t. It’s kind of its own user-level distribution in a sense.
To be fair they’ve got enough market share to start a distro they got enough market share to be platform agnostic
They already have their SteamOS, which has 43% of the Linux market share on Steam (I guess almost all Steam Deck)
SteamOS isn’t included in the combined numbers, but comparing it to Arch which is only 0.15% of steam, the deck is <1% of the total.
I actually quite like the read only incremental update model of SteamOS combined with flatpak. It makes the OS a lot simpler and I rarely ever change the OS much outside of apps that I can install in home or with flatpak. And if you have special hardware, you are probably already looking at other distros anyway. There is enough choice.
Linus himself has been long advocating for something flatpak-like in general: One of his projects, subsurface, is not exactly of interest to most people for the simple reason that most people don’t dive, why should half a gazillion distros maintain their own packages? Distros should focus on the actual OS part and a full-featured DE, from document viewer to browser – stuff everyone needs, also the little stuff practically noone wants to choose, like, say, a desktop calculator.
Yeah, Windows 7 is very old. It’s definitely a concern. I keep him highly firewalled on the network so that hopefully he won’t get hacked.
I usually play on Debian, but when I contacted Steam for support regarding Proton, they said they only supported Ubuntu or Steam OS. Since Steam OS isn’t currently available for PC, that means Ubuntu.
it is kinda wild that people abandon Windows 7 because of Steam
There’s this certain subsection of Win7/8 diehards that absolutely confuse me. It’s one thing to keep using them on old systems, but I’ve seen a few people posting about their brand-new PC, equipped with RTX 4090s and 13th gen I9 processors, who are adamant on running those outdated operating systems as their only OS. Such a waste of money.
Nah I think it’s just that windows 7 and 8 was and still is quite literally one of those ones where it hit the sweet spot between good UI and UX and actually having huge range and compatibility straight off the bat. Plus everything was pretty smooth back then, but hell, nobody ever says how many viruses and dumb apps were floating around for Windows 7x32 and x64
I mean that’s true, but what what I was specifically referring to was those using top-of-the-line hardware, which you can’t properly utilize on those systems because the CPU scheduler isn’t optimized for modern CPUs and you can’t really make good use of the GPU either due to the lack of DX12. With that hardware you need Win10+ or a somewhat recent version of Linux.
It’s almost certainly a very small percentage of the already small percentage of people still running Win7/8, but I’m just stunned everytime someone brags about such a crappy setup.
I don’t think Steam actually recommends any distro since some time anymore
I think they do by proxy since they only distribute it via .deb (and with Steam of course) and all games in the store that have a native Linux version mention some kind of Ubuntu version in their requirements as well. Which is funny since the Steam Deck doesn’t even run Ubuntu.
Valve releases Steam as Flatpak too
Isn’t SteamOS based on Arch? Did I miss something?
the way SteamOS works is extremely different to how a regular Arch Linux runs so I wouldn’t really conclude anything from that
it just shows how little the underlying distro mattersIt’s based on Debian.
2.0 is debian based. 3.0 (the version on steamdeck) is arch based
To be fair, steam reports less than 1% of users using windows 7. It’s not as big as we think.
Did that report include in the third world?
Yes, these are global stats, but as someone from the third world myself, I can say that most gamers around here resort to piracy, even though steam has gained a lot of popularity, so, only a fraction of us are included in the steam statistics, which would make such data not very representative.
Perhaps a better source for understanding software usage in the third world is data from statcounter. They show something around 3 to 5%, a much higher number. However, even this data can be biased, because they only count machines connected to the internet and who browse certain sites.
only a fraction of us are included in the steam statistics, which would make such data not very representative
And since not all users get the survey I imagine even this isn’t as accurate as it could be - I would guess at least.
In that case steam doesn’t need to send the survey to all users, but only to a randomized sample, and it will statistically represent the whole of steam users.
Can’t they just automatically collect this data if the user gives permission?
Good question, almost all of my country’s government PCs are still running Windows 7.
I don’t think they have steam installed on them.
You’d be surprised… 😂
I imagine governments are paying for the ESU packs if they’re still on Win7
That’s cool. I imagine I’m a billionaire.
hahahaha maybe in the US or Europe. Not here, lmao, luckily they are being maintained.
Yes… It’s anyone internet connected with steam, ie the people who this will affect
But steam has > 100 million active users. Even if it is less than 1%, it still is a huge number
Nah. It’s more, year of the piracy comeback
Have downloaded 10k songs in the last week, at 160GB so far, 22,000 total. Synced all to my phone with media monkey. Ditching any subscription services.
I’ve got a good fast fiber internet connection at home so I just host a Plex server and use Plexamp, which is a great app.
A lot of my music was ripped by me though, not downloaded, so my library isn’t as large as some other people’s.
160gb in a phone? Thats pretty large storage for a phone
It shouldn’t be though.
Micro SD 512
or 1tb even
The price difference wasnt worth. 512 was sub $25, jumped to $100 for 1tb. This is a good start. It’s also all stored on a 15tb truenas.
No.
That also helps linux. Tried watching something on someone else’s peacock account logged into Linux, and got an error. Checked Google to see if it was available. A free site had it, in better quality streaming too! We ended up using her computer, but I was kind of amazed.
I’m pretty sure that this is because steam uses chromium as its backend and chromium new version doesn’t run on windows 7. It’s still not good because there are some games that won’t run on newer systems and therefore 7 is required for preservation.
As many of you pointed out, yes I agree proton is the answer if possible. YMMV
This is the actual reason. Steam officially said that: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/4784-4F2B-1321-800A
This change is required as core features in Steam rely on an embedded version of Google Chrome, which no longer functions on older versions of Windows. In addition, future versions of Steam will require Windows feature and security updates only present in Windows 10 and above.
As a former lifelong Windows user (from 2002 to 2019), I honestly don’t get why people continue using Windows in the future. It doesn’t make sense to me. They’re cracking down on liberties, increasing system requirements, and old software and games are gradually becoming less compatible. And people seem to be starting to realize that other options are becoming gradually more attractive, because Windows is now hovering below 70% while just ten years ago it was at over 90%. Meanwhile Mac has grown from 7% to 20%, and Linux is at an unprecedented 3%, and that’s not counting ChromeOS, which is slightly higher.
The mistakes Microsoft is doing can prove fatal. Because I think for most people, once they embrace Linux, even if Windows improves, they won’t wanna go back.
You’re right. And people continue to use Windows because all software is available for it. See… Adobe products, Notion, Windows games with just a double click, even the Whatsapp application, Full OneNote and do not even mention MS Office…
Yeah, I think the reason many don’t switch, is because of software availability.
I think the main reason is it’s preinstalled on most PCs and most people have no idea Linux exists let alone how how to install a new OS.
I mean, yeah. But retailers with install Windows on them, even if Microsoft don’t pay them a dime (at least in my country it is like that)
Having recently replaced my laptop (with a used Lenovo T495) and set it up to dual boot Win11 and Endeavor…Windows 11 was by far the most difficult and time consuming to get from “boot off installation media” to “open functional web browser”. Would have been even easier had I asked Endeavor to just use up all of the partition I left free from installing Windows.
So when I got the T495, I went through the Win 11 OOBE to check it out. Turned it off until I got the Ram upgrade for it in the mail. That was my first problem, because “turn off” doesn’t mean what you think it does in Windows. If you want to get to the Lenovo system settings/boot order/diagnostics, turns out you have to “restart”. Go figure.
Then I did the switcheroo with NVMes in my old T470s and the 495. Took my 1TB out of the 470 into the 495, and took the 256 that came with the 495 and put it in the 470.
Then go to start the 470 and it boots fine to Win 11 but I can’t login with my PIN because my PIN is now expired. I’d enter a password but it never even let me do that. I tried to connect to my wifi and it wouldn’t connect.
Obviously this is because the host system changed and the TPM isn’t there anymore, but still frustrating to not be able to use the laptop offline just the same. I ended up just formatting and installing Endeavor on that, too. This was just where I finally realized that “reboot” means “give me the option to change boot order this time”, because I couldn’t get back into BIOS after it booted to windows.
Only reason I use windows is for work. All the software for industrial controls stuff is windows only. But luckily its so shit at being updated that I still have to keep a windows xp VM around for some stuff so hopefully I’ll be retired before I need to use windows 11+
I got my CNC router working via wine about 2 years ago. Was very happy when it not only worked but worked well. Thought I was going to need to setup a dedicated windows PC for it but I can just use my workshop/tinkering laptop.
I still might try and use Linux as a host for the windows VMS but I’d probably still need to keep a dual boot around can’t risk not having it in case of something that wouldn’t work with USB pass through.
RIP Windows 7, long live Linux Mint Xfce
Noo please don’t Ubuntu. Just plain debian or mint debian instead for the closest thing without canonical. Ubuntu is based on debian and all the actual reasons to use it over debian ended probably like a decade or so ago.
I don’t think there are many distro specific proton issues, if they exist at all. I’ve switched from arch to tumbleweed to bazzite(ublue/fedora based) and the only issues were unrelated to gaming. Proton would work on a toaster if it had a display and a vulkan compatible GPU.
Someone who’s going to use Ubuntu wouldn’t know what “debian,” “mint debian,” or “canonical” are. You should include an actual explanation or link to what you’re referring to when trying to help beginners otherwise you’ve failed to help them
ubuntu is fine lol especially for a newbie. Zorin is really familliar for a windows user.
I’m not sure for Ubuntu… I’ve seen here and there that some snap are still not as good as flatpak or .deb.
Especially the steam one where some games wouldn’t launch on the snap but do with the flatpak or the .deb. Progress are made regularly, but until the snaps aren’t on par with other packages type, I wouldn’t recommand Ubuntu for beginners.
Distro based on it, without snap, yeah sure. Pop OS, tuxedo OS, Mint, Debian… There is a lot of alternative where you do not have to struggle on forced non finished applications.
And even not for newbies. I’ve using so many distros in the part 15 years, and I still prefer Ubuntu. (Or maybe Fedora)
Debian is the way
I’ve had exactly zero issues with steam on NixOS. It might actually be the best distro to choose short of the officially supported ones as steam runs in chroot with exactly what it’s expecting in terms of libraries etc. Not a beginner-friendly distro though, user base is pretty much made up of devops, functional programmers, programmers appreciating replicable environments and willing to tolerate nix, as well as the odd enthusiast tinkerer.
Nixos user here, ive used it on nixos with meh experiences. Especially with proton + the witcher 3 for example. Have to install it through flatpak for better compatibility.
Try switching Witcher 3 from using fullscreen to borderless window or the other way around, that fixed the fullscreen issues for me, it’s just the game getting confused about whether it has focus or not. That was before the update though haven’t tried since then.
That’s a general proton issue though and not NixOS, fullscreen just is fickle on windows and that extends to an emulated windows.
According to a recent test, three good choices for gaming on Linux are Nobara (Fedora), Pop!OS (Ubuntu), and Steam OS 3 (Arch).
There’s a bit of controversy regarding Ubuntu that I don’t need to get into but Fedora and Pop!_OS are also really good for Proton support. Ubuntu will work fine but I just prefer not to use it. Maybe you could let him try out the live environment for a couple distros to see what he might like in terms of UI.
And Mint as well
Yay Mint! But seriously, it’s an excellent choice for anyone switching from Windows. And I’ve been running Steam on it without any issues whatsoever.
Mint is a really good distro for people coming from windows 7 UI wise.
They also ripped out Snaps, which is half the performance problems with Ubuntu
I’ve had some random issues with Mint and Lutris that I haven’t had on Fedora. Otherwise it’s a great distro
Ubuntu has experimented with so much shit going in then being pulled out it’s a surprise she don’t have an anal relapse
I second popos and mint. I love fedora but if he is a gamer you want something that will just work (navida built in or a very easy one click mechanism to get it). If he has to research PPAs and installing rpmfussion it will get all too hard very quickly. Also do some expectation setting before hand, research what games he plays work on linux, better he finds out now rather than after 2 hours of pain or getting band for “hacking” because of proton triggered an anti-cheat thing.
Edit: I run fedora on all my machines except my gaming rig which is popos. Fedora works too but popos is hassle a free experience.
Fedora more or less just works. I followed, like, 5 simple steps on the top Google result for “installing nvidia drivers fedora” and that was all it took. No further configuration or fiddling required.
I’ve done it. I agree it can be done very easily. But is relying on all new users entering the right question into google and google returning a correct answer for their distro that is not 7 years out of date the best strategy in the long run?
Any distro that does not offer a option during install or on first boot to just install this stuff with a promt is not new user friendly.
Ublue-nvidia. Just works
Would Ublue be of any use to someone who uses AMD? I’m seeing it recommended a lot lately.
Yes I use it on Amd / Intel too
The project in general is huge. Checkout secureblue or hyprgreen, these all use ublue as base.
Really, ublue made Fedora more like Ubuntu with all the variants. Just a looot more modern.
I’ll have to give it a shot then, maybe on a VM or something. I thought it was mainly for specific configurations at first.
No its a toolbox (not the program) based on Fedora, with minor changes and improvements.
This is a great way to package stuff, as it means changes are done fully automated and scalable.
Ublue has maaany images, for more Desktops than Fedora officially supports (so they wont be as stable but they are there), including different kmods and rules for Asus, Framework, Surface, with or without NVIDIA drivers.
There are other projects using ublues tooling, like Secureblue, which is now in a well working state.
So its not only good for Nvidia but the shitty mess that is kernel modules and proprietary drivers, while being on a recent distro, can be tamed best in ostree and immutable snapshots.
If an update fails, you wont get it. And even if, you will have a rollback image that you can select on boot.
All of those are still ancient systems. Arch or opensuse tumbleweed are the only systems that are reasonable for a desktop because they’re rolling releases
Fedora is still pretty frequently and recently up to date with respect to packages and kernel, not sure you’d be losing much over arch.
But the debate to me is also not that important, I’ve been running fedora and have at some few occasions gotten some instabilities due to updates (mostly Nvidia with Wayland) so I can totally understand someone wanting stability and reliability over bleeding edge).
Someone who reviewed Nobara a while back said it best: Arch is bleeding edge while Fedora is cutting edge. Both embrace new things in the Linux world like systemd, Btrfs and PipeWire, but Fedora tries to keep things stable.
I might hop back onto it if my Arch install cakes it.
I don’t know about vanilla Arch, but on Manjaro each update breaks at least one thing. I never had issues with Mint. I wonder if I’d still get more stability from Mint if I installed Plasma on it. Anyway, I already got used to AUR and not having to deal with version upgrades. But I still wouldn’t recommend Arch-based distros when stability is needed.
This hasn’t really been true with arch for years. As long as you update reasonably frequently. I haven’t had a breaking issue in ages.
What were the issues you had that broke things?
Usually LibreOffice has issues. That could be because I use libreoffice-still as opposed to fresh. Then there’s often file and dependency conflicts requiring manual intervention. The latter is usually documented here, I think, if it’s expected. Oh, and protonvpn is absolutely broken every single time.
A little unrelated, but how come we’re successfully federating with yiffit.net? We currently have broken outgoing federation. I checked sh.itjust.works, lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, lemmy.dbzer0.com and none of those show content from us anymore.
Yeah dude I totally need those new flags the latest
lessimplements.
Lol 0.06% usage in November 2023
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
There are more linux users than windows7 users.
0.69% (nice) on windows 7 64bit. That’s 0.75% total or 0.91% including windows 8 which is also dying. This is slightly under half of the linux user base according to these statistics
I think the 1.91 also includes the stream deck, but for some reason it isn’t included in the list (it is included if you select only Linux). It is about 5.5x Arch so around 0.8% of the total installs.
So the discontinue versions are around the same number as Linux desktop installs.
Missed that indeed. Weird sorting 😅
Win 7 64-bit handily beats any distro of Linux at .69% (nice). Comparing only to 32-bit isn’t a fair comparison. Not that I’m against using Linux, I use Pop_os on a spare computer as a Linux test bed for gaming.
Why are some Linux distros in scare quotes?
Probably to capture different flavours of those distros into one stat?
Wow that’s shit, I know a lot of people who would still be quite happy to continue using Windows 7
It’s ancient, unsupported, and closed source. Nobody can create or distribute security updates. People would have been happy to keep using horses and buggies if there’d been an automatic horse shit shoveller.
People are lazy as fuck. Provided it plays their games they don’t give a shit about features updates, patches, bug fixes etc.
They probably have no ideal what version of windows is even installed on their machine.
That’s true, but their apathy or ignorance is a threat to any networked device. There’s definitely an argument for “my device,y software, my rules”, and technically you can run windows 7 as long as you want, but Valve shouldn’t be perpetually expected to support deprecated software either. In their case specifically, if would be hard to ensure their anti-cheating software isn’t being circumvented at the operating system level, meaning the experience of everyone on any OS would be lowered by continuing to support a 14 year old version of Windows.
The difference is, cars are better than horses. Windows 8, 10 and 11 are all worse than 7.
what a terrible take. honestly this community is like a parody of itself sometimes
How so? 7 is the last good version of Windows. It’s not surprising some people want to keep using it. It does have security issues but at least there are no ads in the Start menu and it doesn’t shill for OneDrive on startup.
So that is true it doesn’t do those bad things, but what makes it actually good and not just not bad?
Nothing, it’s still Windows. But at least it doesn’t actively get in the user’s way.
Fair enough. I wish we could fork it.
Edit: by we I mean someone who knows what they’re doing or even what should be done. Which isn’t me.
my boyfriend. He’s running Windows 7
You saint.
Like others already mentioned, I would suggest Linux Mint as well. It’s better Ubuntu than Ubuntu and similarity to Windows UI would make his transition much better.
Linux mint tends to work quite well on steam with proton after initially setting everything up
Why not Linux mint? It is way more use friendly.
Also why on earth is anyone using windows 7 in 2023. I stopped using it to move to Linux back in 2016
I do, in VirtualBox. I have a 20 year old printer, and the drivers don’t work in newer Windows versions. I mean, at all. The installer crashes, and automatic driver installer only gets the scanner working.
Anyway, I don’t use Windows. It works on Linux. Kinda. In Linux Mint, I just can’t use high DPI, but I can scan, print, and see “remaining ink” just fine.
Manjaro is another story. Only “Normal Grayscale” works, hp-toolbox doesn’t even show the color cartridge. So I just use Windows 7 with the drivers as the heaviest printer driver ever.But when I have to use Windows (e.g.: at school), I prefer Windows 7. Windows 10/11 have really weird control, and they are SLOW. Also, when installing Windows 10 onto school computers, nobody bothered to install drivers.
I like the ThinkPad T440s laptops that are in one class. But after upgrade to Windows 10 they have some battery charging issues, and some of them just fail to boot from time-to-time. I use the last one with Windows 7 because it just works.You really should not be using Windows 7. If you need to for old software make sure it is isolated and doesn’t have network access. It is very insecure at this point.
All these people saying “use this or use that distro instead” is why Windows users don’t go into Linux. Ubuntu is a solid choice for beginners because that’s a distro with a lot of tutorials online if not the most.
