this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2024

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Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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The Best way to switch to Linux is to NOT (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Okay I know this sounds like click bait but trust me switching over to linux requires you to first master the open source software that you will be replacing your windows/mac counterparts with. Doing it in an unfamiliar OS with no fallback to rely on is tough, frustrating and will turn you off of trying linux. DISCLAIMER: I know that some people cannot switch to linux because open source / Linux software is not good enough yet. But I urge you to keep track of them and when so you can know when they are good enough.

The Solution

So I suggest you keep using windows, switch all your apps to open or closed source software that is available on linux. Learn them, use them and if you are in a pinch and need to use your windows only software it will still be there. Once you are at a point where you never use the windows only software you can then think of switching over to linux.

The Alternatives

So to help you out I'll list my favorites for each use case.

MS Office -> Only Office

Not for folks who use obscure macros and are deep into MS Office
Has Collaboration and integration with almost all popular cloud services..
Has a MS Office like UI and the best compatibility with MS Office.

Adobe Premiere -> Da Vinci Resolve

It is closed source but available on linux
Great UI, competitive features and a free version

Outlook -> Thunderbird

Recently went through massive updates and now has a modern design.
Templates, multi account management, content based filters, html signatures, it is all there.

Epic Games, GOG, PRIME -> Heroic

Easy to use, 1 click install, no hassel
Beautiful UI
Automatically imports all the games you have bought

PDF Editor -> LibreOffice Draw

Suprisingly good for text manipulation, moving around images and alot more.
There might be slight incompatibilities (I haven't noticed anything huge)
But hey, it's free

How do I pick a distro there are so many! NO

So finally after switching all the apps you think you are ready? Do not fall into the rabbit hole of changing your entire OS every two days, you will be in a toxic relationship with it.

I hate updates and my hardware is not that new

Mint - UI looks a bit dated but it is rock solid
Ubuntu - Yes, I know snaps are bad, but you can just ignore them

I have new hardware but I want sane updates

Fedora
Open Suse Tumbleweed

I live on the bleeding edge baby, both hardware and software

Arch ... btw

Anyways what is more important is the DE than the distro for a beginner, trust me. Gnome, KDE, Cinnamon, etc. you can try them all in a VM and see which one you like.

SO TLDR: Don't switch to linux! Switch to linux apps.

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

For me, inkscape is the easier PDF editor.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

I semi-agree. I did that, switching to Inkscape, Firefox, and LibreOffice in the weeks before I realized I should just make the switch. What actually helped me get the experience though was running various distros in VirtualBox, which I’d done in various forms since 2017 or so starting with Ubuntu 16.04, then going through each subsequent version up to 20.04, trying (and ultimately using as a main VM) Debian Buster, Bullseye and Bookworm (Testing at the time). In the final few weeks of daily-driving Windows, I did some VM distrohopping with Arch and NixOS before ultimately choosing Debian Bookworm Testing for my first bare metal install on my main device (it was originally intended as a test to see how I would do things if I did transition to Linux before it just turned into my main distro. On an unrelated note, I had installed Debian on an old Fujitsu Lifebook before then.). That Testing install has survived to the present day and is currently on Trixie.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

You know there is almost more stuff advising how to switch to Linux than there is stuff for existing users or people with their feet in both worlds. There are plenty of people who used Linux but only for server, or as a dual boot, or on one machine but not another. I think they would benefit from advice on how to fully switch over or how to use both systems to full effectiveness together. Like I only fully switched to Linux maybe 6 months ago after going back and forth for years.

We also need to be thinking about how to get people from beginner level to intermediate, and then on to advanced levels. There isn't a clear progression path forward. It could be something like: Linux Mint -> Arch -> Nix. I believe projects like Arco Linux are striving to fulfill this gap from beginner to advanced.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Another option if you have a laptop and desktop is to test the waters slowly with the laptop, and keep your desktop as is. It's what I did for a long while to get used to things on Linux.

If there is a critical problem with my Linux instalation on my laptop, it's OK because all the real stuff I care about is still on the desktop. So I'm free to wipe the laptop at a moments notice. It's the easiest way to learn in my experience.

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

Let's not forget that switching to Linux isn't always the right choice. In some industries the software doesnt have high enough quality Linux equivalents.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Yeah I originally trying to daily Linux for like the past 10 years but kept falling back to Windows, mainly due to the app compatibility.

A lot of people suggested dual booting but I found that it messed up disrupted my workflow, and Level 2 hypervisors were too slow to be practical

What finally made Linux stick for me was Proxmox.. it let daily Linux and still have the option to quickly spin up a Windows VM with a GPU if I needed something urgently, without the hassle of rebooting.

So now, six months later, I’m dailying Arch and also self-hosting a bunch of stuff on Debian, and I haven’t looked back.

I think it's about convenience.

Tags for federation: @acceptable_humor #infosec

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

Or just install Linux.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Just dual boot

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

Just be aware that windows has a bad habit of fucking up for Linux when you do. Which sounds like it shouldn't be possible, right?

Windows can claim hardware resources that it doesn't release properly, so your WiFi adapter doesn't work in Linux, but works fine in Windows. Windows also (used to, at least) "correct" a boot partition, because, I presume, it sees something "unknown". Oh, and the system clock might be off every time you switch between one and the other, because windows thinks it makes sense to write the current timezone value and not UTC.

Those kinds of things.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

I’m trying to remember, but I feel like either the regular Debian installer or expert installer recently offered to choose between Windows-style tome and Unix-style time. Also, though, there is a registry hack for Windows to make it use UTC.

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

true but i have never had any problem with drivers only nvidia and thats pretty much it the time there is a script that prevents windows from using your bios clock

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I want to use Thunderbird but my university won't let me log into my email outside of Outlook... So dumb.

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

Yeah, always it must be security concerns.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Fuck all that.

Install Linux, any flavor. Install virtualbox, and set up a Windows VM. Go ahead and install any of your windows bullshit on that VM. That's your crutch, your failsafe: a windows instance that you don't have to leave Linux to access.

Save snapshots before and after any changes, so if/when it goes to shit, you can roll it back to where it was still working.

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

Maybe spend a year ficking around with WSL. Learn some bash, get used to the CLI.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Strongly recommend a KDE-based distro if coming from Windows.

Gnome is too janky when you're used to the workflow in Windows. It's almost like Windows 8, which nobody uses if they can help it.

KDE is just way more familiar.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

I feel that. I also like XFCE. I chose between that and KDE on a proverbial coinflip.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Good advice for the average Windows user, but I found GNOME a refreshing and streamlined way to work. I hate when I have to do something for work in Windows now, its just a terrible user experience.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

I feel a surge of rage every time I have to touch Windows Update.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

Or Cinnamon! IMO it feels less overwhelming than KDE to people coming from Windows.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

Remember, annotating PDF is fine but editing PDF is not fine. .doc or .odt files are supposed to be edited. PDF files are supposed to be printed or filled (fill the blanks). If you require editing a pdf, someone in the process is making a mistake.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Stop recommending OnlyOffice.

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

What's bad about it? It has better compatibility from my experience, and the UI doesn't look ass. I'm a big fan of LibreOffice, but unless you're only editing OpenDocument Format files it doesn't work that well most of the time (and even if you are... I have tried, but god, does the OpenDocument Foundation need some money funneled into it. I never get .ods to work the way I want to)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

The solution that solves ODF compatibility issues is to not allow applications that do not adhere to the standard. In other words, to explicitly disallow the use of Microsoft products. It's not by accident that MS Office products are slightly fucking up documents, it's by design.

Since many companies use MS Office, when they do a pilot to see if they can use ODF, it ends up "causing problems". If anyone tries to use it in a mostly Office based workspace, it'll also "causes problems".

MS only has very good reason to always be just subtly off, and everything to lose if they aren't.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

I get that, but even my .ods files get slightly fucked up when I only ever edit them with LibreOffice. That being said, I'm a staunch supporter and I will always send my text files as .odt and my slideshows as .odp, and I keep donating money in hopes it'll improve in the future (and for fuck's sake, the UI shouldn't be that important, but it is. It might as well be one of the biggest barriers of entry for normies, it's not a good thing that FOSS always looks either outdated or overcomplicated)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

@okamiueru @glaber , well it is an issue to fuck up by design. There are third party plugins for ODF for MSO that work better than its own implementation.

I am forced to use MSO for work, but it's LO for everything else of mine.

Edit: One should also see what they can do to make Microsoft improve/fix their ODF implementation since it is an ISO standard. There has to be something to get that ball rolling.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

should also see what they can do to make Microsoft improve/fix their ODF implementation since it is an ISO standard. There has to be something to get that ball rolling.

The answer to this should be the same as when some standard S is implemented in software X, Y, Z. If Z doesn't follow the standard, blacklist it until it does. That's the whole point of having a format standard, that it shouldn't matter what software you use.

If people, companies, institutions and governments have this stance and attitude, MS will need to compete on actual user experience, and not degrading the UX of the competition.

They'd get their shit together mighty fast. I'd expect them to lose too. Software to edit documents isn't complicated. If we can have things like blender, which I'd say is about 3-4 orders of magnitude a greater endeavour, for which use case has the inverse potential user base, it's pretty obvious that the only reason that MS Office is a thing (i.e. in raking in billions in license fees... 49 billion USD in 2022), is shady business practices.

It still pisses me off that in my country, when they had a group of experts make the evaluation of which document standard to follow, all experts agreed on ODF. But, because of shady MS money being thrown around, they ignored the recommendation, and went with DOCX.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

software to edit documents isnt complicated

Write me a function to generate a Pivot Table with all of the features from Excel, from scratch

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

If you read what I wrote, in context. I'm sure you can get a better idea of what I meant, than what you're implying here.

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

My point is you are grossly oversimplifying software and how hard it is to actually write something like an office clone

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

I'm not. You implied that my point was that it was easy to write OpenOffice, or the equivalent. From the context, it should have been obvious that this wasn't my point, and I'm not interested in entertaining such straw man arguments, and my responses tend to be rude. Apologies.

I don't feel like paraphrasing myself either, but in the spirit of good intentions: I made the comparison that document productivity software is orders of magnitude simpler than something like Blender. If you disagree on this, that's fine. Inferring that this means productivity software is easy, that's all on you.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Onlyoffice ain't bad yes its built by a company but it's open source and feels like something that's used in a professional environment + libreoffice ui is pretty dated

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

How come? I've been out of the open source loop recently

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

I keep a win10 virtual box available when I need excel while in Mint. Otherwise I’m good. Have win10 set as dual boot but switched main boot to Mint once I got used to it.

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