If you absolutely must use windows
Download the Pro ISO from windows.
Use MicroWin to create an iso without tpm requirements and with offline installation
Use MAS and use only the Enterprise edition. You might need to upgrade to Professional first.
Then use WindowsDebloater to tailor it to your liking.
My wife’s HP Spectre something laptop became twice as fast when I reinstalled it and removed all the cruft.
Unfortunately that requires a full reinstall, I wish there was a way to upgrade from 10 pro to 10 enterprise.
Yeah there’s no foolproof way to do a general upgrade. Wiping is the easiest way to bypass the tpm requirement.
Is Windows Enterprise LTSC a good idea?
It is.
As good as it gets, if you can’t get around using Windows.
Nope.
Yes
Maybe
Please elaborate
It’s fine. It’s mostly crap-ware free, and it’s more stable than other versions. It’s Long-Term-Stable-Channel, it’s used by corporate, so it doesn’t change frequently. It still gets security updates but not the latest BS, like Recall, and on-by-default Bitlocker. It also doesn’tt require a MS account during setup.
System latency, weird USB drivers that don’t play nice with my audio deck, video drivers won’t be kept up to date and compatible soon for gaming cards as it’s meant for commercial applications. Also fuck windows.
I’ve had a Mac for over 10 years, still runs like the day I got it. Sure I can’t play games on it, but does absolutely everything else perfect for me.
I have a ten year old one which works fine with OpenCore Legacy Patcher.
Support for 2015 macs ended 7 months ago. Forget 10 years ago, my 2015 mac doesn’t run like it used to in Big Sur.
That’s unfortunate for you I guess.
That’s great, but what does it have to do with the topic?
I thought Apple started the stopping support of Intel Mac’s a couple of years ago? If you had the newest Intel from 5 years ago, support is supposed to end this year.
I finally switched to Linux for my daily driver and gaming PC. It was easy.
So honestly, which percentage of your game collection runs on Linux? Because I’ve looked into doing this just a few months ago, and unless the industry had some kind of mass exodus, less than 10% of my games run on Linux, and that’s a generous estimate.
Not defending Windows or anything, this is just my experience.
I know you’re getting a ton of replies already, but I switched to Arch Linux two months back or so and I just want to say nearly every game I’ve tried works great out of the box, a handful of games required me to go to my steam settings a flip a switch or copy and paste something from protondb, and no games have failed to work.
Gaming on Linux is so good that you end up flipping one switch in steam and get nearly perfect performance (with most games running identically or better than they did on Windows for me). It’s been such a surprise, I just played the Arc Raiders technical Alpha and I thought for sure Linux would fail me then. And it did. For the first day, then on the second day they patched proton and the game and I played all week and weekend with zero issues. It was fantastic!
I would highly encourage any gamer who’s thinking about switching to Linux but worried their games won’t work to not worry as much. Check protondb for your favorites, but you can safely assume most game work out of the box.
Sorry but how did you only have 10% running on linux a few months back? I run every game except apex legends, warzone and fornite… This is ridiculous misinformation of you
Honestly I have a ridiculous pile o’ games like a lot of us do, and I’ve yet to find something (that’s not VR) that I cannot play .
For reference I’m running OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with a 30 series Nvidia card. Wayland, two monitors, main is 144hz ultrawide 3440 x 1440, another is 1080p 60hz.
First off there’s a few programs out there to get you “Glorious Eggroll” versions of Proton which add even more stuff Valve can’t distribute in their versions.
This beautiful software right here looks about right: https://davidotek.github.io/protonup-qt/
Steam works fantastically. Heck, Proton works better than native Linux builds sometimes! Deck playability is an even bigger mark of quality.
Even EA’s silly launcher works. I got Titanfall 2 and that Sims 2 Ultimate they gave away ages ago working like butter.
I also love actually owning my games, so I use Heroic Launcher for GoG titles.
Oh! I even have CD games or old .EXEs windows would refuse to even install anymore! Don’t worry, Linux has got this. I use Bottles to have separate environments for those games to install to and run. Majority of the time it works great but this is where things can get iffy. But hey, Windows wouldn’t run them at all!
Wanna know what made me switch? Vermintide 2 kept giving me BSODs in Windows 10 with some super vague error code that made me think “Oh crap, please don’t tell me my GPU is dying.”
Nope! Linux ran it with zero probs once I fixed some small quirk to make their dumb little launcher work.
Cherry on top? All my RGB stuff works with Open RGB or my recently retired Corsair keyboard works with “CKB Next”.
The community has made incredible strides. My Win10 partition only exists because it has Windows Mixed Reality, which they’re abandoning. But not to fear, the Monado project is making HUGE improvements.
Give it a shot. I think you’ll be surprised. :)
How are you getting on with VR? I have a Reverb G2 and if I can play Elite and DCS on Linux I’m basically sold at this point.
I really want a new headset but nothing beats the G2 right now, without giving money to Meta which I refuse to do.
At this point it’s pretty much only the competitive games with kernel level anti-cheat that don’t work on Linux because of their kernel level anti-cheat.
But then again, if 90% of the games you play are competitive games that require kernel level anti-cheat, you should probably consider expanding your gaming experience lol
Would “Steam Deck compatibility” be a good proxy, at least for Steam games?
Yep! 👍
idk where you looked, protondb.com is a good database for this stuff, from your later reply insurgency sandstorm and hund showdown are both “gold” rated, they should be okay
but the thing is … you could just try for yourself, for freeI had just looked at the publisher’s system requirements on Steam, since my experience with Wine from over a decade ago was a dead end. I’ve learned a lot from this thread, though, and it seems things have improved dramatically.
it seems things have improved dramatically.
Like maxo said, things are definitely waaaaaaaay better than 10 years ago.
I’d say roughly 80% of my windows only games run as good as on windows, and probably 25-30% of my full library (not just what runs in proton) runs better in Linux with proton/wine than they do in win11.
Mostly what doesn’t work is stuff with kernel level anticheat.It did. I recently downloaded steam on Ubuntu and you don’t need to install any 3rd party stuff yourself. It’s available as compatibility toggle in steam. Sometimes you need to configure different version of Proton for games to work and they are slower to start. But they run fast and I didn’t experienced much bugs. It’s amazing, now after end of win10 I can ditch windows completely, as this and photoshop was the only reason I still have win10 installed.
I just made the switch this weekend. I have not had a single incompatibility yet. I have seen an oddity here and there in Helldivers 2, but nothing crazy.
Oddity 1: In normal windows play async issues sometimes happen where a player steps on a mine in the other person’s client but not their own. They continue to play because their client doesn’t mark them dead. To the other person, they appear as a person missing some number of body parts (sometimes just a floating torso). We call this torso mode.
Since switching to linux I have not seen my friend go torso mode a single time. He still sees me go torso mode.
Oddity 2: The artillery rounds are color coded for what each of them does. Since switching to linux they only appear silver for whatever reason. It’s a nonissue, I just read them when I walk next to them. If anyone asks my character is colorblind.
One additional note:
If you install steam with a flatpak, you’re going to have to tangle with the permissions related to a flatpak. Once you add directory permissions for an additional directory via flatseal (for example, if you want a library on each of your harddrives), you won’t have to touch it again and it’s great.
Maybe these issues are significant to you, maybe they aren’t. Ultimately, god I love my system starting up in just a few seconds. And having true control over it.
Its a fairly safe bet that your offline games won’t have much trouble, from my experience.
What kind of games do you play? Unless a game has anticheat, it is pretty much guaranteed to run on Linux.
“Unless your game is one of the most popular games that people play, it will run on Linux”
Unless your game has an anticheat, forbids linux to be played with the anticheat due to cheaters on linux and still end up with an online experience where the cheaters blatantly wallhack and never get caught unless they kill a famous streamer in the game.
Who even wants to play apex legends or cod these days? Riddled with cheaters
Among my favorites with anti cheat are Insurgency: Sandstorm and Hunt: Showdown. I will reluctantly play Fortnite if friends insist!
i have just recently found out that from ps4 and xbox one up you can play fortnite and a bunch of other f2p titles, without subscription and with mouse and keyboard, with crossplay to every other platform
Should be ok:
Fortnite does not work on Linux.
I’m on Garuda, every game I have tried has worked great, sometimes I just have to choose a different proton version with an easy pull down menu. The only game I have given up is Destiny 2, because they say they will ban anyone on Linux because of their anti cheat.
Most games that don’t have kernel level anti-cheat tend to work.
Have you tried to play the games or did you look them up on a site? I’ve found that unless you are looking at a popular new game, a lot of the games listed are saying that they don’t play, but we’re last checked in 2023, and they do work now but no body has updated the new results.
I looked up my favorites, based on my experience in the past with unsupported games. Long ago, I tried using Wine, way back before Steam even had a native Linux client. I managed to get Steam to run through Wine but never succeeded in getting any game to run beyond a loading screen. That was ages ago, though.
Things have changed since then. Steam not only has a Linux client, but also has Proton which loads most Windows apps (it’s marketed for games, but in reality it will work on Windows apps).
Multiplayer games and ones that require Uplay or Origin (can’t remember their new names) have issues, but most single player stuff will run fine. You’ll typically have to run them via Wine or Proton, but Steam will handle that for you.
I’ve never tried Proton, but I’ve gone down a rabbit hole of trying to use Wine for running games a few years back. I’ll look into Proton, thanks for the suggestion.
Yeah Proton is definitely the way to go over using Wine directly. Valve has put a ton of work into making it seamless. I have a large steam library and have found literally only one game (Destiny 2) that doesn’t work. And that’s just because Bungie has gone out of their way to make sure it won’t run on Linux for “anti cheating” reasons.
What’s MS’s plan after this? Everyone I know that uses Windows/M365 hate it more with every passing day and is looking to leave.
I really don’t want to be in tech support in 2029 when they kill off old outlook. There will be blood on that day.
No one (meaning less than 1% of people) will leave windows (sadly).
People are lazy as shit and rather swipe their credit cards and buy something new with windows than to even give Linux a chance.
99% of people really don’t give a shit about privacy or freedom when it comes to computers. Microsoft could slap handcuffs on them and point a camera at their screen (yes MS is already spying with telemetry, but try expaining that to a regular person) and they’d still use windows.
I switched to outlook in browser only because their native windows software is so terrible. Wish I could leave that shit OS entirely.
Sounds like you live in an echo chamber. Windows is still by far the most popular computer operating system, and it’s not even close. There’s no sign of people moving away from Windows en-masse. Windows 11 adoption has been massive.
If Win11 adoption is really massive, it’s because MS forced it down people’s throats.
I work at a national IT support company talking to hundreds of windows users every week, and the general sentiment is that Windows 11 is unnecessary, new outlook is literally the Antichrist and people are sick of being charged more and more every year for crap they don’t want or need.
Just l8ke I still see 2012R2 servers in the wild, Windows 10 isn’t going away anytime soon.
Sounds like you live in a contrarian chamber. People really do hate the “new Outlook” (basically it’s just Hotmail) and Windows 11 adoption has been slower than for most other versions of Windows. The requirements often mean needing to buy a new computer which a lot of people can’t afford, especially if prices go up because of tariff nonsense.
There will be a lot of people still running on out of support Windows 10 systems at the end of the year.
New outlook is a steaming pile. Classic Outlook has some very handy features and unless Evolution pulls its finger out, I will continue to use classic Outlook. Hell, I used Outlook 2010 until last year.
It met my needs.
i have an older desktop with 10, it doesn’t have tpm, but there is a slot, i could get one and upgrade but also i mostly use linux on it
but i still feel like i’m going to lose something and it stresses me out a bitYeah yeah, I will get round to it, stop bloody nagging me.
Imagine all the people, using their PC’s.
Using their PC’s what?
No Dell below us, above us only Pi
MS is for a rude awakening when general populace will not update their hardware with record inflation.
Those people will do what they always do, just keep using it without security updates.
Be clear about it - you’ll still get Windows Defender updates, but not patches to the OS or MS applications/Utilities.
People will just keep using insecure windows 10 versions.
JFC it doesn’t become a honeypot on November 1.
Or, you know, Linux, and be done with the crap
Just like they did when every other version of Windows stopped being supported. That’s why Linux has a 70%+ market share on computers right now…….
The general populace isn’t going to switch to Linux. They’re just not.
The path of least resistance is to continue using Win10
I’ll be doing both with Linux as my primary and Win10 as a compatibility fallback.
If my computer could run faster it would catch up with my refrigerator.
I DID buy a new computer; MacBook!
Congratulations on the downgrade. You’ve gone from an OS that will support your hardware from at least 10 years, to maybe 7 years of support.
I bought a used PC with a 6-year old CPU model only to find out that Windows 11 wouldn’t support it. That’s when I realized that the only advantage that Windows had over Macs in my opinion (aside from games) was gone.
::laughs in kde::
I love Linux, but my older system has an older Nvidia graphics card in it and I lost 15-20 FPS when I switch to Linux.
The new cards seem to perform better, but the old stuff is really hit and miss…
20% downgrade on nVidia GPU’s when using some Linux OS.
Nvidia isn’t really the best, no
Unfortunate for Linux then because nvidia gpus are the best gpus.
I ran Microsoft Activation Scripts (MAS) on my PC, making it W10 IoT Enterprise and then ran Sophia script from GitHub to debloat my Windows. It’s pretty sweet, works for me so far.
I think you would enjoy the adventure of learning the Linux.
Again… So much proprietary software is the industry standard, particularly Adobe, and much of it is Linux-compatible, making it not so easy to make the switch as a freelancer
There are more hoops involved—stuff Windows 10 with your Adobe software in a VM with no Internet connection and you should be okay even after Win10 stops getting security updates—but it isn’t quite impossible for you to migrate everything else and have one or two specific Windows programs too. Granted, you may not have the time and energy to go that route.
You’re right but not correct due to that’s not all the time. With my partners/clients I was able to use affinity and/or Davinci Resolve. Also Avid has Linux VM support which is nice. Also you can import a lot of modern adobe formats these days and also universal formats between the two. If you say “that’s a lot of work”, know your software more= write scripts and/or actions. It’s all automated now, just have to set it up once.
Why would a freelancer need to follow an industry standard? Do you have to share project sources with clients in proprietary formats rather than just the final output formats?
The entire reason why standards exist, that’s why. Generally when you make something for a client they want to be able to hand it to anyone else in the industry to be able to also work on it.
A freelancer who doesn’t use industry standard stuff generally isn’t going to be freelancing for very long.
I see. Surely that means that the source files have to be structured in a certain way then. If a design for a piece of print media was flattened to a single rasterised layer, or a video project had all the effects baked into the clips, a freelancer could deliver in the right format, but that file would be much less useful than if every operation was preserved non-destructively. I would think some artists wouldn’t want to just give away how they achieve certain effects.
I don’t know if that’s much of a thing in creative fields, or if there are conventions on things like keeping text as text, not editing it as vectors or pixels.
It’s more about ingesting their house design guide in proprietary formats. But you will also be contractually obliged to deliver back working files along with the final deliverables, and they will specify formats and versions.
Ah, I see. I guess that varies by client but you wouldn’t want to limit the work you take like that. That’s a difficult situation to change.
It doesn’t vary by client much, there’s a baseline of expectations that what you deliver can be further worked on by anyone using the software that 95% of the industry is using.
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Its boring. You open a web browser or Steam, you do a thing, you go to sleep.
you do a thing
Is that the thing when you switch from light mode to dark mode?
