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
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
Did you write “thinkering” on purpose? Because it’s fantastic.
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
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)
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.
Here’s the guide I used: https://www.standingpad.org/posts/2024/06/affinity-on-linux/
The only thing I did differently was I used this yaml to make the container: https://gist.github.com/gnat/8b69cf49b68e2349afe5e8cb5af49bf8
There’s a bit of tinkering afterwards, but it runs.
I wrote a guide myself aswell:
https://rentry.co/affinitylinux
This is not a ad
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.
on second thought i can possibly leave windows once affinity subscription ended but its not a guarantee
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
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
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
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
Alr
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
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
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
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.
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
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?
In some cases they look for generic virtual hw devices, in other cases things like available cpu flags or BIOS version.
There are ways to hide it though:
https://github.com/zhaodice/qemu-anti-detection
https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/how-do-i-hide-the-fact-to-windows-that-it-runs-in-a-vm.115627/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.
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)
This is a great middle ground suggestion
