With the recent announcement of Microsoft's recall feature, I've now made Linux my main desktop OS

Privacy and Security Discussions
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For a while I was on the fence between Windows and Linux. The Wayland issues I was having with NVIDIA and the overall stability of Windows are what kept me coming back.

However, with the recent announcement of Microsoft recall, for my comfort they have crossed a line that gives me no confidence or trust in Microsoft’s ability to bring trustworthy, secure, consumer-friendly software anymore.

The simple fact of Microsoft’s track record of turning back on features you turned off after an update, the immense number of viruses and vulnerabilities with how people download packages on Windows (I personally blame this on them not talking much at all about winget and not refining the Microsoft Store), and lack of transparency by their closed source nature as to what is being sent to Microsoft, makes it impossible for me to trust something so potentially harmful and invasive like this.

Now, for my fellow NVIDIA users, I can confirm at least for my GPU (Geforce GTX 1650 SUPER) Wayland has equivalent or less bugs as Xorg now. No more sporatic visual glitches with Steam and steam games like I used to experience. Long as you have the proprietary drivers installed, you should be good to go. (I will say if you are still experiencing this issue even with the latest proprietary drivers, currently NVIDIA is pushing out a solution to the lack of explicit sync that has led to these issues.)

Another question you may have is what distro did I end up choosing? Initially, I had went with Linux Mint out of worry about whether Wayland was going to work well, and I was under the understanding that Fedora 40 did not ship with Xorg variants of Gnome by default anymore.

However, I ended up starting to have a surprising amount of issues with Linux Mint. So, I ended up gambling on going back to Fedora in the hopes that whatever issues I have with Steam would be resolved within the next couple of months.

Luckily, it was a good gamble, because I now have gotten fedora fully set up. I’ve had no problems with my experience with fedora for the last two weeks, and it has been a very smooth and suprisingly stable experience.

Wherever you may be on your privacy and security journey that you may be stricken to Windows because of certain applications that you need for work or that you just prefer to use, I wish all the best for you. However for those in the camp that your preferred applications that do not work on Linux, I would definitely advise maybe giving another shot to the FOSS alternatives or in the case of DaVinci Resolve, a proprietary video editing application with a native Linux port.

(As a final note for future-proofing, the only reason I will ever dual boot or utilize Windows on a separate device would be for explicit needs by my job or if I ever wanted to play an online game that doesnt work on Linux.)

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The Windows Recall feature has me second guessing my choice of Windows as well. Like I cannot trust an OS to be secure if its doing nonsense like capturing my credentials. Davinci Resolve is still incomplete and broken on Linux. I wish they could ship it as flatpak and I don’t know if the AUR version is consistently maintained enough

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Good for you! I want to see more posts like this. I unfortunately don’t know how it is like to use the proprietary nvidia drive because I use sway, which straight up refuses to start up with it. I’m now using the open-source amdgpu driver for my amd GPU, which I got specifically to have better linux support. (AMD is up there in my company tierlist with Blackmagick (the Davincis) and Obsidian)

Back to your post. In cituations where you need to use windows you can just run it in a vm with something like virt-manager (like Virtual Box, but more open). You can even use WinApps for a seamless experience, but I heard it doesn’t work anymore. Also, all games I tried (which is ADOFAI, King of the Bridge and Poly Bridge 3) worked perfectly with no tweaks using wine (not even proton!). [Lutris | lutris.net] (A game launcher) has built in support for Wine and Proton (as well as yuzu, dolphin, Steam, EPIC and many more), so you should definitely try it for running games.

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People have been making containerised versions of Davinci Resolve you could try that to avoid the dependency shenanigans.

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Microsoft Recall? More like Recall The Windows Operating System. [crickets]

Still, congratulations on the switch. Did it myself recently and it’s been quite nice.

Now, for my fellow NVIDIA users, I can confirm at least for my GPU (Geforce GTX 1650 SUPER) Wayland has equivalent or less bugs as Xorg now. No more sporatic visual glitches with Steam and steam games like I used to experience.

Can confirm that Wayland runs charmingly with beefier GPUs as well, though the graphical glitches are not great for some apps. Krita’s my go-to illustration app and it does not take hardware acceleration from Nvidia well at all. AMD is much better in this regard.

A bit of a derail, I think something that a lot of Linux jumping posts fail to mention is that Linux is a hobbyist OS. Configuring Linux and learning how it works is very fun. Testing FOSS apps is very fun. KDE Connect is such an amazing little thing it easily justifies the switch for me. Most people could feasibly install Linux with Mint or Fedora now and only have to touch the console perhaps twice. But Windows is made to be looked at and not touched and stable as a rock-- if you’ve messed with registry keys at least once, Linux can be a legitimately enjoyable experience.

It’s a shame Windows is still the golden standard for PC gaming, though, and virtualization is a cointoss. LTSC is the best version of Windows by far to make a Launchbox machine and they have that locked under corporate license only. Legally, anyway.

Maybe Valve will continue flat out revolutionizing Linux gaming, what with several distros testing out HDR. Who knows?

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Is this a DIY solution or is this something packaged?

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Sorry forgot to link it.

I’ve never tried it myself but this could be an option.

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I’m considering the same thing with my PC too actually! I have put up with so much crap from Microsoft on Windows, but this full force into AI thing is really putting me off. And Recall is really just the cherry on top.

Those of you who remember me from the Discord though may know me for a time period going between Linux and Windows a lot when something inevitably happened with Linux. This time I have a plan.

I already own a fairly recent laptop (probably more powerful than my desktop in some regards) which is running Windows 11. For several reasons, it pretty much needs Windows. My hope is that by running both operating systems on two different machines, I might be able to actually use Linux for real this time. Not to mention. There’s also much better compatability with games on Steam than when I first did this.

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Add me to the list who’ve jumped ship :upside_down_face:
I’d tried fedora several months ago but had to switch back to windows for a time (I forget why), anyway whatever the reason I don’t need to now anymore so I switched back to fedora and did a fresh install so I feel like I can properly set it up to the way I like it now that I understand it more

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How does the gaming angle work for games with anticheat software. My primary game for the past decade has been Destiny 2 and the Steamdeck compatibility thing is like “lolno”.

…Of course, I’ve been shifting back towards console gaming with my windows PC aging, so there is that avenue.

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I have no idea, but I heard some anticheat software natively supports linux (I still don’t get the concept of client-side anticheat)

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Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t.

The key word here is that while there are anticheats that work on Linux (Easy Anticheat, for example), they only work on a Native game. Steamdeck is using Proton to turn Windows games playable on the fly, but the Windows version of anticheat won’t work on Linux.

Furthermore, some companies just block Linux from being able to play them entirely. Destiny 2 is one. Roblox was another.

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I recently set up a Fedora dual boot too, and I use it as my main OS, switching to Windows only if absolutely necessary. It’s been a wonderful experience so far and I’m looking forward to making my laptop Windows-free sometime in the future.

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Welcome to the bright side.

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Ooooooh. Well that makes sense.

[The-More-You-Know.gif]

Well, for now at least, If/when I get a Linux machine, it won’t be for gaming. Hopefully things will go more in favor for Linux gaming, (thanks in part to Steam showing more personal interest, ((as long as they don’t copyright/trademark/whatever how it’s done,)),) by the time I get a good enough machine.

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Steam’s generally been fairly good as a company throughout its lifetime, primarily by its philosophy of not trying to tweak the service that makes them loads of money for random metrics. It should be fine until, well, Gabe Newell kicks it.

As for linux gaming, it’s certainly doable-- a more elegant setting though is either running a dualboot with something like SteamOS or its derivative distros, or with a less volatile Windows build like LTSC. While having to shut down the pc to game is annoying, I find it a lot easier to concentrate on tasks with a ‘gaming’ partition and a ‘work’ partition, though that’s not for everyone.

I do recommend a cheap mule laptop as your first linux machine, though. Most Linux distros thrive as a casual usage/productivity environment, and it really can facelift old machines.

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I am actually looking for a sub $100USD laptop at the moment to get my feet wet(er).

I had tried Mint and Kubuntu as VMs on my Windows 10 machine, but after my internet card died, a professional told me his best guess was the VM fucked with Windows. He had to do a clean reinstall of Win10.

So hundreds of dollars later, (I also had some upgrades put in while they were digging around,) I don’t want to mess with Linux on my Windows PC anymore.

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I genuinely believe that Linux Mint and the steam deck are the most valuable things for Linux atm. LM being the best, imo, distro for beginners. Steam Deck basically pulling Linux toward being a gamer friendly OS single-handedly. There’s still many issues to be handled but we are in a very, very good position to capitalize on Microsoft’s continued failures.

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I don’t want to mess with Linux on my Windows PC anymore.

Yeah, this is just wise. Windows is generally greedy when it comes to partitions. It might eat a Linux bootloader, or mount a drive wrong, or the VM may act erroneously. It’s also the biggest barrier of entry for getting into Linux-- most people have only one laptop or desktop (if any), and don’t want to lose their files. My boots sleep on separate beds because of this.

My recommendation is to check with family, friends, or local for junker PCs or the most rundown POS you can track down. The more lightweight Mint spins will run a fair amount of old PCs much better than Windows can now, and live instances are just a lot better to experiment on than VMs, in my opinion.

Similarly, trying to learn to run your own homelab is a great gateway. I initially got started running a pihole, it’s dirt cheap with a Best Buy Rpi kit, and you get acquainted with the terminal.

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Linux Mint is by far the most Windows-refugee friendly OS by how similar it looks to windows out of box. I’ve found I like fedora better as a driver, but Mint you can just put on anything.

Valve meanwhile just casually turbocarried Linux gaming into viability.

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