Brave blocks Microsoft Recall by default

I can never understand how anyone with an interest in tech hasn't switched to Linux for their personal desktop/laptop at some point in the last 20+ years.

Why would you want to use a closed source OS controlled by a corporation with a past as checkered as Microsoft's?

Personally I still hold that if Microsoft made an OS that is stripped down with only true essentials, I would go back to Windows. Until then, Linux is my home, outside of work or my dedicated Windows device (a Surface laptop) which I rarely if ever need to bust out to do something.

My last hurdle which I kind of sucked up was Discord, I was holding off on it for ages, till I got irritated enough with Windows to ignore it. It didn't let me stream with audio, but when they switched from 32-bit to 64-bit it seems Linux finally got streaming with audio.

Gaming. Linux gaming has come a long way (especially thanks to the steam deck) but the vast majority of games are still only released on Windows.

I’ll tell you why I still use a Mac: it’s because my non-techie wife still uses one. Even then I still have to provide her with regular tech support. For someone like her using Linux is not yet a viable option.

My 75 years old mother can do it completely unassisted…

Congratulations. The planet has ~8 billion people on it and everyone is different.

Right, but thanks to Proton that’s just not relevant? Blue Prince, Clair Obscure, Lost Records, The Alters, Doom: The Dark Ages, Oblivion Remastered, South of Midnight… all run just fine on Steam on linux.

If you have older hardware and play older games, Proton often doesn't run those as well as windows on the same hardware. On my laptop (win10/ubuntu dual boot, about 6 years old) windows is significantly faster in every game I have tried. I also had to do a futzy ad-hoc binary search to find a proton version that works with one game (either fallout 3 or fallout new vegas, can't remember which). And proton generally crashes more.

That’s great but I think that says more about your mother than it does about Linux.

Completely agreed. Contrary to popular belief, my experience is that the elderly get along better with Linux than most people. The elderly typically memorize exactly how to do what they want to do. They learn to click this, click that, and get what they want without taking any deviations. And Kubuntu is nice because each update doesn't change their workflow.

Considering that most elderly that I've met do their entire workflow through the browser, that just adds to the ease of moving to Linux.

What stops you from dual-booting?

You use Windows for games, and only games. For everything else, you use Linux.

This is a practical setup.

Same, I have my whole family on MacOS because the marriage of hardware and software across the ecosystem is unmatched. I totally get why people wouldn't want "i" and "pod" everything, but when you do have everything - it all just plays so nicely together. Even stupid little things like being able to remotely control the tv with your phone, or automatically unlock your computer by simply wearing your watch, add up to reduce a ton of friction day to day.

> If you have older hardware

So Windows 11 won't work, will it?

I go one step further. I have a Windows PC primarily for gaming, on its own physical LAN all to itself, that can only talk to the Internet (not any other LANs). I have an almost-identical PC (sans GPU) for Linux Mint, which I do all of my actually important or meaningful work on.

Like you alluded to, I never use the Windows PC for anything else -- nothing even remotely sensitive -- nothing with identification like logging into government websites, no financial activity, etc. It has no access to my e-mail, instant messaging, calendar, contacts, pictures, videos, and so on. While it has Steam on it, I don't buy Steam games on it; I go to Steam's website on my Linux desktop and buy games there, then they show up in my Steam library on the Windows desktop. I do also use it for 3D CAD since I'm still very much in my infancy learning FreeCAD (which will remove that Windows dependency).

It spends the vast majority of its time turned off and if the entire contents of its drives were published publicly I wouldn't lose a minute's sleep over it. I still image the drive every couple months so I can revert to a known-good config should the need arise, as breaking itself for no reason is what Windows is really good at.

Which makes those god-awful prompts to "Finish setting up Windows Backup" every couple of weeks bloody hilarious...

What about steam chat, discord, etc?

There's an almost violent resistance to switching to Linux because there's perceived fears of it being too technical. The mere thought of potentially needing to open up a command prompt sends people into a fear panic and needing to solve problems freaks people out.

I wish I was exaggerating but I've had these arguments with people that really should know better and there was nothing I could do to convince them. There's a lot of people that are strangely proud in being completely technically illiterate and they don't care to actually have control over their computer or personal data. This isn't an age thing either; this was from people that were otherwise my age or younger that simply got angry at the mere thought of Linux.

I myself made the full switch last year with the advent of them forcing copilot shit everywhere and everything just works out of the box. I originally thought I might need to switch back to Windows every now and then for gaming but no, everything I've thrown at it works great and often better than it did on Windows. I only keep Windows around on my separate dev/work machine for the sake of game dev and coding.

As a counterpoint; I've primarily played games that are old or jank as hell to setup in general. Septerra Core, Nox, Diablo 2, various assortments of RPG Maker games across different engines. They all worked perfectly fine and arguably were easier to setup on a modern machine than trying to figure out how to get them working on Windows.

The only game that didn't work out of the box for me was Path of Exile 2.

Every single game you mentioned has some sort of tinker step reported on protondb even though it may be marked platinum. Here’s the one for oblivion:

    DRI_PRIME=1 WINEDLLOVERRIDES="xaudio2_7=n,b" PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=90 %command%

Or maybe it’s this one that the next user reported…

    DXIL_SPIRV_CONFIG=wmma_fp8_hack FSR4_UPGRADE=1 game-performance %command%

I personally don’t want to have to do stuff like that to get them to work.

Don't use, don't have.

These are almost always unnecessary. I have 460 games in my Steam library (most of them are popular games, including ones mentioned in the parent comment, not obscure indies) and all of them work great out of the box without command line options. That's a higher success rate than my Windows machine. For example, the latter command is for someone who wants to hack in FSR4 support on 9xxx AMD cards; this is for power users.

They run "just fine" meaning their developers and publishers just tolerate the fact that someone out there may be running them on unsupported OS's, and that too only barely. Many will straight up lock their games out of Linux, let alone support them.

There are very few games that run "better" on Linux, and that too only on specific benchmarks and after a lot of tweaks and hacks. Nvidia is a lost cause, many devices, parts and peripherals don't bother providing Linux driver support, and HDR & VRR have either bog-standard implementations or are straight-up unsupported. There is no way any current nontrivial game runs better out-of-the-box on any Linux distro for a layman than on Windows on most retail "gaming" computers.

That is certainly true, but they usually work fine on Linux thanks to Proton. I'm a big gamer and I've been primarily Linux (for gaming too) for something like 4 years now.

I am using Discord in Firefox for years without any issues. I also created a container for it after containers became a thing.

I use Discord only for programming groups, study groups, etc. Not for games or in-game chatting.

I haven't played most of those games, but I can at least attest that I could run Clair Obscur with no tinkering whatsoever. A lot of times even if some people had to tinker with a game, you will be just fine and not have to tinker.

Just yesterday I wiped my dual booted linux mint. As bad as Microsoft is, there is a certain sense of polish and dare I say confidence to using windows. Lol I can't believe I'm saying that even though just now I saw chris titus's video on AI code inside windows.

Say when an application starts being slow for memory issues or io issues or downright freezes, I can still click a button or start typing something in that application, wait and it'll work eventually. I can push windows as far as I can, I can be absolutely careless and it'll still work.

On mint, if things start going slow, I'll stop clicking and wait for it to die so I can restart the app again. I don't feel confident enough to push it.

It's like buying a boring, easy to maintain japanese car and a fancy, one of 100, exotic super car from some obscure european brand. I know which one I can confidently thrash about.

Having played Doom, Oblivion, Blue Prince, and Clair Obscur on linux, I can tell you that the tinker steps are unnecessary. I have literally just clicked play and didn't need to think about it. This didn't require a bunch of manual setup to get to that point either; I installed Endeavour and it installed the drivers I needed, then I installed Steam as normal and it was like nothing had changed from my Windows install.

People will post their tinker steps for everything. It's often just to disable the steam overlay, or inject their own overlay, or whatever they think gets them an extra 2 fps. It's linux and people love to configure it their way, but honestly steam/proton handles it automatically 99% of the time.

I use Mac daily but a windows desktop for gaming. I tried to switch. There’s still too much incompatible although proton has made huge advances.

> This is a practical setup.

What if you need to check emails or take care of some other task mid-game?

I'd argue it isn't a practical setup.

Dual-booting means supporting 2 OSes on my personal machine. My personal machine is for doing personal things, not supporting OSes.

I use windows on my main PC because it supports all the games I want to play, and it also supports all the software I want to use. Linux does not. Simple as that, for me.

I also use Linux and Mac at work daily. I prefer to use the right tool for the job.

I will bite. I have this exact setup. And indeed at the very beginning I would mostly use Linux, then I started playing more games on Windows. And that's when the convenience factor makes windows win. Having to reboot to use linux after a gaming session is annoying when I can just open another app in windows and achieve the same result (and don't forget I would have to reboot yet again when it's time to resume play).

Because I have work to do and lost the interest in tinkering with my OS back when flying toasters were a popular screen saver.

This is what stops me from dual-booting. I don't enjoy Windows as much as the next person, but dual booting inevitably requires me to just duplicate logging into services and installing the same programs in both OSes, and then if I don't boot into one of the OSes for a while, I end up having to wait for updates (admittedly this is a much worse problem on Windows, but it's not not a problem for Linux) and any other things that need to happen just so I can use the computer.

More practical would be to use Windows and then use WSL to host Linux applications.

> check emails

I just do it on my phone if needed.

> some other task mid-game

Like what? Something taking long, serious, and business/work related? Then you are stopping to play anyway.

Or want to order something via Amazon? You can do it on the phone. The app or any browser is sufficient.

Not if you care about online gaming. Anti-cheat measures generally don't work well in Proton.

It won't, but since 10 still exists I'm just running that now and will probably do so as long as I can - then maybe I can get a hardware upgrade, do the proton switch, and my games will run about as well as they used to with 10 on my old hardware - with some fiddling naturally.

My point is it isn't a universal truth that everybody currently running 10 can just switch to linux/proton now and it is seamless. Really depends on what you run and your hardware, as with everything linux.

I also hack some games with dll injection and I don't know how I'm going to get that working with proton, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't.

Those of us doing creative production work really don't have a chance since the majority of apps only support Win/Mac. I understand the tech but cannot escape it.

> I just do it on my phone if needed.

Do you have your phone by you all the time? Mine is always sitting somewhere, probably charging. On my laptop I just get a notification instantly showing me an email preview without me having to do anything. Having to go check my phone isn't a substitute for that.

> Like what? Something taking long, serious, and business/work related?

Like replying to a message? Going to fetch your phone and type on it is way more painful from than just pressing alt-tab and doing it on the computer.

> Like what? Something taking long, serious, and business/work related?

Do you have nothing long or serious outside of work? I just had to fill out some forms and do some shopping yesterday online for my personal life. That'd have been painful on the phone.

> Then you are stopping to play anyway.

Stopping the app loses your exact state... that's kind of the whole point of pausing the game.

FWIW you have a partial solution here which is to run a VM that boots into the same system that you also dual boot into. It's still inconvenient, but not nearly as bad as having to terminate your app and reboot.

Much to my annoyance, no one seems to have any interest in making a Linux compatible Quicken alternative. Until they do, I'll have to deal with Windows in some form. That's just my example though. The broader point is that there is a lot of Windows only software out there and each person only needs to have one piece of mission critical Windows only software in their life to make the friction of switching too high to bother with.

Most people are not THAT different.

Yes I'm sure that a lifetime of teaching literature prepared her to use linux better than average.

I reinstalled Arch 4 times before setting up btrfs. It has it's own issues but it is nice to be able to work with confidence again.

Game development, design, photography, gaming, ease of accessing torrents to trial applications before purchasing, etc.

Windows still wins, mac is great for most of those points except for gaming and torrents, Linux bad at most of those.