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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

Debian Stable (Linux) welcomes escapees from lobster boiling:

https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/iso-dvd/

There's also Mint, which is the boring 0 effort option. Don't run it myself because I like rolling release distros, but for a Windows refugee it may be welcoming: https://www.linuxmint.com/

Mint is actually great. I used to dismiss it because it seemed slow with its technical choices, but the flip side of that is that the experience is really refined. The support is great and it's very well suited for beginners and especially people who prefer GUI tools over the command line.

I love Mint! I am a refugee. When I read about the requirement to have a Microsoft account I motivated to learn and finally make the switch. Mint does have its issues with modules, and package availability, but I am slowly learning its quirks.

I eval'd popOS and mint and went with pop due to the fancy gnome tiling plugin. It's been a pleasant experience, but the software updater uses like 1G of ram on an 8GB laptop and I'm beginning to wish I was running mint xfce.

In terms of laptop compatibility because I need it all to be as cutting edge as possible, with minimum fuss, I moved to Fedora and not looked back.

For everything else, Debian is great.

Did you run into any specific issues with Debian?

Yes, the kernel was too old so my Ryzen didn't perform great.

I could have gone through enabling backports, but I could also have just gone Fedora and not have to mess around with things I shouldn't need to.

Well, Pop!_OS is a fantastic choice. Plus, there’s a ISO version with Nvidia drivers.

Pop is perfect for those coming from Windows.

100%. This is the nail in the coffin for me with Windows. It's all Mac and Linux from here on out.

As if Apple is any better than Microsoft.

Certainly the overwhelming view of HN is that they're morally equivalent, but that's more an indictment of blinkered HN groupthink than a statement of fact.

Agreed. Apple is by no means perfect (far from it), and neither is macOS. But anything user-hostile in macOS is relatively minor in comparison to Windows.

And for anyone who hasn't used macOS, it's not a locked-down walled-garden like iOS is.

I look at it like this.

For me, Linux.

For my mom, Mac.

For my enemies, Windows.

There's no such thing as a statement of fact when it comes to morals. And I say this as someone who believes in universal moral law.

Debian is just about the worst Linux distribution to recommend for desktop use for newcomers to the ecosystem.

Anyone familiar with desktop Linux enough to advocate for its use is so disconnected from the experience for a newcomer that they should never ever ever be trusted.

Anyone who can perform the arcane incantations and rituals required to uninstall, disable, defuse, and circumvent all the user hostile anti-features ( which are only increasing in number by the way ) will do just fine with Linux in my honest opinion.

We're on a tech forum, where people probably need less handholding with tech gear than the general public does.

And, once no longer a newb, Debian is easily one of the best distros to be in, for many purposes, long-term.

Why not start with one of the most popular and principled distros, and see whether it just works for you?

From there, if your eye ever starts wandering towards some strange other distro, you have a well-informed good baseline to compare against.

To be perfectly honest, anyone approaching Linux from Windows needs caveats so that they can make their mind up for themselves and pick what's best for them. Every distro (and Linux as a whole) has trade offs and things that will need to be considered.

> We're on a tech forum, where people probably need less handholding with tech gear than the general public does.

I'm not sure about that. I think the days of assuming people who can code or do another specialized tech sill are long over.

The amount of comments from people who prefer windows or mac or ubuntu and systemd because of convenience and abstraction (i.e. handholding) are plentiful.

Debian runs systemd. How does a preference for systemd make Debian a bad recommendation?

I didn't say a preference for systemd makes $SYSTEMD-USING-DISTRO a bad recommendation.

Fedora Silverblue is probably the most appropriate distro for fleeing Windows. Great UI, Snap is coming along and there's fewer footguns.

Snap? Do you mean Flatpaks?

Has to be, I doubt fedora would use a Canonical product as a default.

Absolutely. Blame the lack of caffeine. I hate Snaps.

I can no longer edit my comment though. Mea culpa.

Mint feels more like Windows, by design.

Does it have a gui based update manager that doesn't require me to enter my password because it ducktapes sudo on top?

God, the ubuntu one is the worst as it'll sometimes prompt multiple times for a password.

IME, the GUI updates work out of the box with the default Debian desktop, no prompting for passwords.

I guess Ubuntu behavior you saw might've been due to their Snap package stuff, not the normal Debian APT package stuff.

GhostBSD (FreeBSD) welcomes everyone as well.

https://www.ghostbsd.org/download

GhostBSD is like that second party in The Office that the party planning committee made.

Due to all this mess with Recall, force account log-ins, spamming my desktop with crap all the time, not being able to to disable telemetry, confusing privacy settings spread all through out the OS... I finally made the call two weeks ago to get rid of Windows after decades of using the Microsoft OS. I tried Pop, Ubuntu, Mint... all decent options but settled on Debian for now. It's been a slog of a two weeks and one massive learning curve, but everything is now setup and working great. I have 100% parity with my previous Windows install and it was a freeing experience being able to delete my Windows partition. My biggest problem was with video drivers. I have some utilities that require at least Nvidia 535 and Debian for some reason I can't fathom only supports 525 (obsolete by Nvidia's indication). All of the advice in Debian related forums was "don't go with proprietary install scripts" which was flat out wrong. I don't know what is causing this brain failure on the part of the entire Debian community when it comes to drivers, but they need to fix that. No need to run the latest and greatest, but when the only option is a driver that is marked as obsolete and won't run a lot of software, it needs to be addressed.

The pleasant surprise has been games. I thought I would have to abandon gaming or keep a second Windows partition, but so far all the games I have tried have run 100% -- even though it took some minimal tweaking in some cases. V-Rising, Elder Scrolls Online, New World, RimWorld... all work as well as on Windows thanks to Steam and Proton. (Rimworld required one change in the config .ini to support my super ultra wide monitor, ESO had to be manually imported into Steam. V-Rising required installing the Proton-GE version to address a problem with cut scenes). It's a bit tedious to have to address small problems like that, but more than worth it to get rid of an OS that I feel is constantly trying to attack me.

I am moving my wife to Zorin next. I can't recommend Debian to most people that just want to use a desktop. It was difficult for me and I have decades of experience in running Linux servers. I will probably stick with Debian as its working great now, but too many things were too hard to make it an option for most desktop users I would imagine. I can recommend ditching Windows for some flavor of Linux.

FWIW, I found Pop_OS to provide pretty (very?) up-to-date Nvidia drivers via the pop_os repos.

So I haven't found any reason to use Nvidia's installers.

Yeah I didn't have any problems with this on Pop or Ubuntu. I guess its a Debian issue. I might end up moving over to a different distro at some point, but I finally have everything working on Debian so I am hesitant to switch right now.

Boiling pot escape is not possible if said lobsters have been humanely euthanized.

Okay, huge tangent, but just yesterday at the dinner table this came up. I realized I've shied away from the horrors of boiling live lobsters, and I'm not okay with doing it any more.

I need to learn how to kill them less painfully prior to cooking. And I doubt I can eat restaurant lobster in good conscience any more.

You can usually euthanize the lobster before cooking it by spiking it at the top of its head, or by freezing it.

At some point, there’s a personal decision to be made as to whether the inhumanity of eating a crustacean that was alive shortly before cooking is any different than the inhumanity of predator-prey relationships in the wild.

Being touted as an escape every single time there is a new Windows version for the last 30 years.

Meanwhile Steam has to use Proton, and is nonetheless around 2%.

Proton has massively changed the game. I'd say the time since 2018 has had more advances in usability than the 25 years before it (for "normal" people), effectively making any "you've been saying this for X years" argument moot.

Proton is Windows PC gaming with a Linux kernel.

It is only a moot point for those "I feel good to use Linux kernel to run Windows on top" kind of feeling.

While ignoring it is still Windows games that are being written, by game studios targeting regular Windows deployments, and those same studios might even have Android games written in OpenGL ES/Vulkan, that they won't bother porting to GNU/Linux.

I don't really understand the issue. I click on 'play' on Steam and the game works. That's all that matters to me.

Might be, doesn't change the fact those are Windows games.

But hang on, your original comment was slating Linux for people saying that it was an escape for the past 30 years. It is now an escape for an ever increasing audience and set of use cases, and you're saying that these new people who have to this point not had any issues with running Windows games won't be able to "escape" because they'd have to play Windows games?

Have some consistency.

2% after 30 years is hardly an ever increasing audience.

Proton is not an escape when it is still Windows software, using Windows APIs, written by companies targeting Windows customers.

I love how you leapt on 'audience' there and didn't want to refute use cases. Also leaning on that '30 year' figure. Funny.

The Steam Deck has sold millions of units (increase in audience) and now supports 89% of the top 1000 games at Silver and above (increase in use case). 2% is indeed an increase from where it started in 2018, but it goes to show how many Windows machines are out there that the % isn't higher.

I don't really understand your position. You're vehemently against any Windows code or games running at all and want to belittle, minimise or dismiss any progress that has been made. It feels like you're arguing in bad faith.

What use cases?

That Linux gamers are so starving for Linux native games that they have to contend with running Windows games via an API translation layer?

Not even studios that target other POSIX platforms bother targeting GNU/Linux natively.

SteamDeck sales are a drop in the ocean of Switch, Playstation, XBox, and Windows PC sales, if you feeling like going into war numbers.

But hey, enjoy your "Linux" games.

I will, thank you

I mean sure it's not using native APIs, but many developers are specifically targeting Steam Deck to get a Steam Deck Verified label and show up prominently on the Steam Store. So despite developing for Windows, they are doing QA on Linux.

Proton is the only stable and maintained runtime you can target for Linux and it comes with no performance penalty.

Few games actually get more fps than on Windows. What alternative runtime would you suggest and more to the point what problem would it actually solve.

If the game studio actually so much as tests on Proton (or more realistically Steam Deck) that’s great gold medal and as much targeting Linux as you can get.

Demanding anything more is not realistic given current market share, but also again what would you even gain.

The actual threat to gaming on Linux is any form of DRM.

With the increasing efforts from Asus, MSI, Lenovo, and the potential XBox Handheld that keeps being hyped about, let's see how long SteamDeck keeps its relevance.

The Deck is tied into the most popular PC games store, and one with followers so loyal they'll refuse to buy a game until it comes to Steam because they don't want another launcher.

It'll do fine. People don't want to re-buy their gaming libraries for an Xbox handheld and the OS integration for the other devices is pretty poor.

> it comes with no performance penalty.

I keep reading this on the internet and I’m fully convinced that this is written by people with powerful machines.

Whenever I try to play a game that barely runs at 60 fps on windows in my basic system it invariably runs in the range of 45-55 fps on Linux.

This would be perfectly acceptable except that it eventually leads to stutters that I never experienced on windows..

Ps. Yeah I tried to troubleshoot this with everything google and ChatGPT had to offer: disable composers, different proton versions, different distros and different desktops environments. The matter of the fact is that there’s an overhead and if your system is barely running it on windows you will probably have performance headaches on Linux.

Yeah I mean if you look at windows vs linux gaming benchmarks on phoronix it's clear there's about a 10% performance penalty. On the other hand there's a 10% penalty using bitlocker on windows vs almost none on linux, so it evens out if you care about privacy. Also you know for certain MS isn't keylogging everything you type to some godforsaken MS service, and the developer experience on linux is miles better.

> Whenever I try to play a game that barely runs at 60 fps on windows in my basic system it invariably runs in the range of 45-55 fps on Linux.

This is not a valid test. You need to compare Linux native vs. Proton rather than (Proton+Linux) vs. Windows. Otherwise you’re comparing at least three things at once.

> Proton is Windows PC gaming with a Linux kernel.

Who the hell cares? Besides RMS I suppose, but he wouldn't want to run closed source games to begin with.

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