I already did this 2 years ago and I still don’t miss Windows. I want my OS to just work, and that means not having big companies intentionally blocking updates and bullying consumers just so they can profit from artificially induced OEM license sales. It’s pretty wild how quickly Linux has fit the bill in recent years, and how Windows no longer does.
Only hurdle on Linux right now is the transition from X11 to Wayland. Proton doesn’t have good support for it yet so I occasionally have to load an X11 session for some games to run. I can imagine that getting worked out eventually.
Microsoft could have simply dropped official support for older machines and then literally done nothing and that would have still been better than what they did. At least then those machines would still receive security updates beyond next year, provided they could still run the latest version of Windows.
For the record, if the arbitrary CPU block is bypassed, then it’s possible to install Windows 11 23H2 on a Prescott era Pentium 4 or Athlon 64. The true requirements did change for 24H2, but even then you can install that on a 1st gen Intel or a Bulldozer era AMD system. Microsoft can go suck a dick.
I’ll also add the audio stack in Linux at the moment is a hot mess. I’m currently trying to resolve a problem that seems to exclusively plague the rear mic input on my system and nothing else and this shit is fucking obtuse. It’s ridiculous how many competing audio frameworks there currently are.
There are only 2 current audio frameworks, right? PipeWire (most current, best compatibility from what I’ve seen) and PulseAudio (dominant for a long time but now being replaced by PipeWire)
Sort of kind of. The actual drivers are still ALSA which both pulse and pipewire build on top of. Then there’s JACK which is older but basically tried to be Pipewire before Pipewire. Lastly there’s WirePlumber which is an automation/scripting thing built on top of Pipewire. So depending on what you’re doing you end up having to wrangle with a minimum of Pipewire and ALSA, and might also need to mess with WirePlumber and Pulse (as Pipewire exposes a Pulse API).
Just install wireplumber, plus the pipewire modules for alsa and pulseaudio (pipewire-alsa and pipewire-pulse, respectively). These 3 will run any audio application.
Wine (which Proton is based on) has had support for Wayland since version 9.0 (about half a year old). Admittedly it’s not even enabled by default, but it works and I’ve played Path Of Exile through wine’s Wayland backend. There’s talks to ship the Wayland driver along X11, but not enabled by default yet, since there’s still some issues before they consider it on par with X11 backend. Proton might take longer, since I don’t think Valve will enable that before they add Wayland support for the Steam client.
My PC is getting old and I might replace it in about a year whenever I can get an OK GPU for a reasonable amount of money again.
I’ve built my own PCs since the late 90’s and this will be the first time I will not install Windows on a computer I built. Get fucked Microsoft.
I already did this 2 years ago and I still don’t miss Windows. I want my OS to just work, and that means not having big companies intentionally blocking updates and bullying consumers just so they can profit from artificially induced OEM license sales. It’s pretty wild how quickly Linux has fit the bill in recent years, and how Windows no longer does.
Only hurdle on Linux right now is the transition from X11 to Wayland. Proton doesn’t have good support for it yet so I occasionally have to load an X11 session for some games to run. I can imagine that getting worked out eventually.
Microsoft could have simply dropped official support for older machines and then literally done nothing and that would have still been better than what they did. At least then those machines would still receive security updates beyond next year, provided they could still run the latest version of Windows.
For the record, if the arbitrary CPU block is bypassed, then it’s possible to install Windows 11 23H2 on a Prescott era Pentium 4 or Athlon 64. The true requirements did change for 24H2, but even then you can install that on a 1st gen Intel or a Bulldozer era AMD system. Microsoft can go suck a dick.
I’ll also add the audio stack in Linux at the moment is a hot mess. I’m currently trying to resolve a problem that seems to exclusively plague the rear mic input on my system and nothing else and this shit is fucking obtuse. It’s ridiculous how many competing audio frameworks there currently are.
There are only 2 current audio frameworks, right? PipeWire (most current, best compatibility from what I’ve seen) and PulseAudio (dominant for a long time but now being replaced by PipeWire)
Sort of kind of. The actual drivers are still ALSA which both pulse and pipewire build on top of. Then there’s JACK which is older but basically tried to be Pipewire before Pipewire. Lastly there’s WirePlumber which is an automation/scripting thing built on top of Pipewire. So depending on what you’re doing you end up having to wrangle with a minimum of Pipewire and ALSA, and might also need to mess with WirePlumber and Pulse (as Pipewire exposes a Pulse API).
Just install wireplumber, plus the pipewire modules for alsa and pulseaudio (pipewire-alsa and pipewire-pulse, respectively). These 3 will run any audio application.
Wine (which Proton is based on) has had support for Wayland since version 9.0 (about half a year old). Admittedly it’s not even enabled by default, but it works and I’ve played Path Of Exile through wine’s Wayland backend. There’s talks to ship the Wayland driver along X11, but not enabled by default yet, since there’s still some issues before they consider it on par with X11 backend. Proton might take longer, since I don’t think Valve will enable that before they add Wayland support for the Steam client.