The longer you wait, the more distros we'll have to argue about when you ask for suggestions
Jump ship. Just know, windows will pull you back in, especially if you work in corporate/office work. I was doing my work from home on Linux for two years straight, then my work mandated windows 11 for everyone. It’s been a nightmare. I just want my xfce!
Using Rufus (https://rufus.ie/en/) and a fast USB thumbdrive, such as Kingston DataTraveler Max - https://www.storagereview.com/review/kingston-datatraveler-max-review, you can make a "Windows To Go" installation.
Now you have a Windows install that you can boot directly from the thumbdrive when the need arise.
Perfect for booting up if your bios can't updated directly from the usb drive and forces you into Windows, or to run that one software you can't replace just yet and that refuses your attempts to run with wine.
Just make sure that it's an ssd usb thumbdrive or it's gonna be too slow to be any use.
Jump ship. If you can make do without windows, do so. It takes away so much of the frustration, and you just learn to let it go when devs won't make linux-compatible binaries: after all, it's basically them telling you they need to be able to spy on you, so why use their app?
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
I wish I could switch to Linux but sadly I can't (one of the main things I use a computer for won't work on Linux) so I'll be using windows 10 beyond eol and forever into the foreseeable future and I don't see native instruments making a Linux version any time soon. I email them at least once a year asking about it in the hope they one day fucking do it!
Ltsc is possible it is for embedded systems tho
I have no idea what LTSC is but I shall have a bit of a search around after work to see if it is something I can benefit from. Thank you :)
yw but ltsc you can use windows till 2034 or smth
Cool, thank you. I may try a Linux distro again soon and try to get Traktor DJ working but the last time I tried (admittedly quite a few years ago) the audio latency was far too high for DJing with so I had to return to windows.
I am aware of mixxx as a DJ software and I periodically try it out to see how it is advancing (my last try being a few months ago) but it is just not there yet for me. Hopefully one day!
i never used or heard of Traktor DJ but i was getting affinity working on wine (compile the custom wine version) it was way too buggy and no opencl hardware acceleration support.
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(proton and native 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.
My recommendation would be dual-boot until you get everything you need working and have had everything working for a month or two under Linux. Then do a full image backup of the Windows partitions with the Windows backup utility and keep it around just in case. After that spin-up a Windows VM for any edge cases you might come across and enjoy Linux.
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
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)
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.
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
If you switch to single boot Linux you can always install Windows in a virtual machine later in a pinch.
Yeah I can spin up some ltsc vm without gpu acceleration sadly I don't want win11 no thanks 🤮
dual boot, you never know when will you be forced to use windows again
- and for those who suggest VM, there are situations where its a hassle to make thing work or its impossible all together ( updating bios is one of those )
I think you can update your bios using linux there is a software for it
not necessarily, for example some laptop oems do not use the standard format and you cant just extract them from the exe so you have to use windows
~~most~~ all BIOS updates I made needed a bootable USB made from an image or had to be started from within the old BIOS setup.
For me you need to run a file on windows and convert it to a flash file you can put it on the bios
I chose the dual boot option when I decided to switch a year ago, and I found myself rarely using Windows eventhough it is installed on my laptop. I might have only boot it up 3-4 times since the switch, for GFN not working properly with ALT when running through browser. The dual boot just make my disk partition needlessly complicated, and I'm going to reinstall it yet again, without Windows.
I feel you. I installed dual boot and basically just never bothered to boot Windows again because the stuff I need works.
I find my self only using windows for roblox and use affinity for 6 months till March 2025 (and roblox is easy to quit it has some issues with mods and stuff)
I tried dual-booting Win10 and Arch for a few months. It was problematic.
I had to set the clock every time I switched because one expected the hardware clock to use UTC time and the other expected local time.
NTFS on Linux is not good. The driver works, but there are fundamental differences between NTFS and Unix-like filesystems that makes cooperation difficult (e.g. NTFS uses ACLs instead of the user/group ownership and user/group/others permissions of Unix). Windows also places additional restrictions on the filesystem (e.g. NTFS supports file names that contain :
, Windows doesn't) that can completely bork the volume if violated.
But the worst offender, and what made me nuke Windows entirely, is Windows Update. It completely fucked up the boot partition, deleted the bootloader, then died and left Windows unusable.
These are all issues that can be solved, if you know how to solve them. My advice is to go cold turkey and delete Windows from your life.
Ohh yeah the time thing is soo annoying but solvable and idk if windows updates delete bootloaders on separate disks
When I ran dual boot I kept windows on a separate disk to my mint install. I unplugged the mint disk when ever I wanted to boot windows.
Still had the clock issue of course.
Better just start dual booting. If you begin to use Windows less and less, you can throw away that Windows partition and expand your Linux partition.
You need to plan ahead for that, and executing it is risky for data loss.
Alr I was planning to expand it with raid (i have 2 ssds one with windows and one with linux) I got help with raid in another post tho and windows I only see my self using it for roblox and affinity suite 6 month free trial
The way I'm handling it is I currently dual boot with 2 separate hard drives. Linux is primary boot. there is no bootloader, I used the bios boot selector to load windows. Windows typically fucks up boot loaders or shared partitions so I have neither. I hope to have found a good distro that does everything I need by the time windows dies,
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