I changed my main machine over to Linux in the beginning of April, setting it up on its own NVMe so I could keep my other drive with Windows 10 intact and dual boot when needed.
I’ve been having a blast - ricing hyprland, better workflows, great gaming experiences.
Then yesterday I realized that I hadn’t actually bothered to dual boot once since testing out the Windows entry in my systemd-boot menu when I first set it up.
Guess who just gained a 1TB drive to install more games?
I wiped out the Windows drive with no remorse. Damn, that felt good.
Goodbye Windows, you won’t be missed.
I switched my last windows device to cachy os, and chose the plasma desktop. Not only does it look pretty, but all my games work great! Windows is no longer needed, suffice it to say.
That was my experience as well. 2 hard drives, so I thought, why not dual boot? Surely, I’d need windows for some reason or another.
6 months later, I realized the same thing - I have a 1 TB drive doing nothing. I nuked it and never looked back.
Sometimes I run into some bullshit reason so I keep an old 120 GB SSD with Windows 10 in it so when I need I can plug it into my laptop.
The latest reason was, Xiaomi’s bullshit bootloader unlocker that only works on Windows.
Do you need windows running on bare metal? I’m quite happy with a VM for all my windows usage. For example the mouse I use has a config tool that only works on windows
Most of the time a VM suffice. But when it comes to authenticating programs like that bootloader unlocker, I usually run into problems. Instead of trying to fix its problems, I find this solution easier. It’s a 120 GB SSD I wouldn’t possibly use otherwise anyway, so no hurt.
I just use a windows laptop for those occasions.
Fair point
What mouse is that?
I initially set up my dual boot with 1 TB to Windows, 3 TB to CachyOS, since I planned to commit to it but wanted the space on the windows side just in case. I’ve shrunken it down to 250GB and that’s where it’s staying.
I’m this close to just wiping out the dual boot entirely, but it is convenient to have around once every few months for some odd reason or another
Do you need windows running on bare metal? I’m quite happy with a VM for all my windows usage
Clickbaited by a Lemmy post title… How far have I fallen…
Good for you, tho!
Lmao gotem
I think I had my last windows install (Win98) on bare metal in somewhere between 1999-2002.
I tried to cope with Macs until 2004 or 2006. After that Gentoo… Damn it felt good. It was a rough start, but I kinda knew it back then.
Straight from Windows to Hyperland? That’s wild!
I’ve been running Linux exclusively on my laptop for about 5 years.
I went from Manjaro, to EndeavourOS, then to Arch - using KDE, Xfce, Gnome, and eventually landing on hyprland.
There was a few games that I played that were exclusive to Windows, so I kept Win10 on my desktop PC and kept tweaking it to match my Linux setup.
But once I was done with those games and the Win10 EOL approaching, I was reminded of that Omni-Man meme, “Look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power”. My system had so many registry edits and applications/integrations just to imitate Linux, why not just go for the real deal?
Hyperland is what sold me on Linux. Would nog have switched if it wasn’t for this project
Never looked back.
I was impressed too, must people jump to gnome, KDE or xfce first. But straight to a tiling window manager. Good on you! I would never go back to a floating window manager now, wish I had discovered it straight away
How do you use it? Do you need to use hot keys constantly?
Hyprland uses mostly keybinds, though you can bind some actions to your scroll wheel.
You can definitely use something like waybar to create a custom interface that you can interact with your mouse or even touchscreen.
The beauty of using something like hyprland, sway, niri, etc. is that it is entirely up to you how your computer works, with every person pretty much getting their own custom desktop environment in the end.
I already use super+meta+arrows to move/tile windows around in xfce (modified it a bit from how it behaved in win10), but I was wondering if a tiling manager could elevate the experience.
The problem for me is that there’s nothing that properly replaces Rufus on Linux. That’s the last reason I keep Windows.
Fedora image writer. Thank me later.
This is a joke comment, right? I upvoted it because it has to be a joke.
Nope. I’ve tried to create bootable disks on Linux and, simply put, my computer does not boot from them. Rufus is 100% reliable.
Hop on board the ventoy train and become a distro hoarder
Fedora image writer
Rufus, the bootable usb creator? Ventoy should do what you want. You install it to the USB drive and then just drop the ISO files into a folder that you want to boot from, and it creates a menu for you to choose which ISO file to choose at boot time.
You can also natively do what Rufus does in Linux, if you have a disk imaging software installed. I think Ubuntu comes with gnome-disks, you right click an ISO file, click open with, select disk image writer, and select the destination device (your USB drive) and it writes the ISO file to the USB device. You should double check it actually makes it bootable, but I think it does.
Huh? In my (exclusively Mint Cinnamon) experience, it’s a right click on the iso away to get a bootable usb (not that I would need that feature on a daily basis, but you do you)
Skill issue
On pop os I use popsicle
I don’t know your use cases. For me, if it can’t be fixed with ventoy, I use the raspberry pi imager. Not the same options but I find that between both of those, I can handle everything I need
These 2 do it all. And iVentoy if you want to try pxe
I did almost the exact same thing, on the same timeline! Installed Bazzite on a second NVMe sometime in the spring, and it’s been my daily driver for months now. For the first couple months I was swapping back and forth due to some graphics driver instability, but that’s because I got a 9070XT at launch and it took a bit for the Linux drivers to get to where they needed to be. That’s pretty much sorted now though, and I can’t remember the last time I booted into Windows.
Guess who just gained a 1TB drive to install more games?
I might use mine to try other distros. Bazzite has been great so far, but I’m not sure I’m sold on immutability and I might try a non-Fedora based distro.
Nice! I’ve been split between mac for my every day stuff, and Linux for my gaming. Linux is great for gaming these days. I saw recently that Linux is approaching (or might be over now) 3% of the steam install. So it’s getting there. I think Windows 11 requiring TPM is playing a role. People don’t want to throw their shit out just because windows 11 won’t support it, so they are finally getting the kick in the pants they need to switch.
also, which distro?
Not op but Bazzite is excellent.
I would prefer to have it removed now but as an alternative you can just install games and stuff on it while windows still lives on it.
Theoretically you can boot proton games from both sides. I just have never needed to do so.
It’s a pain. Windows can’t read ext4 and NTFS does not play well with Proton gaming. You could use exfat as a common filesystem. My solution before I gave up duel booting was to put games on my NAS and access them via NFS. It was a bit slow even on a 2.5gb network, but very playable.
I’ve kinda been putting off switching to Linux until the steam OS goes to desktops more officially, since it’s pretty close to just being used as a gaming rig, but I’m running out of patience. I had Ubuntu for a while like 15 years ago.
How are the drivers for a 1060 GPU?
Bazzite has a version for legacy Nvidia GPUs (including the 10xx series). I would start there.
SteamOS, even if it releases anytime soon, most likely will not support your GPU.
I really thought that particular card would get patched in. It was so popular and a lot of machines from that timeframe aren’t win 11 supported.
Nvidia drivers are a bit more of a hassle than amd but apparently bazzite does a good job at working out of the box with nvidia.
Bazzite has been out of the box solid as my 2nd Linux attempt. Except for one little issue with refresh rates above 120 on the desktop. It has both handheld and desktop builds, comes with steam installed, GNOME or Plasma interface.
My 1080ti didn’t have any driver issues as far as I can tell.
Thanks. I was planning on just going to Mint, but I may go for Bazzite instead by the sounds of it.
This doesn’t really apply since he’s using separate drives for each OS
It seems a bit dated too, I definitely have a bitlocker disk mounted right now.
The TPM secure boot key part is true, but you can disable secure boot and use (on Windows) manage-bde to add a password based key. When you boot and it can’t load the bitlocker key from the TPM it prompts the user for a password.
I’m fairly sure there’s a way to bypass the secure boot requirement for Windows 11 too, I think I read about it but I’m not using windows so I didn’t look into it much.
I’m unfortunately chained to my Windows install - a handful of Windows-only games I play with friends, and solidworks (I use a VM for it here and there but it’s usually easier to just use Windows). When I first jumped to Linux, though, I accidentally broke my Windows install, so I was forced to get used to it for the first month or so.
Have you checked out winapps? https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps/
I think it came up during my initial search a year or so ago. For whatever reason I decided it wasn’t the way to go. I know solidworks supposedly has lots of issues running through programs like wine and proton. The games I play are only Windows-only due to things like anti-cheat bullshit.
