October is going to be a great month to get a cheap second hand computer.
It’s online corps offload computers but there will be a delay and many will just have the extended windows 10 supports. So I’d give it another year.
Is that Sam Reich in a penguin suit!?
It’s one new PC, Michael. How much could it cost? $10?
What’s 10 dollars? The people saying this are too rich to understand poor numbers. They probably think in terms of “a new pc costs less than an hour at my favorite spa, people are complaining too much”.
Arrested Development tv show. Pretty funny. The family fortune started with the dad opening a banana stand in his youth.
ALT: 2 panels. 1st panel- Rich mom from Arrested Development sitcom, holding a cup, opulent home, saying “I mean it’s one banana, Michael. How much could it cost? Ten dollars?”
2nd panel- Michael sitting back, head on hand saying “you’ve never actually stepped foot in a supermarket, have you?”
It’s a joke from a tv show. The rich out of touch lady thinks bananas “only cost” ten dollars.
Trade in their PCs to who? Fucking Aquaman?
That excellent gag is how I discovered hbomberguy some years ago
Hot take from an IT guy: save your important data, make a plain vanilla W11 boot USB (nothing fancy, no Rufus tricks), wipe your hard drive to zeroes, and install W11 like normal. I’ve reimaged a ton of older PCs and literally never seen it not work. My 10 year old Optiplex, supposedly ineligible for W11, runs W11 just fine.
Microsoft might someday break it, sure. That’s not new. Microsoft products were always, in practice, available to us at Microsoft’s pleasure. This is the same company that allows massgrave to exist on github because they’d rather we pirate MS Office than allow LibreOffice any oxygen. We’ll probably be fine.
DoN’t YOu gUyS hAvE TPM? Hilarious.
Translation: “Install Linux.”
I really want to put Linux on my gaming PC, but I’m doubtful I can get my Rift S working on there. :/
Apparently there is an openxr driver for it, though, so I suppose I should at least give it a shot.
There’s absolutely no way I’m going to win11, though.
I got my meta quest 2 working on Linux, so you should definitely just try :)
I did read that there were some input issues with the d-pads not working, but that was also 2 years ago so it could’ve been fixed by now.
So you’re right, I should!
Pretty sure I’ve got an old drive around somewhere that I could toss it on.
Your best shot is with Monado, which supports the Rift S: https://monado.freedesktop.org/
I only have an Index, so I can’t speak for how well it works or how easy it is to setup.
Nobara or Pop! OS would be good choices.
Yeah, VR is still catching up, but I feel like (dual) booting to Win 10 just for specific purposes would greatly reduce the risk.
I’d just be scared of windows trying to clobber my nix partition.
I would, except there’s always some software or some feature missing. And there’s always the FOSS app that “might” meet “some” aspects of what native software does but it’s almost always never “native” support.
Sure, I know I can play MOST games on Linux, but I know for a fact they’ll launch on windows.
Or things like, sure, I know that my corsair Hardware MIGHT be controlled by signal RGB, but what about controlling the pump in my AIO? Or the sound levels on ny headset? Or the DPI in my mouse?
Then you have things like drivers. I’m not using any Nvidia GPUs right now, but the nvidia support for Linux is atrocious and you lose access to things like RTX-HDR and RTX Voice, and hell, even in AMD you lose access to certain features like AMFM2.
Then the software, not only does things like Adobe or Office just don’t exist, the FOSS solutions are not industry standard, so sure, I can learn to use LibreOffice, but that’s worth absolutely nothing when you apply for a corporate job and they expect you to know how to use outlook as a bare minimum, hell, even the Google office suite is being adopted faster… Ah, but if the software is available there’s still a chance it doesn’t work because it’s missing a dependency or something and you have to ask people to use the terminal and… Sigh
All in all, it’s just behind in many ways, sure, for some people it’s ok, and for laptops I’d think is mostly ok, great even. But I know I could deal with Linux, and I don’t want to troubleshoot a whole PC to play a game when I already spend the whole day dealing with solving issues or servers or services on my job.
I’m rooting for Steam OS to release to desktops because my living room PC is LITERALLY just for gaming, so that “could” work nicely.
Hardware MIGHT be controlled by signal RGB
OpenRGB to the rescue: https://flathub.org/apps/org.openrgb.OpenRGB
controlling the pump in my AIO?
What do you need to control about your pump? I sure hope it works without OS support.
Or the sound levels on ny headset?
Move the volume slider up or down?
Or the DPI in my mouse?
Save them to the mouse as profile if it can or use Piper: https://flathub.org/apps/org.freedesktop.Piper
in AMD you lose access to certain features like AMFM2
FSR Frame Gen works just fine, not sure why you need fake frames in more games.
the FOSS solutions are not industry standard, so sure, I can learn to use LibreOffice, but that’s worth absolutely nothing when you apply for a corporate job and they expect you to know how to use outlook as a bare minimum
There is also OnlyOffice and online MS Office. Not sure what you need to know about Outlook to open it and use your eyes to read the mails.
even the Google office suite is being adopted faster
Good news, it runs in a browser and works on every OS!
Ah, but if the software is available there’s still a chance it doesn’t work because it’s missing a dependency or something and you have to ask people to use the terminal and… Sigh
I have not fixed dependencies issue on Linux since the early 2000s. Flatpaks are your friend https://flathub.org/ .
All in all, it’s just behind in many ways, sure, for some people it’s ok, and for laptops I’d think is mostly ok, great even.
I run it on my high end PC and I disagree. It’s ahead in many ways.
- The graphics drivers are included and don’t need any bloated software to work
- It has a banger OpenGL driver, which makes games like Minecraft run significantly faster.
- It has a very active community for game support for games where the developer does not care
- It translates older DirectX versions to Vulkan automatically, resulting in a performance uplift and more stability. People on Windows are installing DXVK just so older games work. Look up DXVK in the Steam forums.
- It downloads shader caches from Valve, preventing shader stutter in games that don’t do it on their own
That list could go on for a while and it’s only for gaming.
I haven’t even gone into installation and not having to run ShutUp10 every time just to make the OS usable. Or how KDE is so much cleaner than Windows. Or how I don’t have any ads in my start menu, don’t have to force download Candy Crush on first boot, don’t have pre-installed apps I can’t remove, don’t have to block my own OS in its firewall to get rid of telemetry, don’t have to be told that I need to upgrade to Windows 11 constantly.
For work: Docker just works, complex networking setups are not a pain to setup, creating VMs is so much easier and has so many more features. VPN is so seamlessly setup. I can read almost every file system on the planet and use ROCm without jumping through hoops. Not to mention I don’t get Copilot and Recall shoved down my throat.
Are there issues on Linux? Sure, lots of them. But if I find them I can tell somebody about it and don’t have to deal with them for centuries.
I’m rooting for Steam OS to release to desktops because my living room PC is LITERALLY just for gaming, so that “could” work nicely.
SteamOS is just a modern Linux distro with Steam pre-installed and in autostart. If stuff works there, it works on regular Linux just as well.
Bazzite achieves the same thing right now: https://bazzite.gg/
Excellent breakdown. Well done!
And on top of all that, the article is specifically about Microsoft urging people to get rid of old hardware, which I take to mean NOT current-gen, bleeding-edge gaming hardware. So my suggestion was about not being forced to upgrade your hardware to keep having a usable computer.
Linux
Ah, the old Ben Shapiro logic. If you don’t want your house that’s at risk of flooding, don’t worry, simply sell it! Someone’s bound to give you a good price for it!
Sell it to the merpeople, they’ll be happy to have a proper house for once!
Yes. The totaly real PC trade-in market…
Just in case anyone reading doenst know - the free tool Rufus can write a Win 11 ISO to your usb drive md remove all the silly soft requirements.
Windows updates don’t work correctly a lot of the time if you’ve bypassed the requirements. My predecessor at work installed 11 on some ancient systems and it’s been a hassle.
Or better yet, windows 10 LTSC. Which will be supported for another 2 years. 4 if you subsequently switch the product key to the IOT LTSC version.
The hurdles windows users are willing to put up with is nothing less than amazing. That’s not a good thing.
Oh, I already have Linux on my laptop. It’s my desktop that still has some blockers preventing a full Linux transition.
Primarily the Pimax headset. Once I get a suitable replacement, I’ll actually be able to start testing and transferring stuff.Or look at it the other way: they hate Linux so much they’d rather deal with that than deal with Linux.
I would love to learn and deal with Linux, unfortunately the software I need for work only supports Mac or Win
Yeah, but will updates work? And even if they do, what’s stopping Microsoft in disabling them somehow?
Nowadays if you want to have usable Windows installation you need to use a bunch of 3rd party scripts that might break on next update. Learning Linux is easier than this shit.
I can’t wait for someone to ask me how to solve some shit in Windows, and me saying that I don’t have patience for this crap.
updates work.
MS won’t disable them - they want people to move to Windows 11.
Congrats on migrating to Linux! it’s what i’ve been pushing friends and family towards for decades, and thankfully Ubuntu is in a position right now to be a fine desktop OS, esp for the average user who lives in a web browser.
I am using Debian stable, since I no longer care about having latest stuff and the whole Debian-like ecosystem is what I am the most familiar with. As for Ubuntu I never had good experience with it, with random crashes all the time last time I used it (about 10-12 years ago), and when I tried it last year, I encountered random crashes in GNOME apps just after finishing setup.
Linux Mint (regular or LMDE) is what I’d probably install on other people computers though. Literally never had problems with it (used it about 10 years ago on a netbook).
sure sounds like you have some funny hardware configurations with all these issues you have across OSes.
👍
Microsoft is getting billions for AI datacenters (they’re now turning back on) why do you buy me a fucking new PC Microsoft
Ok, write me a check for a new one.
A testament to the shit development standards at MS. An OS literally should not in a million years be this resource inefficient, especially out of the box.
Always wandering why it isn’ t possible for Microsoft to maintain their version and update all along. Linux can do it, Android can do it. I’ m not sure about Apple. I switched to Linux years ago and I’m still most satisfied about my choice. My current laptop is from 2009 and can still go on for years. That is what you call sustainability
Sustainable products are not profitable products. Look at what happened to Tupperware.
True. But the real problem is that we want too much profit and the companies are getting to big. My guess is that if the tax plans are changed and we settle for less money, it will be much better for many things. It should be added that prices would then also have to be much lower