Which is the better option + spinning a vm is possible and ltsc the only issue is I have to repirte a windows license for ltsc(and according to Microsoft ltsc was mostly designed for embedded systems) thanks for any help and I decided to post it on the linux community bcs I couldn’t find a suitable place to post it and this is related to linux but man I love linux tho and if I go with the jumpship method I have to sadly leave some games behind like roblox (it’s fine due to some moderation issues bad games etc etc but ngl its a fun game ik sober exists but i kinda dont wanna use a android emulator to play roblox i could use it since its our only option for linux and also i need to wait some time for my affinity subscription to end orrrr i try running it on bottles/wine again)
Edit: I have delete roblox due to 2 reasons one to ease deleting windows and their management
Edit 2: i might test first If I ever boot into my windows disk to see if I need it anymore
should I completely jumpship to linux when windows 10 ends support
Nah, there’s no need to wait.
I’d recommend dual booting right now so you can transition over a longer period. Also make sure your chosen distro supports dual-boot. Technically any distro can dual-boot but if it doesn’t support dual-boot you’ll have to put in some extra effort to make sure both can boot safely and easily.
need it for some apps but its possible i can switch on march 2025 a whole few months before windows 10 ends support
When I left for Linux I had to give up League of Legends. I sucked it up, & after a month, I was fine without it & it was better since I knew it wouldn’t be worth the effort even trying to install it on Linux.
i am trying to give up roblox preparing for 4 months to a year why a long time you might ask bcs am currently waiting for the 6 month trial to end.
LoL is addicting & sucks your soul out; Roblox does this while making child labor on their platform on how the games are built & monetized inside their platform. It is pretty gross.
And the 6 months is for affinity but yeah ruben sim explains what’s wrong with roblox pretty well
I’ve been a dual / triple / god knows how many OS booted since the 90’s.
Windows has gotten into bad habits lately - it’s not staying in its lane. Meaning it hasn’t respected other boot partitions for a long time, and recently there seems to be a lot of people having problems with windows nuking their linux installs.
My strong recommendation is to buy a second hard drive if you dual boot. Then windows can be “over there” - I’ve never had a problem dedicating ssds to the OS. My second recommendation is to do this now, why wait until you’re forced into something? You’ve got a year to learn Linux and get comfortable with it.
As a counterpoint, I’ve had Ubuntu’s installer and grub’s updater overwrite and break Windows’ boot files several times, but never had the opposite happen (I’ve had both destroy themselves, though). Thankfully, I know how to rebuild the necessary parts of a Windows install, so it’s never been a catastrophe, but it’s irritating to see what’s always been the source of the problems I’ve had be held up as infallible. Possibly this is a problem unique to Ubuntu - I’m happy to blame Canonical - so maybe it could be entirely sidestepped with other distros.
I took a more aggressive approach, I bought a second drive, but I just took the old one out (laptop). I made a windows recovery USB too and just stored them together. My laptop doesn’t get firmware updates through FW update so a couple times this year I have swapped the drive back in, booted up the windows partition and updated the firmware through their stupid tool.
Even on the vendor site, this laptop only has .exe files for firmware
oh yeah speaking of other drives its better since gparted doesnt let you merge it somtimes into one linux disk causing you to reinstall
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
Doesn’t hurt to try. I weened myself off Windows by using linux every single day and fiddling around for a few hours. Eventually it just clicked and i very rarely boot up Windows nowadays for apps that will not run on linux. Good luck!
I seen people erase windows since it’s useless
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 🤮
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
I would almost recommend GPU passthrough if you have a dual GPU system and can figure it out. It definitely takes a bit of tinkering, but I like the results: I now have both a Windows 10 (maybe will become 11, maybe 11 LTSC) and a Hackintosh VM. It’s not as good if you only have one graphics card, through. If you’re up for it, I used this tutorial. If it’s an AMD card, though, make sure to check my issue for any steps relating to that.
As for dual boot, get a second drive if you can. I find it helps me avoid a lot of the misery, although I very rarely actually boot up Windows anymore - just a VM if I really have to (which I do for MATLAB because my university is ridiculous and I figure if I’m going to use an evil programming language, I might as well use it in an isolated, evil environment).
I’m a fan of dual booting AND using a passthrough VM. It’s easiest to set up if your machine has two NVMe slots and you put each OS on its own drive. This way you can pass the Windows NVMe through to the VM directly.
The advantage of this configuration is that you get the convenience of not needing to reboot to run some Windows specific software, but if you need to run software that doesn’t play nice with virtualization (maybe a program has too large a performance hit with virtualization, or software you want to run doesn’t support virtualized systems, like some anticheat-enabled games), you can always reboot to your same Windows installation directly.
I can see that. I nuked my Windows partition years ago, though. Honestly, if I find a software is jerk enough to block virtualization, I don’t find it worth using.
Fair enough! I think it’s more common for games to do that, but sometimes I had trouble with software on Windows that used virtualization elements themself. I probably just didn’t properly configure HyperV settings, but I know nested virtualization can be tricky.
For me it’s also because I’m on a laptop, and my Windows VM relies on me passing through an external GPU over TB3 but my laptops’ dedicated GPU has no connection to a display, so it would be tricky to try and do GPU passthrough on the VM if I were on the go. I like being able to boot Windows on the go to edit photos in Lightroom, for example, but otherwise I’d prefer to run the Linux host and use the Windows VM only as needed.
Yeh, I think it has to do with some CPU topology crap. I have it working pretty well, luckily - I once had an old Virtualbox VM with MacOS that I needed, and I was able to boot it in my Windows VM.
With Lightroom, you’re right on that. Honestly, the state of FOSS image editors is a bit ridiculous, especially considering how good FOSS vector editors like Inkscape are these days compared to their commercial, proprietary counterparts.
Yeah there’s a good chance you’re right. Maybe something to do with memory management as well.
Long term I’ll probably end up switching back to Darktable. I used it before and honestly it is quite good, but I currently have a free license for CC from my university and the AI denoise features in LR are pretty nice compared to the classical profiled denoise from Darktable. It does also help that the drivers for my SD card reader are less finicky on Windows so it’s easier for me to quickly copy over images from my camera on there instead of Linux. Hopefully that also gets better over time!
Interesting, I’ve never heard of softwares that don’t support virtualized systems, I mean how would they… know?
I don’t know exactly, but it’s apparently a thing. Some game anti-cheat software such as Easy Anti-Cheat will give you an error message saying something along the lines of “Virtual machines are not supported.” Some are easy to bypass by just tweaking your VM config, others not so much.
In some cases they look for generic virtual hw devices, in other cases things like available cpu flags or BIOS version.
There are ways to hide it though:
https://github.com/zhaodice/qemu-anti-detection
https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/how-do-i-hide-the-fact-to-windows-that-it-runs-in-a-vm.115627/
if i ever considered gpu passthrough should i get a gt 710 alongside gtx 1650
Something like that. In my setup, I passthrough my RX 580 (my nicer card) and have my RX 550 (a dirt cheap one I got for ~$85 on sale) stay connected to the host.
You should set up dual boot now so you don’t get surprised by differences when support ends and you feel the need to switch to an ltsc sku or use Linux.
Don’t wait, prepare!
Keep a hold of windows for a little while so that if something critical comes up that you can’t figure out you have a fallback.
ok prob 4-months/1 year i will keep a hold of windows
A good project between now and then is to investigate the iot sku. It has everything “unnecessary” cut out because it’s intended to be installed on refrigerators and has a much longer support window (2032?) for the same reason.
the iot sku would be helpful on those edge cases i needed to use windows
The alternative route I took is maintaining a mac computer for when I need to “be normal”.
was my idea but macs are quite expensive
Maybe not as expensive as you think. The classic getting into the mac game choice is the 2012 mbp 12”, which can run a supported macos with opencore legacy patcher and costs <$200 with 16gb ram and an ssd.
The next best starter option is probably to make the big long leap to a first gen m1 air which can be had for ~$400 if you keep your eyes open.
Those are both expensive to me lol, but not the multiple thousands for a new computer.
ohh
Eh, you’ve already dual booted and “used linux more and more,” unless you can think of a reason why you’d really need windows, and since you’re already comfortable with linux, you might as well switch fully if you think you’re ready.
i am gonna be fully ready on april 2025 ngl
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!
Why wait? There’s no need for Windows, unless you’re running some super-specialized app. The new versions of Windows already have telemetry and privacy issues, so why just go with minimal security options that MS is selling you? You can do almost everything in Linux just as well, if not better, than Windows does at this point. Start with Linux Mint, which is the most Windows-y distribution and you should be golden.
i already use linux as a dualbooted os, Ngl i agree but i got affinity i need to wait for it to expire (it was 6 mounths)
Basically there’s your answer. Hang onto Windows until then, move your workload over as much as possible, and then jump ship.
Yep this is my plan
I use Photopea on the browser when I need something that the Gimp can’t do.
You can always consider the experience of using Linux as a “game” itself and DU ET NAO!
…no really. Do it.
prob 4-months/1 year
If you have a laptop and a desktop put it on the laptop fully rather than dual boot
Until proton came out I kept dual booting but I always ended up booting into windows because I didn’t know how to do x on Linux
When I just wiped windows completely and put it on my laptop I distro hopped for a bit but never went back
Ended up switching my PC over too after about 6 months and I no longer own any windows machines, nor feel the need to besides the odd firmware upgrade of a peripheral or something
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.
windows to go can be useful at times but man i dont wanna use win11 as my windows os ik a project called live11 tho
Can always use the Windows 10 LTSC 2021 iso to create the Windows To Go. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/download-windows-10-enterprise
Getting a proper license is gonna be impossible as a private consumer though, or well you can probably find someone selling the product keys online for cheap but that isn’t a real sales channel and it could suddenly become deactivated by Microsoft. I can find sites illegally selling them for as low as $14 when doing a quick search.The real way to get the license is to sign up for their Volume Licensing Program.
Windows Enterprise LTSC is available in the per-user and per-device model, depending on the Volume Licensing program through which it’s acquired.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/windows-licensing#windows-desktop-offerings-available-through-commercial-licensing
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/vlsc-faqs-home-pagehow about perment activation on hwid there is a program that does that
No idea to be honest, been a long time since I ran Windows at home.
