Digichelle6d ago

Windows 11 on my gaming PC began to act up in ways beyond repair. Out of frustration, I thought, “Fuck it. Forget clean installing Windows. Instead, let me flip the bird at Microsoft by installing Linux instead.”

Fast-forward to now, after attempting to install Bazzite and CachyOS, but failing. The Bazzite installers (both their new and legacy ones) wouldn’t even boot, no matter what switches I flipped in my BIOS settings. The CachyOS installer launched and ran, at least, but the resulting system hung at a black screen on boot. So I’m conceding defeat for now and prepping a new Windows USB installer.

I wish this wasn’t the case. I wish I could tell you all that I’m happily gaming on Linux. Alas, I simply don’t have the patience to keep banging my head against a solid lead wall.

Maybe I’ll try again sometime in the future. For now, I just wanna play! 😭

Show threadDigichelle

The thing is, I hate Windows.

I didn’t always hate Windows. I’m not sure I ever loved Windows, but at least before, I was more ambivalent about it. At least before, Windows itself had little in the way of bloatware. Used to be that if you wanted to blow away all the junk preinstalled on most Windows PCs, a clean install of the OS was the way to go.

Now the OS itself is chock full of crap, and it gets worse every day. Microsoft is determined to shove AI into every corner of it. They put it in fucking Notepad. Notepad! Then they stick ads everywhere. It doesn’t matter if I have an active Microsoft 365 subscription—they push it on me anyway, and hard. (I would whine about them pushing Edge too and not respecting your chosen default browser, but that’s basically a 90s throwback to when they did the same with Internet Explorer. That’s nothing new.)

On top of that, there’s an unforgivable amount of jank. Every time I use File Explorer, it makes me long for basically any Linux/BSD GUI file manager or even the macOS Finder. It’s unforgivably slow and unstable for such a critical component. And speaking of instability, wouldn’t it be nice if it could get through a day without the whole system slowing to a crawl and/or having random shit break? For me, the Action Center flyout (the bit that’s conceptually similar to the Control Center on Apple devices or Quick Settings on Android devices) decided to randomly stop working roughly five minutes into a fresh boot. That was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, and what finally made me snap.

The worst part is, Microsoft doesn’t seem to care about any of this. They don't seem to care whether or not people actually love Windows. All they care about is milking every last cent from it, user satisfaction be damned. I suppose this has always been true, to an extent, but it’s even worse nowadays. Their flippancy and arrogance stinks to high heaven.

Anyway, yeah, really fucking mad I couldn’t get Linux to work on my gaming PC. Goddess, I really wanna get off this demented ride. 🤬

Mar 17 at 6:37amWeb
Show threadgeraldew6d ago

@digichelle While I'm a long term Linux user at home, I'm not a gamer, so I won't presume to offer setup advice.

What your rant made me realise is that my work (big organisation) experience of Win11 has been without most of your complaints. This suggests that the "enterprise" edition(s) might be quite different.

At the EOL for Win10 there were articles about ways to get those editions, so might be something to consider.

I boringly run Xubuntu from USB drives, but as noted, not a gamer.

Show threadExit Code 16d ago
@geraldew @digichelle I'm not going to lie, it can be really finicky. If you don't mind sharing, which bazzite version did you try, and what graphics card do you have? I installed it for my partner and remember being overwhelmed by all the options. And sometimes a specific iso is just a dud. If you've tried all relevant bazzite ones and none of them work, give Pop!_OS a try. I had to use the AMD iso and then get the nvidia driver manually, but that was longish ago now.