Switch From Windows to Linux

erek said:
My New Year's resolution is to finally ditch Chrome, Windows and other computing crap in 2020

Time to embrace the penguin
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I can't without getting a new large hard disk because I set up a spanned volume in windows a few years back (software raid 0) and don't have anywhere to back that up to make the transition. About 12 TB of media and I don't have a couple hundred ATM for a new disk. Linux doesn't see the spanned volume out of the box and I'm too scared to tinker with it out of fear of losing it all
 
blackmomba said:
I can't without getting a new large hard disk because I set up a spanned volume in windows a few years back (software raid 0) and don't have anywhere to back that up to make the transition. About 12 TB of media and I don't have a couple hundred ATM for a new disk. Linux doesn't see the spanned volume out of the box and I'm too scared to tinker with it out of fear of losing it all
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I'd make that your number one spending priority before you lose all of your data. RAID0 is inherently unreliable.
 
blackmomba said:
I can't without getting a new large hard disk because I set up a spanned volume in windows a few years back (software raid 0) and don't have anywhere to back that up to make the transition. About 12 TB of media and I don't have a couple hundred ATM for a new disk. Linux doesn't see the spanned volume out of the box and I'm too scared to tinker with it out of fear of losing it all
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Get a cheap small SSD to mess with Linux for awhile. But make backing up your most important stuff job 1. :)
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I'd make that your number one spending priority before you lose all of your data. RAID0 is inherently unreliable.
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i lost all my data even without RAID0 :(

my WD 6TB Black w/ 128MB cache had some degraded rubber gasket like material expose the innards of the drive !!! Quickly failed on me !!
 
I don't see why Windows and Linux in these threads are always discussed as fierce "either or" choices.

They both do certain things very well.

If you want proprietary big brand software packages. Windows is the way to go. Pretty much everything exists in a version that will natively run, and run well on Windows. But it comes with some drawbacks. Bloat (both on disk footprint, and in RAM), and the fact that Microsofts business interests trump yours. Also, while better than it has ever been, security and stability are still constant issues.

Linux on the other hand offers you choice up the wazoo, as long as you are content not running big proprietary programs (Adobe, Microsofts Office, etc.) or games. Yes there are workarounds, compatibility layers, etc. that will let you run these programs and many games, but usually when they run, they run slower, less stable and have problems compared to running on Windows. Even native Linux ports tend to run like crap with worse graphics an much much lower framerates than in Windows. And again, yes this is much better than it ever has been with initiatives like DXVK and the various Wine frontends that make setting things up eaiser, but still the experience is crap compared to doing it natively on Windows.

I switched to Linux from Windows in 2001 for my regular desktop type work (Browser, image editing, office etc.) I still keep a VM around just in case for when I encounter documents that absolutely need Ms Office, etc. but I rarely open it these days. I don't need Adobe or anything like that. the open source workalikes are good enough for me, and I'd rather have the security, stability and resource friendliness of Linux. I've also become used to configuring things in Linux over the years, and now vastly prefer editing text based config files over hunting and pecking through checkboxes and dropdowns in multi-tabbed config windows.

On the flipside, I keep a Windows dual boot around just for games, because this is what it does best. Outside of downloading the occasional driver or something, I don't even browse the web in Windows. It is for games and only for games. It has wound up being great because I can keep a clean OS with minimal things installed and optimal settings for games at all time, and not have to worry about it being a multi-purpose OS.

I wish Windows 10 were trying to shove fewer things down my throat (like all the non-removable apps and Cortana which I don't want) but that is not enough of a nuisance to make me even consider switching to Linux for gaming. I have a Pascal Titan X. it gets me to 60fps at 4k in most new graphically intensive titles by a hair. I can't afford to lose even 5 fps, let alone the 20-30% or more in some cases you lose by going to Linux. When it comes to games on th ePC squeezing every last drop of performance from the stone is what matters most to me, and until and unless Linux can keep up on that front, it is not even in the running.

This combination works for me, and given how quickly and easily operating systems boot up in the NVMe era, I don't understand why so many see it as a problem. Back on hard drives this was a major pain, but today booting is a snap.
 
erek said:
i lost all my data even without RAID0 :(

my WD 6TB Black w/ 128MB cache had some degraded rubber gasket like material expose the innards of the drive !!! Quickly failed on me !!
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Yeah, that stinks.

That happened to me back in 2001, and I swore I'd never let it happen again.

Ever since then I've always run storage with some sort of redundancy, as well as regular backups of important data.

Since 2010 that has been an either FreeNAS or ZFS on Linux redundant NAS. My data has survived many hard drive failures because of it since then. When one drive fails, pop it out, and rebuild with a new one. With the right hardware, you don't even need to reboot!

For a long time I did cloud backup. I don't trust those services, so I encrypted everything local first before sending it using EncFS. Then when I last upgraded my storage server, I kept the old one around, and came up with an arrangement where I stash my server at my friends place, and he stashes his here, and we both have offsite backups.

These days all of my data is stored on my 120TB 2xRAIDz2 ZFS pool locally (ZFS Equivalent of RAID60) and the most important datasets are snapshotted nightly and synced over the internet at the block level using ZFS send/recv to my old 48TB backup server at my friends place. Over there (because it is a bit far to maintain regularly, and high performance is not important as all it will ever see are WAN speeds) everything is in one large RAIDz3 pool, with a 3 disk redundancy that has no hardware RAID equivalent.

Short of something REALLY bad happening, I have reduced the likelihood of data loss to near nil.

Now this shit has been a little pricy, and beyond what most would be willing to spend, but you don't have to go as nuts as I have. There are in-between steps that can still be very reliable and help prevent data loss.. That's the great thing about both FreeNAS and ZFS on Linux. They are very scalable to suit your needs, everything from a cheap build with spare hardware up to enterprise class servers that support an entire organization.
 
ManofGod said:
Time to embrace different problems, have fun.
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Dump a plethora of problems for the inability to use Adobe or Microsoft Office products..

Based on experience working on Windows as a platform, that doesn't actually sound like a terribly bad compromise to me. Plenty of businesses now embrace alternate cloud based suites over MS Office.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I don't see why Windows and Linux in these threads are always discussed as fierce "either or" choices.

They both do certain things very well.

If you want proprietary big brand software packages. Windows is the way to go. Pretty much everything exists in a version that will natively run, and run well on Windows. But it comes with some drawbacks. Bloat (both on disk footprint, and in RAM), and the fact that Microsofts business interests trump yours. Also, while better than it has ever been, security and stability are still constant issues.

Linux on the other hand offers you choice up the wazoo, as long as you are content not running big proprietary programs (Adobe, Microsofts Office, etc.) or games. Yes there are workarounds, compatibility layers, etc. that will let you run these programs and many games, but usually when they run, they run slower, less stable and have problems compared to running on Windows. Even native Linux ports tend to run like crap with worse graphics an much much lower framerates than in Windows. And again, yes this is much better than it ever has been with initiatives like DXVK and the various Wine frontends that make setting things up eaiser, but still the experience is crap compared to doing it natively on Windows.

I switched to Linux from Windows in 2001 for my regular desktop type work (Browser, image editing, office etc.) I still keep a VM around just in case for when I encounter documents that absolutely need Ms Office, etc. but I rarely open it these days. I don't need Adobe or anything like that. the open source workalikes are good enough for me, and I'd rather have the security, stability and resource friendliness of Linux. I've also become used to configuring things in Linux over the years, and now vastly prefer editing text based config files over hunting and pecking through checkboxes and dropdowns in multi-tabbed config windows.

On the flipside, I keep a Windows dual boot around just for games, because this is what it does best. Outside of downloading the occasional driver or something, I don't even browse the web in Windows. It is for games and only for games. It has wound up being great because I can keep a clean OS with minimal things installed and optimal settings for games at all time, and not have to worry about it being a multi-purpose OS.

I wish Windows 10 were trying to shove fewer things down my throat (like all the non-removable apps and Cortana which I don't want) but that is not enough of a nuisance to make me even consider switching to Linux for gaming. I have a Pascal Titan X. it gets me to 60fps at 4k in most new graphically intensive titles by a hair. I can't afford to lose even 5 fps, let alone the 20-30% or more in some cases you lose by going to Linux. When it comes to games on th ePC squeezing every last drop of performance from the stone is what matters most to me, and until and unless Linux can keep up on that front, it is not even in the running.

This combination works for me, and given how quickly and easily operating systems boot up in the NVMe era, I don't understand why so many see it as a problem. Back on hard drives this was a major pain, but today booting is a snap.
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And that is the whole point that is being made by me early on. The choice is in the users hands and all those choices are good. I use Windows primarily for everything at home because I want to and the OS is a good OS. Unlike what some have said, that does not make me a uninformed Windows user because I have really good applicable knowledge of all the OSes and am still learning things all the time.

Back in the Windows XP days, security was not good, at least until SP2 but, I still used it because I was always aware of what I was clicking on. I really preferred Vista SP1 64 Bit but, it was not popular and so they made Windows 7, which I found to be a deprecated version of Windows Vista, in many ways. I even tried Cedega back in the day but, they seemed to never support the games that I preferred playing and also, it seems that way even now with Proton and Lutris, even though those are good ideas. True loving of an OS is things like the Amiga and OS/2 Warp back in the day. Those things were great and fun to use.
 
ManofGod said:
And that is the whole point that is being made by me early on. The choice is in the users hands and all those choices are good. I use Windows primarily for everything at home because I want to and the OS is a good OS. Unlike what some have said, that does not make me a uninformed Windows user because I have really good applicable knowledge of all the OSes and am still learning things all the time.

Back in the Windows XP days, security was not good, at least until SP2 but, I still used it because I was always aware of what I was clicking on. I really preferred Vista SP1 64 Bit but, it was not popular and so they made Windows 7, which I found to be a deprecated version of Windows Vista, in many ways. I even tried Cedega back in the day but, they seemed to never support the games that I preferred playing and also, it seems that way even now with Proton and Lutris, even though those are good ideas. True loving of an OS is things like the Amiga and OS/2 Warp back in the day. Those things were great and fun to use.
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Except it's obvious you really don't understand how userland interacts with the kernel at all. Furthermore if someone questions your claims you respond with a simple "Windows is better because it supports stuff".

Understand that software support is no indication of a superior OS, especially when that OS performs in many cases up to 50% worse than Linux due to an ageing kernel and file system.
 
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Correct. Vendors support Windows more because it is the most popular desktop OS.

McDonald's is also the world's most popular restaurant, doesn't make the food good.
 
cybereality said:
Correct. Vendors support Windows more because it is the most popular desktop OS.

McDonald's is also the world's most popular restaurant, doesn't make the food good.
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You cannot compare one with the other. Windows support is better because it is the most popular OS. Also, it is a good OS and in form or another, it mostly has been.

Edit: Oh, and if someone attempts to compare Linux to a luxury car brand, like Mercedes, let it be known that they make unreliable money pits for cars. Or compare it to gourmet food, which is usually just overpriced garbage sold at at high price because it looks better than it is.
 
ManofGod said:
You cannot compare one with the other. Windows support is better because it is the most popular OS. Also, it is a good OS and in form or another, it mostly has been.

Edit: Oh, and if someone attempts to compare Linux to a luxury car brand, like Mercedes, let it be known that they make unreliable money pits for cars. Or compare it to gourmet food, which is usually just overpriced garbage sold at at high price because it looks better than it is.
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Sounds like blind love.. ;)
 
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