I’ve decided to turn away from Microsoft’s Windows. The latest news about making it an Agentic OS in order to jam more AI into ALLTHETHINGS!@(*&!#! really got to me. Besides recent fiascos such as forcing people to use a Microsoft Account when you install Windows, adding in the stupid Windows Recall which takes screenshots of your screen and documents, putting advertisements in your GUI and forcing data to sync with OneDrive whether you like it or not is just going too far. They think they have a captive audience, but they really do not.
Linux has come a long way and with the help of Proton from Valve you can run a large amount of stuff on a Linux distribution.
Valve has brought out the SteamDeck. A lovely little handheld device which runs a Linux variant and you can play a lot of your games in your Steam library on it. So, it’s been in Valve’s best interests to ensure a larger percentage of games run nicely on Linux. They use Proton to add some Windows emulation layers and each iteration of Proton makes more and more games run nicely. You can check out how well your favourite games run on the ProtonDB site. Now Valve has also announced the Steam Machine (sexy name or what?? 😀 ):
You can see the Steam Machine (the boxy thingy), new controller for the Steam Machine and a new VR headset coming real soon now.
This box runs a variant of Linux and will run a lot of your games “out of the box” (so to speak).
I decided to try out Fedora after seeing a lot of recommendations for it. I still have a 1Tb drive with Windows 11 in case there’s some reason I want to hurt myself again! 😀 Well, just in case I need access to something or an app I can’t get to run on Linux. I installed Fedora on my 2Tb nvme drive. It’s really nice. It was easy to install and boots in less than 20 seconds. I don’t need a Microsoft account. I can install whatever I want and it’s working with everything I need so far. I still use Firefox as my main browser. Discord works nicely. I’m playing Valheim in my Steam account, even with mods from r2modman. I installed the Heroic launcher. I logged into my Amazon, EA and GoG accounts and all my games on those platforms are listed. It turns out I have 100 games in there I’ve never even played! I subscribe to Amazon Prime and they give away games all the time. I tested out Centipede:Recharged and it worked flawlessly. It was only programmed for Windows, but still runs very well in my Fedora Linux install.
I’ve made some configuration updates such as installing ArcMenu for Gnome. It’s a nice menu to use instead of the default gnome Application menu. I’m trying out the Kitty terminal program. I use Starship to have a really nice BASH command prompt. Fedora comes with LibreOffice installed by default so I don’t need Microsoft Office which keeps pushing their subscription model. It works better than Microsoft Office applications anyway. I also stumbled across FreeTube which lets you watch YouTube videos in an application and does not track everything and report back to Google. You can download videos and subscribe to channels easily. It also uses less CPU resources than the YouTube website in a browser!
I’ve set up Github syncing and installed VS Code (sadly Microsoft.. I know!) which may encourage me to try making a game for the Spectrum Next. I started porting my Commander X16 game to the Spectrum Next but am wondering if I need to make something better looking with a deeper gameplay. Time will tell. I may just port Tomb of Anneis anyway to get the hang of programming, but NextBuild with Boriel BASIC is really good and it compiles to fast Assembly code anyway. So you get the ease of using a BASIC but a superfast game as well!
Audacity, Spotify, Cockos Reaper and VLC all work really well. Today I also installed an Internet Radio application called Shortwave which is nice to listen to while I game. Damask downloads random wallpapers every 15 minutes and changes my background to something new. I also installed SublimeText which I was using to edit text files on Windows.
All in all, I’m happy with my change to get away from Microsoft and De-Windows my computer sessions. Hopefully it goes better than Pop!OS which got stuck in a dependency loop and prevented me from installing or uninstalling any applications. I’m optimistic, though, which is a strange new thing for me! 😀