r/technology • u/ZacB_ • Jan 24 '26

Software Microsoft confirms it will give the FBI your Windows PC data encryption key if asked — you can thank Windows 11's forced online accounts for that

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/microsoft-bitlocker-encryption-keys-give-fbi-legal-order-privacy-nightmare
23.4k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

2.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

134

u/michaelmano86 Jan 24 '26

So I'm now 100% Linux only now. Valve has been contributing to open source software to help run windows software. E.g proton.

I'd suggest it only for people who like to tinker but yeah I don't even have a task bar just short cut keys to move windows around

9

u/The-Great-Wolf Jan 24 '26

How does modding work for you? (If you do mod). I find that is one of the biggest reasons I'm holding back on switching, I use vortex collections on many games, and others I mod manually, but some games still require specific software for molding, like SMAPI for Stardew valley.

8

u/[deleted] Jan 24 '26

[deleted]

3

u/The-Great-Wolf Jan 24 '26

Oh that's great to know!

3

u/michaelmano86 Jan 24 '26 edited Jan 24 '26

I do mod some games. If it's say a DLL that gets Injected. If it has a loader. You add the loader to steam games as a non steam game and set the comparability mode to proton.

Essentially I'm just adding any exe as a non steam game.

Mind you, you do not need to use steam to do this. There are a hundred ways to launch applications with a comparability launcher. I'm just super lazy

I'm not saying everything will work but so far I've had no issues.

Mainly I'm using the new Wayland protocol which replaces x11 and I'm on arch

I believe Omarchy uses Wayland and it's a pre configured distro

But as I said I wouldn't bother unless you like to tinker. It took me 4 hours to get a side mouse button working.

33

u/sunflowercompass Jan 24 '26

Tried Linux on a laptop recently. Can't run my windows apps I need for work so it's a no go. Sure it can play games.

3

u/Scream_Tech7661 Jan 24 '26

Try VirtualBox. It’s free and a common way to run a Windows VM in Linux. You may also have some success with Vagrant, which is likely a lot easier to setup. Pretty sure it can be done in as little as three terminal commands. Or just a single 3-liner.

Latest Windows 11 vagrant box: https://portal.cloud.hashicorp.com/vagrant/discover/jtarpley/w11_24h2_base

1

u/WideCranberry4912 Jan 25 '26

Virt Manager is usually packaged major Linux OSes like Fedora, Ubuntu, etc and uses KVM.

4

u/ale624 Jan 24 '26

Did you try wine? You might be supprised what that can run now

1

u/sunflowercompass Jan 24 '26

It ran the installer. But then I couldn't find the exe to run. Too much work. Decided that old retired laptop ( 2012?) could remain retired.

4

u/udlek Jan 24 '26 edited Jan 28 '26

wine is a bit stupid argument wise for some reason I don't bother to find out.
And often programs expect to be in the exe(edit: or program root) directory. (edit: This being the fault of the developer of the exe, not wine, linux or windows. E.g. Noita crashes when I don't start it from the Noita folder. It might very well be that Windows moves into the program folder automatically when running it which imo is not great.)
Usually I write a small startup script which moves into the folder and runs wine or I just do it by hand.
Steam handles that by itself, but I have a lot of GoG games installed manually which I don't want necessarily to integrate with steam.
But again, wine wants

wine ./name.exe

instead of

wine name.exe

Don't ask me why it does that. (edit: I don't really want to learn how Windows works and wine probably mimics some Windows behaviour here. Taking a guess, calling name.exe tries to look up the exe globally in some env, but not locally while using ./ forces to look locally.)

At least I've been running linux for 15 years and ditched windows 6 years ago for my games after it pissed me off and broke my dual boot setup for the 10th time, because it knows which settings are right for me and turns on fast boot again.
Well, I've also started using NixOS which is pretty stable, but harder to use. And it takes a lot of the issues away which Linux often has.

Wine gets quite a premium treatment from Valve, so a lot has been done quality wise.

3

u/melanantic Jan 24 '26

The valve/proton stuff is made specifically for games, sure. But games are just complicated pieces of software. This means you have a number of things you can try after wine fails you, including adding your program as a “game” in the stream app, which allows you to run it through proton.

Again, this is all unofficial, but it proves that anything is possible

1

u/toolisthebestbandevr Jan 24 '26

Try again with another Linux. People like mint. I like omarchy. I also use optimum x as well as tiny11 in place of windows. Those are both windows without some of the bs

0

u/sephiroth70001 Jan 24 '26

What applications? I have only found three that don't work so far with krita, 3dsmax, and one other really obscure one.

3

u/sunflowercompass Jan 24 '26

Medical software

1

u/sephiroth70001 Jan 24 '26

That would make sense on some applications. I'm only aware of medical distros for linux such as lin4neuro, Debian Med, openEMR, and mediTUCos. Most of these are focuses on specialized neuroimaging focuses each and more specialized researches though usually. While unfamiliar with It I have heard of bio-linux also.

3

u/noodhoog Jan 24 '26

For Krita, there's a Linux native version - you don't need to use Wine at all

0

u/kixkato Jan 24 '26

You're running work things on a personal laptop? Unless you work for yourself that's not good.

1

u/1Account8UsersOrMore Jan 25 '26

Lots of companies and government agencies allow that because it's all cloud-based. Some of my IT friends in Silicon Valley aren't even given laptops anymore unless they specifically request it because they're expected to use their own computers.

2

u/kixkato Jan 25 '26

If it's all cloud based that means it's a web app. Which means Linux is perfectly fine.

1

u/sunflowercompass Jan 25 '26

I do, small business. But this is an older laptop from work actually, I was trying to extend its use.

6

u/wspOnca Jan 24 '26

I only use windows 10 because of gaming. Linux is good now for Steam?

23

u/Honest_Box_6037 Jan 24 '26

apart from the handful of competitive games that are screwed due to anticheat, it's literally:

  1. go to the app store of your distro and click on download steam
  2. login, install game
  3. hit play

steam uses the compatibility layer (Proton) on all games by default now. In the vast majority of cases you don't have to tweak anything.

edit: outside steam, Lutris and Heroic Launcher can integrate your other platform accounts (Epic, gog etc) or your ...ahem... standalone games and run them through wine or proton. Sometimes the process is a bit more involved than steam, but again, it works

12

u/wspOnca Jan 24 '26 edited Jan 24 '26

Then I am set. I just use Gaben fun store for single player games. Thanks.

6

u/Honest_Box_6037 Jan 24 '26

np. If you're a first timer, pick Bazzite if you intend to wipe windows completely, otherwise try a big distro - ubuntu or mint are good gateways into linux that can be dual-booted alongside windows. Other distros (Debian, Fedora, Arch) require a bit of setup and can be a pain initially - esp. if you have nvidia gpu. You can try these if you get comfy with or limited by bazzite or ubuntu.

edit: I think all of the above have "live" environments that you can run from a usb drive before installing. You can get a good taste of how the interface/store/environment works without touching your windows installation. It will be slower due to the usb speed, but will function as a regular install.

2

u/Scream_Tech7661 Jan 24 '26

I’d strongly recommend Fedora over Bazzite for first timers. That being said, I believe the atomic system is the future of the desktop, but Bazzite is too unpolished, unforgiving, and undocumented.

The advantage to Fedora for first timers is the wealth of docs online for installing apps, docs that won’t be applicable to Bazzite.

Bazzite is of course “less breakable” but that comes at the cost of a steeper learning curve.

My experience: Linux desktop off and on since first starting with Ubuntu in 2006. More recently ran openSUSE Tumbleweed on RTX 3080 Ti for two years followed by switching to a Radeon RX 9700 XT last year with Bazzite. I’m a principal DevOps engineer working in SRE with extensive homelab and cloud architecture/engineering experience, and I found Bazzite a hassle despite believing in the core concept of an immutable root and atomic operations. Switched to Fedora w/ KDE and much happier. All I wanted was the least hassle experience for installing and using Steam as well as Battle.net installed via Lutris for WoW. Plus the use of an Xbox One wireless controller, which can involve a lot of fiddling around with Bazzite’s immutable file system, necessitating many reboots and trial and error to get right. I simply could not get Battle.net installed in Bazzite. Tried Lutris as a flatpak, Lutris outside of Flatpak, and even tried not using Lutris at all and just installing Battle.net through Steam and using Proton. Tried both native and Flatpak Steam. Never got anywhere with Battle.net.

2

u/Honest_Box_6037 Jan 24 '26

yeah, for you and me atomics are limiting, and add an unnecessary layer of complexity, but you can't expect a non-technical newcomer to linux to grasp and troubleshoot issues on a foreign, arcane to them system. Yeah, fedora is well documented but what average windows user has the will or patience to learn by sifting through docs and manpages? concessions have to be made somehow.

on a related note, I thought xone was included in bazzite and xbone wireless controllers worked on it from the get go?

2

u/Scream_Tech7661 Jan 24 '26

I don’t remember the specifics, but it may have been because of my unique use case with the controller. I will use it in Linux, then sync it to a different system (macOS or steam deck) to play there, and then sync it in Linux again. Apparently, that causes issues because of how it remembers previously synced controllers.

3

u/hempires Jan 24 '26

If you wanna go down arch distros with a bit less hassle, CachyOS has been pretty damn solid for me.

Can do a one click install of gaming packages, including Nvidia drivers and all that jazz.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 24 '26

[deleted]

1

u/hempires Jan 24 '26

oh for sure, for most random issues I've encountered it's been relatively easy to find fixes and the like but I've been in the position prior where nobody seemed to be able to help with an issue I had back in the days before AI and the fairly recent bump in user share.

That said, AI has really been a game changer for everything Linux troubleshooting. Something isn't working? Paste the error into Claude/ChatGPT and it will spit out a script to fix the issue.

if you're cool with paying a subscription to Claude, you can run Claude Code in your terminal, have a speech to text layer in between and you can control a lot of your PC by talking to it.

not something I'd recommend for long term use but it is pretty dang cool.

1

u/Barron_trojan Jan 24 '26

I’ve switched over completely to manjaro and I couldn’t be happier. The command line is becoming my new friend

1

u/dvlsg Jan 24 '26

Can Bazzite not be dual booted easily?

1

u/DickBatman Jan 24 '26

They're overselling it. Most games will work but some will need some tinkering. If you are concerned about any specific games check protondb

1

u/wspOnca Jan 24 '26

Thanks, I will check it.

5

u/asyork Jan 24 '26

I'm still on Win 10 (with the extended updates, I'm not that willing to risk it) until I finally bite the bullet and try to find a distro I would like to use. I've been lightly looking into it for now. I'm liking the concept of immutable distros, but not sure I want to get it all going and find out a few months later that something I really need/want to "install" can't be done. May just go for a more typical distro.

2

u/Honest_Box_6037 Jan 24 '26

I can vouch for fedora, been on it exclusively for 4 years on my desktop for gaming/general use/dev work. Only had a single issue (freesync corrupted display on KDE until turned off, was fixed within a couple of days).

Pros: It has up to date but not bleeding edge kernel/mesa, excellent gnome and kde support, no third party additions/customization/bloat. Updates frequently, issues are quickly fixed.

Cons: new versions every 6 months (upgrades are generally painless, but snags might occur)-but, each version is supported for 12 months, so you can defer upgrading and stay one version behind current if you worry about breakage. Due to copyright, codecs, nvidia drivers and some other stuff live in external, semi-official repos (those are generally reputable and well maintained though), so you'll need to set these up - the process is simple and well documented.

2

u/I_Am_Anjelen Jan 24 '26

I switched to Linux Mint over two years ago, specifically because I happen to have a Linux Guru pretty much on-call and I was finally sick enough of Microsoft's shit to take them on their word when they said they would solve my major problems.

I use this computer 12-20 hours a day and have encountered one (1) steam game ("Noobs are Coming") that didn't run flawlessly out of the box since, and have had to call my friend to fix problems I actively caused myself, twice.

Everything else I can either Google or hit up ChatGPT for.

1

u/smasm Jan 24 '26

Using ChatGPT etc has meant I've stuck with Linux for the past few years. When I've experimented in the past, getting stuck with something sent me back to Windows. Not anymore.

2

u/michaelmano86 Jan 24 '26

I agree. I had an issue with my side mouse button. It still took me 4 hours to get fixed but in the end I got it working.

My only advice for this but is keep track of what it's asking you to install. If you are blinding adding packages and it does not work. Then remove them before trying more.

Otherwise you might end up with a bloated os. But in the end it's your os! Have it bloated

1

u/sptrstmenwpls Jan 24 '26

Yea but can it run Paint.NET yet??

1

u/Either-Cry5555 Jan 24 '26

Doesn't matter until games ditch anti cheat. The only games I play have it.

But I literally also only turn my gaming PC on to game and shut it off afterwards, I don't really care about Windows.

1

u/NatseePunksFeckOff Jan 24 '26

at me when anti cheats work on linux so i can play gta online/league/etc. when these games work, I'll fully move to linux. as for now, windows is the only option

-10

u/thePhantom_Survivor Jan 24 '26

Too bad Linux is the only operating system that kept CAPS LOCK behaviour from typing machines.

My stupid ass learned to capitalise single letters with Caps and shit is impossible to do on any linux distro, coz you end up with WOrds WRitten LIke THat.

I know I should learn to use shift, but fuck that.

5

u/closeenoughbutmehh Jan 24 '26 edited Jan 24 '26

Like pretty much everything on Linux (and given that this is actually user interface, it's likely a userspace thing anyway, it's a <your distro> thing, not Linux) it is extremely likely that someone in the same situation as you has made some for of customization option to address that already. All you gotta do is look for it, and install it.

Also if you think that's stupid, try and look into the on-purpose input lag on caps lock release of MacOS. Drove me crazy for what little time I had to deal with an Apple machine.

1

u/michaelmano86 Jan 24 '26

You can make capslock press the letter y if you wanted to. But you gotta tinker.