Oh they can, as we see

No enterprise is going to want to deal with that and realistically they’re the only ones with the pockets to fight that battle.

Microsoft has been telegraphing these moves for years now tbh.

ITS THE YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP! 🥂

Yes, even M$ use Linux in it's servers

The icon itself is probably more than 8kb. It's either incorrect or literally just a desktop URL shortcut

You’ve heard good things about arch solely because you’re on Lemmy. Using arch means you’ll be dedicating about 50% of your working time towards tinkering and making it fucking work, which is fun don’t get me wrong- unless you have actual work to do.

Ubuntu is solid but a little sluggish, I’m personally an advocate for Mint as far as something you can drop a windows users in and they’ll generally figure it out.

Linux Mint. That's always the answer. It's lightweight, it's simple, it's easy, it does what you need. Even gaming. SomeOrdinaryGamers did a vidso on YT about installing it, it's pretty easy!

Given that this is in a thread about Microsoft Server, I'd recommend using Debian as the distribution to replace Microsoft Server.

If you want a desktop, I'd start with a LiveCD version and familiarise yourself with the various available distributions on offer.

The intent of a LiveCD is essentially to boot into Linux without modifying your hard-disk and keeping your existing OS unchanged.

I'll note that many of these images are available for DVD or USB. Some will offer a mechanism to store data on your existing drive without wiping anything.

With USB drives being fast and cheap, you can also often use a LiveCD to install onto an external drive.

Finally, you can install a virtual machine on your computer and use it to run your Linux tests.

Are you looking for a Windows, server, replacement or desktop replacement? Your experience will differ depending on which one you're trying to replace.

For instance, if you're trying to replace Windows active directory services with a single Linux server, might have a bad time. I'm in the process of migrating from AD to FreeIPA, PowerDNS, and isc-dhcp (or something similar for DHCP).

In the spirit of these kinds of changes, I’d love to hear some honest Linux distribution recommendations. I’m leaning towards Ubuntu because it is the most widely advertised and UX focused from my perspective. But I’ve also heard good things about Arch. Any others I should be considering?

Depends on your needs and preferences. If you want an easy Linux distribution Linux Mint is a good choice. Arch Linux is indeed good but default Arch is not that suitable for new Linux users unless you're willing to read documentation. You can go for Garuda or EndeavourOS to have Arch with easy installers and GUI.

For a distro that just works, Linux Mint.

I wouldn’t recommend arch as a first distro imo. I don’t see what the advantage would be for a newbie.

Personally I would recommend Fedora.

"Dual boot friendly" means installing Linux on its own hard drive, just so you know. If you don't do that, it's likely the next Windows update will screw up the Linux bootloader. Maybe that's gotten better, but it's what I'd recommended from past experience.

Don't move to Arch. It's a great distro don't get me wrong but it's not for someone who isn't quite familiar with Linux. You need to choose every package on your system and configure it all.... Give yourself some time to know Linux.

Ubuntu is a great distro with a great out of box experience. The company behind it though has been making some choices I don't much care for so I've moved away from them. (They created a pretty crappy new packaging system, then started making the old, reliable packaging system use the new one without user consent)

OpenSuSe Tumbleweed is a great option. It has sane defaults, and nice versions of KDE and GNOME (two popular types of desktop environments, I'd recommend KDE if you're new to Linux - it's closer to the desktop philosophy you're used to. GNOME is great too but it's very opinionated and non-traditional, not for everyone.) It's also a "rolling release" distro, which means there's no big releases it just gets updated over time and provides you with very up to date packages. It's known to be quite stable which is unusual for a rolling-release distro (like Arch, for example).

Fedora is also a great choice - just follow a guide on how to get some media codecs on it (Fedora is big on not including software that isn't 100% open, but it's easy to add the few things you'll need). But it provides a great package manager, great KDE and GNOME versions, and all around very sane and stable. This is a traditional release distro with new versions every 6 months. You'll still get security and minor software updates between releases.

Whatever you choose, I think you'd be very surprised at what you CAN play under Linux with no problem. Outside of a few games (mostly due to anti-cheat which unfortunately rules out some - but not all - of the more popular multiplayer competitive games) there's really not much that doesn't run on Linux already nowadays.

If you want something a little more fresh, I'd maybe avoid Arch as your first go and try openSUSE Tumbleweed. It strikes a balance between bleeding edge and stable (they call it "leading edge" I believe). Everything is tested before release and isn't too stale like Ubuntu/Debian flavors. I personally like KDE for the desktop environment but the installer lets you choose.

If you want to stick with Ubuntu or something similar, I'd recommend Linux Mint. I used it before switching to openSUSE.

Most options should be dual boot friendly but I'd recommend installing Windows first to avoid bootloader issues.

This is a ridiculous statement. Copilot should be opt-in, not opt-out and the setting is new.

Perfectly reasonable by the sysadmin to not have that already set.

Let me see if I understand your logic. Microshit decides to push something sneakily on servers, and the OP mentions that he just found out about it, and never once does he mention that he doesn't know what to do about it, but and you assume he doesn't know, but and choose to blast him over your assumption.

Did I miss something?

Can't see this going wrong.

"Hey Copilot, make me a domain admin"

All these discussions turn into that because WE KNOW that no one will convince MS to stop doing whatever they want, specially after investing literally billions on this kind of technology, the idea of MS "being held accountable" is something that realistically will not happen, and literally the only leverage people have against them is to just stop playing their game. Oh yeah, it's not easy, but given the fact that MS have made it so that you'll HAVE to fight the tech and relearn stuff every time they unilaterally decide to change things you might as well put effort where it will make a difference and free you from their BS

Unfortunately these services also open up security issues

Anyone who cares about this and doesn't require a Windows server is already using BSD/Linux/etc