It’s worth acknowledging the real challenges raised in this thread: desktop Linux still has rough edges for some use cases, hardware support isn’t always perfect, and niche professional software may lack native support or require workarounds. But these obstacles are not intrinsic technical limitations so much as ecosystem and investment gaps, areas where community projects, standards efforts, and wider adoption could drive improvement without sacrificing freedom.
Viewed through the lens of digital autonomy and citizenship, the question isn’t simply “Is Linux perfect?” but rather: Do we want our fundamental computing environment to be ultimately under our control, or controlled by private interests with their own incentives?
> Viewed through the lens of digital autonomy and citizenship, the question isn’t simply “Is Linux perfect?” but rather: Do we want our fundamental computing environment to be ultimately under our control, or controlled by private interests with their own incentives?
As a user of Linux as my main desktop OS for more than 20 years, a user of Linux far longer than that, and a promoter of FOSS before that was a term, this has always been the question. Most of the world does not care. I suspect that is more true today than ever before. There are now adults that grew up in the age of social media that have no idea how local computing works.
Not to be negative but the "obstacles" to adopting Linux were never actually obstacles most of the time. Fifteen years ago my mother started using Linux as her main OS with no training. I gave her the login information, but never had a chance to show her how to use it, and she just figured it out on her own. Everything just worked, including exchanging MS Office documents for work.
> Most of the world does not care. I suspect that is more true today than ever before. There are now adults that grew up in the age of social media that have no idea how local computing works.
Yep. I was amazed when I was talking to a friend who's a bit younger (late 20s) and told him about a fangame you could just download from a website (Dr Robotnik's Ring Racers, for the record) and he was skeptical and concerned at the idea of just downloading and running an executable from somewhere on the internet.
I suspect most adults these days are like this; their computing experience is limited to the web browser and large official corporate-run software repositories e.g. app stores and Steam. Which ironically means they would do just fine on Linux, but there's also no incentive for them to switch off Windows/MacOS.
To them, Microsoft and Apple having control of their files and automatically backing up their home directory to Azure/iCloud is a feature, not a problem.
> Ironically, being concerned and skeptical about running random executables from the internet is a good idea in general.
I agree you shouldn't run random executables, but the key word is "random". In this case, Ring Racers is a relatively established and somewhat well-known game, plus it's open-source.
It doesn't guarantee it's not harmful of course, but ultimately for someone with the mindset of "I should never run any programs that aren't preapproved by a big corporation", they may as well just stick to Windows/MacOS or mobile devices where this is built into the ecosystem.
Open-source only matters if you have the time/skill/willingness to download said source (and any dependencies') and compile it.
Otherwise you're still running a random binary and there's no telling whether the source is malicious or whether the binary was even built with the published source.
It's no guarantee, but it's a positive indicator of trustworthiness if a codebase is open source.
I don't have hard numbers on this, but in my experience it's pretty rare for an open source codebase to contain malware. Few malicious actors are bold enough to publish the source of their malware. The exception that springs to mind is source-based supply chain attacks, such as publishing malicious Python code to Python's pip package-manager.
You have a valid point that a binary might not correspond to the supposed source code, but I think this is quite uncommon.
> It's no guarantee, but it's a positive indicator of trustworthiness if a codebase is open source.
It's something we as techies like to believe due to solidarity or belief in the greater good, but I'm not sure it's actually justified? It would only work if there's a sizeable, technically-inclined userbase of the project so that someone is likely to have audited the code.
If you're malicious, you can still release malicious software with an open-source cover (ideally without the source including the malicious part - but even then, you can coast just fine until someone comes along and actually checks said source). If you're anonymous there is little actual downside of detection, you can just try again under a different project.
Remember that the xz-utils backdoor was only discovered because they fucked up and caused a slowdown and not due to an unprompted audit.
> It would only work if there's a sizeable, technically-inclined userbase of the project so that someone is likely to have audited the code.
Not really. There's a long history of seemingly credible closed-source codebases turning out to have concealed malicious functionality, such as smart TVs spying on user activity, or the 'dieselgate' scandal, or the Sony rootkit. This kind of thing is extremely rare in Free and Open Source software. The creators don't want to run the risk of someone stumbling across the plain-as-day source code of malicious functionality. Open source software also generally makes it easy to remove malicious functionality, or even to create an ongoing fork project for this purpose. (The VSCodium project does this, roughly speaking. [0])
Firefox's telemetry is one of the more high-profile examples of unwanted behaviour in Free and Open Source software, and that probably doesn't even really count as malware.
> If you're malicious, you can still release malicious software with an open-source cover (ideally without the source including the malicious part - but even then, you can coast just fine until someone comes along and actually checks said source).
I already acknowledged this is possible, you don't need to spell it out. Again I don't have hard numbers, but it seems to me that in practice this is quite rare compared to malicious closed-source software of the 'ordinary' kind.
A good example of this was SourceForge injecting adware into binaries. [1]
> Remember that the xz-utils backdoor was only discovered because they fucked up and caused a slowdown and not due to an unprompted audit.
Right, that was a supply chain attack. They seem to be increasingly common, unfortunately.
Of course this is true. But you can keep going down the rabbit hole. How do you know there isn't a backdoor hidden in the source code? How do you know there isn't a compromised dependency, maybe intentionally?
Ultimately there needs to be trust at some point because nobody is realistically going to do a detailed security analysis of the source code of everything they install. We do this all the time as software developers; why do I trust that `pip install SQLAlchemy==2.0.45` isn't going to install a cryptominer on my system? It's certainly not because I've inspected the source code, it's because there's a web of trust in the ecosystem (well-known package, lots of downloads, if there were malware someone would have likely noticed before me).
> still running a random binary
Again "random" here is untrue, there's nothing random about it. You're running a binary which is published by the maintainers of some software. You're deciding how much you trust those maintainers (and their binary publishing processes, and whoever is hosting their binary).
The problem is that on Windows or your typical Linux distro "how much you trust" needs to be "with full access to all of the information on my computer, including any online accounts I access through that computer". This is very much unlike Android, for example, where all apps are sandboxed by default.
That's a pretty high bar, I don't blame your friend at all for being skeptical.
Right, which goes back to the main point; "total control of your computing environment" fundamentally means that you are responsible for figuring out which applications to trust, based on your own choice of heuristics (FOSS? # of downloads/Github stars? Project age? Reputation of maintainers and file host? etc...) Many, maybe most people don't actually want to do this, and would much rather outsource that determination of trust to Microsoft/Google/Apple.
> Right, which goes back to the main point; "total control of your computing environment" fundamentally means that you are responsible for figuring out which applications to trust, based on your own choice of heuristics
Hard disagree. Total control of my computing environment would be to allow an application access to my documents, a space to save a configuration, perhaps my Videos folder or even certain files in that folder. Or conversely, not.
At the moment, none of the desktops give me the ability to set a level of trust for an application. I can't execute Dr. Robotniks Ring Run (or whatever the example was) and be able to specify what it can, or cannot access. There may be a request for permission at a system level access, but that could be explained away as usually is for iApps and Android when requesting some scary sounding permission groups.
And it also doesn't stop malware from accessing my documents. Sometimes my Mac asks if an application is allowed to access Documents, but it isn't consistent.
> they are hidden away inside the settings, and they are not granular.
The switches default to off though, with a prompt on first attempt at accessing the protected resource.
The problem is that they're leaky like a sieve and the permission model and inheritance works is unclear (I once had the Terminal app ask me for permission - does it now mean anything I run from the terminal automatically inherits it - and so on).
> Open-source only matters if you have the time/skill/willingness to download said source (and any dependencies') and compile it.
Not really. The fact that an application is open-source means its originator can't rug-pull its users at some random future date (as so often happens with closed-source programs). End users don't need to compile the source for that to be true.
> Otherwise you're still running a random binary and there's no telling whether the source is malicious or whether the binary was even built with the published source.
This is also not true in general. Most open-source programs are available from an established URL, for example a Github archive with an appropriate track record. And the risks of downloading and running a closed-source app are much the same.
The kind of rug-pulling you describe only works if the software implements an online licensing check/DRM, and either way has nothing to do with security against malicious behavior.
> Github archive with an appropriate track record
How do you judge the "track record"? Github stars can be bought. Marketing can be used to inflate legitimate usage of a program before introducing the malicious behavior.
> the risks of downloading and running a closed-source app are much the same
But that's my point - open-source doesn't really change the equation there unless you are actually auditing the source and building & running said source. If you're just relying on a binary download you're no better than downloading proprietary software in binary form.
> The kind of rug-pulling you describe only works if the software implements an online licensing check/DRM, and either way has nothing to do with security against malicious behavior.
My point was that an open-source program cannot rug-pull its users without the obvious remedy of forking the project and removing the offending code. Open-source: commonly seen. Closed-source: not possible and often illegal.
For both options, you have to trust the source, which makes that a non-issue. You can checksum the Linux kernel to satisfy yourself that it came from a trusted source. You can checksum the Windows kernel to satisfy yourself that you're about to be screwed.
> But that's my point - open-source doesn't really change the equation there unless you are actually auditing the source and building & running said source.
In the open-source world, knowing how computers work is essential. In the closed-source world, knowing how computers work is somewhere between pointless and illegal. This is how open-source "changes the equation."
Modifying open-source code is welcome and accepted. Modifying closed-source code breaks the law. Take your pick.
As a threat model, it's a little outmoded. With the browser being an application platform, you do this every time you click a link. There's something sinister about considering a local open source application as dangerous but a closed source "cloud" app as safe.
To be fair, downloading and running random executables from the internet is a genuinely terrible security model when the OS (like Windows, Linux, or (to a lesser extent) MacOS) does nothing to prevent it from doing anything you can do.
> It's quite concerning that you frame this as a bad idea.
Downloading and executing other people's compiled software is how things worked for many decades. It's only been in recent years that people have come to believe that Google/Microsoft/Apple should be the final authorities on which executables are safe to run.
> It's only been in recent years that people have come to believe that Google/Microsoft/Apple should be the final authorities on which executables are safe to run.
I mean, the OS package repositories at least have some vetting and processes behind them, as opposed to a random website found online - so there's surely middle ground there!
You don't need to give everything up to a few big corpos to have at least a bit of a sense of security - I personally trust the Debian maintainers quite a bit due to their track record, short of bad actors infiltrating the community or accounts getting compromised.
> Most of the world does not care. I suspect that is more true today than ever before
100% of the people I have spoken with, from uber drivers to grandparents, have all noticed, hated, and are sympathetic to the fight against the rental/subscription economy. In 2025 I don't think I've had a single person defend the status quo because they all know what's coming.
I think Arduino and RPi demonstrate that there is still a relatively strong attraction for tinkering. In the past, freedom meant a lot to tinkerers. My sense is that this is not so true today. Perhaps I am wrong. It may be that few people respect licensing enough to care. As long as somebody (not necessarily the producer) has made a youtube video of how to hack something, that's good enough.
This was probably always true. Replace youtube with Byte magazine and it was probably the same 45 years ago. I wonder if the percentage of true FOSS adherents has changed much. It would be a bit of a paradox if the percent of FOSS software has exploded and the percent of FOSS adherents has declined.
Note: I mean "adherent" to mean something different than "user".
> I think Arduino and RPi demonstrate that there is still a relatively strong attraction for tinkering
Raspberry Pi is an interesting example because it is constantly criticized by people who complain about the closed source blobs, the non-open schematics, and other choices that don’t appease the purists.
Yet it does a great job at letting users do what they want to do with it, which is get to using it. It’s more accessible than the open counterparts, more available, has more guides, and has more accessories.
The situation has a lot of parallels to why people use Windows instead of seeking alternatives: It’s accessible, easy, and they can focus on doing what they want with the computer.
The problems with SBCs are primarily software. I have a ton of SBCs, mostly Raspberry Pis and OrangePis.
OrangePi boards are great. Zero is almost stamp sized, plus and pro has tons of options and on-board NVMe + fast-ish eMMC with great official cases, whatnot.
But, guess what? The OS is bad. I mean, unpatched, mishmashed, secured as an open door bad.
You get an OS installation which drops you to root terminal automatically on terminal output. There are many services which you don't need on board. There's an image, not an installer, and all repositories look to Chinese servers.
Armbian is not a good solution, because it's not designed to rollover like Debian and RasberryPi OS. So you can't build any long-term system from them like you can build with RaspberryPi.
On top of that, you can't boot anything mainline on most of them because either drivers are closed source, or the Kernel has weird hacks to make things work, or generally both.
So, what makes Raspberry Pi is not the hardware, but software support.
I don't think tinkering is the dominant culture behind tech anymore, but it's definitely operating at a higher scale than ever before. There's more OSS projects than ever, and there are tons of niche areas with entire communities. Examples could include: LoRa radios (or LoRA adaptors!), 3d printing, FPGA hacking, new games for retro hardware...
There was a gap before (think 90s and early 2000s) where there was a niche tinkering and more mainstream user/power user/programmer crowds. All these groups have knowledge gaps between them, but the gap was surmountable.
Now, the groups have drifted apart. Even if you're a programmer, unless you care or get excited about the hardware, you don't know how things work. You follow the docs, push the code to magical gate via that magical command, and that works. It's similar even for Desktop applications.
When you care about performance, and try to understand how these things work, you need to break that thick ice to start learning things, and things are much more complicated now, so people just tend to run away and pretend that it's not there.
Also, since the "network is reliable, computing cheap" gospel took hold, 90% of the programmers don't care about how much performance / energy they waste.
I'm guilty of this. I started with a C64 and love hardware and programming, but modern CPUs and MCUs are so complicated I can't be bothered learning about them.
The old 8-bit Arduinos were pretty understandable, but with an ESP-32 I just assume the compiler knows what it's doing and that the Espressif libs are 'good enough'.
You are right. Most will never care. I think of it like, lets try to keep the lights on for the folks that inevitably get burned and need an escape hatch. Many will not, but always some will. At least that's my way of not being a techno-nihilist.
> They like it given a chance. My daughters for example far prefer Linux to Windows.
The two topics are orthogonal. GP talks about "local computing" vs. "black box in the cloud", the difference between running it vs. using it. You're talking about various options to run locally, the difference between running it this way or that way.
Linux or Windows users probably understand basic computing concepts like files and a file system structure, processes, basic networking. Many modern phone "app" users just know what the app and device shows them, and that's not much. Every bit of useful knowledge is hidden and abstracted away from the user. They get nothing beyond what service the provider wants them to consume.
> There are now adults that grew up in the age of social media that have no idea how local computing works.
Very few people of any age understood how local computing (or any computing) works. There's probably more now since most of the world is connected.
Profit scale has reached a point where commercial OS creators have to do stuff like shove ads into the UI. There's probably more legitimate need from non-developers to use Linux now than ever before, just to get a better base-line user experience.
>> Do we want our fundamental computing environment to be ultimately under our control, or controlled by private interests with their own incentives?
Define "our".
Because having general compute under developer/engineering control does not mean end-users want, need, or should, tinker inside appliances.
So there are two definitions of our: our end-users, and ourselves the engineers.
Worldwide, in aggregate, far more harms come to users from malware, destroying work at the office and life memories at home, than benefits from non-tech-savvy users being able to agree to a dialog box (INSTALL THIS OR YOUR VOTING REGISTRATION WILL BE SWITCHED IN 30 MINUTES!!!) and have rootkits happen.
Our (hackers) tinkering being extra-steps guardrailed by hardware that we can work within, to help us help general computing become as "don't make me think, and don't do me harm" as a nightstand radio clock, seems a good thing.
Not hard to see through the false "only two cases" premise of the quote, however un-hip to agree so.
Desktop Windows still has rough edges. Desktop MacOS still has rough edges. Desktop Linux still has rough edges. Pick your poison.
Niche professional software may lack native Windows support or require workarounds.
Windows has a strong grip in enterprise environments where it is desirable to remove desktop control from users.
You have things like FreeIPA and Samba making weak offers beyond directory services in that direction. You have things like OpenTofu and Ansible making partial efforts in that direction. But you don't have an integrated goto standard solution for giving Linux desktop control to the enterprise. So Windows continues its grip in the enterprise. (If I'm wrong, please post a correction here. I'll be grateful for the education.)
For companies less obsessed with taking control away from users, Windows has less of a grip.
> Desktop Windows still has rough edges. Desktop MacOS still has rough edges. Desktop Linux still has rough edges. Pick your poison.
I think this sentiment is often overlooked as people are used to their 'poison'.
As someone who uses Linux a their main personal machine (with dual boot to Windows every now and then) as well as W11 for work, it's amazing what you get used to.
I was almost agreeing with OP, remembering bluetooth issues I had with Linux just last month when one of my headphones couldn't connect properly and I had to spend 10-15 minutes messing about with bluetooth stacks to get it working again.
But reading your comment I just realised that my current work machine doesn't even detect my bluetooth headphone's microphone and I have not found a fix yet.
That machine also does not go to sleep properly (a common, real, complaint from many linux users) and I have to hibernate it manually via command line as the option does not exist in my power menu due to corporate's rules and regulations.
I also get Windows blue screens far more often than I get Linux kernel panics.
You're just so used to the issues and inconveniences that you don't even recognise them as such anymore.
Issue and inconveniences from a new piece of software you're trialing stick out like sore thumb though...
The thing I like about Linux is that if your thing doesn't work you have a way better chance of being able to wrangle it into working (odds increasing as your technical skill increases)
Meanwhile on Windows if something doesn't work you're generally SOL.
What do you mean?
If i google "{Insert issue here} Windows" i get clear and easy solutions.
1. You reboot.
2. You try sfc /scannow
3. You try Dism
4. You reboot again.
Doesnt work? (like 99,99999% of cases, like with a pc i had to fix yesterday)
5. Reinstall windows
Doesnt work? Have fun trying to get information from microsofts documentation where the same thing got documented 3 different ways 3 different times, and when you change from/to your native language you get another 3 different documentations. All telling you entirely different things, each screenshot showing a ui that doesnt resemble yours because it gotta change every month.
>That machine also does not go to sleep properly (a common, real, complaint from many linux users) and I have to hibernate it manually via command line as the option does not exist in my power menu due to corporate's rules and regulations.
Are you required to make it sleep (perhaps due to a security directive)? If so, then why are you doing this? You should simply refuse, and tell IT it doesn't work. Then let them fix the problem, since it's a security issue. It's not your job to come up with workarounds for the IT department's failures.
I manage both, alongside macOS. There are heaps of things that are trivial to do on a Windows or macOS desktop fleet that are a headache on Linux.
macOS is the easiest endpoint platform to manage. Apple’s MDM capabilities are amazing, and don’t leave me wanting for much at all other than application control, but there are plenty of commercial apps to do this.
Windows (in an Active Directory environment) is pretty good, but Group Policy has grown unwieldy over the decades. Policies can conflict in strange ways, and Microsoft has no made no effort to keep their policy language consistent. Sometimes ‘enabled’ means a feature is enabled, other times it means it is disabled, and vice versa.
Deploying hardware-bound machine certificates for 802.1x, VPN etc to Windows or macOS is extremely easy. Takes 10 minutes to set up.
On Linux, this is a very significant engineering effort that would take months, assuming you happen to have people with the skills on your payroll at all.
I think you are thinking about it way too hard. Windows 11 is a dog. Constant hardware problems, slow, and frustrating UX. Is any desktop linux perfect? No, but its better than w11 right now.
No hardware problems in the version I run, not sure what version you use. It's also not frustrating for me but what I do get frustrated with is trying to get software to run and Linux but just won't work. Most people are smart enough to be able to use windows without getting frustrated.
As a Windows user since 3.x days, I complain mostly about UX issues these days. It's also clear leadership is not aligned with what I want with my desktop.
I've hardly had hardware issues since I moved to Windows 2000. Sure some, but few enough I can't recall any in particular.
Anyway, while I agree about the slowness (now that I've experienced Linux snappiness and done the benchmarks), it's the constant nagging / dark patterns that seals the deal for me. Microsoft would still have me as a happy customer and MSVC user if they hadn't bricked their OS after Win 7 and shoved AI, MS account, ads etc down everyone's throats.
On that note, even more hilarious/tragic is their turning MS Office into Microsoft Copilot 365 App lol, probably the tech biggest marketing blunder of all time, and entirely unforced (unlike for example Intel mostly abandoning the Pentium brand after the P4).
I’ve got this older laptop I just set up for dual boot with a Linux distro. Before installing GRUB, I stripped down Windows 11 using Chris Titus’s utility, though you can accomplish the same thing manually, as you probably know, to kill all that Microsoft telemetry garbage. Windows runs beautifully now, no lag whatsoever. Linux, on the other hand, locks up constantly. And it’s not a hardware issue. Plenty of RAM, confirmed all the drivers loaded properly. Ironic?
Exactly: it's like that pit bull that everything thinks is so cute, until one day it goes berzerk and rips your child's face off, and then its owners say "It's your kid's fault for looking at him wrong!"
Doesn't matter if Windows sucks or not. People will still use it, either because they have to, or because it's the path of least resistance. Same reason even though your Government sucks, you still pay your taxes and follow the law.
The problem I see with most people is that it just doesn't occur to them that there are alternatives. They're so used to a shitty experience with Windows and MS apps, and to them there's no such thing as os" and "hardware", in their minds they're lumped together.
So they shrug, say "meh, computers, I just can't understand them," and go on their merry way rebooting Windows for the 10th time that day.
Now, don't get me wrong, Windows has improved a lot from a robustness standpoint. Moreover, most people only use computers that come pre-configured, either from the factory or by their IT department. They won't face the crazy shit I have to put up with when I manually reinstall mine. Half the things on my 5 yo HP Elitebook don't work out of the box and I need to install a bunch of drivers from HP with dubious names, like sp1234 which makes the touchpad work, and sp4321 which enables the webcam. After a further set of updates, I can use my external screen connected to the intel integrated gpu and finally try to get some work done. Good times.
> I need to install a bunch of drivers from HP with dubious names, like sp1234
This is just how HP names their software deployment packages. Lenovo will have something like "u6chp70us17" or "83wo12ww". You go on your product's page, download the driver, install it. I understand complaining about a device that doesn't work out of the box, but about the name of the driver installer?
To be honest I've never seen an EliteBook that needed any drivers for the common components (I also own quite a few Elites, oldest from 2012), and in general any laptop that needed a touchpad driver to work in well over a decade. And I've played with a lot of different laptops, business models in particular. Not saying it doesn't happen, just that I don't think it's common.
I have two similar laptops, 840 g8 and 845 g8. The first is intel, the other amd.
The intel one had some kind of new touchpad, which doesn't work during the windows install. It was apparently some new thing introduced with intel's 11th gen, don't remember the specifics, but apparently other models had the same issue. Windows needs to connect to the internet to fetch drivers once installed, even 25h2 which I installed two weeks ago. Bonus points for the AMD ethernet dongle not being recognized, even though it's some random realtek, so I have to type my wifi password (my AP doesn't support wps). The AMD one works, even though the touchpads seem similar.
For a long time, the AMD's webcam didn't work. There's some USB doohickey that wasn't recognized (showed up with an exclamation point in device manager), and even installing all the drivers from HP's webpage didn't solve it. It solved itself somehow after some windows update two or three years later. Out of the box, it did have the webcam working, but the display brightness was somehow limited to "pretty dim". I was ready to write it off as just another crappy enterprise pc panel, but then I rebooted it into the bios and the thing burned a hole through my eyes. Installing windows manually fixed the backlight. Sleep on windows more often than not hangs for some reason, even now, 5 years in.
The intel had a long-standing issue with 4k output over its usb-c ports. At one point, installing the gpu driver from intel fixed it, but windows update would helpfully update it to an older, borken version. Nowadays we have 5k panels at work. I can only get 5k if the driver is initialized with the monitor connected. So if the screen goes to sleep, it won't run at 5k anymore when it wakes back up. Newer models don't seem to have this issue anymore.
Fortunately I'm only an occasional windows user, so don't care all that much. Everything worked perfectly under linux since day one, so apart from the comically bad display quality, I'm generally a happy camper.
Frustrating UX? Nope. Slow? Nope. Constant hardware problems? Just no.
I've already switched to Linux, but this was not at all my experience of Windows. The only reason I switched was because Windows is going towards an "AI" focused OS which I do not want, as well as the cost of the Pro version - I run many VMs and not shelling out for Pro for all of them.
MS Office is hardly "niche professional software." I hate it, and recognize that I can use the online services, but the reality is that I have to send, receive, and work in this application and I can't easily do it on Linux.
How do I join a live editing session of an Excel file with several people using regular Excel with LibreOffice?
I can't.
Or the same with PowerPoint.
I can't.
In a modern workspace it's not just local software running solely on just your local machine emailing around files or clobbering changes in some corporate file share.
If you're working in a corporate environment, this may not be viable. LibreOffice is great software, but it's not 100% compatible. Things may look slightly different, get lost or otherwise cause problems. I've really tried, but at the end of the day I occasionally do need to use actual Microsoft Office.
Yep. And then there is Visio which gets used a lot where I work. LibreOffice Draw doesn't come anywhere near it. It saves a lot of grief just to give our Linux users a Windows VM with Office on it if they need to do any significant docs or drawings.
I used Word to write a reasonably complicated document that necessarily used tables. It was one of the most frustrating, bug inducing experiences of my life. I had to open the document and edit it in LibreOffice to get any sort of stability.
I don’t do corporate work on my home computer? I don’t know who’s suggesting corporate IT departments should convert everyone to Linux. “Work computer” and “home computer” are entirely separate use cases.
(Also a ton of MS Office work is being done through the web interfaces now anyway. I find the web versions pretty terrible but people seem to put up with them.)
I am also forced to use "productivity" software from MS, but I make do with the web versions on Linux at work. I hate it all, but it's okay. I am playing the long term game of trying to get my whole org to Linux. It helps that I can influence technical decisions, slow but steady process.
This is an clarifying perspective. In particular, I think this sheds light on understanding the various perspectives in the thread:
> Viewed through the lens of digital autonomy and citizenship, the question isn’t simply “Is Linux perfect?” but rather: Do we want our fundamental computing environment to be ultimately under our control, or controlled by private interests with their own incentives?
We make choices, become passionate about some, and wear values we feel strongly about on our shoulder. What we witness here, I believe, is a conflation of two things:
A: Linux as a value: Representing open source software, rejecting bad corporate behavior, and as a philosophy for software ownership
B: Linux as a collection of related operating systems, as practical software.
I think trying to understand each person's perspective, and if it can be categorized as one or the other makes sense of this article, similar ones, and discussion. Someone in Category B evaluating operating systems as tools should not be viewed by someone in Category A as an affront to their identity. It may just be different use cases; different hardware; different priorities; different variants and versions of operating systems used.
Yes but the headwinds of Linux adoption are (to some extent) that Linux is the best choice for A, but it is not far and away the best choice for B (not saying it’s bad or even worse than Windows, it’s just not CLEARLY better).
But when you approach 99% of the population who, to the extent they’ve even thought about it, will only judge an OS on B, Linux is just one of 3 main choices (sorry BSD folks. Don’t yell at me). Is it the best choice purely on functionality and app ecosystem? Maybe, but also maybe not.
Since the majority of Linux does not come on hardware by default what you’re essentially asking people to do is to buy a car and swap out the motor. We have to convince them why that new motor is better and is worth the effort of doing so. If it’s marginally better or worse, it just won’t be worth the headache to most people.
To be clear Linux (and MacOS) are my preferred OS. I haven’t owned a Windows box in at least 5 years.
> But these obstacles are not intrinsic technical limitations so much as ecosystem and investment gaps, areas where community projects, standards efforts, and wider adoption could drive improvement without sacrificing freedom.
Are you sure? My second-hand thinkpad still won't hibernate properly. It's not a weird model, it's a ryzen-based X13 Gen1 so not even shiny new. You can imagine on a laptop one would want hibernation to just work.
The fault is surely on Lenovo's table... Yet it would work if I was to run Windows (which I don't want to do).
So yeah... Now I have a laptop from a brand which is known and appreciated for linux compatibility, and a basic thing like hibernation does not work.
> You can imagine on a laptop one would want hibernation to just work.
Well, I think MS took care of that by removing the hibernation option from the start menu. You have to manually turn it back on from the old control panel.
My personal pet peeve is the GTK/Qt divide. Theming has an extra step, as you have to pick a matching theme for the other toolkit apps you inevitably end up using.
KDE/Qt has excellent scaling support, but GTK apps (OrcaSlicer for example) end up having blurry text or messed up text labels if you run a non-integer scaling resolution.
The Wayland transition almost seems akin to the IPv6 debacle. Support is there, but it’s half-baked in half the cases. I crave RDP remote access, but this is currently not possible with KRDP as it does not work with Wayland sessions. Wine is just getting there, but only with scary messages that say that it’s an experimental feature.
We at out Uni provide default Ubuntu installs on laptops. Most people just live with whatever UI.
I have a feeling that many have stopped configuring, themeing etc. those only from 80s to 2000 were just spending lots of time building and creating many themes like matrix etc.
Also people are so addicted to smartphone. That is the main place for their heart.
> My personal pet peeve is the GTK/Qt divide. Theming has an extra step, as you have to pick a matching theme for the other toolkit apps you inevitably end up using.
Is this perhaps an issue of fractional scaling? I’ve run Openbox/Blackbox on Linux for ~15 years and never had these issues. Not 100% sure I understand the issue at least.
Things look mostly fine (to me) and even if they don’t, the apps still work as they should (no blur). AFAIK Openbox/X11 just uses the DPI the monitor reports and things scale as they should.
Sounds like an issue with Gnome/KDE to me, not with Linux?
I may be wrong, I’m not seeking a super polished look or want to tweak my UIs a lot.
Yes, this is a KDE/GTK issue, but this is also a real-world case.
Linux Greybeards, a hypothetical man with astute technical and sexual prowess, might not be bothered by follies such as proper text rendering, but it is an issue if desktop environments have any chance to compete with mainstream operating systems.
> Yes, this is a KDE/GTK issue, but this is also a real-world case
I believe you when you say it.
> Linux Greybeards, a hypothetical man with astute technical and sexual prowess
No need to be snarky. I was speaking from my own Linux experience (just like you did?), not trying to impress anyone.
Text renders fine in Openbox, hence the question about the issue being with Linux or GTK/KDE. I’ve honestly never heard of these issues or experienced them myself. Perhaps because Openbox is simpler (no fractional scaling AFAIK) so I’ve likely been “shielded” from such issues (never heard about theming or issues like this tbh).
I have been running desktop Linux for a very long time, but I actually agree. There's a lot of rough edges. I do think a lot of these problems do go away if you are a bit proactive in choosing compatible hardware. I bought my mother in law a laptop for Christmas, and I put Linux Mint on there [1]. There were no issues getting it working on Mint with Cinnamon, but that's in no small part because I double checked all the common hardware (wi-fi, GPU, trackpad, etc) to make sure it worked fine in Linux and it did.
If you don't do your homework, it's definitely a crapshoot with hardware compatibility, and of course that sucks if you're telling people that they should "switch to Linux" on their existing hardware, since they might have a bad experience.
That said, it is weird that people seem to have total amnesia for the rough edges of Windows, and I'm not convinced that Windows has fewer rough edges than Linux. I've grown a pretty strong hatred for Windows Update, and the System Restore and Automatic Repair tools that never work. Oh, and I really think that NTFS is showing its age now and wish that Microsoft would either restart effort on ReFS or port over ZFS to run on root.
[1] Before you give me shit for this, if anything breaks I agreed to be the one to fix it, and I find that generally I can solve these kinds of problems by just using tmate and logging into their command line which AFAIK doesn't have a direct easy analog in Windows.
I've found generally that business-grade hardware has better Linux support. So for laptops, for instance, Lenovo Thinkpad and Dell Latitude laptops work better than some bargain-basement consumer-grade laptop.
As a rule AMD stuff is pretty safe, but to answer your question, I generally go look at kernel sources, or sometimes I go and see if I can find the model in the NixOS Github and see how many workarounds that they have to do to get it working.
I suspect the person you are responding to wasn't including everything that doesn't work on Linux, in particular Microsoft Office, in this phrase, but domain specific / specialized business software.
> Do we want our fundamental computing environment to be ultimately under our control, or controlled by private interests with their own incentives?
The reality is a lot more nuanced than that. Should one live in a forest, devoid of any city services and company of other individuals, so that one may be under "own control"? This is the essential value proposition with Linux and it's no wonder many prefer the comforting institution of proprietary prisons^Wsystems.
>Should one live in a forest, devoid of any city services and company of other individuals
extremely bizarre comparison given that 90% of people spend their time on the web which is utterly agnostic as to what operating system you're on.
The reality of Linux in 2025 isn't that you have to live like Tom Hanks in Cast Away and talk to a football as your best friend, it's that maybe you have to spend a few hours learning how the OS works. Almost your entire Steam Library runs on Linux courtesy of Valve and a lot of ambitious individuals.
If people are too lazy to invest even the tiniest bit of personal effort into trying out new things that's one thing, but at least be honest about it instead of giving me the "I don't want to live in the jungle" spiel. Don't be the tech equivalent of the person who runs around telling everyone they can't get into shape without a million dollars and a personal trainer
Not everything that runs on windows is proprietary I use a lot of open source software on Windows myself. Windows is also a lot easier to configure to run exactly the way I wanted to run and to be the OS I need it to be. It's extremely customizable and easy to control. It's also modifiable in many many more ways.
>Windows is strictly quite a bit less configurable than Linux.
I wish I could agree, but I just can't: the OP may be correct, depending on which Linux desktop environment he's talking about.
*My* Linux is indeed much more configurable than Windows, but I'm using KDE. However, that's only promoted by a few distros like openSUSE. Most users are going to get GNOME shoved in their faces whether they like it or not, and no, GNOME is *NOT* more configurable than Windows. GNOME needs to be used exactly as the GNOME devs want you to use it, because otherwise it'll just break on the next update. For many users who are not Linux experts, and perhaps use Linux at work where their IT departments only allow them to use GNOME, they think GNOME==Linux because that's what most distros push so strongly, so I can see why OP would make such a claim.
I think there are two factors that lead people to make statements like that. The first is a given: they're talking about configuring it as a user, not a developer. Obviously Linux can do whatever you want it to do if you build your own distro from source. But additionally, while Linux is also substantially configurable in userland, those configurations might not actually cover the cases people need. You can, for example, pick between GNOME, KDE, etc -- which, on a pedantic level, is "objectively" more customizable than Windows, where you have exactly one option. Yet, if the settings within all of the off-the-shelf GUI shells do not serve the use cases the settings of the single option on Windows does, users will have every reason to assert that, on a practical level, the degree of customizability is inferior and not sufficient for them.
The idea that KDE is not objectively more configurable, in every way, than Windows, is lunacy.
However, GNOME is completely the opposite; doing anything differently requires installing special extensions, which break every time an update happens. The devs do not want you changing it from their One True Vision for how a desktop should work (which, apparently, is almost identical to a tablet).
People who aren't Linux experts or long-time users may not even know about KDE, Xfce, etc., and just think that GNOME is the only way to use Linux. Most distros push it very strongly, and even in corporate environments it's pushed hard. My company uses Linux, but the IT department only supports GNOME; luckily I'm able to install KDE but I'm basically a reneage by doing so.
So if we're comparing Windows (which has only one DE, the Windows one), to GNOME (which for many users is synonymous with Linux), I'd say he's right: Windows is much more configurable and easy to customize.
Why the Linux world has gone this way, I honestly have no idea. It almost seems like a conspiracy.
It isn't an issue with Linux, it's an issue with the companies that make proprietary software and devices with only windows support. A better world is possible, but you need to accept the fight isn't easy. Switch today.
I'd ask you the inverse question: If Linux never got any better than it is currently, what would it take to push you away from Windows? I don't mean this as a challenge, I'm genuinely curious.
Not OP but I have a couple of red lines that if crossed, I would move to Linux: things stop “just working”, and ads/nags/notifications/behaviors that I don’t want cannot be disabled.
Things are very occasionally annoying right now when a new update enables some new idiotic thing but 99.9% of the time things just work.
>desktop Linux still has rough edges for some use cases, hardware support isn’t always perfect, and niche professional software may lack native support or require workarounds
Personally, I believe the REAL problem is the rough edges WITH Linux.
Hardware support? You can blame manufacturers for not supporting Linux. Software support? Same.
But if you use a Linux software made for Linux by Linux users and it just feels inconvenient, non-intuitive, buggy, and mentally painful to use, you're going to think that Linux is full of bad software. Because it doesn't matter if you use X11 or Wayland under the hood, you try to drag and drop an icon from the start menu to the desktop or vice-versa and that only works in some DEs. You try to drag and drop an image from Chrome to the file manager, and that doesn't always work. You try to click the close button and sometimes there is a few pixels of padding at the top so you can't close the window on first try.
This isn't Nvidia's fault, or Adobe's fault, or Microsoft's fault. It's just Linux.
You overestimate the level of investment the average person can and will make for these freedoms. People buy Kindles because they work (and are heavily marketed), they buy Apple because they simply work, and will keep preferring windows to Linux until Linux offer a easier barrier to entry.
Microsoft will (almost already has) loose its advantage to Apple before it loses to Linux.
I got tired of fighting to keep Fusion running in wine so now Fusion is literally the only reason I maintain a windows partition to dual boot into. I hate that.
I’m no longer using it professionally so I could explore other options but FreeCAD kinda sucks (I will die on that hill), and OnShape offers the choice between my designs to be publicly visible, or a subscription that assumes I have a corporate expense account makes it not viable. (I don’t mind paying for good tools but there has to be a middle ground).
If Autodesk ever ported Fusion to Linux… I’d probably pay for a subscription just out of sheer elation ha.
Some desktop versions of GNU/Linux have rough edges. Self-important grognards think everyone should "git gud" and install Arch or waste a weekend waiting for Gentoo to compile in order to optimize the install. This article along with this one (https://www.theverge.com/tech/858910/linux-diary-gaming-desk...) go on about using an Arch-based distro rather than a Debian-based distro.
Clearly there will be challenges, minor or major.
The failure of these articles is the authors aren't going for distros that "just work". Want to undercut Microsoft's user base, grow GNU/Linux, and herald the year of Linux on desktop that's been promised for decades? Keep it simple.
Majority of people going online with their computers are browsing the web, doomscrolling, and engaging on social media. They're not pentesting with Rust, running an instance of a LLM, or setting up a webserver for giggles.
Keep it simple.
But pushing Arch and other beardy distros with these kinds of articles reeks of gatekeeping as if only "smart" people are allowed to engage online and control their experience. Everyone else should suck it up with Microsoft having Copilot phone home since they don't deserve to know better. And I don't care how much preamble they give about Debian-based and beginner distros, they're just wagging their dicks to easily-awed proles and relishing imagined egoboos from other neo-Stallmans.
as a long-time windows user who has fairly recently switched to linux - windows has a few rough edges too (and feels like it's getting increasingly rougher). Having recently switched I don't feel like things have changed much for me in terms of jankiness/broken-ness (and maybe linux is slightly better, for the subset of tools and programs I am using?).
Yeah but folks around here like to stick their heads in the sand when reminded that this is a very real and concerning barrier to adoption of desktop Linux. It could happen 1000 times and they’ll still scream that it’s either user error or even worse “it works on my machine”.
Until the Linux community stops pretending and accepts that these are real issues and they need addressing, it will never be the year of the Linux desktop.
Over 90% of desktops had Windows back then. So yea, that's everybody. Unless you're being pedantic because one guy was using IRIX on an SGI workstation, or the odd Mac.
Nobody cares about what runs under the hood (I mean the real market, not the dozen of us nerds), as long as it looks and plays nice. Market already uses linux both in the form of android but also as a server OS. For both of these the financial incentive was there for someone to write the drivers, make the UI user friendly (android users never have to open a terminal), create sales channels.
Desktop and laptop market is weird because no hardware vendor wants to compete with MS. The only one who does (apple), owns both the hardware and software as well as sales channels, so they are not affected by MS’s deals.
> the question isn’t simply “Is Linux perfect?” but rather: Do we want our fundamental computing environment to be ultimately under our control, or controlled by private interests with their own incentives?
The answer is: it doesn't matter. Linux desktop doesn't exist because of privacy nerds, free software evangelists, anti-capitalists, or European protectionists, and it won't change because of them either. Sit here on the internet and pontificate all you want. Pontificating doesn't fix bugs or write code. It is what it is. If there was money in it, people'd be going after it. If there was some "higher calling" to galvanize people into action, it would've galvanized them already. This is the best it's going to get.
The much, much bigger issue is control of applications, and the browsers (and their owners) won that long ago. Doesn't matter what OS you use, you need a browser to do anything useful on the internet. And if that ever gets "solved", it'll just pass on to the next shit-show of humans letting things get as bad as they can stand. Technology is made by humans, so it follows human values.
I'll be glad if someone tells that I'm wrong but doesn't current windows 11 present even more of the same challenges? Last I tried, old driver compatibility in newer windowses was not fantastic, Wine slowly is becoming more compatible with legacy windows programs than the windows itself, forced updates are dealbreaker for many usecases. And need for workaroubds and poking around has reached Windows XP levels.
I mean, there are two ways to make Linux better alternative than Windows, and currently the main effort is coming from Microsoft...
> But these obstacles are not intrinsic technical limitations so much as ecosystem and investment gaps
For people who are trying to get their work done now, in the present, this doesn’t change anything. We all know that Linux could technically run the same productivity apps and games if every company put enough investment money toward it. However even some of the apps I use which had a Linux version have announced that they’re sunsetting Linux compatibility due to low demand.
For all of the people whose work lives inside of text editors, web browsers, and terminals switching to Linux is easy. I think these threads become biased toward people who fit that description who don’t understand why everyone can’t just switch over.
> Viewed through the lens of digital autonomy and citizenship, the question isn’t simply “Is Linux perfect?” but rather:
That feels like a strawman argument. Most people don’t choose their OS on ideological grounds. The reasons people don’t use Linux isn’t because it’s not “perfect”. People use Windows because it works, it’s familiar, and their software runs on it. All of these calls to make OS choice about ideological wars isn’t convincing or even relevant to people who haven’t already switched to Linux.
>The reasons people don’t use Linux isn’t because it’s not “perfect”. People use Windows because it works, it’s familiar, and their software runs on it.
The reason most people run Windows is because that is what their jobs IT department put on their computer, and those IT departments run Windows because of the enterprise tools Microsoft has provided for lifecycle management with AD, GPO, etc.
Linux will have difficulty making progress with enterprises for the non-SecDevOps staff until it's as easy to centrally manage user and computer polices, accounts, and upgrades across the entire end-user fleet as it is with Microsoft.
I switched to Bluefin, which is a branch of Universal Blue, which is flavour of Fedora. Sounds complicated, but in fact is the best thing to ever happen to Linux. I get all the ease of use of something like macOS but pre-built with tools for development like distrobox, and then I can just build my dev environments and get shit done in no time, without having to worry about breaking updates or nuking the whole file system because my bash sucks.
Its Linux for babies, and it makes me happy.
=====
Further ass-kissing:
Also I forgot to mention I tried gaming on it via Steam and it works like a charm... Not so sure about bleeding edge AAA games since I don't play any of that, but at least for all my oldies it works just fine.
Oh!, and the one thing I miss is Affinity Designer.
> Oh!, and the one thing I miss is Affinity Designer.
While I haven't experimented with it that much yet, Affinity (the new one, the one after the Canva acquisition) does work in Wine 10.20.
Now, I won't say it is a smooth experience, one of the workarounds that I needed to do is use Wine's virtual desktop so Affinity's tooltips are rendered correctly instead of being pure black, and the GUI does seem to not render correctly sometimes (it renders as white until something causes a redraw).
This makes you wonder: How hard it could be for a business that already has a 80% working application via Wine to patch the application/Wine to make it work 99+%, and then bundle the application with Wine and say that it has "native Linux support"?
> How hard it could be for a business that already has a 80% working application via Wine to patch the application/Wine to make it work 99+%, and then bundle the application with Wine and say that it has "native Linux support"?
First 80% of a job typically takes 80% of the allocated time. The last 20% of a job typically takes another 80% of the allocated time.
> This makes you wonder: How hard it could be for a business that already has a 80% working application via Wine to patch the application/Wine to make it work 99+%, and then bundle the application with Wine and say that it has "native Linux support"?
CodeWeavers (developers of CrossOver and one of the main contributors and sponsors of Wine and related tools) actually offer something like this as a paid service for companies called PortJump:
Getting it running in linux is the easiest part dev wise.
It is the rest of the iceberg that causes problems.
- You need your support to be able to support linux which means they will need training and experience helping people in an entirely new system
- Linux comes in finite but vastly more combinations than OSX and Windows which means you are probably going to need to pick something like Ubuntu or struggle with the above
>- Linux comes in finite but vastly more combinations than OSX and Windows which means you are probably going to need to pick something like Ubuntu or struggle with the above
This is easily solvable by distributing the app via a distro agnostic mechanism, like as a Flatpak or AppImage. Using Flatpak also eliminates the need for rolling their own app update mechanism.
But most of those issues are because Linux doesn't have enough market share. No one brushes off Windows because they need to support Windows and they need to add CI/CD for Windows.
The combination issue is a real issue though that (as far as I know) is mostly solved with Flatpaks, or in case of games, by using the Steam Runtime.
Of course, it is a "chicken and egg" problem of "we don't want to support Linux because there aren't enough users using it" but "we don't want to use Linux because there aren't enough business supporting it".
Thankfully with improvements in Wine the need of having "native" Linux support is shrinking, but at the same time there is still a looooong way to go (like the issues I said before with Affinity).
Windows userland compatibility is outstanding. I can run most 30 year old Windows applications on Windows 11 without a problem. This makes it easy for a commercial vendor to support their applications on Windows.
The same is not at all true on Linux.
Right now at work, I’ve got a bunch of commercial apps built for RHEL9 for which I’m chasing vendors for new builds that work on RHEL10, for a variety of reasons. Dependencies like libXScrnSaver have simply been removed, and so apps linked against that library no longer work.
Wine has some gaping holes in some of its API implementations. Direct2D, for instance, has existed since Windows 7 but is badly implemented in Wine -- there is no antialiasing and the ArcTo() function draws a line. The MS documentation is not that great either, so fixing Wine isn't necessarily easier than porting to native.
Yeah, I thought that Affinity would work pretty well in Wine because I've seen a lot of people pointing to the "just follow the guide (AffinityOnLinux repo) and it will work!" but in my experience it didn't work that well as people were saying.
And the guide itself seems to be outdated, the guide says that you need to install some stubs/shims but doesn't say that happens if you don't do it (I think that it would crash) but at least in my experience it did "work" without them when using an up-to-date Wine version.
Sadly Photoshop also doesn't work, if you want to follow the rules and use Creative Cloud it won't work at all, if you decide to sail the seven seas and download an older Photoshop version it will work but it also has some annoying bugs (sometimes the canvas doesn't update after an edit until you try to do another edit).
Don't get me wrong I do think that Wine is an amazing project and I hope that it continues to improve, but sometimes people don't seem to actually point all the issues that it exist when running an application in Wine.
> This makes you wonder: How hard it could be for a business that already has a 80% working application via Wine to patch the application/Wine to make it work 99+%, and then bundle the application with Wine and say that it has "native Linux support"?
I've had cases where running an app under wine worked better than the native linux port :/
Not that there aren't trust issues with bigger projects but don't folks worry that the further down the "branch of a flavour of of a branch of a flavour" chain they go the higher and higher the risk of someone sneaking nefarious code through becomes? I guess there's a natural barrier in that the lesser known code bases become less of a target.
Sometimes I just find it wild with how much we talk about containers and sandboxes for the user space code we run that there's still regular recommendations for the random distro of the week published by who knows who.
Bluefin, Aurora, and Bazzite are taking over my home.
I've been using desktop linux since before ubuntu, and I have never had so much confidence in my linux rigs. They are dependable, which is refreshing after boot-breaking updates have ruined my setups before.
As another anecdote in favor of Universal Blue's approach. My mother (who can't use a computer but to check email or regular websites) has been swapped to Aurora and has nothing but positive feedback.
To be fair, the people who barely use the computer are the easiest to move to Linux. As Mental Outlaw said, "to a normie, an OS is just a bootloader for Google Chrome". If all you do is check emails, it doesn't really matter what OS you have installed.
Switching to Linux hasn't been an issue for those users for a long time - it's usually gamers, users of professional software, or IT people with deeply established workflows who have troubles
I guess the only part that matters is updates, and atomic systems like Fedora Silverblue do allow you to enable automatic updates without the fear of breaking everything, which is great
Doesn't matter though. Every single one of these "casual" users I know has a terribly outdated device with a broken battery that doesn't even charge anymore.
Laptop battery is mostly an issue of inefficient CPUs nowadays. I don't know about other distros, but at least Fedora's default power saving settings give a battery life very much comparable to Windows. Which is obviously still nothing compared to macbooks or even snapdragon laptops.
not the same thing at all. Different userspace that may or may not be that efficient at power, as well as well tested power management in the kernel for specific devices.
My old man was using Ubuntu 20 years ago because all he needed was a browser and openoffice. Shoot, with a live cd you can even make computer use foolproof since it's impossible for them to permanently break it.
When my dad (83) was looking to replace his ancient Win7 Dell PC I convinced him to buy a MacMini since he's had an iPad for a long time, and more recently an iPhone.
Initially he was concerned about the "new" interface after using Windows since 3.11 days, but within an hour he was happy doing his usual "basic tasks" (email, basic Excel, Word for letters, printing, etc). He was amazed both his printers (colour/scanner, b&w) worked with zero hassle after simply plugging them in.
Now he loves the ability to FaceTime anyone in the family (kids, grandkids, etc.) at the click of a button using the webcam plugged into the Mini, and really enjoys the sync of photos, emails, notes, etc.
I think he would have really struggled with Windows 11 so I was tempted by an older-person friendly Linux distro if macOS wasn't an option.
Apple is by far the best integrated ecosystem for nontechsavy users; its incredible how they follow this approach; iPhone is since V1 (?) without manual.
Im looking fearfully into the future: What will happen to Apple product perfectness if any of these MBA or even PE guys is taking over CEO role?
They usually work well with printers, but I've run into some situations where I was just plain unable to get it to work with my Brother laser printer after a certain ChromeOS update. They screwed up something with the CUPS drivers and it just never worked.
On MacOS at least I have a chance of being able to fix this stuff. ChromeOS is so locked down you can't even fix things.
I thought about mentioning my mom, since she's been my number 1 tech support client since ever... And I was going to say that, I am so certain of how solid this distro is, that I would even install it on my mom's laptop without any hesitation.
I was originally blown away by Bazzite, which I run on my Legion Go, but then I discovered uCore (https://github.com/ublue-os/ucore) and haven't looked back! Running it on my homelab and multiple servers at work, its a wonderful server OS.
I'm currently working on converting an ARM Chromebook to run a different userland from ChromeOS and have been wondering which distro to use. I've starting getting Nix on it, but I think I'll switch over to Bluefin based on your recommendation.
I think bluefin is more of a distro for babies in the sense that it really protects itself leaving the user with very limited capacity to break things while mint, also an awesome distro is more of a nice drop in for users that want to feel familiar with their desktop environment and traditional configuration
These articles... I'm not sure who are the target audience, because I am definitely not and I don't know anyone who is.
Specific OS is not the important, anything with modern KDE is good enough to replace Windows 10/11.
But do I (and all my colleagues) need Microsoft Office (Word, Excel at least) and/or Drawing software (Adobe or something) and/or god forbid Visual Studio 2026, and some other corporate software to make a living? Inevitably yes.
I have a Mac laptop, a Linux workstation, and a Windows workstation for different purposes and I use them all. I agree. Every time someone says they switched OSes and they don’t miss anything, it’s revealed that 90-100% of their work was in generic outlets like the web browser, terminal, e-mail, and Slack.
To be fair, that could cover a lot of people.
In my experience watching people make the switch in the real world, the failure point is either the last 10% of software that they actually need, or the first time they encounter some Linux quirk that they didn’t expect. Then it reaches a point where there isn’t really any upside for people who aren’t ideologically motivated and who don’t get triggered by Windows 11 design choices or occasional pop-ups.
I have some specific engineering software that must run on Windows, period. I’ve gotten flak from the software engineers at every company whenever it’s discovered that my second machine is Windows, but outside of software devs nobody else questions it. Using Windows for work is perfectly understood by most other disciplines
Windows 11 isn't running half as bad for me as most here seem to say.
I experience no delays with the start menu, and it's perfectly smooth on my 240 Hz monitor.
I also never encountered crashes like described as OP's reason for the switch.
So what do I have to gain from using Linux? A bit better compatibility for my software work, but much worse game compatibility. Fewer annoying popups, but they aren't that frequent on Windows either. Probably a worse update experience, and more time spent configuring.
The only reason I'm not using Linux on my work-provided computer is due to the security software. None of it runs on Linux, it only runs on Windows and MacOS. Glad I don't have to use any software that only runs on Windows to do development. Hopefully the security software will someday support Linux.
Windows pop-ups can all be turned off. I have them all turned off on my machines and nothing pops up anymore. Windows is extremely customizable and modifiable and it runs 100% of Windows software which is most of the software being produced in the world today.
>90-100% of their work was in generic outlets like the web browser, terminal, e-mail, and Slack. To be fair, that could cover a lot of people.
It does ... for them Linux is a very good substitute for their needs. OTOH, for certain specialties, software available for Linux is NOT the best. 2012 was the Linux year for me ... but while FOSS is OK, sometimes a $200 app is a far superior choice for non-technical people. (Musicians for example.)
Target audience is probably especially anyone not in the US?
It is beginning to look a lot like war is brewing between Europe and the US over Greenland. US media working super hard to make an "acquisition" sound reasonable and "FreedomTM".
If and that is a big if, Trump were to get Greenland, there is not much that Europe can do in any case. Maybe a few politicians will go on X/twitter and complain but every country in the EU knows that they are no match for the US military and I am saying that as someone who lives in the EU.
I suppose the EU could go after big US tech companies but since most of Europe's needs are covered by the very same companies, I don't think this would be viable solution either and let's be honest the EU people are not just going to switch to Ubuntu tomorrow morning.
> If and that is a big if, Trump were to get Greenland, there is not much that Europe can do in any case.
Whether or not that's true, that doesn't mean they won't try anyway. Pride sometimes beats pragmatism. I think it's foolish to dismiss the possibility of war, been if you believe it will be one-sided.
The EU can just kick out the US bases and forbid Mastercard and Visa working here. ASML? Good luck for Intel; I'm sure AMD would have its asses already covered and found some alternative in Asia.
Watch the Dow Jones collape in minutes.
On GAFAM, there are alternatives, and libre software it's libre for the whole world, not just the US.
Software it's easily replaceable except for die hard industrial DOS (where FreeDOS experts would cover) and some special XP/w9x era machinery. European hardware, the industrial one... there's no alternative in the US. No one.
If the US army steps on Greenland in order to seize it, it's the end of the American economy.
China and Russia? These two should watch the Bering currents and South Asian quakes first; the upcoming ones will be a nightmare due to ice meltings.
You assume that this is not the goal of the current US "leadership". They want the country to fail, so they can rule over the ashes. They are a lot more fucked up in the head than you probably think they are. They simply don't care what happens, so long as they are the ones in power.
Trump would love nothing more than to dissolve NATO, and isolate from all of the EU. He would see that as an accomplishment. I wish I were joking.
> The EU can just kick out the US bases and forbid Mastercard and Visa working here. ASML? Good luck for Intel; I'm sure AMD would have its asses already covered and found some alternative in Asia.
The EU uses Mastercard and Visa. If youblock them in the EU, you just cripple the EU economy instantly.
> On GAFAM, there are alternatives, and libre software it's libre for the whole world, not just the US.
How many people do you know that would be willing to switch to an alternative OS tomorrow or give up their Iphones?
> If the US army steps on Greenland
The US army is already on Greenland. They have a military base there.
I agree with you in spirit but in reality any countermeasures would inflict a lot of pain the EU as well. I don't think anyone has a crystal ball but whatever happens won't be good for anyone.
Yeah, I think it is naive of the grandparent to believe that iPhones, Android phones with Google Play Services, a lot of cloud services can be replaced overnight. That said, it might not happen overnight, but it will surely happen.
I feel like we are close to a tipping point where governments and companies will move off US services en masse as fast as they reasonably can. I think this movement already started. E.g. our local university has forbidden use of US (well, any non-EU) LLMs for work and are trialing Mistral. Two years ago they would have gone Gemini without thinking (since they are already using Google Workspace). They are also extending support for their Linux workspace, which has primarily been maintained for CS'y groups, but they want to be ready to roll it out when needed.
A lot of organizations (especially non-profits, universities, etc.) have woken up when Microsoft relinquished Microsoft 365 access of the ICC chief prosecutor overnight.
I guess one side effect of the US going rogue is open source getting a lot more traction.
I hope that the EU (and UK) will also invest heavily in iOS and Google Android alternatives, because that will be the hardest bits to replace, but as long as AOSP still exists it will be possible to bootstrap reasonably quickly.
Its going to be a very long time before it changes enough to do without US tech. How many European governments are encouraging the use of apps that only run on iOS and Android? How many critically important businesses like banks require customers run unrooted Android or IOS? HSBC's app will not even work if you install apps from F-Droid!
A few governments are trying to do something about reliance on the US, but they are also doing things that create greater reliance.
Its good your university is trying, but that sounds like a limited response. Do they use Windows? MS Teams? Google Drive?
I know of no government making serious attempts to get the private sector of US dependence. Just check how many things you use regularly run on AWS. Desktop Linux is great but is any governmentactually making consistent attempts to persuade businesses to switch to it?
Its going to be a very long time before it changes enough to do without US tech. How many European governments are encouraging the use of apps that only run on iOS and Android? How many critically important businesses like banks require customers run unrooted Android or IOS? HSBC's app will not even work if you install apps from F-Droid!
Step by step. For example, most Dutch banking apps work fine on GrapheneOS. Yes, still with Google Play Services, but at least they are sandboxed. It shows that there is a path to removing dependence incrementally. There are also a bunch of European phone brands (yes, most manufactured in China), like Nothing, Fairphone, Gigaset, HMD, etc. and at least one of them already supports alternative Android versions. Yes, I know they have issues, but you need to start somewhere.
Its good your university is trying, but that sounds like a limited response. Do they use Windows? MS Teams? Google Drive?
Yes, but they also have an official Linux workplace, last time I was there, you could choose to re-image a machine to run Linux on every machine. They are also trialing ownCloud.
The migration won't happen overnight, but it's good that they are setting up the alternatives, trialing them with small user groups, etc. It's the best way to prepare yourself.
I know of no government making serious attempts to get the private sector of US dependence. Just check how many things you use regularly run on AWS. Desktop Linux is great but is any government actually making consistent attempts to persuade businesses to switch to it?
I agree, not enough persuasion is done. But being gloomy is not going to help. Best is to trust in our own strength (we can do it), accept that the solutions are going to be worse (at least initially), make people aware of the risks and alternatives.
The whole situation sucks, but big changes also give rise to big opportunities and it is an opportunity to change to a more open, more privacy-friendly, more user-oriented, etc. ecosystem.
I love you guys, and I wish you were right, but I don't think you are.
Any of the above moves (military bases, Visa/MC, ASML, etc) would make the US suffer, but it would collapse the EU. Europe has a decade or two of hard work and crippling costs to significantly disengage from the US, and no one has the vision or fortitude to make that happen.
You also wouldn't have any security. If you disengage from the US militarily (whatever's left of "NATO"), we'll all see how far Russia can project power. Not as far as they'd like, but enough to make life miserable in a half-dozen or more current-NATO countries. Which puts pressure on their neighbors of course. This would be a shooting war in the east, which would require central and western European countries to decide whether they want to spend blood and treasure to respond. "No" kicks the can down the road a few years, "Yes" is economically devastating.
China could step in! It's a long way from China to the Mediterranean and North Atlantic, and their naval power is ... thin, currently. But you don't want China to step in. They could send money, but then they'd own you worse than the US even fever dreams about owning you.
The US seizing Greenland would be a terrible thing for the world, but I think the most likely outcome is that there would be complaints from the EU countries at highest level and volume, and a handful of countries would get legislation through to make the US suffer, but it would fail at the EU level, maybe even split the EU into two factions of American-bully-reluctantly-aligned countries vs American-bully-righteously-andor-selfservingly-opposed countries. The instability would last a few years, maybe a decade, and then we'd be back to where we are now, with "Greenland (US)" replacing "Greenland (DK)" on maps, but otherwise no one would spend much time thinking about it.
And the stomach-turning irony is that all of this is completely unnecessary. The US has a compact of free operation in Greenland already, including military operations. This is just an exercise in establishing dominance (i.e. The End of Politeness). There are some administrative details like mineral rights and redrawing international exclusivity zones (watch out Canada), but those are not very important when the global economic machine is working properly.
The rhetoric here in the US is that RU and CN are waiting to pounce on Greenland already, and that if we don't, they will. I honestly don't know if there's even a shred of truth to that -- it sounds like absolute manufactured BS to me (RU isn't strong enough to hold it, and CN can't project at that distance), but I have a strong anti-trusting bias against liars who lie, and those are the people dominating the conversation on this side.
The next ten months in the US will decide the next fifty years of the world. On a personal level, that's the rest of my life, and I'm worried about it.
I wish wisdom, resilience, and peace, for all of us.
> Any of the above moves (military bases, Visa/MC, ASML, etc) would make the US suffer, but it would collapse the EU
And many other places - most countries depend in US tech and increasingly so (recent NH stories about Vietnam mandating banks only use unrooted mobile phones). Just card payments not working would be an economic disaster. So would closing down all the businesses and services that rely on AWS, GCP and Azure. So would whatever the US chose to do through Apple, MS, and Google OSes.
> we'll all see how far Russia can project power. Not as far as they'd like, but enough to make life miserable in a half-dozen or more current-NATO countries. Which puts pressure on their neighbors of course. This would be a shooting war in the east, which would require central and western European countries to decide whether they want to spend blood and treasure to respond
I am more optimistic than you about this. Russia is struggling just against Ukraine. They might just invade the Baltic states but anything more would force Western Europe to commit and the Russians know this. Even in Ukraine they invaded because we had signalled we would do nothing by not responding to the previous invasion of Ukraine, to threats to invade and previous Russian invasions of other countries.
> The rhetoric here in the US is that RU and CN are waiting to pounce on Greenland already, and that if we don't, they will. I honestly don't know if there's even a shred of truth to that - RU isn't strong enough to hold it, and CN can't project at that distance
If Greenland becomes independent in a few years time would it then become more of a threat?
> RU isn't strong enough to hold it, and CN can't project at that distance
China is building its armed forces, and there are ways of getting a country within your sphere if influence short of invasion.
> I wish wisdom, resilience, and peace, for all of us.
We all do but I think we are living in a new cold war.
> This is just an exercise in establishing dominance (i.e. The End of Politeness).
I agree.
It's a way to assert dominance and the EU countries are partially responsible for the state of things.
I mean, when you outsource your manufacturing capabilities to China, your tech services to the US and your security to NATO, then it frees up a lot of cash to spend on other things and that is probably why life in the EU is pretty good.
Unfortunately the other side of this coin is that it leaves you completely unprepared if/when things change quickly.
> Europe has a decade or two of hard work and crippling costs
Once again unfortunately, many EU countries are already maxing out their budgets each year and running sky high deficits so there is not much dry powder to absorb these costs.
Raising more money through taxes is politically unpalatable when a lot of the EU countries are already in the top 10 of most taxed countries on the planet.
The only notable exceptions are Poland and Germany but they won't be able to carry the rest of the EU by themselves.
> maybe even split the EU into two factions of American-bully-reluctantly-aligned countries vs American-bully-righteously-andor-selfservingly-opposed countries.
The smallest EU countries have no choice. There is no EU army and therefore if the US leaves there is no one to replace it. It's a basic case of choosing the best worst outcome. Become a vassal of Russia or become a vassal of the US.
Again, Russia would need to fight harsh natural disasters first. If any, they will need us. Earthquakes due to ice melts and current flows will be no joke. Temperatures will be warmer in the Arctic, and a potential small war due to gas/resources/routes will happen, everyone knows that. But what no one speaks it's that the damn nature can crush any vehicle in between no matter if it's from USA, Europe, Russia or China.
It will be scary and nature doesn't give a shit where are you from.
Every base you set on either ice or the coast can be plummeted down due to a quake/tsunami in hours.
Also, back to economics. The inner European market can be huge. We have decent armies ourservers, too, among market with the whole Mediterranean, Africa and South America (Spaniards know how to do deals, no matter which political side). Oh, and don't forget China, the Chinese will love to sell us advanced tech at bargain price.
The US tries to set right wing sided mafias in LatAm, Europe tries to get good deals. The US needs to behave like gentlemen and not like thugs.
Maybe Windows should remain as a professional tool for using these applications. Most people don't need them. They need a web browser and not much else. Maybe some games for kids. Something like Ubuntu can serve those needs just fine. If you need VS for developing Windows apps, then you obviously stay on Windows.
Target audience is anyone who will click it. They don’t make money from you installing Linux, they make money from you wanting to read how the switching went
Yeah, but I guess part of the point is that MS themselves have been moving their desktop stack to the cloud making it even better for Linux users to maintain some degree of interoperability between the two OSs. I never particularly liked the Libre alternatives to Office, but now with 365 I can keep up with my colleges stack without having to switch to a VM or some other artifact just to collaborate on a document.
Drawing, yeah, true... design as well... closest the Linux world ever was to get something decent in the design department was the Serif/Affinity products, but they never made the port.
You're making the exact same argument everyone here is making, and that's because you're attempting to argue from technical parity / superiority. Windows isn't the dominant desktop OS because of it's technical superiority to Linux, it's dominant because of deeply entrenched compliance and industry reasons.
Healthcare, finance, legal, engineering (less so today, but still very sub-discipline dependant), and government all have very specific software needs that no one in their right mind will bother writing new software, or rewriting existing software, would do for 6% desktop market share.
EMR programs (Epic, Cerner, Meditech), Practice management and billing, Tax and compliance, Legal discovery and case-management tools, Niche hardware and it's control software
This is all the realm of Windows. Most of these applications are Windows-only (Win32 / .NET / ActiveX legacy), they're only certified and validated on Windows, and they're only contractually supported on Windows.
Even if Wolters-Kluwer rewrote the entire CCH ProSystem fx suite for Linux, now there's recertification, regulatory review, vendor retraining, staff retraining, potential issues with auditors and regulators, etc.
There's currently no upside large enough to justify: Vendor finger-pointing, Compliance risk, Training costs, Downtime risk
It's negative ROI all the way down.
Windows has to become so bad that switching to Linux for desktops overcomes all of the above.
I guess it depends on your field, for the past ten years I've worked in companies that use Google workspace, google docs, google drive, etc, etc, and slack.
I've not had any lock-in to Microsoft software and I don't think I've deal with a .doc file in all that time. I need a terminal to run devops stuff, and emacs to write it with, but almost nothing else.
Artists, and so on, are probably tied to Adobe, etc. But random developers and sysadmins are certainly capable of switching I think.
Krita and Inkscape have successfully replaced Photoshop and Illustrator for me. There isn't any good video editing options and lightroom still beats Gimp.
For me the biggest sticking point to windows is cad/cam software, lightburn and anything proprietary needed for hobby equipment. I'm glad though that 3d printer software has always had equal Linux support (as long as you don't use Bambu).
While office can run in the browser, the browser version sucks and I commonly need to open the files in the desktop version. This often happens when there's a browser version or a mobile version or an app version. There's a lack of feature parity.
The browser versions aren't as good as the desktop versions. And Googles alternatives aren't as good as Microsofts. Both do 60% of the job, which is probably enough for 80% of the people.
The browser versions (and the mobile versions) are nowhere near parity with the desktop Windows version, even in quite basic matters of styling. To be honest this annoyed me enough in the end that I just moved to a PandaDoc/CSS/PDF workflow and honestly I now have both a simpler editing process, and a more powerful engine for customisation.
I'm currently developing ASP.Net Core services and modern .Net is quite nice. Everyone around me uses absolutely free Visual Studio Community edition, so it would be weird to not use it.
Have you tried replacing Microsoft Office with Libreoffice? It's been perfectly usable for years and I'm even comfortable sending anyone .odt files. I haven't got a single question or comment about it. You may not be able to but in that case just use the .docx extension, install whatever fonts your colleagues expect and continue exactly as you were.
I can't take these kinds of arguments seriously because I regularly read, edit and create documents and spreadsheets and never felt the need to use Word or Excel. It seems most people I've met who claim they can't use Linux because they need X, Y or Z never really tried when I ask. It's just an assumption and they deal with Microsoft based on it.
It's a shame, we could have a world without data-mining and vendor lock-ins if we were principled and didn't always choose the easy path.
I see this argument again and again, but I would imagine most people reading this have separate work and home computers?
For the average home user I can see gaming - while hugely improved in recent years - could still be a showstopper.
But surely for the average user Libreoffice or online versions of MS Office will suffice? Surely there cannot be _that_ many average PC users that need the full power of Photoshop?
Of course I expect the average HN user to be quite different from the average user in general, but I really do think that many casual users get no advantages from Windows apart from familiarity.
In 2012 I borked my Windows 7 install by messing with the registry. I then used an Ubuntu live disk to back up my data. Then I reinstalled Windows 7, but when I couldn't access the internet because I hadn't installed the ethernet driver I had a thought: 'that Ubuntu thing didn't need me to install an ethernet driver to access the internet'. So I decided to install Ubuntu instead and I've been using GNU/Linux exclusively since then. I switched away from Ubuntu when the Amazon lens controversy happened and eventually wound up bouncing between Arch and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
Every now and then a new article "Why you should go Linux". I get it, I like Linux too but every case is different. I want to use Linux but I have to use Digital Audio Workstation. So in my case, I shouldn't dump Windows (and thousand of $$ I've spent on audio software).
I know people desperately want to believe that Linux is "there", but it really isn't. And will probably never be. It’s still too confusing for the average user (many distros, many desktop environments, Wayland vs X, systemd vs init, snap vs flatpak).
> It’s still too confusing for the average user (many distros, many desktop environments, Wayland vs X, systemd vs init, snap vs flatpak).
Users don't need to know about any of that, except for picking a distro and just using whatever is there.
Regarding DAW - I get sticking with Windows if you have thousands invested in it. Even so, there's quite a bit of professional software out there with native support (like Bitwig) or flawless Wine support.
I'm fairly proficient when it comes to Windows, but the diversity in install methods for Fedora threw me for a loop, too. It seemed easier at first -- get all your software from trusted sources in the default package manager, just like an app store! But then there's the question of RPM vs. Snap vs. Flatpak vs. downloading an installer from their website, some versions being further behind than others, the method you use having implications for where/how programs are installed and maintained, etc. It adds cognitive friction and makes troubleshooting harder; I'm not even sure if there's a reliable way to see a list of all programs installed on your machine (regardless of method) or how to easily uninstall them. I don't regret switching, but it is an obstacle, and more consistently than the initial question of which distro to use.
I've been a full-time Linux user since 1998, and over the years I've invested uncountable hours doing all kinds of tweaking and fixing. But with time that has gotten less and less (probably due to both Linux and me maturing), to the point that I now basically use my laptop as an appliance.
I run Aurora, an immutable Linux distro. It auto-updates the core OS without me even noticing (just remember to reboot your laptop every couple of weeks). It has a software center to install GUI apps (all Flatpak, I think) and comes with brew to install command line apps. Things pretty much just work, and for the occasional small issue, I generally manage to just shrug.
To be fair, one thing still lingers just above my annoyance threshold: connecting/disconnecting monitors while my laptop is suspended will sometimes lead to a black screen when resuming, requiring a reboot. A gentle wink from the bad/good old days. :-)
It's the evergreen of ios vs android.
Want to have something that "just works" you'll get exactly that. You want freedom of choice, here you go with all the freedom you can get.
If you want someone that tailors the experience, you'll have to pay with money and freedom.
They absolutely do, the moment you have any problem you are on your own. I spent half a day troubleshooting why nvidia drivers were not loading (mint was not signing them and secure boot silently kicked the module out), and I'm many times more proficient at technology than an average person.
I bought a brand new Dell laptop with Windows 11 25H2 at the end of November 2025. The first patches released by Microsoft in December did not install. WTF!!!
If you go online, you will see a whole YouTube videos and articles on how to fix the issue. Let me tell you, after a considerable amount of time, I gave up.
I'm running Ubuntu 24.04 on my desktop, and I can't remember the last time I had issues applying patches.
Windows has problems all the time. There is widespread knowledge on how to troubleshoot and fix these problems.
Similar problems will have very different solutions for Linux. The knowledge of how to resolve them is much less widespread. I’ve had very good success in asking ChatGPT how to resolve Linux issues, probably better success then I would on Windows because the error messages on Linux are much more detailed.
A lot of the time the "solution" to problems on Windows is to reinstall/in-place upgrade because, as you said, Windows errors tend to be more generic so you can browse Google all you want but none of the instructions people provide will be of much help. So I'm not sure "widespread knowledge" is a point in favor of Windows when the errors frequently aren't specific enough to be reliably actionable.
Windows has a "check the Internet for solutions" option that never works. You can just let Claude code loose on your system and have it go fix your shit for you instead of copy and pasting anything.
Until they run into one of the many problems that force them to know it. Hell, just googling for "How do I do X in Ubuntu" leads to 20 different random forum threads (because Ubuntu doesn't have any official answer or support for you), with solutions that don't work, because it's random people posting random comments of "what worked for them" over 15 years.
I'm an expert and I can't even figure it out half the time. Regular users are screwed.
Compared to Bitwig, since that's what I use on both Macs and Windows PCs. Distro was Ubuntu Studio, which is tooted as an OS "configured for best performance for various purposes: Audio, Graphics, Video, Photography and Publishing", and comes with Jack.
Not really sure... drivers maybe, or sound server ? When it's time to make music I don't want to waste time troubleshooting things so after a few attempts at fixing this I just got back to Windows.
Even if they pick a distro and decide to install it, more often than not the install process is still overly convoluted even in just making installation media.
Going to a distro website and trying to find where to get it (ubuntu has a habit of leading with literally anything else other than regular desktop distro on their front page). Finding a download page, and having it just spit out an iso file, with no explanation on what to do with it, or 'how to install' link in sight (debian, it's very nice that there's a big download button, but like...then what. where's the explanation link. it's buried under other downloads, but that's not very intuitive). Getting to a 'how to install' page and having it be intimidatingly long, perhaps even needlessly. Sites, pages and explainers being laid out in confounding ways, and install process sometimes laid out in a bit of an overcomplicated way. (debian has an installation guide that's presented perhaps in the most intimidating way possible to a new unwitting user, and also buried under click on a click on a click. somehow writing the iso is not even among the first dozen of pages there. ubuntu mate gives you links to iso downloads, and yet the installation process is buried under 'faq' (again, not very intuitive or straightforward), that faq only has a bunch of oddly laid out 'making installation media' pages, and the rest of actual installation process is just somewhere else.)
That's before someone even gets to the actual install process. Somehow all of that stuff hasn't gotten more streamlined or user friendly. If you try to see how one would go about getting and installing any distro, you'd quickly see that it's very confusing and convoluted, way more than it has to be, or needs to be to appeal and be simple for new users.
There's glimmers of hope, like fedora which has its media writer, which is gonna hold your hand through the whole thing. Even that links out to github for a download, despite clicking on a seemingly specific 'windows/mac or linux' button. It's a little buried too, below iso downloads, when it really should be brought up more forward, and explain a little bit better on how it's gonna guide you thru the whole thing.
It really should be an app that's gonna guide you thru it, or a dead simple 1-2-3 step tutorial that's gonna guide you thru writing an image (download writer, download iso, write an image - laying it out more than that is just overcomplicating it really, at least in the initial quick install guide), with a clear, visible link to it - and yet somehow even this is too high of a bar for many distros to clear.
What has done a number on the ease of installing linux is how compact discs have just went away, because having a compact disc, burning it, or having it be just sent to users was making that step of the process simpler. Sure, writing to a USB is easy, but the expectation that everyone's just gonna have a spare usb is naive (and you're never gonna hear that you actually need to buy a usb stick in any of those guides lol), and there's just a little more opportunity to fuck up there (overwriting other disks, unless the writer app is laid out nicely and fail-proof). Distros might as well start selling usb sticks with installers on them. If someone's gonna be brand new to the whole thing and they're gonna have to buy a usb stick anyway, they might as well buy it from the distro with the distro on it already.
Some distros may want to get real about how a new user would even navigate their websites in order to get the thing. Like just trying to go thru that process themselves and see what's that experience like.
> There's glimmers of hope, like fedora which has its media writer, which is gonna hold your hand through the whole thing. Even that links out to github for a download, despite clicking on a seemingly specific 'windows/mac or linux' button. It's a little buried too, below iso downloads, when it really should be brought up more forward, and explain a little bit better on how it's gonna guide you thru the whole thing.
> It really should be an app that's gonna guide you thru it, or a dead simple 1-2-3 step tutorial that's gonna guide you thru writing an image (download writer, download iso, write an image - laying it out more than that is just overcomplicating it really, at least in the initial quick install guide), with a clear, visible link to it - and yet somehow even this is too high of a bar for many distros to clear.
Sorry, but this is just ridiculously nit-picky. How much more hand-holding do you need? Everything you want is literally there. Are you complaining that Fedora also addresses Linux users, at all?
Fact is, installing an operating system is a bit of an involved process. Realistically, people wouldn't even start with the docs, but some YouTube tutorial... But man... Fedora tries so hard! The site is ultra clean and on-point. Docs are friendly and very much 1-2-3 structured, they maintain a fucking media writer to do all the complicated shit like choosing a mirror and checking signatures, a simple installer where all complexity is hidden and you can just hit 'next'. What the hell do you want more?
MacOS and Windows don't even consider OS installation and only show you where you can find their OS preinstalled. Lol.
(I do have to agree with you on ubuntu.com tho. Haven't opened their site in a while and... jesus christ, what a mess!)
Reaper is just as good as FL Studio or Logic Pro. VSTs are really your biggest hurdle. Depending on how they are compiled, they may rely on platform specific code. Most big plugin makers have VSTs for all platforms though and your license works on all.
The pathway is there should you choose, one day. Linux is quite good now. That being said, I know a lot of niche plugins that some guy wrote that only works on windows because that’s all he/she has access to. Some 8-bit synth bitcrushers come to mind.
Also Steinburg made VST 3 sdk open source so you have a path to a free music production studio.
"as good as" (debatable in the first place) isn't enough justification to switch. Everyone has their own workflows, settings etc that they used over many years, which they are not going to give up, just to "switch to Linux". This is about real loss in productivity.
Yes but readers may be reading and think that Linux isn’t capable. It is. There’s plenty of DAWs available. You can also use WINE with proton to run FL Studio on Linux. My suggestion is just that, a suggestion to explore the possible.
If we just learn one thing and never change then we wind up being left behind. While FL Studio and Logic, Cubase and Ableton are what most people know. There’s ways of running ALL of them on Linux.
> While FL Studio and Logic, Cubase and Ableton are what most people know. There’s ways of running ALL of them on Linux.
As I just managed to get VR working with HP Reverb G2 in my Linux environment, quite literally the only reason I have Windows still installed on my computer is because of Ableton, and not being able to run that properly on even workstation hardware.
How exactly do I get Ableton running with an external USB soundcard and everything running exactly like it runs on Linux? I'm quite literally ready to give you money if you manage to give me an answer that actually leads to me being able to run Ableton on Arch Linux, because for years I have tried, and waited for the moment it's possible. So please do tell, how do I get it running?
Thanks, I've seen that repository before, but when I last saw it it boiled down to basically "create a prefix with these winecfg values" and not much more, but it seems a lot more fleshed out now, will give it another go.
Would be great if we'd eventually get some PipeWireASIO thing, sounds like a missing piece of the puzzle still, although not strictly required I suppose.
This doesn't work like everyone makes it out to. The first problem is overcoming the plethora of build errors. Then if you're lucky enough to actually get Ableton launched and working, you'll run into weird issues like Ableton crashing as soon as you attempt to add a MIDI track. When you find a work-around for that, you then run into random crashing in the middle of playback with absolutely atrocious latency despite the claims of "low latency". It's not worth it. I gave up
I've tried to passthrough Behringer audio interface, as well as HX Stomp (to, of course, avoid dual-boot) and it stuttered like crazy. Maybe there is a way to make it more "realtime" but it's not the default, at least in VirtualBox.
Yeah passing through usb devices to a VM for audio seems to be a dark art like working with a bunch of analog equipment. Everything has to be tuned. I do understand why a bare metal windows and/or mac computer is always in a studio, one can skip the head ache. Even if main DAW is Linux.
That's not wine, and I'd rather keep dual booting that running Windows VMs that barely can keep up. Have you tried doing music production inside a Windows VM before?
Yes Ableton, VST and usb. I have used the Coreweave windows VM with Nvidia to run everything audio and video, though haven't routed USB devices to it.
Cognitively it's easier to just buy a second PC for windows. But threadripper pro etc have so many cores and pcie lanes it's easy to run multiple OS VMs with dedicated GPUs at close to native speed in one box.
You can't, I've tried. The "passthrough" is bullshit, it doesn't fucking work and I wish people would stop recommending this time wasting "advice". That's not even the main issue as 90% of your VSTs will probably not work either and latency will be through the roof.
And that is unfortunately the place where I spent my big bucks.
I do however use Linux for my work, and have for more than a decade. If all the plugins (plus FL Studio, I've tried Reaper but it might be not for me) worked, I'd switch my personal desktop in a heartbeat. It's honestly the only thing locking me to Win10. Maybe I'll try a Mac through work (we get to keep the machines).
And yes, I've tried running FL using Wine, and it works surprisingly well! Just not _well enough_, and some plugins do not work at all. Most do, and that's great, but not enough for me at least.
I still remember the first time I stumbled across Logic Pro X. For the price of $200 I got a complete package that contains about 200 plugins and instruments. The DAW itself was maybe 7% of the full contents of that package.
That is unbeatable value for money in the DAW market and that was before Logic Pro 11 came out and added a ton of new plugins.
It's not the apps, it's the drivers. I've got expensive high quality audio hardware (RME Fireface 800) that doesn't have Linux drivers. Oh sure, I could invest $2000 to get a newer version, but that would just mean a steep learning curve to get drivers, hardware, and DAW working anywhere near as seamlessly as my Windows setup.
It's not that I'm a Windows fan, I'm just looking for the most cost- and time-effective solutions. I'd rather spend my time recording and making music than sweating over driver and software issues.
> So in my case, I shouldn't dump Windows (and thousand of $$ I've spent on audio software).
If you mean that there's no Linux replacement for Digital Audio Workstation, then I agree: switching is not for you. But if what worries you are the $$ you have spent, you are just another victim of the sunk cost fallacy. The earlier you realize your mistake, the earlier you are ready to evaluate the options without biases.
The thousands of $$ on audio software are spent because they actually provide the exact output needed. Think of them as a precision-tooled machine part critical to the production flow in a factory. Sure, you can replace it with a cheaper alternative but the cheaper part will likely have rough edges and the errors caused by those rough edges will cascade into your final production output...
most interesting part is to guess how many here complaining about a poor ecosystem on Linux audio, actually work professionally on the field
Surge-XT, Vitalium and/or PlugData or Cardinal can get you so far on the synthesis world that maybe not even a full dedicated lifetime can explore everything you can do with it... Ardour isn't a shinning pot for MIDI editor generational features but if you actually know music-theory, it works pretty solid for writing. the in-line editor makes very much sense, just like sheet music can hold an orchestra info. on a sigle page
I am a linux user for 26 years. And used windows since 3.11 up to 2005. After that point I just helped people with windows, never worked with it.
I had this friend while my kid went to school with his kid, he was a musician.
He absolutely was frightened of even handling me the mouse of his windows 7 setup in case I break his DAW, cherry audio tools and midi mixers just by me showing him a website.
Also helped to switch some dlls (hi didn't know how to kill background task to release dll to be replaced) and edit windows registry cause he needed an upgrade for some pirated software.
I have seen many more nightmarish stuff hapenning in windows, even on holy sacred windows xp.
On the other hand my mother has been using debian xfce in her acer touch screen laptop for 15 years. No issues. Many elder people got in shock when windows 8 made all those changes.
So whenever windows users talk about linux confusion I smirk.
I see this mentioned again and again, but I don't buy it.
For power users or users with niche use cases, sure there might be specialized software that lock you into Windows or Mac.
But for most casual home users, I think Linux would be perfectly adequate, and familiarity being the only real detractor.
Assuming someone can help install a friendly Linux distribution (and that the hardware is compatible), then what are the big blockers? Gaming maybe, for those where it is relevant.
But looking at all my not so tech savvy family members and friends, a browser, online versions of MS Office (or Libreoffice for sure), maybe Spotify or the like, would really be enough. Being able to install apps via an (actually useful) app store is a big win in itself.
Looking at those friends/family members, it is not like they are able to support their Windows machines either when something goes wrong or needs to be changed - I (or someone else technical) always need to help out anyway, fixing driver issues, installing software, changing any non-trivial settings, and so on. And I could just as well do that on Linux - and whether I need to pull up a terminal is irrelevant.
Ableton + Serum + many custom VSTs user here. You're spot on. This is actually the biggest reason I can't switch. In fact Steve Duda (creator of Serum) has said many times that he doesn't ever plan to support Linux. That's not a deal-breaker necessarily, but the fact we paid lots of money for this stuff makes it a bit unreasonable to switch to Linux.
I have Windows only audio and 3d software. I ended up with a windows VM with GPU passthrough on Linux. It sits on its own m2 drive for the rare occasion I need to dual boot. So Windows has been become legacy software for me. (IClone and CC).
And Steam Deck is there.
But I think the desktop interface is legacy for anyone under the age of 25, I get a kick out of watching them navigate a desktop.
I guess it depends on your needs. 90% of my working life is a terminal to run terraform, emacs to write code, and slack to chat with colleagues. In each of the companies I've worked over the past 10 years I've had a google workspace account, and I think I've never even touched microsoft office in all that time.
Yes there are options. In practice you pick one distro, the one your friend recommends, or that the IT department gives you.
There are probably fields in which you cannot use Linux software, but for your average joe? It's not impossible, and it's not that confusing with a little patience.
I’m so close to the switch myself for silly reasons. I don’t like windows due to their creepy business practices and negative design patterns in their OS so I’m very bias against it. Forcing copilot is just the latest in their creepy practices…
For more details on why I came close to switching: I use my win desktop as a host for ai services such as Comfy UI for stable diffusion generation since it is a beefy platform; for example, I generate reference stuff for Krita (digital painting software) illustrations on my drawing tablet. I remember the process to configure windows as being strange, GUI bound (NOT windows strong suit), and just annoying due to my aforementioned bias. Valve has done great work with running games on linux which is the only reason I keep that OS and I’d rather set up services on linux.
This comment serves as a reminder to myself that I should just go ahead grab my windows license keys for archival purposes and flash a better OS on that system.
Krita is among the main reasons why I am so impressed with the KDE project. Not only do they deliver a very good desktop environment, but they also deliver some genuine flagship apps for it
I call it silly because essentially I’m complaining that I don’t like setting up a service on an OS I don’t normally set up services for. My quibbles with that process can in part be addressed by crafting a terminal based workflow to configure the host and enable the service on my desktop, skipping the GUI completely. E.g. I’m sure I can do Task Scheduler shenanigans through powershell. More experience would help sand down the rough parts I experienced.
Now the product decisions behind the OS giving me the icks… The terminal can’t (completely) help with that ^_^
Eh those applications can both be run in linux without issue.
They are likely to have more issues related to getting the drawing tablet configured correctly.
The rest is just having to start from scratch and lose the decades of windows experience and intuition which can make things painful as that type of thing cant be replaced without time.
Having just yesterday installed a fresh Mint distro on a newly received PC that came with Windows pre-installed, I can tell you that this is merely an hour of work, and most of the time will be spent downloading and burning the .iso on the USB key.
Do you have reference for the krita+comfyui setup? I have a drawing tablet and always wanted to augment drawings using AI but never got around to deploying a stack for that. I have a 3090 that should be enough for it, I just need a reference for the setup.
Running ComfyUI or _any_ AI stuff on Linux is a night and day difference in terms of ease of use and performance when compared against that of Windows users. Python on Windows is suffering
The pain I’ve experienced running ComfyUI on windows is from (1) pytorch and the complexities of managing it through pip when python’s platform concept doesn't encompass CUDA versions, (2) dependency conflicts between custom nodes (some of which also involve #1 because they pin a specific pytorch version as a dependency), and (3) gratuitous breakage in ComfyUI updates.
It works great until it doesn't. Wait until your dependencies require you to change torch versions, or a comfy update requires dependency changes, or you have to change CUDA versions.
Solving these problems (and avoiding them in the first place) is a lot easier to manage on a Linux install.
Copilot is already great and it's only getting better. I can get so much more work done and the same amount of time or get the same amount of work done in a lot less time.
It's funny how many people were afraid of AI. Technophobes abound in this world
Funny, I disagree. I think copilot truly sucks compared to the other options. But you can uninstall copilot, so I don’t see why it bothers people at all.
I tried to leave Windows 11 for Linux - it just didn't work for me. I installed EndeavourOS onto my main gaming desktop. It worked great for a while and ran all the games I played with my friends. However, one night when I went on to play a game I ran a system update and it seemed to completely break my nvidea drivers - I tried reinstalling them and also using the open source driver. This meant I just couldn't play any games that night and was simply diagnosing linux issues.
I probably chose the wrong distro for this but I really just want the PC to work for playing games without any issues. I don't use it for anything other than playing games so for my time I just went back to Windows 10 and will use that until apps stop working.
Haha, exact same thing happened to me a couple weeks ago. You probably had the same issue as me. The driver dropped support for older cards and you had to switch to a legacy AUR package. I fixed it with some frantic googling while my friends waited a half hour. Not sure how you would know this without subscribing to some arch news feed or something. Not ideal.
That's exactly how it's supposed to work: Arch expects you to check the notes on their news section always before you update. The NVIDIA driver issue and solution was posted on Dec 20th.
I'm not saying I'm reading these regularly, just that yes it's the expected way.
So it wouldn't be incorrect to refer to Arch and Arch based distros as 'well, if you want to have fun with a broken system, otherwise avoid', just so it could be mentioned in a succinct way when talking about what distros one could try.
No, I don't think that's a fair way to put it. People regularly report having quite old Arch installs without stability issues. And people also regularly advice Linux newcomers not to pick Arch.
If you check their news section, it's a reasonable number of notes, 13 for last year. I think it's fair to say it seems to work well if you are willing to follow their procedure and already know what you're doing.
Indeed. Arch-based distros ought to be managed by intermediate-advanced users. Linux Mint is better suited to beginners.
> but I really just want the PC to work for playing games without any issues.
If you decide to give it another go, and you have the means, I suggest using an AMD graphics card. Nvidia's drivers are notorious for being troublesome on Linux, and although they can usually be made to work (either by the user or by a distro developer), the drivers for AMD GPUs are much better integrated with the OS.
I switched to AMD a few years ago and have been very pleased with the results, both in games and in non-gaming tasks. (I don't use my GPU for LLM development, though, so I can't speak to the current state of things in that area.)
I have been 'enjoying' this with Debian on a PC with a 1080Ti nvidia card, which is no longer supported by the nvidia v590 + drivers. I've had to pin to v580, but the whole "oops, I updated, rebooted and 'look ma, no high-resolution anymore'" got tired really quickly. You have my sympathies.
EndeavourOS is apparently Arch-based so I've got no useful suggestions for fixing there, sorry.
Yeah the real mistake was starting with Endeavour. I wonder just how many people are turned off by their initial Linux experience because they choose stuff like Arch, Gentoo, or some obscure variant rather than Fedora, Kubuntu or Mint. Even stuff like Bazzite is probably an odd choice for a novice - though it would have handled that failed nVidia upgrade nicely.
This is why I go the console route. I tried building a PC after being inundated with people saying it was better. Even on Windows it felt like it turned into a sys admin job that I didn’t care for. I just wanted to play some games after work.
The fix is not buying Nvidia, even though some people here will tell you how much AMDs drivers actually sucked in 2009 and how good Nvidia is now and all that noise.
Buy full AMD in 2026, and you'll have no problems with games.
I can't understand this reasoning. System updates obviously don't become less risky because of the OS they're updating. But going back to Win10 means having less control over when those updates happen (and much less control over, and understanding of, what is updated), and waiting much longer for them to complete.
> System updates obviously don't become less risky because of the OS they're updating
The last time I used arch, I ran an update and it broke my bootloader, meaning the next time I restarted it wouldn't boot at all.
Sure I could make a recovery USB and fix it, but at that point I was away from home, and just really needed to do the totally crazy thing of "using my computer to actually do work".
(To be clear, I didn't and I'm not recommending going back to Windows, just a more sane Linux)
Yikes. It's 2026. "Don't break the bootloader" should be table stakes for any OS distribution's update process by now. I am not a fan of Windows or macOS, but I don't even recall the last time an operating system software broke my ability to boot--maybe during the Windows 2000 days?
Yet, when you go online to refresh your memory on how to update your Linux installation, too many of the guides still say STEP 1: Back everything up because you may not be able to boot after you do this!
My point was exactly that GGP shouldn't have expected to be able to do the system update without risk.
But the usual way to install Linux nowadays is from a live boot, so you automatically have a recovery drive anyway. It's not hard to set up regular restore points with Timeshift or similar, either.
That said, I haven't had problems like what you describe in nearly 4 years.
And the other person did, as have many others on support forums.
Updates generally just work, on the balance of my experience and other available evidence. It's still unwise to schedule them at a time where a failure would be more disruptive than baseline, and it's still best practice to be prepared for a failure and not have to figure things out on the fly.
The mistake is that you did a system update when you wanted to use the computer. Not implying that system updates should be a dangerous thing to do, but just something learnt from experience - I’ve had similar issues, especially with Nvidea drivers and kernel versions getting updated at the same time. The take away is keep the updates to when you have an hour to debug or get comfortable rolling back updates.
I mean, you get what you signed up for. If you wanted total stability and infrequent updates then why would you use Arch? (If the answer is "I didn't know what I signed up for" then that's fair. Simply understanding the practical differences between distros is a huge hurdle.)
That's absurd. The system should be able to update itself without fear that it's going to break anything. The user should not be expected to have to set aside time to babysit an update.
Windows isn't perfect in this respect by any means, but it sure seems like it handles updates a lot better than the distros that have been mentioned in this thread; in that Windows at least takes steps to examine your hardware first and to not apply updates where it's known something has fallen out of support.
Windows also, apparently unlike these mentioned distros, maintains a Last Known Good configuration so if an update does start causing failures, it can automatically roll itself back (or, at worst, can manually be rolled back). There are some distros that do similar, particularly immutable distros; but honestly this sort of thing should be table stakes to the point that if a distro doesn't do it, it should be laughed out of the room.
There is absolutely no acceptable excuse for any operating system to break itself in an update.
Not saying I'm not considering it given the current political climate, but I'm spoiled by my Macbook Air. The Thinkpad I've been issued for work costs about the same, runs hot like crazy, always has fans running, is cheap-feeling plastic, thicker, heavier, garbage touchpad, weird keyboard layout (printscreen right next to the arrow keys, what were they thinking?), mushy keys, barely serviceable display ... what do I buy if I want something as sleek and well-built and polished as Apple?
I don't think anyone will build as nice hardware as Apple anytime soon, so I think if that's your primary requirement then any other choice will be a compromise. I don't really like Apple, but it must must acknowledged that even a few basic things (the monitor turning on immediately as I open the screen, the touchpad quality, etc.) seem totally elusive to other manufacturers.
Apple's pretty imperfect, and it's sad to see that they've neglected and regressed their desktop OS, however I don't think anyone can argue that macOS is anywhere near as bad as Windows 11.
Apple's only just started getting good hardware. For so long their hardware was so below standard and in a lot of areas it still is. Apple users will sit there with a straight face telling me about how much they care about a good cpu when I know they paid 3k for a low tier intel cpu and 8gb of ram not to long ago.
Also when they talk about how their laptop can handle all this stuff without fans spinning up its only because the laptops come with next to no cooling and spend most of the time thermal throttling.
Eh. debatable. my work MBP frequently dies and the screen never turns on when i plug it in. I have to wait 15-20 minutes for it to turn on. My Linux laptop on the other hand, the screen turns immediately power or no power/just plugged in
Don't they offer downloads of Xcode outside of the App Store if you pay their developer program fee? That includes their SDKs. Theoretically there is only an expenditure of time and effort to build an iOS app on Linux. I forget if it is against their terms or not, but I don't think the SDK available is a barrier.
To each his own. I liked may company issued ThinkPad so much I ended up buying one myself and I have been pushing back getting a replacement (HP Elitebook).
Some of your points are common, such as the touchpad being garbage, or that it runs hotter than an Apple Silicon MacBook Air. But most people consider ThinkPad keyboards to be way better than Apple's and while most (not all) ThinkPads have a plastic shell, they certainly don't feel cheap. Apple displays are typically really good, but ThinkPads have a lot of options, so it is hard to tell.
Your comment, especially regarding the keyboard makes me think you just love your MacBook. Why buy anything else?
Linux support is not great, but a lot of a significant part of what makes Apple great is in their hardware/software integration and they are not doing it open source. It means a MacBook without OSX is a lesser MacBook, but at least, it is not Windows 11.
ThinkPads run the gamut. Their flagship line is nice. In most regards, I enjoy my first gen X1 Nano — good keyboard, screen (even if it annoyingly requires fractional UI scaling), body feels solid despite being lightweight, soft touch plastic makes it feel nice to hold. Trackpad is just ok but the trackpoint makes for that.
It likes to spin up its fan doing the most insignificant things though (even plugging in a pedestrian 1x scaling external monitor can while idle can do it) and its battery life is somewhat abysmal. Standby time is also quite poor.
Some of these things are in theory improved by a newer CPU (Lunar Lake in particular looks decent) but sadly they discontinued the Nano. The Carbon isn’t that much bigger, but the size difference is noticeable in some circumstances.
It dual boots Windows 11 and Fedora, and I’ve played with other distros in the past. They have minor edges over each other in various ways but none offer a major concrete advantage over the others in any category (except harassment/junkware, which any distro has a major upper hand over Windows 11 in, but Windows 10 accomplishes that almost as well).
Either there’s simply a hard limit on how good this hardware can be in terms of thermals and battery life or neither Lenovo’s tuning of Windows nor any Linux distro has gone far enough in properly leveraging power management and the like.
Yeah, if you don't like the case quality of a T model Thinkpad, you are the problem ;) - fiber reinforced plastic is arguably a more suitable laptop case material than aluminum.
If you want something a bit more like a Macbook Pro, consider the HP Zbook G1A.
It's basically built like a Macbook in terms of case and screen quality, but it's based on an AMD Strix Halo chipset - mine is an AI Max Pro+ 395.
The chip design is somewhat similar to Apple Silicon in that it's one big chip with unified memory - you can get them with up to 128GB of unified ram - that thing is a beast for running local LLMs.
Since HP also sells them with Ubuntu preinstalled, Linux support is quite good, though it requires some bleeding edge packages for everything to be supported.
In my case, I have suspend and hibernate working perfectly, fingerprint reader, webcam, etc all work.
Nothing is quite as slick as Apple, but companies are popping up doing pretty sleek Linux-first laptops, I have a Starlabs notebook [1] and am waiting for their new Starfighter [2]...
Classic lenovo. Some models have FN as the most bottom left key, instead of ctrl. Gotta be the worst design decision ive ever seen. Everyone copy+pastes and finds, whoever thought that was a good idea really needs relieved of decision making power.
You've got history backwards. IBM Thinkpads did it that way 30+ years ago, when there was no consensus in the industry. Do you switch it now, and anger every lifetime Thinkpad loyalist, or keep it and annoy just the folks who switch back and forth between different vendors' laptops?
In a brief survey of laptop photos from the early 90s, IBM, Toshiba, Zenith, NEC, Packard Bell, Compaq, and Fujitsu all put Fn on the outside.
Epson, Apple, HP, Panasonic, and Sony put it as the second key.
A handful put it as the third key. Heck, one Toshiba machine had Ctrl left of A, Alt on the extreme lower-left starting out the bottom row, followed by Caps Lock and Fn and backslash and finally spacebar.
Only in the last 15-ish years have most of the Fn-Ctrl keyboards died out and the majority of the industry is now using Ctrl-Fn. Thinkpads are the last major holdout, but they didn't decide to buck the trend, the trend bucked them.
Idk, I find it easier to press control on a Thinkpad because it's closer. It being in a corner would be farer away.
Anyway, control should be (and traditionally was) where CapsLock is. Just remap it - everything is suddenly easy and ergonomic.
As well as beautiful hardware that is a pleasure to use, Apple machines can be capable of running local models like gpt-oss-20B or Qwen Coder portably and without sweating. My 24GB M4 Mini was very cheap considering the local models it can run.
Yes hardware is great. Price per performance watt is also great. But UI sucks. Look at all then posts even macOS fans about new macOS release like the glass ones. I prefer ssh and running jobs in macOS.
Nice for experimentation, but if you want a daily driver that lasts for years: Dell Latitude (now Dell Pro), HP EliteBook or Lenovo ThinkPad. Literally laptops built to last. Will last a decade with ease. Higher segments ofcourse better than lower segments, but in general very very good if you stay away from lowest tier
I really like my HP Omnibook 14 with the Ryzen AI HX 370 chip.. it's sleek, well built (so far, at least).. insane battery life.. the standby time on Linux is in weeks and the battery life when light browsing/YouTube viewing is easily 9+ hours. Even the finger print sensor finally just works. The touchpad gestures with kwin input actions are as smooth as, if not better than os x.
The only thing my work 16" MBP does better is the speakers.
edit: Updated the battery life to 9+ hours from 7+ hours based on what the battery monitor says.. I remember binge watching a couple of long movies/tv shows without ever having to plug in the laptop that day...
Such is the cost of freedom, unfortunately. There is no free lunch. Historically, people abandoned comfort and made sacrifices for a greater social good.
A computer (or a smartphone, basically whichever type of Turing complete Von Neumann machine you use) is your interface to the modern world, from interacting with your government to the stores you frequent and talking to the people you love to the media you consume.
So in that sense I think it does matter who is the ultimate arbiter of what it will and won't do, not only in an individual sense but a societal one. The more people switch to something they themselves control, the less power third parties have over their behavior.
My computer is my work environment and often an entertainment device. As such it affects my quality of life. It affects my mental health as well as my eye health.
Suffering can be real with a bad screen, an overheating laptop or difficult to use software.
My mental health definitely suffers if I'm forced to use software that enriches companies I dislike for good reason.
I think I get what you’re hinting at. But is there a more expensive option that’s free (as in freedom) and provides an experience that the GP referred to?
And there will never be such option if we all collectively choose to perpetuate Apple's monopoly. It is us, of all people, who need to take a stance, because we have the necessary skill.
Maybe! But the fact that Apple also makes the operating system means the hardware/software integration can’t be beat. I’ve never used a non-Apple laptop where the trackpad worked a tenth as good as any MacBook.
This is also my problem. I am currently using my docked Macbook instead of my much more powerful desktop running Linux, even though I also want to use Linux more.
Why? Because as much as I want to get rid of my dependence on tech giants, Apple's products are just so damn good, and they Just Work^TM, especially with each other.
Having used Linux on/off for many years, I can say that it's definitely gotten better, but I am still waiting for the year of the Linux desktop. It doesn't have to be as polished as my Mac, but I'd like to at least not have to fight with Bluetooth especially, and things like the dongle for my headset not working and other issues like that.
I think we're always going to have that: there will always be That One Software that doesn't work on Linux, and you need to keep another OS around just to run it. I was able to get rid of Windows everywhere in my home except for one gaming PC, where I keep it around just for Fortnite, because of Epic's insistence on using their nasty kernel-level anti-cheat. So I keep that one machine around isolated from the rest of my network, for the sole purpose of playing one game.
I'm now in the process of un-Appleing my home too, and it's going pretty well, but I know I'll need to keep a single Mac somewhere in the corner of my garage in case I need to use Xcode to build an iOS app or something.
> The Thinkpad I've been issued for work costs about the same, runs hot like crazy
I have a personal Thinkpad (Linux) and a company provided one (W11). The personal one basically never turns on the fan. The company one is hot all the time. Guess why.
Snapdragon Elite X Gen 2 laptops are coming out as we speak. Assuming you're not doing GPU heavy work (or gaming), that's what you should be looking at. They are equal to M4 performance. Personally I'd look at the new Asus machines from CES.
That sounds like just what I want, that ought to have great battery life as well. Very promising, if someone were to build a nice light laptop around it...
I mean, it's certainly not as seamless as an open x86 machine, but if you have an Air already you can always try Linux on it? The Fedora Asahi spin [1] supports pretty much everything on M1/M2 devices.
Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, and Mint remain great recommendations; good stability, community support, etc. (even for Ubuntu, a regular user might not actually care that much about snaps so long as everything works)
I just moved to CachyOS, (from Fedora, and earlier from Ubuntu -- I've been on Linux for a while) and I've been very, very happy. The gaming performance is legitimately better than what I was getting on Fedora, and I've just enjoyed the OS and KDE much more than Gnome Shell. I haven't had any real showstoppers with CachyOS, and it really has felt like a user-friendly version of Arch finally exists.
I think a lot of cachy performance is placebo, because Steam games use the container runtime's Debian 11 libraries, it doesn't use the native CachyOS ones at all.
I'm CPU-bound on one of the games I play, and cachy's scheduler may have made a difference for me. I was also fully on the closed-source NVIDIA drivers in Fedora, and had been totally out of the loop that that the kernel driver had been open sourced. And, cachy had me on a more recent version of the driver.
None of these things are truly unique to CachyOS, but nonetheless I do think I experienced a boost when I switched.
To expand a little bit, I think it might clearer to say that CachyOS does out of the box what many other distros could also do with manual configuration. So, in that sense (default) CachyOS probably is faster than (default) [mainstream distro].
That's still using Cachy's kernel. Cachy uses a different scheduler and compiles for x86_64_v3 instruction set. It won't get you a world-shattering boost but ~5% is what comes up in benchmarks.
I've yet to have a day when CachyOS can come out of sleep: hangs at various steps and requires a hard reboot that somehow relaunches apps on login that I explicitly closed hours ago.
I had the same problem with Fedora which is part of what prompted me to switch. It works great for me in Cachy. I assume either way it was an Nvidia problem.
Interestingly enough, I didn't have the same issue with Omarchy/Hyprland. Hyprland doesn't have even the most rudimentary ability to restore windows but it was almost rock solid when it came to coming out of sleep.
Still searching for that one true Linux distribution :) Will stay on Cachy for now because gaming is so much better.
Everyone is talking about moving to Linux lately, it’s a bit of a trend. I wish they’d stop, for one simple reason: I’ve been using Linux exclusively (when I’m not forced to use macOS by work) for several years now, and I rather enjoy the lack of malware, spyware and other bullshit on the platform.
If the general public comes over this situation might end. Desktop linux isn’t a target right now because its niche, I’d prefer that didn’t stop.
While I sympathize with this angle, there's another side to this coin: if more people do the switch, maybe some applications will finally get linux versions.
I'm a Sunday photographer and quite like Lightroom and Photoshop (I know about the drama, but to me, I get enough value from them compared to Darktable and the GIMP to not switch just yet). It's the only reason I still have a windows pc hanging around the house.
I am in a similar boat; my media editing machine ruined windows 10 so that I can use Lightroom. But I would dearly love to ditch windows so I'm currently looking to try out running Lightroom under Winapps to see if it is usable. There's no way of passing the GPU through without something like SR-IOV so I'll have to see how it goes.
I was thinking of doing that, but since that would require me to switch the monitor and whatnot, it would be just like using two PCs. And since I only use my desktop for LR and not much else, jumping through the hoops with emulation doesn't make much sense.
How so? Winapps lets you run windows applications as if they were native to Linux, you interact with them the same way you would anything installed by apt/pacman/dnf etc. Unless I'm very much misunderstanding things (which I don't believe I am)
In the general case, I think you're right. WinApps seems to use RemoteApp functionality on windows to export just the window you're interested in from the virtualized guest vm to the host, which should behave mostly as a "native" app.
But you were talking about sr-iov, which is a whole different matter. Presumably, the goal is to have LR use that GPU for some of its functions. But LR doesn't support multiple GPUs: it does its computation on the same GPU that handles the output. For that, you need to connect the display to the passed-through GPU. Now, aside from intel, I don't think any mainstream GPU actually supports sr-iov, so you need to pass through the entire gpu to the guest VM (the host wouldn't see it anymore at all). This isn't how RemoteApp works, and I doubt WinApps handles this case.
I remember a project (Looking Glass?) that tried to somehow "bring back" the output to the host machine, but it didn't seem too robust at the time. I haven't followed it, so I have no idea if it's any better now, if it's still alive. If it does, this could possibly work if you had two GPUs (which I happen to have, since my CPU has an integrated GPU). But you'd still get the whole Windows desktop of the VM, not an RDP connection.
There's a lot of servers running Linux that are regularly targeted by malware.
There is a big difference in what software a desktop user runs versus what runs on a server, but the great thing about Linux is that you can keep just as much variation between your install and the average desktop user.
Your best bet for security is probably running OpenBSD, but within Linux, if you avoid common optional applications and services like Gnome, KDE, pulseaudio, systemd, etc., you'll have a significantly different attack vector. Avoiding Python and Node package managers and sticking to your distribution's package manager would be great, too.
Better spread the Linux word because with enough users more developers will be attracted and the race good vs bad hackers in OSS will be won be the former. "Nothing is hidden under the sun". Closed source is made to push malware secretly.
That is factually incorrect flamebait. Closed source is made primarily due to a desire to retain control. While one can use control for malicious reasons, the predominant use is to make money.
You overestimate how influential HN is. Everyone on HN is talking about moving to Linux. Which means, uh, nothing really changed for the general public.
Folks on reddit and hackernews aren't normal people. Outside of this bubble few people have heard of linux. Hell so few people I know use firefox which makes me mad. You are safe from that fear.
I did the same for my media centers! Netflix and iQIYI refuse to work. I am cancelling Netflix. Been a member since 2010. I don't need 4k either. The 4k tax is losing ownership over your media. HDMI is closed source compared to display port.
My media center experience is so so much better. The apps on roku logout randomly, the nvidia shield remote craps out, windows firefox/chrome are slow and the logitech keyboard doesn't work. But the same keyboard and browser setup works like a charm on the same machine on linux.
Manufactured waste, fight against general purpose computing and ownership is what is at stake.
You're all too generous. The first time Netflix didn't display past 720p in Firefox, I immediately cancelled my subscription (which was paying for the whole family) and redirected everyone to Bitsearch[0] to pirate everything instead. I don't agree the moral or ethical arguments against it either.
[0] Bitsearch uses a distributed hash table (DHT)[1] to find all public tracker content
> I don't understand people who use anything else, to be honest.
Most people don't make their coffee in an Aeropress either.
I've also used Linux exclusively (in my case 25 years), but I also realize that with a few niche exceptions, there are few mass marketed products that feature the traditional Linux desktop as their primary UI.
Desktop OS UI is hard. It takes investment in technology, product, and marketing all focused on a target market. Even with all of those most upstarts have failed to gain traction. Also consider that most people buy laptops for 2 reasons: 1) browsing the web and if they can afford it 2) as a fashion accessory. People will put up with a lot of BS from a product if they feel like the product gives them social status and acceptance.
No Linux laptop really hits (2). Arguably only a few Windows laptops do either.
> Most people don't make their coffee in an Aeropress either.
Stupid analogy, the Linux version of that would be whatever french press you want to use. Buy your coffee ground or as beans and grind yourself, depending on preference. And for my girlfriend there's always the Starbucks equivalent (Debian stable with Gnome).
Apple would be picked by modern slaves and sold in a capsule at 100,000% markup and it only fits their machines. Windows comes with pesticides for the "benefit of the user".
I don't see how their analogy is stupid. Aeropress and french press are pretty similar from an "enthusiast coffee device" perspective. Lots of room for variability in grind size, coffee choice, and specific brewing technique with both methods.
Aeropress is a brand, one I've never heard of. It fits in the Linux ecosystem (maybe as one of the Red Hat flavors?) but as an analogy it is simplified. Linux is so much bigger than that and there's everything from LFS (grow, grind and brew with tools you've sourced and put together yourself), to Android (plain old drip machine). Reducing everything that's the Linux ecosystem to a niche brand of a specific type of coffee maker is dishonest.
I use a french press myself, and never heard of Aeropress. My machines all run Debian with DWM and I never have any problems. My non-technical girlfriend is fine on Debian and doesn't really know the difference. She did mention how fast her laptop boots though.
I am too lazy and not enough of a snob to write several paragraphs on why Aeropress is objectively better and different from French Press, but it is, and I hope someone can step up and do that here.
> Apple would be picked by modern slaves and sold in a capsule at 100,000% markup and it only fits their machines. Windows comes with pesticides for the "benefit of the user".
The exploitation of labor in developing countries in the electronics supply chain is a serious issue, and worth discussing, but it's not the dimension of the subject my comment was addressing.
> I have been using Linux exclusively for twenty years now.
Ditto. I can't stand other OSs; they are constantly in my way for just the basic tasks.
> I don't understand people who use anything else, to be honest.
Anti-ditto. I would never give Linux to my parents. They're capable enough to maintain their own Windows computers, and switching them to Linux would mean that I'd have to take over all of those tasks -- because they've got other, more important things to do than to learn a new OS.
I'd agree with you if you could buy rando PC with Linux installed and working with no stupid hardware issues. People who can live in Google Docs/Office 365 web and don't have industry specific use cases will almost always be fine. But once you break out of that subset of people, tossing them a Linux machine can be kind of mean.
> Anti-ditto. I would never give Linux to my parents.
I don't know about your parents but most people (including my parents) just use a browser and some applications that are identical to their Windows versions or sufficiently similar. There isn't really anything new to learn.
One huge barrier is printing. I've been using Linux as my daily OS for a decade and I still have stupid problems with printers. I can't print from my laptop because the printer spits out unicode garbage if I try. My desktop works, but sometimes I have to reboot to get the print queue to clear.
Printing has always been the most brittle experience of all IT at least since when I started printing in the 80s.
To add an anecdote I let a friend print on my HP LaserJet from his Windows laptop today. It detected the printer over Wi-Fi but it could not print anything because it was missing the driver. After a 100 MB download from HP's site the installer wanted an USB connection to the printer. That friend of mine is young so he never saw a USB cable with the small squarish plug that connects to a printer (or scanner, or USB2 disk) but that's another story.
The installer run for minutes and failed with an error. I told him not to trust the error and attempt to print anyway. It did print. However after a few pages a pop-up complained about a non original toner (probably true) and it stopped printing. However he managed to find the printer from his Android phone and print from there. Then he was able to print from Windows too.
All of that took about an hour. I installed Debian 13 on my laptop last week and I could detect the printer instantly and print without any problem. No driver to download. I know that I can apt install hplip to get more specific drivers but it was not necessary.
I'm sure most people feel the opposite way. I've been using Windows and Macs for 20 years and I don't ever see myself ever using Linux as a desktop OS.
Among the subculture that would be the type to visit Hacker News (or Slashdot back in the day), this attitude emerged around 25 years ago. In the late 90s, there was widespread enthusiasm for the Linux desktop. I remember those days fondly. It was glorious. Then macOS (or OS X as we called it) swept away a lot of people. A lot of them would get hostile or angry or mock people when they would mention they didn't join the Mac bandwagon.
Same here. Using Linux Mint for about 15 years now. Same for various computer illiterate family members. As far as I am concerned it is significantly more pleasant to use than Windows and MacOS.
This is something I see repeated everywhere but I've been using Linux daily on all sorts of laptops for a little over 15 years and never struggled with this issue.
But during my brief period on Windows I would get issues like my colour settings changing or the behaviour of certain meta keys being switched out when I woke a sleeping laptop.
My colleagues run linux laptops and they don't struggle with this issue either. They just completely turn off their laptops anytime they want to move somewhere. That's how they trust their OS.
>> They just completely turn off their laptops anytime they want to move somewhere
Fine but that attitude isn't going to increase Linux adoption. Arch does work in this regard today but it does require some BIOS tweaks to get it to work flawlessly. Compare this to a MacBook where closing the lid always does the right thing and seems to use basically no power at all in this state. For me, I'll accept the trade-off as I don't want to use macOS (makes no sense for development imo) but some aspects of the experience are clearly superior.
My development machine is a macbook air, which is fantastic for me because I can work anywhere without a power outlet for long hours. Production target is usually debian servers, they just work reliably. And my game/music machine is windows (all the games, all the vsts). I don't like trade-offs.
Battery life is great on a mac, but then I would have to use my macbook / macOS. For me that is a tradeoff as I would prefer to use Arch / Hyprland, kernel support for cgroups, etc.
I have multiple computers with multiple operating systems, but I still need my gaming machine to be windows because some of my favorite games require it.
Can you understand why someone would buy a $20 Mr. Coffee coffeemaker from Walmart and not a $2000 DeLonghi Eletta Explore superautomatic espresso machine?
At work, I got a fancy MacBook, and as much as I admire the hardware, I despise the MacOS window management. IMHO, it is broken by design, and I wonder how anybody at Apple considers this a good system. There is still a small chance that I didn't understand a crucial concept, but until now, nobody was able to explain to me, how it is supposed to work.
I have reached the point where I believe that it must be something historical, like Steve wrote it himself, or else, and now nobody dares to reform it.
For both ideological and practical reasons, I'd love to switch. If I were a desktop computing person, I'd already have done so years ago.
Alas, I exclusively use laptops - as I work a great deal while travelling.
I do not wish to have to carry around a mouse with me wherever I go with my portable computer.
If any Linux distro manages to replicate even 80% of the smoothness and functionality of a Mac trackpad experience, I'll switch. I have yet to find one, however (and yes, I've tried all the Asahi variants - they don't come close).
Agreed. Trackpads on Windows are very good (approaching Mac quality) but on Linux it's hit and (mostly) miss. Gnome gestures are borderline unusable. Sometimes Gnome forgets how many fingers I'm using and every single finger mouse movement is suddenly a gesture, have to retry gestures to switch workspaces because the first two times it fails, etc. It becomes worse with more windows open. No back swipe gesture in Chrome, etc. Basic stuff that is annoying in every day use. Flawless mouse/touchpad support is not too much to ask.
Here's a perfect example of this: Using a Mac trackpad on macOS, you can two-finger scroll as fast or slow as you want. If you go slow enough (you might have to "roll" your fingers instead of moving them down), you can scroll your browser pixel-by-pixel. This behavior carries through every app on the system. Scrolling basically does exactly what your fingers do.
Now, run Linux (say, Ubuntu) on that exact same hardware and try scrolling in Firefox or something. Instead of the content moving exactly as your fingers are moving, it does this weird jumpy "page up / page down" like thing as your fingers move. Even moving your fingers as slowly as you can will make the content jump to the next "page" 20 pixels down. This is not just Firefox's behavior: it carries through to every application.
Yes, there's probably some obscure GNOME configuration I need to add to fix this behavior, and if you search online you'll find forum after forum of people asking for logs and responding with "I dunno, try this." For something that should work out of the box.
idk, the two finger "rolling" pixel-by-pixel scroll seems to work for me - Firefox (also foot terminal, Slack (xwayland), and Signal) on Scroll (a Sway fork) on Debian (testing) on a ~year old Thinkpad X11. I don't think I've done anything to configure or customize it either.
I got a Thinkpad (after a few years on a Macbook) largely because in the past the track point was a lot better than trackpads. But in those years, it seems hardware and/or software have improved enough that I barely use it.
> If any Linux distro manages to replicate even 80% of the smoothness and functionality of a Mac trackpad experience, I'll switch
I find Niri to be a great WM for trackpad use if you are amenable to a scrollable-tiling workflow. All gestures are inertial like MacOS and to my fingers they often feel snappier and more natural than their macOS equivalents. Scrolling is consistent and natural, though which apps have inertial scrolling is definitely hit-or-miss. It perfectly recognizes three and four finger gestures. PikaOS (debian-based) and CachyOS (arch-based) both offer Niri as an option if you want to give it a try.
For context, my experience is on a 4 year old thinkpad which admittedly is probably best case for driver support but is definitely not the best touchpad hardware on the market.
Thanks for the recommendation! I've been playing around with Niri for the past hour and I have to say there's a lot here that I like. I'm still going to need to figure out how to adjust the trackpad gesture sensitivity a bit (which doesn't seem especially straightforward to do) - but this is considerably more buttery than anything I've experienced before on Linux
Take this with a grain of salt, it's impossible for me to tell what you are and aren't comfortable with, but there is an alternative to using trackpads or mice at all and that's tiling window managers. You drive the OS with your keyboard. Combining this with plugins like Vimium for Chromium based browsers (or Tridactyl for Firefox) you can drive your entire OS and browser with keybindings.
As an aside, the latter also teaches you the bindings for Vim which is a nice boon if you've tried in the past and couldn't make it stick.
But again, this might not fit your use case or your preparedness to invest time and effort. I'm just saying.
People can have different preferred input devices to others. It doesn't make them amateurs.
My gripes with the trackpad are less to do with window management and are more to do with the graphical components of my job.
Please explain to me how I'm supposed to design graphics in Inkscape using only the keyboard? Or create presentations in LibreOffice Impress using only the keyboard? I don't spend the entirety of my time in a text editor.
Consider these "amateur" tasks all you like, most organisations value them and I need to be able to undertake them without frustration. MacOS won't fight me in these contexts. Linux will.
Try CachyOS, it's based on Arch but with additional optimizations, better defaults, and is user friendly. The problems the author of the article had would not have happened if he spent some time using an user friendly distro before trying a hard distro.
Do CachyOS optimizations actually make any difference whatsoever? I know they enable certain optimization flags whenever building software, but that doesn't directly equate to performance improvements unless you're actually benchmarking and testing it. I've seen some benchmarks in games and it seems there is literally zero performance difference (sometimes it loses to Fedora, even).
I'd always recommend upstream distributions with corporate backing for novice users: Ubuntu or Fedora. If they're coming from Windows: Linux Mint. There's also a clear upgrade path for users who enjoy Mint or Ubuntu: Debian testing.
Arch Linux is awesome, don't get me wrong. I just believe it's borderline unethical to recommend someone installing anything related to Arch on their workstation. It's just not what a beginner should choose at all. CachyOS included, it even makes you choose your bootloader at install (any user-friendly distro would simply never bother you with that and go with GRUB right away).
A user's first distro can make or break their Linux experience. Think hard before recommending new users the flavor of the month or an Arch derivative.
> Do CachyOS optimizations actually make any difference whatsoever? I know they enable certain optimization flags whenever building software, but that doesn't directly equate to performance improvements unless you're actually benchmarking and testing it.
I switched from Windows 11 to Kubuntu a year ago, and then gave CachyOS a shot after hearing praise for it. I'm on a laptop with an AMD iGPU, and CachyOS's `znver4` optimized repos gave a significant bump on my Geekbench results:
(Note: these results are from almost a year ago though)
Lenovo Thinkpad P14s Gen4 AMD
- Windows 11: 2366 Single-Core Score, 10717 Multi-Core Score
Have you observed any changes in your day-to-day usage, such as faster compilation times? If it's actually decently faster I might try it instead of playing with Gentoo to get better-optimized compilation flags.
I haven't benchmarked anything other than the initial tests with Geekbench. That said, it subjectively felt "snappier"/faster in terms of UI speed with KDE Plasma than Kubuntu. I've been a happy CachyOS user since.
I love Cachy, but please don't recommend it as a reasonable first step into Linux.
It's a lot more polished than Arch, but it's not for someone who hasn't used Linux before and wants a reliably rock solid and predictable experience 365 days a year, with no fiddling.
It's rolling release, and there are inevitably bugs when updating immediately to every minor version of every part of the OS stack. Arch/Cachy/Endeavour are for experts, and those who enjoy tinkering. (If you want to recommend something Arch-flavored, just recommend Manjaro, and don't listen to the memers who parrot some youtuber's list of ancient and silly engagement-bait grievances.)
Or Mint? Works flawlessly for me when I need a Linux, which is not so often these days, but if I was still doing cross-platform software development it's what I'd use. Minimal fuss.
Mint is one of the greatest distributions to get started with for users coming from Windows. I've been using Fedora full-time for more than four years now, but before that I used Linux Mint for about a year. It's a great, seamless experience.
Only problem I believe is the lack of customization options in Cinnamon compared to KDE and even Gnome with extensions. I guess that makes the user miss out on some of the cool parts of owning your software. Also, being stuck in X11 will start to become a problem in the next few years: I'm waiting to see what they come up with on that front.
CachyOS? That distro asking you to pick one out of 5 bootloaders and one out of 13 desktop environments? That is rolling and so comes with the implicit contract that you would have your eyeballs liking every package's release notes for any one of them that you ever update?
Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against CachyOS (I really couldn't care less), but if this is where we collectively set the bar for what is "user friendly", we are doing it wrong.
This is hilarious. Recommendations like this are exactly why nobody takes desktop Linux seriously (aside from gamers who yearn to dick-measure about something). A rolling release distro? Let alone Arch? You may as well recommend Gentoo.
Yeah, it can quickly lead to analysis paralysis.
I've set up three laptops with a Linux on them for non-tech friends and family members and deliberately went with distros that "just work" (Debian and Fedora specifically).
In general I'd recommend sticking to the simple options and not going into niches unless you/the user actually wants or needs to.
That's what I first thought of too. The author picks CatchyOS as their first Linux distro, only to find it's more complicated to set up, and then the mouse buttons don't work.
For the Linux newcomer, the biggest advantage of Ubuntu (or Ubuntu derivatives like Mint) is the wealth of guides, tutorials, and Q&As online, allowing you to google most common problems. You can always switch to another distro once you become more confident with Linux.
Maybe don't tell beginners to use something that will so easily break because you didn't read a wiki post. CachyOS is for the kind of gamer who'd de-bloat Windows, etc. to squeeze 1 fps more out of their hardware. If this isn't you then use something else.
If you wanted to recommend a distro which is a bit more 'out there' (so not just the quadfecta of Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint), I'd much sooner go with Mageia or OpenSUSE than an Arch derivative.
As a long time Linux user I started with Red Hat 7.2. Then moved on to Slackware from there to Ububtu and finally to ArchLinux.
While Linux and the user space ecosystem has come a long way there are still plenty of sharp edges and anyone planning to use Linux long term must be able to figure some issues that will inevitably happen sooner or later when some update/system upgrade happens.
Even though I consider myself fairly proficient Linux user I also gave up on Linux on laptops..life is just too short to tinker to make it work. (Power saving, suspend/resume, graphics with Optimus etc. Are still pain points)
Windows has its own sharp edges, such as the crashes the author of this article experienced.
It's hard to evaluate fairly. This author, for example is fed up with specific issues on Windows and new to Linux. He is likely be more forgiving of sharp edges on Linux, recognizing that it's normal for something unfamiliar to be more challenging. On the other hand, someone content with Windows might think of its sharp edges as just how computers are and consider every way in which Linux is merely different to be pointless aggravation.
Most publications covering Windows have a bunch of articles about how to tinker with Windows 11 to keep it from spying on you, showing ads, and forcing the use of an online account. One might argue life is also too short for that.
I feel there's also a fundamental difference in tinkering to get something working vs. tinkering to remove user-hostile features. In the first one the goals of the OS and user are aligned, in the second one not.
I’ll echo this. I keep at least one secondary machine booting Linux and periodically try moving a main one over, but the experience definitely is not yet without significant pains, depending on one’s needs.
This is not to discount the tens of thousands of hours of hard (often volunteer) work put into the ecosystem, but a substantial amount of work remains on things like battery life and UX (both for devs and more typical end users).
For example, why does getting virtualization under Fedora working require a whole stack of commands? Elsewhere, the most that’s needed is ticking a checkbox (if that). Worse, the mode of failure if you haven’t done the correct dance is unintelligible errors in e.g. GNOME Boxes that don’t even point the user in the right direction.
There’s all sorts of somewhat low hanging fruit like this that I suspect hasn’t gotten attention because it’s not particularly sexy or interesting.
I don't think I have ever had a system upgrade break my system on any Debian derived or Fedora I used. Also upgrades are not forced upon you like they are in Windows, with its dark patterns nudging you to upgrade.
I am also using GNU/Linux on laptops just fine, and the only issue is with battery life.
I think hardware-wise one needs to do some reading before buying, to check what is supported and what is not well supported. Other than that, I don't have issues. But then again I am also a strict on or off guy, who does not use things like hibernation or standby or whatever at all, so maybe I am dodging many bullets there.
> So why did I switch to Linux, and why am I writing this article about the experience? In a word: joy.
I think this is really what more people should take away from the switch. A lot of the time I see people not wanting to make the leap because they're afraid: Afraid of learning how to use the command line, afraid of asking other people for help, afraid of really using the computer. Learning how things work is how you learn to be free, and that holds true no matter your hobby. The cyclist with their repair kit, the driver with their beater car, the cook and their kitchenware. The more we give away for the sake of immediate convenience, the less control we have.
Linux is no longer in the realm of needing to be an expert to resolve issues, just a little bit of willingness to experiment. This isn't to say all issues are easily solvable, there's plenty of workflows that still require you to stay on Windows and some edge cases where things won't work as you expect. But I always encourage people to try, because why not?
Starting on Jan 5th, I am mostly migrated from Windows 10 to Zorin Linux. It has taken about a week. Would have went faster if I wasn't a "power user" who tests every option and tweaks the shit out of my system. I have researched and tested multiple file managers (Nemo won) and terminals (Tabby won). Moved everything possible out of sandboxes. Set up VSCodium with Claude Code desktop extension, moved MCP servers to global in both Linux and Windows vs project specific, installed the wrapper for Claude Desktop, wired in 4 hard drives, bookmarked directories, imported Thunderbird and Librewolf profiles. E.T.C... And to do it I guided Claude Desktop with full access to both Windows 10 and Linux to research and implement, verbosely explaining each step of the way. Zorin did work out of the box. If I was not, unfortunately, a freak about how everything has to work exactly how I want, with a full software dev environment (no, not for vibe coding) to get working fluidly, the migration would have been instant. Zorin worked out of the box, other than passwords. It looks and behaves very similar to Windows. This is on my 2012 Hp 220Z with 32gb ram and an SSD for the OS. It works like a champ.
The article mentions that the author had a negative experience with Void Linux, that it was missing programs in its repository. If you considered it, give it a try anyway. Void is fast and ridiculously stable, even more so given it's a rolling release distro (so often has very new program versions). And in contrast to the author, I was impressed with the broad range of the package system - he might have had a bit of bad luck with the selection.
I've found a very comfortable home on Void Linux for nearly a decade at this point, and wouldn't consider any other distro for desktop use. I find Void to be rock-solid stable and relentlessly simple.
The author of TFA hopped from Mint -> Debian -> Bazzite -> Fedora -> Void -> Artix, so Void is an extremely obvious outlier here.
Aside from Void, every other distro he tried was either a newbie-friendly desktop distro (Mint, Debian, Fedora, Bazzite), or "Arch, but easier, with an installer" (Artix).
Bad luck with Void's package selection is fair enough, but I'm not sure what he meant by "driver compatibility was a big issue" - Void uses an upstream kernel and driver availability should be roughly the same anywhere.
He's using a Ryzen APU on desktop so graphics drivers shouldn't have been an issue there. The MacBook had problems with Broadcom Wi-Fi drivers on Artix(!), but I'd wager this would affect all distros out of the box, and Void has the Broadcom drivers[0] available as well.
It's frustrating that he doesn't explicitly mention what he couldn't find drivers for on Void. I assume it was Broadcom Wi-Fi and he didn't enable the nonfree repository. In fairness, Void's docs don't cover any Broadcom quirks so maybe this isn't as discoverable as it should be.
Seconding this. I was impressed by Void linux stability and speed: xbps (with xtools) might be the fastest and most powerful package manager I've *ever* used.
Sure, Void doesn't have the endless options of Arch+AUR for packages, but it had everything I needed. Even the well-maintained, latest versions of less common software, like Nim compiler.
The author might also missed that Void has a non-free repository, that you have to install for stuff like proprietary drivers, DRM and Steam.
I won't comment on the merits. Each person can do what they want. But, the line that caught my attention was:
> The first question often asked of Windows refugees migrating to Linux is, "Why Linux?"
The answer, realistically, is probably "What else?". Unless you're comfortable with the BSD's (which I like, and weren't mentioned), or unless you have recent Mac hardware lying around, it's the easiest and most practical alternative.
It's a bit of a duopoly, isn't it?; with a third leg that's sometimes something in the BSD camp, and sometimes in the MacOS camp.
Gaming is all well and good, but I'd be interested to hear of experiences with moving and using Audio apps (Ableton Live, Cubase and other Steinberg apps, plus many VSTs) from Windows to Linux.
I see Wine, YABridge and LinVST mentioned in searches, but while I've got plenty of Linux experience, I'm time-poor and would prefer to make computers make noises rather than spend my time making things work. I have Reaper which is cross-platform but again, getting the VSTs working would be great (at a bare minimum).
A Mac is not an option here. Any pointers gratefully received!
> but I'd be interested to hear of experiences with moving and using Audio apps (Ableton Live
I've been using Linux for work and hobbies for more than a decade at this point, mostly Arch Linux, some CachyOS, but always had a partition of Windows available too. Why? Almost solely because Ableton does not run properly with Wine, Proton or any other tooling, and has never been able to do so, for as long as I've used Ableton (since version 8 or 9 I think).
If you spend most of your day with Ableton, then Linux is not ready for you, and then I'm not even considering plugins or what not, just the default and standard stuff is not running properly no matter what you'll try.
right - same here WRT windows partition. Not always using Live, but it gets used when it's necessary. I'm slightly disappointed that they haven't done the decent thing and released a Linux version, but .. ah well, what can ya do hey?
I'd be willing to shell out for a new license if they need that for making a Linux version... I guess next step is to fund some FOSS developer to actually add support for it to Wine, by force if must be :P Wonder if there is some way for developers to raise money for adding support for specific software to Wine? Might not be such a a bad idea.
I can't speak for DAWs but in 2019 when I tried switching to native Linux my Scarlett 2i2 3rd gen USB audio interface did not play nicely with Debian at the time. I'd get an endless amount of crackles and pops during recordings / playback and I spent days going over tons of audio configs / tools (Jack, Alsa, PulseAudio, etc.). They weren't xruns, at least Jack wasn't reporting them as that. Buffer sizes were normal too.
The good news is the same interface today works fine with PipeWire, without needing to tweak anything. I am using Arch this time around.
Yeah, these days the Scarletts are fine (as is the aging Firewire connected Edirol FA-101 I've got attached). Non-DAW things such as Supercollider work fine, but I focus less on that sort of environment (which isn't a dis - SC is great!).
I love how windows-linux discussion is populated by DAW/VST incompatibility. I'm still new to the industry, and therefore also open minded about daw/plugins.
I actually had good experience with setting up yabridge, it could have worked for me I think. But the elephant in the room is that many big commercial plugins use JUCE as a framework, and the recent release of JUCE (JUCE8) just broke compatibility with wine and seem to be sabotaging wine-based usage completely, and are not considering going back at the moment.
There are patches based on binary diffs to JUCE7, but it is just so much pain to simply run the commonest plugins in the field :/
So I'm now kind of stuck between using windows with commercial plugins or use linux with mainly smaller scale alternatives (although there are good ones: lsp, decent sampler, cardinal, surge)
Thanks! I wasn't aware of the JUCE newer version issue.. I'll have to (sometime) dig into that a bit deeper. Me I don't mind the idea of the smaller-scale alternatives, but having to occasionally work withothers that aren't linux based could be.. problematic.
I use Reaper for Linux and love it. Getting Windows VSTs to work is okay with lin-vst and wine. Bascially install wine with your package manager, maybe run winecfg, then get lin-vst and make a copy of its single so-file, named the same as each vst binary in the same directory, then add that dir as a vst location in Reaper. As far as I remember.
> I'm time-poor and would prefer to make computers make noises
Then Linux is not for you at this point. I don't mean to discourage you - for me, Reaper works, Scarlett works, ffmpeg works etc. But there are quirks. Reaper has horrible scaling on 4k screen, which I believe can be resolved by forcing UI scaling, but this requires change every time I switch from laptop to external monitor, so I just live with tiny buttons. Scarlett works, but requires JACK, and I never got it working properly with Pulse/Pipewire (outputs get duplicated sometimes), also control software doesn't exist, aside from one opensource reimplementation, which works but looks horrible.
Yes. Valve (Steam) spent more than a decade building and refining a translation layer called Proton. Nearly 80% of the vast Steam library is now compatible with Linux to the point they are releasing actual Linux consoles (Steam Deck and Steam Machine).
For your regular PC, you can install a gaming-focused distribution like Bazzite to get everything sorted out automatically.
80% is really impressive, but another way to state it is that 20% of the games you try won't work. I don't think I'd put up with that if I was a gamer. I guess maybe it's not evenly distributed. Do a higher percentage of the most popular games work?
That 20% is mostly covered by competitive online multiplayer games that use kernel-level anti-cheat systems which will only work on Windows. There's not a whole lot Valve can do about that, other than continuing to push Linux for gaming and hope that it gets popular enough to create an incentive for anti-cheat providers to start targeting Linux as well.
I never understood why game devs don't just segregate players based on their anti-cheat status. Have a setting in the game like "only play with anti-cheat verified players" that defaults to yes.
That way Linux gamers can still play with other Linux gamers if they want (and cheaters).
Not an ideal situation but probably better than nothing.
I think that would make Linux players into second-class citizens who could only play in a pool that is 90+% filled with Windows cheaters.
Segregating into two pools: Windows-verified, or Linux-unverified, would probably not work for Linux users either. It'd be the same problem (on a smaller scale) as not including kernel anticheat in Windows. No fun for the non-cheaters.
I'm not a gamer though, so I may be missing important details.
I think it's largely to do with the whether the games are PvP multiplayer or not. I.e. many such games have anti-cheat systems that embed in the Windows kernel (or something like that - my Windows internals knowledge is... slim).
I assert that most people who're happy running Linux on their desktop (for games or productivity or development) do not overlap much with the people who're happy to take kernel patches from UbiFuckingSoft. And this includes those people who're willing to take closed-source NVIDIA drivers.
Games with kernel-mode anti-cheat consistently don't work and probably never will (barring them having it removed or made optional). Titles released more recently are more likely to not work simply due to not having had fixes applied to them, although a rather large amount of newer games work fine out of the box if they aren't doing weird stuff. Other than that it's a toss-up, since while it's usually the same few things that prevent games from working properly on Linux, it's not something you as Jonothan S. Gamer will know about unless you go and do research and check ProtonDB and whatnot.
A good rule of thumb is that single player games generally just™ work and that older games generally just™ work.
In a word, yes. While Wine has been an option for decades, Valve and Proton have made gaming on Linux mainstream. You can check compatibility reports from https://www.protondb.com/ for whichever games you're interested in.
> Valve and Proton have made gaming on Linux mainstream.
"Mainstream" is maybe too hefty, the amount of Linux users (including SteamDeck) who participate in the Steam surveys are still in the single digit if I remember correctly. Most gamers today still use Windows, even though Valve made great strides with Proton.
I haven't had any issues installing AoE Gold under Wine. Furthermore, stuff on Steam is usually trivial to get running (just click and play). With Heroic same goes for stuff on GOG (and presumably Epic as well, IDK). PlayOnLinux and Lutris have good support for games you install from CD (I probably could have used either of them to install AoE Gold, but I've been using wine directly for so long I find it more convenient to do it myself).
Many are playable with Steam on Linux, each game in the store states whether that's supported or not. Even non-supported games allow an override. I've tried that for a few with varying success. Steam has so far refunded purchases that didn't run on Linux. Then there's Lutris which runs many old games fine.
Having a steam deck, I can say that gaming on linux is totally doable, but you may want to look on protondb to see what is not compatible with your library.
recently had need to run a legacy win32 game on linux. the game works fine but the updater is in some windows specific java that i just could not get to work, which is kind of ironic since its the "run anywhere" java that wouldnt work but the C++ game would. anyway -- i run the updater in a windows vm that has shared access to the game files, close the vm then run the game through wine. works.
If you must, Windows 11 Enterprise IoT LTSC is where the goodness is at. Less bloat, no ads, a frozen feature set (so they won't move your cheese every 6 months), 10 years of official support and security updates... it's like it's 1997 again! And you can install tools like Classic Shell (with its superior Start menu) to make it even better.
Linux doesn't have all the features that Windows has, features that I use daily. It also doesn't work with all of my games and software so it's a non starter for me still. Tried it several times but it always falls short of what I need. I do have it sandboxed in Windows but it's rare that it is needed for how I use a computer.
Since 2008 I've been on linux as my daily driver. You'll find two laptops in my backpack: a macbook air and whatever linux machine I'm using for development. I'm almost to the point with the mac, I use it maybe once a month. So much works better on linux. The Mac (and occasions where I've tried Windows) is not nearly as easy to deal with as it was. Far too many decisions for the user to make, and far too many situation where you just aren't allowed. For example, I once fired up my macbook, only to be jarred by Apple News notifications about a gristly mass murder. While I sympathize with the victims, I do not want my routine broken by news out of my control. So I tried to get rid of Apple news only to be told by Apple support that was not possible.
My computer is mine. I do not want the manufacturer or author of the OS controlling it. Ever. Full stop.
I don’t really agree with the “Windows 11 is unstable” narrative, especially compared to the ways that system updates on macOS and Linux have not always been 100% stable.
The functionality of the iPhone connection to Linux is not unique to the platform, that works on Windows as well. iPhones present themselves as cameras when connected via USB and as the author found out, some apps present their internal storage for manipulation.
I’m surprised the author didn’t get KDE Connect to work. It’s a clutch app, and it’s even better for Android users. It’s one of the things that has had me consider switching to Android over iPhone (but there are still a couple of things I just can’t quite get over leaving behind like FaceTime for my non-technical family, the unmatched-by-competitors utility of AirTags, Siri Shortcuts, and my general feeling that without installing GrapheneOS, that Android is a less private and secure OS).
I like it because it's based on Ubuntu, so there's almost always a working guide/solution targeting it. It also ships with Nvidia drivers which saves a lot of headaches for some users. To me the game-changer is the fact that it supports tiling window management with minimal configuration.
I don't know about the "you should too" part. I use Arch, it works fine for me but I am patient and want to use it. Realistically, I would expect the largest migration should be devs switching from mac to Linux. I don't see any reason at all to use a mac for development anymore.
Mac battery life is insane - I agree. It is very impressive what they have done. Still, I prefer my ThinkPad running Arch even though it probably has 1/2 the battery life of my Macbook.
Most people sit at their desk with the laptop plugged into the socket and use the battery for meetings or in a cafeteria. Either takes maybe an hour or two, three hours tops.
So what? Most people don't care about battery, so let's just have a crap battery? That argument would work, if Apple released a super light laptop with a tiny battery, specially made for "most people who sit at their desk".
No, people do care about battery life. That's where Macs excel. (I'm saying this as a Thinkpad user, where getting 6-8hrs of battery is doable, if you don't do anything on the laptop).
Sure, there are pros and cons for everything. It also depends on circumstances. I remember in 2012 I'd dim the screen and play with cpufreqd to get maximum time out of a battery, because I had a 3h train ride to my university weekly, with no power sockets most of the time on the train. I barely could do 3h. Today, in age of cheap PD powerbanks and USB-C everywhere, I'd easily take a better OS over battery life.
The touchpad is great, yes, I like it, too. But I'm anyway mostly using mouse and keyboard and occasionally the 3-finger-swipe which is possible with Thinkpad+Linux as well since a few years. Thinkpads are also famous for their touchpad/trackpoint if one doesn't fancy using a mouse.
i have been using macbooks for many years as that's usually the only corporate option next to thinkpad+windows. and i definitely prefer a logitech mouse.
You may not need it but no kernel support for containers / cgroups is a deal breaker for me. Windows at least makes an attempt with WSL. But, at the end of the day, most things are just about rationalizing what you want to use. I personally identify with Linux tribe, not Mac tribe therefore that is what I want to use.
I had no idea there was no kernel support for containers. I use containers a lot now but haven't used MacOS in years. Thanks for the info. (Fedora/ Windows user myself)
Funnily enough, though, you can get a very user friendly experience using Niri and Dank Linux (don't remember the exact name). It takes two 3 CLI commands to install, and the top bar incredibly cool, compared to the i3 defaults and even to what I remember of Gnome and KDE.
Next up: somebody comes up with a desktop environment called BTW.
It’s astonishing to me that Microsoft is letting go of all these users because someone drew something on whiteboard that looked like “force Microsoft Account on all users -> ??? -> Profit”, and has repeatedly done the same with Teams, Ads, Bing, OneDrive, use of WebView in essential components etc.
I’m not only saying that as a former Windows engineer, but as someone who actively uses Windows, OneDrive, Office, etc. Microsoft is hurting their userbase and that’s not a winning strategy in the long term.
But I’m sure some exec will eventually justify Windows’ decline caused by these thousand cuts as “inevitable outcome of macro-level changes in technological trends” or whatever.
Linux user for 25-ish years here, and exclusively so.
I used to heavily configure my ubuntu distros to be keyboard exclusive with i3wm and such, but I ended up with regolith desktop, a version of ubuntu with pre installed i3wm and keyboard focus. I'm too old to keep my dotfiles updated.
Nowadays, imo you should only choose the package manager, any os using that chosen package manager (aptitude for ubuntu) definitely had a version that's close enough to your use cases.
Similarly, I picked up Linux in 1997 and have used it as my primary since 1999. I've distro hopped through probably a dozen or so distros, but ultimately landed on PopOS for most of my machines, similarly to you. These threads are always somewhat disheartening, hearing everybody say they tried to switch but couldn't because of one issue or another. I guess I've just learned to work through it.
Ah, so karma is a thing on HN as well. That would explain it.
Since 2001 I've used Red Hat, Mandrake, Slackware, Ubuntu, and Mint. I got rid of them at the first available opportunity. Elon Musk himself couldn't pay me enough to switch to Linux.
For some reason, there's a huge amount of Hacker News readers who are still full-time Windows users. With the forced migration to Windows 11, I guess a lot of them are now not only trying out Linux for the first time (as a desktop system), but also for some reason going for Arch derivatives, which is always fun to see a beginner mess with LOL
I bought a laptop in 2008 and in 2017 was forced to install W10. Well, the `08 hardware wasn't having it and I didn't have the cash to pony up for a new laptop so I installed Linux. Great decision.
There's definitely specific niche software that is restricted to MS and if you must use that, then by all means stay aboard. Otherwise, today's a great day to scroll distrowatch and pick your poison.
Yep, once I read microsoft was going to integrate that abomination co-pilot into the taskbar and desktop in general, I wiped my windows partition for good. I didn't even back anything up. I have fedora servers at work, but I just need a stable and performant OS at home to do some remote work, hobby coding, and connect to some telescope equipment. So I just run Ubuntu LTS - why? because I don't need to spend my time nerding out on ricing a linux distro, I have better things to do with my time. The same goes for Windows, I have better things to do than try to get an operating system to work - and there lies the big rub. Linux is easy enough now for anyone who is decent at windows to learn and use, and it's free, upgradable, tons of support available, and WORKS BETTER.
As I'm typing this, on my work windows PC, the taskbar icons aren't rendering. Generally the graphics are slow, Microsoft outlook randomly freezes my entire computer, and occasionally my USB drives turn on/off if I'm plugged into a docking station. I experience exactly zero of these issues when running
First you don't have to dump anything to use Linux. The whole thing should not be as antogonistic.
I switched to Linux, Arch btw, Omarchy, sometime last year when it was announced. I installed it on my old Thinkpad and it worked wonderfully, for most part. I realized that I am more productive there in real sense and experience is more delightful.
When I would go back to Mac, I would realize I need several clicks to accomplish something I had on shortcut available. Having websites/apps on shortcuts as an app is huge help. Also working on command line is really much more focused.
Sometimes in September I plugged Thinkpad to desktop setup and in December I set my powerful computer to Omarchy as well.
It isn't seamless experience, there are issues switching from speakers to headphones and dictation can be hard to setup. Overall whole machine seems more powerful and interesting to work on.
This is first time in many years that I can both play and work on same machine which is definitely welcome and surprising.
One more thing to note, nowadays Arch is more stable then Ubunty and works better. However, any distro you pick, you should be happy with, especially if you want to do work, you should just pick and stick with distro.
Yeah this is what switched me. I was forever complaining about wall gardens and yet was too 'comfortable' with my macbook-pro as it was the best laptop period.
I switched to a thinkpad x1-carbon and popos and never looked back. Sure I would love 10 hour battery life, but it's not THAT big of deal (for me) to carry a charger.
My last Windows was Windows 95 (or 98?). I've been exclusively using Linux for ~25 years. I use Ubuntu because I've been using it for ~20 years and have better things to do than try out different distros. My mother, my grandmother, and many of my non-computer-savvy friends also use Ubuntu. I know a Germanist who uses Debian.
It's a bit like with cars. If you know someone who really knows about cars, they'll be able to recommend a solid, simple, super cheap, practical car that will just work and give you no problems. It'll probably be something like a 2010 Toyota Aygo, which you can pick up for next to nothing on the used car market (here in Germany) and which you would never have thought of buying yourself. This is a Linux laptop. Other people who never got this insider tip that driving can be cheap and hassle-free might instead buy a new car from a German manufacturer on credit for half a gross annual salary (or even a whole one). Two years later, the car may already be in the repair shop because the engine is losing oil or because the Nanoslide/Nikasil cylinder liner coating is damaged.
With the Aygo, you can drive from A to B just as well as with any other car, and you might even have a little more fun doing so. But if you need CarPlay and heated seats, distrust things that are cheap, and love that je ne sais quoi that comes with things you've just bought for a lot of money, then this simple 2010 Aygo is not for you.
This weekend, I wrote code for a non-trivial compiler on my old everyday laptop. I didn't even buy it; I got it for free because the previous owner considered the device obsolete and unusable. Slowly, the thing is getting too old for me too, but Linux (Ubuntu) has gotten another couple of years of use out of it. Meanwhile, a friend of mine just bought a used Macbook that still cost more than I would ever spend on a new laptop because she has to write papers for her studies and thinks she needs a “good” computer for that.
The real issue is the lack of support. Real users buy those support packages from vendors. They bring their PC in to be fixed at their local shop. They might Google a problem and find a solution occasionally of they are feeling spicy but how often do you get screenshots to get something to work in a Linux GUI? Web browser only laptops are great until your uncle gets a "killer deal" on some random printer on Facebook marketplace and they can't get it to work. Or a webcam. Or a Bluetooth headset. Or a game controller. Scanner. etc etc.
On top of all of this, they will just give up and buy a new machine and return it if that doesn't fix their issue.
Linux provides virtually nothing on any of those fronts unless you get a private level 8 tech support contact provided by your grandson. Who wants to be 24/7 on call for their extended family?
I don't know why people jump into obscure/difficult distros as a first round... it's like you want to fail. Just use a something simple like Fedora + KDE. NONE of the issues the author would be a problem here out of the box.
I also switched to Linux last month. It hasn't been a smooth experience with my GPU as I'm encountering memory leaks in popular compositors. I also get 150-200ms keyboard input delay in all games using some compositors but not all. I documented as much as I could here https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/gpu-memory-allocation-bugs-wi....
Still, despite all of that when it works it is better than Windows. It's just ironic that my Linux desktop is less stable than Windows 10 since I have to reboot 2-3 times a day from GPU memory leaks. Windows 10 was really stable with the same hardware and had no input delay in games. I only rebooted when the OS pushed an update since I keep my machine on 24 / 7.
It would be fair to mention that this is happening for you with a decade old GPU using an EOL driver, which sucks, but is unlikely to be a common experience.
> It would be fair to mention that this is happening for you with a decade old GPU using an EOL driver, which sucks, but is unlikely to be a common experience.
The drivers are still getting maintained by NVIDIA until August 2026. They also got classified as "legacy" on paper 1 day before I installed them.
The compositor memory leak is affecting a lot of people. Since COSMIC and niri both use the same one (smithay), there's threads on GitHub with people using modern GPUs, both NVIDIA and AMD who experience it. There's a lot of replies across all of the different open issues.
The GPU allocation issue on Wayland (separate from the memory leak) also has hundreds of replies on the NVIDIA developer forums with people using new NVIDIA cards with the latest drivers.
The thing is, most people don't talk about either of them because if you have 8+ GB of GPU memory and turn your computer off every night then you won't experience this problem since all GPU memory allocations get reset on shutdown. It happens to be more of a direct problem for me because I have 2 GB of GPU memory but that doesn't mean the problem isn't common. The root cause is still there. Even if I switched to an AMD GPU the niri / smithay memory leak would be present. Instead of rebooting twice a day, if the GPU had 8 GB of memory I'd have to reboot every 2 days (x4 basically).
Since I opened that issue on GitHub NVIDIA did acknowledge it and suggested I try their experimental egl-wayland2 library. I did try that and it hasn't fixed it fully but it has made GPU memory allocations more stable. It even fixed 1 type of leak in niri. This library is decoupled from the drivers themselves as far as I know. I mean, this same library could still be used for the 590 series, it's not 580 specific which means it's not dependent on your GPU model.
> The compositor memory leak is affecting a lot of people. Since COSMIC and niri both use the same one (smithay), there's threads on GitHub with people using modern GPUs, both NVIDIA and AMD who experience it. There's a lot of replies across all of the different open issues.
But then this sounds like a bug in that particular compositor rather than the driver(s)?
fwiw, I have a modern nvidia card, and use the proprietary drivers, and Wayland (KDE/KWin), and that box has a few weeks of uptime.
> But then this sounds like a bug in that particular compositor rather than the driver(s)?
The NVIDIA GPU memory allocation issue affects all NVIDIA cards, at least based on that forum post where there's a good amount of people replying with similar issues with a large combo of cards + drivers.
You probably don't notice it because you rarely ever use all of your GPU's memory at once. Try running `watch nvidia-smi` and then open multiple copies of every hardware accelerated app you have available. Once you reach nearly the max GPU memory apps will either start crashing or fail to open and if you get semi-unlucky your compositor (including KDE on Wayland) will crash if it's the app trying to allocate resources to render the window. I've had plasmashell or kwin hard lock / crash many times with just a small amount of testing.
The expectation is the driver allocates those memory resources to system memory instead of denying the memory to the app. It works correctly in X11 or if you have an AMD card, in Wayland and X11.
The leak is separate and is compositor specific, possibly related to NVIDIA driver bugs (to some degree) but this leak wouldn't be experienced unless you used this compositor. This leak is the compositor doesn't release any GPU memory after any window is closed, so simply opening and closing apps will cause the leak. Combine this with the first problem and that's how you end up rebooting every few hours with a lower end GPU. AMD and NVIDIA are affected.
The post goes into all of these details and there's reproducible tests, and even demo videos showing the first GPU memory allocation problem in Plasma Wayland but not Plasma X11. It also links to all of the related GitHub issues that I could find.
This was, still is and for the foreseeable future it'll be bad advice. Stay on Windows 10 as long as you can. With LTSC IoT that's 2032. We will figure out something then.
It doesn't work. Right now the main issue is Wayland vs X where Wayland is not working and will never work because the underlying ideas and goals do not align with that of a desktop. Someone described X as ALSA, Wayland as PulseAudio and we are waiting for PipeWire to arrive. Maybe Phoenix will sweep in to save the day, maybe something else will.
Also, hardware and software issues will always be there because the incentives are not there.
I swear Linux on the desktop adherents sound like they have some sort of Stockholm Syndrome but of course in reality just cognitive dissonance explains it.
Is the IoT version of Windows 10 a full desktop? I tried it on my Raspberry Pi when it was released for free but I didn't get past booting. I dropped it because I didn't understand what it was, or what I was supposed to do with it and I wasn't curious enough to find out. This is your suggestion for my grandmother over some simple Linux distro with a browser?
> Wayland is not working and will never work because the underlying ideas and goals do not align with that of a desktop.
Can you elaborate on this?
I don't use Wayland because it lacks something I need (unprivileged Scroll Lock LED control) but I'm curious about what else keeps people from using it.
This was true for a majority of users even fairly recently, but the 'niche' for which Linux is a better option has grown such that those who are worse off with Linux (better off with Windows) are becoming the 'niche'.
I'm still on X because I'm too comfortable with dwm and I've never had problems with Wayland the few times I've tried KDE/Gnome. That said blaming the user for lacking skill for basic stuff like copy/paste between applications or screen sharing isn't constructive. Those features should just work and shouldn't require skill. Building a niche window manager from source is a different discussion.
Alright, good point. Sorry for my bad first comment, I am just a bit defensive after all these years of people saying Wayland is unusable. The problems you describe with screen sharing are likely because of missing xdg-portal implementation (the implementation depends on your setup).
>Those features should just work and shouldn't require skill.
Maybe, yeah. But we are on hacker news, I assumed people would be open to hacking on things, but the comments are always very much not like that.
I switched my laptop (Surface Laptop Go) from Win11 to Tumbleweed, and its great. Mainly because Windows kept getting slower, and arguably Win11 isn't great for an 8GB system. OpenSuse is a great distro.
But my gaming PC and primary workstation remains Win11, and always will be (windows, that is). Notably Suse under WSL2 works great there as well, and my Kubes workflow is just as easy with PowerShell commands as it is with bash.
OS's have purposes, and arguably there is no single platform that is better than the others in every way - Windows is better for games and is more stable across different hardware and configurations. Linux is much lighter, more intentional, and for me better for infosec and some coding activities.
For a normal User I think Linux has been almost perfect for decades. For Games Windows still had some advantage. But for developing software I really didn't like Linux. The windows API is very stable. In Linux constantly new problems showed up. E.g. some window-manager suddenly started stealing my focus, just because it wants to have the focus on an irrelevant Edit-Field somewhere... If Linux wants to be the standard I think it should have a stable Api first. And I don't have much hope in Gnome and KDE doing anything like that.
I am pretty sure that my previous attempts at a Linux desktop have failed because I would tweak my setup by installing packages and updates until I broke it and needed to reinstall. But I want my machine to be indestructible and "just work". Waiting day(s) to diagnose and fix an issue just isn't worth it. I have been contemplating a switch to Linux again. This time, I will embrace a LTS distribution and virtualization so that my tinkering doesn't break things. I always want a safe level to fall back to.
Also, I would enthusiastically pay for a support subscription. I know they are out there. Which companies/organizations have the most positive impact in the open source community?
Not a popular opinion, but RedHat (now IBM) funds an enormous amount of critical open source. They pay people to contribute to hundreds of upstream projects. And RHEL is 100% focused on stability. Sounds like a good match for your priorities / goals.
It has been a few years, but for example breaking the display, bluetooth, power states/sleep, or wifi. Or subtly messing up dependencies of various other packages that I was trying. I just don't want the overhead of system administration.
These days I mostly use VMs or WSL. But I am thinking that I want my host OS to be Linux.
Immutable saves you from packaging issues but configuration always has to happen to some degree. To help there maybe use file system snapshots (btrfs) to rollback changes.
From what I remember, trying to fix configuration was mostly to recover from whatever broken state package/distro updates caused. Thanks for the Silverblue suggestion. In recent years, I enjoyed using Pop!_OS, at least on VMs.
I went Arch recently as well for about 6 months but am now back on Windows. I was impressed by the amount of games that "just work" but ultimately went back for the few that didn't. Had issues on BF6 and major performance issues on Borderlands 4.
I can't fully switch because of audio plugins but I'm using Linux, Windows, and macOS anyway because I'm creating cross-platform apps. I think it's best to use all common operating systems and stay proficient with them.
I've linked it multiple times on HN already but winapps (https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps) can be a game-changer for people relying on some Windows-only software.
It sets up a Windows machine in Docker where you can install your apps, then you'll get .desktop applications that starts the program in the VM and use RDP to only show the app window – it feels nearly native. I've even bought an Office 2024 license to improve some VBA Excel macros for a client.
> After a Windows update (that I didn't choose to do) wiped that partition and, consequently, the Linux installation
WHAT? How people could tolerate a software that wipes partitions without asking? I mean, I can see that it can be handy if OS managed partitions by itself without asking a user what to do, but if it leads to removing user created partitions, it is a no go.
A long time ago I tried to install Mandrake Linux. In the installation process I started to change partition table and wiped it all, due to a fact that Mandrake Linux used its own custom made partition managed written in Perl that applied changes to a partition table as they arrive. I was used to fdisk, that accumulate changes and allows to review them before applying, the behavior of Mandrake's partition manages was completely alien for me. It was the first and the last time I touched Mandrake or its successor Mandriva or anything with "Mand" in front, even despite the fact that it was my mistake, I should've learned more about the partition manager before using it. It was hard (or maybe impossible) to do in an installer, but it is not an excuse. It was the last time I used installers to install Linux, I don't trust them anymore.
But people are tolerating windows that can wipe a partition when you even do not touch them. I can empathize the author ditching Windows.
It is a known and fairly common dual booting people gets hit with in that windows update rewrite the dual booting setup, it is possible that the author misunderstood what had happened and that it could have been fixed by just fixing the boot setup.
That should of course not be necessary, but it could have saved a few hours of setup if that was the case.
I never understood the Linux guys. All that matters to a common user is the user interface and whether their apps and games run or not. They don't care about telemetry, architecture etc. The damn thing should just work and it should allow familiar interactions.
I have tried switching to Linux several times over the decades. It required many compromises on the interface and compatibilities. Why is it so difficult to slap on a clone of Windows or Mac UI on Linux? I'm not saying they are good. But it avoids the feel of moving to an alien land and learn everything afresh. People don't have time for that.
This is why I recommend macOS to everyone. It's the only OS that is truly polished and where you don't have to worry about viruses and everything just works. mac could be better, but it's still leading the pack. People don't want the OS to become their hobby.
I dislike what Microsoft is doing to Windows as much as the next guy but if you get Windows Pro and disable all the icky stuff it is a rock solid OS that just works. Sure, once a year an update might add some new icky stuff but then you just spend 10 minutes to find out how to disable that and go about your business. It. Just. Works.
Windows is prone to getting malware and ransomware. When you buy a new Macbook, you can use the Migration Assistant to move all your apps and files to the new Mac. With Windows there's no easy way. On Mac, apps are almost always safe and not going to crap up your computer. With Windows you have to be wary. Windows usually comes with bloatware, Mac doesn't. Windows you have to manage and install drivers and always update them and sometimes they break. With Mac, drivers and updates are seamless.
I daily drive Windows since Win 95 but there are rough edges that less technical people get cut on.
What the hell are you doing to get malware? I have never had a virus ever. And I only keep Windows Defender running in the background. Though I doubt I'd even need that.
Bloatware – yes. Uninstall it once and it's gone. Once or twice a year a new thing might pop up. Uninstall that and be done with it.
Do you really have to manage drivers or is that just on old wives' tale? I sure as hell don't manage drivers. Windows Update will install any driver I need automatically. Only driver I upgrade manually is GPU a couple times a year when there is a new game that can take advantage of it. Really, that whole driver story is just a bunch of lies since at least Windows 10.
I switched to Debian/Cinnamon few weeks ago. I am fairly good with the server sides of things, but the desktop a little painful.
Screens dont wake up properly, sometimes only one screens wakes up, sometimes one screen wakes up with a wrong resolution. The usual linux desktop problems where nothing really works and finding a solution is very hard to many different permutations of hardware / os / kernel / drivers / window manager / etc.
I have the framework desktop with AMD 395+
My windows ssd is plugged and I can boot it directly using virt-manager, so thats kinda solves some windows specific stuff like tax software.
You are using a distro that is generally very behind on software versions and doesn’t bundle non free software (Debian) on a laptop with brand new hardware. Additionally, you are running a DE (cinnamon) which is really designed for a specific distro (Mint) which you are not using.
If you want stuff to just work you might want to try using a more up to date distro with a mainstream desktop. Stock Ubuntu or Fedora would probably work fine for you.
The amd drivers might not there, and they will continue to not be there on the version of the kernel you are using and choosing to be stuck on by using Debian. Drivers are part of the kernel in Linux, it’s not how windows works. Ubuntu and Fedora are not unstable, you are just choosing pain for yourself.
Stable in Linux language is a synonym for OLD. Don't let any stable OSes near any hardware that is newer than the release, and you'll be fine.
Linux 6.12 was released back in 2024, which is several months earlier than the hardware you have. So the reasonable expectation is that there is a high chance that fixes for it won't be in yet.
And use the builtin AMD drivers, you shouldn't have to touch those assuming other choices were done ok.
I’m not shifting any goal posts. I’m just tired of these posts from people saying that Linux is unstable, has quirks, etc but when you dig into it, all of the “quirks” are actually the result of strange decisions made by the author.
It’s fine to be new to Linux, but please refrain from the sweeping generalizations until you are more familiar with how it works.
Honestly, just switching to a kernel that isn't older than your hardware have a decent chance of fixing your issues. It is typically fine to upgrade kernels unless the distro has made some special modifications to them, and it was a very long time since I was hit by something like that.
Fedora is 6.18, it’s like you did not notice the word Fedora, and chose shitty clone of Debian instead of Debian. Of course it worse, no need to prove that. Get Fedora.
This has been my issue as well - screens waking or not waking up. On latest Linux Mint and everything is great except when switching back and forth inputs between my personal and work laptop (running Windows), I have to do it twice going to my personal laptop or else the external monitor won't show.
I did this sometime in 2022. First I was using POP OS but I wanted to have something more up to date so I gave an Arch based distro a shot, EndeavourOS has been my go to for a full year without any feel of missing out on another distro or features. Yay is the best thing to happen to Arch Linux and its derivatives.
I feel like Pacman is the real reason for instability with people who dont understand how Pacman works messing up upgrade commands and not getting all their dependencies properly updated. When I tried Manjaro like ten years ago it was a mess.
I watched gnome evolve to the point where your calendar notifies you of meetings 10 minutes prior and has a join button which runs the appropriate application. I also get notifications for new emails and slack messages. Last week I was pleasantly surprised by
I installed CachyOS on a spare ssd with the idea that if it became a headache I would go back to windows. All my games work, even weird open source ones. All my sounds, monitor, kvm switch, volume rockers, Bluetooth game controllers, headsets, everything works with zero issue. Cuda works, I can run ML models, and it all works much better and faster than Windows. There's been no reason so far to switch back. Next, I'll wipe my NVME drive and be done with windows for good.
My non technical friend she choose to try installing linux and picked mint. I laughed and I was sure she would brick it at least once but its been over 6 month and the system is still running fine. She did end up dual booting windows because there are a few games which were to hard for her to get setup and some that will never work. I think dual booting is fine its a good pressure release valve as long as you're spending most of the time booting into linux.
My home nvidia desktop is running CachyOS and it's been an overall good experience. 99% of the apps I need just run without issue, and I've only needed to apply a few minor tweaks to get my other laptop set up (switched to deep sleep). As a long time Fedora fan, I was not sure about switching to CachyOS but the performance has been marginally better under heavy use-cases. However, Fedora is fine and can be tweaked to get most of the same benefits though.
Wish I could too. I ended up running Windows, Linux and MacOS. While gaming is getting there, tools in many many domains are still unsupported, e.g. Office, Adobe, Audio Production. No OS is perfect and running all three is the way for the most comprehensive experience for people with interests in multiple domains.
I love desktop linux. I've used it on and off since 2000. Even with Valve's excellent work on gaming, there's still whole software categories that require Windows. Pro audio software is very Windows reliant and I don't see it changing. If you're a software developer, there are many benefits to using and deeply learning linux. But even as a linux super-geek, I don't expect to ditch Windows entirely any time soon.
I tried it (PopOS) on my old gaming laptop. It worked when it worked but when it didn't, it REALLY didn't. Linux unfortunately does not support my preferred (which I use semi-professionally) photo software, either (Capture One). Linux desktop feels like nuclear power to me - I've tried switching many many times over the last 20 years and it's just never quite there. I even use a lot of the open source solutions for office software etc. already, just on Windows.
I installed Bazzite on a slightly esoteric machine, a 16" dual-screen Asus laptop. It's not really my cup of tea as a distribution, either philosophically or practically, but it has some specific patches for Asus hardware and as a result it seems to work better in every way than Windows. Every couple of months I'm annoyed for a moment by all the immutability stuff and the package system, but for both work and play it's running perfectly.
Frankly I'd love to switch from Windows to Linux. But it's the applications. My last attempt to switch got hung up on a few things (in order if importance, probably):
- Quicken. I have 30 years of personal financial data in quicken. I'm not completely opposed to migrating to something else, but I haven't seen a good substitute. I'd probably have to learn double entry bookkeeping, and I'm unsure if other software could still download data from my bank and investment accounts. I'm sure as hell not going to start entering transactions manually (ugh).
- Ableton live. I do have a copy of bitwig, but I am unfamiliar with its workflow, and would have to figure out which of my vsts I would lose, and it seems a big pain in the ass.
- Plex server. For some reason, out of the box this was dog slow. Because of the other issues, I was unwilling to spend the time to try to figure out what was going on with this.
- The are games I would probably lose, but honestly there are so many games available I doubt I would care that much.
How many hundreds of hours am I gonna have to take to figure this all out before I have a working system again? Not my idea of a good time even if I like the outcome.
Edit: and this is from somebody who loves the idea of Linux! I first installed 0.11 or 0.12 way back in the early 90s from a stack of floppies!
> - Quicken. I have 30 years of personal financial data in quicken. I'm not completely opposed to migrating to something else,
Genuinely curious - outside of personal satisfaction/scratching the itch to store data, does personal financial data dating 30 years ago serve any practical purpose?
Occasionally I want to see what I paid for something, or when it happened, or who the vendor was. So if I can't migrate the data somehow, I'd still have to keep a copy of quicken around to access that old data even if I was using some other software for current data.
I might be willing to give all that up if I could find something that worked for new transactions, but I haven't found it yet.
Based on your assessment you’d have almost no issue at all.
I’m almost certain you’d have no trouble running Quicken or Ableton. Ableton even has a Bottles configuration available, which is a one-click GUI install:
Of course, if Wine-based solutions really don’t work, you also have the option to run a VM or dual boot for those one-off needs.
Your comment on plex server seems odd. It seems like most people run it via Docker, I can’t imagine what kind of Linux-specific issue you had. Docker/podman on Linux is quite superior to the experience on Mac and Windows.
As far as games, I have trouble finding games that don’t work. Steam and other launchers for other stores have pretty much eliminated this issue. There are even some online games with anti-cheat software that work in Linux.
Hundreds of hours? No, not really. Not these days. I know it’s hard to believe me but I went through this same thing switching from macOS to Linux last year. I was shocked, I almost thought my experiment would fail and I’d go back. But no, it’s so solid and a bunch of stuff I expected to not work just…worked. (I chose Bazzite as my distribution on a Framework 13).
Current quicken doesn't run on Linux, and the web version doesn't connect to any online investment accounts as far as I know, only bank accounts.
Ableton would still have the issue of: which plugins can I still somehow get to work? And which do I just lose? And then: how reliable is it? Does it really just work, or am I gonna be fighting glitches all the time?
I suspect part of the problem might be a mental block on my end. I spent 25 years as a sysadmin before I retired, and the idea of going back to that is just not acceptable. And I know it would be hundreds of hours because that's what I spent last time I tried to make the switch a few months ago.
I know it’s not the same application but Quicken Simplifi definitely connects to investment accounts.
Hundreds of hours makes me wonder what distribution you chose…I think if you choose something that’s more designed to work out of the box as a ready to go solution you might have a better experience. For example, since I like occasionally playing games, I chose Bazzite which comes with all the gaming stuff installed already and is an immutable OS that “just works.”
And for sure, I think trying to shoehorn complicated non-Linux applications into your Linux workflow might waste your time. I tried this with Autodesk Fusion and I almost got it to work. But it didn’t work. So I just use that on Windows, but it’s also nice to not be bothering with Windows for the majority of what I do.
The way I do it is that my laptop is Linux and my desktop is on Windows and I can just RDP into it over WireGuard to use Windows apps. So I guess this is cheating: ideally my desktop also leaves Windows but I haven’t made that leap.
I am very interested in the Steam Machine, because it will be an out-of-the-box Linux experience with (hopefully) no tweaking required. Hardware designed for Linux gaming from the beginning. I'm willing to put up with worse performance per dollar to not have to spend time tweaking the thing myself, similar to a game console.
I think Steam Machine + macOS laptop + NAS running debian headless is my personal compute plan for the next few years.
I'm not interested in the Steam Machine, but I DO am interested in switching my gaming PC to Steam OS! I hope the Steam Machine will put more pressure on getting Steam OS to the masses.
I have an old Lenovo IdeaPad with fairly modest hardware, and I have both Fedora and Windows installed. About 90% of the time I use Fedora, and it works fine overall. The only thing that bothers me is that Firefox on Fedora feels noticeably more sluggish compared to Edge or Firefox on Windows. Maybe it’s just a perception issue, but I’d love to know what others are using as their web browser on Linux.
> My laptop is a 2014 MacBook Air, which is still a pretty solid machine.
as a long-term contributor to a website that benchmarks (quite extensively!) notebooks of all sorts, quite interesting to see the choice of portable machine.
quite aligned with the overall take and was well-supported with examples.
As soon as the wizards at wine figure out how to get the ricochet kernel level tpm anti cheat stuff for Call Or Duty 7 and similar games working I am nuking windows. But alas playing COD zombies is how I unwind and it’s a no go on Linux. So I have a windows install
Anyone suggesting "you should too" switch to Linux is signing up to a whole lot of troubleshooting work for their friends that listened to them. Anyone somewhat technical, sure, but not anyone.
I moved from Windows about 10 years ago and it took 6 months to click. It was an enlightening experience, like the curtains had been drawn back. The only comparable experience was finally clicking with NixOS, about 18 months ago. Will never go back to any other Linux distro.
Even though the author trivialized the problems he had getting his laptop up and running, there were enough obstacles to keep 90% of non-techies from actually getting it working. How many normies have a USB ethernet laying around and understand enough to uninstall drivers that are interfering with the UI?
It's next to impossible to get windows up and running if you dare not get a computer with it preinstalled, AHCI drivers are almost never included in the installation disc. And windows support gives you links to self installing exe files which you can't run, because you presumably run a linux live cd to be able to access the internet and ask for help, and exe files don't run on it, and can't be accessed by the windows installer either.
Getting Windows up and running isn't necessarily easier. There was a recent review of a handheld Windows device that needed unauthorized hidden driver updates to get performance to match Steam OS. The only way to avoid this type of stuff is to get a Laptop with Ubuntu or Windows preinstalled.
Windows is not exactly free of this sort of nonsense either. Just recently I built a new PC for a friend, and we wanted to keep using his old SSD and Windows installation. After messing about with Bitlocker recovery keys which was already cumbersome enough, we ran into a catch-22 issue where we needed internet access to be able to log in and verify his Microsoft account, but we needed to install a driver for the new motherboard's networking chipset first, for which you need to be able to log in to an account first. Eventually we found that you can use USB tethering from a phone to gain internet access, for which no special driver is needed, which got around the issue but it was not exactly an obvious solution.
I can't use Linux because it doesn't have offline installers (without hacks and workarounds), even if I were willing to ditch decades worth of engineering software, Adobe and old games.
What? You can just put the executable in your path (in simpler terms put the program where the OS will look for it). You have the install command which does that and sets some permissions. That's not a hack that's just how it works. There's also apt-offline[0] which is apt (the package manager on Debian/Ubuntu and the rest) but wait for it... offline.
Of course you will need to get the source or the executable on the machine by some method, such as a USB or whatever. But I'm pretty sure Windows or Mac can't create software out of thin air either. Can you give me an example of a workflow that you use on Windows that you would like on Linux? I'm pretty sure I can help you solve it without hacks.
If you forget what you believe "installing" software means I'm sure you can learn to appreciate Linux and maybe even see that it's simpler and easier than Windows.
I tried Linux again recently. Microsoft needs to be deleted, but this plan is still delusional. Linux is way too confusing for preventable reasons, not even talking about compatibility with Windows stuff.
I'm no Linux expert, but if a SWE has a hard time with it, can't imagine how an average person is supposed to use this. Yeah it's learnable, but nobody wants to. Come back when I can install Linux on a PC, not a "distro" but just Linux, no choices for random stuff like DEs unless you're an expert. And that's necessary, not sufficient.
You are learning an entirely different operating system. You're going to have to make some choices and do some research/learn new things. There will be challenges because it's something completely different from what you know.
The entire point of Linux is there isn't just one Linux, having centralized control of an OS is how Mac and Windows ended up so godawful.
As time goes on the UX will continue to improve (through targeted distros) for less sophisticated users, but we're realistically only now at the point where everything in the ecosystem is "good enough" for a large number of people.
I've been using Linux on and off for a decade+, and it's a moving target. There is one Linux kernel, they can make one Linux OS. (and ofc people can fork but it should remain niche)
Meanwhile I can go on Windows after years and still know how to use it. Last version I daily used was 98, but 11 is still intuitive (despite being annoying).
Which distro and shell you've tried? I believe this makes a lot of difference, and there are distros that are catering for average users, but I have no ideia if it works.
It boils down to hardware support. Look at games like CS2, you need the max performance to play, and so far windows is just more optimized, as the driver authors prioritize it.
I just turned 60. My first computer was a 4.77MHz IBM PC with an 8088 processor, two floppy drives, and that magnificent mechanical keyboard IBM shipped in those days. My father, clearly receiving excellent financial advice at the time, picked up a 300bps Hayes modem for the princely sum of $599. CompuServe, here I come!
For context, this was early 1982. That 599 would cost 1,900 today — still a lot for a modem, but not quite the "gazillion" I remembered. Still, it illustrates just how far we've come.
Since then, I've written software professionally for over 40 years (with varying degrees of success). I've owned well over 200 computers — roughly 90% Wintel machines and 10% MacBooks. I've built them, repaired them, debugged them, and occasionally, after particularly frustrating days, set them back together again. I like to think I know my way around a PC.
Six months ago, I decided it was time. "This is the year of the Linux desktop on my machine," I declared, and I meant it. I installed over 20 of the most popular distributions from DistroWatch and used each one for at least two weeks. I was on a mission to rediscover the joy of computing.
For a while, it was genuinely fun. The sheer number of options was overwhelming in the best way possible. Customization everywhere I looked. All those incredible free software packages waiting in the repositories. In the beginning, I didn't even mind that I found myself doing full reinstalls every two or three days due to random instabilities. I was living the dream. Desktop effects and visual flair? Bring it on. Why does Compiz get so much criticism these days? What's more satisfying than a beautifully animated window?
Six weeks in, things changed. The Linux installations started to degrade — subtle at first, then undeniable. Random slowdowns. Browser links that wouldn't register for 10 or 15 seconds. The kind of frustration that makes you stare at the screen and wonder what's happening under the hood. It was consistent across distributions, which suggests this wasn't just a bad package here or there. Something fundamental was happening.
And yes, I'm aware of the irony. The system celebrated for its stability and reliability was the one leaving me longing for a responsive desktop environment. But that's exactly what I experienced, and I gave each distribution a fair shot.
There's also the practical reality: I'm a heavy Ableton Live user, and dual-booting has become increasingly grating. The Linux audio ecosystem has made real progress, but for my specific workflow, it's not there yet. Maybe in another year or two.
So I'm back on Windows 11. It works. It doesn't surprise me. After four decades, I'm okay with "it works" as a primary criterion.
Will I try Linux again? Maybe. The ecosystem continues to improve, and who knows what the next wave of AI-assisted tools might change. But for now, I wanted to share an honest account of what I encountered — because I genuinely wanted Linux to win.
>> Six weeks in, things changed. The Linux installations started to degrade — subtle at first, then undeniable. Random slowdowns. Browser links that wouldn't register for 10 or 15 seconds. The kind of frustration that makes you stare at the screen and wonder what's happening under the hood. It was consistent across distributions, which suggests this wasn't just a bad package here or there. Something fundamental was happening.
Without more details it would be difficult to determine what problems you were having.
I have never had problems like you describe with Linux. I would be interested to know more details.
> The Linux installations started to degrade — subtle at first, then undeniable. Random slowdowns. Browser links that wouldn't register for 10 or 15 seconds.
Very interesting. It is something I've never hit. Or, rather, I know the symptoms, but in my case they are caused not by the age of the installation, but by the memory use and swapping. When I compile something big, it can eat a lot of memory, and even 32Gb or RAM is not enough sometimes, there are lags and sometimes very painful.
It is really interesting because the behavior was persistent for all Linux distributions you tried, so probably there was some program that ate all the memory. Pity you didn't try running top and watching CPU and memory usage. Now I'll think of possible causes to the end of my days without any hope to find a real cause.
> Six months ago, I decided it was time. "This is the year of the Linux desktop on my machine," I declared, and I meant it. I installed over 20 of the most popular distributions from DistroWatch and used each one for at least two weeks. I was on a mission to rediscover the joy of computing.
Twenty distributions in six months, using each one for at least two weeks. Aside from the overlap, the post claims experience with debugging and repairing computers - but a lot of the blame here is placed on Linux without specifics of hardware of actual distributions used. Reads formulated like the typical narrative meant to deride Linux with surface level anecdotes.
> Six weeks in, things changed. The Linux installations started to degrade — subtle at first, then undeniable. Random slowdowns. Browser links that wouldn't register for 10 or 15 seconds.
This is something that I would expect with Windows over time (not in a few weeks though) but has never happened to me with Linux. I have run less stable rolling release distros, and I have done multiple major version upgrades on the same machine over time over many machines.
its sounds to me as though you are doing some unusual things - few people use Compiz now because DEs like KDE provide those through their default Window managers.
I wouldn't worry much about operating systems. They are just a means to an end (which is running your applications) few are in the situation that 100% of their applications run on more than 1 OS, so they even get a choice of OS.
Its simple. If you require specific software which only runs on Windows, then you cannot use Linux. If that's not the case, the Linux desktop these days is entirely capable of helping you achieve your goals.
Lol, I had to hunt for drivers for a while and then research which ones match my hardware, then I had to research how to strip windows 11 of the more egregious privacy intrusions and nags ... in my case there was plenty of headaches.
Yet it is. I don’t see myself or anyone in my family effortlessly choosing and setting up a Linux distro without outside help.
Windows on the other hand is easy to install and set up. I’d argue most people in my family can do this and I’m the only one that is technically inclined.
I hope one day to upgrade my laptop to a Honor/Huawei AMD Ryzen AI computer to run Linux. Modern Macbooks unfortunatly do not run Linux and the other laptop manifacturers basically produce expensive trash laptops
Repairable laptops don't reduce e-waste. You replace the mainboard and then what? You have a spare mainboard that sits there collecting dust. The best way to prevent e-waste is to build durable laptops that last a lifetime. Like Dell, HP and Lenovo have been doing for years (while also being very repairable at the same time).
We have open source documentation and CAD around the Mainboards to enable people to reuse them as single board computers or mini PCs after upgrading them out of their laptops. Even if the original owner of the Mainboard has no use for that, the functionality means it has resale value for others to use, reducing waste.
Frameworks computers are expensive, you aren't reducing the e-waste because on amd ryzen ai laptops the ram is soldered like in the other laptops from other manifacturers
That is incorrect. All of our laptops have modular, upgradable memory. Our Framework Desktop is a mini PC that does not because AMD’s Ryzen AI Max platform doesn’t support it. Regardless, we maximized modularity and reuseability on that product too by following PC standards. It uses a MiniITX form factor, standard 120mm fan, and FlexATX power supply.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. They're expensive because they don't have the volume that other manufacturers have. If you dig in my comment history, you'll see me complain about the soldered in ram as well, and some of their other decisions. However their modular configuration is still better than the rest of them.
The M2 models came out in 2022. You can't buy them new anymore.
Asahi linux doesn't support any of the currently sold macbooks, so I think it's fair to say modern macbooks don't run linux.
This is also at Apple's mercy, if enough people do it there's a non-zero chance they lock things down further. They've done even more consumer-unfriendly things before.
I've been using an Asus EliteBook for the last 3 years. Despite taking a beating, the build quality has held up flawlessly and with 32 GB of RAM, 1 kg form factor, and great battery life, I have no reason to upgrade yet.
I'd rather be concerned about friendly fire from our own.
As an US American, i'd rather be concerned about big tech and government backdoors than anything else.
Especially in the current atmosphere of doom inside the US.
Nonsense. I've been running Linux just fine as my daily driver on Macbook M4 for a year. Besides battery life (VM is kinda heavy on it) and some minor issues (fewer than you'd think, especially with Vulkan landing in UTM today) it's the best Linux laptop I've owned ever so far. I like macOS as much as the next Linux user here, but it's fairly decent as a hypervisor. If anything, at least it comes with UI unlike Intel ME.
I would be interested in doing the same, but my Linux server in my house has been a bit of a pain for my remote employees to use. Maybe I don't know the best software?
Yep, and the comment section predictably attracts the people who just complain they want something but will do nothing about it, not even complain to the right place (like their favorite proprietary SW/HW vendor, to improve their Linux support).
it's really good these days. nvidia finally fixed their drivers (i suppose all it took was becoming the richest company on earth), kde is really nicely polished and all the friction from the x11 to wayland transition is over (at least from my perspective of an end user of linux desktops).
it's remarkably stable and reliable and way less annoying than modern windows or macos. i'm looking forward to a panther lake thinkpad with robust linux support and incredible battery life.
I have been a Linux user since 2005 or 06. It was one of the best decisions I ever made in the world of computers. I started with Ubuntu and went on a distro hunt such as Fedora, Mandriva, Mint, and others.
In the end, I have stayed with Debian for a good 10 years, now. Both for desktop/laptop and server.
(Maybe one day I will dive deeper with Arch.. but I also like the direction of Guix)
While I use Windows at work, I did have one machine at home dual-boot with Windows. I used it at times for games or work. Now, I cannot find a good reason to have it. My recent Debian install for my laptop + has Steam and Heroic (Epic) without issues.
Despite all the above, I am not someone who forces Linux on others - though I speak my truth and make jokes about it.. but I have little issues with my Linux installs. While I have an ATI card which installed without issue, I did not have much problems with nVidia cards in the past.
I dont hate Windows as a pure Operating System. If you remove all the fluff on top of it - especially with what is going on with Windows 11, you likely have a stable, reliable kernel + core applications.
I do not like the direction MS is going with Windows 11. I am expecting the next version of Windows to simply be named "Windows AI" but don't worry -- they will tell you AI is optional.
Boiling Frog Syndrome - little by little more features will be mandatory. :-)
fwiw... after 20 years I went back to FreeBSD from Linux. I recommend it if you like FreeBSD. [Actually, I run a hybrid where I have a stripped down Debian system and run BSD in a virtual machine, but 99% of my interaction w/ the machine is via FreeBSD.]
Can we stop with the implicit agism that always pops up in Linux threads? I know it's meant to be positive for Linux but it's still agism that diminishes people whose only crime is that they're of advanced age.
I hate it too. Not long ago I met a grandmother who had spent part of her career writing embedded software for nuclear reactors. I met many others who had jobs in technology.
The line of defenses are different. All my Linux applications are either installed via Flatpak (which runs in a sandbox) or via the official package registry (which requires programs to be open source, and has a strong track record)
Linus runs this specifically because it supports kernel development decently well. If you aren’t developing the kernel, his reasons for running Fedora have little to no impact on you.
I bought a thinkpad X1 carbon refurbished for about ~$300. I wanted to travel abroad with a laptop I wouldn't mind getting stolen if it happened. During the installation of Win11 it asked me to create a microsoft account, fuck that. I installed linux mint. Very nice experience overall, so nice to not get assaulted by ads in the start menu. Pleased to see the nightlight functionality (I googled f.lux for linux and that's how I discovered it) is built-in, and with flatpack I installed vlc, qbittorrent and obsidian. Firefox setup was straightforward. And that was it. This is a laptop for youtube and movies, I used the pre-installed libre office calc for small budget things and list making. It just worked for me.
The things that bother me about this laptop are primarily hardware related coming from using a mac laptop (which is the laptop I would mind getting stolen). Trackpad on X1 carbon is definitely not as good, battery life not as good. And opening the lid momentarily reveals what you were on before the lock screen comes on. This last one tastes more like a software issue. I had another issue with the hdmi port being finicky, but that's hardware again.
Overall very happy with this setup, linux mint is in great shape. I do wish there were fewer distro choices for people considering making the switch. It does introduce choice paralysis. I had to set aside my ego and pipe dream aspirations of being a "hacker" and went with a distro that seemed to be simple and straightforward to setup. Mint definitely is easier to install than windows, hands down, no need to create a microsoft account and you don't have to deal with all the slop features it tries to shove down your throat.
Darktable is the best photography editing and classifying software I've ever used. New users should be warned it's quite power-user centric though. Adopting isn't like opening up Lightroom and messing around. You may have to read a bit of documentation regarding the modules and different workflows (i.e. Sigmoid vs FilmicRGB).
I think the Ansel developer has a YouTube series with tutorials on how to edit in Darktable using the Filmic RGB workflow. Not sure if that's where I'd get started nowadays (I've just adopted Sigmoid and it's way quicker to edit with it), but it gave me a solid base in how to use this software.
Darktable is another piece of software that really shows warts in UX.
For example, you can right click empty space to "remove" or "update path to file..." in the left hand rail. There shouldn't be a right click option in empty space.
Everything lower case makes it very difficult to quickly parse, especially the settings menu.
Inkscape is also full of these sins. For that matter, so is KDE.
I tested literally all alternatives to Lightroom, including even other commercial Windows only software, just because I want to get off the subscription. I tested two specific functions I use and need, and zero of all other programs do them well. It's frustrating.
to add on: alternatives I am seriously considering is buying a macbook m2 purely for lightroom and run linux on intel, and macbook m2 + asahi + dumping the intel.
No libre office suite will ever be on par with Microsoft proprietary options. It's a constant race of keeping up with features, using mostly unpaid volunteer developers.
I've used Linux for 25+ years and my reaction is always to do my best with the options I have, but in those cases when it's not enough I just say "I'm sorry but I can't edit this document" or "sorry but some of the formatting was lost when I saved this in libreoffice".
The thing is that I'm a senior Linux specialist so people accept my excuses because they generally need my work.
> It's a constant race of keeping up with features, using mostly unpaid volunteer developers.
What new features are Microsoft bringing out that are that critical for LibreOffice et al to catch up with?
I can’t think of much which I use that wasn’t already available in Office 95 which was released 30 years ago.
Aside from OOXML (which isn’t nearly as open as the name suggests) and the ribbon bar (which i personally hate), there hasn’t really been any big innovations.
The only features I can think of are:
- better security model for marcos. But that was only needed because MS Office was insecure to begin with so not really relevant here either
- Unicode support
- more rows in excel (though generally once you start reaching that point, the memory footprint of Excel becomes too great to make working on that spreadsheet practical)
The real issue with LibreOffice isn’t new features. It’s the subtle rending and parsing quirks when working on OOXML documents. But that’s likely Microsoft’s fault and thus OOXML working as intended.
I don’t doubt there’s been plenty of new features. But are they significant enough that users on older versions or non-MS suites are left longing for the latest version of Excel?
I just don’t think there is much innovation left. Or at least not without changing the UX and/or paradigm significantly. Neither of which have happened.
Unless you need precise formatting because you will send someone nontrivial slides to present, libreoffice should be fine.
Excel really depends - if you're using it as a glorified document with a table, then libreoffice will do fine. If you need compatibility and more advanced features, or your whole company runs on excel like a financial corp - there's no alternative. VM in that case.
As far as compatibility goes, OnlyOffice is fairly good at it, more geared towards MS-compatibility than LibreOffice, which is more of its own thing (and pretty good at that).
This never lasts long, in my experience. It’s a nice idea, but it’s a huge pain. At some point, I always end up sticking with the OS that has what I need, which is never Linux. Linux is what I install when feeling idealistic, but it doesn’t allow me to do anything I can’t do on a mainstream OS that is mission critical to my life.
I’d say commit. Force yourself to find new tools and workflows on the new OS of choice. If that isn’t possible, it seems like a waste of time and effort.
I agree modern Windows sucks for the average consumer, with all the dark patterns and icky stuff, but if you are on this forum and technically inclined enough to install Linux, you can just disable all the bad parts of Windows and get a rock solid OS with perfect compatibility. Unpopular opinion, I know, but that's how I view it.
It is indeed a huge problem. The whole operating system now behaves and
feels like the US government spying on everyone. Now, Microsoft has done
that before, but with Win11 it really now seems almost shameless AND
desperate in abusing users, while also alienating many of them via
"features" they don't want, in particular all the AI garbage slop.
It does not really affect me that much, as I switched to Linux in 2005
or so, give or take, but some people around me, in particular elderly,
depend on Windows still. So that's a dilemma. Do I want to install Win11
for them? Or Win10? And help maintain either? Replacing those computers
with Linux is not so trivial. You would need virtually kind of 100%
"what works on Windows must work on Linux too". Any complexity is a real
total showstopper for many elderly people who have very little experience
with computer systems.
As somebody who's doing the same thing for the first time in almost 2 decades: kubuntu wins for me.
Mint was too buggy. It just felt so single-threaded. It had upsides - easiest Nvidia support for example. Cinnamon is nicely customizable and has some great ideas but it's just too rough around the edges.
Raw Debian was just too hard to get Nvidia drivers playing nice.
But for "I'm comfy editing config files but I need some hand-holding for this" KDE with Ubuntu is the best balance of performance and clean design and support.
My biggest disappointment is how little batteries-included gui I'm seeing for core Linux functionality. Where is the systemd service manager? Why are all the file managers so bad at editing permissions?
Oh look, a “I switched to linux” article that will convince nobody because it’s full of issues they ran into that users don’t want to and should not have to learn how to solve. Or maybe I’m wrong and everything is smooth now? _reads article_ Nope, it’s exactly as I expected.
Am I the only one who thinks (mobile safari with an ad blocker) it’s a jackass move to show a fake popup that leads to “must be an adblocker” and prevents page viewing? Or maybe just bad JS junk causing it?
Update: OMG I turned ad blocker off and what a disaster of a site.
>Dolphin held a pleasant surprise: it could detect my iPhone when it was plugged in. This made it a snap to transfer files to and from my phone as the file manager granted full file access to the iPhone
Do iphones show the file system as a USB storage or MTP device when plugged into a computer? If so, that has worked for many years.
You can also access the file system over the local network from Dolphin using KDE connect. I know that with Android the phone just appears as a drive and I think its the same with Apple devices.
Davinci Resolve is a high end professional video editing suite, and is well supported on Linux. Also Lightworks (but I'm biased because I used to work there).
Eh, I wanted to do this, but the manufacturer of my laptop doesn't allow me to disable RST in the BIOS, so I can only work from a flash drive, and it's slow. :(
I'm waiting on Ableton, Arturia, and Native Instruments. The latter two should have the easiest time since all their stuff is already VST3 and it can support Linux.
Not really, Linux evangelists are a thing because Linux is primarily held back by lack of adoption. A lot of common issues can be attributed to either:
1. The hardware manufacturer has never tested Linux support for drivers.
2. Some application that you need doesn't target Linux due to lack of users
This isn't everything, sure. But I think it's a majority of the headaches. Thus, Linux-users really want other people to also use Linux, so that companies actually give a shit about supporting it.
There's also the whole ideology involved. A lot of companies are increasingly pushing that you are not allowed to control the computer/phone/device you buy and Linux is at the forefront of combating this.
I don't think Linux itself is held back by lack of adoption at all. Android is the most popular mobile operating system in the world, last I checked. My dad doesn't know the difference between dir and ls, and he will only use an Android phone.
I would rather hug a fully grown crocodile than install Linux on my computer. But even I wouldn't deny that Android - and by extension Linux - is probably the best thing that happened to mobile devices.
Desktop Linux is lacking in adoption, but maybe that's because it's not packaged nearly as nicely as Android.
I never run into stability issues and couldn't care less about telemetry which feels like admitting some kind of a sin on HN. Windows 11 is fine and Linux will always be for niche use cases.
It’s worth acknowledging the real challenges raised in this thread: desktop Linux still has rough edges for some use cases, hardware support isn’t always perfect, and niche professional software may lack native support or require workarounds. But these obstacles are not intrinsic technical limitations so much as ecosystem and investment gaps, areas where community projects, standards efforts, and wider adoption could drive improvement without sacrificing freedom.
Viewed through the lens of digital autonomy and citizenship, the question isn’t simply “Is Linux perfect?” but rather: Do we want our fundamental computing environment to be ultimately under our control, or controlled by private interests with their own incentives?
> Viewed through the lens of digital autonomy and citizenship, the question isn’t simply “Is Linux perfect?” but rather: Do we want our fundamental computing environment to be ultimately under our control, or controlled by private interests with their own incentives?
As a user of Linux as my main desktop OS for more than 20 years, a user of Linux far longer than that, and a promoter of FOSS before that was a term, this has always been the question. Most of the world does not care. I suspect that is more true today than ever before. There are now adults that grew up in the age of social media that have no idea how local computing works.
Not to be negative but the "obstacles" to adopting Linux were never actually obstacles most of the time. Fifteen years ago my mother started using Linux as her main OS with no training. I gave her the login information, but never had a chance to show her how to use it, and she just figured it out on her own. Everything just worked, including exchanging MS Office documents for work.
> Most of the world does not care. I suspect that is more true today than ever before. There are now adults that grew up in the age of social media that have no idea how local computing works.
Yep. I was amazed when I was talking to a friend who's a bit younger (late 20s) and told him about a fangame you could just download from a website (Dr Robotnik's Ring Racers, for the record) and he was skeptical and concerned at the idea of just downloading and running an executable from somewhere on the internet.
I suspect most adults these days are like this; their computing experience is limited to the web browser and large official corporate-run software repositories e.g. app stores and Steam. Which ironically means they would do just fine on Linux, but there's also no incentive for them to switch off Windows/MacOS.
To them, Microsoft and Apple having control of their files and automatically backing up their home directory to Azure/iCloud is a feature, not a problem.
> and he was skeptical and concerned at the idea of just downloading and running an executable from somewhere on the internet
Ironically, being concerned and skeptical about running random executables from the internet is a good idea in general.
> Ironically, being concerned and skeptical about running random executables from the internet is a good idea in general.
I agree you shouldn't run random executables, but the key word is "random". In this case, Ring Racers is a relatively established and somewhat well-known game, plus it's open-source.
It doesn't guarantee it's not harmful of course, but ultimately for someone with the mindset of "I should never run any programs that aren't preapproved by a big corporation", they may as well just stick to Windows/MacOS or mobile devices where this is built into the ecosystem.
> plus it's open-source
Open-source only matters if you have the time/skill/willingness to download said source (and any dependencies') and compile it.
Otherwise you're still running a random binary and there's no telling whether the source is malicious or whether the binary was even built with the published source.
It's no guarantee, but it's a positive indicator of trustworthiness if a codebase is open source.
I don't have hard numbers on this, but in my experience it's pretty rare for an open source codebase to contain malware. Few malicious actors are bold enough to publish the source of their malware. The exception that springs to mind is source-based supply chain attacks, such as publishing malicious Python code to Python's pip package-manager.
You have a valid point that a binary might not correspond to the supposed source code, but I think this is quite uncommon.
> It's no guarantee, but it's a positive indicator of trustworthiness if a codebase is open source.
It's something we as techies like to believe due to solidarity or belief in the greater good, but I'm not sure it's actually justified? It would only work if there's a sizeable, technically-inclined userbase of the project so that someone is likely to have audited the code.
If you're malicious, you can still release malicious software with an open-source cover (ideally without the source including the malicious part - but even then, you can coast just fine until someone comes along and actually checks said source). If you're anonymous there is little actual downside of detection, you can just try again under a different project.
Remember that the xz-utils backdoor was only discovered because they fucked up and caused a slowdown and not due to an unprompted audit.
> It would only work if there's a sizeable, technically-inclined userbase of the project so that someone is likely to have audited the code.
Not really. There's a long history of seemingly credible closed-source codebases turning out to have concealed malicious functionality, such as smart TVs spying on user activity, or the 'dieselgate' scandal, or the Sony rootkit. This kind of thing is extremely rare in Free and Open Source software. The creators don't want to run the risk of someone stumbling across the plain-as-day source code of malicious functionality. Open source software also generally makes it easy to remove malicious functionality, or even to create an ongoing fork project for this purpose. (The VSCodium project does this, roughly speaking. [0])
Firefox's telemetry is one of the more high-profile examples of unwanted behaviour in Free and Open Source software, and that probably doesn't even really count as malware.
> If you're malicious, you can still release malicious software with an open-source cover (ideally without the source including the malicious part - but even then, you can coast just fine until someone comes along and actually checks said source).
I already acknowledged this is possible, you don't need to spell it out. Again I don't have hard numbers, but it seems to me that in practice this is quite rare compared to malicious closed-source software of the 'ordinary' kind.
A good example of this was SourceForge injecting adware into binaries. [1]
> Remember that the xz-utils backdoor was only discovered because they fucked up and caused a slowdown and not due to an unprompted audit.
Right, that was a supply chain attack. They seem to be increasingly common, unfortunately.
[0] https://vscodium.com/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SourceForge#Installer_with_adw...
Of course this is true. But you can keep going down the rabbit hole. How do you know there isn't a backdoor hidden in the source code? How do you know there isn't a compromised dependency, maybe intentionally?
Ultimately there needs to be trust at some point because nobody is realistically going to do a detailed security analysis of the source code of everything they install. We do this all the time as software developers; why do I trust that `pip install SQLAlchemy==2.0.45` isn't going to install a cryptominer on my system? It's certainly not because I've inspected the source code, it's because there's a web of trust in the ecosystem (well-known package, lots of downloads, if there were malware someone would have likely noticed before me).
> still running a random binary
Again "random" here is untrue, there's nothing random about it. You're running a binary which is published by the maintainers of some software. You're deciding how much you trust those maintainers (and their binary publishing processes, and whoever is hosting their binary).
The problem is that on Windows or your typical Linux distro "how much you trust" needs to be "with full access to all of the information on my computer, including any online accounts I access through that computer". This is very much unlike Android, for example, where all apps are sandboxed by default.
That's a pretty high bar, I don't blame your friend at all for being skeptical.
Right, which goes back to the main point; "total control of your computing environment" fundamentally means that you are responsible for figuring out which applications to trust, based on your own choice of heuristics (FOSS? # of downloads/Github stars? Project age? Reputation of maintainers and file host? etc...) Many, maybe most people don't actually want to do this, and would much rather outsource that determination of trust to Microsoft/Google/Apple.
> Right, which goes back to the main point; "total control of your computing environment" fundamentally means that you are responsible for figuring out which applications to trust, based on your own choice of heuristics
Hard disagree. Total control of my computing environment would be to allow an application access to my documents, a space to save a configuration, perhaps my Videos folder or even certain files in that folder. Or conversely, not.
At the moment, none of the desktops give me the ability to set a level of trust for an application. I can't execute Dr. Robotniks Ring Run (or whatever the example was) and be able to specify what it can, or cannot access. There may be a request for permission at a system level access, but that could be explained away as usually is for iApps and Android when requesting some scary sounding permission groups.
And it also doesn't stop malware from accessing my documents. Sometimes my Mac asks if an application is allowed to access Documents, but it isn't consistent.
Technically you can do all that with on Linux with SELinux. But it's not the default, nor is it easy.
> it's not the default, nor is it easy.
That's really the main point for me. Flatpak could also a lot of this, but Flatseal isn't the default, nor is it easy for users.
MacOS has a bunch of switches for access, but they are hidden away inside the settings, and they are not granular.
If it's not the default, and it's not easy then it may as well not be there for most people.
> they are hidden away inside the settings, and they are not granular.
The switches default to off though, with a prompt on first attempt at accessing the protected resource.
The problem is that they're leaky like a sieve and the permission model and inheritance works is unclear (I once had the Terminal app ask me for permission - does it now mean anything I run from the terminal automatically inherits it - and so on).
> Open-source only matters if you have the time/skill/willingness to download said source (and any dependencies') and compile it.
Not really. The fact that an application is open-source means its originator can't rug-pull its users at some random future date (as so often happens with closed-source programs). End users don't need to compile the source for that to be true.
> Otherwise you're still running a random binary and there's no telling whether the source is malicious or whether the binary was even built with the published source.
This is also not true in general. Most open-source programs are available from an established URL, for example a Github archive with an appropriate track record. And the risks of downloading and running a closed-source app are much the same.
The kind of rug-pulling you describe only works if the software implements an online licensing check/DRM, and either way has nothing to do with security against malicious behavior.
> Github archive with an appropriate track record
How do you judge the "track record"? Github stars can be bought. Marketing can be used to inflate legitimate usage of a program before introducing the malicious behavior.
> the risks of downloading and running a closed-source app are much the same
But that's my point - open-source doesn't really change the equation there unless you are actually auditing the source and building & running said source. If you're just relying on a binary download you're no better than downloading proprietary software in binary form.
> The kind of rug-pulling you describe only works if the software implements an online licensing check/DRM, and either way has nothing to do with security against malicious behavior.
My point was that an open-source program cannot rug-pull its users without the obvious remedy of forking the project and removing the offending code. Open-source: commonly seen. Closed-source: not possible and often illegal.
For both options, you have to trust the source, which makes that a non-issue. You can checksum the Linux kernel to satisfy yourself that it came from a trusted source. You can checksum the Windows kernel to satisfy yourself that you're about to be screwed.
> But that's my point - open-source doesn't really change the equation there unless you are actually auditing the source and building & running said source.
In the open-source world, knowing how computers work is essential. In the closed-source world, knowing how computers work is somewhere between pointless and illegal. This is how open-source "changes the equation."
Modifying open-source code is welcome and accepted. Modifying closed-source code breaks the law. Take your pick.
How do they know they’ve found the legitimate Ring Racers download and not some scammer who managed to get their search result above the real one?
Nothing wrong with downloading and running programs you trust, but there needs to be a good answer to that question.
As a threat model, it's a little outmoded. With the browser being an application platform, you do this every time you click a link. There's something sinister about considering a local open source application as dangerous but a closed source "cloud" app as safe.
To be fair, downloading and running random executables from the internet is a genuinely terrible security model when the OS (like Windows, Linux, or (to a lesser extent) MacOS) does nothing to prevent it from doing anything you can do.
> he was skeptical and concerned at the idea of just downloading and running an executable from somewhere on the internet.
It's quite concerning that you frame this as a bad idea.
> It's quite concerning that you frame this as a bad idea.
Downloading and executing other people's compiled software is how things worked for many decades. It's only been in recent years that people have come to believe that Google/Microsoft/Apple should be the final authorities on which executables are safe to run.
> It's only been in recent years that people have come to believe that Google/Microsoft/Apple should be the final authorities on which executables are safe to run.
I mean, the OS package repositories at least have some vetting and processes behind them, as opposed to a random website found online - so there's surely middle ground there!
You don't need to give everything up to a few big corpos to have at least a bit of a sense of security - I personally trust the Debian maintainers quite a bit due to their track record, short of bad actors infiltrating the community or accounts getting compromised.
> Most of the world does not care. I suspect that is more true today than ever before
100% of the people I have spoken with, from uber drivers to grandparents, have all noticed, hated, and are sympathetic to the fight against the rental/subscription economy. In 2025 I don't think I've had a single person defend the status quo because they all know what's coming.
I think Arduino and RPi demonstrate that there is still a relatively strong attraction for tinkering. In the past, freedom meant a lot to tinkerers. My sense is that this is not so true today. Perhaps I am wrong. It may be that few people respect licensing enough to care. As long as somebody (not necessarily the producer) has made a youtube video of how to hack something, that's good enough.
This was probably always true. Replace youtube with Byte magazine and it was probably the same 45 years ago. I wonder if the percentage of true FOSS adherents has changed much. It would be a bit of a paradox if the percent of FOSS software has exploded and the percent of FOSS adherents has declined.
Note: I mean "adherent" to mean something different than "user".
> I think Arduino and RPi demonstrate that there is still a relatively strong attraction for tinkering
Raspberry Pi is an interesting example because it is constantly criticized by people who complain about the closed source blobs, the non-open schematics, and other choices that don’t appease the purists.
Yet it does a great job at letting users do what they want to do with it, which is get to using it. It’s more accessible than the open counterparts, more available, has more guides, and has more accessories.
The situation has a lot of parallels to why people use Windows instead of seeking alternatives: It’s accessible, easy, and they can focus on doing what they want with the computer.
The problems with SBCs are primarily software. I have a ton of SBCs, mostly Raspberry Pis and OrangePis.
OrangePi boards are great. Zero is almost stamp sized, plus and pro has tons of options and on-board NVMe + fast-ish eMMC with great official cases, whatnot.
But, guess what? The OS is bad. I mean, unpatched, mishmashed, secured as an open door bad.
You get an OS installation which drops you to root terminal automatically on terminal output. There are many services which you don't need on board. There's an image, not an installer, and all repositories look to Chinese servers.
Armbian is not a good solution, because it's not designed to rollover like Debian and RasberryPi OS. So you can't build any long-term system from them like you can build with RaspberryPi.
On top of that, you can't boot anything mainline on most of them because either drivers are closed source, or the Kernel has weird hacks to make things work, or generally both.
So, what makes Raspberry Pi is not the hardware, but software support.
I don't think tinkering is the dominant culture behind tech anymore, but it's definitely operating at a higher scale than ever before. There's more OSS projects than ever, and there are tons of niche areas with entire communities. Examples could include: LoRa radios (or LoRA adaptors!), 3d printing, FPGA hacking, new games for retro hardware...
There was a gap before (think 90s and early 2000s) where there was a niche tinkering and more mainstream user/power user/programmer crowds. All these groups have knowledge gaps between them, but the gap was surmountable.
Now, the groups have drifted apart. Even if you're a programmer, unless you care or get excited about the hardware, you don't know how things work. You follow the docs, push the code to magical gate via that magical command, and that works. It's similar even for Desktop applications.
When you care about performance, and try to understand how these things work, you need to break that thick ice to start learning things, and things are much more complicated now, so people just tend to run away and pretend that it's not there.
Also, since the "network is reliable, computing cheap" gospel took hold, 90% of the programmers don't care about how much performance / energy they waste.
I'm guilty of this. I started with a C64 and love hardware and programming, but modern CPUs and MCUs are so complicated I can't be bothered learning about them.
The old 8-bit Arduinos were pretty understandable, but with an ESP-32 I just assume the compiler knows what it's doing and that the Espressif libs are 'good enough'.
You are right. Most will never care. I think of it like, lets try to keep the lights on for the folks that inevitably get burned and need an escape hatch. Many will not, but always some will. At least that's my way of not being a techno-nihilist.
The same with multiple people I know. Its not perfect, but neither is Windows.
> There are now adults that grew up in the age of social media that have no idea how local computing works.
They like it given a chance. My daughters for example far prefer Linux to Windows.
> They like it given a chance. My daughters for example far prefer Linux to Windows.
The two topics are orthogonal. GP talks about "local computing" vs. "black box in the cloud", the difference between running it vs. using it. You're talking about various options to run locally, the difference between running it this way or that way.
Linux or Windows users probably understand basic computing concepts like files and a file system structure, processes, basic networking. Many modern phone "app" users just know what the app and device shows them, and that's not much. Every bit of useful knowledge is hidden and abstracted away from the user. They get nothing beyond what service the provider wants them to consume.
> There are now adults that grew up in the age of social media that have no idea how local computing works.
Very few people of any age understood how local computing (or any computing) works. There's probably more now since most of the world is connected.
Profit scale has reached a point where commercial OS creators have to do stuff like shove ads into the UI. There's probably more legitimate need from non-developers to use Linux now than ever before, just to get a better base-line user experience.
>> Do we want our fundamental computing environment to be ultimately under our control, or controlled by private interests with their own incentives?
Define "our".
Because having general compute under developer/engineering control does not mean end-users want, need, or should, tinker inside appliances.
So there are two definitions of our: our end-users, and ourselves the engineers.
Worldwide, in aggregate, far more harms come to users from malware, destroying work at the office and life memories at home, than benefits from non-tech-savvy users being able to agree to a dialog box (INSTALL THIS OR YOUR VOTING REGISTRATION WILL BE SWITCHED IN 30 MINUTES!!!) and have rootkits happen.
Our (hackers) tinkering being extra-steps guardrailed by hardware that we can work within, to help us help general computing become as "don't make me think, and don't do me harm" as a nightstand radio clock, seems a good thing.
Not hard to see through the false "only two cases" premise of the quote, however un-hip to agree so.
Desktop Windows still has rough edges. Desktop MacOS still has rough edges. Desktop Linux still has rough edges. Pick your poison.
Niche professional software may lack native Windows support or require workarounds.
Windows has a strong grip in enterprise environments where it is desirable to remove desktop control from users.
You have things like FreeIPA and Samba making weak offers beyond directory services in that direction. You have things like OpenTofu and Ansible making partial efforts in that direction. But you don't have an integrated goto standard solution for giving Linux desktop control to the enterprise. So Windows continues its grip in the enterprise. (If I'm wrong, please post a correction here. I'll be grateful for the education.)
For companies less obsessed with taking control away from users, Windows has less of a grip.
> Desktop Windows still has rough edges. Desktop MacOS still has rough edges. Desktop Linux still has rough edges. Pick your poison.
I think this sentiment is often overlooked as people are used to their 'poison'.
As someone who uses Linux a their main personal machine (with dual boot to Windows every now and then) as well as W11 for work, it's amazing what you get used to.
I was almost agreeing with OP, remembering bluetooth issues I had with Linux just last month when one of my headphones couldn't connect properly and I had to spend 10-15 minutes messing about with bluetooth stacks to get it working again.
But reading your comment I just realised that my current work machine doesn't even detect my bluetooth headphone's microphone and I have not found a fix yet. That machine also does not go to sleep properly (a common, real, complaint from many linux users) and I have to hibernate it manually via command line as the option does not exist in my power menu due to corporate's rules and regulations.
I also get Windows blue screens far more often than I get Linux kernel panics.
You're just so used to the issues and inconveniences that you don't even recognise them as such anymore. Issue and inconveniences from a new piece of software you're trialing stick out like sore thumb though...
The thing I like about Linux is that if your thing doesn't work you have a way better chance of being able to wrangle it into working (odds increasing as your technical skill increases)
Meanwhile on Windows if something doesn't work you're generally SOL.
What do you mean? If i google "{Insert issue here} Windows" i get clear and easy solutions.
1. You reboot. 2. You try sfc /scannow 3. You try Dism 4. You reboot again. Doesnt work? (like 99,99999% of cases, like with a pc i had to fix yesterday) 5. Reinstall windows
Doesnt work? Have fun trying to get information from microsofts documentation where the same thing got documented 3 different ways 3 different times, and when you change from/to your native language you get another 3 different documentations. All telling you entirely different things, each screenshot showing a ui that doesnt resemble yours because it gotta change every month.
Very fun, not annoying at all :)
>That machine also does not go to sleep properly (a common, real, complaint from many linux users) and I have to hibernate it manually via command line as the option does not exist in my power menu due to corporate's rules and regulations.
Are you required to make it sleep (perhaps due to a security directive)? If so, then why are you doing this? You should simply refuse, and tell IT it doesn't work. Then let them fix the problem, since it's a security issue. It's not your job to come up with workarounds for the IT department's failures.
I manage both, alongside macOS. There are heaps of things that are trivial to do on a Windows or macOS desktop fleet that are a headache on Linux.
macOS is the easiest endpoint platform to manage. Apple’s MDM capabilities are amazing, and don’t leave me wanting for much at all other than application control, but there are plenty of commercial apps to do this.
Windows (in an Active Directory environment) is pretty good, but Group Policy has grown unwieldy over the decades. Policies can conflict in strange ways, and Microsoft has no made no effort to keep their policy language consistent. Sometimes ‘enabled’ means a feature is enabled, other times it means it is disabled, and vice versa.
Deploying hardware-bound machine certificates for 802.1x, VPN etc to Windows or macOS is extremely easy. Takes 10 minutes to set up.
On Linux, this is a very significant engineering effort that would take months, assuming you happen to have people with the skills on your payroll at all.
AFAIK the grip is because migration costs money, see Schleswig-Holstein story.
I think you are thinking about it way too hard. Windows 11 is a dog. Constant hardware problems, slow, and frustrating UX. Is any desktop linux perfect? No, but its better than w11 right now.
No hardware problems in the version I run, not sure what version you use. It's also not frustrating for me but what I do get frustrated with is trying to get software to run and Linux but just won't work. Most people are smart enough to be able to use windows without getting frustrated.
That is the same thing many people using linux say. It not frustrating or have any issues.
So why are so many people complaining about Windows 11?
As a Windows user since 3.x days, I complain mostly about UX issues these days. It's also clear leadership is not aligned with what I want with my desktop.
I've hardly had hardware issues since I moved to Windows 2000. Sure some, but few enough I can't recall any in particular.
People have complained about every version of Windows, including the ones that were considered to be good milestones (like 2k and 7).
> Windows 11 is a dog.
So, man's best friend?
Anyway, while I agree about the slowness (now that I've experienced Linux snappiness and done the benchmarks), it's the constant nagging / dark patterns that seals the deal for me. Microsoft would still have me as a happy customer and MSVC user if they hadn't bricked their OS after Win 7 and shoved AI, MS account, ads etc down everyone's throats.
On that note, even more hilarious/tragic is their turning MS Office into Microsoft Copilot 365 App lol, probably the tech biggest marketing blunder of all time, and entirely unforced (unlike for example Intel mostly abandoning the Pentium brand after the P4).
I’ve got this older laptop I just set up for dual boot with a Linux distro. Before installing GRUB, I stripped down Windows 11 using Chris Titus’s utility, though you can accomplish the same thing manually, as you probably know, to kill all that Microsoft telemetry garbage. Windows runs beautifully now, no lag whatsoever. Linux, on the other hand, locks up constantly. And it’s not a hardware issue. Plenty of RAM, confirmed all the drivers loaded properly. Ironic?
>> Windows 11 is a dog. >So, man's best friend?
Exactly: it's like that pit bull that everything thinks is so cute, until one day it goes berzerk and rips your child's face off, and then its owners say "It's your kid's fault for looking at him wrong!"
Doesn't matter if Windows sucks or not. People will still use it, either because they have to, or because it's the path of least resistance. Same reason even though your Government sucks, you still pay your taxes and follow the law.
I take it you just read the first sentence and darted to the reply button...
Or GP knows that anyone who finds the following appealing has already been using linux for years:
> Do we want our fundamental computing environment to be ultimately under our control, or controlled by private interests with their own incentives?
But if windows is now objectively worse than linux, normal people also now have a reason to switch.
The problem I see with most people is that it just doesn't occur to them that there are alternatives. They're so used to a shitty experience with Windows and MS apps, and to them there's no such thing as os" and "hardware", in their minds they're lumped together.
So they shrug, say "meh, computers, I just can't understand them," and go on their merry way rebooting Windows for the 10th time that day.
Now, don't get me wrong, Windows has improved a lot from a robustness standpoint. Moreover, most people only use computers that come pre-configured, either from the factory or by their IT department. They won't face the crazy shit I have to put up with when I manually reinstall mine. Half the things on my 5 yo HP Elitebook don't work out of the box and I need to install a bunch of drivers from HP with dubious names, like sp1234 which makes the touchpad work, and sp4321 which enables the webcam. After a further set of updates, I can use my external screen connected to the intel integrated gpu and finally try to get some work done. Good times.
> I need to install a bunch of drivers from HP with dubious names, like sp1234
This is just how HP names their software deployment packages. Lenovo will have something like "u6chp70us17" or "83wo12ww". You go on your product's page, download the driver, install it. I understand complaining about a device that doesn't work out of the box, but about the name of the driver installer?
To be honest I've never seen an EliteBook that needed any drivers for the common components (I also own quite a few Elites, oldest from 2012), and in general any laptop that needed a touchpad driver to work in well over a decade. And I've played with a lot of different laptops, business models in particular. Not saying it doesn't happen, just that I don't think it's common.
I have two similar laptops, 840 g8 and 845 g8. The first is intel, the other amd.
The intel one had some kind of new touchpad, which doesn't work during the windows install. It was apparently some new thing introduced with intel's 11th gen, don't remember the specifics, but apparently other models had the same issue. Windows needs to connect to the internet to fetch drivers once installed, even 25h2 which I installed two weeks ago. Bonus points for the AMD ethernet dongle not being recognized, even though it's some random realtek, so I have to type my wifi password (my AP doesn't support wps). The AMD one works, even though the touchpads seem similar.
For a long time, the AMD's webcam didn't work. There's some USB doohickey that wasn't recognized (showed up with an exclamation point in device manager), and even installing all the drivers from HP's webpage didn't solve it. It solved itself somehow after some windows update two or three years later. Out of the box, it did have the webcam working, but the display brightness was somehow limited to "pretty dim". I was ready to write it off as just another crappy enterprise pc panel, but then I rebooted it into the bios and the thing burned a hole through my eyes. Installing windows manually fixed the backlight. Sleep on windows more often than not hangs for some reason, even now, 5 years in.
The intel had a long-standing issue with 4k output over its usb-c ports. At one point, installing the gpu driver from intel fixed it, but windows update would helpfully update it to an older, borken version. Nowadays we have 5k panels at work. I can only get 5k if the driver is initialized with the monitor connected. So if the screen goes to sleep, it won't run at 5k anymore when it wakes back up. Newer models don't seem to have this issue anymore.
Fortunately I'm only an occasional windows user, so don't care all that much. Everything worked perfectly under linux since day one, so apart from the comically bad display quality, I'm generally a happy camper.
Frustrating UX? Nope. Slow? Nope. Constant hardware problems? Just no.
I've already switched to Linux, but this was not at all my experience of Windows. The only reason I switched was because Windows is going towards an "AI" focused OS which I do not want, as well as the cost of the Pro version - I run many VMs and not shelling out for Pro for all of them.
MS Office is hardly "niche professional software." I hate it, and recognize that I can use the online services, but the reality is that I have to send, receive, and work in this application and I can't easily do it on Linux.
> the reality is that I have to send, receive, and work in this application
Why? You can edit MS Office documents fine in LibreOffice and other similar software.
How do I join a live editing session of an Excel file with several people using regular Excel with LibreOffice?
I can't.
Or the same with PowerPoint.
I can't.
In a modern workspace it's not just local software running solely on just your local machine emailing around files or clobbering changes in some corporate file share.
If you're working in a corporate environment, this may not be viable. LibreOffice is great software, but it's not 100% compatible. Things may look slightly different, get lost or otherwise cause problems. I've really tried, but at the end of the day I occasionally do need to use actual Microsoft Office.
Yep. And then there is Visio which gets used a lot where I work. LibreOffice Draw doesn't come anywhere near it. It saves a lot of grief just to give our Linux users a Windows VM with Office on it if they need to do any significant docs or drawings.
I used Word to write a reasonably complicated document that necessarily used tables. It was one of the most frustrating, bug inducing experiences of my life. I had to open the document and edit it in LibreOffice to get any sort of stability.
I don’t do corporate work on my home computer? I don’t know who’s suggesting corporate IT departments should convert everyone to Linux. “Work computer” and “home computer” are entirely separate use cases.
(Also a ton of MS Office work is being done through the web interfaces now anyway. I find the web versions pretty terrible but people seem to put up with them.)
I am also forced to use "productivity" software from MS, but I make do with the web versions on Linux at work. I hate it all, but it's okay. I am playing the long term game of trying to get my whole org to Linux. It helps that I can influence technical decisions, slow but steady process.
Check out WinApps.
This looks interesting, how is the experience?
This is an clarifying perspective. In particular, I think this sheds light on understanding the various perspectives in the thread:
> Viewed through the lens of digital autonomy and citizenship, the question isn’t simply “Is Linux perfect?” but rather: Do we want our fundamental computing environment to be ultimately under our control, or controlled by private interests with their own incentives?
We make choices, become passionate about some, and wear values we feel strongly about on our shoulder. What we witness here, I believe, is a conflation of two things:
A: Linux as a value: Representing open source software, rejecting bad corporate behavior, and as a philosophy for software ownership
B: Linux as a collection of related operating systems, as practical software.
I think trying to understand each person's perspective, and if it can be categorized as one or the other makes sense of this article, similar ones, and discussion. Someone in Category B evaluating operating systems as tools should not be viewed by someone in Category A as an affront to their identity. It may just be different use cases; different hardware; different priorities; different variants and versions of operating systems used.
The people who wanted A created B. It's not really a conflation but more of a causal reality.
Yes but the headwinds of Linux adoption are (to some extent) that Linux is the best choice for A, but it is not far and away the best choice for B (not saying it’s bad or even worse than Windows, it’s just not CLEARLY better).
But when you approach 99% of the population who, to the extent they’ve even thought about it, will only judge an OS on B, Linux is just one of 3 main choices (sorry BSD folks. Don’t yell at me). Is it the best choice purely on functionality and app ecosystem? Maybe, but also maybe not.
Since the majority of Linux does not come on hardware by default what you’re essentially asking people to do is to buy a car and swap out the motor. We have to convince them why that new motor is better and is worth the effort of doing so. If it’s marginally better or worse, it just won’t be worth the headache to most people.
To be clear Linux (and MacOS) are my preferred OS. I haven’t owned a Windows box in at least 5 years.
> But these obstacles are not intrinsic technical limitations so much as ecosystem and investment gaps, areas where community projects, standards efforts, and wider adoption could drive improvement without sacrificing freedom.
Are you sure? My second-hand thinkpad still won't hibernate properly. It's not a weird model, it's a ryzen-based X13 Gen1 so not even shiny new. You can imagine on a laptop one would want hibernation to just work.
The fault is surely on Lenovo's table... Yet it would work if I was to run Windows (which I don't want to do).
So yeah... Now I have a laptop from a brand which is known and appreciated for linux compatibility, and a basic thing like hibernation does not work.
> You can imagine on a laptop one would want hibernation to just work.
Well, I think MS took care of that by removing the hibernation option from the start menu. You have to manually turn it back on from the old control panel.
> … desktop Linux still has rough edges …
My personal pet peeve is the GTK/Qt divide. Theming has an extra step, as you have to pick a matching theme for the other toolkit apps you inevitably end up using.
KDE/Qt has excellent scaling support, but GTK apps (OrcaSlicer for example) end up having blurry text or messed up text labels if you run a non-integer scaling resolution.
The Wayland transition almost seems akin to the IPv6 debacle. Support is there, but it’s half-baked in half the cases. I crave RDP remote access, but this is currently not possible with KRDP as it does not work with Wayland sessions. Wine is just getting there, but only with scary messages that say that it’s an experimental feature.
This is only for people that know choices.
We at out Uni provide default Ubuntu installs on laptops. Most people just live with whatever UI.
I have a feeling that many have stopped configuring, themeing etc. those only from 80s to 2000 were just spending lots of time building and creating many themes like matrix etc.
Also people are so addicted to smartphone. That is the main place for their heart.
>> … desktop Linux still has rough edges …
> My personal pet peeve is the GTK/Qt divide. Theming has an extra step, as you have to pick a matching theme for the other toolkit apps you inevitably end up using.
Is this perhaps an issue of fractional scaling? I’ve run Openbox/Blackbox on Linux for ~15 years and never had these issues. Not 100% sure I understand the issue at least.
Things look mostly fine (to me) and even if they don’t, the apps still work as they should (no blur). AFAIK Openbox/X11 just uses the DPI the monitor reports and things scale as they should.
Sounds like an issue with Gnome/KDE to me, not with Linux?
I may be wrong, I’m not seeking a super polished look or want to tweak my UIs a lot.
Yes, this is a KDE/GTK issue, but this is also a real-world case.
Linux Greybeards, a hypothetical man with astute technical and sexual prowess, might not be bothered by follies such as proper text rendering, but it is an issue if desktop environments have any chance to compete with mainstream operating systems.
> Yes, this is a KDE/GTK issue, but this is also a real-world case
I believe you when you say it.
> Linux Greybeards, a hypothetical man with astute technical and sexual prowess
No need to be snarky. I was speaking from my own Linux experience (just like you did?), not trying to impress anyone.
Text renders fine in Openbox, hence the question about the issue being with Linux or GTK/KDE. I’ve honestly never heard of these issues or experienced them myself. Perhaps because Openbox is simpler (no fractional scaling AFAIK) so I’ve likely been “shielded” from such issues (never heard about theming or issues like this tbh).
On your first point, the KDE configuration GUI does a really good job at setting the GTK theme.
I have been running desktop Linux for a very long time, but I actually agree. There's a lot of rough edges. I do think a lot of these problems do go away if you are a bit proactive in choosing compatible hardware. I bought my mother in law a laptop for Christmas, and I put Linux Mint on there [1]. There were no issues getting it working on Mint with Cinnamon, but that's in no small part because I double checked all the common hardware (wi-fi, GPU, trackpad, etc) to make sure it worked fine in Linux and it did.
If you don't do your homework, it's definitely a crapshoot with hardware compatibility, and of course that sucks if you're telling people that they should "switch to Linux" on their existing hardware, since they might have a bad experience.
That said, it is weird that people seem to have total amnesia for the rough edges of Windows, and I'm not convinced that Windows has fewer rough edges than Linux. I've grown a pretty strong hatred for Windows Update, and the System Restore and Automatic Repair tools that never work. Oh, and I really think that NTFS is showing its age now and wish that Microsoft would either restart effort on ReFS or port over ZFS to run on root.
[1] Before you give me shit for this, if anything breaks I agreed to be the one to fix it, and I find that generally I can solve these kinds of problems by just using tmate and logging into their command line which AFAIK doesn't have a direct easy analog in Windows.
How do you check the hardware is compatible in practice? Is there some reliable resource for doing this?
I've found generally that business-grade hardware has better Linux support. So for laptops, for instance, Lenovo Thinkpad and Dell Latitude laptops work better than some bargain-basement consumer-grade laptop.
As a rule AMD stuff is pretty safe, but to answer your question, I generally go look at kernel sources, or sometimes I go and see if I can find the model in the NixOS Github and see how many workarounds that they have to do to get it working.
https://linux-hardware.org/ is useful for this.
I bought a cheap laptop with preinstalled linux, it happened to be compatible with linux.
>niche professional software may lack native support
Microsoft Office is not "niche professional software"
What is Microsoft Office? Do you mean Microsoft 365 Copilot?
You forgot the "App" :) I'm still astonished at how dumb that rebrand is...
The "app" isn't even capitalized, which is my favorite part!
Well played sir. Well played
*Microslop 365 Copilot
I suspect the person you are responding to wasn't including everything that doesn't work on Linux, in particular Microsoft Office, in this phrase, but domain specific / specialized business software.
I have two Windows systems; I use LibreOffice on them. It's just so much better.
> hardware support isn’t always perfect
It's not perfect on windows either. Crashes, non working sleep on almost any windows laptop... at least compared to what Apple can do.
> Do we want our fundamental computing environment to be ultimately under our control, or controlled by private interests with their own incentives?
The reality is a lot more nuanced than that. Should one live in a forest, devoid of any city services and company of other individuals, so that one may be under "own control"? This is the essential value proposition with Linux and it's no wonder many prefer the comforting institution of proprietary prisons^Wsystems.
>Should one live in a forest, devoid of any city services and company of other individuals
extremely bizarre comparison given that 90% of people spend their time on the web which is utterly agnostic as to what operating system you're on.
The reality of Linux in 2025 isn't that you have to live like Tom Hanks in Cast Away and talk to a football as your best friend, it's that maybe you have to spend a few hours learning how the OS works. Almost your entire Steam Library runs on Linux courtesy of Valve and a lot of ambitious individuals.
If people are too lazy to invest even the tiniest bit of personal effort into trying out new things that's one thing, but at least be honest about it instead of giving me the "I don't want to live in the jungle" spiel. Don't be the tech equivalent of the person who runs around telling everyone they can't get into shape without a million dollars and a personal trainer
Not everything that runs on windows is proprietary I use a lot of open source software on Windows myself. Windows is also a lot easier to configure to run exactly the way I wanted to run and to be the OS I need it to be. It's extremely customizable and easy to control. It's also modifiable in many many more ways.
You are using subjective claims to back an objective assertion…
Windows is strictly quite a bit less configurable than Linux. You likely just know Windows better?
>Windows is strictly quite a bit less configurable than Linux.
I wish I could agree, but I just can't: the OP may be correct, depending on which Linux desktop environment he's talking about.
*My* Linux is indeed much more configurable than Windows, but I'm using KDE. However, that's only promoted by a few distros like openSUSE. Most users are going to get GNOME shoved in their faces whether they like it or not, and no, GNOME is *NOT* more configurable than Windows. GNOME needs to be used exactly as the GNOME devs want you to use it, because otherwise it'll just break on the next update. For many users who are not Linux experts, and perhaps use Linux at work where their IT departments only allow them to use GNOME, they think GNOME==Linux because that's what most distros push so strongly, so I can see why OP would make such a claim.
I think there are two factors that lead people to make statements like that. The first is a given: they're talking about configuring it as a user, not a developer. Obviously Linux can do whatever you want it to do if you build your own distro from source. But additionally, while Linux is also substantially configurable in userland, those configurations might not actually cover the cases people need. You can, for example, pick between GNOME, KDE, etc -- which, on a pedantic level, is "objectively" more customizable than Windows, where you have exactly one option. Yet, if the settings within all of the off-the-shelf GUI shells do not serve the use cases the settings of the single option on Windows does, users will have every reason to assert that, on a practical level, the degree of customizability is inferior and not sufficient for them.
The idea that KDE is not objectively more configurable, in every way, than Windows, is lunacy.
However, GNOME is completely the opposite; doing anything differently requires installing special extensions, which break every time an update happens. The devs do not want you changing it from their One True Vision for how a desktop should work (which, apparently, is almost identical to a tablet).
People who aren't Linux experts or long-time users may not even know about KDE, Xfce, etc., and just think that GNOME is the only way to use Linux. Most distros push it very strongly, and even in corporate environments it's pushed hard. My company uses Linux, but the IT department only supports GNOME; luckily I'm able to install KDE but I'm basically a reneage by doing so.
So if we're comparing Windows (which has only one DE, the Windows one), to GNOME (which for many users is synonymous with Linux), I'd say he's right: Windows is much more configurable and easy to customize.
Why the Linux world has gone this way, I honestly have no idea. It almost seems like a conspiracy.
Will these issues with Linux ever be overcome?
I want to switch but I just don't feel confident yet, and I wonder how long the "yet" will remain.
It isn't an issue with Linux, it's an issue with the companies that make proprietary software and devices with only windows support. A better world is possible, but you need to accept the fight isn't easy. Switch today.
> Will these issues with Linux ever be overcome?
As a Linux user forced to run Windows at work, I only see issues with Windows ;)
> I want to switch but I just don't feel confident
Live distros make it very easy to dip your toes and try, without committing to anything.
IMO Linux has much better UI options because there are so many choices and freedom.
You can likely find something that looks/works EXACTLY like you’ve always dreamed of - but maybe you have to try a few options to find it.
Here’s a simple decision tree:
Do you run any exotic hardware? Do you run MS Office regularly? Do you run any highly specialized software?
If the answer is no to all those then Linux is worth a shot.
>Will these issues with Linux ever be overcome?
I'd ask you the inverse question: If Linux never got any better than it is currently, what would it take to push you away from Windows? I don't mean this as a challenge, I'm genuinely curious.
Not OP but I have a couple of red lines that if crossed, I would move to Linux: things stop “just working”, and ads/nags/notifications/behaviors that I don’t want cannot be disabled.
Things are very occasionally annoying right now when a new update enables some new idiotic thing but 99.9% of the time things just work.
> Will these issues with "the other side of the road" ever be overcome?
> I want to switch but I just don't feel confident yet, and I wonder how long the "yet" will remain.
For people like you who think like this.
FOREVER
You'll always dream up some reason why this side of the road, is just better.
>desktop Linux still has rough edges for some use cases, hardware support isn’t always perfect, and niche professional software may lack native support or require workarounds
Personally, I believe the REAL problem is the rough edges WITH Linux.
Hardware support? You can blame manufacturers for not supporting Linux. Software support? Same.
But if you use a Linux software made for Linux by Linux users and it just feels inconvenient, non-intuitive, buggy, and mentally painful to use, you're going to think that Linux is full of bad software. Because it doesn't matter if you use X11 or Wayland under the hood, you try to drag and drop an icon from the start menu to the desktop or vice-versa and that only works in some DEs. You try to drag and drop an image from Chrome to the file manager, and that doesn't always work. You try to click the close button and sometimes there is a few pixels of padding at the top so you can't close the window on first try.
This isn't Nvidia's fault, or Adobe's fault, or Microsoft's fault. It's just Linux.
You overestimate the level of investment the average person can and will make for these freedoms. People buy Kindles because they work (and are heavily marketed), they buy Apple because they simply work, and will keep preferring windows to Linux until Linux offer a easier barrier to entry.
Microsoft will (almost already has) loose its advantage to Apple before it loses to Linux.
May be in the US (as Apple products are cheaper and people are dependent on iMessge)
Rest will remain on pirated windows or linu.many often don't even use computer.
Fusion360 is the one tool I wish had better wine support
I got tired of fighting to keep Fusion running in wine so now Fusion is literally the only reason I maintain a windows partition to dual boot into. I hate that.
I’m no longer using it professionally so I could explore other options but FreeCAD kinda sucks (I will die on that hill), and OnShape offers the choice between my designs to be publicly visible, or a subscription that assumes I have a corporate expense account makes it not viable. (I don’t mind paying for good tools but there has to be a middle ground).
If Autodesk ever ported Fusion to Linux… I’d probably pay for a subscription just out of sheer elation ha.
Some desktop versions of GNU/Linux have rough edges. Self-important grognards think everyone should "git gud" and install Arch or waste a weekend waiting for Gentoo to compile in order to optimize the install. This article along with this one (https://www.theverge.com/tech/858910/linux-diary-gaming-desk...) go on about using an Arch-based distro rather than a Debian-based distro.
Clearly there will be challenges, minor or major.
The failure of these articles is the authors aren't going for distros that "just work". Want to undercut Microsoft's user base, grow GNU/Linux, and herald the year of Linux on desktop that's been promised for decades? Keep it simple.
Majority of people going online with their computers are browsing the web, doomscrolling, and engaging on social media. They're not pentesting with Rust, running an instance of a LLM, or setting up a webserver for giggles.
Keep it simple.
But pushing Arch and other beardy distros with these kinds of articles reeks of gatekeeping as if only "smart" people are allowed to engage online and control their experience. Everyone else should suck it up with Microsoft having Copilot phone home since they don't deserve to know better. And I don't care how much preamble they give about Debian-based and beginner distros, they're just wagging their dicks to easily-awed proles and relishing imagined egoboos from other neo-Stallmans.
as a long-time windows user who has fairly recently switched to linux - windows has a few rough edges too (and feels like it's getting increasingly rougher). Having recently switched I don't feel like things have changed much for me in terms of jankiness/broken-ness (and maybe linux is slightly better, for the subset of tools and programs I am using?).
Yeah but folks around here like to stick their heads in the sand when reminded that this is a very real and concerning barrier to adoption of desktop Linux. It could happen 1000 times and they’ll still scream that it’s either user error or even worse “it works on my machine”.
Until the Linux community stops pretending and accepts that these are real issues and they need addressing, it will never be the year of the Linux desktop.
Maybe not for everyone, but it will never be the year of the Windows Desktop for everyone either.
Everyone is a basically impossible metric, so this is a fairly pointless statement.
It was, some 25+ years ago.
No it wasn't. Only in your head
Over 90% of desktops had Windows back then. So yea, that's everybody. Unless you're being pedantic because one guy was using IRIX on an SGI workstation, or the odd Mac.
10% of everyone is still a whole lot of people. Even 1% of everyone is a lot of people.
No one said “everyone” until you did, and now you’re using it to be pedantic… bad faith tactic that.
Don’t be a troll.
Nobody cares about what runs under the hood (I mean the real market, not the dozen of us nerds), as long as it looks and plays nice. Market already uses linux both in the form of android but also as a server OS. For both of these the financial incentive was there for someone to write the drivers, make the UI user friendly (android users never have to open a terminal), create sales channels.
Desktop and laptop market is weird because no hardware vendor wants to compete with MS. The only one who does (apple), owns both the hardware and software as well as sales channels, so they are not affected by MS’s deals.
I had to open a terminal on android to copy photos to laptop with tar|netcat for backup and larger screen.
No, you didn’t, that’s just the solution you chose to go with. You could’ve used literally any other file transfer method.
Which method, sftp?
You can’t think of any other method to transfer a photo from a phone to a computer? You know, one that doesn’t involve a terminal?
I would argue that hardware support in Linux is superior to any other operating system on the planet.
> the question isn’t simply “Is Linux perfect?” but rather: Do we want our fundamental computing environment to be ultimately under our control, or controlled by private interests with their own incentives?
The answer is: it doesn't matter. Linux desktop doesn't exist because of privacy nerds, free software evangelists, anti-capitalists, or European protectionists, and it won't change because of them either. Sit here on the internet and pontificate all you want. Pontificating doesn't fix bugs or write code. It is what it is. If there was money in it, people'd be going after it. If there was some "higher calling" to galvanize people into action, it would've galvanized them already. This is the best it's going to get.
The much, much bigger issue is control of applications, and the browsers (and their owners) won that long ago. Doesn't matter what OS you use, you need a browser to do anything useful on the internet. And if that ever gets "solved", it'll just pass on to the next shit-show of humans letting things get as bad as they can stand. Technology is made by humans, so it follows human values.
I'll be glad if someone tells that I'm wrong but doesn't current windows 11 present even more of the same challenges? Last I tried, old driver compatibility in newer windowses was not fantastic, Wine slowly is becoming more compatible with legacy windows programs than the windows itself, forced updates are dealbreaker for many usecases. And need for workaroubds and poking around has reached Windows XP levels.
I mean, there are two ways to make Linux better alternative than Windows, and currently the main effort is coming from Microsoft...
> But these obstacles are not intrinsic technical limitations so much as ecosystem and investment gaps
For people who are trying to get their work done now, in the present, this doesn’t change anything. We all know that Linux could technically run the same productivity apps and games if every company put enough investment money toward it. However even some of the apps I use which had a Linux version have announced that they’re sunsetting Linux compatibility due to low demand.
For all of the people whose work lives inside of text editors, web browsers, and terminals switching to Linux is easy. I think these threads become biased toward people who fit that description who don’t understand why everyone can’t just switch over.
> Viewed through the lens of digital autonomy and citizenship, the question isn’t simply “Is Linux perfect?” but rather:
That feels like a strawman argument. Most people don’t choose their OS on ideological grounds. The reasons people don’t use Linux isn’t because it’s not “perfect”. People use Windows because it works, it’s familiar, and their software runs on it. All of these calls to make OS choice about ideological wars isn’t convincing or even relevant to people who haven’t already switched to Linux.
>The reasons people don’t use Linux isn’t because it’s not “perfect”. People use Windows because it works, it’s familiar, and their software runs on it.
The reason most people run Windows is because that is what their jobs IT department put on their computer, and those IT departments run Windows because of the enterprise tools Microsoft has provided for lifecycle management with AD, GPO, etc.
Linux will have difficulty making progress with enterprises for the non-SecDevOps staff until it's as easy to centrally manage user and computer polices, accounts, and upgrades across the entire end-user fleet as it is with Microsoft.
That's the problem that you highlighted.
It's not -their- software is it.
> desktop Linux still has rough edges for some use cases
Windows is shit from the total management viewpoint: what it means to own and operate Windows over the long haul.
windows is okay when there is some program on it that works well and that you like, and you're interacting with that while avoiding Windows.
If Windows were the dominant platform and Windows were trying to eke out share, it wouldn't stand a chance.
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I have...
I switched to Bluefin, which is a branch of Universal Blue, which is flavour of Fedora. Sounds complicated, but in fact is the best thing to ever happen to Linux. I get all the ease of use of something like macOS but pre-built with tools for development like distrobox, and then I can just build my dev environments and get shit done in no time, without having to worry about breaking updates or nuking the whole file system because my bash sucks.
Its Linux for babies, and it makes me happy.
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Further ass-kissing:
Also I forgot to mention I tried gaming on it via Steam and it works like a charm... Not so sure about bleeding edge AAA games since I don't play any of that, but at least for all my oldies it works just fine.
Oh!, and the one thing I miss is Affinity Designer.
> Oh!, and the one thing I miss is Affinity Designer.
While I haven't experimented with it that much yet, Affinity (the new one, the one after the Canva acquisition) does work in Wine 10.20.
Now, I won't say it is a smooth experience, one of the workarounds that I needed to do is use Wine's virtual desktop so Affinity's tooltips are rendered correctly instead of being pure black, and the GUI does seem to not render correctly sometimes (it renders as white until something causes a redraw).
The Canva global marketing lead did say that Linux support is "being discussed seriously internally": https://techcentral.co.za/affinity-for-linux-canvas-next-big...
This makes you wonder: How hard it could be for a business that already has a 80% working application via Wine to patch the application/Wine to make it work 99+%, and then bundle the application with Wine and say that it has "native Linux support"?
Yeah, the 80/80 rule. That made me smile.
> This makes you wonder: How hard it could be for a business that already has a 80% working application via Wine to patch the application/Wine to make it work 99+%, and then bundle the application with Wine and say that it has "native Linux support"?
CodeWeavers (developers of CrossOver and one of the main contributors and sponsors of Wine and related tools) actually offer something like this as a paid service for companies called PortJump:
https://www.codeweavers.com/portjump
Getting it running in linux is the easiest part dev wise.
It is the rest of the iceberg that causes problems.
- You need your support to be able to support linux which means they will need training and experience helping people in an entirely new system
- Linux comes in finite but vastly more combinations than OSX and Windows which means you are probably going to need to pick something like Ubuntu or struggle with the above
- Gotta track bugs in twice as many places
- Need CI / CD for more platforms
etc
>- Linux comes in finite but vastly more combinations than OSX and Windows which means you are probably going to need to pick something like Ubuntu or struggle with the above
This is easily solvable by distributing the app via a distro agnostic mechanism, like as a Flatpak or AppImage. Using Flatpak also eliminates the need for rolling their own app update mechanism.
AppImage relies on the old, unmaintained and suid root fuse2. Not a wise choice in 2025.
But most of those issues are because Linux doesn't have enough market share. No one brushes off Windows because they need to support Windows and they need to add CI/CD for Windows.
The combination issue is a real issue though that (as far as I know) is mostly solved with Flatpaks, or in case of games, by using the Steam Runtime.
Of course, it is a "chicken and egg" problem of "we don't want to support Linux because there aren't enough users using it" but "we don't want to use Linux because there aren't enough business supporting it".
Thankfully with improvements in Wine the need of having "native" Linux support is shrinking, but at the same time there is still a looooong way to go (like the issues I said before with Affinity).
Windows userland compatibility is outstanding. I can run most 30 year old Windows applications on Windows 11 without a problem. This makes it easy for a commercial vendor to support their applications on Windows.
The same is not at all true on Linux.
Right now at work, I’ve got a bunch of commercial apps built for RHEL9 for which I’m chasing vendors for new builds that work on RHEL10, for a variety of reasons. Dependencies like libXScrnSaver have simply been removed, and so apps linked against that library no longer work.
Funnily enough there are old Windows applications that do work on Wine, but doesn't work on Windows 11
And then people wonder, why electron became a thing.
Wine has some gaping holes in some of its API implementations. Direct2D, for instance, has existed since Windows 7 but is badly implemented in Wine -- there is no antialiasing and the ArcTo() function draws a line. The MS documentation is not that great either, so fixing Wine isn't necessarily easier than porting to native.
This. OMG Affinity is the ONE piece of software I actively miss. I tried the wine setup for it and it just doesn't work to a usable extent.
Yeah, I thought that Affinity would work pretty well in Wine because I've seen a lot of people pointing to the "just follow the guide (AffinityOnLinux repo) and it will work!" but in my experience it didn't work that well as people were saying.
And the guide itself seems to be outdated, the guide says that you need to install some stubs/shims but doesn't say that happens if you don't do it (I think that it would crash) but at least in my experience it did "work" without them when using an up-to-date Wine version.
Sadly Photoshop also doesn't work, if you want to follow the rules and use Creative Cloud it won't work at all, if you decide to sail the seven seas and download an older Photoshop version it will work but it also has some annoying bugs (sometimes the canvas doesn't update after an edit until you try to do another edit).
Don't get me wrong I do think that Wine is an amazing project and I hope that it continues to improve, but sometimes people don't seem to actually point all the issues that it exist when running an application in Wine.
> This makes you wonder: How hard it could be for a business that already has a 80% working application via Wine to patch the application/Wine to make it work 99+%, and then bundle the application with Wine and say that it has "native Linux support"?
I've had cases where running an app under wine worked better than the native linux port :/
Don’t they use Qt for their Win/macOS version already?
Not that there aren't trust issues with bigger projects but don't folks worry that the further down the "branch of a flavour of of a branch of a flavour" chain they go the higher and higher the risk of someone sneaking nefarious code through becomes? I guess there's a natural barrier in that the lesser known code bases become less of a target.
Sometimes I just find it wild with how much we talk about containers and sandboxes for the user space code we run that there's still regular recommendations for the random distro of the week published by who knows who.
Universal blue images are built via public GitHub Actions runners. If you don’t trust them, fork it and use your own image.
How would that solve the problem of running the unaudited changeset between Fedora and Blue Fin and then between that and Universal Blue?
We don't talk about that here. We're here to spit on Microsoft.
Bluefin, Aurora, and Bazzite are taking over my home.
I've been using desktop linux since before ubuntu, and I have never had so much confidence in my linux rigs. They are dependable, which is refreshing after boot-breaking updates have ruined my setups before.
As another anecdote in favor of Universal Blue's approach. My mother (who can't use a computer but to check email or regular websites) has been swapped to Aurora and has nothing but positive feedback.
Been 90 days with zero issues.
To be fair, the people who barely use the computer are the easiest to move to Linux. As Mental Outlaw said, "to a normie, an OS is just a bootloader for Google Chrome". If all you do is check emails, it doesn't really matter what OS you have installed.
Switching to Linux hasn't been an issue for those users for a long time - it's usually gamers, users of professional software, or IT people with deeply established workflows who have troubles
I guess the only part that matters is updates, and atomic systems like Fedora Silverblue do allow you to enable automatic updates without the fear of breaking everything, which is great
Laptop battery life suffers greatly on Linux. When their Google Chrome bootloader is out of battery all day, it matters which OS they installed.
Doesn't matter though. Every single one of these "casual" users I know has a terribly outdated device with a broken battery that doesn't even charge anymore.
And I agree: if it works, why replace it?
People who care deeply about unplugged battery life aren't on Windows to begin with.
Laptop battery is mostly an issue of inefficient CPUs nowadays. I don't know about other distros, but at least Fedora's default power saving settings give a battery life very much comparable to Windows. Which is obviously still nothing compared to macbooks or even snapdragon laptops.
This doesn't make much sense, ChromeOS is itself Linux, and those are prime "computers for parents" machines.
not the same thing at all. Different userspace that may or may not be that efficient at power, as well as well tested power management in the kernel for specific devices.
My old man was using Ubuntu 20 years ago because all he needed was a browser and openoffice. Shoot, with a live cd you can even make computer use foolproof since it's impossible for them to permanently break it.
When my dad (83) was looking to replace his ancient Win7 Dell PC I convinced him to buy a MacMini since he's had an iPad for a long time, and more recently an iPhone.
Initially he was concerned about the "new" interface after using Windows since 3.11 days, but within an hour he was happy doing his usual "basic tasks" (email, basic Excel, Word for letters, printing, etc). He was amazed both his printers (colour/scanner, b&w) worked with zero hassle after simply plugging them in.
Now he loves the ability to FaceTime anyone in the family (kids, grandkids, etc.) at the click of a button using the webcam plugged into the Mini, and really enjoys the sync of photos, emails, notes, etc.
I think he would have really struggled with Windows 11 so I was tempted by an older-person friendly Linux distro if macOS wasn't an option.
Apple is by far the best integrated ecosystem for nontechsavy users; its incredible how they follow this approach; iPhone is since V1 (?) without manual.
Im looking fearfully into the future: What will happen to Apple product perfectness if any of these MBA or even PE guys is taking over CEO role?
Chromebooks are also pretty good if google sheets/docs would suffice for excel/word.
They usually work well with printers, but I've run into some situations where I was just plain unable to get it to work with my Brother laser printer after a certain ChromeOS update. They screwed up something with the CUPS drivers and it just never worked.
On MacOS at least I have a chance of being able to fix this stuff. ChromeOS is so locked down you can't even fix things.
I've not heard of Universal Blue before, so thank you both for mentioning it! Seems like a great step forward for Linux Desktop!
It's very good
I thought about mentioning my mom, since she's been my number 1 tech support client since ever... And I was going to say that, I am so certain of how solid this distro is, that I would even install it on my mom's laptop without any hesitation.
I was originally blown away by Bazzite, which I run on my Legion Go, but then I discovered uCore (https://github.com/ublue-os/ucore) and haven't looked back! Running it on my homelab and multiple servers at work, its a wonderful server OS.
Keep an eye on the Graphite vecor app that's in development. It's Linux native I think.
I am curious.
Does the flatpak Firefox allows access to all folders?
Heya, not by default, but you can allow it.
> The current Linux desktop didn't get us there, but we believe that what was made, can be unmade.
This is a strange thing for them to say when they are pretty much a clone of Fedora Silverblue, with a few minor tweaks.
If Bluefin works for you, great. But I find their marketing rather pretentious.
I'm currently working on converting an ARM Chromebook to run a different userland from ChromeOS and have been wondering which distro to use. I've starting getting Nix on it, but I think I'll switch over to Bluefin based on your recommendation.
How does bluefin compare to Linux Mint? I ask because I always thought mint was Linux for babies.
I think bluefin is more of a distro for babies in the sense that it really protects itself leaving the user with very limited capacity to break things while mint, also an awesome distro is more of a nice drop in for users that want to feel familiar with their desktop environment and traditional configuration
I have an old pc lying around and will be installing bluefin today. Thanks for the inspiration.
These articles... I'm not sure who are the target audience, because I am definitely not and I don't know anyone who is. Specific OS is not the important, anything with modern KDE is good enough to replace Windows 10/11.
But do I (and all my colleagues) need Microsoft Office (Word, Excel at least) and/or Drawing software (Adobe or something) and/or god forbid Visual Studio 2026, and some other corporate software to make a living? Inevitably yes.
I have a Mac laptop, a Linux workstation, and a Windows workstation for different purposes and I use them all. I agree. Every time someone says they switched OSes and they don’t miss anything, it’s revealed that 90-100% of their work was in generic outlets like the web browser, terminal, e-mail, and Slack.
To be fair, that could cover a lot of people.
In my experience watching people make the switch in the real world, the failure point is either the last 10% of software that they actually need, or the first time they encounter some Linux quirk that they didn’t expect. Then it reaches a point where there isn’t really any upside for people who aren’t ideologically motivated and who don’t get triggered by Windows 11 design choices or occasional pop-ups.
I have some specific engineering software that must run on Windows, period. I’ve gotten flak from the software engineers at every company whenever it’s discovered that my second machine is Windows, but outside of software devs nobody else questions it. Using Windows for work is perfectly understood by most other disciplines
Windows 11 isn't running half as bad for me as most here seem to say.
I experience no delays with the start menu, and it's perfectly smooth on my 240 Hz monitor.
I also never encountered crashes like described as OP's reason for the switch.
So what do I have to gain from using Linux? A bit better compatibility for my software work, but much worse game compatibility. Fewer annoying popups, but they aren't that frequent on Windows either. Probably a worse update experience, and more time spent configuring.
The only reason I'm not using Linux on my work-provided computer is due to the security software. None of it runs on Linux, it only runs on Windows and MacOS. Glad I don't have to use any software that only runs on Windows to do development. Hopefully the security software will someday support Linux.
A big reason why Linux runs better than Windows is the absence of Crowdstrike and similar real-time-fuck-shit-up—alyctic engines
Windows pop-ups can all be turned off. I have them all turned off on my machines and nothing pops up anymore. Windows is extremely customizable and modifiable and it runs 100% of Windows software which is most of the software being produced in the world today.
>90-100% of their work was in generic outlets like the web browser, terminal, e-mail, and Slack. To be fair, that could cover a lot of people.
It does ... for them Linux is a very good substitute for their needs. OTOH, for certain specialties, software available for Linux is NOT the best. 2012 was the Linux year for me ... but while FOSS is OK, sometimes a $200 app is a far superior choice for non-technical people. (Musicians for example.)
Target audience is probably especially anyone not in the US?
It is beginning to look a lot like war is brewing between Europe and the US over Greenland. US media working super hard to make an "acquisition" sound reasonable and "FreedomTM".
Windows 11 is actually less annoying in the EU than in the US, thanks to the DMA.
I don't believe a "war" is brewing.
If and that is a big if, Trump were to get Greenland, there is not much that Europe can do in any case. Maybe a few politicians will go on X/twitter and complain but every country in the EU knows that they are no match for the US military and I am saying that as someone who lives in the EU.
I suppose the EU could go after big US tech companies but since most of Europe's needs are covered by the very same companies, I don't think this would be viable solution either and let's be honest the EU people are not just going to switch to Ubuntu tomorrow morning.
It's unfortunate but it's the reality.
> If and that is a big if, Trump were to get Greenland, there is not much that Europe can do in any case.
Whether or not that's true, that doesn't mean they won't try anyway. Pride sometimes beats pragmatism. I think it's foolish to dismiss the possibility of war, been if you believe it will be one-sided.
>No match
The EU can just kick out the US bases and forbid Mastercard and Visa working here. ASML? Good luck for Intel; I'm sure AMD would have its asses already covered and found some alternative in Asia.
Watch the Dow Jones collape in minutes.
On GAFAM, there are alternatives, and libre software it's libre for the whole world, not just the US.
Software it's easily replaceable except for die hard industrial DOS (where FreeDOS experts would cover) and some special XP/w9x era machinery. European hardware, the industrial one... there's no alternative in the US. No one.
If the US army steps on Greenland in order to seize it, it's the end of the American economy.
China and Russia? These two should watch the Bering currents and South Asian quakes first; the upcoming ones will be a nightmare due to ice meltings.
>Watch the Dow Jones collape in minutes.
>it's the end of the American economy.
You assume that this is not the goal of the current US "leadership". They want the country to fail, so they can rule over the ashes. They are a lot more fucked up in the head than you probably think they are. They simply don't care what happens, so long as they are the ones in power.
Trump would love nothing more than to dissolve NATO, and isolate from all of the EU. He would see that as an accomplishment. I wish I were joking.
> The EU can just kick out the US bases and forbid Mastercard and Visa working here. ASML? Good luck for Intel; I'm sure AMD would have its asses already covered and found some alternative in Asia.
The EU uses Mastercard and Visa. If youblock them in the EU, you just cripple the EU economy instantly.
> On GAFAM, there are alternatives, and libre software it's libre for the whole world, not just the US.
How many people do you know that would be willing to switch to an alternative OS tomorrow or give up their Iphones?
> If the US army steps on Greenland
The US army is already on Greenland. They have a military base there.
I agree with you in spirit but in reality any countermeasures would inflict a lot of pain the EU as well. I don't think anyone has a crystal ball but whatever happens won't be good for anyone.
Yeah, I think it is naive of the grandparent to believe that iPhones, Android phones with Google Play Services, a lot of cloud services can be replaced overnight. That said, it might not happen overnight, but it will surely happen.
I feel like we are close to a tipping point where governments and companies will move off US services en masse as fast as they reasonably can. I think this movement already started. E.g. our local university has forbidden use of US (well, any non-EU) LLMs for work and are trialing Mistral. Two years ago they would have gone Gemini without thinking (since they are already using Google Workspace). They are also extending support for their Linux workspace, which has primarily been maintained for CS'y groups, but they want to be ready to roll it out when needed.
A lot of organizations (especially non-profits, universities, etc.) have woken up when Microsoft relinquished Microsoft 365 access of the ICC chief prosecutor overnight.
I guess one side effect of the US going rogue is open source getting a lot more traction.
I hope that the EU (and UK) will also invest heavily in iOS and Google Android alternatives, because that will be the hardest bits to replace, but as long as AOSP still exists it will be possible to bootstrap reasonably quickly.
Its going to be a very long time before it changes enough to do without US tech. How many European governments are encouraging the use of apps that only run on iOS and Android? How many critically important businesses like banks require customers run unrooted Android or IOS? HSBC's app will not even work if you install apps from F-Droid!
A few governments are trying to do something about reliance on the US, but they are also doing things that create greater reliance.
Its good your university is trying, but that sounds like a limited response. Do they use Windows? MS Teams? Google Drive?
I know of no government making serious attempts to get the private sector of US dependence. Just check how many things you use regularly run on AWS. Desktop Linux is great but is any governmentactually making consistent attempts to persuade businesses to switch to it?
Its going to be a very long time before it changes enough to do without US tech. How many European governments are encouraging the use of apps that only run on iOS and Android? How many critically important businesses like banks require customers run unrooted Android or IOS? HSBC's app will not even work if you install apps from F-Droid!
Step by step. For example, most Dutch banking apps work fine on GrapheneOS. Yes, still with Google Play Services, but at least they are sandboxed. It shows that there is a path to removing dependence incrementally. There are also a bunch of European phone brands (yes, most manufactured in China), like Nothing, Fairphone, Gigaset, HMD, etc. and at least one of them already supports alternative Android versions. Yes, I know they have issues, but you need to start somewhere.
Its good your university is trying, but that sounds like a limited response. Do they use Windows? MS Teams? Google Drive?
Yes, but they also have an official Linux workplace, last time I was there, you could choose to re-image a machine to run Linux on every machine. They are also trialing ownCloud.
The migration won't happen overnight, but it's good that they are setting up the alternatives, trialing them with small user groups, etc. It's the best way to prepare yourself.
I know of no government making serious attempts to get the private sector of US dependence. Just check how many things you use regularly run on AWS. Desktop Linux is great but is any government actually making consistent attempts to persuade businesses to switch to it?
I agree, not enough persuasion is done. But being gloomy is not going to help. Best is to trust in our own strength (we can do it), accept that the solutions are going to be worse (at least initially), make people aware of the risks and alternatives.
The whole situation sucks, but big changes also give rise to big opportunities and it is an opportunity to change to a more open, more privacy-friendly, more user-oriented, etc. ecosystem.
I love you guys, and I wish you were right, but I don't think you are.
Any of the above moves (military bases, Visa/MC, ASML, etc) would make the US suffer, but it would collapse the EU. Europe has a decade or two of hard work and crippling costs to significantly disengage from the US, and no one has the vision or fortitude to make that happen.
You also wouldn't have any security. If you disengage from the US militarily (whatever's left of "NATO"), we'll all see how far Russia can project power. Not as far as they'd like, but enough to make life miserable in a half-dozen or more current-NATO countries. Which puts pressure on their neighbors of course. This would be a shooting war in the east, which would require central and western European countries to decide whether they want to spend blood and treasure to respond. "No" kicks the can down the road a few years, "Yes" is economically devastating.
China could step in! It's a long way from China to the Mediterranean and North Atlantic, and their naval power is ... thin, currently. But you don't want China to step in. They could send money, but then they'd own you worse than the US even fever dreams about owning you.
The US seizing Greenland would be a terrible thing for the world, but I think the most likely outcome is that there would be complaints from the EU countries at highest level and volume, and a handful of countries would get legislation through to make the US suffer, but it would fail at the EU level, maybe even split the EU into two factions of American-bully-reluctantly-aligned countries vs American-bully-righteously-andor-selfservingly-opposed countries. The instability would last a few years, maybe a decade, and then we'd be back to where we are now, with "Greenland (US)" replacing "Greenland (DK)" on maps, but otherwise no one would spend much time thinking about it.
And the stomach-turning irony is that all of this is completely unnecessary. The US has a compact of free operation in Greenland already, including military operations. This is just an exercise in establishing dominance (i.e. The End of Politeness). There are some administrative details like mineral rights and redrawing international exclusivity zones (watch out Canada), but those are not very important when the global economic machine is working properly.
The rhetoric here in the US is that RU and CN are waiting to pounce on Greenland already, and that if we don't, they will. I honestly don't know if there's even a shred of truth to that -- it sounds like absolute manufactured BS to me (RU isn't strong enough to hold it, and CN can't project at that distance), but I have a strong anti-trusting bias against liars who lie, and those are the people dominating the conversation on this side.
The next ten months in the US will decide the next fifty years of the world. On a personal level, that's the rest of my life, and I'm worried about it.
I wish wisdom, resilience, and peace, for all of us.
> Any of the above moves (military bases, Visa/MC, ASML, etc) would make the US suffer, but it would collapse the EU
And many other places - most countries depend in US tech and increasingly so (recent NH stories about Vietnam mandating banks only use unrooted mobile phones). Just card payments not working would be an economic disaster. So would closing down all the businesses and services that rely on AWS, GCP and Azure. So would whatever the US chose to do through Apple, MS, and Google OSes.
> we'll all see how far Russia can project power. Not as far as they'd like, but enough to make life miserable in a half-dozen or more current-NATO countries. Which puts pressure on their neighbors of course. This would be a shooting war in the east, which would require central and western European countries to decide whether they want to spend blood and treasure to respond
I am more optimistic than you about this. Russia is struggling just against Ukraine. They might just invade the Baltic states but anything more would force Western Europe to commit and the Russians know this. Even in Ukraine they invaded because we had signalled we would do nothing by not responding to the previous invasion of Ukraine, to threats to invade and previous Russian invasions of other countries.
> The rhetoric here in the US is that RU and CN are waiting to pounce on Greenland already, and that if we don't, they will. I honestly don't know if there's even a shred of truth to that - RU isn't strong enough to hold it, and CN can't project at that distance
If Greenland becomes independent in a few years time would it then become more of a threat?
> RU isn't strong enough to hold it, and CN can't project at that distance
China is building its armed forces, and there are ways of getting a country within your sphere if influence short of invasion.
> I wish wisdom, resilience, and peace, for all of us.
We all do but I think we are living in a new cold war.
> Vietnam mandating banks only use unrooted mobile phones
Other way around. They are used to using money. Even India tried to make everything electronic. A bit successful but not totally.
Yes Playstore is important. But unless US mandates Qualcomm and mediatek, apple to brick all non US.phones this won't happen.
> This is just an exercise in establishing dominance (i.e. The End of Politeness).
I agree.
It's a way to assert dominance and the EU countries are partially responsible for the state of things.
I mean, when you outsource your manufacturing capabilities to China, your tech services to the US and your security to NATO, then it frees up a lot of cash to spend on other things and that is probably why life in the EU is pretty good.
Unfortunately the other side of this coin is that it leaves you completely unprepared if/when things change quickly.
> Europe has a decade or two of hard work and crippling costs
Once again unfortunately, many EU countries are already maxing out their budgets each year and running sky high deficits so there is not much dry powder to absorb these costs.
Raising more money through taxes is politically unpalatable when a lot of the EU countries are already in the top 10 of most taxed countries on the planet.
The only notable exceptions are Poland and Germany but they won't be able to carry the rest of the EU by themselves.
> maybe even split the EU into two factions of American-bully-reluctantly-aligned countries vs American-bully-righteously-andor-selfservingly-opposed countries.
The smallest EU countries have no choice. There is no EU army and therefore if the US leaves there is no one to replace it. It's a basic case of choosing the best worst outcome. Become a vassal of Russia or become a vassal of the US.
Again, Russia would need to fight harsh natural disasters first. If any, they will need us. Earthquakes due to ice melts and current flows will be no joke. Temperatures will be warmer in the Arctic, and a potential small war due to gas/resources/routes will happen, everyone knows that. But what no one speaks it's that the damn nature can crush any vehicle in between no matter if it's from USA, Europe, Russia or China. It will be scary and nature doesn't give a shit where are you from. Every base you set on either ice or the coast can be plummeted down due to a quake/tsunami in hours.
Also, back to economics. The inner European market can be huge. We have decent armies ourservers, too, among market with the whole Mediterranean, Africa and South America (Spaniards know how to do deals, no matter which political side). Oh, and don't forget China, the Chinese will love to sell us advanced tech at bargain price.
The US tries to set right wing sided mafias in LatAm, Europe tries to get good deals. The US needs to behave like gentlemen and not like thugs.
France has nukes and the only shoot first, ask questions later nuclear stance in the world.
I would advise Americans not to do anything stupid.
No, we know it would be the breaking-point for not acting. It will be a shooting war if the US tries it.
We don't need to annihilate the US forces, just make the US bleed enough to rethink this stupid shit.
We really need to make LibreOffice much better. I am tired of Microsoft really.
This begs the question of who “we” are.
The people who want people to switch from Windows to Linux.
Maybe Windows should remain as a professional tool for using these applications. Most people don't need them. They need a web browser and not much else. Maybe some games for kids. Something like Ubuntu can serve those needs just fine. If you need VS for developing Windows apps, then you obviously stay on Windows.
“ They need a web browser and not much else.”
These people will probably use a tablet or phone.
Yes, but if they need to write a document, the larger screen and keyboard make it more usable.
Then they will attach a keyboard to their tablet. I think desktop OS for personal use is pretty much on the way out.
Target audience is anyone who will click it. They don’t make money from you installing Linux, they make money from you wanting to read how the switching went
Yeah, but I guess part of the point is that MS themselves have been moving their desktop stack to the cloud making it even better for Linux users to maintain some degree of interoperability between the two OSs. I never particularly liked the Libre alternatives to Office, but now with 365 I can keep up with my colleges stack without having to switch to a VM or some other artifact just to collaborate on a document.
Drawing, yeah, true... design as well... closest the Linux world ever was to get something decent in the design department was the Serif/Affinity products, but they never made the port.
Not even remotely true.
You're making the exact same argument everyone here is making, and that's because you're attempting to argue from technical parity / superiority. Windows isn't the dominant desktop OS because of it's technical superiority to Linux, it's dominant because of deeply entrenched compliance and industry reasons.
Healthcare, finance, legal, engineering (less so today, but still very sub-discipline dependant), and government all have very specific software needs that no one in their right mind will bother writing new software, or rewriting existing software, would do for 6% desktop market share.
EMR programs (Epic, Cerner, Meditech), Practice management and billing, Tax and compliance, Legal discovery and case-management tools, Niche hardware and it's control software
This is all the realm of Windows. Most of these applications are Windows-only (Win32 / .NET / ActiveX legacy), they're only certified and validated on Windows, and they're only contractually supported on Windows.
Even if Wolters-Kluwer rewrote the entire CCH ProSystem fx suite for Linux, now there's recertification, regulatory review, vendor retraining, staff retraining, potential issues with auditors and regulators, etc.
There's currently no upside large enough to justify: Vendor finger-pointing, Compliance risk, Training costs, Downtime risk
It's negative ROI all the way down.
Windows has to become so bad that switching to Linux for desktops overcomes all of the above.
I guess it depends on your field, for the past ten years I've worked in companies that use Google workspace, google docs, google drive, etc, etc, and slack.
I've not had any lock-in to Microsoft software and I don't think I've deal with a .doc file in all that time. I need a terminal to run devops stuff, and emacs to write it with, but almost nothing else.
Artists, and so on, are probably tied to Adobe, etc. But random developers and sysadmins are certainly capable of switching I think.
Krita and Inkscape have successfully replaced Photoshop and Illustrator for me. There isn't any good video editing options and lightroom still beats Gimp.
For me the biggest sticking point to windows is cad/cam software, lightburn and anything proprietary needed for hobby equipment. I'm glad though that 3d printer software has always had equal Linux support (as long as you don't use Bambu).
Davinci Resolve for video editing. It's what I'd use on Windows, as well.
Lightroom vs Gimp does not make sense, should be Gimp vs Photoshop if anything.
For photos you can use digikam + darktable/rawtherapee.
Kdenlive is good enough for my video editinf needs
Don’t all of these run in the browser nowadays?
While office can run in the browser, the browser version sucks and I commonly need to open the files in the desktop version. This often happens when there's a browser version or a mobile version or an app version. There's a lack of feature parity.
The browser versions aren't as good as the desktop versions. And Googles alternatives aren't as good as Microsofts. Both do 60% of the job, which is probably enough for 80% of the people.
The browser versions (and the mobile versions) are nowhere near parity with the desktop Windows version, even in quite basic matters of styling. To be honest this annoyed me enough in the end that I just moved to a PandaDoc/CSS/PDF workflow and honestly I now have both a simpler editing process, and a more powerful engine for customisation.
I don't think you'll ever see a web version of Visual Studio.
Is Visual Studio still relevant if you're not developing native Windows software?
I'm currently developing ASP.Net Core services and modern .Net is quite nice. Everyone around me uses absolutely free Visual Studio Community edition, so it would be weird to not use it.
Only limited versions, and the usability downgrade is severe.
> I'm not sure who are the target audience, because I am definitely not and I don't know anyone who is.
Are you all expected to provide your own personal hardware?
Maybe this depends on location, but everyone I can think of has a corporate-issued laptop on which their corporate software runs.
Have you tried replacing Microsoft Office with Libreoffice? It's been perfectly usable for years and I'm even comfortable sending anyone .odt files. I haven't got a single question or comment about it. You may not be able to but in that case just use the .docx extension, install whatever fonts your colleagues expect and continue exactly as you were.
I can't take these kinds of arguments seriously because I regularly read, edit and create documents and spreadsheets and never felt the need to use Word or Excel. It seems most people I've met who claim they can't use Linux because they need X, Y or Z never really tried when I ask. It's just an assumption and they deal with Microsoft based on it.
It's a shame, we could have a world without data-mining and vendor lock-ins if we were principled and didn't always choose the easy path.
I see this argument again and again, but I would imagine most people reading this have separate work and home computers?
For the average home user I can see gaming - while hugely improved in recent years - could still be a showstopper.
But surely for the average user Libreoffice or online versions of MS Office will suffice? Surely there cannot be _that_ many average PC users that need the full power of Photoshop?
Of course I expect the average HN user to be quite different from the average user in general, but I really do think that many casual users get no advantages from Windows apart from familiarity.
In 2012 I borked my Windows 7 install by messing with the registry. I then used an Ubuntu live disk to back up my data. Then I reinstalled Windows 7, but when I couldn't access the internet because I hadn't installed the ethernet driver I had a thought: 'that Ubuntu thing didn't need me to install an ethernet driver to access the internet'. So I decided to install Ubuntu instead and I've been using GNU/Linux exclusively since then. I switched away from Ubuntu when the Amazon lens controversy happened and eventually wound up bouncing between Arch and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
Every now and then a new article "Why you should go Linux". I get it, I like Linux too but every case is different. I want to use Linux but I have to use Digital Audio Workstation. So in my case, I shouldn't dump Windows (and thousand of $$ I've spent on audio software).
I know people desperately want to believe that Linux is "there", but it really isn't. And will probably never be. It’s still too confusing for the average user (many distros, many desktop environments, Wayland vs X, systemd vs init, snap vs flatpak).
> It’s still too confusing for the average user (many distros, many desktop environments, Wayland vs X, systemd vs init, snap vs flatpak).
Users don't need to know about any of that, except for picking a distro and just using whatever is there.
Regarding DAW - I get sticking with Windows if you have thousands invested in it. Even so, there's quite a bit of professional software out there with native support (like Bitwig) or flawless Wine support.
I'm fairly proficient when it comes to Windows, but the diversity in install methods for Fedora threw me for a loop, too. It seemed easier at first -- get all your software from trusted sources in the default package manager, just like an app store! But then there's the question of RPM vs. Snap vs. Flatpak vs. downloading an installer from their website, some versions being further behind than others, the method you use having implications for where/how programs are installed and maintained, etc. It adds cognitive friction and makes troubleshooting harder; I'm not even sure if there's a reliable way to see a list of all programs installed on your machine (regardless of method) or how to easily uninstall them. I don't regret switching, but it is an obstacle, and more consistently than the initial question of which distro to use.
I've been a full-time Linux user since 1998, and over the years I've invested uncountable hours doing all kinds of tweaking and fixing. But with time that has gotten less and less (probably due to both Linux and me maturing), to the point that I now basically use my laptop as an appliance.
I run Aurora, an immutable Linux distro. It auto-updates the core OS without me even noticing (just remember to reboot your laptop every couple of weeks). It has a software center to install GUI apps (all Flatpak, I think) and comes with brew to install command line apps. Things pretty much just work, and for the occasional small issue, I generally manage to just shrug.
To be fair, one thing still lingers just above my annoyance threshold: connecting/disconnecting monitors while my laptop is suspended will sometimes lead to a black screen when resuming, requiring a reboot. A gentle wink from the bad/good old days. :-)
It's the evergreen of ios vs android. Want to have something that "just works" you'll get exactly that. You want freedom of choice, here you go with all the freedom you can get.
If you want someone that tailors the experience, you'll have to pay with money and freedom.
They absolutely do, the moment you have any problem you are on your own. I spent half a day troubleshooting why nvidia drivers were not loading (mint was not signing them and secure boot silently kicked the module out), and I'm many times more proficient at technology than an average person.
I bought a brand new Dell laptop with Windows 11 25H2 at the end of November 2025. The first patches released by Microsoft in December did not install. WTF!!!
If you go online, you will see a whole YouTube videos and articles on how to fix the issue. Let me tell you, after a considerable amount of time, I gave up.
I'm running Ubuntu 24.04 on my desktop, and I can't remember the last time I had issues applying patches.
Windows has problems all the time. There is widespread knowledge on how to troubleshoot and fix these problems.
Similar problems will have very different solutions for Linux. The knowledge of how to resolve them is much less widespread. I’ve had very good success in asking ChatGPT how to resolve Linux issues, probably better success then I would on Windows because the error messages on Linux are much more detailed.
A lot of the time the "solution" to problems on Windows is to reinstall/in-place upgrade because, as you said, Windows errors tend to be more generic so you can browse Google all you want but none of the instructions people provide will be of much help. So I'm not sure "widespread knowledge" is a point in favor of Windows when the errors frequently aren't specific enough to be reliably actionable.
Windows has a "check the Internet for solutions" option that never works. You can just let Claude code loose on your system and have it go fix your shit for you instead of copy and pasting anything.
> Users don't need to know about any of that
Until they run into one of the many problems that force them to know it. Hell, just googling for "How do I do X in Ubuntu" leads to 20 different random forum threads (because Ubuntu doesn't have any official answer or support for you), with solutions that don't work, because it's random people posting random comments of "what worked for them" over 15 years.
I'm an expert and I can't even figure it out half the time. Regular users are screwed.
Pick any distro and it'll still have at least 3 ways to install software. Might also have 2 window systems and 4 DEs.
> (like Bitwig)
Been there, done that... worked fine but with an unacceptable performance penalty.
Compared to which software? Ableton? Reaper? Did you use RT kernel? JACK or ALSA? Pipewire?
DE will also affect performance.
Compared to Bitwig, since that's what I use on both Macs and Windows PCs. Distro was Ubuntu Studio, which is tooted as an OS "configured for best performance for various purposes: Audio, Graphics, Video, Photography and Publishing", and comes with Jack.
That's kind of surprising? Any idea what might have caused that?
Not really sure... drivers maybe, or sound server ? When it's time to make music I don't want to waste time troubleshooting things so after a few attempts at fixing this I just got back to Windows.
Even if they pick a distro and decide to install it, more often than not the install process is still overly convoluted even in just making installation media.
Going to a distro website and trying to find where to get it (ubuntu has a habit of leading with literally anything else other than regular desktop distro on their front page). Finding a download page, and having it just spit out an iso file, with no explanation on what to do with it, or 'how to install' link in sight (debian, it's very nice that there's a big download button, but like...then what. where's the explanation link. it's buried under other downloads, but that's not very intuitive). Getting to a 'how to install' page and having it be intimidatingly long, perhaps even needlessly. Sites, pages and explainers being laid out in confounding ways, and install process sometimes laid out in a bit of an overcomplicated way. (debian has an installation guide that's presented perhaps in the most intimidating way possible to a new unwitting user, and also buried under click on a click on a click. somehow writing the iso is not even among the first dozen of pages there. ubuntu mate gives you links to iso downloads, and yet the installation process is buried under 'faq' (again, not very intuitive or straightforward), that faq only has a bunch of oddly laid out 'making installation media' pages, and the rest of actual installation process is just somewhere else.)
That's before someone even gets to the actual install process. Somehow all of that stuff hasn't gotten more streamlined or user friendly. If you try to see how one would go about getting and installing any distro, you'd quickly see that it's very confusing and convoluted, way more than it has to be, or needs to be to appeal and be simple for new users.
There's glimmers of hope, like fedora which has its media writer, which is gonna hold your hand through the whole thing. Even that links out to github for a download, despite clicking on a seemingly specific 'windows/mac or linux' button. It's a little buried too, below iso downloads, when it really should be brought up more forward, and explain a little bit better on how it's gonna guide you thru the whole thing.
It really should be an app that's gonna guide you thru it, or a dead simple 1-2-3 step tutorial that's gonna guide you thru writing an image (download writer, download iso, write an image - laying it out more than that is just overcomplicating it really, at least in the initial quick install guide), with a clear, visible link to it - and yet somehow even this is too high of a bar for many distros to clear.
What has done a number on the ease of installing linux is how compact discs have just went away, because having a compact disc, burning it, or having it be just sent to users was making that step of the process simpler. Sure, writing to a USB is easy, but the expectation that everyone's just gonna have a spare usb is naive (and you're never gonna hear that you actually need to buy a usb stick in any of those guides lol), and there's just a little more opportunity to fuck up there (overwriting other disks, unless the writer app is laid out nicely and fail-proof). Distros might as well start selling usb sticks with installers on them. If someone's gonna be brand new to the whole thing and they're gonna have to buy a usb stick anyway, they might as well buy it from the distro with the distro on it already.
Some distros may want to get real about how a new user would even navigate their websites in order to get the thing. Like just trying to go thru that process themselves and see what's that experience like.
> There's glimmers of hope, like fedora which has its media writer, which is gonna hold your hand through the whole thing. Even that links out to github for a download, despite clicking on a seemingly specific 'windows/mac or linux' button. It's a little buried too, below iso downloads, when it really should be brought up more forward, and explain a little bit better on how it's gonna guide you thru the whole thing.
> It really should be an app that's gonna guide you thru it, or a dead simple 1-2-3 step tutorial that's gonna guide you thru writing an image (download writer, download iso, write an image - laying it out more than that is just overcomplicating it really, at least in the initial quick install guide), with a clear, visible link to it - and yet somehow even this is too high of a bar for many distros to clear.
Sorry, but this is just ridiculously nit-picky. How much more hand-holding do you need? Everything you want is literally there. Are you complaining that Fedora also addresses Linux users, at all?
Fact is, installing an operating system is a bit of an involved process. Realistically, people wouldn't even start with the docs, but some YouTube tutorial... But man... Fedora tries so hard! The site is ultra clean and on-point. Docs are friendly and very much 1-2-3 structured, they maintain a fucking media writer to do all the complicated shit like choosing a mirror and checking signatures, a simple installer where all complexity is hidden and you can just hit 'next'. What the hell do you want more?
MacOS and Windows don't even consider OS installation and only show you where you can find their OS preinstalled. Lol.
(I do have to agree with you on ubuntu.com tho. Haven't opened their site in a while and... jesus christ, what a mess!)
Reaper is just as good as FL Studio or Logic Pro. VSTs are really your biggest hurdle. Depending on how they are compiled, they may rely on platform specific code. Most big plugin makers have VSTs for all platforms though and your license works on all.
The pathway is there should you choose, one day. Linux is quite good now. That being said, I know a lot of niche plugins that some guy wrote that only works on windows because that’s all he/she has access to. Some 8-bit synth bitcrushers come to mind.
Also Steinburg made VST 3 sdk open source so you have a path to a free music production studio.
https://github.com/steinbergmedia/vst3sdk
"as good as" (debatable in the first place) isn't enough justification to switch. Everyone has their own workflows, settings etc that they used over many years, which they are not going to give up, just to "switch to Linux". This is about real loss in productivity.
Yes but readers may be reading and think that Linux isn’t capable. It is. There’s plenty of DAWs available. You can also use WINE with proton to run FL Studio on Linux. My suggestion is just that, a suggestion to explore the possible.
If we just learn one thing and never change then we wind up being left behind. While FL Studio and Logic, Cubase and Ableton are what most people know. There’s ways of running ALL of them on Linux.
> While FL Studio and Logic, Cubase and Ableton are what most people know. There’s ways of running ALL of them on Linux.
As I just managed to get VR working with HP Reverb G2 in my Linux environment, quite literally the only reason I have Windows still installed on my computer is because of Ableton, and not being able to run that properly on even workstation hardware.
How exactly do I get Ableton running with an external USB soundcard and everything running exactly like it runs on Linux? I'm quite literally ready to give you money if you manage to give me an answer that actually leads to me being able to run Ableton on Arch Linux, because for years I have tried, and waited for the moment it's possible. So please do tell, how do I get it running?
https://github.com/BEEFY-JOE/AbletonLiveOnLinux
https://hanez.org/document/ableton-live-linux-wine/
https://github.com/wineasio/wineasio
The biggest thing with any Linux and Wine mix for DAWs is using JACK and WineASIO for low latency
Thanks, I've seen that repository before, but when I last saw it it boiled down to basically "create a prefix with these winecfg values" and not much more, but it seems a lot more fleshed out now, will give it another go.
Would be great if we'd eventually get some PipeWireASIO thing, sounds like a missing piece of the puzzle still, although not strictly required I suppose.
This doesn't work like everyone makes it out to. The first problem is overcoming the plethora of build errors. Then if you're lucky enough to actually get Ableton launched and working, you'll run into weird issues like Ableton crashing as soon as you attempt to add a MIDI track. When you find a work-around for that, you then run into random crashing in the middle of playback with absolutely atrocious latency despite the claims of "low latency". It's not worth it. I gave up
It does work and no you don’t need to fiddle with build errors and crap unless you have some weird hardware.
It works for me plug n play with my scarlett devices. Many tracks.
Core i9, RTX 3080, Fedora w/ Proton on Vulkan. USB-C Scarlett.
I think your issue might be that you aren’t using an ALSA device.
Windows VM with USB passthrough. I haven't had any issues with USB devices this way.
I've tried to passthrough Behringer audio interface, as well as HX Stomp (to, of course, avoid dual-boot) and it stuttered like crazy. Maybe there is a way to make it more "realtime" but it's not the default, at least in VirtualBox.
Yeah passing through usb devices to a VM for audio seems to be a dark art like working with a bunch of analog equipment. Everything has to be tuned. I do understand why a bare metal windows and/or mac computer is always in a studio, one can skip the head ache. Even if main DAW is Linux.
VirtualBox is the worst VM software.
QEMU on Linux with kvm is gold.
> Windows VM
That's not wine, and I'd rather keep dual booting that running Windows VMs that barely can keep up. Have you tried doing music production inside a Windows VM before?
Yes Ableton, VST and usb. I have used the Coreweave windows VM with Nvidia to run everything audio and video, though haven't routed USB devices to it.
Cognitively it's easier to just buy a second PC for windows. But threadripper pro etc have so many cores and pcie lanes it's easy to run multiple OS VMs with dedicated GPUs at close to native speed in one box.
You can't, I've tried. The "passthrough" is bullshit, it doesn't fucking work and I wish people would stop recommending this time wasting "advice". That's not even the main issue as 90% of your VSTs will probably not work either and latency will be through the roof.
> VSTs are really your biggest hurdle.
And that is unfortunately the place where I spent my big bucks.
I do however use Linux for my work, and have for more than a decade. If all the plugins (plus FL Studio, I've tried Reaper but it might be not for me) worked, I'd switch my personal desktop in a heartbeat. It's honestly the only thing locking me to Win10. Maybe I'll try a Mac through work (we get to keep the machines).
And yes, I've tried running FL using Wine, and it works surprisingly well! Just not _well enough_, and some plugins do not work at all. Most do, and that's great, but not enough for me at least.
I still remember the first time I stumbled across Logic Pro X. For the price of $200 I got a complete package that contains about 200 plugins and instruments. The DAW itself was maybe 7% of the full contents of that package.
That is unbeatable value for money in the DAW market and that was before Logic Pro 11 came out and added a ton of new plugins.
I fully understand, that’s me and basically all those Native Instrument packs. You’ll have to pry guitar rig from my cold dead hands.
It's not the apps, it's the drivers. I've got expensive high quality audio hardware (RME Fireface 800) that doesn't have Linux drivers. Oh sure, I could invest $2000 to get a newer version, but that would just mean a steep learning curve to get drivers, hardware, and DAW working anywhere near as seamlessly as my Windows setup. It's not that I'm a Windows fan, I'm just looking for the most cost- and time-effective solutions. I'd rather spend my time recording and making music than sweating over driver and software issues.
FireWire is dead. Apple moved on to Thunderbolt
"As good as" is highly debateable. Have you used Logic Pro 11 in the past two years?
Yes, I own Logic Pro
> Most big plugin makers have VSTs for all platforms though and your license works on all.
Most??? I can’t find Arturia, Korg, Reason Rack Plugin, FabFilter, Native Instruments, Softube and those are just from the top of my head.
> So in my case, I shouldn't dump Windows (and thousand of $$ I've spent on audio software).
If you mean that there's no Linux replacement for Digital Audio Workstation, then I agree: switching is not for you. But if what worries you are the $$ you have spent, you are just another victim of the sunk cost fallacy. The earlier you realize your mistake, the earlier you are ready to evaluate the options without biases.
I wish to gently but firmly disagree.
The thousands of $$ on audio software are spent because they actually provide the exact output needed. Think of them as a precision-tooled machine part critical to the production flow in a factory. Sure, you can replace it with a cheaper alternative but the cheaper part will likely have rough edges and the errors caused by those rough edges will cascade into your final production output...
most interesting part is to guess how many here complaining about a poor ecosystem on Linux audio, actually work professionally on the field
Surge-XT, Vitalium and/or PlugData or Cardinal can get you so far on the synthesis world that maybe not even a full dedicated lifetime can explore everything you can do with it... Ardour isn't a shinning pot for MIDI editor generational features but if you actually know music-theory, it works pretty solid for writing. the in-line editor makes very much sense, just like sheet music can hold an orchestra info. on a sigle page
I am not familiar with Digital Audio Workstation, but this seems a good use case for WinApps.
I am a linux user for 26 years. And used windows since 3.11 up to 2005. After that point I just helped people with windows, never worked with it.
I had this friend while my kid went to school with his kid, he was a musician. He absolutely was frightened of even handling me the mouse of his windows 7 setup in case I break his DAW, cherry audio tools and midi mixers just by me showing him a website. Also helped to switch some dlls (hi didn't know how to kill background task to release dll to be replaced) and edit windows registry cause he needed an upgrade for some pirated software.
I have seen many more nightmarish stuff hapenning in windows, even on holy sacred windows xp.
On the other hand my mother has been using debian xfce in her acer touch screen laptop for 15 years. No issues. Many elder people got in shock when windows 8 made all those changes.
So whenever windows users talk about linux confusion I smirk.
I see this mentioned again and again, but I don't buy it.
For power users or users with niche use cases, sure there might be specialized software that lock you into Windows or Mac.
But for most casual home users, I think Linux would be perfectly adequate, and familiarity being the only real detractor.
Assuming someone can help install a friendly Linux distribution (and that the hardware is compatible), then what are the big blockers? Gaming maybe, for those where it is relevant.
But looking at all my not so tech savvy family members and friends, a browser, online versions of MS Office (or Libreoffice for sure), maybe Spotify or the like, would really be enough. Being able to install apps via an (actually useful) app store is a big win in itself.
Looking at those friends/family members, it is not like they are able to support their Windows machines either when something goes wrong or needs to be changed - I (or someone else technical) always need to help out anyway, fixing driver issues, installing software, changing any non-trivial settings, and so on. And I could just as well do that on Linux - and whether I need to pull up a terminal is irrelevant.
Ableton + Serum + many custom VSTs user here. You're spot on. This is actually the biggest reason I can't switch. In fact Steve Duda (creator of Serum) has said many times that he doesn't ever plan to support Linux. That's not a deal-breaker necessarily, but the fact we paid lots of money for this stuff makes it a bit unreasonable to switch to Linux.
The confusion is a problem for nearly every use case. They don't even seem to be converging on things, it's getting worse.
I have Windows only audio and 3d software. I ended up with a windows VM with GPU passthrough on Linux. It sits on its own m2 drive for the rare occasion I need to dual boot. So Windows has been become legacy software for me. (IClone and CC).
And Steam Deck is there.
But I think the desktop interface is legacy for anyone under the age of 25, I get a kick out of watching them navigate a desktop.
There is no "there" for Linux to be, because
> every case is different
Every article like this is another person for whom Linux is there.
> t’s still too confusing for the average user (many distros, many desktop environments, Wayland vs X, systemd vs init, snap vs flatpak).
Average users need to buy hardware with a suitable distro installed. Usually that means Ubuntu. Its a decision that should be taken for them
With regard to DEs - Gnome for touch devices, KDE for mouse and keyboard driven ones. Both set up to be Windows like by default.
The average user is never even going to know whether they are running Wayland or systemd or snap. They will never change the default.
FLStudio in Wine, Bitwig and Reaper work amazing on Linux, Mixxx for DJing works with Traktor keyboards.
I guess it depends on your needs. 90% of my working life is a terminal to run terraform, emacs to write code, and slack to chat with colleagues. In each of the companies I've worked over the past 10 years I've had a google workspace account, and I think I've never even touched microsoft office in all that time.
Yes there are options. In practice you pick one distro, the one your friend recommends, or that the IT department gives you.
There are probably fields in which you cannot use Linux software, but for your average joe? It's not impossible, and it's not that confusing with a little patience.
I'm sure you mean Microsoft Copilot 365 App, not Office :D
I can't get over how they torpedoed one of the most famous brands in the world... but that's kind of on brand for them now, self-sabotage.
I’m so close to the switch myself for silly reasons. I don’t like windows due to their creepy business practices and negative design patterns in their OS so I’m very bias against it. Forcing copilot is just the latest in their creepy practices…
For more details on why I came close to switching: I use my win desktop as a host for ai services such as Comfy UI for stable diffusion generation since it is a beefy platform; for example, I generate reference stuff for Krita (digital painting software) illustrations on my drawing tablet. I remember the process to configure windows as being strange, GUI bound (NOT windows strong suit), and just annoying due to my aforementioned bias. Valve has done great work with running games on linux which is the only reason I keep that OS and I’d rather set up services on linux.
This comment serves as a reminder to myself that I should just go ahead grab my windows license keys for archival purposes and flash a better OS on that system.
Don't forget that Krita has home-turf advantage on Linux :)
Krita is among the main reasons why I am so impressed with the KDE project. Not only do they deliver a very good desktop environment, but they also deliver some genuine flagship apps for it
As does Wacom. My drawing tablet from 2002 is plug-and-play with zero driver installation.
There's nothing silly about those reasons.
I call it silly because essentially I’m complaining that I don’t like setting up a service on an OS I don’t normally set up services for. My quibbles with that process can in part be addressed by crafting a terminal based workflow to configure the host and enable the service on my desktop, skipping the GUI completely. E.g. I’m sure I can do Task Scheduler shenanigans through powershell. More experience would help sand down the rough parts I experienced.
Now the product decisions behind the OS giving me the icks… The terminal can’t (completely) help with that ^_^
Eh those applications can both be run in linux without issue.
They are likely to have more issues related to getting the drawing tablet configured correctly.
The rest is just having to start from scratch and lose the decades of windows experience and intuition which can make things painful as that type of thing cant be replaced without time.
Having just yesterday installed a fresh Mint distro on a newly received PC that came with Windows pre-installed, I can tell you that this is merely an hour of work, and most of the time will be spent downloading and burning the .iso on the USB key.
You should just give it a go tonight.
Do you have reference for the krita+comfyui setup? I have a drawing tablet and always wanted to augment drawings using AI but never got around to deploying a stack for that. I have a 3090 that should be enough for it, I just need a reference for the setup.
Plugin for Krita I use: https://github.com/Acly/krita-ai-diffusion
App I recommend to download models and manage UIs: https://github.com/LykosAI/StabilityMatrix
(1) Download Krita (2) Download and install the Krita AI diffusion plugin (3) Run comfy UI using StabilityMatrix
Docs for using the Krita AI plugin: https://docs.interstice.cloud/basics/ It's a really fun plugin to use!
Running ComfyUI or _any_ AI stuff on Linux is a night and day difference in terms of ease of use and performance when compared against that of Windows users. Python on Windows is suffering
I fail to see how Python or ComfyUI would be easier to setup and use on Linux, unless we're talking about torch compile or Triton.
You said you fail to see how it would be easier, and then you gave examples of things that are easier.
The pain I’ve experienced running ComfyUI on windows is from (1) pytorch and the complexities of managing it through pip when python’s platform concept doesn't encompass CUDA versions, (2) dependency conflicts between custom nodes (some of which also involve #1 because they pin a specific pytorch version as a dependency), and (3) gratuitous breakage in ComfyUI updates.
None of which Linux makes any better.
You just making stuff up? ComfyUI just works on windows.
It works great until it doesn't. Wait until your dependencies require you to change torch versions, or a comfy update requires dependency changes, or you have to change CUDA versions.
Solving these problems (and avoiding them in the first place) is a lot easier to manage on a Linux install.
I recently started using Lutris for gaming in Linux, and so far so good.
Copilot is already great and it's only getting better. I can get so much more work done and the same amount of time or get the same amount of work done in a lot less time. It's funny how many people were afraid of AI. Technophobes abound in this world
Funny, I disagree. I think copilot truly sucks compared to the other options. But you can uninstall copilot, so I don’t see why it bothers people at all.
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I tried to leave Windows 11 for Linux - it just didn't work for me. I installed EndeavourOS onto my main gaming desktop. It worked great for a while and ran all the games I played with my friends. However, one night when I went on to play a game I ran a system update and it seemed to completely break my nvidea drivers - I tried reinstalling them and also using the open source driver. This meant I just couldn't play any games that night and was simply diagnosing linux issues.
I probably chose the wrong distro for this but I really just want the PC to work for playing games without any issues. I don't use it for anything other than playing games so for my time I just went back to Windows 10 and will use that until apps stop working.
Haha, exact same thing happened to me a couple weeks ago. You probably had the same issue as me. The driver dropped support for older cards and you had to switch to a legacy AUR package. I fixed it with some frantic googling while my friends waited a half hour. Not sure how you would know this without subscribing to some arch news feed or something. Not ideal.
That's exactly how it's supposed to work: Arch expects you to check the notes on their news section always before you update. The NVIDIA driver issue and solution was posted on Dec 20th.
I'm not saying I'm reading these regularly, just that yes it's the expected way.
Fair enough, and now I do. It is still the most recent news item and the instructions for the fix are clear: https://archlinux.org/news/nvidia-590-driver-drops-pascal-su...
When I was googling to fix in the moment, I unfortunately did not find the news page.
If the expected way and the attitude is to just break user installs, then that's no better than Windows, perhaps even worse.
It's the Arch way. A beginner shouldn't be using Arch, Gentoo, NixOS or FreeBSD etc.
That's why there are myriad of distros.
So it wouldn't be incorrect to refer to Arch and Arch based distros as 'well, if you want to have fun with a broken system, otherwise avoid', just so it could be mentioned in a succinct way when talking about what distros one could try.
No, I don't think that's a fair way to put it. People regularly report having quite old Arch installs without stability issues. And people also regularly advice Linux newcomers not to pick Arch.
If you check their news section, it's a reasonable number of notes, 13 for last year. I think it's fair to say it seems to work well if you are willing to follow their procedure and already know what you're doing.
https://archlinux.org/news/
> I probably chose the wrong distro for this
Indeed. Arch-based distros ought to be managed by intermediate-advanced users. Linux Mint is better suited to beginners.
> but I really just want the PC to work for playing games without any issues.
If you decide to give it another go, and you have the means, I suggest using an AMD graphics card. Nvidia's drivers are notorious for being troublesome on Linux, and although they can usually be made to work (either by the user or by a distro developer), the drivers for AMD GPUs are much better integrated with the OS.
I switched to AMD a few years ago and have been very pleased with the results, both in games and in non-gaming tasks. (I don't use my GPU for LLM development, though, so I can't speak to the current state of things in that area.)
I have been 'enjoying' this with Debian on a PC with a 1080Ti nvidia card, which is no longer supported by the nvidia v590 + drivers. I've had to pin to v580, but the whole "oops, I updated, rebooted and 'look ma, no high-resolution anymore'" got tired really quickly. You have my sympathies.
EndeavourOS is apparently Arch-based so I've got no useful suggestions for fixing there, sorry.
Never heard of that Linux variant. Use one of the big names: Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian.
If you have a choice don't use nVidia either, but the bigger distributions do handle them well.
Yeah the real mistake was starting with Endeavour. I wonder just how many people are turned off by their initial Linux experience because they choose stuff like Arch, Gentoo, or some obscure variant rather than Fedora, Kubuntu or Mint. Even stuff like Bazzite is probably an odd choice for a novice - though it would have handled that failed nVidia upgrade nicely.
This is why I go the console route. I tried building a PC after being inundated with people saying it was better. Even on Windows it felt like it turned into a sys admin job that I didn’t care for. I just wanted to play some games after work.
I think using an atomic distro like Bazzite would have solved your problem.
The fix is not buying Nvidia, even though some people here will tell you how much AMDs drivers actually sucked in 2009 and how good Nvidia is now and all that noise.
Buy full AMD in 2026, and you'll have no problems with games.
Also, Bazzite would have saved you from this.
I can't understand this reasoning. System updates obviously don't become less risky because of the OS they're updating. But going back to Win10 means having less control over when those updates happen (and much less control over, and understanding of, what is updated), and waiting much longer for them to complete.
> System updates obviously don't become less risky because of the OS they're updating
The last time I used arch, I ran an update and it broke my bootloader, meaning the next time I restarted it wouldn't boot at all.
Sure I could make a recovery USB and fix it, but at that point I was away from home, and just really needed to do the totally crazy thing of "using my computer to actually do work".
(To be clear, I didn't and I'm not recommending going back to Windows, just a more sane Linux)
Yikes. It's 2026. "Don't break the bootloader" should be table stakes for any OS distribution's update process by now. I am not a fan of Windows or macOS, but I don't even recall the last time an operating system software broke my ability to boot--maybe during the Windows 2000 days?
Yet, when you go online to refresh your memory on how to update your Linux installation, too many of the guides still say STEP 1: Back everything up because you may not be able to boot after you do this!
My point was exactly that GGP shouldn't have expected to be able to do the system update without risk.
But the usual way to install Linux nowadays is from a live boot, so you automatically have a recovery drive anyway. It's not hard to set up regular restore points with Timeshift or similar, either.
That said, I haven't had problems like what you describe in nearly 4 years.
I've used Windows, Ubuntu, and NixOS all for longer than I ever used arch and never had an update leave my computer inoperable.
And the other person did, as have many others on support forums.
Updates generally just work, on the balance of my experience and other available evidence. It's still unwise to schedule them at a time where a failure would be more disruptive than baseline, and it's still best practice to be prepared for a failure and not have to figure things out on the fly.
The mistake is that you did a system update when you wanted to use the computer. Not implying that system updates should be a dangerous thing to do, but just something learnt from experience - I’ve had similar issues, especially with Nvidea drivers and kernel versions getting updated at the same time. The take away is keep the updates to when you have an hour to debug or get comfortable rolling back updates.
So just like windows, don’t update it
Year of the Linux desktop for sure
I mean, you get what you signed up for. If you wanted total stability and infrequent updates then why would you use Arch? (If the answer is "I didn't know what I signed up for" then that's fair. Simply understanding the practical differences between distros is a huge hurdle.)
That's absurd. The system should be able to update itself without fear that it's going to break anything. The user should not be expected to have to set aside time to babysit an update.
Windows isn't perfect in this respect by any means, but it sure seems like it handles updates a lot better than the distros that have been mentioned in this thread; in that Windows at least takes steps to examine your hardware first and to not apply updates where it's known something has fallen out of support.
Windows also, apparently unlike these mentioned distros, maintains a Last Known Good configuration so if an update does start causing failures, it can automatically roll itself back (or, at worst, can manually be rolled back). There are some distros that do similar, particularly immutable distros; but honestly this sort of thing should be table stakes to the point that if a distro doesn't do it, it should be laughed out of the room.
There is absolutely no acceptable excuse for any operating system to break itself in an update.
Not saying I'm not considering it given the current political climate, but I'm spoiled by my Macbook Air. The Thinkpad I've been issued for work costs about the same, runs hot like crazy, always has fans running, is cheap-feeling plastic, thicker, heavier, garbage touchpad, weird keyboard layout (printscreen right next to the arrow keys, what were they thinking?), mushy keys, barely serviceable display ... what do I buy if I want something as sleek and well-built and polished as Apple?
I don't think anyone will build as nice hardware as Apple anytime soon, so I think if that's your primary requirement then any other choice will be a compromise. I don't really like Apple, but it must must acknowledged that even a few basic things (the monitor turning on immediately as I open the screen, the touchpad quality, etc.) seem totally elusive to other manufacturers.
Apple's pretty imperfect, and it's sad to see that they've neglected and regressed their desktop OS, however I don't think anyone can argue that macOS is anywhere near as bad as Windows 11.
Apple's only just started getting good hardware. For so long their hardware was so below standard and in a lot of areas it still is. Apple users will sit there with a straight face telling me about how much they care about a good cpu when I know they paid 3k for a low tier intel cpu and 8gb of ram not to long ago.
Also when they talk about how their laptop can handle all this stuff without fans spinning up its only because the laptops come with next to no cooling and spend most of the time thermal throttling.
Some of the stuff coming out of CES is nice. Whether the apparent quality survives in production is another question.
Eh. debatable. my work MBP frequently dies and the screen never turns on when i plug it in. I have to wait 15-20 minutes for it to turn on. My Linux laptop on the other hand, the screen turns immediately power or no power/just plugged in
I'm pretty sure Apple is unavoidable if you work as a mobile app developer. I mean, no iOS SDK for Windows/Linux.
If your work area is anything other than it, perhaps the Mac isn't necessary.
Don't they offer downloads of Xcode outside of the App Store if you pay their developer program fee? That includes their SDKs. Theoretically there is only an expenditure of time and effort to build an iOS app on Linux. I forget if it is against their terms or not, but I don't think the SDK available is a barrier.
While not strictly required, for me macOS has been less cantankerous for running Android Studio on compared to Windows/Linux too.
> If your work area is anything other than it, perhaps the Mac isn't necessary.
How about photography and video production?
Ah, forgot about it. Perhaps a yes, considering lots of photographers and video editors work on Mac.
To each his own. I liked may company issued ThinkPad so much I ended up buying one myself and I have been pushing back getting a replacement (HP Elitebook).
Some of your points are common, such as the touchpad being garbage, or that it runs hotter than an Apple Silicon MacBook Air. But most people consider ThinkPad keyboards to be way better than Apple's and while most (not all) ThinkPads have a plastic shell, they certainly don't feel cheap. Apple displays are typically really good, but ThinkPads have a lot of options, so it is hard to tell.
Your comment, especially regarding the keyboard makes me think you just love your MacBook. Why buy anything else?
Linux support is not great, but a lot of a significant part of what makes Apple great is in their hardware/software integration and they are not doing it open source. It means a MacBook without OSX is a lesser MacBook, but at least, it is not Windows 11.
ThinkPads run the gamut. Their flagship line is nice. In most regards, I enjoy my first gen X1 Nano — good keyboard, screen (even if it annoyingly requires fractional UI scaling), body feels solid despite being lightweight, soft touch plastic makes it feel nice to hold. Trackpad is just ok but the trackpoint makes for that.
It likes to spin up its fan doing the most insignificant things though (even plugging in a pedestrian 1x scaling external monitor can while idle can do it) and its battery life is somewhat abysmal. Standby time is also quite poor.
Some of these things are in theory improved by a newer CPU (Lunar Lake in particular looks decent) but sadly they discontinued the Nano. The Carbon isn’t that much bigger, but the size difference is noticeable in some circumstances.
Are you running windows on this?
It dual boots Windows 11 and Fedora, and I’ve played with other distros in the past. They have minor edges over each other in various ways but none offer a major concrete advantage over the others in any category (except harassment/junkware, which any distro has a major upper hand over Windows 11 in, but Windows 10 accomplishes that almost as well).
Either there’s simply a hard limit on how good this hardware can be in terms of thermals and battery life or neither Lenovo’s tuning of Windows nor any Linux distro has gone far enough in properly leveraging power management and the like.
Is your macbook air running 8 different corporate security products eating CPU?
I had a macbook for work previously and it was just as shit as windows due to all the junk running in the background.
So the weird answer is... a better model Lenovo. They vary from plastic disaster to metal or carbon fiber dream machine.
Yeah, if you don't like the case quality of a T model Thinkpad, you are the problem ;) - fiber reinforced plastic is arguably a more suitable laptop case material than aluminum.
Lenovo's cheap laptops are as bad as anyone's.
If you want something a bit more like a Macbook Pro, consider the HP Zbook G1A.
It's basically built like a Macbook in terms of case and screen quality, but it's based on an AMD Strix Halo chipset - mine is an AI Max Pro+ 395.
The chip design is somewhat similar to Apple Silicon in that it's one big chip with unified memory - you can get them with up to 128GB of unified ram - that thing is a beast for running local LLMs.
Since HP also sells them with Ubuntu preinstalled, Linux support is quite good, though it requires some bleeding edge packages for everything to be supported.
In my case, I have suspend and hibernate working perfectly, fingerprint reader, webcam, etc all work.
> I have suspend and hibernate working perfectly
In Linux? Seriously? How much tweaking did that require?
Do you dare to throw the laptop into a backpack in sleep mode instead of shutting it down first?
Nothing is quite as slick as Apple, but companies are popping up doing pretty sleek Linux-first laptops, I have a Starlabs notebook [1] and am waiting for their new Starfighter [2]...
[1] https://starlabs.systems/pages/starbook-horizon
[2] https://starlabs.systems/pages/starfighter
Batter life claims are very bold. Also the starfighter launches with a 3 year old CPU .
Doesn't seem to me like a good deal especially price wise.
It looks like the best option for somebody who wants a great laptop and doesn't want a Mac.
And the price looks perfectly fine.
Don't buy one then.
> weird keyboard layout
Classic lenovo. Some models have FN as the most bottom left key, instead of ctrl. Gotta be the worst design decision ive ever seen. Everyone copy+pastes and finds, whoever thought that was a good idea really needs relieved of decision making power.
You've got history backwards. IBM Thinkpads did it that way 30+ years ago, when there was no consensus in the industry. Do you switch it now, and anger every lifetime Thinkpad loyalist, or keep it and annoy just the folks who switch back and forth between different vendors' laptops?
In a brief survey of laptop photos from the early 90s, IBM, Toshiba, Zenith, NEC, Packard Bell, Compaq, and Fujitsu all put Fn on the outside.
Epson, Apple, HP, Panasonic, and Sony put it as the second key.
A handful put it as the third key. Heck, one Toshiba machine had Ctrl left of A, Alt on the extreme lower-left starting out the bottom row, followed by Caps Lock and Fn and backslash and finally spacebar.
Only in the last 15-ish years have most of the Fn-Ctrl keyboards died out and the majority of the industry is now using Ctrl-Fn. Thinkpads are the last major holdout, but they didn't decide to buck the trend, the trend bucked them.
> Thinkpads are the last major holdout
ThinkPads were one of the last major holdouts, they went to the Control-Fn layout in 2024.
Whoah.
Is that the end of it, then?
It seems so, even niche manufacturers like Getac have adopted Control-Fn for their newer models.
You can swap those in BIOS for most models.
Yes. I use my Lenovo that way. Bottom left key is labeled "Fn" and act as Ctrl because I swapped them in BIOS.
Idk, I find it easier to press control on a Thinkpad because it's closer. It being in a corner would be farer away. Anyway, control should be (and traditionally was) where CapsLock is. Just remap it - everything is suddenly easy and ergonomic.
Apple also puts fn/globe in the bottom left corner and control to its right.
Yeah, but that's conflating that a key labeled "control" for a Windows machine and a key labeled "control" for a Mac refer to different concepts.
All MacBooks have Fn at the left bottom corner too?
But CMD is generally used instead of control, and at least in my case, with the thumb rather than pinky. Different muscle memory.
As well as beautiful hardware that is a pleasure to use, Apple machines can be capable of running local models like gpt-oss-20B or Qwen Coder portably and without sweating. My 24GB M4 Mini was very cheap considering the local models it can run.
Yes hardware is great. Price per performance watt is also great. But UI sucks. Look at all then posts even macOS fans about new macOS release like the glass ones. I prefer ssh and running jobs in macOS.
https://frame.work/
Nice for experimentation, but if you want a daily driver that lasts for years: Dell Latitude (now Dell Pro), HP EliteBook or Lenovo ThinkPad. Literally laptops built to last. Will last a decade with ease. Higher segments ofcourse better than lower segments, but in general very very good if you stay away from lowest tier
I really like my HP Omnibook 14 with the Ryzen AI HX 370 chip.. it's sleek, well built (so far, at least).. insane battery life.. the standby time on Linux is in weeks and the battery life when light browsing/YouTube viewing is easily 9+ hours. Even the finger print sensor finally just works. The touchpad gestures with kwin input actions are as smooth as, if not better than os x.
The only thing my work 16" MBP does better is the speakers.
edit: Updated the battery life to 9+ hours from 7+ hours based on what the battery monitor says.. I remember binge watching a couple of long movies/tv shows without ever having to plug in the laptop that day...
You can get more than double that battery time with an ARM
Once you cross the ~7h battery range the cons of having to use apple hardware and software is too much to bare.
But then you need Apple hardware and MacOS.
I think they mean snapdragon hardware?
Right, that works if you don't also need very high performance.
Such is the cost of freedom, unfortunately. There is no free lunch. Historically, people abandoned comfort and made sacrifices for a greater social good.
It’s a computer. Stop acting like a martyr. Your “suffering” is meaningless.
A computer (or a smartphone, basically whichever type of Turing complete Von Neumann machine you use) is your interface to the modern world, from interacting with your government to the stores you frequent and talking to the people you love to the media you consume.
So in that sense I think it does matter who is the ultimate arbiter of what it will and won't do, not only in an individual sense but a societal one. The more people switch to something they themselves control, the less power third parties have over their behavior.
My computer is my work environment and often an entertainment device. As such it affects my quality of life. It affects my mental health as well as my eye health.
Suffering can be real with a bad screen, an overheating laptop or difficult to use software.
My mental health definitely suffers if I'm forced to use software that enriches companies I dislike for good reason.
I think I get what you’re hinting at. But is there a more expensive option that’s free (as in freedom) and provides an experience that the GP referred to?
And there will never be such option if we all collectively choose to perpetuate Apple's monopoly. It is us, of all people, who need to take a stance, because we have the necessary skill.
Mac hardware is overrated. Asus ExpertBooks, Thinkpads and Dell XPS models are all very nice, and have lasted for just as long as Macbooks do.
Maybe! But the fact that Apple also makes the operating system means the hardware/software integration can’t be beat. I’ve never used a non-Apple laptop where the trackpad worked a tenth as good as any MacBook.
This is also my problem. I am currently using my docked Macbook instead of my much more powerful desktop running Linux, even though I also want to use Linux more.
Why? Because as much as I want to get rid of my dependence on tech giants, Apple's products are just so damn good, and they Just Work^TM, especially with each other.
Having used Linux on/off for many years, I can say that it's definitely gotten better, but I am still waiting for the year of the Linux desktop. It doesn't have to be as polished as my Mac, but I'd like to at least not have to fight with Bluetooth especially, and things like the dongle for my headset not working and other issues like that.
I think we're always going to have that: there will always be That One Software that doesn't work on Linux, and you need to keep another OS around just to run it. I was able to get rid of Windows everywhere in my home except for one gaming PC, where I keep it around just for Fortnite, because of Epic's insistence on using their nasty kernel-level anti-cheat. So I keep that one machine around isolated from the rest of my network, for the sole purpose of playing one game.
I'm now in the process of un-Appleing my home too, and it's going pretty well, but I know I'll need to keep a single Mac somewhere in the corner of my garage in case I need to use Xcode to build an iOS app or something.
It's such a shame that Lenovo discontinued the X1 Nano series. It's my everyday casual driver. I would buy a newer model instantly if necessary.
X13 is not that much bigger I believe.
> The Thinkpad I've been issued for work costs about the same, runs hot like crazy
I have a personal Thinkpad (Linux) and a company provided one (W11). The personal one basically never turns on the fan. The company one is hot all the time. Guess why.
Snapdragon Elite X Gen 2 laptops are coming out as we speak. Assuming you're not doing GPU heavy work (or gaming), that's what you should be looking at. They are equal to M4 performance. Personally I'd look at the new Asus machines from CES.
That sounds like just what I want, that ought to have great battery life as well. Very promising, if someone were to build a nice light laptop around it...
Not so sure :(
https://www.phoronix.com/review/snapdragon-x-elite-linux-eoy...
Huawei?
I mean, it's certainly not as seamless as an open x86 machine, but if you have an Air already you can always try Linux on it? The Fedora Asahi spin [1] supports pretty much everything on M1/M2 devices.
[1] https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support
USB-C display support is coming soon too.
Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, and Mint remain great recommendations; good stability, community support, etc. (even for Ubuntu, a regular user might not actually care that much about snaps so long as everything works)
I just moved to CachyOS, (from Fedora, and earlier from Ubuntu -- I've been on Linux for a while) and I've been very, very happy. The gaming performance is legitimately better than what I was getting on Fedora, and I've just enjoyed the OS and KDE much more than Gnome Shell. I haven't had any real showstoppers with CachyOS, and it really has felt like a user-friendly version of Arch finally exists.
I think a lot of cachy performance is placebo, because Steam games use the container runtime's Debian 11 libraries, it doesn't use the native CachyOS ones at all.
I'm CPU-bound on one of the games I play, and cachy's scheduler may have made a difference for me. I was also fully on the closed-source NVIDIA drivers in Fedora, and had been totally out of the loop that that the kernel driver had been open sourced. And, cachy had me on a more recent version of the driver.
None of these things are truly unique to CachyOS, but nonetheless I do think I experienced a boost when I switched.
To expand a little bit, I think it might clearer to say that CachyOS does out of the box what many other distros could also do with manual configuration. So, in that sense (default) CachyOS probably is faster than (default) [mainstream distro].
That's still using Cachy's kernel. Cachy uses a different scheduler and compiles for x86_64_v3 instruction set. It won't get you a world-shattering boost but ~5% is what comes up in benchmarks.
I've yet to have a day when CachyOS can come out of sleep: hangs at various steps and requires a hard reboot that somehow relaunches apps on login that I explicitly closed hours ago.
I had the same problem with Fedora which is part of what prompted me to switch. It works great for me in Cachy. I assume either way it was an Nvidia problem.
Yup, I have Nvidia :)
Interestingly enough, I didn't have the same issue with Omarchy/Hyprland. Hyprland doesn't have even the most rudimentary ability to restore windows but it was almost rock solid when it came to coming out of sleep.
Still searching for that one true Linux distribution :) Will stay on Cachy for now because gaming is so much better.
Are you able to quantify the performance improvement, e.g. in FPS on particular games?
Curious as to how CachyOS does it.
Everyone is talking about moving to Linux lately, it’s a bit of a trend. I wish they’d stop, for one simple reason: I’ve been using Linux exclusively (when I’m not forced to use macOS by work) for several years now, and I rather enjoy the lack of malware, spyware and other bullshit on the platform.
If the general public comes over this situation might end. Desktop linux isn’t a target right now because its niche, I’d prefer that didn’t stop.
Oh well. Maybe nothing lasts forever.
While I sympathize with this angle, there's another side to this coin: if more people do the switch, maybe some applications will finally get linux versions.
I'm a Sunday photographer and quite like Lightroom and Photoshop (I know about the drama, but to me, I get enough value from them compared to Darktable and the GIMP to not switch just yet). It's the only reason I still have a windows pc hanging around the house.
I am in a similar boat; my media editing machine ruined windows 10 so that I can use Lightroom. But I would dearly love to ditch windows so I'm currently looking to try out running Lightroom under Winapps to see if it is usable. There's no way of passing the GPU through without something like SR-IOV so I'll have to see how it goes.
https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps
I was thinking of doing that, but since that would require me to switch the monitor and whatnot, it would be just like using two PCs. And since I only use my desktop for LR and not much else, jumping through the hoops with emulation doesn't make much sense.
How so? Winapps lets you run windows applications as if they were native to Linux, you interact with them the same way you would anything installed by apt/pacman/dnf etc. Unless I'm very much misunderstanding things (which I don't believe I am)
In the general case, I think you're right. WinApps seems to use RemoteApp functionality on windows to export just the window you're interested in from the virtualized guest vm to the host, which should behave mostly as a "native" app.
But you were talking about sr-iov, which is a whole different matter. Presumably, the goal is to have LR use that GPU for some of its functions. But LR doesn't support multiple GPUs: it does its computation on the same GPU that handles the output. For that, you need to connect the display to the passed-through GPU. Now, aside from intel, I don't think any mainstream GPU actually supports sr-iov, so you need to pass through the entire gpu to the guest VM (the host wouldn't see it anymore at all). This isn't how RemoteApp works, and I doubt WinApps handles this case.
I remember a project (Looking Glass?) that tried to somehow "bring back" the output to the host machine, but it didn't seem too robust at the time. I haven't followed it, so I have no idea if it's any better now, if it's still alive. If it does, this could possibly work if you had two GPUs (which I happen to have, since my CPU has an integrated GPU). But you'd still get the whole Windows desktop of the VM, not an RDP connection.
There's a lot of servers running Linux that are regularly targeted by malware.
There is a big difference in what software a desktop user runs versus what runs on a server, but the great thing about Linux is that you can keep just as much variation between your install and the average desktop user.
Your best bet for security is probably running OpenBSD, but within Linux, if you avoid common optional applications and services like Gnome, KDE, pulseaudio, systemd, etc., you'll have a significantly different attack vector. Avoiding Python and Node package managers and sticking to your distribution's package manager would be great, too.
Thanks, and that probably is a good security posture, but having to stop using everything good and switch to OpenBSD is exactly what I want to avoid!
Not that OpenBSD isn't good, it's just different priorities.
Better spread the Linux word because with enough users more developers will be attracted and the race good vs bad hackers in OSS will be won be the former. "Nothing is hidden under the sun". Closed source is made to push malware secretly.
> Closed source is made to push malware secretly.
That is factually incorrect flamebait. Closed source is made primarily due to a desire to retain control. While one can use control for malicious reasons, the predominant use is to make money.
You overestimate how influential HN is. Everyone on HN is talking about moving to Linux. Which means, uh, nothing really changed for the general public.
Folks on reddit and hackernews aren't normal people. Outside of this bubble few people have heard of linux. Hell so few people I know use firefox which makes me mad. You are safe from that fear.
I did the same for my media centers! Netflix and iQIYI refuse to work. I am cancelling Netflix. Been a member since 2010. I don't need 4k either. The 4k tax is losing ownership over your media. HDMI is closed source compared to display port.
My media center experience is so so much better. The apps on roku logout randomly, the nvidia shield remote craps out, windows firefox/chrome are slow and the logitech keyboard doesn't work. But the same keyboard and browser setup works like a charm on the same machine on linux.
Manufactured waste, fight against general purpose computing and ownership is what is at stake.
You're all too generous. The first time Netflix didn't display past 720p in Firefox, I immediately cancelled my subscription (which was paying for the whole family) and redirected everyone to Bitsearch[0] to pirate everything instead. I don't agree the moral or ethical arguments against it either.
[0] Bitsearch uses a distributed hash table (DHT)[1] to find all public tracker content
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table
I have been using Linux exclusively for twenty years now. I don't understand people who use anything else, to be honest.
> I don't understand people who use anything else, to be honest.
Most people don't make their coffee in an Aeropress either.
I've also used Linux exclusively (in my case 25 years), but I also realize that with a few niche exceptions, there are few mass marketed products that feature the traditional Linux desktop as their primary UI.
Desktop OS UI is hard. It takes investment in technology, product, and marketing all focused on a target market. Even with all of those most upstarts have failed to gain traction. Also consider that most people buy laptops for 2 reasons: 1) browsing the web and if they can afford it 2) as a fashion accessory. People will put up with a lot of BS from a product if they feel like the product gives them social status and acceptance.
No Linux laptop really hits (2). Arguably only a few Windows laptops do either.
> Most people don't make their coffee in an Aeropress either.
Stupid analogy, the Linux version of that would be whatever french press you want to use. Buy your coffee ground or as beans and grind yourself, depending on preference. And for my girlfriend there's always the Starbucks equivalent (Debian stable with Gnome).
Apple would be picked by modern slaves and sold in a capsule at 100,000% markup and it only fits their machines. Windows comes with pesticides for the "benefit of the user".
I don't see how their analogy is stupid. Aeropress and french press are pretty similar from an "enthusiast coffee device" perspective. Lots of room for variability in grind size, coffee choice, and specific brewing technique with both methods.
Aeropress is a brand, one I've never heard of. It fits in the Linux ecosystem (maybe as one of the Red Hat flavors?) but as an analogy it is simplified. Linux is so much bigger than that and there's everything from LFS (grow, grind and brew with tools you've sourced and put together yourself), to Android (plain old drip machine). Reducing everything that's the Linux ecosystem to a niche brand of a specific type of coffee maker is dishonest.
I use a french press myself, and never heard of Aeropress. My machines all run Debian with DWM and I never have any problems. My non-technical girlfriend is fine on Debian and doesn't really know the difference. She did mention how fast her laptop boots though.
I am too lazy and not enough of a snob to write several paragraphs on why Aeropress is objectively better and different from French Press, but it is, and I hope someone can step up and do that here.
That's not the point, unless you're trying to tell me you're using Apple products and I'm putting the Aeropress in the wrong category?
/s
> Apple would be picked by modern slaves and sold in a capsule at 100,000% markup and it only fits their machines. Windows comes with pesticides for the "benefit of the user".
The exploitation of labor in developing countries in the electronics supply chain is a serious issue, and worth discussing, but it's not the dimension of the subject my comment was addressing.
> I have been using Linux exclusively for twenty years now.
Ditto. I can't stand other OSs; they are constantly in my way for just the basic tasks.
> I don't understand people who use anything else, to be honest.
Anti-ditto. I would never give Linux to my parents. They're capable enough to maintain their own Windows computers, and switching them to Linux would mean that I'd have to take over all of those tasks -- because they've got other, more important things to do than to learn a new OS.
I'd agree with you if you could buy rando PC with Linux installed and working with no stupid hardware issues. People who can live in Google Docs/Office 365 web and don't have industry specific use cases will almost always be fine. But once you break out of that subset of people, tossing them a Linux machine can be kind of mean.
> Anti-ditto. I would never give Linux to my parents.
I don't know about your parents but most people (including my parents) just use a browser and some applications that are identical to their Windows versions or sufficiently similar. There isn't really anything new to learn.
System76!
One huge barrier is printing. I've been using Linux as my daily OS for a decade and I still have stupid problems with printers. I can't print from my laptop because the printer spits out unicode garbage if I try. My desktop works, but sometimes I have to reboot to get the print queue to clear.
Printing has always been the most brittle experience of all IT at least since when I started printing in the 80s.
To add an anecdote I let a friend print on my HP LaserJet from his Windows laptop today. It detected the printer over Wi-Fi but it could not print anything because it was missing the driver. After a 100 MB download from HP's site the installer wanted an USB connection to the printer. That friend of mine is young so he never saw a USB cable with the small squarish plug that connects to a printer (or scanner, or USB2 disk) but that's another story. The installer run for minutes and failed with an error. I told him not to trust the error and attempt to print anyway. It did print. However after a few pages a pop-up complained about a non original toner (probably true) and it stopped printing. However he managed to find the printer from his Android phone and print from there. Then he was able to print from Windows too.
All of that took about an hour. I installed Debian 13 on my laptop last week and I could detect the printer instantly and print without any problem. No driver to download. I know that I can apt install hplip to get more specific drivers but it was not necessary.
To be fair, I also have stupid problems with printers in all other OSes.
Printers are their own slice of misery that seem to transcend brand, OS, platform, etc.
I did give Linux to my dad and he used it fine for many years until my sister gave him a Windows laptop.
Most people just use an OS to start applications. There is nothing they need to learn other than maybe the start button has a different logo on it.
I'm sure most people feel the opposite way. I've been using Windows and Macs for 20 years and I don't ever see myself ever using Linux as a desktop OS.
Among the subculture that would be the type to visit Hacker News (or Slashdot back in the day), this attitude emerged around 25 years ago. In the late 90s, there was widespread enthusiasm for the Linux desktop. I remember those days fondly. It was glorious. Then macOS (or OS X as we called it) swept away a lot of people. A lot of them would get hostile or angry or mock people when they would mention they didn't join the Mac bandwagon.
Same here. Using Linux Mint for about 15 years now. Same for various computer illiterate family members. As far as I am concerned it is significantly more pleasant to use than Windows and MacOS.
Do you use a laptop? It seems that doing the right then when opening / closing the lid only happened in the past 5 years or so.
Changed many laptops in the past 20 years. I have run Linux on dell XPS, Asus zensomething, now hp dragonfly. No problem.
This is something I see repeated everywhere but I've been using Linux daily on all sorts of laptops for a little over 15 years and never struggled with this issue.
But during my brief period on Windows I would get issues like my colour settings changing or the behaviour of certain meta keys being switched out when I woke a sleeping laptop.
My colleagues run linux laptops and they don't struggle with this issue either. They just completely turn off their laptops anytime they want to move somewhere. That's how they trust their OS.
>> They just completely turn off their laptops anytime they want to move somewhere
Fine but that attitude isn't going to increase Linux adoption. Arch does work in this regard today but it does require some BIOS tweaks to get it to work flawlessly. Compare this to a MacBook where closing the lid always does the right thing and seems to use basically no power at all in this state. For me, I'll accept the trade-off as I don't want to use macOS (makes no sense for development imo) but some aspects of the experience are clearly superior.
My development machine is a macbook air, which is fantastic for me because I can work anywhere without a power outlet for long hours. Production target is usually debian servers, they just work reliably. And my game/music machine is windows (all the games, all the vsts). I don't like trade-offs.
Battery life is great on a mac, but then I would have to use my macbook / macOS. For me that is a tradeoff as I would prefer to use Arch / Hyprland, kernel support for cgroups, etc.
This point is now moot since x86 broke sleep for everyone.
Certain versions of Ubuntu have this issue on Thinkpads, which requires updating a specific setting in Grub.
I have multiple computers with multiple operating systems, but I still need my gaming machine to be windows because some of my favorite games require it.
Can you understand why someone would buy a $20 Mr. Coffee coffeemaker from Walmart and not a $2000 DeLonghi Eletta Explore superautomatic espresso machine?
I agree.
However, most people do not know what an OS is. They do not understand its software rather than hardware.
Some people are not allowed to use Linux.
At work, I got a fancy MacBook, and as much as I admire the hardware, I despise the MacOS window management. IMHO, it is broken by design, and I wonder how anybody at Apple considers this a good system. There is still a small chance that I didn't understand a crucial concept, but until now, nobody was able to explain to me, how it is supposed to work.
I have reached the point where I believe that it must be something historical, like Steve wrote it himself, or else, and now nobody dares to reform it.
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have you tried to draw a circle with GIMP? /s
Yes, on my work's laptop that is running windows...
Yes but i usually use inkscape for geometric figures.
For both ideological and practical reasons, I'd love to switch. If I were a desktop computing person, I'd already have done so years ago.
Alas, I exclusively use laptops - as I work a great deal while travelling.
I do not wish to have to carry around a mouse with me wherever I go with my portable computer.
If any Linux distro manages to replicate even 80% of the smoothness and functionality of a Mac trackpad experience, I'll switch. I have yet to find one, however (and yes, I've tried all the Asahi variants - they don't come close).
I always agreed with this take until I went all in on keyboard driven tiling window managers. First with i3 and now with Omarchy/hyprland.
I find my use of the trackpad so rare now that it’s a non factor.
what do you use to get web browsing to work without a mouse? I tried Vimium and Vimperator, but that was a really long time ago.
I still use the mouse in a browser, but I find myself tabbing around a lot more often than I used to.
Agreed. Trackpads on Windows are very good (approaching Mac quality) but on Linux it's hit and (mostly) miss. Gnome gestures are borderline unusable. Sometimes Gnome forgets how many fingers I'm using and every single finger mouse movement is suddenly a gesture, have to retry gestures to switch workspaces because the first two times it fails, etc. It becomes worse with more windows open. No back swipe gesture in Chrome, etc. Basic stuff that is annoying in every day use. Flawless mouse/touchpad support is not too much to ask.
Here's a perfect example of this: Using a Mac trackpad on macOS, you can two-finger scroll as fast or slow as you want. If you go slow enough (you might have to "roll" your fingers instead of moving them down), you can scroll your browser pixel-by-pixel. This behavior carries through every app on the system. Scrolling basically does exactly what your fingers do.
Now, run Linux (say, Ubuntu) on that exact same hardware and try scrolling in Firefox or something. Instead of the content moving exactly as your fingers are moving, it does this weird jumpy "page up / page down" like thing as your fingers move. Even moving your fingers as slowly as you can will make the content jump to the next "page" 20 pixels down. This is not just Firefox's behavior: it carries through to every application.
Yes, there's probably some obscure GNOME configuration I need to add to fix this behavior, and if you search online you'll find forum after forum of people asking for logs and responding with "I dunno, try this." For something that should work out of the box.
idk, the two finger "rolling" pixel-by-pixel scroll seems to work for me - Firefox (also foot terminal, Slack (xwayland), and Signal) on Scroll (a Sway fork) on Debian (testing) on a ~year old Thinkpad X11. I don't think I've done anything to configure or customize it either.
I got a Thinkpad (after a few years on a Macbook) largely because in the past the track point was a lot better than trackpads. But in those years, it seems hardware and/or software have improved enough that I barely use it.
> If any Linux distro manages to replicate even 80% of the smoothness and functionality of a Mac trackpad experience, I'll switch
I find Niri to be a great WM for trackpad use if you are amenable to a scrollable-tiling workflow. All gestures are inertial like MacOS and to my fingers they often feel snappier and more natural than their macOS equivalents. Scrolling is consistent and natural, though which apps have inertial scrolling is definitely hit-or-miss. It perfectly recognizes three and four finger gestures. PikaOS (debian-based) and CachyOS (arch-based) both offer Niri as an option if you want to give it a try.
For context, my experience is on a 4 year old thinkpad which admittedly is probably best case for driver support but is definitely not the best touchpad hardware on the market.
Thanks for the recommendation! I've been playing around with Niri for the past hour and I have to say there's a lot here that I like. I'm still going to need to figure out how to adjust the trackpad gesture sensitivity a bit (which doesn't seem especially straightforward to do) - but this is considerably more buttery than anything I've experienced before on Linux
I've been using fedora desktop on laptop for years, alongside a Mac, without any issues
Take this with a grain of salt, it's impossible for me to tell what you are and aren't comfortable with, but there is an alternative to using trackpads or mice at all and that's tiling window managers. You drive the OS with your keyboard. Combining this with plugins like Vimium for Chromium based browsers (or Tridactyl for Firefox) you can drive your entire OS and browser with keybindings.
As an aside, the latter also teaches you the bindings for Vim which is a nice boon if you've tried in the past and couldn't make it stick.
But again, this might not fit your use case or your preparedness to invest time and effort. I'm just saying.
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People can have different preferred input devices to others. It doesn't make them amateurs.
My gripes with the trackpad are less to do with window management and are more to do with the graphical components of my job.
Please explain to me how I'm supposed to design graphics in Inkscape using only the keyboard? Or create presentations in LibreOffice Impress using only the keyboard? I don't spend the entirety of my time in a text editor.
Consider these "amateur" tasks all you like, most organisations value them and I need to be able to undertake them without frustration. MacOS won't fight me in these contexts. Linux will.
I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not.
In any case, I am proud to be a very weak Linux amateur despite having used it for two decades.
Try CachyOS, it's based on Arch but with additional optimizations, better defaults, and is user friendly. The problems the author of the article had would not have happened if he spent some time using an user friendly distro before trying a hard distro.
Do CachyOS optimizations actually make any difference whatsoever? I know they enable certain optimization flags whenever building software, but that doesn't directly equate to performance improvements unless you're actually benchmarking and testing it. I've seen some benchmarks in games and it seems there is literally zero performance difference (sometimes it loses to Fedora, even).
I'd always recommend upstream distributions with corporate backing for novice users: Ubuntu or Fedora. If they're coming from Windows: Linux Mint. There's also a clear upgrade path for users who enjoy Mint or Ubuntu: Debian testing.
Arch Linux is awesome, don't get me wrong. I just believe it's borderline unethical to recommend someone installing anything related to Arch on their workstation. It's just not what a beginner should choose at all. CachyOS included, it even makes you choose your bootloader at install (any user-friendly distro would simply never bother you with that and go with GRUB right away).
A user's first distro can make or break their Linux experience. Think hard before recommending new users the flavor of the month or an Arch derivative.
> Do CachyOS optimizations actually make any difference whatsoever? I know they enable certain optimization flags whenever building software, but that doesn't directly equate to performance improvements unless you're actually benchmarking and testing it.
I switched from Windows 11 to Kubuntu a year ago, and then gave CachyOS a shot after hearing praise for it. I'm on a laptop with an AMD iGPU, and CachyOS's `znver4` optimized repos gave a significant bump on my Geekbench results:
(Note: these results are from almost a year ago though)
Lenovo Thinkpad P14s Gen4 AMD
- Windows 11: 2366 Single-Core Score, 10717 Multi-Core Score
- Kubuntu: 2496 Single-Core Score, 9878 Multi-Core Score
- CachyOS: 2569 Single-Core Score, 11563 Multi-Core Score
Repeat tests were essentially the same (Win11 23xx/107xx, Kubuntu 24xx/98xx, Cachy 25xx/115xx)
That's actually pretty great!
Have you observed any changes in your day-to-day usage, such as faster compilation times? If it's actually decently faster I might try it instead of playing with Gentoo to get better-optimized compilation flags.
I haven't benchmarked anything other than the initial tests with Geekbench. That said, it subjectively felt "snappier"/faster in terms of UI speed with KDE Plasma than Kubuntu. I've been a happy CachyOS user since.
I love Cachy, but please don't recommend it as a reasonable first step into Linux.
It's a lot more polished than Arch, but it's not for someone who hasn't used Linux before and wants a reliably rock solid and predictable experience 365 days a year, with no fiddling.
It's rolling release, and there are inevitably bugs when updating immediately to every minor version of every part of the OS stack. Arch/Cachy/Endeavour are for experts, and those who enjoy tinkering. (If you want to recommend something Arch-flavored, just recommend Manjaro, and don't listen to the memers who parrot some youtuber's list of ancient and silly engagement-bait grievances.)
A user friendly distribution would be something like Fedora or Ubuntu, not "Arch but with some optimizations that probably won't matter much"
Or Mint? Works flawlessly for me when I need a Linux, which is not so often these days, but if I was still doing cross-platform software development it's what I'd use. Minimal fuss.
Mint is one of the greatest distributions to get started with for users coming from Windows. I've been using Fedora full-time for more than four years now, but before that I used Linux Mint for about a year. It's a great, seamless experience.
Only problem I believe is the lack of customization options in Cinnamon compared to KDE and even Gnome with extensions. I guess that makes the user miss out on some of the cool parts of owning your software. Also, being stuck in X11 will start to become a problem in the next few years: I'm waiting to see what they come up with on that front.
CachyOS? That distro asking you to pick one out of 5 bootloaders and one out of 13 desktop environments? That is rolling and so comes with the implicit contract that you would have your eyeballs liking every package's release notes for any one of them that you ever update?
Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against CachyOS (I really couldn't care less), but if this is where we collectively set the bar for what is "user friendly", we are doing it wrong.
This is hilarious. Recommendations like this are exactly why nobody takes desktop Linux seriously (aside from gamers who yearn to dick-measure about something). A rolling release distro? Let alone Arch? You may as well recommend Gentoo.
That's one of the biggest pain points of convincing someone to switch to linux: the bazillions distributions
Yeah, it can quickly lead to analysis paralysis. I've set up three laptops with a Linux on them for non-tech friends and family members and deliberately went with distros that "just work" (Debian and Fedora specifically).
In general I'd recommend sticking to the simple options and not going into niches unless you/the user actually wants or needs to.
I find this comment funny given it reminded me of a very similar recent thread.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46567586
That's what I first thought of too. The author picks CatchyOS as their first Linux distro, only to find it's more complicated to set up, and then the mouse buttons don't work.
For the Linux newcomer, the biggest advantage of Ubuntu (or Ubuntu derivatives like Mint) is the wealth of guides, tutorials, and Q&As online, allowing you to google most common problems. You can always switch to another distro once you become more confident with Linux.
Maybe don't tell beginners to use something that will so easily break because you didn't read a wiki post. CachyOS is for the kind of gamer who'd de-bloat Windows, etc. to squeeze 1 fps more out of their hardware. If this isn't you then use something else.
If you wanted to recommend a distro which is a bit more 'out there' (so not just the quadfecta of Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint), I'd much sooner go with Mageia or OpenSUSE than an Arch derivative.
As a long time Linux user I started with Red Hat 7.2. Then moved on to Slackware from there to Ububtu and finally to ArchLinux.
While Linux and the user space ecosystem has come a long way there are still plenty of sharp edges and anyone planning to use Linux long term must be able to figure some issues that will inevitably happen sooner or later when some update/system upgrade happens.
Even though I consider myself fairly proficient Linux user I also gave up on Linux on laptops..life is just too short to tinker to make it work. (Power saving, suspend/resume, graphics with Optimus etc. Are still pain points)
Windows has its own sharp edges, such as the crashes the author of this article experienced.
It's hard to evaluate fairly. This author, for example is fed up with specific issues on Windows and new to Linux. He is likely be more forgiving of sharp edges on Linux, recognizing that it's normal for something unfamiliar to be more challenging. On the other hand, someone content with Windows might think of its sharp edges as just how computers are and consider every way in which Linux is merely different to be pointless aggravation.
Most publications covering Windows have a bunch of articles about how to tinker with Windows 11 to keep it from spying on you, showing ads, and forcing the use of an online account. One might argue life is also too short for that.
I feel there's also a fundamental difference in tinkering to get something working vs. tinkering to remove user-hostile features. In the first one the goals of the OS and user are aligned, in the second one not.
Yep. It's sad that the best experience happens by being least worst and by detoriarating slower than the competition.
This author uses a Mac and he’s trying to compare Windows and Linux. Sounds futile for me.
Ironically, instead of Linux eventually closing this usability gap, what we have is windows developing its own sharp edges and annoyances.
For many users, linux is already easier to use.
I’ll echo this. I keep at least one secondary machine booting Linux and periodically try moving a main one over, but the experience definitely is not yet without significant pains, depending on one’s needs.
This is not to discount the tens of thousands of hours of hard (often volunteer) work put into the ecosystem, but a substantial amount of work remains on things like battery life and UX (both for devs and more typical end users).
For example, why does getting virtualization under Fedora working require a whole stack of commands? Elsewhere, the most that’s needed is ticking a checkbox (if that). Worse, the mode of failure if you haven’t done the correct dance is unintelligible errors in e.g. GNOME Boxes that don’t even point the user in the right direction.
There’s all sorts of somewhat low hanging fruit like this that I suspect hasn’t gotten attention because it’s not particularly sexy or interesting.
I don't think I have ever had a system upgrade break my system on any Debian derived or Fedora I used. Also upgrades are not forced upon you like they are in Windows, with its dark patterns nudging you to upgrade.
I am also using GNU/Linux on laptops just fine, and the only issue is with battery life.
I think hardware-wise one needs to do some reading before buying, to check what is supported and what is not well supported. Other than that, I don't have issues. But then again I am also a strict on or off guy, who does not use things like hibernation or standby or whatever at all, so maybe I am dodging many bullets there.
> So why did I switch to Linux, and why am I writing this article about the experience? In a word: joy.
I think this is really what more people should take away from the switch. A lot of the time I see people not wanting to make the leap because they're afraid: Afraid of learning how to use the command line, afraid of asking other people for help, afraid of really using the computer. Learning how things work is how you learn to be free, and that holds true no matter your hobby. The cyclist with their repair kit, the driver with their beater car, the cook and their kitchenware. The more we give away for the sake of immediate convenience, the less control we have.
Linux is no longer in the realm of needing to be an expert to resolve issues, just a little bit of willingness to experiment. This isn't to say all issues are easily solvable, there's plenty of workflows that still require you to stay on Windows and some edge cases where things won't work as you expect. But I always encourage people to try, because why not?
This HN thread is ongoing,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46566465 ("I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great (theverge.com)"; 20 hours ago, 596 comments)
Starting on Jan 5th, I am mostly migrated from Windows 10 to Zorin Linux. It has taken about a week. Would have went faster if I wasn't a "power user" who tests every option and tweaks the shit out of my system. I have researched and tested multiple file managers (Nemo won) and terminals (Tabby won). Moved everything possible out of sandboxes. Set up VSCodium with Claude Code desktop extension, moved MCP servers to global in both Linux and Windows vs project specific, installed the wrapper for Claude Desktop, wired in 4 hard drives, bookmarked directories, imported Thunderbird and Librewolf profiles. E.T.C... And to do it I guided Claude Desktop with full access to both Windows 10 and Linux to research and implement, verbosely explaining each step of the way. Zorin did work out of the box. If I was not, unfortunately, a freak about how everything has to work exactly how I want, with a full software dev environment (no, not for vibe coding) to get working fluidly, the migration would have been instant. Zorin worked out of the box, other than passwords. It looks and behaves very similar to Windows. This is on my 2012 Hp 220Z with 32gb ram and an SSD for the OS. It works like a champ.
The article mentions that the author had a negative experience with Void Linux, that it was missing programs in its repository. If you considered it, give it a try anyway. Void is fast and ridiculously stable, even more so given it's a rolling release distro (so often has very new program versions). And in contrast to the author, I was impressed with the broad range of the package system - he might have had a bit of bad luck with the selection.
I've found a very comfortable home on Void Linux for nearly a decade at this point, and wouldn't consider any other distro for desktop use. I find Void to be rock-solid stable and relentlessly simple.
The author of TFA hopped from Mint -> Debian -> Bazzite -> Fedora -> Void -> Artix, so Void is an extremely obvious outlier here.
Aside from Void, every other distro he tried was either a newbie-friendly desktop distro (Mint, Debian, Fedora, Bazzite), or "Arch, but easier, with an installer" (Artix).
Bad luck with Void's package selection is fair enough, but I'm not sure what he meant by "driver compatibility was a big issue" - Void uses an upstream kernel and driver availability should be roughly the same anywhere.
He's using a Ryzen APU on desktop so graphics drivers shouldn't have been an issue there. The MacBook had problems with Broadcom Wi-Fi drivers on Artix(!), but I'd wager this would affect all distros out of the box, and Void has the Broadcom drivers[0] available as well.
It's frustrating that he doesn't explicitly mention what he couldn't find drivers for on Void. I assume it was Broadcom Wi-Fi and he didn't enable the nonfree repository. In fairness, Void's docs don't cover any Broadcom quirks so maybe this isn't as discoverable as it should be.
[0] https://voidlinux.org/packages/?arch=x86_64&q=broadcom
Seconding this. I was impressed by Void linux stability and speed: xbps (with xtools) might be the fastest and most powerful package manager I've *ever* used.
Sure, Void doesn't have the endless options of Arch+AUR for packages, but it had everything I needed. Even the well-maintained, latest versions of less common software, like Nim compiler.
The author might also missed that Void has a non-free repository, that you have to install for stuff like proprietary drivers, DRM and Steam.
Every major tech publication seems to be making a version of this article for the new year.
It's impressive Microsoft has bungled Windows enough to make this go viral.
I won't comment on the merits. Each person can do what they want. But, the line that caught my attention was:
> The first question often asked of Windows refugees migrating to Linux is, "Why Linux?"
The answer, realistically, is probably "What else?". Unless you're comfortable with the BSD's (which I like, and weren't mentioned), or unless you have recent Mac hardware lying around, it's the easiest and most practical alternative.
It's a bit of a duopoly, isn't it?; with a third leg that's sometimes something in the BSD camp, and sometimes in the MacOS camp.
Gaming is all well and good, but I'd be interested to hear of experiences with moving and using Audio apps (Ableton Live, Cubase and other Steinberg apps, plus many VSTs) from Windows to Linux.
I see Wine, YABridge and LinVST mentioned in searches, but while I've got plenty of Linux experience, I'm time-poor and would prefer to make computers make noises rather than spend my time making things work. I have Reaper which is cross-platform but again, getting the VSTs working would be great (at a bare minimum).
A Mac is not an option here. Any pointers gratefully received!
> but I'd be interested to hear of experiences with moving and using Audio apps (Ableton Live
I've been using Linux for work and hobbies for more than a decade at this point, mostly Arch Linux, some CachyOS, but always had a partition of Windows available too. Why? Almost solely because Ableton does not run properly with Wine, Proton or any other tooling, and has never been able to do so, for as long as I've used Ableton (since version 8 or 9 I think).
If you spend most of your day with Ableton, then Linux is not ready for you, and then I'm not even considering plugins or what not, just the default and standard stuff is not running properly no matter what you'll try.
right - same here WRT windows partition. Not always using Live, but it gets used when it's necessary. I'm slightly disappointed that they haven't done the decent thing and released a Linux version, but .. ah well, what can ya do hey?
I'd be willing to shell out for a new license if they need that for making a Linux version... I guess next step is to fund some FOSS developer to actually add support for it to Wine, by force if must be :P Wonder if there is some way for developers to raise money for adding support for specific software to Wine? Might not be such a a bad idea.
Actually I saw this last night (but have yet to try it): https://usebottles.com/app/#abletonlive
usual disclaimers apply! :)
I can't speak for DAWs but in 2019 when I tried switching to native Linux my Scarlett 2i2 3rd gen USB audio interface did not play nicely with Debian at the time. I'd get an endless amount of crackles and pops during recordings / playback and I spent days going over tons of audio configs / tools (Jack, Alsa, PulseAudio, etc.). They weren't xruns, at least Jack wasn't reporting them as that. Buffer sizes were normal too.
The good news is the same interface today works fine with PipeWire, without needing to tweak anything. I am using Arch this time around.
Yeah, these days the Scarletts are fine (as is the aging Firewire connected Edirol FA-101 I've got attached). Non-DAW things such as Supercollider work fine, but I focus less on that sort of environment (which isn't a dis - SC is great!).
I love how windows-linux discussion is populated by DAW/VST incompatibility. I'm still new to the industry, and therefore also open minded about daw/plugins.
I actually had good experience with setting up yabridge, it could have worked for me I think. But the elephant in the room is that many big commercial plugins use JUCE as a framework, and the recent release of JUCE (JUCE8) just broke compatibility with wine and seem to be sabotaging wine-based usage completely, and are not considering going back at the moment.
https://forum.juce.com/t/juce8-direct2d-wine-yabridge/64298/...
https://github.com/robbert-vdh/yabridge/issues/386
There are patches based on binary diffs to JUCE7, but it is just so much pain to simply run the commonest plugins in the field :/
So I'm now kind of stuck between using windows with commercial plugins or use linux with mainly smaller scale alternatives (although there are good ones: lsp, decent sampler, cardinal, surge)
Thanks! I wasn't aware of the JUCE newer version issue.. I'll have to (sometime) dig into that a bit deeper. Me I don't mind the idea of the smaller-scale alternatives, but having to occasionally work withothers that aren't linux based could be.. problematic.
I use Reaper for Linux and love it. Getting Windows VSTs to work is okay with lin-vst and wine. Bascially install wine with your package manager, maybe run winecfg, then get lin-vst and make a copy of its single so-file, named the same as each vst binary in the same directory, then add that dir as a vst location in Reaper. As far as I remember.
thanks!
> I'm time-poor and would prefer to make computers make noises
Then Linux is not for you at this point. I don't mean to discourage you - for me, Reaper works, Scarlett works, ffmpeg works etc. But there are quirks. Reaper has horrible scaling on 4k screen, which I believe can be resolved by forcing UI scaling, but this requires change every time I switch from laptop to external monitor, so I just live with tiny buttons. Scarlett works, but requires JACK, and I never got it working properly with Pulse/Pipewire (outputs get duplicated sometimes), also control software doesn't exist, aside from one opensource reimplementation, which works but looks horrible.
If you don't have time, just don't.
I'm not a Linux noob, but I do have better things to do than admin/fix in the evenings too.
What about computer games such as age of empires ? Can we play regular computer games ?
Yes. Valve (Steam) spent more than a decade building and refining a translation layer called Proton. Nearly 80% of the vast Steam library is now compatible with Linux to the point they are releasing actual Linux consoles (Steam Deck and Steam Machine).
For your regular PC, you can install a gaming-focused distribution like Bazzite to get everything sorted out automatically.
80% is really impressive, but another way to state it is that 20% of the games you try won't work. I don't think I'd put up with that if I was a gamer. I guess maybe it's not evenly distributed. Do a higher percentage of the most popular games work?
That 20% is mostly covered by competitive online multiplayer games that use kernel-level anti-cheat systems which will only work on Windows. There's not a whole lot Valve can do about that, other than continuing to push Linux for gaming and hope that it gets popular enough to create an incentive for anti-cheat providers to start targeting Linux as well.
I never understood why game devs don't just segregate players based on their anti-cheat status. Have a setting in the game like "only play with anti-cheat verified players" that defaults to yes.
That way Linux gamers can still play with other Linux gamers if they want (and cheaters).
Not an ideal situation but probably better than nothing.
I think that would make Linux players into second-class citizens who could only play in a pool that is 90+% filled with Windows cheaters.
Segregating into two pools: Windows-verified, or Linux-unverified, would probably not work for Linux users either. It'd be the same problem (on a smaller scale) as not including kernel anticheat in Windows. No fun for the non-cheaters.
I'm not a gamer though, so I may be missing important details.
I think it's largely to do with the whether the games are PvP multiplayer or not. I.e. many such games have anti-cheat systems that embed in the Windows kernel (or something like that - my Windows internals knowledge is... slim).
I assert that most people who're happy running Linux on their desktop (for games or productivity or development) do not overlap much with the people who're happy to take kernel patches from UbiFuckingSoft. And this includes those people who're willing to take closed-source NVIDIA drivers.
Games with kernel-mode anti-cheat consistently don't work and probably never will (barring them having it removed or made optional). Titles released more recently are more likely to not work simply due to not having had fixes applied to them, although a rather large amount of newer games work fine out of the box if they aren't doing weird stuff. Other than that it's a toss-up, since while it's usually the same few things that prevent games from working properly on Linux, it's not something you as Jonothan S. Gamer will know about unless you go and do research and check ProtonDB and whatnot.
A good rule of thumb is that single player games generally just™ work and that older games generally just™ work.
Building, no. Refining Wine, yes.
In a word, yes. While Wine has been an option for decades, Valve and Proton have made gaming on Linux mainstream. You can check compatibility reports from https://www.protondb.com/ for whichever games you're interested in.
> Valve and Proton have made gaming on Linux mainstream.
"Mainstream" is maybe too hefty, the amount of Linux users (including SteamDeck) who participate in the Steam surveys are still in the single digit if I remember correctly. Most gamers today still use Windows, even though Valve made great strides with Proton.
I haven't had any issues installing AoE Gold under Wine. Furthermore, stuff on Steam is usually trivial to get running (just click and play). With Heroic same goes for stuff on GOG (and presumably Epic as well, IDK). PlayOnLinux and Lutris have good support for games you install from CD (I probably could have used either of them to install AoE Gold, but I've been using wine directly for so long I find it more convenient to do it myself).
Many are playable with Steam on Linux, each game in the store states whether that's supported or not. Even non-supported games allow an override. I've tried that for a few with varying success. Steam has so far refunded purchases that didn't run on Linux. Then there's Lutris which runs many old games fine.
There is a community maintained website for checking game compatibility: https://www.protondb.com/
Having a steam deck, I can say that gaming on linux is totally doable, but you may want to look on protondb to see what is not compatible with your library.
For years now. Look into proton, its built into steam even.
recently had need to run a legacy win32 game on linux. the game works fine but the updater is in some windows specific java that i just could not get to work, which is kind of ironic since its the "run anywhere" java that wouldnt work but the C++ game would. anyway -- i run the updater in a windows vm that has shared access to the game files, close the vm then run the game through wine. works.
You can play almost all solo games and most multi-player games depending on anti-cheat
Age of empires will be okay.
For reference, you can always check out these websites:
[0]: https://www.protondb.com/explore [1]: https://areweanticheatyet.com/
There was an article on the front page a few months ago that showed most games performed better on the Steam Deck with Linux than Windows.
Sure, Valve has done some amazing work in that regard. Most mainstream and older games just work, others require some tinkering.
If you must, Windows 11 Enterprise IoT LTSC is where the goodness is at. Less bloat, no ads, a frozen feature set (so they won't move your cheese every 6 months), 10 years of official support and security updates... it's like it's 1997 again! And you can install tools like Classic Shell (with its superior Start menu) to make it even better.
Linux doesn't have all the features that Windows has, features that I use daily. It also doesn't work with all of my games and software so it's a non starter for me still. Tried it several times but it always falls short of what I need. I do have it sandboxed in Windows but it's rare that it is needed for how I use a computer.
What specific features? Some people have specific software they need, but features really surprises me.
For me, one of them would be an actually working way of putting laptop to sleep. Screw you, modern standby.
That’s the exact same 'missing features' script people used to dismiss Apple during the height of the PC era.
Since 2008 I've been on linux as my daily driver. You'll find two laptops in my backpack: a macbook air and whatever linux machine I'm using for development. I'm almost to the point with the mac, I use it maybe once a month. So much works better on linux. The Mac (and occasions where I've tried Windows) is not nearly as easy to deal with as it was. Far too many decisions for the user to make, and far too many situation where you just aren't allowed. For example, I once fired up my macbook, only to be jarred by Apple News notifications about a gristly mass murder. While I sympathize with the victims, I do not want my routine broken by news out of my control. So I tried to get rid of Apple news only to be told by Apple support that was not possible.
My computer is mine. I do not want the manufacturer or author of the OS controlling it. Ever. Full stop.
I don’t really agree with the “Windows 11 is unstable” narrative, especially compared to the ways that system updates on macOS and Linux have not always been 100% stable.
The functionality of the iPhone connection to Linux is not unique to the platform, that works on Windows as well. iPhones present themselves as cameras when connected via USB and as the author found out, some apps present their internal storage for manipulation.
I’m surprised the author didn’t get KDE Connect to work. It’s a clutch app, and it’s even better for Android users. It’s one of the things that has had me consider switching to Android over iPhone (but there are still a couple of things I just can’t quite get over leaving behind like FaceTime for my non-technical family, the unmatched-by-competitors utility of AirTags, Siri Shortcuts, and my general feeling that without installing GrapheneOS, that Android is a less private and secure OS).
Can recommend https://system76.com and Pop!_OS https://youtu.be/IOp7g7BNzRE?si=IKm6SLIdedgHr-u3 even if the name "Pop OS" isn't my favorite.
Can you also add why and for who you recommend it?
Pop!_OS is a solid desktop tailoring of Ubuntu for the hardware.
I would not recommend Pop for server situations, as the desktop trim might be unneeded.
I like it because it's based on Ubuntu, so there's almost always a working guide/solution targeting it. It also ships with Nvidia drivers which saves a lot of headaches for some users. To me the game-changer is the fact that it supports tiling window management with minimal configuration.
It also looks and feels pretty sleek.
I don't know about the "you should too" part. I use Arch, it works fine for me but I am patient and want to use it. Realistically, I would expect the largest migration should be devs switching from mac to Linux. I don't see any reason at all to use a mac for development anymore.
Unfortunately Mac hardware is a huge leap ahead of anything else.
Most of those advantages are practically irrelevant for the majority of users or a matter of having gotten used to things being a certain way.
That just isn't true. Battery life, for example, is definitely not irrelevant for most users.
Mac battery life is insane - I agree. It is very impressive what they have done. Still, I prefer my ThinkPad running Arch even though it probably has 1/2 the battery life of my Macbook.
Most people sit at their desk with the laptop plugged into the socket and use the battery for meetings or in a cafeteria. Either takes maybe an hour or two, three hours tops.
So what? Most people don't care about battery, so let's just have a crap battery? That argument would work, if Apple released a super light laptop with a tiny battery, specially made for "most people who sit at their desk".
No, people do care about battery life. That's where Macs excel. (I'm saying this as a Thinkpad user, where getting 6-8hrs of battery is doable, if you don't do anything on the laptop).
my point is that foregoing a superior OS for reasons that are only relevant on paper is not logical.
Sure, there are pros and cons for everything. It also depends on circumstances. I remember in 2012 I'd dim the screen and play with cpufreqd to get maximum time out of a battery, because I had a 3h train ride to my university weekly, with no power sockets most of the time on the train. I barely could do 3h. Today, in age of cheap PD powerbanks and USB-C everywhere, I'd easily take a better OS over battery life.
No, the touchpad alone puts it way above every laptop I’ve tried
The touchpad is great, yes, I like it, too. But I'm anyway mostly using mouse and keyboard and occasionally the 3-finger-swipe which is possible with Thinkpad+Linux as well since a few years. Thinkpads are also famous for their touchpad/trackpoint if one doesn't fancy using a mouse.
> I'm anyway mostly using mouse and keyboard
Have you considered that you're using the mouse because the touchpad doesn't work as well on any other OS?
It's not the hardware, it's the software somehow that makes the touchpad usable in Mac OS.
i have been using macbooks for many years as that's usually the only corporate option next to thinkpad+windows. and i definitely prefer a logitech mouse.
Steelseries not good? Razer? Microsoft?
Has apple severely degraded the developer experience on MacOS recently or something?
You may not need it but no kernel support for containers / cgroups is a deal breaker for me. Windows at least makes an attempt with WSL. But, at the end of the day, most things are just about rationalizing what you want to use. I personally identify with Linux tribe, not Mac tribe therefore that is what I want to use.
I had no idea there was no kernel support for containers. I use containers a lot now but haven't used MacOS in years. Thanks for the info. (Fedora/ Windows user myself)
Omarchy is a nice experience for devs.
Funnily enough, though, you can get a very user friendly experience using Niri and Dank Linux (don't remember the exact name). It takes two 3 CLI commands to install, and the top bar incredibly cool, compared to the i3 defaults and even to what I remember of Gnome and KDE.
Next up: somebody comes up with a desktop environment called BTW.
It’s astonishing to me that Microsoft is letting go of all these users because someone drew something on whiteboard that looked like “force Microsoft Account on all users -> ??? -> Profit”, and has repeatedly done the same with Teams, Ads, Bing, OneDrive, use of WebView in essential components etc.
I’m not only saying that as a former Windows engineer, but as someone who actively uses Windows, OneDrive, Office, etc. Microsoft is hurting their userbase and that’s not a winning strategy in the long term.
But I’m sure some exec will eventually justify Windows’ decline caused by these thousand cuts as “inevitable outcome of macro-level changes in technological trends” or whatever.
> someone drew something on whiteboard that looked like “force Microsoft Account on all users -> ??? -> Profit”
The problem is not what people have drawn on the whiteboard.
The problem is all the long-term decisions and actual values that aren't there anymore.
I am on Linux for 26 years. Last 5 years I run PopOs! on my desktop. User friendly and stable, Ubuntu based.
Linux user for 25-ish years here, and exclusively so.
I used to heavily configure my ubuntu distros to be keyboard exclusive with i3wm and such, but I ended up with regolith desktop, a version of ubuntu with pre installed i3wm and keyboard focus. I'm too old to keep my dotfiles updated.
Nowadays, imo you should only choose the package manager, any os using that chosen package manager (aptitude for ubuntu) definitely had a version that's close enough to your use cases.
Similarly, I picked up Linux in 1997 and have used it as my primary since 1999. I've distro hopped through probably a dozen or so distros, but ultimately landed on PopOS for most of my machines, similarly to you. These threads are always somewhat disheartening, hearing everybody say they tried to switch but couldn't because of one issue or another. I guess I've just learned to work through it.
I thought this was Hacker News! How come dumping Windows for Linux in the year 2026 makes the headlines?
Easy karma on HN. We have these posts every couple of days.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46566465
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46483432
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46471199
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46457770
Oh, damn!
I bet 2027 will be the year when writing code by hand will be (re)discovered.
Hopefully.
Ah, so karma is a thing on HN as well. That would explain it.
Since 2001 I've used Red Hat, Mandrake, Slackware, Ubuntu, and Mint. I got rid of them at the first available opportunity. Elon Musk himself couldn't pay me enough to switch to Linux.
[dead]
For some reason, there's a huge amount of Hacker News readers who are still full-time Windows users. With the forced migration to Windows 11, I guess a lot of them are now not only trying out Linux for the first time (as a desktop system), but also for some reason going for Arch derivatives, which is always fun to see a beginner mess with LOL
It's been Eternal September for quite a few years now.
Today is the 11820th of September 1993.
Desktop Linux is still very niche, even in technical communities like HN.
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I bought a laptop in 2008 and in 2017 was forced to install W10. Well, the `08 hardware wasn't having it and I didn't have the cash to pony up for a new laptop so I installed Linux. Great decision.
There's definitely specific niche software that is restricted to MS and if you must use that, then by all means stay aboard. Otherwise, today's a great day to scroll distrowatch and pick your poison.
Yep, once I read microsoft was going to integrate that abomination co-pilot into the taskbar and desktop in general, I wiped my windows partition for good. I didn't even back anything up. I have fedora servers at work, but I just need a stable and performant OS at home to do some remote work, hobby coding, and connect to some telescope equipment. So I just run Ubuntu LTS - why? because I don't need to spend my time nerding out on ricing a linux distro, I have better things to do with my time. The same goes for Windows, I have better things to do than try to get an operating system to work - and there lies the big rub. Linux is easy enough now for anyone who is decent at windows to learn and use, and it's free, upgradable, tons of support available, and WORKS BETTER.
As I'm typing this, on my work windows PC, the taskbar icons aren't rendering. Generally the graphics are slow, Microsoft outlook randomly freezes my entire computer, and occasionally my USB drives turn on/off if I'm plugged into a docking station. I experience exactly zero of these issues when running
First you don't have to dump anything to use Linux. The whole thing should not be as antogonistic.
I switched to Linux, Arch btw, Omarchy, sometime last year when it was announced. I installed it on my old Thinkpad and it worked wonderfully, for most part. I realized that I am more productive there in real sense and experience is more delightful.
When I would go back to Mac, I would realize I need several clicks to accomplish something I had on shortcut available. Having websites/apps on shortcuts as an app is huge help. Also working on command line is really much more focused.
Sometimes in September I plugged Thinkpad to desktop setup and in December I set my powerful computer to Omarchy as well.
It isn't seamless experience, there are issues switching from speakers to headphones and dictation can be hard to setup. Overall whole machine seems more powerful and interesting to work on.
This is first time in many years that I can both play and work on same machine which is definitely welcome and surprising.
One more thing to note, nowadays Arch is more stable then Ubunty and works better. However, any distro you pick, you should be happy with, especially if you want to do work, you should just pick and stick with distro.
At some point it is not that Linux is better, it's about rejecting the decisions made by a company blinded by profits.
Yeah this is what switched me. I was forever complaining about wall gardens and yet was too 'comfortable' with my macbook-pro as it was the best laptop period.
I switched to a thinkpad x1-carbon and popos and never looked back. Sure I would love 10 hour battery life, but it's not THAT big of deal (for me) to carry a charger.
new intel cpus might change that as long as standby is fixed :)
My last Windows was Windows 95 (or 98?). I've been exclusively using Linux for ~25 years. I use Ubuntu because I've been using it for ~20 years and have better things to do than try out different distros. My mother, my grandmother, and many of my non-computer-savvy friends also use Ubuntu. I know a Germanist who uses Debian.
It's a bit like with cars. If you know someone who really knows about cars, they'll be able to recommend a solid, simple, super cheap, practical car that will just work and give you no problems. It'll probably be something like a 2010 Toyota Aygo, which you can pick up for next to nothing on the used car market (here in Germany) and which you would never have thought of buying yourself. This is a Linux laptop. Other people who never got this insider tip that driving can be cheap and hassle-free might instead buy a new car from a German manufacturer on credit for half a gross annual salary (or even a whole one). Two years later, the car may already be in the repair shop because the engine is losing oil or because the Nanoslide/Nikasil cylinder liner coating is damaged.
With the Aygo, you can drive from A to B just as well as with any other car, and you might even have a little more fun doing so. But if you need CarPlay and heated seats, distrust things that are cheap, and love that je ne sais quoi that comes with things you've just bought for a lot of money, then this simple 2010 Aygo is not for you.
This weekend, I wrote code for a non-trivial compiler on my old everyday laptop. I didn't even buy it; I got it for free because the previous owner considered the device obsolete and unusable. Slowly, the thing is getting too old for me too, but Linux (Ubuntu) has gotten another couple of years of use out of it. Meanwhile, a friend of mine just bought a used Macbook that still cost more than I would ever spend on a new laptop because she has to write papers for her studies and thinks she needs a “good” computer for that.
The real issue is the lack of support. Real users buy those support packages from vendors. They bring their PC in to be fixed at their local shop. They might Google a problem and find a solution occasionally of they are feeling spicy but how often do you get screenshots to get something to work in a Linux GUI? Web browser only laptops are great until your uncle gets a "killer deal" on some random printer on Facebook marketplace and they can't get it to work. Or a webcam. Or a Bluetooth headset. Or a game controller. Scanner. etc etc.
On top of all of this, they will just give up and buy a new machine and return it if that doesn't fix their issue.
Linux provides virtually nothing on any of those fronts unless you get a private level 8 tech support contact provided by your grandson. Who wants to be 24/7 on call for their extended family?
I can recommend the other way round:
For un-bricking my phone, I had to use some proprietary windows-only software. So I took an old Laptop and installed Windows 10.
Installing it was such a pain already. So many dark patterns, so many privacy issues. I even had to create a microsoft account!
After the deed was done, I closed the Laprop, went back to my Linux system and enjoyed it even more :-)
I don't know why people jump into obscure/difficult distros as a first round... it's like you want to fail. Just use a something simple like Fedora + KDE. NONE of the issues the author would be a problem here out of the box.
I also switched to Linux last month. It hasn't been a smooth experience with my GPU as I'm encountering memory leaks in popular compositors. I also get 150-200ms keyboard input delay in all games using some compositors but not all. I documented as much as I could here https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/gpu-memory-allocation-bugs-wi....
Still, despite all of that when it works it is better than Windows. It's just ironic that my Linux desktop is less stable than Windows 10 since I have to reboot 2-3 times a day from GPU memory leaks. Windows 10 was really stable with the same hardware and had no input delay in games. I only rebooted when the OS pushed an update since I keep my machine on 24 / 7.
It would be fair to mention that this is happening for you with a decade old GPU using an EOL driver, which sucks, but is unlikely to be a common experience.
> It would be fair to mention that this is happening for you with a decade old GPU using an EOL driver, which sucks, but is unlikely to be a common experience.
The drivers are still getting maintained by NVIDIA until August 2026. They also got classified as "legacy" on paper 1 day before I installed them.
The compositor memory leak is affecting a lot of people. Since COSMIC and niri both use the same one (smithay), there's threads on GitHub with people using modern GPUs, both NVIDIA and AMD who experience it. There's a lot of replies across all of the different open issues.
The GPU allocation issue on Wayland (separate from the memory leak) also has hundreds of replies on the NVIDIA developer forums with people using new NVIDIA cards with the latest drivers.
The thing is, most people don't talk about either of them because if you have 8+ GB of GPU memory and turn your computer off every night then you won't experience this problem since all GPU memory allocations get reset on shutdown. It happens to be more of a direct problem for me because I have 2 GB of GPU memory but that doesn't mean the problem isn't common. The root cause is still there. Even if I switched to an AMD GPU the niri / smithay memory leak would be present. Instead of rebooting twice a day, if the GPU had 8 GB of memory I'd have to reboot every 2 days (x4 basically).
Since I opened that issue on GitHub NVIDIA did acknowledge it and suggested I try their experimental egl-wayland2 library. I did try that and it hasn't fixed it fully but it has made GPU memory allocations more stable. It even fixed 1 type of leak in niri. This library is decoupled from the drivers themselves as far as I know. I mean, this same library could still be used for the 590 series, it's not 580 specific which means it's not dependent on your GPU model.
> The compositor memory leak is affecting a lot of people. Since COSMIC and niri both use the same one (smithay), there's threads on GitHub with people using modern GPUs, both NVIDIA and AMD who experience it. There's a lot of replies across all of the different open issues.
But then this sounds like a bug in that particular compositor rather than the driver(s)?
fwiw, I have a modern nvidia card, and use the proprietary drivers, and Wayland (KDE/KWin), and that box has a few weeks of uptime.
> But then this sounds like a bug in that particular compositor rather than the driver(s)?
The NVIDIA GPU memory allocation issue affects all NVIDIA cards, at least based on that forum post where there's a good amount of people replying with similar issues with a large combo of cards + drivers.
You probably don't notice it because you rarely ever use all of your GPU's memory at once. Try running `watch nvidia-smi` and then open multiple copies of every hardware accelerated app you have available. Once you reach nearly the max GPU memory apps will either start crashing or fail to open and if you get semi-unlucky your compositor (including KDE on Wayland) will crash if it's the app trying to allocate resources to render the window. I've had plasmashell or kwin hard lock / crash many times with just a small amount of testing.
The expectation is the driver allocates those memory resources to system memory instead of denying the memory to the app. It works correctly in X11 or if you have an AMD card, in Wayland and X11.
The leak is separate and is compositor specific, possibly related to NVIDIA driver bugs (to some degree) but this leak wouldn't be experienced unless you used this compositor. This leak is the compositor doesn't release any GPU memory after any window is closed, so simply opening and closing apps will cause the leak. Combine this with the first problem and that's how you end up rebooting every few hours with a lower end GPU. AMD and NVIDIA are affected.
The post goes into all of these details and there's reproducible tests, and even demo videos showing the first GPU memory allocation problem in Plasma Wayland but not Plasma X11. It also links to all of the related GitHub issues that I could find.
For that old of a GPU you may have a better time on X instead of wayland - there the NVIDIA drivers are supposed to be pretty decent.
This was, still is and for the foreseeable future it'll be bad advice. Stay on Windows 10 as long as you can. With LTSC IoT that's 2032. We will figure out something then.
It doesn't work. Right now the main issue is Wayland vs X where Wayland is not working and will never work because the underlying ideas and goals do not align with that of a desktop. Someone described X as ALSA, Wayland as PulseAudio and we are waiting for PipeWire to arrive. Maybe Phoenix will sweep in to save the day, maybe something else will.
Also, hardware and software issues will always be there because the incentives are not there.
I swear Linux on the desktop adherents sound like they have some sort of Stockholm Syndrome but of course in reality just cognitive dissonance explains it.
Is the IoT version of Windows 10 a full desktop? I tried it on my Raspberry Pi when it was released for free but I didn't get past booting. I dropped it because I didn't understand what it was, or what I was supposed to do with it and I wasn't curious enough to find out. This is your suggestion for my grandmother over some simple Linux distro with a browser?
> Wayland is not working and will never work because the underlying ideas and goals do not align with that of a desktop.
Can you elaborate on this?
I don't use Wayland because it lacks something I need (unprivileged Scroll Lock LED control) but I'm curious about what else keeps people from using it.
This was true for a majority of users even fairly recently, but the 'niche' for which Linux is a better option has grown such that those who are worse off with Linux (better off with Windows) are becoming the 'niche'.
>Wayland is not working
What's your source on that? I have been using it for years. Skill issue?
I'm still on X because I'm too comfortable with dwm and I've never had problems with Wayland the few times I've tried KDE/Gnome. That said blaming the user for lacking skill for basic stuff like copy/paste between applications or screen sharing isn't constructive. Those features should just work and shouldn't require skill. Building a niche window manager from source is a different discussion.
Alright, good point. Sorry for my bad first comment, I am just a bit defensive after all these years of people saying Wayland is unusable. The problems you describe with screen sharing are likely because of missing xdg-portal implementation (the implementation depends on your setup).
>Those features should just work and shouldn't require skill.
Maybe, yeah. But we are on hacker news, I assumed people would be open to hacking on things, but the comments are always very much not like that.
I switched my laptop (Surface Laptop Go) from Win11 to Tumbleweed, and its great. Mainly because Windows kept getting slower, and arguably Win11 isn't great for an 8GB system. OpenSuse is a great distro.
But my gaming PC and primary workstation remains Win11, and always will be (windows, that is). Notably Suse under WSL2 works great there as well, and my Kubes workflow is just as easy with PowerShell commands as it is with bash.
OS's have purposes, and arguably there is no single platform that is better than the others in every way - Windows is better for games and is more stable across different hardware and configurations. Linux is much lighter, more intentional, and for me better for infosec and some coding activities.
For a normal User I think Linux has been almost perfect for decades. For Games Windows still had some advantage. But for developing software I really didn't like Linux. The windows API is very stable. In Linux constantly new problems showed up. E.g. some window-manager suddenly started stealing my focus, just because it wants to have the focus on an irrelevant Edit-Field somewhere... If Linux wants to be the standard I think it should have a stable Api first. And I don't have much hope in Gnome and KDE doing anything like that.
I am pretty sure that my previous attempts at a Linux desktop have failed because I would tweak my setup by installing packages and updates until I broke it and needed to reinstall. But I want my machine to be indestructible and "just work". Waiting day(s) to diagnose and fix an issue just isn't worth it. I have been contemplating a switch to Linux again. This time, I will embrace a LTS distribution and virtualization so that my tinkering doesn't break things. I always want a safe level to fall back to. Also, I would enthusiastically pay for a support subscription. I know they are out there. Which companies/organizations have the most positive impact in the open source community?
Not a popular opinion, but RedHat (now IBM) funds an enormous amount of critical open source. They pay people to contribute to hundreds of upstream projects. And RHEL is 100% focused on stability. Sounds like a good match for your priorities / goals.
There is no meaningful support subscription for end users, only enterprise. If you want to donate pick specific small projects you like.
I don’t understand how someone breaks a system but look into immutable options like Fedora Silverblue.
It has been a few years, but for example breaking the display, bluetooth, power states/sleep, or wifi. Or subtly messing up dependencies of various other packages that I was trying. I just don't want the overhead of system administration. These days I mostly use VMs or WSL. But I am thinking that I want my host OS to be Linux.
Immutable saves you from packaging issues but configuration always has to happen to some degree. To help there maybe use file system snapshots (btrfs) to rollback changes.
From what I remember, trying to fix configuration was mostly to recover from whatever broken state package/distro updates caused. Thanks for the Silverblue suggestion. In recent years, I enjoyed using Pop!_OS, at least on VMs.
I went Arch recently as well for about 6 months but am now back on Windows. I was impressed by the amount of games that "just work" but ultimately went back for the few that didn't. Had issues on BF6 and major performance issues on Borderlands 4.
I can't fully switch because of audio plugins but I'm using Linux, Windows, and macOS anyway because I'm creating cross-platform apps. I think it's best to use all common operating systems and stay proficient with them.
I've linked it multiple times on HN already but winapps (https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps) can be a game-changer for people relying on some Windows-only software.
It sets up a Windows machine in Docker where you can install your apps, then you'll get .desktop applications that starts the program in the VM and use RDP to only show the app window – it feels nearly native. I've even bought an Office 2024 license to improve some VBA Excel macros for a client.
> After a Windows update (that I didn't choose to do) wiped that partition and, consequently, the Linux installation
WHAT? How people could tolerate a software that wipes partitions without asking? I mean, I can see that it can be handy if OS managed partitions by itself without asking a user what to do, but if it leads to removing user created partitions, it is a no go.
A long time ago I tried to install Mandrake Linux. In the installation process I started to change partition table and wiped it all, due to a fact that Mandrake Linux used its own custom made partition managed written in Perl that applied changes to a partition table as they arrive. I was used to fdisk, that accumulate changes and allows to review them before applying, the behavior of Mandrake's partition manages was completely alien for me. It was the first and the last time I touched Mandrake or its successor Mandriva or anything with "Mand" in front, even despite the fact that it was my mistake, I should've learned more about the partition manager before using it. It was hard (or maybe impossible) to do in an installer, but it is not an excuse. It was the last time I used installers to install Linux, I don't trust them anymore.
But people are tolerating windows that can wipe a partition when you even do not touch them. I can empathize the author ditching Windows.
It is a known and fairly common dual booting people gets hit with in that windows update rewrite the dual booting setup, it is possible that the author misunderstood what had happened and that it could have been fixed by just fixing the boot setup.
That should of course not be necessary, but it could have saved a few hours of setup if that was the case.
It makes sense. Yes, if OS rewrites the booting setup sometimes, it is kinda tolerable.
I never understood the Linux guys. All that matters to a common user is the user interface and whether their apps and games run or not. They don't care about telemetry, architecture etc. The damn thing should just work and it should allow familiar interactions.
I have tried switching to Linux several times over the decades. It required many compromises on the interface and compatibilities. Why is it so difficult to slap on a clone of Windows or Mac UI on Linux? I'm not saying they are good. But it avoids the feel of moving to an alien land and learn everything afresh. People don't have time for that.
This is why I recommend macOS to everyone. It's the only OS that is truly polished and where you don't have to worry about viruses and everything just works. mac could be better, but it's still leading the pack. People don't want the OS to become their hobby.
MacOS has its warts and 'unpolish' as well, as it also gets viruses despite what Apple may want you to believe.
I dislike what Microsoft is doing to Windows as much as the next guy but if you get Windows Pro and disable all the icky stuff it is a rock solid OS that just works. Sure, once a year an update might add some new icky stuff but then you just spend 10 minutes to find out how to disable that and go about your business. It. Just. Works.
Windows is prone to getting malware and ransomware. When you buy a new Macbook, you can use the Migration Assistant to move all your apps and files to the new Mac. With Windows there's no easy way. On Mac, apps are almost always safe and not going to crap up your computer. With Windows you have to be wary. Windows usually comes with bloatware, Mac doesn't. Windows you have to manage and install drivers and always update them and sometimes they break. With Mac, drivers and updates are seamless.
I daily drive Windows since Win 95 but there are rough edges that less technical people get cut on.
What the hell are you doing to get malware? I have never had a virus ever. And I only keep Windows Defender running in the background. Though I doubt I'd even need that. Bloatware – yes. Uninstall it once and it's gone. Once or twice a year a new thing might pop up. Uninstall that and be done with it. Do you really have to manage drivers or is that just on old wives' tale? I sure as hell don't manage drivers. Windows Update will install any driver I need automatically. Only driver I upgrade manually is GPU a couple times a year when there is a new game that can take advantage of it. Really, that whole driver story is just a bunch of lies since at least Windows 10.
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Have you tried Linux with KDE? Feels more Windows-ish than modern Windows
Trademarks and other intellectual property rights prevent cloning those.
I switched to Debian/Cinnamon few weeks ago. I am fairly good with the server sides of things, but the desktop a little painful.
Screens dont wake up properly, sometimes only one screens wakes up, sometimes one screen wakes up with a wrong resolution. The usual linux desktop problems where nothing really works and finding a solution is very hard to many different permutations of hardware / os / kernel / drivers / window manager / etc.
I have the framework desktop with AMD 395+
My windows ssd is plugged and I can boot it directly using virt-manager, so thats kinda solves some windows specific stuff like tax software.
You are using a distro that is generally very behind on software versions and doesn’t bundle non free software (Debian) on a laptop with brand new hardware. Additionally, you are running a DE (cinnamon) which is really designed for a specific distro (Mint) which you are not using.
If you want stuff to just work you might want to try using a more up to date distro with a mainstream desktop. Stock Ubuntu or Fedora would probably work fine for you.
debian 13 is using kernel 6.12 vs ubuntu 24 6.14. I don't think it's a kernel issue, and more that amd drivers aren't there yet for the new hardware.
running the latest also is problematic, i.e. a new kernel upgrade that blows thing up.
and that's the main difference between linux and windows, windows just works, osx just works, linux is a minefield of different quirks.
The amd drivers might not there, and they will continue to not be there on the version of the kernel you are using and choosing to be stuck on by using Debian. Drivers are part of the kernel in Linux, it’s not how windows works. Ubuntu and Fedora are not unstable, you are just choosing pain for yourself.
>Drivers are part of the kernel in Linux
While the drivers at the runtime are part of the kernel, they are not distributed as part of the kernel.
My drivers are *latest* -> 6.16.6.30200100-2255209.24.04
https://instinct.docs.amd.com/projects/amdgpu-docs/en/latest...
Debian is *stable*, but you are so far only proving my point in my original post.
If you are going to download ubuntu, the version proposed is 24.04 that has older kernel version than my debian 13.
https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop -> Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS -> Kernel 6.8
> Debian is stable,
Stable in Linux language is a synonym for OLD. Don't let any stable OSes near any hardware that is newer than the release, and you'll be fine.
Linux 6.12 was released back in 2024, which is several months earlier than the hardware you have. So the reasonable expectation is that there is a high chance that fixes for it won't be in yet.
And use the builtin AMD drivers, you shouldn't have to touch those assuming other choices were done ok.
This is just false. Amdgpu is an in tree kernel module and has been forever. https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/gpu/amdgpu/index.html
If you are installing via an outside method, again, you are going agasint the grain for no good reason and making problems for yourself.
Nobody is suggesting installing LTS on brand new hardware.
>This is just false. Amdgpu is an in tree kernel module and has been forever. https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/gpu/amdgpu/index.html
You are arguing and arguing and shifting goal posts as we go.
The facts are:
* I am running the latest amdgpu video driver.
* AI 395 wasn't released yesterday, but a year ago.
* (My original point) Many different permutations of hardware / os / kernel / drivers / window manager / etc.
I highly doubt that installing Ubuntu 25.10 will fix the issue. Can you provide that guarantee? No. Then we can stop talking.
I’m not shifting any goal posts. I’m just tired of these posts from people saying that Linux is unstable, has quirks, etc but when you dig into it, all of the “quirks” are actually the result of strange decisions made by the author.
It’s fine to be new to Linux, but please refrain from the sweeping generalizations until you are more familiar with how it works.
Honestly, just switching to a kernel that isn't older than your hardware have a decent chance of fixing your issues. It is typically fine to upgrade kernels unless the distro has made some special modifications to them, and it was a very long time since I was hit by something like that.
Fedora is 6.18, it’s like you did not notice the word Fedora, and chose shitty clone of Debian instead of Debian. Of course it worse, no need to prove that. Get Fedora.
This has been my issue as well - screens waking or not waking up. On latest Linux Mint and everything is great except when switching back and forth inputs between my personal and work laptop (running Windows), I have to do it twice going to my personal laptop or else the external monitor won't show.
I did this sometime in 2022. First I was using POP OS but I wanted to have something more up to date so I gave an Arch based distro a shot, EndeavourOS has been my go to for a full year without any feel of missing out on another distro or features. Yay is the best thing to happen to Arch Linux and its derivatives.
I feel like Pacman is the real reason for instability with people who dont understand how Pacman works messing up upgrade commands and not getting all their dependencies properly updated. When I tried Manjaro like ten years ago it was a mess.
I watched gnome evolve to the point where your calendar notifies you of meetings 10 minutes prior and has a join button which runs the appropriate application. I also get notifications for new emails and slack messages. Last week I was pleasantly surprised by
We are in a good place.I installed CachyOS on a spare ssd with the idea that if it became a headache I would go back to windows. All my games work, even weird open source ones. All my sounds, monitor, kvm switch, volume rockers, Bluetooth game controllers, headsets, everything works with zero issue. Cuda works, I can run ML models, and it all works much better and faster than Windows. There's been no reason so far to switch back. Next, I'll wipe my NVME drive and be done with windows for good.
My non technical friend she choose to try installing linux and picked mint. I laughed and I was sure she would brick it at least once but its been over 6 month and the system is still running fine. She did end up dual booting windows because there are a few games which were to hard for her to get setup and some that will never work. I think dual booting is fine its a good pressure release valve as long as you're spending most of the time booting into linux.
My home nvidia desktop is running CachyOS and it's been an overall good experience. 99% of the apps I need just run without issue, and I've only needed to apply a few minor tweaks to get my other laptop set up (switched to deep sleep). As a long time Fedora fan, I was not sure about switching to CachyOS but the performance has been marginally better under heavy use-cases. However, Fedora is fine and can be tweaked to get most of the same benefits though.
Wish I could too. I ended up running Windows, Linux and MacOS. While gaming is getting there, tools in many many domains are still unsupported, e.g. Office, Adobe, Audio Production. No OS is perfect and running all three is the way for the most comprehensive experience for people with interests in multiple domains.
I love desktop linux. I've used it on and off since 2000. Even with Valve's excellent work on gaming, there's still whole software categories that require Windows. Pro audio software is very Windows reliant and I don't see it changing. If you're a software developer, there are many benefits to using and deeply learning linux. But even as a linux super-geek, I don't expect to ditch Windows entirely any time soon.
I tried it (PopOS) on my old gaming laptop. It worked when it worked but when it didn't, it REALLY didn't. Linux unfortunately does not support my preferred (which I use semi-professionally) photo software, either (Capture One). Linux desktop feels like nuclear power to me - I've tried switching many many times over the last 20 years and it's just never quite there. I even use a lot of the open source solutions for office software etc. already, just on Windows.
I installed Bazzite on a slightly esoteric machine, a 16" dual-screen Asus laptop. It's not really my cup of tea as a distribution, either philosophically or practically, but it has some specific patches for Asus hardware and as a result it seems to work better in every way than Windows. Every couple of months I'm annoyed for a moment by all the immutability stuff and the package system, but for both work and play it's running perfectly.
Frankly I'd love to switch from Windows to Linux. But it's the applications. My last attempt to switch got hung up on a few things (in order if importance, probably):
- Quicken. I have 30 years of personal financial data in quicken. I'm not completely opposed to migrating to something else, but I haven't seen a good substitute. I'd probably have to learn double entry bookkeeping, and I'm unsure if other software could still download data from my bank and investment accounts. I'm sure as hell not going to start entering transactions manually (ugh).
- Ableton live. I do have a copy of bitwig, but I am unfamiliar with its workflow, and would have to figure out which of my vsts I would lose, and it seems a big pain in the ass.
- Plex server. For some reason, out of the box this was dog slow. Because of the other issues, I was unwilling to spend the time to try to figure out what was going on with this.
- The are games I would probably lose, but honestly there are so many games available I doubt I would care that much.
How many hundreds of hours am I gonna have to take to figure this all out before I have a working system again? Not my idea of a good time even if I like the outcome.
Edit: and this is from somebody who loves the idea of Linux! I first installed 0.11 or 0.12 way back in the early 90s from a stack of floppies!
> - Quicken. I have 30 years of personal financial data in quicken. I'm not completely opposed to migrating to something else,
Genuinely curious - outside of personal satisfaction/scratching the itch to store data, does personal financial data dating 30 years ago serve any practical purpose?
Occasionally I want to see what I paid for something, or when it happened, or who the vendor was. So if I can't migrate the data somehow, I'd still have to keep a copy of quicken around to access that old data even if I was using some other software for current data.
I might be willing to give all that up if I could find something that worked for new transactions, but I haven't found it yet.
Based on your assessment you’d have almost no issue at all.
I’m almost certain you’d have no trouble running Quicken or Ableton. Ableton even has a Bottles configuration available, which is a one-click GUI install:
https://usebottles.com/app/#abletonlive
Isn’t Quicken also primarily a web/cloud app now?
Of course, if Wine-based solutions really don’t work, you also have the option to run a VM or dual boot for those one-off needs.
Your comment on plex server seems odd. It seems like most people run it via Docker, I can’t imagine what kind of Linux-specific issue you had. Docker/podman on Linux is quite superior to the experience on Mac and Windows.
As far as games, I have trouble finding games that don’t work. Steam and other launchers for other stores have pretty much eliminated this issue. There are even some online games with anti-cheat software that work in Linux.
Hundreds of hours? No, not really. Not these days. I know it’s hard to believe me but I went through this same thing switching from macOS to Linux last year. I was shocked, I almost thought my experiment would fail and I’d go back. But no, it’s so solid and a bunch of stuff I expected to not work just…worked. (I chose Bazzite as my distribution on a Framework 13).
Current quicken doesn't run on Linux, and the web version doesn't connect to any online investment accounts as far as I know, only bank accounts.
Ableton would still have the issue of: which plugins can I still somehow get to work? And which do I just lose? And then: how reliable is it? Does it really just work, or am I gonna be fighting glitches all the time?
I suspect part of the problem might be a mental block on my end. I spent 25 years as a sysadmin before I retired, and the idea of going back to that is just not acceptable. And I know it would be hundreds of hours because that's what I spent last time I tried to make the switch a few months ago.
I know it’s not the same application but Quicken Simplifi definitely connects to investment accounts.
Hundreds of hours makes me wonder what distribution you chose…I think if you choose something that’s more designed to work out of the box as a ready to go solution you might have a better experience. For example, since I like occasionally playing games, I chose Bazzite which comes with all the gaming stuff installed already and is an immutable OS that “just works.”
And for sure, I think trying to shoehorn complicated non-Linux applications into your Linux workflow might waste your time. I tried this with Autodesk Fusion and I almost got it to work. But it didn’t work. So I just use that on Windows, but it’s also nice to not be bothering with Windows for the majority of what I do.
The way I do it is that my laptop is Linux and my desktop is on Windows and I can just RDP into it over WireGuard to use Windows apps. So I guess this is cheating: ideally my desktop also leaves Windows but I haven’t made that leap.
I am very interested in the Steam Machine, because it will be an out-of-the-box Linux experience with (hopefully) no tweaking required. Hardware designed for Linux gaming from the beginning. I'm willing to put up with worse performance per dollar to not have to spend time tweaking the thing myself, similar to a game console.
I think Steam Machine + macOS laptop + NAS running debian headless is my personal compute plan for the next few years.
I'm not interested in the Steam Machine, but I DO am interested in switching my gaming PC to Steam OS! I hope the Steam Machine will put more pressure on getting Steam OS to the masses.
I have an old Lenovo IdeaPad with fairly modest hardware, and I have both Fedora and Windows installed. About 90% of the time I use Fedora, and it works fine overall. The only thing that bothers me is that Firefox on Fedora feels noticeably more sluggish compared to Edge or Firefox on Windows. Maybe it’s just a perception issue, but I’d love to know what others are using as their web browser on Linux.
Edge is based on Chromium. I'd test any Chromium based browsers (Chrome, Brave, Vivaldi, etc) to see if performance is better.
> My laptop is a 2014 MacBook Air, which is still a pretty solid machine.
as a long-term contributor to a website that benchmarks (quite extensively!) notebooks of all sorts, quite interesting to see the choice of portable machine.
quite aligned with the overall take and was well-supported with examples.
As soon as the wizards at wine figure out how to get the ricochet kernel level tpm anti cheat stuff for Call Or Duty 7 and similar games working I am nuking windows. But alas playing COD zombies is how I unwind and it’s a no go on Linux. So I have a windows install
Anyone suggesting "you should too" switch to Linux is signing up to a whole lot of troubleshooting work for their friends that listened to them. Anyone somewhat technical, sure, but not anyone.
I moved from Windows about 10 years ago and it took 6 months to click. It was an enlightening experience, like the curtains had been drawn back. The only comparable experience was finally clicking with NixOS, about 18 months ago. Will never go back to any other Linux distro.
Even though the author trivialized the problems he had getting his laptop up and running, there were enough obstacles to keep 90% of non-techies from actually getting it working. How many normies have a USB ethernet laying around and understand enough to uninstall drivers that are interfering with the UI?
It's next to impossible to get windows up and running if you dare not get a computer with it preinstalled, AHCI drivers are almost never included in the installation disc. And windows support gives you links to self installing exe files which you can't run, because you presumably run a linux live cd to be able to access the internet and ask for help, and exe files don't run on it, and can't be accessed by the windows installer either.
Then windows and intel support decide to blame the customer, because it's never their company's fault. Sample conversation: https://community.intel.com/t5/Rapid-Storage-Technology/Inte...
> AHCI drivers are almost never included in the installation disc
This was a valid argument with... Windows 9x and XP. Today, not.
Getting Windows up and running isn't necessarily easier. There was a recent review of a handheld Windows device that needed unauthorized hidden driver updates to get performance to match Steam OS. The only way to avoid this type of stuff is to get a Laptop with Ubuntu or Windows preinstalled.
Windows is not exactly free of this sort of nonsense either. Just recently I built a new PC for a friend, and we wanted to keep using his old SSD and Windows installation. After messing about with Bitlocker recovery keys which was already cumbersome enough, we ran into a catch-22 issue where we needed internet access to be able to log in and verify his Microsoft account, but we needed to install a driver for the new motherboard's networking chipset first, for which you need to be able to log in to an account first. Eventually we found that you can use USB tethering from a phone to gain internet access, for which no special driver is needed, which got around the issue but it was not exactly an obvious solution.
Non-techies neither build their own pc, nor do they bother with bitlocker...
I can't use Linux because it doesn't have offline installers (without hacks and workarounds), even if I were willing to ditch decades worth of engineering software, Adobe and old games.
I am replacing Win11 with Win10 and Win7.
What? You can just put the executable in your path (in simpler terms put the program where the OS will look for it). You have the install command which does that and sets some permissions. That's not a hack that's just how it works. There's also apt-offline[0] which is apt (the package manager on Debian/Ubuntu and the rest) but wait for it... offline.
Of course you will need to get the source or the executable on the machine by some method, such as a USB or whatever. But I'm pretty sure Windows or Mac can't create software out of thin air either. Can you give me an example of a workflow that you use on Windows that you would like on Linux? I'm pretty sure I can help you solve it without hacks.
If you forget what you believe "installing" software means I'm sure you can learn to appreciate Linux and maybe even see that it's simpler and easier than Windows.
[0]: https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/bionic/man8/apt-offline...
Some of the games I am playing only run on Windows. Thats's the biggest obstacle for me to adopt Linux.
Do they require anti-cheat kernel drivers? If not, there's a good chance proton/steam to runs them.
I tried Linux again recently. Microsoft needs to be deleted, but this plan is still delusional. Linux is way too confusing for preventable reasons, not even talking about compatibility with Windows stuff.
I'm no Linux expert, but if a SWE has a hard time with it, can't imagine how an average person is supposed to use this. Yeah it's learnable, but nobody wants to. Come back when I can install Linux on a PC, not a "distro" but just Linux, no choices for random stuff like DEs unless you're an expert. And that's necessary, not sufficient.
You are learning an entirely different operating system. You're going to have to make some choices and do some research/learn new things. There will be challenges because it's something completely different from what you know.
The entire point of Linux is there isn't just one Linux, having centralized control of an OS is how Mac and Windows ended up so godawful.
As time goes on the UX will continue to improve (through targeted distros) for less sophisticated users, but we're realistically only now at the point where everything in the ecosystem is "good enough" for a large number of people.
I've been using Linux on and off for a decade+, and it's a moving target. There is one Linux kernel, they can make one Linux OS. (and ofc people can fork but it should remain niche)
Meanwhile I can go on Windows after years and still know how to use it. Last version I daily used was 98, but 11 is still intuitive (despite being annoying).
Which distro and shell you've tried? I believe this makes a lot of difference, and there are distros that are catering for average users, but I have no ideia if it works.
Ubuntu, Mint, Debian lately. Tons of others before. bash shell
At some point Ubuntu had Gnome2 and only apt for packages, that made more sense than now
It boils down to hardware support. Look at games like CS2, you need the max performance to play, and so far windows is just more optimized, as the driver authors prioritize it.
I just turned 60. My first computer was a 4.77MHz IBM PC with an 8088 processor, two floppy drives, and that magnificent mechanical keyboard IBM shipped in those days. My father, clearly receiving excellent financial advice at the time, picked up a 300bps Hayes modem for the princely sum of $599. CompuServe, here I come!
For context, this was early 1982. That 599 would cost 1,900 today — still a lot for a modem, but not quite the "gazillion" I remembered. Still, it illustrates just how far we've come.
Since then, I've written software professionally for over 40 years (with varying degrees of success). I've owned well over 200 computers — roughly 90% Wintel machines and 10% MacBooks. I've built them, repaired them, debugged them, and occasionally, after particularly frustrating days, set them back together again. I like to think I know my way around a PC.
Six months ago, I decided it was time. "This is the year of the Linux desktop on my machine," I declared, and I meant it. I installed over 20 of the most popular distributions from DistroWatch and used each one for at least two weeks. I was on a mission to rediscover the joy of computing.
For a while, it was genuinely fun. The sheer number of options was overwhelming in the best way possible. Customization everywhere I looked. All those incredible free software packages waiting in the repositories. In the beginning, I didn't even mind that I found myself doing full reinstalls every two or three days due to random instabilities. I was living the dream. Desktop effects and visual flair? Bring it on. Why does Compiz get so much criticism these days? What's more satisfying than a beautifully animated window?
Six weeks in, things changed. The Linux installations started to degrade — subtle at first, then undeniable. Random slowdowns. Browser links that wouldn't register for 10 or 15 seconds. The kind of frustration that makes you stare at the screen and wonder what's happening under the hood. It was consistent across distributions, which suggests this wasn't just a bad package here or there. Something fundamental was happening.
And yes, I'm aware of the irony. The system celebrated for its stability and reliability was the one leaving me longing for a responsive desktop environment. But that's exactly what I experienced, and I gave each distribution a fair shot.
There's also the practical reality: I'm a heavy Ableton Live user, and dual-booting has become increasingly grating. The Linux audio ecosystem has made real progress, but for my specific workflow, it's not there yet. Maybe in another year or two.
So I'm back on Windows 11. It works. It doesn't surprise me. After four decades, I'm okay with "it works" as a primary criterion.
Will I try Linux again? Maybe. The ecosystem continues to improve, and who knows what the next wave of AI-assisted tools might change. But for now, I wanted to share an honest account of what I encountered — because I genuinely wanted Linux to win.
What Linux distributions did you try?
What hardware were you using?
What kind of troubleshooting did you perform?
>> Six weeks in, things changed. The Linux installations started to degrade — subtle at first, then undeniable. Random slowdowns. Browser links that wouldn't register for 10 or 15 seconds. The kind of frustration that makes you stare at the screen and wonder what's happening under the hood. It was consistent across distributions, which suggests this wasn't just a bad package here or there. Something fundamental was happening.
Without more details it would be difficult to determine what problems you were having.
I have never had problems like you describe with Linux. I would be interested to know more details.
> The Linux installations started to degrade — subtle at first, then undeniable. Random slowdowns. Browser links that wouldn't register for 10 or 15 seconds.
Very interesting. It is something I've never hit. Or, rather, I know the symptoms, but in my case they are caused not by the age of the installation, but by the memory use and swapping. When I compile something big, it can eat a lot of memory, and even 32Gb or RAM is not enough sometimes, there are lags and sometimes very painful.
It is really interesting because the behavior was persistent for all Linux distributions you tried, so probably there was some program that ate all the memory. Pity you didn't try running top and watching CPU and memory usage. Now I'll think of possible causes to the end of my days without any hope to find a real cause.
> Six months ago, I decided it was time. "This is the year of the Linux desktop on my machine," I declared, and I meant it. I installed over 20 of the most popular distributions from DistroWatch and used each one for at least two weeks. I was on a mission to rediscover the joy of computing.
Twenty distributions in six months, using each one for at least two weeks. Aside from the overlap, the post claims experience with debugging and repairing computers - but a lot of the blame here is placed on Linux without specifics of hardware of actual distributions used. Reads formulated like the typical narrative meant to deride Linux with surface level anecdotes.
> but a lot of the blame here is placed on Linux without specifics of hardware of actual distributions used.
I don't read blame in this; it's a description of his or her experience.
> Reads formulated like the typical narrative meant to deride Linux with surface level anecdotes.
I don't see this. It is possible for others to have different experiences and preferences without theirs being derision.
> Six weeks in, things changed. The Linux installations started to degrade — subtle at first, then undeniable. Random slowdowns. Browser links that wouldn't register for 10 or 15 seconds.
This is something that I would expect with Windows over time (not in a few weeks though) but has never happened to me with Linux. I have run less stable rolling release distros, and I have done multiple major version upgrades on the same machine over time over many machines.
its sounds to me as though you are doing some unusual things - few people use Compiz now because DEs like KDE provide those through their default Window managers.
I wouldn't worry much about operating systems. They are just a means to an end (which is running your applications) few are in the situation that 100% of their applications run on more than 1 OS, so they even get a choice of OS.
Its simple. If you require specific software which only runs on Windows, then you cannot use Linux. If that's not the case, the Linux desktop these days is entirely capable of helping you achieve your goals.
The opening paragraph gives the reason why Linux is still not at the same level as windows:
“ A few months and several headaches later…”
Additionally, the first comment I read is very positive, yet it also gives insight into the same situation.
> The opening paragraph gives the reason why Linux is still not at the same level as windows:
> “ A few months and several headaches later…”
These are the words of someone that hasn't tried to install Windows on a recent machine. There's plenty of headaches there too.
I have, actually. It was a several-click process with few to no headaches (I don’t recall any in the last several installs I did).
Lol, I had to hunt for drivers for a while and then research which ones match my hardware, then I had to research how to strip windows 11 of the more egregious privacy intrusions and nags ... in my case there was plenty of headaches.
Given how many people here are saying that Windows is great after you do enough tweaking it does not seem very different.
Yet it is. I don’t see myself or anyone in my family effortlessly choosing and setting up a Linux distro without outside help.
Windows on the other hand is easy to install and set up. I’d argue most people in my family can do this and I’m the only one that is technically inclined.
I hope one day to upgrade my laptop to a Honor/Huawei AMD Ryzen AI computer to run Linux. Modern Macbooks unfortunatly do not run Linux and the other laptop manifacturers basically produce expensive trash laptops
In case you hadn't heard of Framework, they're making modular laptops with the intention of reducing e-waste.
http://framework.computer
Repairable laptops don't reduce e-waste. You replace the mainboard and then what? You have a spare mainboard that sits there collecting dust. The best way to prevent e-waste is to build durable laptops that last a lifetime. Like Dell, HP and Lenovo have been doing for years (while also being very repairable at the same time).
We have open source documentation and CAD around the Mainboards to enable people to reuse them as single board computers or mini PCs after upgrading them out of their laptops. Even if the original owner of the Mainboard has no use for that, the functionality means it has resale value for others to use, reducing waste.
Frameworks computers are expensive, you aren't reducing the e-waste because on amd ryzen ai laptops the ram is soldered like in the other laptops from other manifacturers
That is incorrect. All of our laptops have modular, upgradable memory. Our Framework Desktop is a mini PC that does not because AMD’s Ryzen AI Max platform doesn’t support it. Regardless, we maximized modularity and reuseability on that product too by following PC standards. It uses a MiniITX form factor, standard 120mm fan, and FlexATX power supply.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. They're expensive because they don't have the volume that other manufacturers have. If you dig in my comment history, you'll see me complain about the soldered in ram as well, and some of their other decisions. However their modular configuration is still better than the rest of them.
Modern MacBooks DO run Linux
Check out https://asahilinux.org/
> Supported processors - M1 and M2, not M3 or M4
The M2 models came out in 2022. You can't buy them new anymore.
Asahi linux doesn't support any of the currently sold macbooks, so I think it's fair to say modern macbooks don't run linux.
This is also at Apple's mercy, if enough people do it there's a non-zero chance they lock things down further. They've done even more consumer-unfriendly things before.
Looking at the support page, that comes with a lot of asterisks still.
Not really, it's a nice tech demo at best.
What's so great about Huawei laptops?
I've been using an Asus EliteBook for the last 3 years. Despite taking a beating, the build quality has held up flawlessly and with 32 GB of RAM, 1 kg form factor, and great battery life, I have no reason to upgrade yet.
> What's so great about Huawei laptops?
Unlike other laptops, there is always the lingering fear of a Chinese backdoor.
I'd rather be concerned about friendly fire from our own. As an US American, i'd rather be concerned about big tech and government backdoors than anything else. Especially in the current atmosphere of doom inside the US.
>As an US American
I have my doubts
Pretty sure GP meant "if I were American..."
Thanks for putting this into the correct perspective.
Because we all know ASUS doesn't install backdoors by default...
Backdoors in the OS or firmware?
I always use Linux, so I don't care what software it came with. If you're suggesting there are firmware backdoors, I'd like to see your evidence.
There have been known vulnerabilities in ASUS firmware, but I was referring to Armoury Crate which is forcefully pushed on Windows users.
> I'd like to see your evidence.
I think this is a really bad epistemological stance in this case.
A vulnerability (that is presumably fixed after) is a lot different than an intentional backdoor.
> I think this is a really bad epistemological stance in this case.
Why? If one can't point to any evidence, how is it reasonable to suggest that a manufacturer is adding backdoors?
Build quality is better and do not have USA backdoors
Nonsense. I've been running Linux just fine as my daily driver on Macbook M4 for a year. Besides battery life (VM is kinda heavy on it) and some minor issues (fewer than you'd think, especially with Vulkan landing in UTM today) it's the best Linux laptop I've owned ever so far. I like macOS as much as the next Linux user here, but it's fairly decent as a hypervisor. If anything, at least it comes with UI unlike Intel ME.
I would be interested in doing the same, but my Linux server in my house has been a bit of a pain for my remote employees to use. Maybe I don't know the best software?
I'm a Linux users since 1999ish and I find extremely annoying and condescending these kind of titles.
What about "Hey! I tried Linux and it's cool! Let me show you!", instead?
Yep, and the comment section predictably attracts the people who just complain they want something but will do nothing about it, not even complain to the right place (like their favorite proprietary SW/HW vendor, to improve their Linux support).
it's really good these days. nvidia finally fixed their drivers (i suppose all it took was becoming the richest company on earth), kde is really nicely polished and all the friction from the x11 to wayland transition is over (at least from my perspective of an end user of linux desktops).
it's remarkably stable and reliable and way less annoying than modern windows or macos. i'm looking forward to a panther lake thinkpad with robust linux support and incredible battery life.
Did he sneak in OpenCore Legacy Patcher in with the icons for various Linux distros?
EDIT: he did, I should have read FTA
This topic is red meat in a shark tank for online tech forums. Second only to "What's the best browser?".
I just want autodesk stuff on Linux and I'll move over, but I imagine they wouldn't like that since it would be easier to circumvent license checking.
I did this 10 years ago. I now run windows server as my windows guest so I dont get all the client cruft. Works like a charm
>Everything’s great except I can’t run this
>Everything’s great except it doesn’t recognize this device
>Everything’s great except there’s a learning curve
>Conky
Unfortunately it's harder to run CSS HTML Validator's GUI on Linux, but at least there is the command-line tool!
I switched from Solaris/HP-UX to Linux in 1994. Never ran dos/windows. It's been working great for me for 31 years now.
I have been a Linux user since 2005 or 06. It was one of the best decisions I ever made in the world of computers. I started with Ubuntu and went on a distro hunt such as Fedora, Mandriva, Mint, and others.
In the end, I have stayed with Debian for a good 10 years, now. Both for desktop/laptop and server. (Maybe one day I will dive deeper with Arch.. but I also like the direction of Guix)
While I use Windows at work, I did have one machine at home dual-boot with Windows. I used it at times for games or work. Now, I cannot find a good reason to have it. My recent Debian install for my laptop + has Steam and Heroic (Epic) without issues.
Despite all the above, I am not someone who forces Linux on others - though I speak my truth and make jokes about it.. but I have little issues with my Linux installs. While I have an ATI card which installed without issue, I did not have much problems with nVidia cards in the past.
I dont hate Windows as a pure Operating System. If you remove all the fluff on top of it - especially with what is going on with Windows 11, you likely have a stable, reliable kernel + core applications.
I do not like the direction MS is going with Windows 11. I am expecting the next version of Windows to simply be named "Windows AI" but don't worry -- they will tell you AI is optional.
Boiling Frog Syndrome - little by little more features will be mandatory. :-)
fwiw... after 20 years I went back to FreeBSD from Linux. I recommend it if you like FreeBSD. [Actually, I run a hybrid where I have a stripped down Debian system and run BSD in a virtual machine, but 99% of my interaction w/ the machine is via FreeBSD.]
Can we stop with the implicit agism that always pops up in Linux threads? I know it's meant to be positive for Linux but it's still agism that diminishes people whose only crime is that they're of advanced age.
I hate it too. Not long ago I met a grandmother who had spent part of her career writing embedded software for nuclear reactors. I met many others who had jobs in technology.
Mate, I haven’t touched a Windows machine in almost fifteen years. It’s all Linux and Mac.
Just be sure to give up any dreams of power saving, sleep states or hibernation
With recent ntsync changes in Linux and wine.
Start citizen runs fine and gives excellent FPS NOW
How do you deal with malware/etc ?. Are there reliable products available ?
The line of defenses are different. All my Linux applications are either installed via Flatpak (which runs in a sandbox) or via the official package registry (which requires programs to be open source, and has a strong track record)
Did this 2 years ago.
I run Fedora, if its what Linus himself runs then why should i choose anything else?
Linus runs this specifically because it supports kernel development decently well. If you aren’t developing the kernel, his reasons for running Fedora have little to no impact on you.
while i provisionally agree with you, the rest of the distro is very leading edge and very stable and solid.
those are also solid good reasons, and likely play a role in his choices as well.
I bought a thinkpad X1 carbon refurbished for about ~$300. I wanted to travel abroad with a laptop I wouldn't mind getting stolen if it happened. During the installation of Win11 it asked me to create a microsoft account, fuck that. I installed linux mint. Very nice experience overall, so nice to not get assaulted by ads in the start menu. Pleased to see the nightlight functionality (I googled f.lux for linux and that's how I discovered it) is built-in, and with flatpack I installed vlc, qbittorrent and obsidian. Firefox setup was straightforward. And that was it. This is a laptop for youtube and movies, I used the pre-installed libre office calc for small budget things and list making. It just worked for me.
The things that bother me about this laptop are primarily hardware related coming from using a mac laptop (which is the laptop I would mind getting stolen). Trackpad on X1 carbon is definitely not as good, battery life not as good. And opening the lid momentarily reveals what you were on before the lock screen comes on. This last one tastes more like a software issue. I had another issue with the hdmi port being finicky, but that's hardware again.
Overall very happy with this setup, linux mint is in great shape. I do wish there were fewer distro choices for people considering making the switch. It does introduce choice paralysis. I had to set aside my ego and pipe dream aspirations of being a "hacker" and went with a distro that seemed to be simple and straightforward to setup. Mint definitely is easier to install than windows, hands down, no need to create a microsoft account and you don't have to deal with all the slop features it tries to shove down your throat.
Only thing holding me back is Adobe Lightroom, and has been for a while.
>> Only thing holding me back is Adobe Lightroom.
You might be interested in Darktable or the less common fork called Ansel.
https://www.darktable.org/
https://ansel.photos/en/
These have Windows versions you can try before moving your world to Linux.
Darktable is the best photography editing and classifying software I've ever used. New users should be warned it's quite power-user centric though. Adopting isn't like opening up Lightroom and messing around. You may have to read a bit of documentation regarding the modules and different workflows (i.e. Sigmoid vs FilmicRGB).
I think the Ansel developer has a YouTube series with tutorials on how to edit in Darktable using the Filmic RGB workflow. Not sure if that's where I'd get started nowadays (I've just adopted Sigmoid and it's way quicker to edit with it), but it gave me a solid base in how to use this software.
Darktable is another piece of software that really shows warts in UX.
For example, you can right click empty space to "remove" or "update path to file..." in the left hand rail. There shouldn't be a right click option in empty space.
Everything lower case makes it very difficult to quickly parse, especially the settings menu.
Inkscape is also full of these sins. For that matter, so is KDE.
I tested literally all alternatives to Lightroom, including even other commercial Windows only software, just because I want to get off the subscription. I tested two specific functions I use and need, and zero of all other programs do them well. It's frustrating.
to add on: alternatives I am seriously considering is buying a macbook m2 purely for lightroom and run linux on intel, and macbook m2 + asahi + dumping the intel.
Which two specific functions?
How to run PowerPoint and Excel? I'm stuck with these for work?
No libre office suite will ever be on par with Microsoft proprietary options. It's a constant race of keeping up with features, using mostly unpaid volunteer developers.
I've used Linux for 25+ years and my reaction is always to do my best with the options I have, but in those cases when it's not enough I just say "I'm sorry but I can't edit this document" or "sorry but some of the formatting was lost when I saved this in libreoffice".
The thing is that I'm a senior Linux specialist so people accept my excuses because they generally need my work.
> It's a constant race of keeping up with features, using mostly unpaid volunteer developers.
What new features are Microsoft bringing out that are that critical for LibreOffice et al to catch up with?
I can’t think of much which I use that wasn’t already available in Office 95 which was released 30 years ago.
Aside from OOXML (which isn’t nearly as open as the name suggests) and the ribbon bar (which i personally hate), there hasn’t really been any big innovations.
The only features I can think of are:
- better security model for marcos. But that was only needed because MS Office was insecure to begin with so not really relevant here either
- Unicode support
- more rows in excel (though generally once you start reaching that point, the memory footprint of Excel becomes too great to make working on that spreadsheet practical)
The real issue with LibreOffice isn’t new features. It’s the subtle rending and parsing quirks when working on OOXML documents. But that’s likely Microsoft’s fault and thus OOXML working as intended.
Excel had tons of new and useful features over the past years.
…and they are?
I don’t doubt there’s been plenty of new features. But are they significant enough that users on older versions or non-MS suites are left longing for the latest version of Excel?
I just don’t think there is much innovation left. Or at least not without changing the UX and/or paradigm significantly. Neither of which have happened.
Take a look here: https://www.icaew.com/technical/technology/excel-community/e.... There’s really been a sea change since around 2019. In the aggregate, they change how you work with Excel today.
Thanks for the share. These do look like really nice improvements.
Albeit I wouldn’t say they’re significant enough that LibreOffice would struggle to keep up.
But it is nice to see that Excel is still working on basic quality of life features.
> using mostly unpaid volunteer developers.
I'm not even sure this is true. Isn't there some company (or more) like Collabora behind most of the dev work right now?
Winapps is pretty good to run the Microsoft office suite. https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps
A office specific winapps fork : https://github.com/eylenburg/linoffice/
Do you not have a work-issued computer? I'm not being flippant. I don't need to install _anything_ on my home PC for work. It's actively discouraged.
Can you use the online versions? They are starting to become usable now.
That is what we are supposed to do at work.
Move my documents off my PC and give them to Microsoft?! As a way to stop using a Microsoft OS? It beggars belief.
Maybe in a VM.
Or try running via Wine.
You could also try LibreOffice or OnlyOffice and see if the documents are readable / writable.
Failing all that the web versions might work just fine.
Unless you need precise formatting because you will send someone nontrivial slides to present, libreoffice should be fine.
Excel really depends - if you're using it as a glorified document with a table, then libreoffice will do fine. If you need compatibility and more advanced features, or your whole company runs on excel like a financial corp - there's no alternative. VM in that case.
> Failing all that the web versions might work just fine.
I use ~~Office 365~~ the Microsoft 365 Copilot App online all the time on Debian at work.
Winboat should be able to run them: https://www.winboat.app/
As far as compatibility goes, OnlyOffice is fairly good at it, more geared towards MS-compatibility than LibreOffice, which is more of its own thing (and pretty good at that).
MS Office Online has been good with most of the things I need. Has that not been the experience for you?
dual boot
Or a VM for just that purpose. Quickgui was discussed here recently for example to make this easier https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickgui
This never lasts long, in my experience. It’s a nice idea, but it’s a huge pain. At some point, I always end up sticking with the OS that has what I need, which is never Linux. Linux is what I install when feeling idealistic, but it doesn’t allow me to do anything I can’t do on a mainstream OS that is mission critical to my life.
so dual pc ???
I’d say commit. Force yourself to find new tools and workflows on the new OS of choice. If that isn’t possible, it seems like a waste of time and effort.
the "you should too" is so tiring. You don't know what is ultimately the best option for most people out there, stop preaching
If you're primarily a gamer, Bazzite is fantastic.
Sure but I use Ableton, Lightroom, and Battlefield 6 daily.
> There's also ADB (Android Debugging Bridge) via the terminal for executing commands to an Android device. However, I use an iPhone.
I am sorry for you.
Looking forward to your next article: I dumped my iPhone for GrapheneOS, and you should too.
I agree modern Windows sucks for the average consumer, with all the dark patterns and icky stuff, but if you are on this forum and technically inclined enough to install Linux, you can just disable all the bad parts of Windows and get a rock solid OS with perfect compatibility. Unpopular opinion, I know, but that's how I view it.
It is indeed a huge problem. The whole operating system now behaves and feels like the US government spying on everyone. Now, Microsoft has done that before, but with Win11 it really now seems almost shameless AND desperate in abusing users, while also alienating many of them via "features" they don't want, in particular all the AI garbage slop.
It does not really affect me that much, as I switched to Linux in 2005 or so, give or take, but some people around me, in particular elderly, depend on Windows still. So that's a dilemma. Do I want to install Win11 for them? Or Win10? And help maintain either? Replacing those computers with Linux is not so trivial. You would need virtually kind of 100% "what works on Windows must work on Linux too". Any complexity is a real total showstopper for many elderly people who have very little experience with computer systems.
I would if Unreal Engine was properly supported
As somebody who's doing the same thing for the first time in almost 2 decades: kubuntu wins for me.
Mint was too buggy. It just felt so single-threaded. It had upsides - easiest Nvidia support for example. Cinnamon is nicely customizable and has some great ideas but it's just too rough around the edges.
Raw Debian was just too hard to get Nvidia drivers playing nice.
But for "I'm comfy editing config files but I need some hand-holding for this" KDE with Ubuntu is the best balance of performance and clean design and support.
My biggest disappointment is how little batteries-included gui I'm seeing for core Linux functionality. Where is the systemd service manager? Why are all the file managers so bad at editing permissions?
> Where is the systemd service manager?
Kde used to have a systems settings module for Systemd. There are defitely GUIs for managing user services (its called Background services for me)
> Why are all the file managers so bad at editing permissions?
What does right click and then choose properties in Dolphin not do satisfactorily for you?
Bluefin has been a game changer for me
I use both, like pros do.
let me know when you can run visual studio, the best IDE in the world, on Linux, and I wont flinch
Oh look, a “I switched to linux” article that will convince nobody because it’s full of issues they ran into that users don’t want to and should not have to learn how to solve. Or maybe I’m wrong and everything is smooth now? _reads article_ Nope, it’s exactly as I expected.
Ugghhh.
Am I the only one who thinks (mobile safari with an ad blocker) it’s a jackass move to show a fake popup that leads to “must be an adblocker” and prevents page viewing? Or maybe just bad JS junk causing it?
Update: OMG I turned ad blocker off and what a disaster of a site.
>Dolphin held a pleasant surprise: it could detect my iPhone when it was plugged in. This made it a snap to transfer files to and from my phone as the file manager granted full file access to the iPhone
Wait, what? Is this true? Since when?
Do iphones show the file system as a USB storage or MTP device when plugged into a computer? If so, that has worked for many years.
You can also access the file system over the local network from Dolphin using KDE connect. I know that with Android the phone just appears as a drive and I think its the same with Apple devices.
I switched to fedora and I’m so happy it’s so chill not ads and bullshit everywhere.
All my littler hacking projects are faster setup and my idea is faster
However I think if you do video editing you need Mac or Windows
Davinci Resolve is a high end professional video editing suite, and is well supported on Linux. Also Lightworks (but I'm biased because I used to work there).
Eh, I wanted to do this, but the manufacturer of my laptop doesn't allow me to disable RST in the BIOS, so I can only work from a flash drive, and it's slow. :(
C'mon Steinberg, Make cubase for Linux so i can jump ship.
I'm waiting on Ableton, Arturia, and Native Instruments. The latter two should have the easiest time since all their stuff is already VST3 and it can support Linux.
Another of those? Can people install their OS without having to tell the whole planet about it?
I don't see articles about people installing Windows or Mac everyday like the people installing Linux.
Is it such an achievement to do? That make you proud enough to tell the world?
It's worse than vegetarian people at that point.
And what's the point? The whole thread is filled with "yeah yeah, I installed Linux too!" just like some kind of cult.
Look at you...
Misery loves company. You won't see anybody telling people to switch to Windows, Mac or iPhone because those people are too busy enjoying their OS.
Not really, Linux evangelists are a thing because Linux is primarily held back by lack of adoption. A lot of common issues can be attributed to either:
1. The hardware manufacturer has never tested Linux support for drivers. 2. Some application that you need doesn't target Linux due to lack of users
This isn't everything, sure. But I think it's a majority of the headaches. Thus, Linux-users really want other people to also use Linux, so that companies actually give a shit about supporting it.
There's also the whole ideology involved. A lot of companies are increasingly pushing that you are not allowed to control the computer/phone/device you buy and Linux is at the forefront of combating this.
I don't think Linux itself is held back by lack of adoption at all. Android is the most popular mobile operating system in the world, last I checked. My dad doesn't know the difference between dir and ls, and he will only use an Android phone.
I would rather hug a fully grown crocodile than install Linux on my computer. But even I wouldn't deny that Android - and by extension Linux - is probably the best thing that happened to mobile devices.
Desktop Linux is lacking in adoption, but maybe that's because it's not packaged nearly as nicely as Android.
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I never run into stability issues and couldn't care less about telemetry which feels like admitting some kind of a sin on HN. Windows 11 is fine and Linux will always be for niche use cases.