My story is simpler. Microsoft dropped the support for Windows 10 and gave me no upgrade path to Windows 11 because my CPU was 5 years too old apparently.
So I installed Fedora on that machine, I learned the process, I went through the hurdles. It wasn’t seamless. But, Fedora never said “I can’t”. When it was over, it was fine.
Only if Microsoft had just let me install Windows 11 and suffer whatever the perf problem my CPU would bring. Then I could consider a hardware upgrade then, maybe.
But, “you can’t install unless you upgrade your CPU” forced me to adopt Linux. More importantly, it gave me a story to tell.
There is a marketing lesson there somewhere, like Torvalds’ famous “you don’t break userspace”, something along the lines of “you don’t break the upgrade path”.
I'm in the exact same boat. I was a little unhappy with the ads etc in Windows, but perfectly willing to give Windows 11 a try. But Microsoft decreed that my admittedly a bit old but perfectly workable CPU was incompatible, due to not having a feature I wasn't interested in. I'd need to replace most of my existing hardware to switch. So why not try Linux? It certainly seems reasonable when Windows apparently needs more command-line hackery to maybe work for a while than Linux.
So to Fedora I went! So far, I've been pleasantly surprised. All of the software I want to use installed easily and works, via Flatpak. All of my hardware works fine, and there are actually fewer weird hardware quirks than under Windows. I also appreciate that there are options to turn off behaviors I found annoying in Windows.
It's a bit sad to have to switch due to Microsoft trashing their own OS rather than Linux becoming superlatively awesome, but what can you do.
You can bypass the warning really easily, I googled it the moment I saw it and it was very easy. A keyboard shortcut to open the command window during the install and one cheeky command. I agree though that it’s silly they don’t offer it officially.
But I get the feeling you were on the edge of transitioning anyway, which is fine! Sounds more like the straw that broke the camels back.
There's a ton of outdated guides out there because Microsoft has been patching out workaround after workaround. It's likely that the simple solution you used doesn't work anymore.
If you bypass the installer minimum hardware checks then you're making a gamble that the official statement from Microsoft won't affect you:
> If Windows 11 is installed on ineligible hardware, your device won't receive support from Microsoft, and you should be comfortable assuming the risk of running into compatibility issues.
> Devices that don't meet these system requirements might malfunction due to compatibility or other issues. Additionally, these devices aren't guaranteed to receive updates, including but not limited to security updates.
Aren't you guys actually talking about a TPM 2.0 device being present on the machine and not a CPU specifically? Cause the whole Windows 11 thing was (I thought) full disk encryption with TPM 2.0 attestation booted from a secure boot BIOS. That basically just means you can't take the disk and boot it on another machine. There would be no way to decrypt.
There's a little bit of considering it already yeah. Plus what the sibling comments say of it being clearly against what Microsoft wants, so no guarantee they won't disable it or make it even harder in the future. And also, the factor of, doing any of these check-disabling hacks also seems to require a full OS reinstall instead of an in-place update. If I need to do a full reinstall anyways, why not do it with an OS I don't need to hack up to get it to install on a system the OS maintainer doesn't want it to be installed on.
Apparently, fundamentally, Microsoft does not want me as a user. Hacking around their checks won't change that. I'd rather comply with their wishes and use an OS that actually wants me as a user.
I have two laptops that - even being 8 years and 4 years old fit the specs MS decided to set.
I still kicked itin the can. Am a happy Arch User & Ubuntu (will probably migrate that one to an Arch derivate as well, though) nowadays. I still use WIN11 in my day job. And it is an okay OS. I had worse. I had better.
What I find interesting is, that I gained on average 30 - 50% more battery time from the laptops I switched to Linux. It is quite unexpected and to me quite frankly amazing. I am writing this on my day job quite expensive Surface machine. I pulled it from the power connection to sit on the sofa about 20 minutes ago. My battery? At 73%. And I am running Firefox and PowerPoint at the moment (plus whatever corp crapware is installed underneath).
Except for exactly one set of tools (older Affinity progs) I have no need for WIN anymore. And as my day job provides a WIN machine...
Apple does this all the time, though, and seems to get a free pass here. I have four Macs in my home, and they are cut off at Ventura (for the 2017 iMac), Monterey (for the 2014 Mac Mini and the 2015 MacBook Air), and El Capitan (for the 2014 iMac). They are all stuck at 3, 4, and 5 major OS versions back. Nobody really seems to complain about this, though.
I don't think it's the same. On older Apple hardware, it just keeps on running on the older OS version. You don't get some new features or styling of the new OS, but nothing else changes. On Windows, it periodically brings up full-screen notifications that your hardware is obsolete and you need to upgrade, with the only options being to upgrade or "remind me again later".
I think Apple gets a pass because they're a luxury product. For the record, even though Apple has some really impressive hardware, this is one of the reasons I'm not very big on Apple. People praise their phone's longevity all the time, but I think this is crazy. I could be running a 13 year old computer right now and it would work fine if I had Linux. Smartphones don't really have options for this due to the market capture. Apple's PC could be supported longer, but Apple isn't interested in doing it. (and apparently they change architectures every 15 years anyhow.)
They don't get a free pass, I think people have spoken with their wallets and it shows with the user base counts: Windows 66–73%, macOS 14–16%, Linux 3–4%.
Apple seems to support their previous generation OS on older macs for ~8-9 years or so from what I've seen. You just don't get the latest generation features, they cut it off and move on similar to how Microsoft did.
I am in the same boat. Running Windows 10 on a Ryzen 5 until the cows come home. I run Rocky Linux in my laptop but I am a gamer so I'll hold to Windows 10. Some Linux Distros are bringing AI. Not ready for that.
Yep. Similar thing forced me off of Apple. They stopped making 17 inch laptops. They started soldering parts into place. Made it so you couldn’t open your own laptop to replace the HD.
Switched to Linux 8 years ago and haven't looked back.
Which Microsoft really should have been able to see coming, since it’s largely their money that’s being used to soak up all the supply of computing hardware.
I think at a certain point you need to just call it quits with that sort of bullshit. I have my dignity. I'm a fucking grown adult. I'm not going to spend my spare time haplessly looking online to unfuck the new current set of fuckery. Just take the fucking bullet. Learn linux. Congrats you're playing whack-a-mole with a trillion dollar corporation and prolonging your misery. This is stupid.
Win8.1 x64 required double-width compare and exchange instruction support, so people who bought Win8 for a CPU or motherboard that didn't support it had to downgrade to the 32-bit version or lose support in 2016.
Win7 updates from 2018 onwards required SSE2 with no warning.
Win11 24H2 and later won't install on x86 processors that don't support the x86-64-v2 baseline.
From my experience it seems to happen all the time. Settings reset, uninstalled apps reinstalled, firewall settings erased. I went looking for the Windows 10 patch that deleted the Documents folder if you had remapped it to another drive, and it was hard to find an article due to all the other times their updates have also deleted people's Documents folder. This was the first time I recall it happening: https://www.engadget.com/2018-10-09-windows-10-october-updat...
That's, e.g., how I would determine what these commands do
I have had HN replies in the past that argued Windows is open source and thus comparable to UNIX-like OS projects where _the public_ can read the source code and make modifications, _for free_
Absent the source code, we can read Microsoft's documentation
Whenever I see an unexplained command I don't understand from a random internet forum, I hop onto the production server and run it, just in case it might boost performance. Wouldn't want to miss out on that.
Been doing it since I was 12. It taught me all about the ins and outs of `rm`.
Sounds like me back in the early 80s when I used to war dial, and people used to share "active" prefixes. I learned all about the 911 prefix when I set my dialer and went to sleep. About 20 minutes later the cops were banging on my front door. True story; I was in 6th grade, got arrested for it.
I got taken to juvenile hall, put in a holding area with kids that had stolen cars and stabbed other kids in fights. The funny thing is all these "bad kids" were really cool; we talked about video games (Donkey Kong!). I remember one kid got into a fight with his football coach and broke both the coach's legs. He was a big kid, looked like a grown man. He was pretty much in charge of the holding area. But he was cool as hell, cracked jokes with me. I actually kinda enjoyed the holding area.
Anyway, the officials thought I had just called 911 over and over, like to play a prank. They wouldn't hear anything about my computer or whatever (it was the early 80s). They were pissed. I was kept in the holding area for a few hours, then they let me go home. I was ordered to a bunch of community service, cleaning the parking lots of local parks, stuff like that.
Some of the checks are around CPU features that they don’t currently use but may use in the future. And CPUs don’t typically respond super gracefully to being asked to execute instructions they don’t understand.
I've been using Linux for 20+ years, but I was fairly happy with Windows 11. At its core it did exactly what I needed it to do, and it allowed me to run some commercial software that is harder to install and run on Linux (Davinci Resolve).
But my Dell hardware drivers were flaky in Windows. My bluetooth had extremely variable availability. And then Windows rebooted itself, against my wishes, 3x in one week. And then there was the promise of Recall.
That's when I wiped Windows and installed Ubuntu. All my hardware issues went away (yes, I had to fiddle the sound driver a little so it didn't crack when it woke up from sleep, and I had to make one small change so suspend worked properly.. but both were easily solvable). My bluetooth has been flawless since and I was able to use my Logitech wireless mouse again.
I'm never going back.
I do a bit of napkin math on Apple Silicon single-threaded performance, GPU performance, and battery management against non-Macbook Air/Pro specs for same price. I follow DHH (who I otherwise object to) on his adventures with the Asus G14 machines.. but I'm not sure its GPU performance still matches the similarly priced Apple offering.
Less integrated OS, worse battery management, and weaker performance for more money? I'm not sure. But I'll probably still go that way.
The Intel/AMD laptop manufacturers need to get out from under Nvidia's hardware GPU thumb.
You can bypass the warning really easily, I googled it the moment I saw it and it was very easy. A keyboard shortcut to open the command window during the install and one cheeky command.
We had that announcement of a new "Verifiable" Linux project from Pottering, other kernel devs, and a bunch of ex-microsoft employees yesterday. Gives me the heebie jeebies.
Remote Attestation of Immutable Operating Systems built on systemd
Its the "remote" thing that has no place in personal computing, or rather, computing that is to extend one's own autonomy, or agency.
Its no one's damn business whether my system is attested or not! I mean, sure theres certainly benefits for me knowing if its attested, but the other road is one of ruin, and will basically be the chains of the future.
Of course it is, there's no real requirement to have a TPM, plenty of people made a version with that requirement patched out and the system works fine.
I just started a new job where I'm subjected to Windows 11. They gave me a behemoth of a laptop. 64GB of RAM, absolute screamer of a CPU, big GPU, the whole deal.
Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all.
Context menus take a noticeable amount of time to appear.
I'm getting used to a new keyboard, so I keep hitting Print Screen by accident. Half the time I can smack Esc and Snipping Tool will go away. The other half of the time, I have to mouse over and click the X to close it. There is no pattern to when Esc does/doesn't work.
If my computer goes to sleep, WSL becomes unresponsive. I have to save all my stuff and reboot to continue working.
If Windows 11 struggles this badly on a brand new laptop that I'm certain would retail for $4000+, I can only imagine how miserable it is for everyone else. All my colleagues who have been here for a bit longer got last-generation laptops. oof.
Edit... and besides, what does Windows 11 even do that KDE Plasma 5 wasn't doing a decade ago? How did it take this long to get a tabbed file browser?
> Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all.
There's a guy that has written their own version of explorer that's so fast in comparison to the built-in, that you'd think they were cheating somehow because of everyone's experience with explorer.
And someone has written an IDE for C++ that opens while Visual Studio is on its splash screen.
And another that has written a debugger with the same performance.
And a video doing the rounds of Word ('97?) on spinning rust opening in just under 2 seconds.
Basically, everything MS is doing is degrading performance. Opportunities for regular devs to go back to performant software, and MS is unlikely to fix theirs in the foreseeable future.
Same experience here, but I'm not sure it's just MS fault; companies have a way of installing a bunch of stupid software on top of one another, that you can't get rid of without admin rights, that continuously do things that slow the system down.
(And, you can have a tabbed file browser on Win7. I still have a Win7 box at home that works perfectly well and that does have tabs in file explorer. I think it was an addon I installed a while ago; don't remember exactly, but it works perfectly.)
What I’ve seen as an older-than-average developer is that the Agile movement has made it increasingly difficult to make time for paying attention to some of the more subtle aspects of user experience such as performance. Because I can’t predict how much work it will be accurately enough to assign story points to the task, and that means that this kind of work frequently results in a black spot on our team performance metrics.
CD makes it even harder because this kind of work really does need some time to bake. Fast iterations don’t leave much time to verify that performance-oriented changes have the intended effect and no adverse side effects prior to release.
Started a new job about a year and a half ago and got a powerful laptop with a really top of the line CPU and GPU, 64 GB of RAM (Now upgraded to 96GB, needed for my work, even with these specs compile times are longer than I'd like...), and it was a terrible experience, coming from someone who's used to Linux having used it for a bit (started in 2013 with Ubuntu with a dual boot. Moved all-in to Arch in 2016, distro-hopped or played with different desktop enviroments/wms after that (Recently switched to niri), but all of which are leagues ahead of Windows 11 IMO. Only occasionally ran Windows on a spare device or a VM on the rare occasion I needed to, eg for work / school.)
Tons of issues, slow in some operations, weird bugs (in the explorer like you, or with my Bluetooth headphones, or other issues), and even occasional blue screens! It's not just my setup too, my coworkers have similar issues. Plus, it just isn't a nice environment to use.
At first, I tried to set up a nicer environment (as much as IT would allow). I installed PowerToys for QOL improvements, GlazeWM to emulate a tiling window manager setup, I tried debloating as much as I can, I installed Wezterm for my terminal (Why is Windows Terminal so hyped up? It seems like an extremely basic terminal emulator to me...), oh-my-posh theming for my shell, and several other things.
But every convenience program I added just noticeably slowed down my laptop, to the point I just gave up some of the niceties and lived with it. Why is such basic functionality able to be run so smoothly on a much weaker device on Linux, but struggle on Windows on a much more powerful device? I can only think of one reason...
I don't know, my personal windows install which I use for photoshop, lightroom, and the occasional game also has similar issues, and it only has the included windows defender. I've noticed on many computers that whenever there are a bunch of files in a directory, the explorer grinds to a halt.
At work we use clownstrike for our driving-around-with-the-handbrake-on needs, which I have installed on both Linux and Windows, and the former flies while the latter lags all the time (I dual boot, so it's the same exact hardware). Doing something which is fully equivalent, like installing an IntelliJ update takes around a minute on Linux and many more on Windows.
The fan also comes on much more often on Windows than Linux, even though most of my job is done on remote servers via SSH. Under Linux I only hear the fan when I compile something. This morning I booted windows and the fan was running constantly while I was just catching up with a few mails in outlook.
On my company provided laptop with Windows 11 (previously Windows 10), the top three CPU usage was and is usually from Antimalware Executable, Microsoft Defender and MS Teams (or Crowdstrike). I don’t download files or get files from other sources often, yet these things keep doing busywork and slowing things down. Despite virus and threat protection running quick scans often and forcing a full disk scan every couple of weeks or so.
It’s almost as if these programs are people who ought to show that they’re doing something even though they’re just heating the room and running the fan.
> If my computer goes to sleep, WSL becomes unresponsive. I have to save all my stuff and reboot to continue working.
Try wsl --shutdown. Works for me when WSL hangs for no apparent reason.
I've also noticed that, in my case, these hangs are somehow tied to Docker for Windows. Couldn't figure what triggers them so far, though. I just restart DFW and kill WSL when that happens.
My wife recently got a new laptop. She mostly just uses office and the browser so I gave her some specs to look for SSD, 16GB ram, Lenovo should be good (fatal mistake I didn't specify the CPU). She went out and bought a cheap Lenovo laptop with a Celeron dual core and 16GB ram, SSD. It can barely run windows 11. Everything slows to a crawl, she can't be on a video call, and have a google doc open at the same time. It's insane and frankly should be criminal to sell such a poorly performing piece of hardware.
It's so bad that she actually switches to her old laptop from 10 years ago (still on windows 10, also a dual core) for video calls, and it performs way better.
The engineers working on Windows should be embarrassed. I may just try to load ChromeOS on it. Would be nice to get Windows out of my house for good.
I noticed significant slowdown on my home computer, so I did some optimization - namely turning off some services.
AI related things, one drive (this could be one of the reasons file browser is slow), widgets on the screen like news and weather, some other optional/not needed things.
They added a lot of not needed crap to File Manager. I think it's almost better to install a third party one.
It's more likely network calls that are taking a long time or timing out. A lot of developers insert function calls that under the hood hit HTTP servers, and it can take a few hundred milliseconds to stand up a new TLS connection and then however long it takes to send the request and get the response. It's also probable that the endpoints form an accidental microservice architecture in which case everyone is always hitting a different set of connections. This creates a perfect storm of having to reconnect to everything you hit occasionally which can create little slowdowns all over the place all without actually using CPU so it doesn't show up in any resource monitors.
HTTPS calls should be treated as calls to sleep() with undefined timings.
If it's Intel then it might not be fully down to Windows 11. The PC laptops are universally crap. I had a few latest ones, Ultra 9 and they are atrocious. Experience reminds me using a netbook in early 2010s.
I would refuse to work anywhere without a Mac. If x86 then it would have to be linux, as that would be passable (apart from fan noise).
This was me in 2022 or 2023. I have posted on HN about my shift a few times. I gave up with Windows 10 because you needed Windows Pro in order to make an "offline" account, I spent $2000+ for a gaming rig, and I couldn't add new users, one program told me to use the other program which brought me back to the original program... I had to go out of my way, buy a license just to make it work. I just went and installed Linux finally. I was on POP_OS! for a good year, but been on Arch Linux for one year plus now.
I know its a "meme" to talk about how great Arch is, but when you want the latest of something, Arch has it. I use EndeavourOS since it had a nicer simpler installer (idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro) and if you just use "yay" you don't run into Pacman woes.
Alternatively, I'm only buying Macs as well, but for my gaming rigs, straight to Arch. Steam and Proton work perfectly, if you don't sell your games on Steam or in a way I can run them on Linux I am not buying or playing them.
> if you don't sell your games on Steam or in a way I can run them on Linux I am not buying or playing them.
So much this. People like to moan about "oh game XYZ doesn't run so it's not reasonable for gaming". More games run on GNU / Linux than any gaming console. There are simply too many games that do run to give a second thought about the ones that don't, and it's been that way for years.
The giant bugbear in this conversation is always multiplayer. That's because almost all of the big players in that space currently favor rootkits in the form of overly invasive anti-cheat, which the Linux wrappers (mostly the wine project) refuse to support for security reasons.
If you don't play PvP specifically, the rest of the library is significantly more open to you. Personally I have always favored single player experiences and indie games from smaller studios, and for the most part those run great.
It's unfortunate but at the same time if enough people switch to Linux then they'll be forced to change their ways.
So if you can go without those games or don't play MMOs that is rootkits then switch to force their hand.
Besides, them installing a rootkit on your machine is not an acceptable practice anyways. It's a major security issue. Sometimes we need to make a stand. Everyone has a line, where's yours?
MMOs are actually fine. WoW, FFXIV, RuneScape, all work great on Linux. They’re not really games that rely on hidden information, are not pvp first and need to simulate stuff on the server anyway, so can verify moves are valid there.
It’s the competitive progression shooters and ranked esports games that go in for the restrictive anti-cheat
This is true in principle but most gamers are just gonna take the path of least resistance. If they can't play fortnite on Linux (I'm using an example, I don't know if it's actually unplayable on Linux) then they will use whatever OS lets them play.
People have been saying "vote with your wallet" every time gaming companies do something anti consumer like day one dlc or buggy releases (don't pre-order!) or $90 games, but gaming companies continue to push the envelope on what gamers will pay for because gamers keep paying for it.
There's another way. Only a small portion of friends need to change to pull the rest of the group. Pull them to a game that runs on Linux.
Don't do it like "let's play this game because it runs on Linux" do it like "let's play this game because it's fun".
If you want to be the one to lead this change you have to do extra work. Dual boot Linux and find a game that's fun that you can do online. Find the other friend or two in your group that will do the same (at least play the game, Linux is optional but encouraged for this subset). Just play together for a bit, give it a trial run. Then when playing the other game with the larger group say "hey, so and so and I have been playing this game, you guys should play with us sometime". They don't have to install Linux, just play a new game that their friends are already playing. That's why they're there, to play games with their friends. Don't try to get them to switch to Linux, just play games with your friends. You might have a holdout but if most people move then everyone will. But if you want to do that move you have to find what works and at least one other friend to give it a trial (who won't need to do as much work as you). That's how you do it. No crazy scheme and honestly not massive amounts of work either. Just the normal process of finding new games to play with one constraint. It just seems complicated because I stated the process explicitly.
I don't play a lot of online games anymore, but when I did, it wasn't just because friends were playing it. It was because it was fun, it was part of the cultural zeitgeist, it's popular, the community is fun, etc. You can't really replace something like that with just "another game," no matter how fun the other game is.
I did this and was happily Windows-less for quite a few years. I ended up building a PC with a big GPU and so I switched back to PC gaming with a Windows installation alongside Linux, but I still think the console route is a great option.
As a competitive old school arena FPS guy, I have also had a very hard time getting the same smoothness and low latency (input, output, whatever it is) on Linux. The games I play are very fast and twitchy, and milliseconds matter.
There seems to be too many layers and variables to ever get to the bottom of it. Is it the distro itself? Is it a Wayland vs. X11 thing? Is it the driver? The Proton version? Some G-SYNC thing? Some specific tweak that games based on this game engine needs?
I know what you mean, though I have a device running SteamOS though and it runs extremely smoothly, the latency is no different than my windows PC (on titles where it can achieve the same framerate).
I'm sure that it must be possible to replicate whatever optimisations SteamOS has on other distros, but unfortunately I am not sure what those are exactly.
I've had better luck since the switch to Wayland. I don't play many FPS games but mouse input & overall smoothness for strategy games has been great. Check your mouse settings, you might need to set a higher USB sample rate. Piper is a frontend for adjusting them.
Yes, most likely. Without a compositor I get lots of stuttering on x11, whereas KDE and GNOME's wayland sessions are both buttery smooth out of the box.
Might be my Nvidia GPU, but I've never gotten x11 to work flawlessly for gaming.
> That's because almost all of the big players in that space
To the OP's point-- there are soooo many games nowadays, that if you and your friend group can skip some of those "big players," there are still hundreds of multiplayer games to play.
> which the Linux wrappers (mostly the wine project) refuse to support for security reasons.
It's more that there's no sensible way they could do it even if they wanted to. Emulating the Windows kernel internals is well beyond the scope of what WINE is trying to do, and even if they did do it, there would be no way for the anticheat vendors to tell the difference between the AC module being sandboxed for compatibility versus sandboxed as a bypass technique. Trying to subvert the AC in any way is just begging to get banned, even if it's for beingn reasons.
Even PVP is starting to “just work” via Proton. Arc Raiders runs just fine on Linux and is a strictly PvP game. Over time I think this will be less and less of a problem.
> ...which the Linux wrappers (mostly the wine project) refuse to support for security reasons.
I mean, several of the major anticheats can be configured to work just fine on Linux. [0] It's up to the game dev whether or not it's permitted. So, yeah, unless the game is one where its dev makes huge blog posts about how "advanced" its anti-cheat is (like Valorant or the very latest CoD/Battlefield games) it's quite likely that multiplayer games will work just fine on Linux.
And if they don't, and the faulty game is a new purchase on Steam, then ask for a refund and tell them that the game doesn't work with your OS. Easy, peasy.
[0] I have 100% solid, personal knowledge that Easy Anti Cheat can work on Linux. On Linux, I play THE FINALS, Elden Ring, and a couple of other EAC-"protected" games without any troubles. I have perhaps-unreliable memories that at least one of the games I play uses Denuvo, which is only sometimes used as anti-cheat but does use many of the same techniques as kernel-mode anticheat.
> I have 100% solid, personal knowledge that Easy Anti Cheat can work on Linux.
That's no secret, but the catch is that the Linux version is much, much easier to bypass. That's why some developers choose not to enable it, or in the case of Apex Legends, enabled it but later backtracked and disabled it again.
> oh game XYZ doesn't run so it's not reasonable for gaming
People tend to generalize, but what they probably mean is "it's not reasonable for gaming for the games I play.
I haven't fully switched over yet because the games the combo of the hardware I have + the games I play regularly, still give me issues vs. Windows. Getting them to run isn't the problem, but I haven't been able to solve miscellaneous crashes, lag, lower frame rates, etc.
My next PC upgrade will probably be getting rid of my Nvidia 1660 super and getting something AMD for less headaches.
> People tend to generalize, but what they probably mean is "it's not reasonable for gaming for the games I play.
This. The corollary is also that people take the such quips way too literally.
I, personally, don't play that many games, and those that I do play tend to run faster on Linux (with an AMD GPU, which I bought specifically to avoid nvidia headaches).
But I still game on Windows. Why? Because I still have a Windows box, "because Linux is not reasonable for photo editing". I actually daily drive Linux, but I can't be assed to move from Lightroom and photoshop, so I still keep a windows pc under my desk. I just play games on it because it's much beefier than my 5 yo ryzen U laptop, and since I don't interact with that box all that much, I didn't feel like partitioning my smallish drive for no tangible benefit. My laptop is more than enough for all my other needs.
Ok, if you want to be stubborn about it then leave Windows on a partition and only start it when you want to play that one game. Problem solved.
In many ways, moving to Linux is like starting to live on your own. Your mommy might be a better cook than you, but is that a good enough reason to keep living in your parents' basement?
Win insists on bootlocker/secure boot, meanwhile most of the Linux doesn’t boot with it or you have to go though hell and back to install unsigned drivers (nvidia, gentle-yall).
I’d all say that Linux is like living in a car with 0 euros and saving up for a house. Simple user can scrape by, but mowing dev work life to Linux is much harder than to Mac. VPNs, inconsistent distro support for weird work stuff and such will make you spend days to weeks of unpaid overtime to get comfortable
This is a solvable problem and there's even pacman hooks around to do it for you
But also don't blame Linux. Even your comment says the problem is Microsoft. We need to be collectively mad at the right entity if we're going to get them to change. Otherwise they'll keep bullying people and they've found that they can bully people so much it gives them Stockholm Syndrome, where they feel they can't leave.
Secure boot mainly gets annoying if you have an Nvidia card, since the akmod needs to be self-signed. It's not insurmountable but you have to load your keys into the UEFI before it'll work.
Bazzite builds the Nvidia driver into its kernel, so you don't need to do anything special. Post installation it prompts you to do key enrollment, so all the user needs to do is select "Enroll MOK" and type "universalblue".
FWIW my 4070 Ti Super has had zero headaches in Linux. It’s only older Nvidia cards I’ve had issues with. Seems like there was a major driver change starting with the RTX 20xx series.
Linux probably became first-class for them because a lot of ML workflows rely on NVidia in the cloud, and I don't think anyone really uses Windows for that.
Over the last year or so, nVidia support for the 3+ series of hardware has gotten pretty stable.
With that said, I'm probably going to grab and AMD or Intel card once my 3060 becomes too much of a pain to continue using. It's a little ridiculous that the 5060 gives very little reason for my to update my 5 year old video card.
I only update my rig ever 8-10 years. Saves money though I tend to then play the older games, which is OK for me. I've had a 3080 for 3 years and it still feels like a new card.
There have certainly been issues (I've been on Linux with mostly nvidia GPUs since 2004) but it's
almost always been caused by the module being outside the kernel, and a kernel update breaking compatibility sometimes, understandably. This has always been fixed quickly on nvidias end though. And early Wayland issues and the current DX12 -> Vulkan translation performance issues in more recent times.
But overall I've also had a mostly stable experience during that time. New hardware is supported mostly at release. Not always supporting all the latest features straight away mind you, but still. Meanwhile I seem to hear about issues with support for Intel and AMD cards at release frequently in comparison.
Again, all these games are available on console (mostly) so the excuse to not support Linux is conscious. Those ARE Linux machines. Essentially. (Yeah yeah, they have their own tool chain and rendering) but if they are using Vulkan, DX12, DX11, and a window - it can run on Linux.
Technically PS5 and I think Switch 2 is based on the BSD kernel probably because of the license. Xbox is not exactly Windows but it's using an NT kernel.
Playstation is FreeBSD, yeah, but the Switch runs an almost completely bespoke microkernel. They did borrow some parts of the BSD network stack, but overall it doesn't even vaguely resemble Unix.
Of course, and it's mostly DRM and/or anti-cheat. The studios want full control over the device running their IP, and they can't achieve that with desktop Linux, but they also don't want to leave the PC gaming market behind entirely to launch exclusively on consoles. Hence why the Windows versions of these games install rootkits on your PC, they aren't cooperating with the PC ecosystem, they are forcibly turning your computer into a locked-down console.
and for a good reason, you want an infested cheater to be more a problem than currently bad problem that is happening????
giving a user freedom cause it to make multiplayer game to be more unbearable since its human nature to compete and come out of others ???? who would guess
AMD drivers are now open and in the mainline kernel. They dropped their proprietary driver and now use the upstream MESA stack. Nvidia also still suffers from a 20-30% performance drop on DX12 games on Linux, while AMD does not.
It used to be the reverse as you stated, but that hasn't been true since about 2015.
Okay, but AMD isn't accelerated. It's godawful slow for anything to do with video, and really you just need an NVidia card if you're doing anything to do with video editing or motion graphics.
The built-in amdgpu drivers are awful, constantly crashy and with very poor hardware support of anything more than a couple of years old.
I run both operating systems. But I have to say it either runs the game you want to play or it doesn't. This is especially true if you play games with friends.
That's not what I am saying, sorry if it was confusing. The parent was implying that if it doesn't run a game just pick a different game. But I was pointing out that isn't always an option, and some times you just want to play a specific game.
I used Linux Mint for 2 full months, 99% of my personal computing. Really like it. BUT... not all games my gaming group plays work on it, and social gaming is very important to me.
That doesn't mean I'm sour on Linux PC gaming. I think it's great, and will work for a lot of people, and it's so close for me. And I might switch, since my gaming tastes are shifting.
I do understand the premise but … people want to play the games they want to play.
For example I am a good customer for streaming services because I don’t care about specific titles - I will watch a series or a movie because it is available. I will most likely not go through a hassle to watch some specific show if it is not on streaming I already have.
Gaming doesn’t really work like that for me. I usually want to play specific titles - not just some game.
But I fully understand someone has the same approach to games as I have for movies/series.
I ran Starcraft 2 through Lutrus and it was a piece of cake. No lag that I could discern. There was a little mini launcher and everything. The multiplayer also worked just fine, although the matchmaking system seemed to think I was an expert level player for some reason and kept matching me with dudes who were way better at the game than I was.
To me, this is the one thorn in Linux (and the Linux online community) that gives me pause.
For the people that it just works for, well it just works for.
For anyone else, apparently they are the problem? Not Linux?
Well sorry no. I did get StarCraft 2 working with Lutris... once. Then I couldn't get it to start again. Eventually I switched to running Battle.Net from Steam and for some reason that did work. But it wasn't a "just works" or "piece of cake." It was a puzzle.
Maybe the difference is that I am running Ubuntu? Personally I think it's a common mistake for new users to jump on some obscure distro because they read something online where someone says it's the best. Even if that's true there is value in being on a popular distro in that bugs tend to be discovered and fixed quicker and there's almost always someone who has had the same problem you did and often figured out the solution just a web search away.
I think Canonical and the Gnome foundation have made some really bone headed decisions over the years, but I stick with Ubuntu because the mass of users on it means I never get left high and dry. Or at least I'm not alone when I run into a problem.
Fwiw I've been playing Hogwarts Legacy lately, though single player. Only problem I ever face is sometimes in a cave if I'm facing a certain direction I'll get blinding light as if I have ray tracing enabled and it's badly implemented. Though considering it's a AAA game and other things I've seen, I don't think that's exactly a Linux problem. Much like Starfield...
It's like this. You eventually got Starcraft2 to work. That means Linux can run Starcraft2, it's in the "Runs" category. Games like League of Legends, which have kernel level anti cheat, are in the "Won't Run" category.
But you don't want to sacrifice comfort or other things. The game should work just right on Linux.
I have an Nvidia card and use mostly Ubuntu (mate), also for gaming. It's even a problem now, because I would benefit from a hard divide between the gaming and working\studying system (I have a gaming user in backlog).
On Linux it's mostly KSP, Factorio, but sometimes DeepRockGalactic, Valheim, Euro Truck Sim or Warhammer: Total War1\2\3. These games work flawlessly or with <10%fps hit.
There are games that kind of work - Ancestors: Humankind Odyssey, Cyberpunk, Hunt: Showdown. But you lose comfort and I'd rather just play them on Windows, than suffer decreased functionality on Linux. I know that some of it (definitely Cyberpunk) is only because of NVIDIA.
When buying games I usually don't buy Windows only games unless there is a very good reason. And I quit League of Legends and WRC rally because of anti cheat scam. I feel scammed after putting lot of money in a game and suddenly losing the ability to play it.
This shifting of goalposts just to cater to linux just explains it all.
Comeon. If a customer bought a game that says it runs on linux, they should be able to play it on linux well, not just launch it and quit within 5 mins.
I get you have the ideology up in your head, but don't lie and embellish linux to this degree. The attitude just turns people off.
"Linux" is really a family of operating systems, so people need to be more specific. It might run perfectly out of the box on consumer/gamer focused operating systems like Bazzite or SteamOS while perhaps requiring more work on something like Red Hat or NixOS. Those different operating systems all have wildly different approaches to how the OS actually works despite generally being able to run a largely overlapping set of programs.
It's like saying something works on "laptop" without specifying whether it's a Thinkpad or a Chromebook or a Macbook.
Not saying you didn’t experience this, but I’ve definitely run StarCraft 2 in the past, and I play Anno 1800 regularly fine (thanks to the mods I’ve been playing it’s even got 50% more sessions than the base game)
Did multiplayer LAN work in Anno 1800 for you out of the box, or did you make adjustments? I couldn't figure out how to get it to work.
StarCraft 2 worked, oddly enough, run from Steam as an external program. (Lots of search results tried to get me to use Lutris/bottles, but I couldn't get it to work consistently under Lutris.)
Ah yes that's what I meant. But yes unfortunately I could not figure out how to get multiplayer to connect. No idea why or how to troubleshoot and fix.
They don't mean all games thru all times, they mean "the latest $70 release" that still can have problem if it is multiplayer DRM/anticheat ridden one.
I haven't booted windows in months but there is definitely some caveats for gamers
Initially I hated that Linux was so niche in 2005 or so.
Meanwhile now, I don't have time for games anyway. I still think gaming should be better on Linux, but I don't miss Windows anymore either (though I have it as secondary operating system on another computer; I just don't really care about it, it could die tomorrow and I would not miss it one iota).
I personally wouldn't install any kernel anticheat on a computer that I intend to use for anything important, so I would personally refuse to install the incompatible games even if I was using windows.
Take ProtonDB with a grain of salt, Apex Legends still has a Silver rating ("Runs with minor issues") despite being 100% unplayable on Linux for over a year now.
"Just trust us, bro! Our security is better than the banks, governments, and major services and we would never let anyone exploit or abuse the gaping hole we're deliberately installing in your security profile! It's just our perfectly secure rootkit that won't ever be used for anything bad!"
It's so weird to me that people just allow this, or even defend it. Game companies should be legally obligated to scale human moderation and curation of multiplayer games, and if you're paying for service that gets moderated and curated, there should be some legal expectation of process - a requirement that the service provider lay out a specific "due process" framework, even if it ends up mediated, that gives a customer legal recourse. Instead, they try to automate everything, which has notoriously indiscriminate collateral damage with no recourse.
If you pour significant chunk of your private time and money into a game, you should be entitled to not arbitrarily lose an account or gameplay progress because some poorly configured naive Bayes classifier decided you did something wrong, without corresponding evidence or recourse to undo bad bans.
For some reason companies are entitled to infinitely expand their reach without concurrently expanding their responsibilities in providing service to individuals. Must be nice.
Does a game "run on Linux" when it has 100% feature parity? 90%? 80%? What are you willing to cut? Some performance? A few graphical effects? Multiplayer?
When you look at the details, Linux gaming is not as good as it might seem.
What you sacrifice in feature parity, you gain in user freedom and principle. To me, that is a worthwhile tradeoff. Especially since it's really not that much different at this point. You're not sacrificing much in most cases now. It's really quite remarkable.
The only pain point I've found is VR. I've bounced off trying to get it working multiple times with the best results getting about 10% functional (video working on one or two games, input broken on all).
That said, I haven't tried getting the same kit working on windows so I can't say if it's any better.
VR is rough at the moment, but one would hope that Valve is prepping an overhaul for SteamVR on Linux since they're launching a standalone VR headset which runs Linux soon.
I ran into the issue where I didn't know that you can tell Steam to always prefer NATIVE LINUX programs over everything over Proton. This was causing a ton of issues with VR, I havent gone back to try it yet though, havent found the time.
It was very broken for a long time. Since fairly recently you have WiVRn (specifically wivrn-dashboard on Arch) for Oculus (more supported though) and I would daresay it works better then SteamVR used to do for me on Windows
Hardware for flight sim games is also in a similar boat. It's hard to configure most of the newer hardware, but a lot of the old low quality joysticks work alright out of the box.
I have owned the index for a few years, running it on ubuntu/mint. It is a pain. But VR is a pain generally. I go months without using the thing. Then when i do use it some bit of software has been updated and i inevitably have to spend an hour getting it to work correctly again. Honestly, VR on linux feels like using windows again.
VR is bad because nobody cares much about it. The hardware is clunky, the market tiny, and costs great. As the hardware improves it will get more attention from the FOSS community and so too will the overall experiance.
There it is, the classic “just change what you enjoy then!!”. Linux will take off when the community stops trying to force new users to conform to the Linux way of life and instead respect that other people have other needs and wants that are valid, and not a moment before.
While I agree it's unreasonable, it's also kind of a chicken and an egg thing. These things won't change until Linux becomes big enough to ignore. I'm not sure what the solution is though, as I don't think it's realistic to make people give up what they enjoy to get there. That's not gonna happen. But Valve has at least made a dent with the Steamdeck and Proton in general, and maybe more with the upcoming Steam Machine. Devs actively target the Steamdeck nowadays for games where it makes sense, so it is taken into consideration at a whole new level compared to years past.
Most of the games I play would work fine, but it’s the damn anti cheat and multiplayer games that forces Windows down my throat, and I’m not happy about it.
I only use my gaming rig for gaming so I have no other requirements, which kind of makes it even worse.
I've been using Fedora+KDE for over a decade, Windows 8 was last version of Windows I had installed at home, and we all know what a squarified mess that was.
Gnome is fine, but it's just not for me.
For everyone on here that complains about Windows requiring an 'online' account, MacOS does as well, but the perception is different. MacOS, just kind of quietly does it, with no ceremony, but Windows does a Ballmer-esque right-in-your-face demand. I couldn't possibly comment on Windows 11 as I've yet to use it, but Win10 felt a lot worse than Windows 7 which was probably the last high water mark for Windows after Windows 2000.
The familiarity is great but the thing that really draws me to Plasma over Gnome is that the KDE developers seem to have an attitude of just implementing the features people want even if it's not perfect yet. Gnome is polished, but it's missing so many basic configuration options out of the box.
It's kind of funny because when I first got into linux it was practically the opposite story. Back in the day of KDE 2 or 3 and Gnome 2, KDE was the slow one to bring in features while Gnome felt like the wild wild west.
Now it seems like Gnome has gone down a practically walled garden path which I don't love. Last I tried it, I wanted to launch an app focused and in full screen on startup. The gnome response for that was basically "You're not allowed to do that".
Afaik, you can choose to not sign into icloud when creating an account on your mac. It's not a hard requirement like it is on Windows, though they do obviously strongly nudge you to login to icloud.
At least on the latest Sequoia, there has been no hard requirement for an online account. They nudge you towards it, but you can decline and continue. As far as I can remember, macOS has never required an online account to set up a Mac.
> if you don't sell your games on Steam or in a way I can run them on Linux I am not buying or playing them.
Agree 1000% and recently Steam Community Support pissed me off so I am now looking into GOG (I have my first GOG game now and playing it), Epic and Luna. In fact, the GOG game I got was free through Luna ironically. Even more ironic, the excellent Heroic game launcher lets you mark the game to show up in Steam, then when you start steam run it from there and it uses the config settings from Heroic but you can use screenshots, etc. in Steam.
The gaming landscape on Linux is great, except for those companies that refuse to support anti-cheat.
I suspect this is less about when Windows declined and more about individual computing journeys. Early exposure (home, school, work) tends to set a baseline that’s hard to shake.
Microsoft had realyl good engineers and talent. Microsoft internally has gone to shit. They hire an army of H1B's and all the talent has left. Shell of a company on the Windows side that anyone working with them can see. It started a couple years ago, but it's really gone off the deepend and will just get worse. I say this as a windows expert and someone who thinks linux is crap.
I started using Linux in like 2007 but the GPU was always an issue. Then it was running games. Linux changed for me around 2013+ when I would install it on my laptops and get a heck of a performance boost. Heck those laptops still turn on to this day. Windows just bloats all hardware.
It's been an unfortunate re-occurring issue for me as well. Recent hardware is much better about this, and I too have seen the performance bumps at the cost of software compatibility. I feel like if Adobe brought their CC suite to Linux I'd have no reason to ever use Windows outside the random game that _needs_ it.
Been on / off Linux for the desktop since about the same time. Recurring theme across my AMD and NVIDIA gpus. Support has always sucked!
Over the years it felt like a game of whack a mole finding the right combination of driver versions, open or closed source. R9 390 owners back in the day will understand... Fast forward to now, the same problems keep occurring albeit better off then they were.
> I started using Linux in like 2007 but the GPU was always an issue.
Were you running Nvidia hardware? I've been running Linux since like 2000-ish, have always run ATi/AMD hardware on my desktop machines, and (aside from overheat issues brought on by the undersized replacement fan attached with bread ties to that one board) haven't had troubles. On the other hand, I don't suspend my desktop or servers to RAM or disk, so maybe that has intermittently or always been broken... I'd never know.
I've only had Intel hardware in my laptops, and I can't remember ever having trouble suspending those to RAM or disk.
Yes, but it took some time before the suck became so bad too many people started to notice, and those people weren’t tech people.
Most people had never even heard of Linux. It has taken a lot of very bad things on Windows for it to get to this point. It’s classic frog in a slowly heating up pot territory.
My experience is that people fear linux, rather than not knowing. I am the lonely Linux user since c. 2005, and people see half my screen is always a console, the other half a browser. So they fear linux is for console wizards, not for regular users. Nothing will convince them otherwise, even when they are 100% of the time using online webapps. I have some coworkers using browser + VS code + WSL2 all the time, but they don't switch because they fear the console-to-config-everything instead of Control Panel.
So much of it is a problem of execution. If people could use Linux without ever having to know what a terminal is (much like the average Windows user doesn't know what PowerShell is), then it would actually be quite successful. It has gotten better over the past decade, but it still suffers from endless paper cuts and the odd issue that requires a shell session to fix. I will say that Valve's SteamOS has come the closest to avoiding this trap. You can use a deck without ever having to touch a CLI.
I don't know, man. In my experience, people make no difference between "windows" and "the pc". I think the vast majority of "regular people" have no idea there are alternatives to "windows", other than "macs".
I am a hardcore DayZ player. DayZ does not work on Proton[0]. I cannot use Linux as my main gaming platform. Battlefield 6 does not work. Latest Call of Duty does not work. You can talk about voting with your wallet, but when millions of people are buying the game, your one non-vote means nothing.
So either you punish yourself and refuse to play with friends, or you punish yourself and install windows. It’s a damned situation regardless of your choice
[0] point me to as many compatibility databases as you want, the game will not start on my vanilla Ubuntu build
Sounds like it might be an issue with your setup, considering that other people have no problems running it. Hard to tell what the problem is, but definitely a frustrating situation.
This is really just a subset of competitive shooters. Arc Raiders, The Finals, Hunt Showdown, Halo Infinite all play fine.
I have a Windows drive for Battlefield but I stopped booting into it after interest in the game waned.
Playing on console is also an option. Most games allow you to alternate between keyboard/mouse and controller. Discord works fine, and every game is cross-play.
this is why a lot of people run arch and why valve based steamOS on arch instead of debian as the previous version was, you need a newer kernel and other packages to really play games on linux with the least friction possible
> idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro
They largely have now, archinstall.
It's still text based/TUI but it's pretty simple and intuitive, anyone already familiar with installing a Linux distro (especially any sort of -server variant) will be comfortable with the archinstall script.
> anyone already familiar with installing a Linux distro (especially any sort of -server variant) will be comfortable with the archinstall script.
To be fair, thats not _generally_ the audience we tend to think about when we talk about the enshittification of Windows. We're usually talking regular consumers / computer users and "gamers" the latter of which is a wide range of people that can fend for themselves with instructions to people that cannot.
Fair enough, but I wouldn't generally direct that audience to vanilla arch linux as "gamers first distro" anyway.
I'd direct them to something like Bazzite (Immutable), or CachyOS for staying arch-based but providing a GUI installer and tools, Endeavor OS, even Fedora, etc.
Agreed. I know in some circles it's a meme, but if the Steam Gaming Console actually makes a debut any time soon, I think we'll see more of a jump from the "Gamer" crowd away from Windows. My (some say naive) hope is that it will make game devs try to design games that aren't only locked in on Windows and have more Proton support.
It's really a (good IMHO) sign of the times that us old hats have to remind ourselves that most new comers to Linux today aren't necessarily adept at installing another OS, let alone using the command line. The first time I installed Arch was maybe four years ago, but the very first dual boot setup I made was between Win 3.1 and OS/2 2.1 in 1993 when I was 10, and I've been playing with Linux since the mid-late 90s. When I first installed Arch the "hard way" I said to myself--"I don't understand why it has this reputation... this is all stuff I've done before countless times." Frankly, I'm still trying to figure out the distribution graph of Linux knowledge and how to engage with different skill levels.
I agree. I also think that not everyone (I couldn't say if this is generational, I see this among peers sometimes too) has the same appetite for problem solving. People hit a problem or a wall and say "So I tried X and now I see Y. I dont know what to do" and then they just sit there. The reason that LMGTFY and RTFM come off as "elitist" is because people are frustrated by others' willingness to just "stop trying" whenever they hit a road block.
Regarding why Arch doesn't "invest" in a graphical installer, it's worth mentioning that Arch's installation image has a different design philosophy than most installation media.
The image is a fully functional arch environment that copies the entirety of its contents to RAM on boot, giving you special installation opportunities such as the ability to install Arch to the same flash drive that booted the installer. Having no graphical dependencies lets this image remain small enough to pull this off, as well as allowing for fully remote installations over SSH out of the box, since archinstall is a TUI.
I don't believe there are any serious technical obstacles to providing a graphical installer in something like an initramfs environment. Many distros do provide graphical installation mechanisms using PXE, which loads the kernel and installer-initramfs over the network (and is similar in the sense that it won't touch local storage unless you tell it to)
I don't have a way to quickly around to check, but I thought the arch install media used squashfs? In which case I wouldn't have thought it was safe to blow away the backing store.
Not that this is going to matter to you because you've left Windows behind, but I refuse to buy License Keys any more and I try to steer people away from buying "Gray Keys" to avoid the ridiculous costs. Using the MS Activation Scripts[0] is the much better go-to.
Given the push to monetize user data it seems Microsoft is demphasizing their focus on key piracy. I bought a computer with a 55" touch screen. The company selling it said it was a Windows 11 computer. The computer was a 14 year old Intel CPU/Mobo that was never designed to run Windows 11. The company selling it had hacked Windows to run on this old computer. They didn't have a license key. I report it to Microsoft and crickets. The company ghosted me on the issue. In 2003, with XP in it's prime, they were cracking down hard on piracy... now it's part of the business model...
Absolutely. I would also think that the amount of money "lost" on license keys specifically on the "regular consumer" side pales in comparison to the data that they get once you're on their operating system. How many non-power users bother with disabling telemetry and other data that MS collects through their operating system? How many people bother configuring a Local Account? All of that is probably worth way more than a ~$200 license key.
On the business side, businesses make it a focus to be in compliance with licensing agreements so they still see whatever oodles of money from companies that have fleets of computers that run Windows.
> idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro
Because its supposed to be stripped down. To serve as a base to create things like Endeavour, Manjaro, or Cachy.
There's still a lot of utility to doing things the hard way. I do suggest people that want to actually learn Linux install Arch and live in the terminal. You learn a lot very fast because you're forced to. But it's not for everyone and that's totally okay too. That's the beauty of Linux after all. That's the beauty of computing. You can't build a product for everyone but you can build an environment that can become what anyone needs.
But I'll second your point. I've been on Endeavour on my main machine for about 3-4 years now and only had one problem where I just got a mismatch in a new kernel and new Nvidia driver so I couldn't load the desktop. Easy rollback (from the cache) and a day or two later the issue was solved so I could upgrade without a problem. Took no more than 10 minutes to solve and that's the worst problem I've had the entire time. I will also give the advice that if you have an Nvidia card give your boot partition like 5GB instead of 1GB
I don't think it is because they can't do it or that they want to be a base for other distros. They simply let the user choose what the user wants. And if you don't know what you want then you learn it.
I switched to arch 15 years ago to learn Linux. And it is by far the best way to understand it.
Having used Arch I can easily maintain almost any distro out there, but it doesn't work the other way around.
If I am understanding correctly, you were using Windows without a licence? I think that's more the problem here, as Windows does provide a way to have offline accounts, you just didn't want to pay for it.
I installed fedora yesterday. Instead of steam i am hoping that GOG with heroic games launcher will work nicely. Idk, I want to support drm free software so if it's on gog, I buy it there.
[obviously YMMV, take me with a grain of salt etc]
I actually tried Fedora first (thinking dev-first workflows) but ended up switching to Ubuntu w/x11 for gaming. A lot of that had to do with Fedora's release schedule (rather than Ubuntu's 2-year LTS) breaking working GOG/steam/wine-based apps on a rotating basis. Since switching to a defaults lifestyle / Ubuntu with x11 I deal with NVIDIA driver compatibility issues every 6 months or so instead of once/month. The 22 -> 24 upgrade was better than I expected and I didn't lose more than a couple of hours of life to appease the shell gods.
In any case Fedora and a once/month problem would still beat the Windows update nonsense, which I am still supporting since my spouse hasn't switched yet :/
I've used Ubuntu since 2006 and started using Kubuntu (I prefer KDE) about 2 years ago. Ubuntu (or Kubuntu) are very solid for gaming. It puzzles me how often I see highly customized distros like Bazzite and CachyOS touted for gaming after looking into some of the wild tweaks those distros do; it's amazing to me that they run at all.
Fedora Silverblue user here. Lutris (from flatpak) can play GoG games fine (*).
(*): Apparently achievement support even on single player games requires the gamestore client (GoG client in my case) and Lutris doesn't support that yet. Am old enough to not care :p
My spare PC runs Win10. Was able to install it without internet and thus get an offline account.
Since they stopped full updates for it, it's a lot less annoying. Almost all the nags were at reboot time, usually triggered by the update giving it a new thing to nag about. Only thing now is it'll ask me once a month about either OneDrive or Win11, which is bad but tolerable.
Yeah, yay works until it doesn't anymore, because the pacman library dependency it uses was updated but yay was not... and then you need to recompile yay manually. I mean, I'll still use it (or rather paru, which works basically the same way), but it's very annoying, when it happens every few months.
That's assuming you do system upgrades through paru/yay. However, you may not want to upgrade the packages you've obtained from the AUR and so you upgrade using pacman. That may cause the updated libalpm to become incompatible with the installed yay/paru.
Iirc it was to force the extra step necessary for the user to acknowledge that the AUR can bootstrap malware if used blindly.
This seems to be a relatively consistent discussion surrounding AUR helper development; for example, adding UX to incentivise users to read PKGBUILDs, lest the AUR becomes an attractive vector for skids.
No one wants the AUR to become NPM, and the thing that will incentivise that is uneducated users. Having the small barrier of not having helpers in the main repos is an effective way of accomplishing that.
> I know its a "meme" to talk about how great Arch is, but when you want the latest of something, Arch has it
I love my Arch installs to death, but I feel like I'm the oddball out about the mess that is AUR. The main repositories have a lot of things but I always end up getting pushed to AUR and then it just feels like I bolted on a hack rather than pacman/the arch base just supporting AUR more like a different package source normally.
I use Arch but don't want to fiddle with stuff anymore.
Installing via the archinstall command was pretty easy. Not quite as easy as a Fedora or Ubuntu install, but for someone familiar with Linux, it's negligible.
Yeah, my last arch install was my last. It was fun to rice my system and setting up everything from scratch 4 or 5 times taught me a lot about operating systems and computers. Ultimately my setup is not significantly different than any other distro, it's just that I installed the packages and did configs myself. I'll be fine with a minimally riced system, if I ever even need to install an OS again.
There was some 3D printer slicer software I needed that wouldnt run, when I finally figured out why it had to do with GLIBC being out of date. I have used Debian since like 2008, and Ubuntu since the mid 2010s so I am accustomed to doing PPA's and what not, but something in me broke and I wanted to finally try something more bleeding edge. I nearly went for Fedora but the version I wanted to try didn't even boot (I don't like to waste any time with command line incantations anymore) so I looked up EndeavourOS I don't remember how I found it, I think a friend said someone they knew used it (turns out they dont LOL) so I gave it a shot.
I had bad experiences with Arch before because of Manjaro, but in hindsight, I think the main issues I had were more to do with how Pacman can get insanely nuanced. When you update packages you have to know what you're doing, it will update all weird, its not like Debian or Ubuntu upgrades where it installs / uninstalls what you do and don't need unless you tell it to be that nuanced.
I'm genuinely curious as to what the key differences are (especially those that would cause someone to switch), as someone who is pretty tech savvy but whose use of Linux as a daily driver is admittedly pretty weak.
You usually try a few distros, until you find the one that does whenever you needed, and then you stick with it for 15 years ;)
From my own experience: 15 years ago, when (except for academia), Linux was very nisje, it was hard to use it. Random rare errors would pop up. On Windows you would know someone who knew what to do, but with Linux? So I chose Ubuntu, because it had the most support. Solution to any error could be found on askubuntu (?) forums. But if you had a friend, you would choose his system and get help from him. I once had university admins very happy to help me with something and even give me some tips.
Nowadays it really doesn't matter that much, other than extra easy (with an LLM everything is already easy) installation of drivers (POP os?)/initial programs you used on Windows (on Mate it takes 10min due to a special GUI appstore).
BUT there are reasons to switch. Like Ubuntu's pushing of very annoying snaps, making it very hard to get Firefox without a snap. Snaps are annoying, because they don't have a cleaning mechanism and old versions just clog your hard drive. They take forever to launch and it's just not a good idea for a browser. Don't mind snaps for other things.
There is also Desktop Environment support and support for hidpi monitors and such.
Other than that, there is a little of philosophy. Like super FOSS and idealistic like Debian (i guess? Pls correct me if I'm wrong). Or more business aligned, like Redhat/Fedora. Or elitist that like to waste their users time and make them read manuals for fdisk like Arch, where you have to format your hard drive without GParted or any other GUI.
I'm no pro, but that's a little that came to mind if you wanted to know what mattered in the past.
not OP, but for some it might be availability of latest versions packages (say, you've heard about new major version of Bash or Vim being released today, and wondering how soon it might be available in your distro packages), and, as someone else mentioned, less update stress due to lack of "major version bumps" - just remember to subscribe to https://archlinux.org/news/ and watch out for entries requiring "manual intervention".
I would say EndeavourOS is the "Ubuntu" to "Arch" if you will. The installer is easy, and it comes with "yay" out of the box which is a frontend to Pacman which holds your hand in just the right ways. If I want to update my OS I type "yay" into a terminal, hit enter and confirm the packages needing updating (or select which ones I want) and type my password, and that's it. In the past with Manjaro I did a system update with Pacman, and problems ensued.
Long term stability is less important for gaming computers than having the most cutting edge (and theoretically highest performance) drivers. That's why the community leans so heavily towards arch.
I just got a new work laptop: the ThinkPad X1 Carbon gen13. It's gorgeous: weighs a bit over 900 grams, has an amazing matte OLED screen, Intel Lunar Lake that sips power (1-2W idle) and is fast enough to compile Rust if needed, amazing keyboard, touchpad is great but I just use the trackpoint, everything works from the box on Linux (they even deliver it with either Fedora or Ubuntu, but I installed CachyOS).
Suspend: works always.
Battery life: great, the whole day.
Wifi: works always, connects fast, works fast.
The build quality is really nice, especially the carbon fiber body that doesn't feel so cold/hot to touch.
> idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro
Simplicity, among other reasons. Installers force the users hand and need maintenance. Having no installer but rather a detailed installation guide offers unlimited freedom to users. Installation isn't difficult either, you just pacstrap a root filesystem and configure the bootloader, mounts and locale.
ArchLinux does now have an installer called archinstall, but it's described more as a library than a tool. It allows you to automate the installation using profiles.
Just to paint an example, if I am installing Arch I like to have:
* A user configured through systemd-homed with luks encryption
* The limine bootloader
* snapperd from OpenSUSE with pacman hooks
* systemd-networkd and systemd-resolved
* sway with my custom ruby based bar
* A root filesystem in a btrfs subvolume, often shared across multiple disks in raid0
If you were to follow the installation guide it will tell you to consider these networking/bootloader/encryption options just fine. But trying to create an installer which supports all these bleeding edge features is futile.
Also if you want 'Arch with sensible defaults' CachyOS is basically that, people think of it as a 'gaming distro' but that's not an accurate characterisation. I use it as a daily driver on my personal machine mostly for non-gaming work and it's an excellent distro.
There is though the TUI installer, not like it used to be where the commands were typed in following the wiki. Not that there was anything wrong with the 'manual' mode, it gave you insight into the basic building blocks/configurations right from the start.
It's been a very long time since I moved to Arch, but I swear that something like 12 years ago it did have some form of menu-driven installer.
Nowadays, there are so many ways to partition the drive (lvm, luks, either one on top of the other; zfs with native encryption or through dm-crypt), having the efi boot directly a unified kernel image or fiddle with some bootloader (among a plethora of options)...
One of the principal reasons why I love Arch is being able to have a say in some of these base matters, and would hate to have to fight the installer to attain my goals. I remember when Ubuntu supported root on zfs but the installer didn't it was rather involved to get the install going. All it takes with Arch is to spend a few minutes reading the wiki and you're off to the races. The actual installation part is trivial.
But then again, if you have no idea what you want to do, staring at the freshly-booted install disk prompt can be daunting. Bonus points for it requiring internet for installation. I would have to look up the correct incantation to get the wifi connected on a newer PC with no wired ethernet, and I've been using the thing for a very long time.
You spent $2000 on a new machine but wouldn’t shell out another $20-30 for a windows pro key? You’re willing to burn a bunch of time fiddling with getting a completely new operating system setup, but you’re not willing to spend a few minutes fiddling with setting up an offline windows account?
I get that maybe that was the final straw or something, but come on, “I switched to Linux because I didn’t want to take an hour to set up Windows” really sounds like you never really wanted Windows in the first place, you were just looking for an excuse.
The meme was “I use Arch, BTW,” but I think it has mostly died as enough people have pointed out that Arch isn’t really hard-mode Linux or something. It is a barebones start but
1) very stable due to rolling-release producing small changes
2) the skill barrier to getting a full system is “basic literacy, to read the wiki”
Eventually I switched to Ubuntu for some reason, it has given me more headaches than Arch.
> 1) very stable due to rolling-release producing small changes
Having very frequent updates to bleeding edge software versions, often requiring manual intervention is not "stable". An arch upgrade may, without warning, replace your config files and update software to versions incompatible with the previous.
That's fine if you're continuously maintaining the system, maybe even fun. But it's not stable. Other distributions are perfectly capable of updating themselves without ever requiring human intervention.
> 2) the skill barrier to getting a full system is “basic literacy, to read the wiki”
As well as requiring you to be comfortable with the the linux command line as well as have plenty of time. My mom has basic literacy, she can't install ArchLinux.
ArchLinux is great but it's not a beginner-friendly operating system in the same way that Fedora/LinuxMint/OpenSUSE/Pop!_OS/Ubuntu/ElementOS are.
> Having very frequent updates to bleeding edge software versions, often requiring manual intervention is not "stable". An arch upgrade may, without warning, replace your config files and update software to versions incompatible with the previous.
12 in the last year if you used all the software (I don’t many people are running dovecot and zabbix), so probably actually like 3 for most users: https://archlinux.org/
That’s not too dissimilar from what you’d get running stable releases of Ubuntu or Windows. And of course plenty of windows software will auto upgrade itself in potentially undesired ways, windows users just don’t blame the OS for that
I don't just mean the types of manual intervention mentioned in the news. ArchLinux ships bleeding edge software to users with very little downstream changes. ArchLinux also replaces config files when upgrading. This is inherently different behavior from stable release distributions like Ubuntu.
ArchLinux is not an operating system where you can do an unattended upgrade and forget about it. That's not "bad" or "good", that's just a design choice.
Arch replaces _unmodified_ config files when changing. It’s not an uncommon behaviour in software to update defaults to the new defaults.
If you have a modified config file, it puts the new default one in a .pacnew file for you to compare, which seems strictly better to just deleting the new default one.
Huh you're right, I must've confused myself by removing/installing instead of upgrading recently.
Anyway I think the discussion boils down to semantics. ArchLinux is not "unstable" in the sense that it is prone to breaking. But it also delivers none of the stability promises that stable release distros or rolling release distros with snapshotting and testing like OpenSUSE Tumbleweed deliver. To call ArchLinux stable would make every distribution stable, and the word would lose all meaning.
Most distributions promise that an upgrade always results in a working system. Instead moving the manual maintenance to major release upgrades.
> very stable due to rolling-release producing small changes
Can you elaborate on the chain of thought here? The small changes at high frequency means that something is nearly constantly in a <CHANGED> state, quite opposite from stable. Rolling release typically means that updates are not really snapshotted, therefore unless one does pull updates constantly they risk pulling a set of incompatible updates. Again, quite different from stable.
It’s stable in the way that a person taking small predictable steps at a time is stable compared to somebody who making large random lurching steps. Sure, the system is often changed, but if only a few packages have changed, should there be a problem it is easy to identify the culprit.
Although it is hard to say. Ubuntu also has, I guess, intentional behavior that is hard to distinguish from a bug, like packages switching from apt to snap. So it might just be that my subjective experience feels more buggy.
It's the same train of thought as the modern cloud software notion that deploying small changes more often is safer than bundling "releases"; if you upgrade 3 packages 3x a week (or deploy 50 lines of code 3x a week), you catch small issues quickly and resolve them immediately, rather than upgrading 400 packages 1x a year (or deploying 50,000 lines of code 2x a year), where when things break you have a rather tall order just to triage what failed.
I think there are advantages to both, but I will say that I've found modern Arch to be quite good. The other huge benefit of Arch is the general skill level present in the user base and openness of the forums; when something breaks it's usually easy to google "arch + package name broken" and immediately find a forum thread with a real fix.
I don't think I'd use Arch for a corporate production server for change management reasons alone, but for a home desktop and my home server, it's actually the distribution that's required me to do the _least_ "Linux crap" to keep it going.
I think op meant the subjective feeling of having a system that runs in a stable manner.
I don't quite follow their reasoning either (maybe the smaller changesets expose compatibility bugs before affecting general ux?), but I agree that arch was a joy for me to use and felt "stable".
I know. I was emphasising that this time is not like before. That there are major differences, and things look similar only on a very superficial level.
I've started my Linux journey a decent year ago. It's been fun but I'm happy that they're such a great community to troubleshoot along with me. Never tried Arch but I do love a barebones no fuzz system.
> idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro
Because Arch maintainers are a bunch of elitist gatekeepers that don't accept any level of knowledge that is lower than theirs. You can see that through every forum interaction generally and any discussion about the installation process specifically.
Arch is great btw. It could be greater, if all maintainers would quit.
As a long-time Linux user who fairly recently dropped the Windows partition entirely, I do think the remaining chafing points are these:
* UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous mess. And now you don't just have different versions of GTK vs QT to keep track off, but also X vs Wayland, and their various compatibility layers.
* Support for non-standard DPI monitors sucks, mostly because of the previous point. Wayland has fractional scaling as a sort-of workaround if you can tolerate the entire screen being blurry. Every other major OS can deal with this.
* Anything to do with configuring webcams feels like you're suddenly in thrown back 20 years into the past. It'll probably work fine out of the box, but if it doesn't. Hoo boy.
> UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous mess
I thought you were talking about Windows there. There are 4 (5?) different UI paradigms within Windows, and doing one thing sometimes requires you to interact with each of them.
At least on Linux, with GTK/KDE, you can pick a camp and have a somewhat consistent experience, with a few outliers. Plus many apps now just use CSD and fully integrate their designs to the window, so it's hopeless to have every window styling be consistent.
I never had to mind X vs Wayland when starting user applications tho.
If we're talking about mass adoption of Linux then there really has to be no concept of even "picking a camp". The vast majority of users - even techy people - will not understand what a window manager is, never mind be capable of choosing one.
Yes, there are many UI implementations in Windows but they are almost totally transparent to the user (no pun intended), and they can all run on the same system at once.
Hard disagree. You can run the same programs on any DE or Window Manager or even without one (on pure X11 for example). That's not a hurdle it's a feature.
Users who don't know about the feature can just use a pre-configured system like Mint Cinnamon and never know about any of these things.
> Yes, there are many UI implementations in Windows but they are almost totally transparent to the user (no pun intended), and they can all run on the same system at once.
I mean this is a solved problem on linux using modern distributions like NixOS or even 'normal' distros with flatpak, appimage, etc. I haven't had to deal with anything like this in years.
The windows UIs are way more different than linux was. There was a time in the 90s where UIs were expected to follow platform specifics. These days, most UIs don't and they're almost kind of like the branding. Thus, this is not as big a deal as you're making it out to be. If anything, things like the gnome apps and gtk4 are more consistent than any windows app.
If there's something I hate about Linux, it's CSD (Client-Side Decorations, in case people don't know what it is).
If I wanted all my apps to look different from each other, I'd use macOS. I want a clean desktop environment, with predictable window frames that are customizable and they all look the same. CSD destroys that.
Conversely, I don't want all of my apps to look identical to each other. I want to be able to tell with a submoment of a glance what app I am working on or looking for without having to cognitively engage to locate it, breaking my state of flow in the process.
> UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous mess.
At least things look more or less the same over time. With commercial offerings one day you open your laptop and suddenly everything looks different and all the functions are in a different submenu because some designer thought it was cool or some manager needed a raise.
> It'll probably work fine out of the box, but if it doesn't. Hoo boy.
LLMs are actually very useful for Linux configuration problems. They might even be the reason so many users made the switch recently.
They're pretty good for most things, yes... but man was it rough figuring out getting my IP allocation routing right on my Proxmox server. The system is issued a primary IP, and need to route my subnet through that to my VMs... wasn't too bad once I got it working... I'd also wanted a dnat for "internal" services, and that's where it got tricky.
I need to refresh myself as I'm wanting to move from a /29 to a /28 ... mostly been lazy about not getting it done, but actually mqking progress oo some hobby stuff with Claude Code... definitely a force multiplier, but I'm not quite at a "vibe code" level of trust, so it's still a bit of a slog.
Where would those IPs route to/from if it didn't have a configured default gateway exactly?
The machine got a single IP, I had to route the CIDR block using that IP as the gateway in the host OS. The VMs wouldn't just get assigned additional real IPs.
On UI frameworks... mostly agree, I say this as a COSMIC user even... so many apps still don't show up right in the tray, but it's getting a bit better, I always found KDE to be noisy, and don't like how overtly political the Gnome guys are. So far Wayland hasn't been bad, X apps pretty much just work, even if they don't scale right.
I'm on a very large OLED 3440x1440 display and haven't had too many issues... some apps seem to just drop out, I'm not sure if they are on a different workspace or something as I tend to just stick to single screen, single display. I need to take the time to tweak my hotkeys for window pinning. I'll usually have my browser to half the screen and my editor and terminal on the other half... sometimes stretching the editor to 2/3 covering part of the browser. I'm usually zoomed in 25-30% in my editor and browser... I'd scale the UI 25% directly, like on windows or mac, but you're right it's worse.
For webcams, I don't use anything too advanced, but the Nexigo cams I've been using lately have been working very well... they're the least painful part of my setup, and even though I tend to use a BT headset, I use the webcam mic as switching in and out of stereo/mono mode for the headset mic doesn't always work right in Linux.
On audio filtering, I can only imagine... though would assume it's finally starting to get better with whatever the current standard is (pipewire?), which from what I understand is closer to what mac's interfaces are. I know a few audio guys and they hate Windows and mostly are shy to even consider Linux.
> * UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous me
I'd take balkanization over the "we force-migrate everyone to the hot new thing where nothing works".
> It'll probably work fine out of the box, but if it doesn't.
Drivers are a pain point and will probably stay so until the market share is too large for the hardware vendors to ignore. Which probably aren't happening any time soon, sadly.
This is not a driver issue I'm talking about. It's a "best way to adjust the white balance is with this GTK+-2.0 app that hasn't seen maintenance since the Bush administration" issue.
> I'd take balkanization over the "we force-migrate everyone to the hot new thing where nothing works".
The UI framework for macOS has not changed in any substantial design-update-requiring ways since OS X was first released. They did add stuff (animations as a core concept, most notably).
The UI framework for Windows has changed even less, though it's more of a mess because there are several different ones, with an unclear relationship to each other. win32 won't hurt though, and it hasn't changed in any significant ways since dinosaurs roamed the silicon savannahs.
The UI framework for Linux ... oh wait, there isn't one.
I had to dump a perfectly fine c.2012 workstation recently because of video driver limitations. Could no longer stay current on my flavor of Linux (OpenSUSE) and have better than hideous display resolution limited to just one monitor. NVIDIA’s proprietary drivers are great, but the limited support lifecycle plus poor open source coverage is actually making Linux turn fine systems into trash just the way Windows used to do.
>poor open source coverage is actually making Linux turn fine systems into trash just the way Windows used to do.
I'd blame Linux as a very small percentage of the problem here. This is on NVIDIA ensuring their hardware doesn't last to long and forcing you to throw it away eventually. Open source can make the monitor 'work' but really aren't efficient, and really can never be efficient because NVIDIA doesn't release the needed information and directly competes with their proprietary driver.
Couldn't you swap out for a now lower level AMD GPU? An RX 6600 should be under $200 and likely at least as good as what you were running... unless you were doing specific CUDA workloads. Even on PCIe 2/3, it should be fine.
> Wayland has fractional scaling as a sort-of workaround if you can tolerate the entire screen being blurry. Every other major OS can deal with this.
I think Windows is the only other one which really does this properly, macOS also does the hack where they simulate fractional scales by rendering with an integer scale at a non-native resolution then scaling it down.
> I think Windows is the only other one which really does this properly
Windows is the only one that does this properly.
Windows handles high pixel density on a per-application, per-display basis. This is the most fine-grained. It's pretty easy to opt in on reasonably modern frameworks, too; just add in the necessary key in the resource manifest; done. [1]
Linux + Xorg has a global pixel density scale factor. KDE/Qt handles this OK; GNOME/GTK break when the scaling factor is not an integer multiple of 96 and cause raster scaling.
Linux + Wayland has per-display scaling factors, but Chromium, GNOME, and GTK break the same way as the Xorg setup. KDE/Qt are a bit better, but I'm quite certain the taskbar icons are sharper on Xorg than they are on Wayland. I think this boils down to subpixel rendering not being enabled.
And of course, every application on Linux in theory can handle high pixel density, but there is a zoo of environment variables and command-line arguments that need to be passed for the ideal result.
On macOS, if the pixel density of the target display is at least some Apple-blessed number that they consider 'Retina', then the 'Retina' resolutions are enabled. At resolutions that are not integer multiples of the physical resolution, the framebuffer is four times the resolution of the displayed values (twice in each dimension), and then the final result is raster-scaled with some sinc/Lanczos algorithm back down to the physical resolution. This shows up as ringing artifacts, which are very obvious with high-contrast, thin regions like text.
On non-retina resolutions, there is zero concept of 'scaling factor' whatsoever; you can choose another resolution, but it will be raster-scaled (usually up) with some bi/trilinear filtering, and the entire screen is blurry. The last time Windows had such brute-force rendering was in Windows XP, 25 years ago.
> Windows is the only one that does this properly. Windows handles high pixel density on a per-application, per-display basis.
This is not our [0] experience. macOS handles things on a per-section-of-window, per-application, per-display basis. You can split a window across two monitors at two different DPIs, and it will display perfectly. This does not happen on Windows, or we have not found the right way to make it work thus far.
> macOS handles things on a per-section-of-window, per-application, per-display basis.
No, it does not. If you have two displays with different physical pixel densities, and especially if they are sufficiently different that Apple will consider one 'Retina' and 'not Retina' (this is usually the case if, for instance, you have your MacBook's display—which probably is 'Retina'—beneath a 2560 × 1440, 336 × 597 mm monitor, which is 'not Retina'), then the part of the window on the non-Retina display will be raster-scaled to account for the difference. This is how KDE Plasma on Wayland handles it, too.
In my opinion, any raster-scaling of vector/text UI is a deal-breaker.
These were probably written against the old-school Win32. It's pretty easy to fix.
Right-click on the `.exe`
Properties
Compatibility tab
Change settings for all users
Change high DPI settings
Under 'High DPI scaling override' section, tick box for 'Override high DPI scaling behaviour. Scaling performed by'
In the drop-down box below, select 'Application'
Done.
For MMC snap-ins like `diskmgmt.msc`, `services.msc`, or `devmgr.msc`, there's a Registry key you can set. See this ServerFault question: https://serverfault.com/q/570785/535358
The 'doing it right' part is from how it should be done, but it still needs application support.
The thing is X11/Xorg can also theoretically do the same thing (and most likely Wayland too) but it needs, you guessed it, application (and window manager / compositor) support.
That's roughly what I did for my ANSI console/viewer... I started with EGA resolution, and each ega pixel renders 3x4 in its' buffer then a minor blur, then scaled to fit the render area. The effect is really good down to about 960px wide, which is a bit bigger in terms of real pixels than the original... at 640px wide, it's a little hard to make out the actual pixels... but it's the best way I could think of to handle the non-square pixels of original EGA or VGA... I went with EGA because the ratio is slightly cleaner IMO. It's also what OG RIPterm used.
I'm using KDE with Wayland and 2 non-standard DPI monitors (one at 100% the other at 150% scale). No workarounds needed, nothing is blurry. I think your experience comes from GNOME which lacks behind in this regard.
FWIW, I can do the same with KDE on Xorg with Gentoo Linux.
Since the introduction of the XSETTINGS protocol in like 2003 or 2005 or so to provide a common cross-toolkit mechanism to communicate system settings, the absence of "non-integer" scaling support has always been the fault of the GUI toolkits.
> I think your experience comes from GNOME which lacks behind in this regard.
When doesn't GNOME lag behind? Honestly, most of Wayland's problems have been because a project that expects protocol implementers and extenders to cooperate in order to make the project work set those expectations while knowing that GNOME was going to be one of those parties whose cooperation was required.
The issue with X11 is that it's not dynamic. Think using a laptop, which you sometimes connect to a screen on which you require a different scale. X11 won't handle different scales, and it also won't switch from one to the other without restarting it.
No, it is. Maybe you're using an ancient (or misconfigured) Xorg? Or maybe you've never used a GTK program? One prereq is that you have a daemon running that speaks the ~20 year old XSETTINGS protocol (such as 'xsettingsd'). Another prereq is that you have a DE and GUI toolkit new enough to know how to react to scaling changes. [0]
Also, for some damn reason, QT and FLTK programs need to be restarted in order to render with the new screen scaling ratio, but GTK programs pick up the changes immediately. Based on my investigation, this is a deficiency in how QT and FLTK react to the information they're being provided with.
At least on my system, the KDE settings dialog that lets you adjust screen scaling only exposes a single slider that applies to the entire screen. However, I've bothered to look at (and play with) what's actually going on under the hood, and the underlying systems totally expose per-display scaling factors... but for some reason the KDE control widget doesn't bother to let you use them. Go figure.
[0] I don't know where the cutoff point is, but I know folks have reported to me that their Debian-delivered Xorg installs totally failed to do "non-integer" scaling (dynamic or otherwise), but I've been able to do this on my Gentoo Linux machines for quite some time.
- Yes. I think big players in Linux should start supporting core functionalities in GNOME and KDE, and make it polished for laptops and desktops and that would be very cool. For a long time, KDE had a problem of having too many things under its umbrella. Now, with separation of Plasma Desktop and Applications, focusing on Plasma Desktop and KDE PIM should be a good step.
- Kind of ties to the old point: KDE on Wayland does this extremely well.
- You're back to 20 years because problems are exactly from 20 years ago. Vendors refusing to support linux with d rivers.
- Audio filtering? Interesting. I know people who use Pipewire + Jack quite reasonably. But may be you have usecase I am now aware of? Would be happy to hear some.
Hardware support for esoteric things such as the new generation of Wacom EMR is still awkward --- I was able to get the previous gen working on a ThinkPad X61T using Lubuntu --- wish that there was such an easy way to try out Linux on my Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360....
> * Support for non-standard DPI monitors sucks, mostly because of the previous point. Wayland has fractional scaling as a sort-of workaround if you can tolerate the entire screen being blurry. Every other major OS can deal with this.
This sounds like you're using some old software. GNOME and sway have clean fractional scaling without blurring, though that hasn't always been the case (it used to be terrible).
Fractional scaling on Wayland is only blurry for X apps, and even then, most apps have Wayland support at this point, so for the remaining apps, just turn off Xwayland scaling, and using native scaling through env vars and flags, and no more blurriness.
> UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous mess.
Amen.
But, which OS doesn't have this problem? I'm currently running windows on a work laptop and even freaking first-party apps have a different look and behave differently from one another. Teams can't even be assed to use standard windows notifications! And don't get me started on electron apps, of which most apps are nowadays, each coming with their own look and feel.
Also, have you tried switching from light to dark mode, say at night? The task manager changes only partially. The explorer copy info window doesn't even have a dark mode! On outlook the window controls don't change colour, so you end up with black on black or white on white. You can't possibly hold up windows as a model of uniform UI.
So while I agree that this situation is terrible, I wouldn't pin it on the linux ecosystem(s).
> Every other major OS can deal with [high dpi].
Don't know about mac os, but on Windows it's a shitshow. We use some very high DPI displays at work which I have to run at 200%, every other screen I use is 100%. Even the freaking start menu is blurry! It only works well if I boot the machine with the high-dpi display attached. If I plug it in after a while (think going to work with the laptop asleep), the thing's blurry! Some taskbar icons don't adapt, so I sometimes have tiny icons, or huge cropped ones if I unplug the external monitor. Plasma doesn't do this.
IME KDE/Plasma 6 works perfectly with mixed DPI (but I admit I haven't tried "fractional" scales). The only app which doesn't play ball 100% is IntelliJ (scaling works, it's sharp, but the mouse cursor is the wrong size).
> Audio filtering is a pain to set up.
What do you mean? I've been using easyeffects for more than five years now to apply either a parametric EQ to my speakers or a convolver to my headphones. Works perfectly for all the apps, or I can choose which apps it should alter. The PEQ adds a bit of a latency, but applications seem to be aware of it, so if I play videos (even youtube on firefox with gpu decoding!) it stays in sync. It detects the output and loads presets accordingly. I also don't have to reboot when I connect some new audio device, like BT headphones (well, technically, on Windows I don't anymore, either, since for some reason it can't connect to either of my headphones at all). I would love to have something similar on windows, but the best I found isn't as polished. It also doesn't support dark mode, so it burns my eyes at night.
I came to rely pretty heavily on Docker and WSL(2) in Windows. I was an insiders user for a bit over a decade, and worked with .Net and C# since it was "ASP+" ...
I had setup a dual boot when I swapped my old GTX 1080 for an RX 5700XT, figuring the "open source" drivers would give me a good Linux experience... it didn't. Every other update was a blank/black screen and me without a good remote config to try to recover it. After about 6 months it was actually stable, but I'd since gone ahead and paid too much for an RTX 3080, and gone back to my windows drive...
I still used WSL almost all day, relying mostly on VS Code and a Browser open, terminal commands through WSL remoting in Code and results etc. on the browser.
Then, one day, I clicked the trusty super/win menu and started typing in the name of he installed program I wanted to run... a freaking ad. In the start menu search results. I mean, it was a beta channel of windows, but the fact that anyone thought this was a good idea and it got implemented, I was out.
I rebooted my personal desktop back to Linux... ran all the updates and it's run smoothly since. My current RX 9070XT better still, couldn't be happier. And it does everything I want it to do, and there's enough games in Steam through Proton that I can play what I want, when I want. Even the last half year on Pop Coxmic pre-release versions was overall less painful than a lot of my Windows experiences the past few years. Still not perfect, but at least it's fast and doesn't fail in ways that Windows now seems to regularly.
Whoever is steering Windows development at Microsoft is clearly drunk at the wheel over something that should be the most "done" and polished product on the planet and it just keeps getting worse.
I do not have ads in my start menu, and no, I didn't "debloat" my PC. This is a base install where I flipped a couple of settings in the start menu options.
It was a test they ran on Insiders channel to see how people reacted to them. It never mated it into GA, or for that matter the entire insiders channels... They'll feature gate things to some insiders users and A/B test them to see how the user response looks. There was a bit of an uproar at the time for those that saw them, including myself... I ditched windows altogether (except my assigned work laptop).
The problem isn't that ads can be disabled. The problem is that a paid operating system ships with ads in the first place. Full stop. There's no universe where that's acceptable product design, and the fact that you can disable them (for now, at least) doesn't make it less offensive.
I don't understand why you're going to bat for a trillion-dollar corporation here. Your settings work now. Great. They won't after the next feature update, this is a well-documented pattern. Windows updates routinely re-enable telemetry, Bing integration, and promotional content that users explicitly disabled. You're not configuring your OS, you're fighting it.
The TPM2 requirement is pure planned obsolescence. Millions of perfectly good machines binned because Microsoft decided hardware from 2016 is suddenly "insecure"... whilst the actual benefit is DRM enforcement and remote attestation.
It's a corporate compliance tool, not a security feature.
The Insiders build being referenced had actual web advertisements in search results. That's where this is headed. If you're comfortable defending that trajectory, carry on flipping those settings.
Yes, I paid for Windows 11. It came bundled with the £1,900 laptop I bought. The fact that the licence cost is hidden in the hardware price doesn't make it free.
And even if it were free, which it isn't, that still wouldn't justify ads. Android is free. Linux is free. Neither ships with gambling app promotions in the system UI.
Microsoft made $20 billion in Windows revenue last year. They're not a scrappy startup looking for alternative monetisation. The ads exist because they can get away with it, not because they need to.
> The problem is that a paid operating system ships with ads in the first place.
You never buy a laptop or pre-build? They are often full of ads that are not Microsoft Windows build in but add-on by the OEM.
Now i agree that Ads in your OS that you paid for, is a big nono. I never understood why Microsoft threats Home and Pro as almost the exact same. Sell Home for cheaper and with Ads, but keep the more expensive Pro clean. Microsoft can do that easily because Windows Server is just that ...
But on the Linux front, i have never been happy with the desktop experience. Often a lot of small details are missing, if the DE itself not outright crashes (KDE, master in Plasma/Widget crashes!). And so many other desktop feel like they have been made in the 90s (probably are) and never gotten updated.
And i do not run W11, still on old and very stable W10. There is no reason to upgrade that i see. Did the same with W7, for years after support ended (and by that time W10 was well polished and less buggy).
The problem is, what does Linux Desktop offer me more, then a few annoyances that i can remove after a fresh install? Often a lot more trouble with the need to use the terminal for things, that are ancient in Windows. That is the problem ... With Apple, you can get insane good M-CPU hardware (yes, mem/storage is insane), for the os/desktop switch.
I noticed that often the people who switch to Linux, are more likely to send more time into finetuning their OS, tinkering around, etc... aka people with more time on their hands. But when you get a bit older, you simply want something that works and gives you no trouble. I can literally upgrade my PC here from a NVidia to AMD or visa versa, and it will simply work with the correct full performance drivers. Its that convenience that is the draw to keep using (even ifs a older) Windows.
For now 25 years every few years, i look at upgrading to Linux permanently, install a few distro's and go back. Linus Desktop does not feel like you gain a massive benefit, if that makes sense? Especially not if your like me, who simply rides out Microsoft their bad OS releases. What is the killer features that you say, hey, Linux Desktop is insane good, it has X, Y, Z that Microsoft does not have, its ... That is the issue in my book. Yes, it has no adds but that is like 5 min work on a fresh install, a 2 min job of copy/past a cleanup script to remove the spyware and other crap and your good for year. So again, killer features?
Often a lot of programs that are less developed or stripped down compared to Windows, let alone way too often 90 style feels programs. You can tell its made by developers often, with no GUI / Graphical developers involved lol
I said it a 1000 times but Linux Desktop suffers from a lot of distro redoing the same time over and over again. Resulting in this lag ...
That is my yearly Linux rant hahaha. And yes, i know, W11 is a disaster but i simply wait it out on W10, and see what the future brings when the whole AI hype dies down and Microsoft loses too much customers. I am betting that somebody is going to get scared at MS and we then get a better W12 again.
I've been pretty happy with Pop in general, I did upgrade to COSMIC pre-release about 6 months ago, and although there have been rough edges, less than some of my Win11 experiences. I don't really fiddle that much in practice, I did spend a year with Budgie, but only the first week fiddling. Pop's out of the box is about 90% of what I want, which is better than most.
I do use a Macbook M1 Air for my personal laptop and have used them for work off and on over the years... I'm currently using a very locked down windows laptop assigned from work. Not having WSL and Docker have held me back a lot though.
In the end, I do most of my work in Linux anyway... it's where what I work on tends to get deployed and I don't really do much that doesn't work on Linux without issue at this point. Windows, specifically since Win11 has continued to piss me off and I jumped when I saw something that was just too much for me to consider dealing with. I ran insiders for years to get the latest WSL integrations and features. This bit me a few times, but was largely worth it, until it wasn't anymore.
C# work is paying the bills... would I rather work on Rust or TS, sure... but I am where I am. I'm similar to you in that I looked at Linux every few years, kicked the tires, ran it for a month or a couple weeks and always went back. This time a couple years ago... it stuck. Ironically, my grandmother used Linux much longer than I ever did on her computer that I maintained for her. For her, it just worked, and she didn't need much beyond the browser.
> You never buy a laptop or pre-build? They are often full of ads that are not Microsoft Windows build in but add-on by the OEM.
This was never acceptable, but we tolerated it because it subsidised the cost of the laptop, OEMs decided the trade-off and you could vote with your wallet for cleaner experiences (often with the same manufacturer).
Show me the ThinkPad T or X series (or EliteBook, or Precision/Latitude) that shipped with ads and I'll take it as a valid point. Otherwise, it's not valid.
For those that want to remove items, You can quickly disable these options by going into Settings > Personalization > Start and turn off "Show recommendations for tips, shortcuts, new apps, and more".
It's like a 10 second fix and basically everything is gone.
That's not what I'm referring to... it was a beta test that included actual internet ads in the start menu search results... It was literally a product I was looking at on the previous day.
Microsoft implemented, in its Beta Windows Insider Channel in 2024, ads in the "Recommended" section of the Start Menu. The very section I just described pretty plainly how to turn off.
I mean I don't understand why everyone is so puffed up about this. You read some internet headline and start screeching about it on social media as if it doesn't take 2 seconds to literally turn off.
AGAIN this is NOT what I was referring to... I'm referring to when you start typing in the name of a program you have installed, and you get a short list of matches, with maybe additional results... not a PRODUCT ADVERTISEMENT (not software) from the internet at the top, which is what I got.
It's not a feature that should EVER exist at an OS level... I didn't even mind the adjacent product ads or the Recommended section you mention that much... but it's emphatically not what I'm fucking talking about.
The fact that this was even something that was implemented and tested means that I'm not someone who will buy or choose Microsoft Windows at all from here forward. I have over 3 decades of development experience on/for/with software that runs on Windows.
An even then... It doesn't matter if I can shut it off, it shouldn't have existed in the first place.
It might be different if they didn't push updates every other month that changed settings like default browser back to their products.
You're right that there are simple fixes but the point is that Microsoft is no longer on your side. You're now stuck defensivly scrambling for value in a product where you are no longer the customer.
The Ass-Fucker 3000 fucks you in the arse when you use your car ignition.
But don't get bent out of shape - you can disable it in settings. Takes 10 seconds. Assuming you know it exists and the option doesn't disappear in a future update.
And if it re-enables itself after the next patch? Well, at least the option to disable it still exists! Probably.
Why would you buy a different car? It's so easy to turn off. What, you want to use a BMW? Be a BMW-user? A sheep? All your tools already integrate with our car anyway. There's no real choice, is there - unless you want to be a try-hard. And maybe it doesn't even work properly. You don't want that hassle, do you? Just accept the Ass-Fucker 3000. Next week they'll add the Wife-Beater 2000, but don't worry -that'll have a toggle too.
Cope harder. I wish I had apologists like you for my software.
It's really hard to maintain a product team where the mandate is just "don't break anything and keep the quality high". Especially something with as big of an installed base as Windows.
The team will look for excuses to build new and exciting stuff and new opportunities to increase revenue. Even if the product is pretty much "done".
I disagree, I think companies mostly just don't want to spend development money on existing "finished" products. That's the smell I'm getting from microsoft.
There are plenty of easily identifiable issues with performance in windows 11. There should be people in the windows team dedicated to eliminating "jank". MS product owners, on the other hand, are much more interested in getting copilot integrations into every menu. That's an "easy" task which looks good on a scorecard when you complete it.
No, it really shouldn't be... You can reduce headcount a lot, which they did, and concentrate on bugs (including security reports), while working with hardware vendors for if/when new features need to be integrated for better usability.
If/when you decide to do a redesign, it should be limited to a specific area, or done in such a way that all functionality gets moved to its' new UI/UX in a specified timeframe and released when done. Not, oh, here's a new right click menu that you now have an extra click 1/3 of the time for the old menu that has what you are actually looking for because the old extension interface was broken.
Want a real exercise in fun ... just for fun, because I know it's not as useful on a laptop, but was fun on desktops... get a screensaver working in windows that runs for an hour or so before going to sleep... just try it... that's a fun exercise in frustration... oh, it's still in there, but every third update will disable it all again. I get it... but you know what, I want my matrix screensaver to run when I'm only away for a few minutes or over lunch.
Every month more and more people switch to Linux and I just love it. I'm tired of one company controlling the core operating system of 85% of desktop computers and users being at their whim.
You want proprietary programs? Alright, fine, one can argue for that. But the central, core operating system of general purpose computers should be free and fully controllable by the users that own them!
> Every month more and more people switch to Linux
We've been hearing this for decades and yet the home Linux userbase is microscopic and somehow even smaller than ever. Unless we're going to count Google's Android and Chrome OS. Those are the only Linux-based distributions that have ever gained market share over desktop Windows.
Somehow I think the stars might be aligning this time though. People are genuinely fed up with Windows and governments around the world are loudly thinking about how to reduce dependence on US tech. And then there is Proton which makes it much easier for Gamers to jump ship. To me it feels like there is more momentum than ever for this.
On the other hand I am also a realist and I don't think that Linux will take over the Desktop, but it will certainly have its biggest growth year ever in 2026.
> Somehow I think the stars might be aligning this time though
> governments around the world are loudly thinking about how to reduce dependence on US tech
I am definitely sympathetic, after all, I worked for a major Linux company for quite a few years, started using Linux RH) in 1994, and even wrote some network related kernel modules.
However, this switch to Linux is not going to happen (apart from where it is already used heavily, from servers to many non-PC systems).
I have been in projects for large companies but also government on and off. Now, I manage the IT of a small (<50 employees) non-IT business with people in several countries.
People who actually comment in these discussions seem to be entirely focused on the OS itself. But that is what matters the least in business. Office is another, and even there most people who don't deal with it at scale are way too focused on some use case where individuals write documents and do some spreadsheeting. It's almost always about a very small setup, or even just a single PC.
However, the Microsoft stack is sooooo much more. ID management. Device management. Uncountable number of little helpers in form of software and scripts that you cannot port to a Linux based stack without significant effort. Entire mail domains are managed by Office 265 - you own the domain and the DNS records, you get licenses for Office365 from MS, you point the DNS records to Microsoft, you are done.
Sure, MS tools and the various admin websites are a mess, duplicating many things, making others hard to find. But nobody in the world would be able to provide soooo much stuff while doing a better job. The truth is, they keep continuously innovating and I can see it, little things just conveniently showing up, like that I now have a Teams button to create an AI script of my conversations, or that if more than one person opens an Office document that is stored in OneDrive we can see each other inside the document, cursor positions, and who has it open.
Nobody in their right mind will switch their entir4e org to Linux unless they have some really good reasons, a lot of resources to spare, and a lot of experience. Most businesses, for whom IT is not the be-all-end-all but just a tool will not switch.
But something can be done.
The EU could, for example, start requiring other stacks for new special cases. They cannot tell the whole economy to switch, not even a fraction of it, but they could start with new government software. Maybe - depends on how it has to fit into the existing mostly Microsoft infrastructure.
They could also require more apps to be web-only. I once wrote some code for some government agency to manage business registrations, and it was web software.
The focus would have to be to start creating strong niches for local business to start making money using other stacks, and to take the long road, slowly replace US based stacks over the next two or three decades. At the same time, enact policies that let local business grow using alternative stacks, providing a safe cache-flow that does not have to compete with US based ones.
The EU also needs some better scaling. The nice thing about the MS stack is that I can use it everywhere, in almost all countries. The alternative cannot be that a business would have to use a different local company in each country.
I read a month ago that EU travel to the US is down - by only ~3%. Just like with any calls for boycott of this and that, the truth is that those commenting are a very tiny fraction. The vast majority of people and businesses are not commenting in these threads (or at all), and their focus is on their own business and domain problems first of all. Switching their IT stack will only done by force, if the US were to do something really drastic that crashes some targeted countries Microsoft- and Cloud-IT.
> However, the Microsoft stack is sooooo much more. ID management. Device management. Uncountable number of little helpers in form of software and scripts that you cannot port to a Linux based stack without significant effort. Entire mail domains are managed by Office 265 - you own the domain and the DNS records, you get licenses for Office365 from MS, you point the DNS records to Microsoft, you are done.
Is there any bit of this that is not web based or does not support Linux nowadays? Office 365 runs on a browser, and even Intune supports some enterprise oriented distributions, like RH, so device management shouldn't be a problem. But even if none of that was true, there is certainly competition in the IT management space. Defaulting to Microsoft just because of a Windows based fleet doesn't sound like a great idea.
> The truth is, they keep continuously innovating and I can see it, little things just conveniently showing up, like that I now have a Teams button to create an AI script of my conversations, or that if more than one person opens an Office document that is stored in OneDrive we can see each other inside the document, cursor positions, and who has it open.
This is stuff other vendors have been offering for ages now.
The browser versions of the Office apps aren't comparable to the native apps, and also don't support whatever native integrations (like VBA add-ins) companies use.
Trading dependency on a company in Redmond, WA, USA, for one in mountain view, CA, USA does nothing for moving away from USA in the dependency chain, but it proves that it's possible. And I know it's possible as there are several billion-dollar companies in Google Workspace I know of personally. And if it's possible for them, it means it's possible for the EU to get there. The only question is will they ever? Let's form a committee to schedule a meeting to look into that question.
"Possible" is everything that does not violate any laws of the universe, that is not a useful criterion!
Oh and thanks for ignoring everything I wrote I guess. Not that I expected anything different, it is always the same in these threads after all. Why bother with arguments, especially those of the person you respond to?
But you see, this "laziness" actually supports my point. Not even you want to do the hard thing and bother with what somebody else thinks when there is a much easier path. But you expect others to care about the things that you care about, without spending much effort even merely understanding their position.
Go and download the archives of Reddit, there are plenty of torrents out there. Filter to a sub like r/gaming. Relative frequency graph of Linux mentions. You'll see a magnitude increase over the last 12 months compared to years before. It's real.
Must admit, not sure if the data torrents are
uptodate now that Reddit anti-scrapes so hard to raise their premium on the exclusive contract to the highest bidder, OpenAI.
Calling 4-5% marketshare microscopic is not fair. I get it if it was still stuck at 1%, but it's growing, and the rate of growth has been increasing too.
Take this with a grain of salt, because numbers from Statcounter are not fully accurate. However, none of those numbers are small. 3.86% of the entire PC market is not something to scoff at.
There's also the people like me that couldn't historically run certain games well directly on Linux, so we have Windows virtual machines with GPU passthrough. Which would read as me being a Windows user in the Steam stats, but a Linux user in other stats.
The state of gaming has improved drastically since I started doing it that way, though, and I'm considering ditching the VM entirely. Multiplayer games seem to be getting the hint about anticheat exclusion on Linux. ARC Raiders, for example, is a competitive game and runs flawlessly directly on Linux.
Last time I looked on stat counter it showed 4 and something percent. That's where I pulled the number from. But it seems they updated it to 3.86 now. It's so over for the Linux community.
Its not ... The problem is that people do not realize that devices like Steam Deck are also considered Linux desktop devices in those numbers. Chrome tends to also inflate those numbers. Yes, they are Linux desktops but not in the way people are comparing Windows to Linux.
The real number is closer to 2.5% somewhere. What is still growth but nowhere the "year of the Linux desktop".
You tend to see a rather vocal minority that makes you feel like there is some major switch but looking here in the comments, people that switched 8 years, 12 year, 20 years ago are people that are part of the old statistics. There are some new converts but not what you expect to see despite Linux now also being more gaming compatible.
It still has minor issues (beyond anti-cheat), that involve people fixing things, less then the past. But its still not the often click and play, works under every resolution, has no graphic issue etc etc. That is the part people often do not tell you, because a lot of people are more thinkers, so a issue pops up, they fix it and forget about it.
Ironically, MacOS just dominates as the real alternative to Windows in so many aspects. If Apple actually got their act together about gaming, it can trigger a actual strong contender to Windows.
A growth of 4% over 20 years is not an increasing rate. And yes, 4% marketshare is microscopic. macOS has a bigger share but you wouldn't say macOS is massive. Posts like this are cheerleading OS's because everything needs to be a zero sum competition.
As phones replace desktop computers for non-technical users, leaving a concentration of "skilled" users, my suspicion is that the pattern will resemble the quote "Slowly, then all at once."
I mean, this is literally false? Desktop Linux userbase is growing, it's bigger than it has ever been even without including ChromeOS, and more OEMs are shipping devices with desktop linux than ever before (Valve's suite of devices, multiple laptop vendors including major ones like Lenovo, a few SteamDeck competitors)
More and more desktop apps are just becoming websites. More and more desktop apps are using Electron rather than some native app. Windows is slowly becoming a dumpster fire in terms of usability and issues. Most games these days Just Work on Linux without any tinkering.
While I hardly think that this year will be "the year of the Linux desktop" or whatever, but if these trends keep going, I really foresee Linux market share growing, slowly, each year, until it's not so microscopic anymore.
I mean - steam deck was a pretty significant inflection point quite recently. Making gaming viable on linux via a popular consumer product is a huge deal and starts to kill one of desktop linux's single biggest barriers to adoption.
According to the Steam Hardware Survey (https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...) only ~3.6% Steam users use Linux and these statistics include the Steam Deck users. SteamOS accounts for ~26% of Linux users, which in turn brings down the count to ~2.6%. For comparision, MacOS is ~2.1% of the market share at the moment. Wake me up when Linux gets to 10%.
> You had unsaved work? Too bad, it's gone, get bent.
This has happened to me a couple of times. I put the PC to sleep and the next morning I discover it has decided to close everything to install an update.
Not using Windows ever again to do any work. Say what you will about Apple but at least they don't do crap like this.
I installed Windows Update Blocker (AKA "WUB") and i've stopped the nonsense shutdowns late at night.
That helped stopping the aggravation, but lets see how long I last. I do feel my next computer will be a Linux OS ... but i'm not a programmer and I wince at having to do all the wine installs fresh...
Why though? On Mac, I have tons of unsaved work: many TextEdit windows which keep their state for many months, even through reboots. And it has been working like for at least 10 years. It's such a simple, little quality-of-life thing. And Microsoft just doesn't care.
This is what a computer should be doing: helping the user to get their work done, without the user having to worry about insignificant details about saving files. E.g. does Google Docs ever ask where to save a file before closing the browser or shutting down the computer? No you just get an untitled document that is automatically saved. If I want to rename it or save it in a different location, I am free to do so. But as long as I don't, it doesn't get in the way and just persists stuff automatically.
I don't disagree, but you have to know which applications reliably keep their state across restarts. You can't blindly rely on it on any desktop system. The Microsoft Office applications actually do auto-save documents since a couple of years ago, even though the revocery UX can be a bit awkward.
What Microsoft doesn't care about is that you may have applications running that don't do that, when Windows reboots for updates.
On macOS the feature is baked into the OS's APIs, the app developer just opts into using them. If they don't, quitting with unsaved work will prompt the user modally, and block the restart to the point where the OS will timeout the reboot process and give up. The only way to purposefully lose unsaved work in almsot every app I've ever used on macOS is to yank the power cable or hold the power button down.
Window locations and app state are written to plist files, again, using OS libraries and APIs for app resume. I can reboot my Mac and not even realize it happened sometimes it all comes back the way it was.
There's plenty of tasks that can take hours that don't save their progress. E.g. running a simulation, training an AI model, rendering video. Or, these days, leaving agentic AI models running in a loop implementing tasks.
Even if the state is recoverable, it doesn't mean that it's simple to recover.
I would be infuriated if my OS decided to shut itself down without permission.
Years ago MS depended on Windows. It was the profit center. Everything MS did was a moat to sell more seats. Even MS-Exchange was just a ploy to force enterprises to stop deploying any other operating system.
That all changed with Azure.
MS realized they could make billions in Windows or trillions with Azure.
They changed the org structure. Now Azure is at the top and everything else is a moat or a way to draw people to Azure. They changed the sales commission (your multiplier doesn’t kick in unless you’ve sold enough cloud services).
Windows is no longer a profit center. It’s a cost center.
Anything that scares people away from using Windows is a benefit.
Let those other suckers spend money developing operating systems. As long as it runs on a VM in Azure, Microsoft will profit.
Windows being worse and worse isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.
I've been running Ubuntu Linux for a long time now (over a decade, started with 8.04). Linux still has it's fair share of bugs but I'll take having to deal with those over running Windows or MacOS any day.
For me the biggest thing is control, with Windows there are some things like updates that you have zero control over. It's the same issue with MacOS, you have more control than Windows but you're still at the whims of Apple's design choices every year when they decide to release a new OS update.
Linux, for all it's issues, give you absolute control over your system and as a developer I've found this one feature outweighs pretty much all the issues and negatives about the OS. Updates don't run unless I tell them to run, OS doesn't upgrade unless I tell it to. Even when it comes to bugs at least you have the power to fix them instead of waiting on an update hoping it will resolve that issue. Granted in reality I wait for updates to fix various small issues but for bigger ones that impact my workflow I will go through the trouble of fixing it.
I don't see regular users adopting Linux anytime soon but I'm quickly seeing adoption pickup among the more technical community. Previously only a subset of technical folks actually ran Linux because Windows/MacOS just worked but I see more and more of them jumping ship with how awful Windows and MacOS have become.
The control is both a blessing and a curse. It’s really easy to accidentally screw things up when e.g. trying to polish some of the rough edges or otherwise make the system function as desired. It also may not be of any help if the issue you’re facing is too esoteric for anybody else to have posted about it online (or for LLMs to be of any assistance).
It would help a lot if there were a distro that was polished and complete enough that most people – even those of us who are more technical and are more demanding – rarely if ever have any need to dive under the hood. Then the control becomes purely an asset.
This is literally Linux Mint, Zorin, and several other distros. I haven't had to "go under the hood" on my daily driver machines that run either of these distros for over 7 years.
I think at this point people are just (reasonably) making excuses not to change.
There's several distros that are fully usable without ever touching a terminal. The control is a gradient, some distros give you all the control and others (eg. SteamOS) lock down your root filesystem and sandbox everything from the internet.
> I've been running Ubuntu Linux for a long time now...Linux still has it's fair share of bugs...
> I don't see regular users adopting Linux anytime soon...
I can see why you think the second statement is true based on the first statements. When Ubuntu switched their desktop to Gnome, they gave up on being the best Linux desktop distro. I'd recommend you to try Linux Mint.
I remember when Ubuntu decided to reroute apt installations into SNAP installs. So you install a package via apt and there was logic to see if they should disregard your command and install a SNAP instead. Do they still do that?
You are confusing debian-family with Linux. Debian family is designed to be outdated upon release. When they say "Stable" it doesn't mean 'Stable like a table'. It means version fixed. You get outdated software that has bugs baked into it.
Fedora is modern and those bugs are fixed already.
Reminder Fedora is not Arch. Don't confuse the two.
Meh, I don't care much about control, I care more about getting my work done with the least amount of friction. Macs do that for me. Linux and Windows have too many barriers to make them a daily GUI driver.
Windows UI has also gotten progressively more ugly, buggy and laggy. From a cursory glance, Win 11 looks a lot cleaner than Win 10/8/7, but just opening the Start Menu is a chore. Rather than fix the underlying issue, Microsoft started pre-rendering the File Explorer in memory to improve launch times. It might've started with letting go of their QA team, but the engineering culture there seems completely broken and clueless.
I'm currently running Fedora on my gaming laptop, and while I do suffer some loss in FPS, it is relatively close to Windows and seems to be getting better.
My main machines have been running Linux for years now, but there are still some things that are really bothering me. For one, I think dealing with virtual machines are still somewhat painful on Linux. VM managers continue to be clunky (I believe KDE is working on a new one), and GPU passthrough, let alone partitioning, isn’t really a thing for Windows guests which is something that works out of the box on WSL. Another frustrating part is the lack of a proper alternative to Windows Hello that allows you to set up passkeys using TPMs.
Between using macOS at work and macOS at home, I really only had my Windows 10 PC for running games in Steam (and I don't even really game very much. I had originally built it with all new parts for Flight Simulator 2020) so its behavior was already becoming annoying whenever I went to use Windows such as the nagging and lack of consent implied with the "finish setting up your PC" window having "continue" (in a bold button) or whatever and "maybe later" (in a tiny link) as options, for example. (The linked article also pointed this out.)
So after making sure I had everything I wanted to keep copied off that computer, I was going to try out Bazzite, but something made me try out the plain old SteamOS steam deck installer first. To my surprise, it actually worked, but only because I had the exact type of system it expected:
64-bit Intel or AMD CPU. (I have AMD.)
AMD Radeon graphics.
NVMe SSD primary boot drive.
UEFI BIOS support
Even the wifi worked. Well, it didn't work the first time, so I thought it wasn't supported. So I hard wired it with Ethernet, but then I saw the Wifi was working. It's possible it updated something or maybe it just needed a reboot.
If it hadn't worked then Bazzite or something similar would have since it's designed to run Steam but with more driver support.
So my complete Windows history is: 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, 2000, XP (set to the classic GUI mode), 7, and finally 11, skipping all the others. Windows 7 was peak.
Linux should consider paying Microsoft and Apple for new customers. Perhaps the customer acquisition funnel is quite long, at least it took 20 years of using Apple in my case before switching to Debian (Xfce), but it was worth it!
As a regular linux user for the last 20 years, who had used windows for games for about 25 of the last 30 years. When I had gotten a macbook pro for work in a company that was all apple there were three things that stood out: The M processors are amazing, the apple hardware is really good, and mac os is absolutely awful. I have no idea how people use mac.
> mac os is absolutely awful. I have no idea how people use mac.
I hear this from a lot of people when they get their first Mac. When they get specific about what their issues are, it tends to be that macOS doesn't do a thing how they are used to doing it, which is more of a learning curve issue, or rigid thinking. Apple software can be quite opinionated, those who fight against those opinions tend to have a hard time. This is true of any opinionated software.
> Apple software can be quite opinionated, those who fight against those opinions tend to have a hard time. This is true of any opinionated software.
And this is why many like me prefer Linux. We have our own opinions, and Linux enables us to enforce our opinions.
I've been a Linux guy for 25 years, and used Windows at work for the last 15. I now have to use MacOS at work.
I miss Windows. It wasn't totally better, but I managed to overcome most Windows headaches with workarounds. I haven't found the alternatives yet to MacOS.
From my perspective, both Windows and MacOS suck - but in different ways. I think the problem many Linux folks have with MacOS is that it is the "uncanny valley" of Linux. You get happy that you can use your usual UNIX flows, and then you find out that you can't.
I really want a good tiling window manager. I have yet to find one on MacOS that has the features AwesomeWM have.
It really sucks not being able to rebind keys to use Ctrl instead of Cmd in many apps. For basic tasks (opening/closing browser tabs), I have to use one set of keys in the daytime (at work), and another at night (at home). Why won't MacOS let me change them?
Most of the stuff isn't really personal preference, more like being temporarily used to a different way.
Btw search "modifier keys" in Mac sysprefs if you want to rebind command to control. I'm also sick of using separate shortcuts at work, but the other way around, gonna rebind Ubuntu.
Packages are not done well compared to linux. Brew is a poor replacement. It feels like the terminal and everything involved is constantly out of date.
The OS just has a lot of weird things, like the ribbon at the bottom taking up so much space. When I made is smaller and hidden except on mouse over it was incredibly rough.
Window management is decades behind windows or linux. It doesn't like maximizing windows and doesn't make partitioning screen space easy. I had to download a third party app to make it better, which was still worse than windows even in windows 7, and miles worse than linux with i3.
Mac has a lot of rough spots. I have two external monitors and occasionally after updates one monitor would be fuzzy or different resolutions, and it wouldn't go back until the next update.
Not just this. I'm linux/macos user since early 2000's and still sometimes hate macos because they have very annoying bugs that are never fixed, and annoying corpo decisions.
E.g. it keeps opening Music app whenever I connect bluetooth earbuds. I can't delete Music app, it just keeps popping up with imbecile message about "user is not logged in" or something. I run a script that monitors that Music.app is running and kills-9 it.
Or blinking desktop background issue, that's been there for years, accumulated many support threads, and still not fixed.
Random services like coreaudiod that suddenly start consuming 100% CPU for no apparent reason.
Macbook throttling (thanks God, gone with M cpu's)
I can keep going but my point is macos has legit problems that can't be simply shrugged off with "they just hold it the wrong way".
Like any other mass product tbh, except rare ideal products like Factorio game or sqlite.
MacOs is extraordinarily opinionated about how everything should work and frequently attempt to predict your workflow.
Linux/Windows (historically) were straightforawrd, each tool did exactly what it said it would do, and it was up to you to learn how to use the tools available.
On linux/windows, if a button was "capture image", it would just capture the image on the screen. On a mac a "capture image" button could do anything from displaying the image on the screen, to saving it in a photos folder, to saving and syncing it to an iCloud account. Whatever the apple PM decided the most common use case was, and god help you if you want to do something different.
If you've been in the mac ecosystem for a while, you've grown used to this and don't notice any longer. You may even occasionally express happiness when a function does something unexpected and helpful!
If you're coming from anywhere else, its unbelievably painful.
With Linux/Windows you’re supplied with a toolbox and from that toolbox you’re expected to cobble together a workflow that works for you and maintain it.
I spent a significant amount of time trying to learn Tasks inside of Outlook and come up with a system that would make it remotely useful. I failed repeatedly. They eventually bought Wunderlist and replaced it with that, which still has some rough edges (last I tried) due to the legacy Outlook Tasks integration.
Apple, more often than not, is looking to identify a problem and give an opinionated solution on how to handle it. If you’re ok with their solution, great, problem solved. If you’re not, you end up either fighting with the Apple tools or finding a 3rd party toolbox style app that lets you cobble together a workflow. I found just going with the opinionated solution removes a lot of needless stress from my life. There are some places I do go 3rd party, but I reevaluate often to ask if I really need these things and if they’re worth the trouble.
It ends up being a question of what my goals are with the computer. Am I looking to work on the operating system and apps to tune them to exactly what I want, or am I just looking for the system to fade into the background so I can do other things. When I was younger, I found tweaking and playing with everything to be a bit of a hobby. These days, I just want to do what I need to get done and move on with my life.
Anything in particular? I get that it takes some tweaking but so does Linux. The biggest thing that you'll probably never get the way you want is window tiling - it's my personal bugaboo with MacOS. Maybe there's a way to get what I want ...
For me, the biggest pain point is the way it decides which window to bring to the front. If I minimize a window, and then click on the application in the bar, it won't show the window just minimized, instead it always seems to show the older window. Really annoying when using an app with many windows
There are an absolute ton of very capable tiling window managers for macOS, posted here frequently. From yabi to aerospace to fully programmable ones like hammerspoon. A quick search will turn up plenty more. I would be shocked if none of them meet your needs.
Shouldn't need to install third party stuff for such a basic feature. One more thing that will possibly break with updates or not play nice with something.
Windows is absolute garbage, I agree. But the application windows behave normally, maximize when I want them, will take half a screen, quarter screen, etc. with just a quick hotkey. Mac doesn't have that extremely basic functionality without a 3rd party extension, which is absurd. But I don't use windows other than if my work gives me one, I am purely linux otherwise.
Six years ago everything was stable and solid, but Apple's board of directors seems to have decided that new Mac users can't handle a computer interface anymore and started merging it with mobile OS interfaces. And the result is absolutely terrible.
They also decided that they have to capture React devs and everything should use a declarative UI, which has brought us the wonderful new Systems Settings.
As much as I love the idea of moving to Linux - Mac hardware is like two years ahead of PC currently in pretty much any regard aside from gaming. I keep looking for an iteration where it makes sense to switch but currently the intel core 3 stuff is at best comparable to M5 base. Strix Halo is much more power hungry and also not that impressive other than having a bunch of cores. Nothing comes close to the pro/max chips in M4 series. And with RAM/storage pricing Apple upgrades are looking reasonably priced (TBD when M5 Pro devices launch).
So I can either get a top tier tool when I upgrade this year or I can buy a subpar device, and the power management is going to likely be even worse on Linux.
I think this mostly only holds if you use local compute in a portable form factor.
Most of my personal development these days is done on my home server - 9995wx, 768GB, rtx 6000 pro blackwell GPU in headless mode. My work development happens in a cloud workstation with 64 cores and 128GB of ram but builds are distributed and I can dial up the box size on demand for heavier development.
I use laptops practically entirely as network client devices. Browser, terminal window, perhaps a VS Code based IDE with a remote connection to my code. Tailscale on my personal laptop to work anywhere.
I'm not limited by local compute, my devices are lightweight, cheap(ish) and replaceable, not an investment.
So whatever resources you have, Apple will use them mostly to render 3D glass effects. With Debian (Xfce), I can't speak for other desktop environments, you need roughly three times fewer resources to run the OS itself.
Apple is disabling downgrading across all of iOS, and starting to do the same with MacOS. So you need to keep old hardware to run older MacOS versions, and it's only a matter of a few years before Tahoe is the latest OS you can run on your Mac.
Oh, I must be clear here: I'm not considering M1 Macs or later, since Apple closed the ecosystem with Apple Silicon.
What you did is a downgrade in what's called the supported OS.
However, if you decide to downgrade to Catalina on an M1 Mac, it's not possible — Big Sur is the earliest version that runs on Apple Silicon.
Anyway, you cannot downgrade to a macOS version older than what your Mac originally came with. So if you buy a Mac now, Tahoe will be the minimum option.
Old Macs can certainly be downgraded. iOS doesn’t allow it though and they pulled the latest security update which fucking sucks. And if you buy a M5, Tahoe is the only OS that’s available.
I have nothing against old Macs and MacOS, but I certainly won't be buying anything since the Apple Silicon switch, because now only Apple controls which OS you can run.
Joking aside, I often hear people say "they should" when talking about GNU/Linux (for example: "they should just standardize on one audio stack"), as if there were a central authority making those decisions. What many don't realize is that with FOSS comes freedom of choice... and inevitably, an abundance of choice. That diversity isn't a flaw, it's a consequence of how the ecosystem works.
There's free choice for those OSes to use different kernels, but they don't, they all use the same Linux (rather than say BSD). There's a lot of advantage in getting aligned on things, even though anyone can choose not to.
If Linux had a revenue stream and model, this would make sense. But the style of open-source is to make good software, and let others gravitate to you as a result.
HP Zbook Ultra G1a, 128GB RAM. Add SSD to taste. HP supported (Canonical OEM) Ubuntu with KDE. Works great as a daily driver with a UGreen GAN charger.
> (c) stops turning every OS feature into an ad, and makes it utilitarian again
Microsoft and OpenAI have the same problem in that they have a massive userbase that costs them money but doesn’t generate any revenue. The only known ways of sustaining such a structure is ads or becoming a marketplace and they failed at the second so I doubt your wish will ever come true.
I'd be super happy if they left Windows alone and did just this for years to come. Use the other products to make money, and just maintain this Win 2000/7/10 type OS without new features, and stop trying to hide everything behind fancy UI. I still revert back to old control panels to do the necessary tweaks.
I think the most likely thing that will happen is MS will have a hard split between the corporate and consumer OSes. Much like they tried to do with windows 2000 vs windows 9x.
And much like what happened with that split, I think you'll see consumers getting copies of corporate windows to get around/away from consumer windows.
Linux since 1996! In chronological order: Slackware, SuSE, DLD, LSF, Gentoo, Ubuntu (starting with 04.10!), eventually Debian 12, now 13.
Back in the days I compiled the kernel myself! :-D
Sure, occasionally I used Windows 3.11, 95, 98se, XP, Vista, 7 and 10, but never as my main system.
I am a software developer, but also do gaming, video production and audio producing. I never got the discussion, Linux works for me for almost 30 years now.
One day, I applied for a new job and was already on the company tour. When they told me that I could only use a Windows computer provided by them, I quickly said, ‘No, thank you,’ and left. The faces they made were truly priceless.
Another day, I applied for another job again and, after some hesitation, unfortunately said yes when they tried to foist a Windows computer on me, because the actual project was really cool. That was the worst year of my career, thanks to restricted Windows 10.
Out of curiosity, back when you were compiling the kernel yourself was it because you wanted to learn it or because you wanted to add more modules to the kernel that didnt exist there by default?
The kernel compilation had a configuration UI where you could select all the drivers you wanted to literally build in. So I selected just what I needed, to save memory, recompiled, waited an hour et voila. Kernel modules came later.
I never advocated for Windows, but I always used it because it "just worked". At a certain point, I realized - as OP had - that I was spending just as much time configuring Windows as I would be spending configuring Linux.
I've moved to Kubuntu and haven't looked back. Proton support is amazing, and Claude Code fixes the doc-diving problem that used to plague Linux. In fact, with Claude, I was able to get such a buttery smooth setup on Kubuntu - Wezterm auto-saving and restorable sessions (even with multiple windows), a working fading background switcher with history, automounting drives and vhdx images on startup - and these are all relatively simple things, but they were near-frictionless to set up and they don't break on a random Tuesday. I love it and would recommend anyone who is on Windows to reconsider.
I still have my Mac 128k with external disk drive and printer. Bought new in Jan 1985 or late Dec 1984. I paid the exorbitant price to upgrade it to 512k during the first year I owned it. I think the RAM needed to be desoldered and new chips soldered in place so it needed to be returned to the store where I bought it.
Shout out to the author of the blog for writing an engaging post that accurately the MS experience. For me, switching is still a work in progress since I am the family troubleshooter and there are lots of things to mess with. It will happen because so far, the ones I have switched have no complaints.
32MB ram <-- no way. 4 and 8MB were the standard (8MB being grand), you could find 16MB on some Pentiums. So 40MB drive and 32MB RAM is an exceptionally unlikely combo.
Yeah, IIRC my first computer, or at least the first one I really maintained, was a Pentium 2 with 32MB of ram and a 2gb hard drive. Good ole gateway pcs.
So this depends if it was a 72 pin DIMM board. I don't think you could get there (easily?) on a 30 pin board, but 72 may have had native support for 64 out of the box.
My Dad had one of them. The first machine I actually purchased myself was a Dragon 32 (6809 processor, 32k RAM) sometime around 1981 - i can remember everything about it, including all the terrible cassette games I bought for it and the money I spent on ROM cartridges (word processor, assembler/debugger). These days I can't even remember what's in my Steam library.
Interestingly I can't remember any specs since about 22 years ago.
First modern PC (dos/win3.1) I had a 12mhz 286, 1 meg of ram, AT keyboard, 40MB hard drive. This progressed via a 486/sx33/4m/170mb and at one point a pentium2 600 with (eventually) 96mb of ram, 2g hard drive, then a p3 of some sort, but after that it's just "whatever".
I documented all of my early computers throughout early college, and I'm glad I did. I remember the first computers well, but without those notes, I wouldn't remember the first ten in so much detail. My first computer that was not a family computer was: UMAX 233mhz Pentium 2, 64Mb Ram, 8Gb HDD (was crushed when sat on by sibling)
First family PC was a used IBM PC XT, 8088 w/ 640kb ram and a cga card with an amber monochrome monitor attached. I remember getting a 14.4 modem on it, and it would freeze, had to force it to 9600bps. Then managed to wranle a 486sx w/ 4mb ram and an EGA card and display.
First decent computer I built was an AMD 5x86 133mhz with the larger cache module and a whopping 64mb ram that I'd traded for some ANSi work. The irony is for some things it ran circles around the Pentiums that friends had, for others it just slogged. Ran OS/2 warp like a beast though. Ever since then, I've mostly maxed out the ram in my systems... I wend from 128gb down to 96GB for my AM5 build though since the most I've ever used is around 75gb, and I wanted to stick to a single pair at a higher speed.
36 years ago: A Wyse branded AT clone 12.5MHz 286 with 1MB of ram, a 10MB hard drive and a Hercules graphics card (it was a decommissioned CAD machine from my dad's work).
I'm not against someone's preferences, but this looks like an anecdotal story. Windows, as much as it's hated here, still works fine for the vast majority of people. What's more, you have higher risk of having problems when running Linux.
Linux user since about 1998, leaning towards BSDs today. Network engineer + R&D + software dev. Daily driver (desktop) about 2002-2010 - work made it too difficult later. Very occasional gamer. Corporate world will give you a Windows VDI or web cloudy things if need be. Win10 on my laptop out of habit, mostly using terminals + WSL and a browser. Lightroom user, but flexible. None of the other gear I own runs Windows, and the numbers are significant (racks). I run my laptops until they die - the current one is 10y and hasn't died yet but won't run Win11 without going through hoops. Next laptop will not be running Windows outside of a VM.
Win7 was a workhorse, moving to win10 felt unnecessary - and I still remember how the laptop vendor had a system performance tuning app for win7 that you could use to put it into limp mode and have it run on battery for a full day and most of the night. No such thing on win10 on the same hardware. Everything has its time, and hopefully I'll never even get to experience the joy that apparently is win11. The times for software freedom of choice are as good as they have ever been.
I'm basically developing on Linux despite running windows. I just set the terminal emulator to open wsl by default, and have VSCode connect to the WSL instance. This also gives you the "native docker" the author mentions, just ignore Docker for Windows exists and install docker in your wsl.
This does have downsides, and the author lists many. It also has some marginal upsides. For example running multiple distros for testing is trivial, and while the Windows file Explorer might be a shitshow that reached its peak over two decades ago it somehow seems to still be leagues ahead of the options in linux gui land. And of course the situation in gaming and content creation used to be way worse just a couple years ago, so for many switching only became viable relatively recently
That seems to be the preferred path for many devs on Windows - unless you can get your hands on a Mac at work WSL is much better/easier. Most non-software companies may not even offer a Linux laptop.
Before MS really started mucking things up the past few years, I was referring to WSL as my favorite Linux distro... MS took a LOT of the rough edges off in terms of development.
Both MacOS and Windows with wsl are perfectly fine for development. Especially MacOS.
There's literally nothing special about Linux when it comes to development. And there are quite a few downsides especially when it comes to some specialized tooling because many vendors often only have Windows tools for their devices.
I would have to agree with this. I don't understand people how say developing on Linux is somehow better. I have built C++ software across Windows, macOS and Linux and I can't say one is easier than the other at all. Perhaps it is because of the package management system that makes installing a compiler "easier" than downloading Xcode or downloading/running the Visual Studio installer??
I certainly don't find development tools better on Linux, particularly for C++ debugging. Windows/Visual Studio is the leader in that regard.
I have also done C#, PHP, Java, JS + web development across all 3 and don't see the difference.
I find a Linux host with a development guest OS the best to work in. It allows for snapshots, backups, and sharing development environments. Solution A might need a different environment than Solution B.
Funny enough, the bluetooth stack works better on a bare metal Linux box than a Windows one. Audio starts being played sooner.
This depends entirely on your stack and preferred workflow. MacOS is increasingly hostile to powerusers. If you don't mind following their golden path, all is fine, otherwise... I wonder how long before you have to enable a scary "developer mode" to install software outside the app store.
While that's true, I still don't have any issues running any stack on Mac (I've had Java, Python, C++, some Rust, Erlang/Elixir; previously I also had PHP and Ruby)
I guess I'd argue that "it depends on lot on what you mean by development".
For anyone hosting a product on servers (almost everything web related)... there IS something special about linux: It's where your product is going to run in production.
For folks who are doing work in other spaces, especially development that involves vendor provided physical devices: Then yes, I agree with you. Vendor support is almost always better for Windows, and sometimes entirely non-existent otherwise. I'll note this is starting to change, but it's not yet over the hump.
The only place I'd consider macOS as a "perfectly fine" linux alternative is mobile (and mainly because Apple forces it with borderline abusive policy/terms). Otherwise it's just a shittier version of linux on nice hardware, riddled with incompatible tooling, forced emulation problems, and a host of other issues. It's not really even "prettier" anymore.
> For anyone hosting a product on servers (almost everything web related)... there IS something special about linux: It's where your product is going to run in production.
I've been at several corporations and companies where the target OS doesn't matter in the least, and I've had multiple projects on my own where it was the same.
Most of development is so far removed from actual hardware and actual OS, it doesn't matter if your backend is developed on Mac and runs on Linux.
Did you have a particularly bad experience? Things have changed _a little_ since 1992.
I switched from Windows in 2018 because I was trying to install some Python packages, and it was hours of work to find the specific visual C++ runtimes that were needed to get them working.
Regarding high-quality commercial Linux software: SideFX Houdini offers a relatively affordable Indie license and is fantastic for most kinds of 3D work, compositing, and post-processing tasks. It’s also fully procedural and scriptable, which really makes my brain buzz.
I was away from Windows for the past 12 years. Recently we bought a desktop and had to install Wondows on it. I was just shocked by the level of shittification that happened. I can't even find a Solitaire game that is not littered with ads.
I was a big fan of Satya. I thought he had new vision that aligns with the emerging world. I saw some successes he had with cloud, office 365 etc. But when offered to take Altman in, I knew Satya is no longer maintaining the stature of the grand company built by Gates.
I think Linux is not quite there as gaming system. Simply due to games' compatibility (and I don't play latest and hottest titles, more like Cities-Skylines/Transport Fever/Anno/Satisfactory etc). Plus to my knowledge NVidia drivers are still an issue.
But for literally anything else I think it's ready. Just browsing? Office work (writing/spreadsheets/presentations/email)? Development? Media production? You're good.
For Linux-curious I'd advise to get a dedicated hardware, like 5/7 year old business machine (Thinkpad or even smth like Dell Latitude), they'll be under $300. Don't do Arch (unless you do that for the sake of being able to install Arch). Instead, get Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, Debian, Zorin (the last one specifically for Windows users), or one of many other beginner-friendly distros, and drive it for a bit. Get the software you want, see if it works for you, and if you don't like it, it's all good. If you do, you can gradually move all your stuff to the new machine, or install Linux on your main machine.
That's what I did (quite a) few years ago when I got fed up with Windows 8, took me about a year, but I've been on Mint Mate ever since. My gaming rig is still Windows 11 but all it has is my Steam collection.
That's not my experience at all. The majority of games, especially on Steam, work out of the box.
I would advise the opposite: Don't get an old box. Take your new box, take a new hard disk, and just install Bazzite (and pretend you don't know anything about Linux, just stick with the defaults).
My quick rebuttal is that gaming is pretty close to 'there' if you pick a distro that prioritizes it.
I run bazzite-DX (nvidia rtx4070) for dev and pleasure and gaming there is ON POINT. I don't play any anti-cheat games, but Cities Skylines, Doom Eternal, Cyberpunk (with full raytracing and HDR), GTA5-Remaster, etc, all run like champs. As of last month, full HDR10 mode started working in chrome and video players too, so hdr videos get those popping brights.
I am thankful that so far Microsoft hasn't removed local admin capabilities of Windows, but I dread the day that happens (mainly because it remains the most consistent ways one can deny windows updates).
Because forcing updates down people's throat creates this, and boy do I hate Microsoft's insistence on doing this for drivers, where you get such fun things like Microsoft installing a different AMD GPU driver than the one that AMD gives out (this to be fair is partially to be blamed on AMD for not having just 1 versioning system) so then you have to go into safe mode, DDU, disconnect the internet, install the drivers, turn off automatic driver update in an obscure setting.
Meanwhile on Linux it's literally 1 version that exists in the kernel.
Ever since Wayland added support for changing mouse scroll speed & changing/customizing middle click behavior that is a lot more consistent, I've used Linux to daily drive, especially with immutable distros ensuring even IF an update breaks my system I can rollback.
Microsoft probably has a problem with tech debt, yes. That is however not the problem. Instead, the product strategy is. And it was bad even before LLMs.
Windows is under 10% of their revenue these days. It’s simply not important to leadership. Just like Xbox - just let it slowly die as you squeeze any last remaining cents out
There’s a lot of odd things said in this article. Like “no more file explorer hanging”, “no more waiting for the start menu to open” - is this something that actually happens to people? Perhaps on very old hardware I could see it, but it’s not my experience at all. Lots of weird emotional and very biased parts to this article.
But it’s just gonna take off here anyway because it’s a switching to Linux article which is like offering HN users free coke.
Of course those are things that happen to people, why would they make them up?! If anything, your reaction seems like an emotional and biased one, refusing to acknowledge the experiences of others when they conflict with your beliefs.
(and I say all this as a happy Windows user with no plans to move to Linux).
After the last "update" the setting for turning windows "game optimization" on and off doesn't work anymore and made factorio unplayable (it MUST be off, otherwise it optimized lag and stuttering and it automatically turns on after every larger update). Since games was the only reason I still had a pc with windows it was time to move. For funzies it tried installing some updates on the last shutdown (it got wiped afterwards).
The only pc I now have with windows on it is a early 00's pc with 98SE on it.
You know what's funny about this article.... Back in 2012 I had the same problems with Windows Update and that is what forced me to go to a mac. I've never looked back.
I've been using Linux as my main system for ~25 years, but always kept Windows installed for games. On my latest computer I've build 3 years ago, thanks to Steam with Proton, I no longer have Windows and have been happily playing Windows-only games without major issues.
It’s sort of crazy how much changed in the past few years. The only things that don’t run well under wine/proton now I feel like are online games with kernel anticheat and products like Autodesk or Adobe.
There are some commercial Applications that just won't work on wine. But virt-manager makes Qemu/kvm backing images for windows 10 or 11 easy. Freezing Windows in time is an absolute must if you do builds with vendors badly maintained development software.
Dual booting off 2 SSD is good now, and the deciding factor on most of our laptop purchases. Windows is still necessary if you do serious heavy GPU CGI rendering, CAD/CAM work, or Games.
I like Linux when everything is working well, as getting work done with the shell CLI is important for handling "Big" problems. Cloning identical Linux environments across all team workstations also greatly simplifies project support. =3
The two things I find unacceptable are no local accounts and non consensual reboots. The latter may need legislation. They don’t even notify you that it happened. They try to restart apps and put things back the way they were but you can still tell that your house was broken into by the missing data that wasn’t saved.
> Adobe Suite: Runs via Winboat. Far from perfect (no video acceleration, laggy at times), but functional
That’s not acceptable to most professionals and one of the things holding me back on a Mac.
Adobe has so many different cross-platform layers that a solution like Proton may never be viable, practically speaking.
For Photoshop alone I remember reading that they still have some custom MacApp Pascal UI code, along with HTML/CSS/JS rendered by WebKit. And there used to be a flavor of Flash as well in mix, to name a few. Lightroom had its own custom Lua UI binding.
The only hope for fast and reliable Adobe-apps-on-Linux IMO is through a Windows VM with GPU pass-through and a focus on making that as easily and seamless as possible.
It seems to be, for most users who switch, that the driver is if they are primarily a consumer or creator. Unix systems have always been a preferred platform for some creators, but this effect seems to be multiplying as the focus for Windows become less and less creator friendly. Yeah, if you are a gamer and watch YouTube videos, then your path to least resistance is Windows; but if you are a software developer, web developer, music editor, video editor, et al... the ability to control, easily automate, and flexibility of your environment (not to mention the reduced system resources) become a huge advantage. There are reasons why MOST creators are moving away from Windows... and most consumers are becoming more and more comfortable with tablets and Chromebooks.
As an Ableton user myself, I’m pretty surprised that this musician could just… switch from Ableton to Bitwig. Goes to show how dire the situation was I guess.
I still have yet to hear any non-technical person I know encounter issues on Windows and seriously consider switching away. The learned helplessness instilled by Microsoft is very difficult to get people to shake off.
Bitwig was developed by ex-Ableton devs, and the layout is incredibly similar. It's a very easy transition compared to coming from a DAW like FL or Logic.
It's also a really attractive offering once you hear about it. It's intuitive, cross-platform, half the price of Ableton for a 3-device lifetime license without geofencing, and the software contains a modular software synth atop which most of the preset instruments are built that is so versatile that its value alone exceeds the price tag of the entire daw.
Big fan. Share your thoughts if you give it a whirl.
I came in here looking for this thread specifically (I can't imagine moving off of Ableton). Thanks for taking a sec to write this up! I might give it a try, just for the synth alone.
My problem (having moved Win to Lin, Ableton to Bitwig too) is with sound. Latency is one and bad. Getting any sound at all on Bluetooth is also hard, where the latency is even worse. Wish there was a simple "apt install make-audio-work-well-for-daw" I could run on my KDE Ubuntu 24.04...
Hmm. I'm on a stock Arch install and had no latency or quality issues to speak of. Bluetooth works out of the box using `bluez` and `blueman`, though Bluetooth is still Bluetooth, with inherent latency. Some headphones have low-latency modes that can be activated in their respective apps at the expense of ANC/battery life, maybe that'll help?
The apt command you're looking for may be the audio backend, though. `apt install pipewire wireplumber -y`. Won't break your existing pulseaudio setup, but will allow low-latency operations. (I think--I avoid the dumpster fire that is Ubuntu like the plague, so ymmv)
He doesn't get into why he didn't switch to Apple. Kind of a middle ground - it's still got the maddening things about being from a corporate behemoth, but it's closer to Unix and you can run your audio software there. (I would be using Linux instead of Apple yesterday if it weren't for a single music program I can't live without).
Sort of funny that Nadella quotes Steve Jobs from 35 years ago with the "bicycles for the mind" quip. Given enough time, MSFT's marketing will eventually catch up with NeXT's marketing.
I tried to make this shift, but managed to somehow brick Linux Mint, so now I'm back on Windows for now...
I was already not very impressed when I attempted to okay a video file, and VLC told me I didn't have the right codec installed, and I had to run a shell command to get the codec... I have to open a shell to watch a common video file?
But then while attempting to install some packages to install Steam (which I also needed shell commands for...), I updated some kernel package, as instructed, rebooted my machine, and now Mint just sits there doing nothing right after I get through the bootloader. Can't seem to run any commands to recover either.
Bricking Mint is annoying, but I was much more astonished that I saw so many people hold up Mint as this beacon of user friendly Linux distros, but to do even the most basic things, I had to start running commands on the shell. That is NOT user friendly. I'll probably try again soon, but I'm pretty disappointed in my first experience.
No such thing as brick when you have a “live drive” available. Reinstall and be up again in a half hour.
The codec issues are caused by the companies that make them, not a free operating system. Next time download an open codec movie or install from the “store” GUI.
Speaking of "Content Creation", I'd also like to add the Affinity Suite. I don't particularly like it after being bought by Canva, but it works almost flawlessly on Linux.
The only tools pinning me to Windows were photo editing apps (Capture One, Adobe), and some music apps (Reason, a whole bunch of other apps) that I barely used. Cut over to Debian about 4 years ago when my laptop started having thermal issues and Covid encouraged me to buy a tower desktop machine. Haven't looked back, it's been so much more productive. The strange and toxic-to-me design choices in the Win11 UI helped motivate the rapid transition.
The only thing that's caused any issue is power management, I'm fairly sure it's not optimal, but it's still better than Win11. That's purely down to lack of effort on my part, and basically setting it for max performance because it's not important to me for a desktop machine. Everything (and I mean everything - sound, video, wifi, bluetooth) else is 100% out of the box working on mid-range commodity hardware, albeit with excessive RAM for my needs. Some of it is a bit clumsy looking in places, but it did look weird on Windows too with some of the apps.
When I did have trouble, it was not like I could get support from Microsoft as the community forum is a joke, but with Linux at least I stand a fighting chance of working around any potential problems.
Is there anything on Windows I miss? No.
Is there anything on Mac that I miss? Yes, there's a few things that I like about MacOS (pre-glass) but I have a MacBook Air for those which is good for occasional use but not as a daily driver.
FYI: latest Photoshop should work on Wine as of this week, but of course that situation may be too subject to change for someone's main source of income.
For me I made the switch in 1998 when Windows Me was so terrible it was unusble. I went to CompUSA and found this cool box of cd roms with a lizard logo - suse linux and I was done with MS forever (except at work).
My Windows 11 installation broke down after one of the updates. Now I get "Please reinstall Windows" warning in Windows Update settings. And some error hex code which doesn't really help. I've installed like 5 different apps on this machine and never ran any "tweaking" scripts or apps.
I don't think I ever had to reinstall Windows 2000 but here we are.
Yeah Windows 2000 had countless software test engineers, I was one of them and on my team there were 5000 of us. I stared in tech support in 97 and moved into QA and always filed bugs on behalf of the customer, sadly everyone must code and customers must test. It's just not working out but Microsoft really only cares about Corporate America and Windows running on all the main languages. It's great to have alternatives and I've moved to MacOS after using Windows since 1.0.
Thank you for your service. :D Windows 2000 will always be my favorite version. I got a free copy as a university student and it was just awesome. XP was the era where things changed for the sake of change. In Windows 2000 you could learn where absolutely everything was and it was always there for you.
I still have my install CD, though it has suffered from bit-rot and can't be read properly. :(
I think the UI was reasonable and easily understood in 2000. After that it seems links and buttons became interchangeable, and now we end up in the mess where scrollbars may or may not be visible until you try fiddling with the UI etc.
My only issue is that i am not a developer, I am heavily reliant on Excel, i know it inside and out and just not sure whether OpenOffice supports excel files. In the past it barely did.
Had a similar experience in around ~2017 and switched over to Linux. At the time I didn't have the time to build my own and bought a mid-range System76 laptop.
Best computer decision I've ever made. I'm not a heavy gamer so the machine is still running fine. I've only had one time in the last 9 years where I had to drop everything and fix my computer vs Windows where it felt like once a year
For literally decades we've hoped that Linux will get like Windows in some crucial areas like sleep and hibernations support for laptops, supported first-party drivers, correct and reliable multi-monitor setups, games, etc. Never ever could I imagine that Linux parity, which I'd like to argue is closer than ever before, would be reached by Windows getting worse in exactly those areas we, the Linux freaks, got told to get Windows for -- sleep not working, graphics drivers bringing whole systems down, incoherent configuration etc. Only games got better and we have to thank Valve for that.
I switched my parents to linux during the gnome 2 days and have given them a consistent environment ever since (kept them on mate).
It is true, they could not do this themselves and sometimes my mom can test my patience, but this is the way if you can do it. (Hint: get a remote desktop with shared view working first :).
Really, the stronghold for windows is their office suite (other family require Word/Excel for work), enterprise domain integration (work to home pc familiarity), and, to a weaker extent, gaming. Gaming is why I still keep an install of windows on my pc.
> All major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave) have native Linux builds. Full support. No compromises.
Full support ? I thought that the DRM were not the same (e.g. Disney+ and Amazon Prime limited to 480p on Linux which is a scam... At least, I remember having to hack something to use the Windows version of Chrome with WINE in order to get a decent image with Amazon Prime when I got a 6-month offered subscription a few years ago)
That's correct, proper open source Linux is always limited to the weakest tiers of streaming DRM (i.e. fully software based) which usually means you only get low resolution streams. Locked-down Linux derivatives like ChromeOS and Android can support the stronger DRM tiers of course but that's not the same thing.
There was a post here a while back saying that Microsoft will eventually switch to Linux instead of maintaining Windows. Given all the negativity around Windows this seems more and more likely (I haven’t used Windows myself for over 20 years so I have no idea what its like now. Last time I used it, it was XP)
Except the problem is their UX more than the kernel itself. I don't see them keeping Gnome or KDE as a desktop UI even if they did fully adopt Linux for desktop usage.
MS should really just buckle down, finish simplifying the UI and make it consistent again... the last time it was mostly consistent was Windows 7, and even then.
I'm willing to bet that System76 gets COSMIC to the level that Win7 reached faster than MS can turn anything around in terms of Windows at this point.
If Microsoft vibe codes a Linux distro and calls it Windows 360 Copilot, I’m on board with the conspiracy theory that the Hadron Collider broke reality
My main operating system is Linux since 2005 or so, or actually late 2004. I still use Win10 on my laptop, for various reasons; in part to test java code and ruby code on windows, in part due to elderly relatives.
Win11 really annoyed many users though. That's actually interesting, since Microsoft committed to it yet it gets harder for Microsoft to retain the people. Linux is unfortunately way too complex to really break the desktop system (and no, Wayland, GNOME, KDE, are not going to change any of that either), but if it were, Microsoft would probably have lost its de-facto monopoly already. Either way it is interesting how much people hate Win11. Microsoft really committed to driving down the cliff here.
It's funny, but I had my grandmother on Linux for about a long while before she passed... Wine managed to run the 3 Windows 9x era games games she was still playing into the 2010's (where real Windows wouldn't) and her browser/email. I wasn't even able to do that for myself. All I had to do was run updates for her every few months (because she didn't) and the one time she had a hardware failure, I'm the one who fixed it.
In the end, I'd say for most people, who aren't their own computer admins/repair anyway... Linux is probably fine. Since most people don't use more than the browser for the most part.
My other grandmother was on a docked Chromebook after the 5th time I had to clean malware off her computer, and she didn't need any windows apps anymore... she couldn't help but click on the "you might have a virus" ads.
Since most application run in the browser nowadays, the OS becomes less meaningful and more of a layer between browser and hardware.
If you see your PC as a tool, not a gimmick to consume, Linux is the only choice. Even MacOS crappifies over time and becomes a Windows copy over time.
I’ve asked before but the answer keeps changing before I get around to implementing it:
My kid wants to upgrade their PC from Windows 11 to Linux. They have a recent-ish Nvidia card. I’m very technical: I don’t mind doing whatever arcane thing needs done. They are not, yet.
I haven’t run Linux on my desktop in a decade and I’m completely out of date here. What should I steer my kid toward to run recent games?
Depends on the games. If your kid wants to play anything with kernel level anticheat, it will not work on Linux, period - these anticheats don't support Linux, and either prevent the game from running altogether or disable certain online modes.
Otherwise, CachyOS is extremely popular these days, and I suppose a valid choice.
In all honesty, it was easy for me to switch to Linux because I was always more interested in the computer itself rather than what useful things I could do with it, so I actually never missed a particular application. I also was more interested in making a game run in Wine with maximum effort rather than actually playing it (I did play countless hours of World of Warcraft though...)
Ironically for me Linux has become the obvious default for casual use - web browsing, entertainment, paying my bills etc. I only boot Windows when I need to do some weird nerdy stuff, like checking updating SSD firmware with some proprietary software available only for Windows.
> You might be thinking "just disable updates, man" or "just install LTSC", or "just run some random debloat script off of GitHub". Why? Why would I jump through all these hoops? I'd rather put in the effort for an OS that knows what consent is and respects me as a user.
The absolute choice quote here. Tattoo it on your forehead.
One of the things I like most about CachyOS is that the configuration is all just in text files, one of the things I like least is that I am never quite sure whether to modify the systemd unit settings that are usually in /usr/lib somewhere, the app settings in /etc or the personal configs in ~/.config. For packages that I am unfamiliar with, I usually end up trying all three locations until I notice that my changes seem to stick.
The installer also completely broke the Windows partition that came with the workstation even though I was planning on dual booting, but oh well, no great loss there.
Other than that, there are some small conveniences and apps that I miss from MacOS (the mac calendar and mail apps are just so nice!) but the Niri window manager is just so amazing that at this point I don't think there's anything that could make me switch back.
I don't understand why he thinks all users will use WSL in Windows. I have never ever touched it, and I've developed on Windows for decades (C++/C#/JS/web). It seems like trying to make Windows non-native or some semi-Linux.
I also have never touched Docker on Linux, despite having used that from RedHat 6.0 days (Fedora, Ubuntu LTS now).
Also, he missed out Shotcut as a decent video editor. It recently enabled a 10bit workflow (plus the Frei0r plugins are easy enough to write for it, if you so desire).
You've sold me. Does anyone have a lightweight guide or something of a no-nonsense tutorial on how to do this without causing an even bigger headache than using windows?
I have always used Linux personally, only work made me use Windows and Mac (controlled endpoints) for the past 20 years. For 4 years I have my own company, 100% Linux.
I know that some things are not as nice on Linux (ie you need to do MS365 in a browser for example, and MS365 files from a NAS in OnlyOffice is not great, etc). But other than that, I just love living in Gnome. What more do you need that just a clean desktop with some tiling, some virtual desktops, a clock, battery indicator and windows with your stuff? I don't even know. I like that I can set up Linux in 10 min.
I recently set up a Windows 11 machine for a neighbor, it took so long! And it offered dozens of things I didn't want, to the point that I began feeling a bit nervous towards my neighbor (no you don't need that, no not that, no that's just tracking, no why would you want your desktop in the cloud?). Then when finished... it wasn't finished, I need printer drivers, an HP package with drivers and stuff for the BIOS etc etc etc. So much time.
Every company I’ve worked at has used Google Docs anyway so the experience for me is the same on Linux. What’s so appealing about the classic Office suite?
Well, it's mostly annoying if people store office docs on some samba share instead of in SharePoint/Teams. Also Teams has issues on Firefox, and sometimes also in Chromium. But overall works well enough (even with my AirPods on Linux). Things like drawing in PowerPoint in the Browser have become significantly better over the last year, before that I avoided it like the plaque. Whats missing in MS365 online is numbered captions for figures (unforgivable!), or reference management. That just really annoying if people use those features. Also, I worked in an org still on Office 2019 but mixed it with MS365, that also lead to lot of pain. It's papercuts mostly, nothing fatal.
Another very important feature which does not get mentioned enough is Ubuntu launching Ubuntu Pro in 2022 which has an ordinary-user-affordable support option where $150 a year gets you what they call "full support" with a four hour ticket response time on weekdays. My time is way too valuable to deal with the driver problems Linux always has, community support is often best described as "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king" -- I once had a problem with a peripheral and people directed me to the Arch Wiki page that I wrote. I stopped using Linux as my main eight years ago and have been on W10/WSL since. I am considering Linux main in May when I get my new laptop if there's commercial support backing me up. I reached out to them with my list of current hardware and they didn't reply yet :( which doesn't bode well.
Example: Thunderbolt networking. Is there a kernel module for it? Yes. Is there experience with it? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I know we keep hearing about how their share holders are forcing this change of focus in order to monetize ai. I just fail to see how alienating developers and the gaming community in the process will ever help achieve that.
I bounced back and forth for a few years. Now? Not even dual boot, not even a VM. Maybe Linux did not get better than Windows, opinions differ. However, Windows certainly has gotten worse than Linux.
Just saw a video on YouTube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDwt9AiItqU - starts at 3:25) that talked about the windows experience in the present day and I totally forgot about booting up and magically having software appear I never asked for due to some partnerships Microsoft made. I've been on Mac for 16 years/iPhone for 10 years and have never looked back. The most annoying thing about Apple is when the OS updates and suddenly you have a different experience like liquid glass. But like all things I usually get used to it after about a week and most of the times I see the benefits (in this case, even more screen real estate).
Kind of interesting after using Manjaro recently, I had stayed away from Ubuntu for a while and started researching to see if it had gotten any better. I found a bunch of blog and reddit posts about how Linux sucks so bad and how much superior Windows and MacOS are.
Only to see this article today. lol
I guess at this point, whatever works for you and your situation is what you should use and ignore all the static. I use Linux for the majority of my dev work, but have the inability to move off Adobe products for the photo and video processing work I do. Something I've found that Linux doesn't compete very well with MS and Apple. I would love to finally get off of one or the other, but I have one foot in each because they both excel in different areas.
I’m kind of curious why Adobe hasn’t gone all-in on Linux by now. IIRC Adobe apps were built on cross-platform tooling like Java (InDesign) and AIR (all the CS UI, and then the underpinnings in C++).
I guess Adobe doesn't exactly have much to win by Windows failing, but their inaction does mean the open source alternatives will continue to get better, and that will hurt them.
Every few years someone posts the same thing in the Adobe forums which then piss off the moderators and Adobe "experts". They continue to say the same thing which makes zero sense.
I'm paraphrasing here but its something along the lines of:
"Linux users are open source people and expect everything for free. They'll never pay for our products, so we see no need to port them for Linux users because so few of them would be willing to pay for our products."
A lot of other comments are cheeky ones like, "Adobe is already on a Linux OS, its called MacOS." - rolls eyes-
And you are correct, the OSS alternatives are getting better and closing the gap, but they're just not there yet - but I hold out hope they will be one day.
Welcome to the club. I started my Linux and BSD journey in ~1998 and I haven't really touched Windows since ~2001 except for the occasional brief interaction.
I've never missed it. Like at all. There have been instances where some piece of software didn't have a Linux alternative, that's mostly been a mild inconvenience. There have been cases where it's been a serious problem too, such as when my ever-so-wonderful government decided to start using e-ID which only worked on Windows (thanks, Wouter from grep.be for fixing that).
Mostly I enjoy how I'm in control of my machine, instead of having to rely on a bunch of untrustworthy moneygrabbers who seem hell-bent on making the worst possible decisions at every turn.
I always like to chime in on these things that I've been a delighted Arch user for about a year now, for similar reasons. Took a lot of setup, but it's dialed now and just works. My computer belongs to me again for the first time in years.
I should really do more to evangelize. It's not ok to use an OS monopoly to degrade and squeeze your users' often primary career and creative tool to your own short term ends, making their lives worse and worse. And it's such a delight to get out from under.
Not sure the situation for normies currently, but for power users, definitely dual boot and give it a try.
I really wish linux had a decent answer for DRM-protected VST plugins. Yes you can run stuff in WINE but I need to be able to use iLok and the bullshit DRM systems for about a dozen other publishers.
I am so glad that gaming on linux is viable. I wish my music production workflows were too.
Most people overlook that. I only ever see comments complaining about time spent to set up Linux. It's not the only variable, and for Windows it's the constant maintenance that's the issue. You are never just done setting up Windows.
I think I might be the only developer left on this forum, and maybe on the planet, who still uses Microsoft OS daily (for over 30 years). I rarely have issues with it, find it incredibly stable, and have made a lot of money using it.
Not sure why, I just felt the need to post this.
Oh, and just to make myself look even worse, Copilot in VS Code has been an amazing asset in my development.
FWIW for similar reasons I nuked my Windows install and installed CauchyOS. My main reason for not doing it earlier was concerns about game compatibility but so far the games I want to play either are working without any issue or work after enabling Steam's proton compatibility layer.
I also think LLMs are well suited to find niche strange bugs way quicker. User posts esoteric error on the issues page. LLM with proper context may converge quickly, allowing the programmer to implement a fix.
2. Linux is already to the point of giving you about as many esoteric errors as Windows or macOS will.
People don't switch either because they are comfortable where they are and don't want to put forth the effort of changing their OS, or they are afraid of outdated criticism of Linux Desktops being error-filled nightmares.
My feeling is that I consistently find on-point solutions for my Linux problems with a quick search. However if my Windows install gets in trouble my search will yield some DISM.exe invocation which doesn't help at all. A bit anecdotal, but this is my experience. I've always been able to fix my Linux installs.
1. It is. It makes me more likely to use Linux, and I'm not that far from the average. On Reddit r/gaming I've seen people who literally made the step and say exactly this "I installed Linux and when I can't figure something out I ask an LLM and it has done a great job so far".
It's happening right now. Maybe you're so opposed to the concept that you hate to imagine it, but it's the reality.
> or they are afraid of outdated criticism of Linux Desktops being error-filled nightmares
Your concept of people installing Linux is behind because even just over the last 12 months things have changed a lot.
I want to switch to Linux for my EOL Windows 10 originally-built-for-gaming rig. It was “new” in 2016, so I hold out hope that there will be few compatibility issues. My biggest concerns are being able to play my library of steam games on it. Overall the problems I have are that last time I tried to put Linux on that machine I tried a dual boot system, and at the time UEFI did not play well with dual booting. I don’t know if it’s gotten better, but as of now I wouldn’t be dual booting anyway so conceivably it wouldn’t be an issue.
This tends to be better overall anyway, if you are really looking to switch. Dual booting is enough of a hassle that I've always ended up staying in whatever OS I felt required me to think I needed to dual boot, and the other aspirational OS gets forgotten.
Going all-in requires that you figure out new workflows, find new software, or in some cases change what you use the computer for and accept it.
I tried building a gaming PC, but I hated PC gaming. It felt like it was half sys admin work, half gaming... if the sys admin work went well that day. I dual booted it for a while, then ran straight Linux on it, and eventually sold it. I liked the idea of one box that did everything, but the reality of it wasn't so great. I now have computers I don't care about gaming on, and have consoles that require 0 effort and let me play games when I feel like playing games.
I doubt the dual boot issue was due to UEFI. It's more likely, Windows was clobbering over GRUB and overwriting your bootloader, as it likes to do. Windows really wants to be the only OS on your drive.
Most reliable way I've ran dual boot systems is to have each OS on it's own separate drive, and then choose with the UEFI boot menu which one to boot instead of choosing in GRUB off a single drive.
As for games, plug them into protondb (https://www.protondb.com) to see compatibility & read through the comments
I haven't driven a Windows box since 2010 (and even then it was just a few months at work) and I'm perfectly happy! Except I'm on a Mac and have been at every job since 2006 when they came out with the Intel-based ones. I of course run Linux on VMs at work, but my daily driver has been and likely will forever be a Mac. I don't miss installing/tweaking video drivers or registry settings. Things just work 99.99% of the time for me. No one is perfect and Apple has made mistakes, but for me, I'm 100% satisfied.
How do you find macOS Tahoe? I have deliberately avoided installing it on my M3 MacBook Air that I use for work mainly due to the lack of attention to detail they seem to have dumped on the UI.
I have used a Mac at work on/off since the Snow Leopard days and I think Snow Leopard made the most sense from a UI point of view, without wedging in iCloud file nonsense.
I have a Windows 10 machine at home for gaming / development but my daily driver at home is a Linux M910 Lenovo (small enough and powerful enough for C++ dev), along with a Windows 11 mini Lenovo machine for GeForce Now usage on a TV in the house, but do I hate using Windows 11.
I have been using Linux as a desktop operating system for what I believe is almost two decades. Recently(?) I see distro named like CashyOS and Bazzite being thrown around. Am I missing out on something?
There are many really good ones these days that will have a much better experience than windows. I’ve used Ubuntu, Pop, Mint and Fedora workstation in the last 5 years and all worked great. Personally Mint Cinnamon had the least issues so I tend to run that on my machines now.
Once SteamOS becomes generally available I’ll switch to that. It’s incredibly polished on Steam Deck
If you don't want the "hassle" of flag optimization when compiling binaries, CachyOS is basically Arch but with optimized binaries. Otherwise, Gentoo all the way, you just need a good machine.
FWIW, On Reddit, I am seeing more and more discussions on the Linux subreddits or people getting fed up with Windows and switching to Linux. Usually, it's the Windows 11 upgrade that finally did it.
My work-issued dev device is a Surface Pro 10. I can't use WSL2 for various regulatory reasons. I will never, ever work on software like this again. Worst development experience of my life because of what a miserable dev env windows is.
I know that's been a meme since forever, but my first hand experience supports it to the extreme.
I've been using Linux on my devices for quite some time now. I was pleasantly surprised when I had to start 4k video editing work and could just use Davinci Resolve. 2026 might not be the year of the Linux desktop, but it's getting better day by day.
I haven't even touched a Windows PC in years at this point. Don't know why you'd do that to yourself. I was hanging on to a gaming PC, but it broke during a move over 2 years ago now. I decided that was the last windows box I'd own at that point.
Microsoft has always been crap. It's success is contributed to hostile business practices and familiarity not quality of product. IBM and Gates partnered to have an OS installed on its computers to gain customers. With no actual OS Gates bought 86-DOS from Tim Patterson and partnered with IBM. This created a direct competitor to Apple. Then Gates partnered with all other PC manufacturers to do the same. This paved way for Microsoft to dominate Apple because they weren't tied to any specific hardware. Then came Active Directory to solidify business use. The businesses rolled with it and users learned Windows which deepened home PC use. Every app "just worked" BECAUSE of the popularity and developers directly targeted it since most people used it, not because it was a good product. Their file system NTFS is crap. Their registry is a mess. Everything about Windows is just awful.
macOS has been quite popular in the United States for a long time now (and I suspect it's not so popular in other region not due to product, but price), showing that things can exist without those "features".
I'm not even sure what macOS have for its own since I basically open either the browser or the terminal. I am vaguely aware that Finder exist when I accidentally open it maybe twice a month.
Ah 3d is fine with Maya and all the real VFX running on Linux. And we haven't had problems with game dev for years on Linux. Agree otherwise good to see another join.
I just have to figure out how to play a few of my games on Steam and I can move over. Unfortunately, a few titles are still PC only so I can't make the switch. I very much would love to, but I basically need a $600 PC at all times to play a few select titles that will never come to Linux due to anti-cheat.
Anyone have a recommendation on a decent cloud-based file sync tool ala OneDrive? I use OneDrive extensively but there is no official client for Linux and the unofficial one has some major stability issues. I'm willing to change providers but not willing to put in the effort to roll-my-own.
Ok so Arch apparently has an install script that does everything[0]. I tried it the other day and it's pretty flawless, albeit terminal-based so not for everyone I guess.
Pacman is _amazing_. Apt broke dependencies for me every few months & a major version Ubuntu upgrade was always a reformat. Plus, obviously, the Arch wiki is something else. I would go as far as to say you'll have an overall better Linux experience on Arch than Ubuntu and friends, even as a beginner.
Everyone says this but I have only ever used arch. Wiped windows and started with Manjaro. No VM to test straight to bare metal. I learned how Linux worked and then installed the base arch distro. If you can read a wiki, you can use arch. It's not rocket science. All the available arch flavored distros make it even easier today. I tried debian once and found it even more cumbersome. Is it apt or apt-get? is it install or update? Never stuck around to find out.
I started with Slackware Linux—something arguably even more “hard-core” than Arch.
What mattered most at the beginning was good installation documentation, and both Arch and Slackware delivered on that front. Slackware, however, had an additional appeal: it was intentionally simple, largely because it was created and maintained by a single person at the time. That simplicity made it feel conceivable that the system could be fundamentally understood by a single human mind.
Whether a newcomer appreciates the Slackware/Arch approach depends heavily on learning style and goals. You can click through a GUI installer and end up with a working distro, but then what? From a beginner’s perspective, you’ve just installed something somehow—and it looks like a crippled Windows machine with fewer buttons.
Starting with Slackware gave me a completely different starting reference point. Installing the system piece by piece was genuinely exciting, because every step involved learning what each component was and how it fit into the whole. The realization that Linux is essentially a set of Lego bricks—and that I might actually master the entire structure, or even build my own pieces—was deeply motivating.
That mindset was strongly shaped by how Slackware and similar distros present themselves. Even the lack of automatic dependency management acted as an early nudge toward thinking seriously about complexity, trade-offs, and minimalism, which stayed with me forever.
It's worth noting that if someone has the skill to install and run Linux with games, they probably have the skill to use massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts and ask AI to help bypass to install a local Windows account. And that probable takes less time.
I'd be happy to switch to Linux, but my Macbook with M processor is a real work horse. First of all, everything works (bluetooth, headphones, camera, etc). Second of all, ARM based processor is a beast. Until someone release an ARM based laptop, I don't see myself switching to Linux.
it's really bad these days. even the teams web client doesn't work properly and when it does it is missing the most basic features like "test my audio." i don't understand what it is about how that company is organized that the software keeps coming out with interfaces and user experiences that look like they were created by 2023 era generative ai.
Fwiw... I've been doing Leenucks since '92. Back when you had to install BSD first, compile the kernel and reverse engineer how to boot into the new kernel you just built with gcc. But it was cheaper than SunOS, and the developers mailing list was more active than the BSD lists. I still miss my 3B1.
Anyway... welcome to the party. We saved you a beer. Doesn't matter you came later than other people. It just matters you made it here eventually.
I’ve been using a Mac for a about three years now, but every once in a while I use my old gaming laptop to play some games and every time I am reminded of how insufferable windows has become, using it feels I’m dumpster diving and the dumpster is asking me to sign into my Microsoft account. Apple gets a lot of shit for how they do things, but no one can deny that once you’re properly established in their ecosystem, it’s a phenomenal experience.
I don't understand how it got so bad. On Windows 95 or 98, you knew that pressing Windows > P > across right > N would open Notepad in about 22 milliseconds of interaction. Things just worked and responded.
Linux has plenty of video card driver issues too. Windows may suck, but Linux sucks in different ways. Windows suckage is solved by "buy a different machine and reinstall". Linux suckage is solved by weeks googling and trying technical fixes in consoles, installing different distributions and trying the same, then eventually buying a different machine.
Apple, for all its flaws, tends to not have the suckage of either. I don't like using Apple, but it does break a lot less. (One of the reasons is encompassed in this story... while Microsoft and Nvidia yell at each other, Apple makes both the OS and the graphics card, so they just solve the problem internally) Apple with VMs gives you everything without the hardware hassles.
I'd switch if it weren't for anticheat breaking the games I play. I really, really hate Windows, and Windows 11 even more than normal levels of Windows hate. I had to do some really weird shit to get it to a place that feels sane.
"The only real limitation is that some games with anti-cheat like Valorant, Call of Duty or League of Legends won't run. But honestly I think not being able to launch League of Legends is actually a feature - one final reason to install Linux."
A few years ago, I would have said that any game that uses such a level of anticheat that makes wine/proton unable to play it (ie: kernel level anticheat) is basically malware and you _shouldn't_ play it anyway, out of both principle, and also because if they had a bug in their code, you're just opening up your device to an unnecessary privilege escalation vector that other malware can abuse to escalate their privileges. (This is not theoretical, this has happened before, eg: with Genshin. Though I believe just the mere existence of a signed driver was enough, since malware can just "Bring your own Driver" (BYOD) and download the driver, at least before it was revoked)
Now, I still hold this belief in most regards. But I do see the appeal, especially if your friends and peers are gamers and actively play these sorts of games, and you feel that you're missing out on socialising or making new friends in that aspect. But there are plenty of other games and consoles, if you could just convince them to switch...
I made the decision to just play a different game when I switched back in 2022 or so. Thankfully, the game in question supported Linux shortly after the switch even though I got used to not playing it and just don't anymore :) I still try any anti-cheat games I come across to see if they work and it's surprising how many actually do.
Nothing wrong with staying on Windows if compatibility is an issue, though.
> If 3 years ago you would have told me that Microsoft would singlehandedly sabotage their own OS, doing more Linux marketing than the most neckbearded Linux fanboy (or the most femboy Thinkpad enjoyer), I'd have laughed in your face
I have no idea what that Thinkpad burn is supposed to mean.
> I'm gonna go full conspiracy nut here, but I bet it's because the LLM understands JavaScript better, and Microsoft can't be asked to pay actual humans to write proper native code.
Do LLMs like Claude really excel at JavaScript than other programming languages? Similarly does OpenAI prefers Python over other languages?
He's a musician, he's switched to Bitwig. Ok, but what about VSTs? I have a collection of instruments I can't leave behind, many are NI, so I'm currently forced to use Windows or Mac.
Iv'e switched all but my work laptop because of well work, but the push came after they seemed to 'dumb' down the OS.
The disjointed WebView mixed with old winforms for navigating simple things is infuriating alone. I've had a problem where the webview wouldn't render any of the display settings so my machine was stuck at a certain resolution and scale.
Simple things like accessing Environment Variables now is atrocious and hidden in the most obscure unintuitive way. That's to say nothing to the crashing. Linux desktop environments have come such a long way it's really any wonder anyone would put up with Windows anymore.
But then again, Microslop don't seem to care about the customer market much anymore anyway.
> I installed CachyOS, a performance-focused Arch-based distribution
Ooph. It's frustrating to see the community starting (again) to get purchase in public mind share at exactly the moment when it's least prepared to accept new users.
The Linux desktop right now is a wreck. EVERYONE has their own distro, EVERYONE has their own opinions and customizations, and so everyone is being pulled in like 72 different directions when they show up with search terms for "How do I install Linux?"
For a while, 15-ish years ago, the answer was "Just Install Ubuntu". And that was great! No one was shocked. Those of us with nerd proclivities and strong opinions knew how to install what we wanted instead. But everyone else just pulled from Canonical, a reasonably big and reasonably funded organization with the bandwidth to handle that kind of support.
I totally get that. But I read about it, and that custom kernel with the BORE scheduler really caught my eye, especially for music & gaming.
I know a lot of people suffer from shiny object syndrome, and to some extent I do too (realistically something like Ubuntu or Fedora would have served me well), but it is what it is.
There are at least a dozen very stable and reliable distros with decades of history and support in addition to the cool new “hey guys I made a OS!” types.
> There are at least a dozen very stable and reliable distros
Exactly. "WTF?! There are a dozen distributions?!" Users love customization and choice when they understand it. No one wants to be confused. The Linux desktop world is a confusing mess right now.
Also note that the distinction between "very stable and reliable" and "hey guys I made a OS!" is only obvious to people who know how the distro is put together.
Similar journey, different distro! I wanted a Linux gaming machine, but given my recent admission into the cult of NixOS, I went with Jovian.
Jovian is a NixOS module that sets up a SteamOS-like experience on top of your existing NixOS config. I was able to build & tweak the config before even building my PC. It booted first try and has since been working without hiccups. Now I am setting up emulators, which is relatively straightforward with nixpkgs :)
> Meanwhile, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote a blog post asking people to stop calling AI-generated content "slop" and to think of AI as "bicycles for the mind."
I can't believe Nadella stole Jobs "bicycles for the mind" metaphor without attribution.
The author tried everything except switching graphics drivers?! That's like listening to the top 10 hits on broken speakers and declaring all new music is terrible.
Uninstalled with DDU, switched to multiple versions back.
But it wasn't the nvidia driver, and I proved that when I switched to an insider build and the flickers were gone :D
Once again, I don't really understand people who say Windows is easier. Take printer drivers. In windows you have a 'simple' wizard to install a printer driver. Except in my experience... it never works the first time and you have to fiddle. On Linux... I just bought a new printer, and it worked out of the box. My experience with most hardware today on Linux is out-of-the-box support while windows requires endless 'driver' installs. Even driver installs on linux are easier. Usually just drop a binary blob somewhere if you really need it and modprobe...
Again it's 2026... why is this so hard. Usually paid software is actually better and more feature-ful, but Windows is just not useful at all. The best use of Windows is WSL2
I honestly don't understand the hatred that Microsoft gets for most of the work they're doing in Windows. As I've stated before, most 'problems' people ultimately have are either configuration issues or hardware issues. And I still stand by this even as I've had issues over the years here or there.
I think the most recent 'production' Windows issue I've had was OneDrive failing to recognize it was syncing my data even though it was syncing. The status symbols for the files and folders wasn't showing up. But that's about it.
My gaming desktop is stable, my PC is rock solid, I run VMs on it (game servers, dev/test environments), and overall just absolutely 0 problems with Windows or my OS at all.
I do, however, have hardware issues semi often. One of my monitors doesn't turn off its backlight, for example. I've had Razer devices just flat out quit on me over the years (multiple Razer mice, at least a couple of Nagas, etc.).
I contend that most people would do better with Windows if they just didn't mess with it (don't run any of those tools proclaiming to "debloat" your OS), and make sure you read the hardware compatibility list of your systems REALLY hard. Incompatible RAM can cause significant problems, a lot of which is completely avoidable if you just read the RAM QVL.
The only thing that I wish vendors would do more is work closer with Microsoft to provide BIOS updates over Windows Update. But, most of these motherboard IHVs are absolutely terrible about doing BIOS updates anyway and require specific mechanisms to keep going correctly. This is in contrast to the Enterprise/Business devices released by HP or Dell which have a usually solid BIOS update track. And again, the only issue I've ever had there was incompatible RAM.
>> I honestly don't understand the hatred that Microsoft gets for most of the work they're doing in Windows. As I've stated before, most 'problems' people ultimately have are either configuration issues or hardware issues.
And then you go on to describe your own hardware problems with windows. That's called "projection" - attributing your experience to everyone else. It's like you don't read the other complaints or somehow dismiss them. Have you not seen the ads yourself? Maybe you take the suggestions to use other Microsoft products as helpful suggestions rather than ads. Is that it? OneDrive failing? Try saying NO to using OneDrive - that's what some people would like to do and it'll keep advertising and trying to enable itself. Then when we do use it... well you've got issues with it not working right too.
Another day another "hey guys I switched Linux" post gets pushed to the top of the heap. These add nothing except create an echo chamber about great Linux is and Windows is the worst.
It's still disappointing how few folks know about gpedit and how much you can reclaim your own machine just by running through the local policies and setting them to "no, I call the shots".
Microsoft had a chance make even better OS than XP and 7 and convince millions of users to use Windows.
Okay maybe with Office products the ocean was already red, but still, instead of disgusting its millions of users, they could make them happy.
I am not a firm believer that GNU/Linux distributions are a drop-in replacement for Windows. One can work around compatibility issues, but for non–tech-savvy people, it's just not feasible.
I switched to MacOS since the release of Windows 10 and never looked back, of course I did miss some apps, though using laggy windows was much more painful.
I’ve been working at a school that uses a mix of Surfacebooks, HP Elitebooks and MacBook Air M2s (now migrating everyone to M4s!).
I used to prefer Windows for work. After the absolutely abysmal performance using a SurfaceBook Pro, never again. I’ve never had to deal with such slow performance in my life. I literally cannot get work done. Staff with Windows have constant problems, updates take forever, reboots aren’t very fast, programs crash, and (not OS related) but the new Outlook is universally despised.
I’ve never seen a company shoot themselves in the foot so badly as I’ve seen Microsoft do this of late. More and more staff want MacBooks , and are even ok with using a remote session (ugh) to access the one app that relies on Windows.
Trados Studio, good luck finding equivalent, I tried, and the alternatives are horrendous and I'm not gonna run it in VM.
Also I tried at least for son on his old computer live distro Mint from USB drive, everything works fine (unlike Zorin, which had problem with sound I think), but when I try to install it of course it doesn't detect Windows, same with wife's laptop.
So I have 3 computers:
son's old laptop where I could install Mint - Linux Mint doesn't detect Windows
wife's old laptop where I could install Mint - Linux Mint doesn't detect Windows
my daily driver where my work SW requires Windows and there is no point installing Mint - Linux Mint detects Windows
I will have look at it during CNY holidays, if I will be able to install it alongside Windows (I need there Windows in case something would happen with my daily driver laptop).
I also plan to switch my father's old desktop to Linux Mint, but somehow I already know what will be most likely Windows detection status over there as well after son's and wife's laptop experiences. It works where it's not needed and it doesn't work, where I could actually install it.
The driver situation on Linux is still pretty hit-or-miss, but thanks to Microsoft's recent efforts, Windows has reached the same level of reliability as well.
If they're bad because they are proprietary, it is what it is. If they're bad because their dx12 performance is worse on linux than windows, supposedly the fixes for the vulkan descriptor boogeyman problem are just around the corner.
Is this an ideological question? They are still primarily closed source.
Is this an install difficulty question? If you can read you can install them.
Is this a performance question? If you're a normie they're good. If you're demanding the top fps at the top resolution in dx12 games then there is still a noticeable difference but it should be fixed this year.
One aspect I wonder about is not so much about whether the collective gaming-on-linux effort can close the performance/features gap, but keep it closed. The story has been that windows is the main target system for "PC" game development and hardware/drivers (for good reason, it has majority market share), and then linux lags behind as various efforts figure out what's missing and how to implement.
Right now and for the foreseeable near term (3 years or so?) it seems like the focus on GPU advancements isn't aimed at gaming so will be a period of stability, but I wonder if/when focus does come back to gaming, when there's a new round of consoles, when a company wants a new feature set to distinguish a new generation (like geforce 20 series versus 10 and earlier), what can be done to make sure linux users aren't second class citizens. I'd also wonder about development tools, to use the most popular engine as an example, what could change with unreal engine to make sure it builds software that plays nice with the linux ecosystem even if the tooling works best under windows.
Yeah the main reason to dislike Nvidia drivers on Linux these days from a regular user point of view (I am not a Wayland developer so I don’t have to deal with whatever technical annoyance there is there) is just the philosophical/potential-privacy annoyance of running closed source code on my open source system. This doesn’t give the entirely closed source OS any points.
> Is this an ideological question? They are still primarily closed source.
That's a decent enough reason for a linux user to buy an AMD GPU but it isn't a good reason not switch to linux from a closed source OS. I'm in the process of switching to linux full time (it shouldn't really take that long but I haven't had a solid chunk of time in a bit) and am using an NVidia GPU so I went from closed source windows drivers to closed source linux drivers.
You're the top comment that addresses this so I'm putting this here but not exactly replying to you.
Drivers are generally fine, but there's more to it than just switching. If you're not bothered by the Win11 stuff, switching is probably not for you. Perhaps you can look into Linux for your current use cases and see if it's at all attractive.
The nvidia gods smile upon me, zero issues except the one I mentioned in the article.
They do have to fix VKD3D performance though, 10-30% perf loss on Intel/Nvidia hardware when playing DX12 games.
My story is simpler. Microsoft dropped the support for Windows 10 and gave me no upgrade path to Windows 11 because my CPU was 5 years too old apparently.
So I installed Fedora on that machine, I learned the process, I went through the hurdles. It wasn’t seamless. But, Fedora never said “I can’t”. When it was over, it was fine.
Only if Microsoft had just let me install Windows 11 and suffer whatever the perf problem my CPU would bring. Then I could consider a hardware upgrade then, maybe.
But, “you can’t install unless you upgrade your CPU” forced me to adopt Linux. More importantly, it gave me a story to tell.
There is a marketing lesson there somewhere, like Torvalds’ famous “you don’t break userspace”, something along the lines of “you don’t break the upgrade path”.
I'm in the exact same boat. I was a little unhappy with the ads etc in Windows, but perfectly willing to give Windows 11 a try. But Microsoft decreed that my admittedly a bit old but perfectly workable CPU was incompatible, due to not having a feature I wasn't interested in. I'd need to replace most of my existing hardware to switch. So why not try Linux? It certainly seems reasonable when Windows apparently needs more command-line hackery to maybe work for a while than Linux.
So to Fedora I went! So far, I've been pleasantly surprised. All of the software I want to use installed easily and works, via Flatpak. All of my hardware works fine, and there are actually fewer weird hardware quirks than under Windows. I also appreciate that there are options to turn off behaviors I found annoying in Windows.
It's a bit sad to have to switch due to Microsoft trashing their own OS rather than Linux becoming superlatively awesome, but what can you do.
Linux is superlatively awesome
and I say that as a FreeBSD user.
You can bypass the warning really easily, I googled it the moment I saw it and it was very easy. A keyboard shortcut to open the command window during the install and one cheeky command. I agree though that it’s silly they don’t offer it officially.
But I get the feeling you were on the edge of transitioning anyway, which is fine! Sounds more like the straw that broke the camels back.
There's a ton of outdated guides out there because Microsoft has been patching out workaround after workaround. It's likely that the simple solution you used doesn't work anymore.
If you bypass the installer minimum hardware checks then you're making a gamble that the official statement from Microsoft won't affect you:
> If Windows 11 is installed on ineligible hardware, your device won't receive support from Microsoft, and you should be comfortable assuming the risk of running into compatibility issues.
> Devices that don't meet these system requirements might malfunction due to compatibility or other issues. Additionally, these devices aren't guaranteed to receive updates, including but not limited to security updates.
Aren't you guys actually talking about a TPM 2.0 device being present on the machine and not a CPU specifically? Cause the whole Windows 11 thing was (I thought) full disk encryption with TPM 2.0 attestation booted from a secure boot BIOS. That basically just means you can't take the disk and boot it on another machine. There would be no way to decrypt.
There's a little bit of considering it already yeah. Plus what the sibling comments say of it being clearly against what Microsoft wants, so no guarantee they won't disable it or make it even harder in the future. And also, the factor of, doing any of these check-disabling hacks also seems to require a full OS reinstall instead of an in-place update. If I need to do a full reinstall anyways, why not do it with an OS I don't need to hack up to get it to install on a system the OS maintainer doesn't want it to be installed on.
Apparently, fundamentally, Microsoft does not want me as a user. Hacking around their checks won't change that. I'd rather comply with their wishes and use an OS that actually wants me as a user.
I have two laptops that - even being 8 years and 4 years old fit the specs MS decided to set.
I still kicked itin the can. Am a happy Arch User & Ubuntu (will probably migrate that one to an Arch derivate as well, though) nowadays. I still use WIN11 in my day job. And it is an okay OS. I had worse. I had better.
What I find interesting is, that I gained on average 30 - 50% more battery time from the laptops I switched to Linux. It is quite unexpected and to me quite frankly amazing. I am writing this on my day job quite expensive Surface machine. I pulled it from the power connection to sit on the sofa about 20 minutes ago. My battery? At 73%. And I am running Firefox and PowerPoint at the moment (plus whatever corp crapware is installed underneath).
Except for exactly one set of tools (older Affinity progs) I have no need for WIN anymore. And as my day job provides a WIN machine...
I can confirm this.
Honestly, I am really surprised this is a top comment here. This was an extremely easy work around. We are all mostly curious nerds here.
All this work because one couldn't google a easy work around?
Last time I tried Linux it sucked for gaming and I've spent hours trying to install a printer.
Not to excuse Microsoft in this situation, Linux is obviously more open.
Which still leaves you in a state that at any time your OS stops updating because they decide to close the "loophole" or remove the "feature"
Apple does this all the time, though, and seems to get a free pass here. I have four Macs in my home, and they are cut off at Ventura (for the 2017 iMac), Monterey (for the 2014 Mac Mini and the 2015 MacBook Air), and El Capitan (for the 2014 iMac). They are all stuck at 3, 4, and 5 major OS versions back. Nobody really seems to complain about this, though.
I don't think it's the same. On older Apple hardware, it just keeps on running on the older OS version. You don't get some new features or styling of the new OS, but nothing else changes. On Windows, it periodically brings up full-screen notifications that your hardware is obsolete and you need to upgrade, with the only options being to upgrade or "remind me again later".
Apple only gets a free pass from folks who are invested in that particular kind of ... relationship.
I think Apple gets a pass because they're a luxury product. For the record, even though Apple has some really impressive hardware, this is one of the reasons I'm not very big on Apple. People praise their phone's longevity all the time, but I think this is crazy. I could be running a 13 year old computer right now and it would work fine if I had Linux. Smartphones don't really have options for this due to the market capture. Apple's PC could be supported longer, but Apple isn't interested in doing it. (and apparently they change architectures every 15 years anyhow.)
They don't get a free pass, I think people have spoken with their wallets and it shows with the user base counts: Windows 66–73%, macOS 14–16%, Linux 3–4%.
Apple seems to support their previous generation OS on older macs for ~8-9 years or so from what I've seen. You just don't get the latest generation features, they cut it off and move on similar to how Microsoft did.
because desktop Apple users have been domesticated for decades now and just accept whatever shows up in the feeding trough.
I would say its part of the promise/agreement of buying into the ecosystem, and a known caveat. Might be overly optimistic viewpoint.
I am in the same boat. Running Windows 10 on a Ryzen 5 until the cows come home. I run Rocky Linux in my laptop but I am a gamer so I'll hold to Windows 10. Some Linux Distros are bringing AI. Not ready for that.
Yep. Similar thing forced me off of Apple. They stopped making 17 inch laptops. They started soldering parts into place. Made it so you couldn’t open your own laptop to replace the HD.
Switched to Linux 8 years ago and haven't looked back.
It's a really bad time for Microsoft to force consumers to upgrade - even computer parts from 5 years ago are price hiking.
Which Microsoft really should have been able to see coming, since it’s largely their money that’s being used to soak up all the supply of computing hardware.
Yeah, until microsoft says "Sup there lil buddy? Running an unsupported system? Oof. The next update is gonna really turn it inside-out"
I think at a certain point you need to just call it quits with that sort of bullshit. I have my dignity. I'm a fucking grown adult. I'm not going to spend my spare time haplessly looking online to unfuck the new current set of fuckery. Just take the fucking bullet. Learn linux. Congrats you're playing whack-a-mole with a trillion dollar corporation and prolonging your misery. This is stupid.
Take backups and disable the updates with group policy. OP just wanted to install Windows 11.
Seriously, if people are willing to learn all this, they can easily learn Linux and simply tell the corporate overlords to fuck right off.
Well that's never happened before (with Windows anyway), so it's not likely to happen now.
It's happened at least three times:
Win8.1 x64 required double-width compare and exchange instruction support, so people who bought Win8 for a CPU or motherboard that didn't support it had to downgrade to the 32-bit version or lose support in 2016.
Win7 updates from 2018 onwards required SSE2 with no warning.
Win11 24H2 and later won't install on x86 processors that don't support the x86-64-v2 baseline.
Has happened:
Core2Duo, Opteron64 and Athlon64 can run W11 RTM
They will bluescreen booting after an update to 24H2 because they are missing the POPCNT instruction.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/windows-11-24h2-goes...
From my experience it seems to happen all the time. Settings reset, uninstalled apps reinstalled, firewall settings erased. I went looking for the Windows 10 patch that deleted the Documents folder if you had remapped it to another drive, and it was hard to find an article due to all the other times their updates have also deleted people's Documents folder. This was the first time I recall it happening: https://www.engadget.com/2018-10-09-windows-10-october-updat...
Where can one read the source code of setup.exe
That's, e.g., how I would determine what these commands do
I have had HN replies in the past that argued Windows is open source and thus comparable to UNIX-like OS projects where _the public_ can read the source code and make modifications, _for free_
Absent the source code, we can read Microsoft's documentation
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactu...
It seems like WinPE is the most useful version of Windows, e.g., it allows more options to setup.exe
How does one quickly and easily download and install a copy of WinPE, preferably on removable media
Who would argue that Windows is open source? That's hilarious.
What's this?
Whenever I see an unexplained command I don't understand from a random internet forum, I hop onto the production server and run it, just in case it might boost performance. Wouldn't want to miss out on that.
Been doing it since I was 12. It taught me all about the ins and outs of `rm`.
Sounds like me back in the early 80s when I used to war dial, and people used to share "active" prefixes. I learned all about the 911 prefix when I set my dialer and went to sleep. About 20 minutes later the cops were banging on my front door. True story; I was in 6th grade, got arrested for it.
wow did you get a record? this is some Hackers(1995) vibe stuff
I got taken to juvenile hall, put in a holding area with kids that had stolen cars and stabbed other kids in fights. The funny thing is all these "bad kids" were really cool; we talked about video games (Donkey Kong!). I remember one kid got into a fight with his football coach and broke both the coach's legs. He was a big kid, looked like a grown man. He was pretty much in charge of the holding area. But he was cool as hell, cracked jokes with me. I actually kinda enjoyed the holding area.
Anyway, the officials thought I had just called 911 over and over, like to play a prank. They wouldn't hear anything about my computer or whatever (it was the early 80s). They were pissed. I was kept in the holding area for a few hours, then they let me go home. I was ordered to a bunch of community service, cleaning the parking lots of local parks, stuff like that.
A work-around to install on unsupported hardware which both works, but is unsupported and could break during a feature Windows Update.
At this point I'd say it's more of a "would" than a "could"
A clever way to maximize the chances that your computer gets bricked on a future Patch Tuesday.
It’s really not
Some of the checks are around CPU features that they don’t currently use but may use in the future. And CPUs don’t typically respond super gracefully to being asked to execute instructions they don’t understand.
LoL with the insane backslash crap
I've been using Linux for 20+ years, but I was fairly happy with Windows 11. At its core it did exactly what I needed it to do, and it allowed me to run some commercial software that is harder to install and run on Linux (Davinci Resolve).
But my Dell hardware drivers were flaky in Windows. My bluetooth had extremely variable availability. And then Windows rebooted itself, against my wishes, 3x in one week. And then there was the promise of Recall.
That's when I wiped Windows and installed Ubuntu. All my hardware issues went away (yes, I had to fiddle the sound driver a little so it didn't crack when it woke up from sleep, and I had to make one small change so suspend worked properly.. but both were easily solvable). My bluetooth has been flawless since and I was able to use my Logitech wireless mouse again.
I'm never going back.
I do a bit of napkin math on Apple Silicon single-threaded performance, GPU performance, and battery management against non-Macbook Air/Pro specs for same price. I follow DHH (who I otherwise object to) on his adventures with the Asus G14 machines.. but I'm not sure its GPU performance still matches the similarly priced Apple offering.
Less integrated OS, worse battery management, and weaker performance for more money? I'm not sure. But I'll probably still go that way.
The Intel/AMD laptop manufacturers need to get out from under Nvidia's hardware GPU thumb.
I get the intent, but moving to linux for better bluetooth support is... an interesting take
Say what you will about Macs, I ain't no fanboy, but from this side of the fence, I had forgotten that drivers were a thing.
You can bypass the warning really easily, I googled it the moment I saw it and it was very easy. A keyboard shortcut to open the command window during the install and one cheeky command.
Microsoft is removing these bypasses over time though.
>no upgrade path to Windows 11 because my CPU was 5 years too old apparently.
Let's be real. It's because new systems support DRM and Microsoft has been captured by the media company lobby.
We had that announcement of a new "Verifiable" Linux project from Pottering, other kernel devs, and a bunch of ex-microsoft employees yesterday. Gives me the heebie jeebies.
Yeah I caught a lot of downvotes for coming out early against it.
How dare you think for yourself in 2026!
Remote Attestation of Immutable Operating Systems built on systemd
Its the "remote" thing that has no place in personal computing, or rather, computing that is to extend one's own autonomy, or agency. Its no one's damn business whether my system is attested or not! I mean, sure theres certainly benefits for me knowing if its attested, but the other road is one of ruin, and will basically be the chains of the future.
If they didn't, people might start capturing copyrighted streaming content and sharing torrents of it. We cannot allow that to happen.
It’s way worse than that. It’s for verified identity and attestation.
Of course it is, there's no real requirement to have a TPM, plenty of people made a version with that requirement patched out and the system works fine.
I just started a new job where I'm subjected to Windows 11. They gave me a behemoth of a laptop. 64GB of RAM, absolute screamer of a CPU, big GPU, the whole deal.
Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all.
Context menus take a noticeable amount of time to appear.
I'm getting used to a new keyboard, so I keep hitting Print Screen by accident. Half the time I can smack Esc and Snipping Tool will go away. The other half of the time, I have to mouse over and click the X to close it. There is no pattern to when Esc does/doesn't work.
If my computer goes to sleep, WSL becomes unresponsive. I have to save all my stuff and reboot to continue working.
If Windows 11 struggles this badly on a brand new laptop that I'm certain would retail for $4000+, I can only imagine how miserable it is for everyone else. All my colleagues who have been here for a bit longer got last-generation laptops. oof.
Edit... and besides, what does Windows 11 even do that KDE Plasma 5 wasn't doing a decade ago? How did it take this long to get a tabbed file browser?
> Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all.
There's a guy that has written their own version of explorer that's so fast in comparison to the built-in, that you'd think they were cheating somehow because of everyone's experience with explorer.
And someone has written an IDE for C++ that opens while Visual Studio is on its splash screen.
And another that has written a debugger with the same performance.
And a video doing the rounds of Word ('97?) on spinning rust opening in just under 2 seconds.
Basically, everything MS is doing is degrading performance. Opportunities for regular devs to go back to performant software, and MS is unlikely to fix theirs in the foreseeable future.
> version of explorer that's so fast
https://filepilot.tech/
Same experience here, but I'm not sure it's just MS fault; companies have a way of installing a bunch of stupid software on top of one another, that you can't get rid of without admin rights, that continuously do things that slow the system down.
(And, you can have a tabbed file browser on Win7. I still have a Win7 box at home that works perfectly well and that does have tabs in file explorer. I think it was an addon I installed a while ago; don't remember exactly, but it works perfectly.)
It seems industry-wide these days.
What I’ve seen as an older-than-average developer is that the Agile movement has made it increasingly difficult to make time for paying attention to some of the more subtle aspects of user experience such as performance. Because I can’t predict how much work it will be accurately enough to assign story points to the task, and that means that this kind of work frequently results in a black spot on our team performance metrics.
CD makes it even harder because this kind of work really does need some time to bake. Fast iterations don’t leave much time to verify that performance-oriented changes have the intended effect and no adverse side effects prior to release.
Similar story here.
Started a new job about a year and a half ago and got a powerful laptop with a really top of the line CPU and GPU, 64 GB of RAM (Now upgraded to 96GB, needed for my work, even with these specs compile times are longer than I'd like...), and it was a terrible experience, coming from someone who's used to Linux having used it for a bit (started in 2013 with Ubuntu with a dual boot. Moved all-in to Arch in 2016, distro-hopped or played with different desktop enviroments/wms after that (Recently switched to niri), but all of which are leagues ahead of Windows 11 IMO. Only occasionally ran Windows on a spare device or a VM on the rare occasion I needed to, eg for work / school.)
Tons of issues, slow in some operations, weird bugs (in the explorer like you, or with my Bluetooth headphones, or other issues), and even occasional blue screens! It's not just my setup too, my coworkers have similar issues. Plus, it just isn't a nice environment to use.
At first, I tried to set up a nicer environment (as much as IT would allow). I installed PowerToys for QOL improvements, GlazeWM to emulate a tiling window manager setup, I tried debloating as much as I can, I installed Wezterm for my terminal (Why is Windows Terminal so hyped up? It seems like an extremely basic terminal emulator to me...), oh-my-posh theming for my shell, and several other things.
But every convenience program I added just noticeably slowed down my laptop, to the point I just gave up some of the niceties and lived with it. Why is such basic functionality able to be run so smoothly on a much weaker device on Linux, but struggle on Windows on a much more powerful device? I can only think of one reason...
Your first gripe kind of sounds like DLP software is installed on the system and it is scanning files you're "accessing".
I don't know, my personal windows install which I use for photoshop, lightroom, and the occasional game also has similar issues, and it only has the included windows defender. I've noticed on many computers that whenever there are a bunch of files in a directory, the explorer grinds to a halt.
At work we use clownstrike for our driving-around-with-the-handbrake-on needs, which I have installed on both Linux and Windows, and the former flies while the latter lags all the time (I dual boot, so it's the same exact hardware). Doing something which is fully equivalent, like installing an IntelliJ update takes around a minute on Linux and many more on Windows.
The fan also comes on much more often on Windows than Linux, even though most of my job is done on remote servers via SSH. Under Linux I only hear the fan when I compile something. This morning I booted windows and the fan was running constantly while I was just catching up with a few mails in outlook.
On my company provided laptop with Windows 11 (previously Windows 10), the top three CPU usage was and is usually from Antimalware Executable, Microsoft Defender and MS Teams (or Crowdstrike). I don’t download files or get files from other sources often, yet these things keep doing busywork and slowing things down. Despite virus and threat protection running quick scans often and forcing a full disk scan every couple of weeks or so.
It’s almost as if these programs are people who ought to show that they’re doing something even though they’re just heating the room and running the fan.
Same here. ng install takes 2000x as long as on my similairly priced mac. Installing a package for any language locks up the laptop for indexing
> If my computer goes to sleep, WSL becomes unresponsive. I have to save all my stuff and reboot to continue working.
Try wsl --shutdown. Works for me when WSL hangs for no apparent reason.
I've also noticed that, in my case, these hangs are somehow tied to Docker for Windows. Couldn't figure what triggers them so far, though. I just restart DFW and kill WSL when that happens.
My wife recently got a new laptop. She mostly just uses office and the browser so I gave her some specs to look for SSD, 16GB ram, Lenovo should be good (fatal mistake I didn't specify the CPU). She went out and bought a cheap Lenovo laptop with a Celeron dual core and 16GB ram, SSD. It can barely run windows 11. Everything slows to a crawl, she can't be on a video call, and have a google doc open at the same time. It's insane and frankly should be criminal to sell such a poorly performing piece of hardware.
It's so bad that she actually switches to her old laptop from 10 years ago (still on windows 10, also a dual core) for video calls, and it performs way better.
The engineers working on Windows should be embarrassed. I may just try to load ChromeOS on it. Would be nice to get Windows out of my house for good.
I noticed significant slowdown on my home computer, so I did some optimization - namely turning off some services.
AI related things, one drive (this could be one of the reasons file browser is slow), widgets on the screen like news and weather, some other optional/not needed things.
They added a lot of not needed crap to File Manager. I think it's almost better to install a third party one.
I'm using it on a work-issued ThinkPad with 8 gigs of RAM and an Intel i3. It's fucking horrible
Maybe investigate the background apps that are running on your laptop?
By the way, I just opened a directory that I hadn't accessed in months. It contains 10945 log files, and Windows Explorer displayed them instantly.
I swear windows is just full of sleeps and it doesn't matter how faster your system is.
It's more likely network calls that are taking a long time or timing out. A lot of developers insert function calls that under the hood hit HTTP servers, and it can take a few hundred milliseconds to stand up a new TLS connection and then however long it takes to send the request and get the response. It's also probable that the endpoints form an accidental microservice architecture in which case everyone is always hitting a different set of connections. This creates a perfect storm of having to reconnect to everything you hit occasionally which can create little slowdowns all over the place all without actually using CPU so it doesn't show up in any resource monitors.
HTTPS calls should be treated as calls to sleep() with undefined timings.
If it's Intel then it might not be fully down to Windows 11. The PC laptops are universally crap. I had a few latest ones, Ultra 9 and they are atrocious. Experience reminds me using a netbook in early 2010s.
I would refuse to work anywhere without a Mac. If x86 then it would have to be linux, as that would be passable (apart from fan noise).
This was me in 2022 or 2023. I have posted on HN about my shift a few times. I gave up with Windows 10 because you needed Windows Pro in order to make an "offline" account, I spent $2000+ for a gaming rig, and I couldn't add new users, one program told me to use the other program which brought me back to the original program... I had to go out of my way, buy a license just to make it work. I just went and installed Linux finally. I was on POP_OS! for a good year, but been on Arch Linux for one year plus now.
I know its a "meme" to talk about how great Arch is, but when you want the latest of something, Arch has it. I use EndeavourOS since it had a nicer simpler installer (idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro) and if you just use "yay" you don't run into Pacman woes.
Alternatively, I'm only buying Macs as well, but for my gaming rigs, straight to Arch. Steam and Proton work perfectly, if you don't sell your games on Steam or in a way I can run them on Linux I am not buying or playing them.
> if you don't sell your games on Steam or in a way I can run them on Linux I am not buying or playing them.
So much this. People like to moan about "oh game XYZ doesn't run so it's not reasonable for gaming". More games run on GNU / Linux than any gaming console. There are simply too many games that do run to give a second thought about the ones that don't, and it's been that way for years.
The giant bugbear in this conversation is always multiplayer. That's because almost all of the big players in that space currently favor rootkits in the form of overly invasive anti-cheat, which the Linux wrappers (mostly the wine project) refuse to support for security reasons.
If you don't play PvP specifically, the rest of the library is significantly more open to you. Personally I have always favored single player experiences and indie games from smaller studios, and for the most part those run great.
It's unfortunate but at the same time if enough people switch to Linux then they'll be forced to change their ways.
So if you can go without those games or don't play MMOs that is rootkits then switch to force their hand.
Besides, them installing a rootkit on your machine is not an acceptable practice anyways. It's a major security issue. Sometimes we need to make a stand. Everyone has a line, where's yours?
MMOs are actually fine. WoW, FFXIV, RuneScape, all work great on Linux. They’re not really games that rely on hidden information, are not pvp first and need to simulate stuff on the server anyway, so can verify moves are valid there.
It’s the competitive progression shooters and ranked esports games that go in for the restrictive anti-cheat
This is true in principle but most gamers are just gonna take the path of least resistance. If they can't play fortnite on Linux (I'm using an example, I don't know if it's actually unplayable on Linux) then they will use whatever OS lets them play.
People have been saying "vote with your wallet" every time gaming companies do something anti consumer like day one dlc or buggy releases (don't pre-order!) or $90 games, but gaming companies continue to push the envelope on what gamers will pay for because gamers keep paying for it.
It's a sad reality.
Take a step back. Why do people want to play Fortnite so much and not anything else?
Because their friends play Fortnite, for example? Multiplayer is often social, so "just play something else" turns into "just get new friends".
There's another way. Only a small portion of friends need to change to pull the rest of the group. Pull them to a game that runs on Linux.
Don't do it like "let's play this game because it runs on Linux" do it like "let's play this game because it's fun".
If you want to be the one to lead this change you have to do extra work. Dual boot Linux and find a game that's fun that you can do online. Find the other friend or two in your group that will do the same (at least play the game, Linux is optional but encouraged for this subset). Just play together for a bit, give it a trial run. Then when playing the other game with the larger group say "hey, so and so and I have been playing this game, you guys should play with us sometime". They don't have to install Linux, just play a new game that their friends are already playing. That's why they're there, to play games with their friends. Don't try to get them to switch to Linux, just play games with your friends. You might have a holdout but if most people move then everyone will. But if you want to do that move you have to find what works and at least one other friend to give it a trial (who won't need to do as much work as you). That's how you do it. No crazy scheme and honestly not massive amounts of work either. Just the normal process of finding new games to play with one constraint. It just seems complicated because I stated the process explicitly.
I don't play a lot of online games anymore, but when I did, it wasn't just because friends were playing it. It was because it was fun, it was part of the cultural zeitgeist, it's popular, the community is fun, etc. You can't really replace something like that with just "another game," no matter how fun the other game is.
I can't answer that, but probably similar reason why anyone plays any game. It's fun, their friends play it, etc.
I don't personally play fortnite. But substitute fortnite for any DRMd multi-player game (or MMO).
I switched to console gaming years ago. I can still play any major release while having whatever OS I want on my computers.
I did this and was happily Windows-less for quite a few years. I ended up building a PC with a big GPU and so I switched back to PC gaming with a Windows installation alongside Linux, but I still think the console route is a great option.
>It's unfortunate but at the same time if enough people switch to Linux then they'll be forced to change their ways.
Nope. Not Nadella. He'll kill windows in a heartbeat.
But standing on principle is too hard!
As a competitive old school arena FPS guy, I have also had a very hard time getting the same smoothness and low latency (input, output, whatever it is) on Linux. The games I play are very fast and twitchy, and milliseconds matter.
There seems to be too many layers and variables to ever get to the bottom of it. Is it the distro itself? Is it a Wayland vs. X11 thing? Is it the driver? The Proton version? Some G-SYNC thing? Some specific tweak that games based on this game engine needs?
I know what you mean, though I have a device running SteamOS though and it runs extremely smoothly, the latency is no different than my windows PC (on titles where it can achieve the same framerate).
I'm sure that it must be possible to replicate whatever optimisations SteamOS has on other distros, but unfortunately I am not sure what those are exactly.
I've had better luck since the switch to Wayland. I don't play many FPS games but mouse input & overall smoothness for strategy games has been great. Check your mouse settings, you might need to set a higher USB sample rate. Piper is a frontend for adjusting them.
> Is it a Wayland vs. X11 thing?
Yes, most likely. Without a compositor I get lots of stuttering on x11, whereas KDE and GNOME's wayland sessions are both buttery smooth out of the box.
Might be my Nvidia GPU, but I've never gotten x11 to work flawlessly for gaming.
> The games I play are very fast and twitchy, and milliseconds matter.
Out of curiosity, what games are those? I wonder if I also play a subset of them.
> That's because almost all of the big players in that space
To the OP's point-- there are soooo many games nowadays, that if you and your friend group can skip some of those "big players," there are still hundreds of multiplayer games to play.
> which the Linux wrappers (mostly the wine project) refuse to support for security reasons.
It's more that there's no sensible way they could do it even if they wanted to. Emulating the Windows kernel internals is well beyond the scope of what WINE is trying to do, and even if they did do it, there would be no way for the anticheat vendors to tell the difference between the AC module being sandboxed for compatibility versus sandboxed as a bypass technique. Trying to subvert the AC in any way is just begging to get banned, even if it's for beingn reasons.
Even PVP is starting to “just work” via Proton. Arc Raiders runs just fine on Linux and is a strictly PvP game. Over time I think this will be less and less of a problem.
Arc Raiders is a PvPvE game, like most extraction shooters.
> ...which the Linux wrappers (mostly the wine project) refuse to support for security reasons.
I mean, several of the major anticheats can be configured to work just fine on Linux. [0] It's up to the game dev whether or not it's permitted. So, yeah, unless the game is one where its dev makes huge blog posts about how "advanced" its anti-cheat is (like Valorant or the very latest CoD/Battlefield games) it's quite likely that multiplayer games will work just fine on Linux.
And if they don't, and the faulty game is a new purchase on Steam, then ask for a refund and tell them that the game doesn't work with your OS. Easy, peasy.
[0] I have 100% solid, personal knowledge that Easy Anti Cheat can work on Linux. On Linux, I play THE FINALS, Elden Ring, and a couple of other EAC-"protected" games without any troubles. I have perhaps-unreliable memories that at least one of the games I play uses Denuvo, which is only sometimes used as anti-cheat but does use many of the same techniques as kernel-mode anticheat.
> I have 100% solid, personal knowledge that Easy Anti Cheat can work on Linux.
That's no secret, but the catch is that the Linux version is much, much easier to bypass. That's why some developers choose not to enable it, or in the case of Apex Legends, enabled it but later backtracked and disabled it again.
> ...but the catch is that the Linux version is much, much easier to bypass.
Shrug. Rumor has it that the Windows version is already fairly trivial to bypass.
The greatest PvP game, DOTA, works on Linux, and once you get hooked on that you'll never want to play another PvP game.
> oh game XYZ doesn't run so it's not reasonable for gaming
People tend to generalize, but what they probably mean is "it's not reasonable for gaming for the games I play.
I haven't fully switched over yet because the games the combo of the hardware I have + the games I play regularly, still give me issues vs. Windows. Getting them to run isn't the problem, but I haven't been able to solve miscellaneous crashes, lag, lower frame rates, etc.
My next PC upgrade will probably be getting rid of my Nvidia 1660 super and getting something AMD for less headaches.
> People tend to generalize, but what they probably mean is "it's not reasonable for gaming for the games I play.
This. The corollary is also that people take the such quips way too literally.
I, personally, don't play that many games, and those that I do play tend to run faster on Linux (with an AMD GPU, which I bought specifically to avoid nvidia headaches).
But I still game on Windows. Why? Because I still have a Windows box, "because Linux is not reasonable for photo editing". I actually daily drive Linux, but I can't be assed to move from Lightroom and photoshop, so I still keep a windows pc under my desk. I just play games on it because it's much beefier than my 5 yo ryzen U laptop, and since I don't interact with that box all that much, I didn't feel like partitioning my smallish drive for no tangible benefit. My laptop is more than enough for all my other needs.
Ok, if you want to be stubborn about it then leave Windows on a partition and only start it when you want to play that one game. Problem solved.
In many ways, moving to Linux is like starting to live on your own. Your mommy might be a better cook than you, but is that a good enough reason to keep living in your parents' basement?
Win partition will make you want to cry.
Win insists on bootlocker/secure boot, meanwhile most of the Linux doesn’t boot with it or you have to go though hell and back to install unsigned drivers (nvidia, gentle-yall).
I’d all say that Linux is like living in a car with 0 euros and saving up for a house. Simple user can scrape by, but mowing dev work life to Linux is much harder than to Mac. VPNs, inconsistent distro support for weird work stuff and such will make you spend days to weeks of unpaid overtime to get comfortable
This is a solvable problem and there's even pacman hooks around to do it for you
But also don't blame Linux. Even your comment says the problem is Microsoft. We need to be collectively mad at the right entity if we're going to get them to change. Otherwise they'll keep bullying people and they've found that they can bully people so much it gives them Stockholm Syndrome, where they feel they can't leave.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Unified_Extensible_Firmware...
Bazzite supports secure boot just fine, its actually enabled by default. I'm sure others do too.
Secure boot mainly gets annoying if you have an Nvidia card, since the akmod needs to be self-signed. It's not insurmountable but you have to load your keys into the UEFI before it'll work.
Bazzite builds the Nvidia driver into its kernel, so you don't need to do anything special. Post installation it prompts you to do key enrollment, so all the user needs to do is select "Enroll MOK" and type "universalblue".
Running two systems has cons of its own
I’ll be honest I’m really struggling with this analogy.
FWIW my 4070 Ti Super has had zero headaches in Linux. It’s only older Nvidia cards I’ve had issues with. Seems like there was a major driver change starting with the RTX 20xx series.
Linux probably became first-class for them because a lot of ML workflows rely on NVidia in the cloud, and I don't think anyone really uses Windows for that.
Over the last year or so, nVidia support for the 3+ series of hardware has gotten pretty stable.
With that said, I'm probably going to grab and AMD or Intel card once my 3060 becomes too much of a pain to continue using. It's a little ridiculous that the 5060 gives very little reason for my to update my 5 year old video card.
I only update my rig ever 8-10 years. Saves money though I tend to then play the older games, which is OK for me. I've had a 3080 for 3 years and it still feels like a new card.
FWIW, I've been gaming with a 1660 on Nobara OS for the past 3 months w/o issue.
I've gamed since 1979 and have used nVidia on Linux since the early 2000's...without issue.
There have certainly been issues (I've been on Linux with mostly nvidia GPUs since 2004) but it's almost always been caused by the module being outside the kernel, and a kernel update breaking compatibility sometimes, understandably. This has always been fixed quickly on nvidias end though. And early Wayland issues and the current DX12 -> Vulkan translation performance issues in more recent times.
But overall I've also had a mostly stable experience during that time. New hardware is supported mostly at release. Not always supporting all the latest features straight away mind you, but still. Meanwhile I seem to hear about issues with support for Intel and AMD cards at release frequently in comparison.
Again, all these games are available on console (mostly) so the excuse to not support Linux is conscious. Those ARE Linux machines. Essentially. (Yeah yeah, they have their own tool chain and rendering) but if they are using Vulkan, DX12, DX11, and a window - it can run on Linux.
Technically PS5 and I think Switch 2 is based on the BSD kernel probably because of the license. Xbox is not exactly Windows but it's using an NT kernel.
Playstation is FreeBSD, yeah, but the Switch runs an almost completely bespoke microkernel. They did borrow some parts of the BSD network stack, but overall it doesn't even vaguely resemble Unix.
Of course, and it's mostly DRM and/or anti-cheat. The studios want full control over the device running their IP, and they can't achieve that with desktop Linux, but they also don't want to leave the PC gaming market behind entirely to launch exclusively on consoles. Hence why the Windows versions of these games install rootkits on your PC, they aren't cooperating with the PC ecosystem, they are forcibly turning your computer into a locked-down console.
I hope they won't start providing their own tailored heavily locked encrypted operating system versions as a requirement to run their games.
They did, it's called Xbox and PlayStation
and for a good reason, you want an infested cheater to be more a problem than currently bad problem that is happening????
giving a user freedom cause it to make multiplayer game to be more unbearable since its human nature to compete and come out of others ???? who would guess
I find this mostly applies to the competitive games due to most standard anti cheat apps not working outside win32.
> My next PC upgrade will probably be getting rid of my Nvidia 1660 super and getting something AMD for less headaches.
Then you'll have AMD headaches. NVidia is the only accelerated graphics card fully supported on Linux.
You only get acceleration in AMD if you use their binary-only drivers and they only support cards for about a year.
AMD drivers are now open and in the mainline kernel. They dropped their proprietary driver and now use the upstream MESA stack. Nvidia also still suffers from a 20-30% performance drop on DX12 games on Linux, while AMD does not.
It used to be the reverse as you stated, but that hasn't been true since about 2015.
Okay, but AMD isn't accelerated. It's godawful slow for anything to do with video, and really you just need an NVidia card if you're doing anything to do with video editing or motion graphics.
The built-in amdgpu drivers are awful, constantly crashy and with very poor hardware support of anything more than a couple of years old.
I run both operating systems. But I have to say it either runs the game you want to play or it doesn't. This is especially true if you play games with friends.
> But I have to say it either runs the game you want to play or it doesn't
Can you elaborate on this?
For example, it was convoluted getting StarCraft 2 to run. Then it did eventually work, though it felt ever so slightly laggy.
Anno 1800 ran though it occasionally slowed way down, occasionally crashed, and multiplayer never worked.
Hogwart's Legacy ran but crashed, and ran massively slower / lower quality settings than on the same hardware but in Windows.
All of those were not binary "runs / doesn't".
That's not what I am saying, sorry if it was confusing. The parent was implying that if it doesn't run a game just pick a different game. But I was pointing out that isn't always an option, and some times you just want to play a specific game.
Gotcha - yeah I'm on the same page.
I used Linux Mint for 2 full months, 99% of my personal computing. Really like it. BUT... not all games my gaming group plays work on it, and social gaming is very important to me.
That doesn't mean I'm sour on Linux PC gaming. I think it's great, and will work for a lot of people, and it's so close for me. And I might switch, since my gaming tastes are shifting.
I do understand the premise but … people want to play the games they want to play.
For example I am a good customer for streaming services because I don’t care about specific titles - I will watch a series or a movie because it is available. I will most likely not go through a hassle to watch some specific show if it is not on streaming I already have.
Gaming doesn’t really work like that for me. I usually want to play specific titles - not just some game.
But I fully understand someone has the same approach to games as I have for movies/series.
I ran Starcraft 2 through Lutrus and it was a piece of cake. No lag that I could discern. There was a little mini launcher and everything. The multiplayer also worked just fine, although the matchmaking system seemed to think I was an expert level player for some reason and kept matching me with dudes who were way better at the game than I was.
To me, this is the one thorn in Linux (and the Linux online community) that gives me pause.
For the people that it just works for, well it just works for.
For anyone else, apparently they are the problem? Not Linux?
Well sorry no. I did get StarCraft 2 working with Lutris... once. Then I couldn't get it to start again. Eventually I switched to running Battle.Net from Steam and for some reason that did work. But it wasn't a "just works" or "piece of cake." It was a puzzle.
Maybe the difference is that I am running Ubuntu? Personally I think it's a common mistake for new users to jump on some obscure distro because they read something online where someone says it's the best. Even if that's true there is value in being on a popular distro in that bugs tend to be discovered and fixed quicker and there's almost always someone who has had the same problem you did and often figured out the solution just a web search away.
I think Canonical and the Gnome foundation have made some really bone headed decisions over the years, but I stick with Ubuntu because the mass of users on it means I never get left high and dry. Or at least I'm not alone when I run into a problem.
Fwiw I've been playing Hogwarts Legacy lately, though single player. Only problem I ever face is sometimes in a cave if I'm facing a certain direction I'll get blinding light as if I have ray tracing enabled and it's badly implemented. Though considering it's a AAA game and other things I've seen, I don't think that's exactly a Linux problem. Much like Starfield...
It's like this. You eventually got Starcraft2 to work. That means Linux can run Starcraft2, it's in the "Runs" category. Games like League of Legends, which have kernel level anti cheat, are in the "Won't Run" category.
But you don't want to sacrifice comfort or other things. The game should work just right on Linux.
I have an Nvidia card and use mostly Ubuntu (mate), also for gaming. It's even a problem now, because I would benefit from a hard divide between the gaming and working\studying system (I have a gaming user in backlog). On Linux it's mostly KSP, Factorio, but sometimes DeepRockGalactic, Valheim, Euro Truck Sim or Warhammer: Total War1\2\3. These games work flawlessly or with <10%fps hit.
There are games that kind of work - Ancestors: Humankind Odyssey, Cyberpunk, Hunt: Showdown. But you lose comfort and I'd rather just play them on Windows, than suffer decreased functionality on Linux. I know that some of it (definitely Cyberpunk) is only because of NVIDIA.
When buying games I usually don't buy Windows only games unless there is a very good reason. And I quit League of Legends and WRC rally because of anti cheat scam. I feel scammed after putting lot of money in a game and suddenly losing the ability to play it.
This shifting of goalposts just to cater to linux just explains it all.
Comeon. If a customer bought a game that says it runs on linux, they should be able to play it on linux well, not just launch it and quit within 5 mins.
I get you have the ideology up in your head, but don't lie and embellish linux to this degree. The attitude just turns people off.
"Linux" is really a family of operating systems, so people need to be more specific. It might run perfectly out of the box on consumer/gamer focused operating systems like Bazzite or SteamOS while perhaps requiring more work on something like Red Hat or NixOS. Those different operating systems all have wildly different approaches to how the OS actually works despite generally being able to run a largely overlapping set of programs.
It's like saying something works on "laptop" without specifying whether it's a Thinkpad or a Chromebook or a Macbook.
Not saying you didn’t experience this, but I’ve definitely run StarCraft 2 in the past, and I play Anno 1800 regularly fine (thanks to the mods I’ve been playing it’s even got 50% more sessions than the base game)
Did multiplayer LAN work in Anno 1800 for you out of the box, or did you make adjustments? I couldn't figure out how to get it to work.
StarCraft 2 worked, oddly enough, run from Steam as an external program. (Lots of search results tried to get me to use Lutris/bottles, but I couldn't get it to work consistently under Lutris.)
In Lutris it'll try to run on Wine 8 by default, I had to set it to use the latest Proton GE.
Was also able to get WoW, Diablo 4, WC3 and SC1 running well this way, since they're all in a single Wine Battle.net install.
I’ve done multiplayer internet play rather than LAN play, but that worked just fine without any changes from my part.
Ah yes that's what I meant. But yes unfortunately I could not figure out how to get multiplayer to connect. No idea why or how to troubleshoot and fix.
They don't mean all games thru all times, they mean "the latest $70 release" that still can have problem if it is multiplayer DRM/anticheat ridden one.
I haven't booted windows in months but there is definitely some caveats for gamers
This. I’d move to Linux in a heartbeat if certain anticheats for certain competetive games had supports for it. (i.e. faceit anticheat)
its easier for me to just have 2 different system for work and entertainment honestly
Well I used to game a lot when I was younger.
Initially I hated that Linux was so niche in 2005 or so.
Meanwhile now, I don't have time for games anyway. I still think gaming should be better on Linux, but I don't miss Windows anymore either (though I have it as secondary operating system on another computer; I just don't really care about it, it could die tomorrow and I would not miss it one iota).
Do the top sellers from the past year work on Linux?
I've been meaning to set up Bazzite on an older desktop.
Basically all games work, except some multiplayer games with kernel anticheat. You can look up the status of games here:
https://www.protondb.com/
And specifically the state of multiplayer games with anticheat here (which is a much less favorable % of working games):
https://areweanticheatyet.com/
I personally wouldn't install any kernel anticheat on a computer that I intend to use for anything important, so I would personally refuse to install the incompatible games even if I was using windows.
Take ProtonDB with a grain of salt, Apex Legends still has a Silver rating ("Runs with minor issues") despite being 100% unplayable on Linux for over a year now.
"Just trust us, bro! Our security is better than the banks, governments, and major services and we would never let anyone exploit or abuse the gaping hole we're deliberately installing in your security profile! It's just our perfectly secure rootkit that won't ever be used for anything bad!"
It's so weird to me that people just allow this, or even defend it. Game companies should be legally obligated to scale human moderation and curation of multiplayer games, and if you're paying for service that gets moderated and curated, there should be some legal expectation of process - a requirement that the service provider lay out a specific "due process" framework, even if it ends up mediated, that gives a customer legal recourse. Instead, they try to automate everything, which has notoriously indiscriminate collateral damage with no recourse.
If you pour significant chunk of your private time and money into a game, you should be entitled to not arbitrarily lose an account or gameplay progress because some poorly configured naive Bayes classifier decided you did something wrong, without corresponding evidence or recourse to undo bad bans.
For some reason companies are entitled to infinitely expand their reach without concurrently expanding their responsibilities in providing service to individuals. Must be nice.
From Steam’s 2025 top X charts (https://store.steampowered.com/charts/bestofyear/2025?tab=3)
11/12 top selling new releases (the exception is battlefield 6, because the anticheat blocks Linux)
9/12 top selling (COD, BF6 and Apex block Linux)
11/12 most played (Apex blocks Linux)
So if you’re into competitive ranked games (especially fps), you might face problems due to anti cheat blocks, but practically everything else works
Does a game "run on Linux" when it has 100% feature parity? 90%? 80%? What are you willing to cut? Some performance? A few graphical effects? Multiplayer?
When you look at the details, Linux gaming is not as good as it might seem.
But I'm still gaming on Linux!
What you sacrifice in feature parity, you gain in user freedom and principle. To me, that is a worthwhile tradeoff. Especially since it's really not that much different at this point. You're not sacrificing much in most cases now. It's really quite remarkable.
The only pain point I've found is VR. I've bounced off trying to get it working multiple times with the best results getting about 10% functional (video working on one or two games, input broken on all).
That said, I haven't tried getting the same kit working on windows so I can't say if it's any better.
VR is rough at the moment, but one would hope that Valve is prepping an overhaul for SteamVR on Linux since they're launching a standalone VR headset which runs Linux soon.
I suspect that this might not ship given the recent dramatic change in memory prices.
I ran into the issue where I didn't know that you can tell Steam to always prefer NATIVE LINUX programs over everything over Proton. This was causing a ton of issues with VR, I havent gone back to try it yet though, havent found the time.
It was very broken for a long time. Since fairly recently you have WiVRn (specifically wivrn-dashboard on Arch) for Oculus (more supported though) and I would daresay it works better then SteamVR used to do for me on Windows
Hardware for flight sim games is also in a similar boat. It's hard to configure most of the newer hardware, but a lot of the old low quality joysticks work alright out of the box.
I have both a Reverb G2 and a Pimax both working great via Monado.
or DRM for old games that check stuff like the cd being present
I have owned the index for a few years, running it on ubuntu/mint. It is a pain. But VR is a pain generally. I go months without using the thing. Then when i do use it some bit of software has been updated and i inevitably have to spend an hour getting it to work correctly again. Honestly, VR on linux feels like using windows again.
VR is bad because nobody cares much about it. The hardware is clunky, the market tiny, and costs great. As the hardware improves it will get more attention from the FOSS community and so too will the overall experiance.
There it is, the classic “just change what you enjoy then!!”. Linux will take off when the community stops trying to force new users to conform to the Linux way of life and instead respect that other people have other needs and wants that are valid, and not a moment before.
While I agree it's unreasonable, it's also kind of a chicken and an egg thing. These things won't change until Linux becomes big enough to ignore. I'm not sure what the solution is though, as I don't think it's realistic to make people give up what they enjoy to get there. That's not gonna happen. But Valve has at least made a dent with the Steamdeck and Proton in general, and maybe more with the upcoming Steam Machine. Devs actively target the Steamdeck nowadays for games where it makes sense, so it is taken into consideration at a whole new level compared to years past.
Most of the games I play would work fine, but it’s the damn anti cheat and multiplayer games that forces Windows down my throat, and I’m not happy about it. I only use my gaming rig for gaming so I have no other requirements, which kind of makes it even worse.
I play multiplayer games with anti cheat all the time. The only ones that don't run are straight up malware.
I’m not disagreeing, it’s just how certain very popular games operate nowadays. I would never play them on a computer I used for anything but gaming.
I've been using Fedora+KDE for over a decade, Windows 8 was last version of Windows I had installed at home, and we all know what a squarified mess that was.
Gnome is fine, but it's just not for me.
For everyone on here that complains about Windows requiring an 'online' account, MacOS does as well, but the perception is different. MacOS, just kind of quietly does it, with no ceremony, but Windows does a Ballmer-esque right-in-your-face demand. I couldn't possibly comment on Windows 11 as I've yet to use it, but Win10 felt a lot worse than Windows 7 which was probably the last high water mark for Windows after Windows 2000.
Plasma 6 is really polished and simple. I think anyone familiar with windows would be able to grab and run with it immediately.
No hate for anyone that likes other desktop environments, I as a long time windows user just really appreciate how familiar KDE feels.
The familiarity is great but the thing that really draws me to Plasma over Gnome is that the KDE developers seem to have an attitude of just implementing the features people want even if it's not perfect yet. Gnome is polished, but it's missing so many basic configuration options out of the box.
It's kind of funny because when I first got into linux it was practically the opposite story. Back in the day of KDE 2 or 3 and Gnome 2, KDE was the slow one to bring in features while Gnome felt like the wild wild west.
Now it seems like Gnome has gone down a practically walled garden path which I don't love. Last I tried it, I wanted to launch an app focused and in full screen on startup. The gnome response for that was basically "You're not allowed to do that".
Afaik, you can choose to not sign into icloud when creating an account on your mac. It's not a hard requirement like it is on Windows, though they do obviously strongly nudge you to login to icloud.
I didn't know that. Thanks. Setting up my mac once in 5 years means it isn't a screen I've seen very often!
At least on the latest Sequoia, there has been no hard requirement for an online account. They nudge you towards it, but you can decline and continue. As far as I can remember, macOS has never required an online account to set up a Mac.
> Windows requiring an 'online' account, MacOS does as well
This has never been my experience. Is that new in Tahoe?
Yes, as pointed out, I was mistaken, but then in my defence, I've only ever set up one Mac, 5 years ago, so I've only seen 'that screen' once.
It isn't. There's no such thing in macOS. Local and iCloud accounts are not necessarily linked, never been.
> if you don't sell your games on Steam or in a way I can run them on Linux I am not buying or playing them.
Agree 1000% and recently Steam Community Support pissed me off so I am now looking into GOG (I have my first GOG game now and playing it), Epic and Luna. In fact, the GOG game I got was free through Luna ironically. Even more ironic, the excellent Heroic game launcher lets you mark the game to show up in Steam, then when you start steam run it from there and it uses the config settings from Heroic but you can use screenshots, etc. in Steam.
The gaming landscape on Linux is great, except for those companies that refuse to support anti-cheat.
I run Kubuntu btw (and Ubuntu since 2006).
PS I keep Snap disabled.
This was me in 2005. I cant believe people say that M$ started to suck in 2025. It always did.
I suspect this is less about when Windows declined and more about individual computing journeys. Early exposure (home, school, work) tends to set a baseline that’s hard to shake.
Microsoft had realyl good engineers and talent. Microsoft internally has gone to shit. They hire an army of H1B's and all the talent has left. Shell of a company on the Windows side that anyone working with them can see. It started a couple years ago, but it's really gone off the deepend and will just get worse. I say this as a windows expert and someone who thinks linux is crap.
I started using Linux in like 2007 but the GPU was always an issue. Then it was running games. Linux changed for me around 2013+ when I would install it on my laptops and get a heck of a performance boost. Heck those laptops still turn on to this day. Windows just bloats all hardware.
It's been an unfortunate re-occurring issue for me as well. Recent hardware is much better about this, and I too have seen the performance bumps at the cost of software compatibility. I feel like if Adobe brought their CC suite to Linux I'd have no reason to ever use Windows outside the random game that _needs_ it.
Been on / off Linux for the desktop since about the same time. Recurring theme across my AMD and NVIDIA gpus. Support has always sucked!
Over the years it felt like a game of whack a mole finding the right combination of driver versions, open or closed source. R9 390 owners back in the day will understand... Fast forward to now, the same problems keep occurring albeit better off then they were.
> I started using Linux in like 2007 but the GPU was always an issue.
Were you running Nvidia hardware? I've been running Linux since like 2000-ish, have always run ATi/AMD hardware on my desktop machines, and (aside from overheat issues brought on by the undersized replacement fan attached with bread ties to that one board) haven't had troubles. On the other hand, I don't suspend my desktop or servers to RAM or disk, so maybe that has intermittently or always been broken... I'd never know.
I've only had Intel hardware in my laptops, and I can't remember ever having trouble suspending those to RAM or disk.
This was me in 2006 as well. Long live Edgy Eft!
My first distro I booted from was Ubuntu 4.04.
Yes, but it took some time before the suck became so bad too many people started to notice, and those people weren’t tech people.
Most people had never even heard of Linux. It has taken a lot of very bad things on Windows for it to get to this point. It’s classic frog in a slowly heating up pot territory.
>Most people had never even heard of Linux.
My experience is that people fear linux, rather than not knowing. I am the lonely Linux user since c. 2005, and people see half my screen is always a console, the other half a browser. So they fear linux is for console wizards, not for regular users. Nothing will convince them otherwise, even when they are 100% of the time using online webapps. I have some coworkers using browser + VS code + WSL2 all the time, but they don't switch because they fear the console-to-config-everything instead of Control Panel.
So much of it is a problem of execution. If people could use Linux without ever having to know what a terminal is (much like the average Windows user doesn't know what PowerShell is), then it would actually be quite successful. It has gotten better over the past decade, but it still suffers from endless paper cuts and the odd issue that requires a shell session to fix. I will say that Valve's SteamOS has come the closest to avoiding this trap. You can use a deck without ever having to touch a CLI.
I don't know, man. In my experience, people make no difference between "windows" and "the pc". I think the vast majority of "regular people" have no idea there are alternatives to "windows", other than "macs".
> Steam and Proton work perfectly
I am a hardcore DayZ player. DayZ does not work on Proton[0]. I cannot use Linux as my main gaming platform. Battlefield 6 does not work. Latest Call of Duty does not work. You can talk about voting with your wallet, but when millions of people are buying the game, your one non-vote means nothing.
So either you punish yourself and refuse to play with friends, or you punish yourself and install windows. It’s a damned situation regardless of your choice
[0] point me to as many compatibility databases as you want, the game will not start on my vanilla Ubuntu build
Sounds like it might be an issue with your setup, considering that other people have no problems running it. Hard to tell what the problem is, but definitely a frustrating situation.
This is really just a subset of competitive shooters. Arc Raiders, The Finals, Hunt Showdown, Halo Infinite all play fine.
I have a Windows drive for Battlefield but I stopped booting into it after interest in the game waned.
Playing on console is also an option. Most games allow you to alternate between keyboard/mouse and controller. Discord works fine, and every game is cross-play.
this is why a lot of people run arch and why valve based steamOS on arch instead of debian as the previous version was, you need a newer kernel and other packages to really play games on linux with the least friction possible
> idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro
They largely have now, archinstall.
It's still text based/TUI but it's pretty simple and intuitive, anyone already familiar with installing a Linux distro (especially any sort of -server variant) will be comfortable with the archinstall script.
> anyone already familiar with installing a Linux distro (especially any sort of -server variant) will be comfortable with the archinstall script.
To be fair, thats not _generally_ the audience we tend to think about when we talk about the enshittification of Windows. We're usually talking regular consumers / computer users and "gamers" the latter of which is a wide range of people that can fend for themselves with instructions to people that cannot.
Fair enough, but I wouldn't generally direct that audience to vanilla arch linux as "gamers first distro" anyway.
I'd direct them to something like Bazzite (Immutable), or CachyOS for staying arch-based but providing a GUI installer and tools, Endeavor OS, even Fedora, etc.
Agreed. I know in some circles it's a meme, but if the Steam Gaming Console actually makes a debut any time soon, I think we'll see more of a jump from the "Gamer" crowd away from Windows. My (some say naive) hope is that it will make game devs try to design games that aren't only locked in on Windows and have more Proton support.
It's really a (good IMHO) sign of the times that us old hats have to remind ourselves that most new comers to Linux today aren't necessarily adept at installing another OS, let alone using the command line. The first time I installed Arch was maybe four years ago, but the very first dual boot setup I made was between Win 3.1 and OS/2 2.1 in 1993 when I was 10, and I've been playing with Linux since the mid-late 90s. When I first installed Arch the "hard way" I said to myself--"I don't understand why it has this reputation... this is all stuff I've done before countless times." Frankly, I'm still trying to figure out the distribution graph of Linux knowledge and how to engage with different skill levels.
I agree. I also think that not everyone (I couldn't say if this is generational, I see this among peers sometimes too) has the same appetite for problem solving. People hit a problem or a wall and say "So I tried X and now I see Y. I dont know what to do" and then they just sit there. The reason that LMGTFY and RTFM come off as "elitist" is because people are frustrated by others' willingness to just "stop trying" whenever they hit a road block.
Came here to say this. Archinstall rocks.
Regarding why Arch doesn't "invest" in a graphical installer, it's worth mentioning that Arch's installation image has a different design philosophy than most installation media.
The image is a fully functional arch environment that copies the entirety of its contents to RAM on boot, giving you special installation opportunities such as the ability to install Arch to the same flash drive that booted the installer. Having no graphical dependencies lets this image remain small enough to pull this off, as well as allowing for fully remote installations over SSH out of the box, since archinstall is a TUI.
I don't believe there are any serious technical obstacles to providing a graphical installer in something like an initramfs environment. Many distros do provide graphical installation mechanisms using PXE, which loads the kernel and installer-initramfs over the network (and is similar in the sense that it won't touch local storage unless you tell it to)
I don't have a way to quickly around to check, but I thought the arch install media used squashfs? In which case I wouldn't have thought it was safe to blow away the backing store.
How do you figure out Arch but not OOBE?
Not that this is going to matter to you because you've left Windows behind, but I refuse to buy License Keys any more and I try to steer people away from buying "Gray Keys" to avoid the ridiculous costs. Using the MS Activation Scripts[0] is the much better go-to.
[0] - https://massgrave.dev/
Given the push to monetize user data it seems Microsoft is demphasizing their focus on key piracy. I bought a computer with a 55" touch screen. The company selling it said it was a Windows 11 computer. The computer was a 14 year old Intel CPU/Mobo that was never designed to run Windows 11. The company selling it had hacked Windows to run on this old computer. They didn't have a license key. I report it to Microsoft and crickets. The company ghosted me on the issue. In 2003, with XP in it's prime, they were cracking down hard on piracy... now it's part of the business model...
Absolutely. I would also think that the amount of money "lost" on license keys specifically on the "regular consumer" side pales in comparison to the data that they get once you're on their operating system. How many non-power users bother with disabling telemetry and other data that MS collects through their operating system? How many people bother configuring a Local Account? All of that is probably worth way more than a ~$200 license key.
On the business side, businesses make it a focus to be in compliance with licensing agreements so they still see whatever oodles of money from companies that have fleets of computers that run Windows.
There's still a lot of utility to doing things the hard way. I do suggest people that want to actually learn Linux install Arch and live in the terminal. You learn a lot very fast because you're forced to. But it's not for everyone and that's totally okay too. That's the beauty of Linux after all. That's the beauty of computing. You can't build a product for everyone but you can build an environment that can become what anyone needs.
But I'll second your point. I've been on Endeavour on my main machine for about 3-4 years now and only had one problem where I just got a mismatch in a new kernel and new Nvidia driver so I couldn't load the desktop. Easy rollback (from the cache) and a day or two later the issue was solved so I could upgrade without a problem. Took no more than 10 minutes to solve and that's the worst problem I've had the entire time. I will also give the advice that if you have an Nvidia card give your boot partition like 5GB instead of 1GB
I don't think it is because they can't do it or that they want to be a base for other distros. They simply let the user choose what the user wants. And if you don't know what you want then you learn it.
I switched to arch 15 years ago to learn Linux. And it is by far the best way to understand it.
Having used Arch I can easily maintain almost any distro out there, but it doesn't work the other way around.
If I am understanding correctly, you were using Windows without a licence? I think that's more the problem here, as Windows does provide a way to have offline accounts, you just didn't want to pay for it.
I installed fedora yesterday. Instead of steam i am hoping that GOG with heroic games launcher will work nicely. Idk, I want to support drm free software so if it's on gog, I buy it there.
[obviously YMMV, take me with a grain of salt etc]
I actually tried Fedora first (thinking dev-first workflows) but ended up switching to Ubuntu w/x11 for gaming. A lot of that had to do with Fedora's release schedule (rather than Ubuntu's 2-year LTS) breaking working GOG/steam/wine-based apps on a rotating basis. Since switching to a defaults lifestyle / Ubuntu with x11 I deal with NVIDIA driver compatibility issues every 6 months or so instead of once/month. The 22 -> 24 upgrade was better than I expected and I didn't lose more than a couple of hours of life to appease the shell gods.
In any case Fedora and a once/month problem would still beat the Windows update nonsense, which I am still supporting since my spouse hasn't switched yet :/
I've used Ubuntu since 2006 and started using Kubuntu (I prefer KDE) about 2 years ago. Ubuntu (or Kubuntu) are very solid for gaming. It puzzles me how often I see highly customized distros like Bazzite and CachyOS touted for gaming after looking into some of the wild tweaks those distros do; it's amazing to me that they run at all.
PS I keep Snap disabled.
Fedora Silverblue user here. Lutris (from flatpak) can play GoG games fine (*).
(*): Apparently achievement support even on single player games requires the gamestore client (GoG client in my case) and Lutris doesn't support that yet. Am old enough to not care :p
My spare PC runs Win10. Was able to install it without internet and thus get an offline account.
Since they stopped full updates for it, it's a lot less annoying. Almost all the nags were at reboot time, usually triggered by the update giving it a new thing to nag about. Only thing now is it'll ask me once a month about either OneDrive or Win11, which is bad but tolerable.
> idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro
It could be a deliberate measure to set the bar high and filter out people who don’t want to troubleshoot themselves.
The arch advantage is that your system gets setup exactly how you want it and you have to consciously choose the software set you want to work with.
That minimalism is somewhat the point of the OS.
Yeah, yay works until it doesn't anymore, because the pacman library dependency it uses was updated but yay was not... and then you need to recompile yay manually. I mean, I'll still use it (or rather paru, which works basically the same way), but it's very annoying, when it happens every few months.
I don't understand, yay updates itself. I've never once had this problem.
That's assuming you do system upgrades through paru/yay. However, you may not want to upgrade the packages you've obtained from the AUR and so you upgrade using pacman. That may cause the updated libalpm to become incompatible with the installed yay/paru.
yay used to be in the official Arch Linux repository for some time, wonder why it was removed.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AUR_helpers
AUR helpers like yay are not supported officially. The other commenter sheds some light as to why.
Iirc it was to force the extra step necessary for the user to acknowledge that the AUR can bootstrap malware if used blindly.
This seems to be a relatively consistent discussion surrounding AUR helper development; for example, adding UX to incentivise users to read PKGBUILDs, lest the AUR becomes an attractive vector for skids.
No one wants the AUR to become NPM, and the thing that will incentivise that is uneducated users. Having the small barrier of not having helpers in the main repos is an effective way of accomplishing that.
> I know its a "meme" to talk about how great Arch is, but when you want the latest of something, Arch has it
I love my Arch installs to death, but I feel like I'm the oddball out about the mess that is AUR. The main repositories have a lot of things but I always end up getting pushed to AUR and then it just feels like I bolted on a hack rather than pacman/the arch base just supporting AUR more like a different package source normally.
I use Arch but don't want to fiddle with stuff anymore.
Installing via the archinstall command was pretty easy. Not quite as easy as a Fedora or Ubuntu install, but for someone familiar with Linux, it's negligible.
Yeah, my last arch install was my last. It was fun to rice my system and setting up everything from scratch 4 or 5 times taught me a lot about operating systems and computers. Ultimately my setup is not significantly different than any other distro, it's just that I installed the packages and did configs myself. I'll be fine with a minimally riced system, if I ever even need to install an OS again.
What made you switch from Pop OS? I just installed it on a couple of old PCs I had lying around for my kids to play around with/learn from.
There was some 3D printer slicer software I needed that wouldnt run, when I finally figured out why it had to do with GLIBC being out of date. I have used Debian since like 2008, and Ubuntu since the mid 2010s so I am accustomed to doing PPA's and what not, but something in me broke and I wanted to finally try something more bleeding edge. I nearly went for Fedora but the version I wanted to try didn't even boot (I don't like to waste any time with command line incantations anymore) so I looked up EndeavourOS I don't remember how I found it, I think a friend said someone they knew used it (turns out they dont LOL) so I gave it a shot.
I had bad experiences with Arch before because of Manjaro, but in hindsight, I think the main issues I had were more to do with how Pacman can get insanely nuanced. When you update packages you have to know what you're doing, it will update all weird, its not like Debian or Ubuntu upgrades where it installs / uninstalls what you do and don't need unless you tell it to be that nuanced.
Probably same reason most folks who are capable of running Linux don't stay on Ubuntu, etc.
I'm genuinely curious as to what the key differences are (especially those that would cause someone to switch), as someone who is pretty tech savvy but whose use of Linux as a daily driver is admittedly pretty weak.
You usually try a few distros, until you find the one that does whenever you needed, and then you stick with it for 15 years ;)
From my own experience: 15 years ago, when (except for academia), Linux was very nisje, it was hard to use it. Random rare errors would pop up. On Windows you would know someone who knew what to do, but with Linux? So I chose Ubuntu, because it had the most support. Solution to any error could be found on askubuntu (?) forums. But if you had a friend, you would choose his system and get help from him. I once had university admins very happy to help me with something and even give me some tips.
Nowadays it really doesn't matter that much, other than extra easy (with an LLM everything is already easy) installation of drivers (POP os?)/initial programs you used on Windows (on Mate it takes 10min due to a special GUI appstore).
BUT there are reasons to switch. Like Ubuntu's pushing of very annoying snaps, making it very hard to get Firefox without a snap. Snaps are annoying, because they don't have a cleaning mechanism and old versions just clog your hard drive. They take forever to launch and it's just not a good idea for a browser. Don't mind snaps for other things. There is also Desktop Environment support and support for hidpi monitors and such.
Other than that, there is a little of philosophy. Like super FOSS and idealistic like Debian (i guess? Pls correct me if I'm wrong). Or more business aligned, like Redhat/Fedora. Or elitist that like to waste their users time and make them read manuals for fdisk like Arch, where you have to format your hard drive without GParted or any other GUI.
I'm no pro, but that's a little that came to mind if you wanted to know what mattered in the past.
not OP, but for some it might be availability of latest versions packages (say, you've heard about new major version of Bash or Vim being released today, and wondering how soon it might be available in your distro packages), and, as someone else mentioned, less update stress due to lack of "major version bumps" - just remember to subscribe to https://archlinux.org/news/ and watch out for entries requiring "manual intervention".
I would say EndeavourOS is the "Ubuntu" to "Arch" if you will. The installer is easy, and it comes with "yay" out of the box which is a frontend to Pacman which holds your hand in just the right ways. If I want to update my OS I type "yay" into a terminal, hit enter and confirm the packages needing updating (or select which ones I want) and type my password, and that's it. In the past with Manjaro I did a system update with Pacman, and problems ensued.
Folks capable of running linux pick the best distro for the job at hand. They are tools, there is no progression like you're implying.
My homeserver is Ubuntu, my gaming PC is Arch.
Long term stability is less important for gaming computers than having the most cutting edge (and theoretically highest performance) drivers. That's why the community leans so heavily towards arch.
The only game I regularly play refuses to pay their anti-cheat for Linux support. After Windows 10 support ends, my gaming days are probably over.
I would love to switch from Mac. But Mac hardware is so resilient & haven't seen that in PC world.
I just got a new work laptop: the ThinkPad X1 Carbon gen13. It's gorgeous: weighs a bit over 900 grams, has an amazing matte OLED screen, Intel Lunar Lake that sips power (1-2W idle) and is fast enough to compile Rust if needed, amazing keyboard, touchpad is great but I just use the trackpoint, everything works from the box on Linux (they even deliver it with either Fedora or Ubuntu, but I installed CachyOS).
Suspend: works always. Battery life: great, the whole day. Wifi: works always, connects fast, works fast.
The build quality is really nice, especially the carbon fiber body that doesn't feel so cold/hot to touch.
Dell, HP and Lenovo have been phenomenally resilient for us, going back more than 2 decades.
You can run Linux on Apple Silicon with Asahi Linux
There's a whole lot of asterisks that you're leaving out of that statement.
M1&2 yes with slight caveats, m3-5 not really (at least yet)
What do you mean by that? As a long term windows user I've never had any issues running my laptops and PCs for years and years.
What kinda graphics card do you have in there? I’m considering building one soon.
With the absurd price of RAM and flash storage (and still-fairly-high price of video cards) now is quite a bad time to purchase a new computer.
Having said that, I'm not the OP, but I currently have a Radeon 9070 (non-XT), and previously had a Radeon 5700 XT. Both work great.
> idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro
Simplicity, among other reasons. Installers force the users hand and need maintenance. Having no installer but rather a detailed installation guide offers unlimited freedom to users. Installation isn't difficult either, you just pacstrap a root filesystem and configure the bootloader, mounts and locale.
ArchLinux does now have an installer called archinstall, but it's described more as a library than a tool. It allows you to automate the installation using profiles.
Just to paint an example, if I am installing Arch I like to have:
* A user configured through systemd-homed with luks encryption
* The limine bootloader
* snapperd from OpenSUSE with pacman hooks
* systemd-networkd and systemd-resolved
* sway with my custom ruby based bar
* A root filesystem in a btrfs subvolume, often shared across multiple disks in raid0
If you were to follow the installation guide it will tell you to consider these networking/bootloader/encryption options just fine. But trying to create an installer which supports all these bleeding edge features is futile.
Also if you want 'Arch with sensible defaults' CachyOS is basically that, people think of it as a 'gaming distro' but that's not an accurate characterisation. I use it as a daily driver on my personal machine mostly for non-gaming work and it's an excellent distro.
There is though the TUI installer, not like it used to be where the commands were typed in following the wiki. Not that there was anything wrong with the 'manual' mode, it gave you insight into the basic building blocks/configurations right from the start.
It's been a very long time since I moved to Arch, but I swear that something like 12 years ago it did have some form of menu-driven installer.
Nowadays, there are so many ways to partition the drive (lvm, luks, either one on top of the other; zfs with native encryption or through dm-crypt), having the efi boot directly a unified kernel image or fiddle with some bootloader (among a plethora of options)...
One of the principal reasons why I love Arch is being able to have a say in some of these base matters, and would hate to have to fight the installer to attain my goals. I remember when Ubuntu supported root on zfs but the installer didn't it was rather involved to get the install going. All it takes with Arch is to spend a few minutes reading the wiki and you're off to the races. The actual installation part is trivial.
But then again, if you have no idea what you want to do, staring at the freshly-booted install disk prompt can be daunting. Bonus points for it requiring internet for installation. I would have to look up the correct incantation to get the wifi connected on a newer PC with no wired ethernet, and I've been using the thing for a very long time.
> One of the principal reasons why I love Arch is being able to have a say in some of these base matters
Exactly, Arch allows you to do many bleeding edge things. An installer would never keep up are give you that freedom.
> I remember when Ubuntu supported root on zfs but the installer didn't it was rather involved to get the install going.
That's why many installers allow you to drop a shell when it's time to partition.
> I would have to look up the correct incantation to get the wifi connected on a newer PC
To be honest that would largely be helped if archiso would start using NetworkManager
>It's been a very long time since I moved to Arch, but I swear that something like 12 years ago it did have some form of menu-driven installer.
Yep, removed in 2012 as the last maintainer quit. Maintaining an installer seems like one of the least fun hobbies.
You spent $2000 on a new machine but wouldn’t shell out another $20-30 for a windows pro key? You’re willing to burn a bunch of time fiddling with getting a completely new operating system setup, but you’re not willing to spend a few minutes fiddling with setting up an offline windows account?
I get that maybe that was the final straw or something, but come on, “I switched to Linux because I didn’t want to take an hour to set up Windows” really sounds like you never really wanted Windows in the first place, you were just looking for an excuse.
The main difference, in my opinion, is that to set up Linux one doesn't need to work around the expected behaviours of the OS.
And why would anyone put so much effort into making Windows usable now, when there is not knowing what Microsoft will do next?
''By the way, I use Arch''
The meme was “I use Arch, BTW,” but I think it has mostly died as enough people have pointed out that Arch isn’t really hard-mode Linux or something. It is a barebones start but
1) very stable due to rolling-release producing small changes
2) the skill barrier to getting a full system is “basic literacy, to read the wiki”
Eventually I switched to Ubuntu for some reason, it has given me more headaches than Arch.
> 1) very stable due to rolling-release producing small changes
Having very frequent updates to bleeding edge software versions, often requiring manual intervention is not "stable". An arch upgrade may, without warning, replace your config files and update software to versions incompatible with the previous.
That's fine if you're continuously maintaining the system, maybe even fun. But it's not stable. Other distributions are perfectly capable of updating themselves without ever requiring human intervention.
> 2) the skill barrier to getting a full system is “basic literacy, to read the wiki”
As well as requiring you to be comfortable with the the linux command line as well as have plenty of time. My mom has basic literacy, she can't install ArchLinux.
ArchLinux is great but it's not a beginner-friendly operating system in the same way that Fedora/LinuxMint/OpenSUSE/Pop!_OS/Ubuntu/ElementOS are.
> Having very frequent updates to bleeding edge software versions, often requiring manual intervention is not "stable". An arch upgrade may, without warning, replace your config files and update software to versions incompatible with the previous.
12 in the last year if you used all the software (I don’t many people are running dovecot and zabbix), so probably actually like 3 for most users: https://archlinux.org/
That’s not too dissimilar from what you’d get running stable releases of Ubuntu or Windows. And of course plenty of windows software will auto upgrade itself in potentially undesired ways, windows users just don’t blame the OS for that
I don't just mean the types of manual intervention mentioned in the news. ArchLinux ships bleeding edge software to users with very little downstream changes. ArchLinux also replaces config files when upgrading. This is inherently different behavior from stable release distributions like Ubuntu.
ArchLinux is not an operating system where you can do an unattended upgrade and forget about it. That's not "bad" or "good", that's just a design choice.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Frequently_asked_questions#...?
Arch replaces _unmodified_ config files when changing. It’s not an uncommon behaviour in software to update defaults to the new defaults.
If you have a modified config file, it puts the new default one in a .pacnew file for you to compare, which seems strictly better to just deleting the new default one.
Huh you're right, I must've confused myself by removing/installing instead of upgrading recently.
Anyway I think the discussion boils down to semantics. ArchLinux is not "unstable" in the sense that it is prone to breaking. But it also delivers none of the stability promises that stable release distros or rolling release distros with snapshotting and testing like OpenSUSE Tumbleweed deliver. To call ArchLinux stable would make every distribution stable, and the word would lose all meaning.
Most distributions promise that an upgrade always results in a working system. Instead moving the manual maintenance to major release upgrades.
> Having very frequent updates to bleeding edge software versions, often requiring manual intervention is not "stable".
I dunno. I have an arch installation that is maybe 4 years old, I might update every few weeks, and have only had one issue.
Any issues are usually on the front page of archlinux.org what the issue is, and how to fix it.
> very stable due to rolling-release producing small changes
Can you elaborate on the chain of thought here? The small changes at high frequency means that something is nearly constantly in a <CHANGED> state, quite opposite from stable. Rolling release typically means that updates are not really snapshotted, therefore unless one does pull updates constantly they risk pulling a set of incompatible updates. Again, quite different from stable.
It’s stable in the way that a person taking small predictable steps at a time is stable compared to somebody who making large random lurching steps. Sure, the system is often changed, but if only a few packages have changed, should there be a problem it is easy to identify the culprit.
Although it is hard to say. Ubuntu also has, I guess, intentional behavior that is hard to distinguish from a bug, like packages switching from apt to snap. So it might just be that my subjective experience feels more buggy.
It's the same train of thought as the modern cloud software notion that deploying small changes more often is safer than bundling "releases"; if you upgrade 3 packages 3x a week (or deploy 50 lines of code 3x a week), you catch small issues quickly and resolve them immediately, rather than upgrading 400 packages 1x a year (or deploying 50,000 lines of code 2x a year), where when things break you have a rather tall order just to triage what failed.
I think there are advantages to both, but I will say that I've found modern Arch to be quite good. The other huge benefit of Arch is the general skill level present in the user base and openness of the forums; when something breaks it's usually easy to google "arch + package name broken" and immediately find a forum thread with a real fix.
I don't think I'd use Arch for a corporate production server for change management reasons alone, but for a home desktop and my home server, it's actually the distribution that's required me to do the _least_ "Linux crap" to keep it going.
I think op meant the subjective feeling of having a system that runs in a stable manner. I don't quite follow their reasoning either (maybe the smaller changesets expose compatibility bugs before affecting general ux?), but I agree that arch was a joy for me to use and felt "stable".
>the skill barrier to getting a full system is “basic literacy, to read the wiki”
if GenZ knew how to read they would be very disappointed right now
in the age of tablets and tiktok, basic literacy is quite a big ask
It really is nothing new. People quickly close windows with errors, they go out of they way to avoid reading actual message.
That's what they said about GenX, Millennials, and probably every other generation before them. Something something, "OK boomer."
they absolutely did not say that tiktok and tablets are destroying basic literacy about GenX or Millenials
if anything, they said the kids were good with technology
Yeah cause that's what he was talking about
I know. I was emphasising that this time is not like before. That there are major differences, and things look similar only on a very superficial level.
If ubuntu had stuck with APT for software installs instead of snap and whatever else, it would be a lock less headachey
I've started my Linux journey a decent year ago. It's been fun but I'm happy that they're such a great community to troubleshoot along with me. Never tried Arch but I do love a barebones no fuzz system.
> idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro
Because Arch maintainers are a bunch of elitist gatekeepers that don't accept any level of knowledge that is lower than theirs. You can see that through every forum interaction generally and any discussion about the installation process specifically.
Arch is great btw. It could be greater, if all maintainers would quit.
As a long-time Linux user who fairly recently dropped the Windows partition entirely, I do think the remaining chafing points are these:
* UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous mess. And now you don't just have different versions of GTK vs QT to keep track off, but also X vs Wayland, and their various compatibility layers.
* Support for non-standard DPI monitors sucks, mostly because of the previous point. Wayland has fractional scaling as a sort-of workaround if you can tolerate the entire screen being blurry. Every other major OS can deal with this.
* Anything to do with configuring webcams feels like you're suddenly in thrown back 20 years into the past. It'll probably work fine out of the box, but if it doesn't. Hoo boy.
* Audio filtering is a pain to set up.
> UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous mess
I thought you were talking about Windows there. There are 4 (5?) different UI paradigms within Windows, and doing one thing sometimes requires you to interact with each of them.
At least on Linux, with GTK/KDE, you can pick a camp and have a somewhat consistent experience, with a few outliers. Plus many apps now just use CSD and fully integrate their designs to the window, so it's hopeless to have every window styling be consistent.
I never had to mind X vs Wayland when starting user applications tho.
If we're talking about mass adoption of Linux then there really has to be no concept of even "picking a camp". The vast majority of users - even techy people - will not understand what a window manager is, never mind be capable of choosing one.
Yes, there are many UI implementations in Windows but they are almost totally transparent to the user (no pun intended), and they can all run on the same system at once.
Hard disagree. You can run the same programs on any DE or Window Manager or even without one (on pure X11 for example). That's not a hurdle it's a feature.
Users who don't know about the feature can just use a pre-configured system like Mint Cinnamon and never know about any of these things.
> Yes, there are many UI implementations in Windows but they are almost totally transparent to the user (no pun intended), and they can all run on the same system at once.
I mean this is a solved problem on linux using modern distributions like NixOS or even 'normal' distros with flatpak, appimage, etc. I haven't had to deal with anything like this in years.
The windows UIs are way more different than linux was. There was a time in the 90s where UIs were expected to follow platform specifics. These days, most UIs don't and they're almost kind of like the branding. Thus, this is not as big a deal as you're making it out to be. If anything, things like the gnome apps and gtk4 are more consistent than any windows app.
>many apps now just use CSD
If there's something I hate about Linux, it's CSD (Client-Side Decorations, in case people don't know what it is).
If I wanted all my apps to look different from each other, I'd use macOS. I want a clean desktop environment, with predictable window frames that are customizable and they all look the same. CSD destroys that.
Conversely, I don't want all of my apps to look identical to each other. I want to be able to tell with a submoment of a glance what app I am working on or looking for without having to cognitively engage to locate it, breaking my state of flow in the process.
> UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous mess.
At least things look more or less the same over time. With commercial offerings one day you open your laptop and suddenly everything looks different and all the functions are in a different submenu because some designer thought it was cool or some manager needed a raise.
> It'll probably work fine out of the box, but if it doesn't. Hoo boy.
LLMs are actually very useful for Linux configuration problems. They might even be the reason so many users made the switch recently.
They're pretty good for most things, yes... but man was it rough figuring out getting my IP allocation routing right on my Proxmox server. The system is issued a primary IP, and need to route my subnet through that to my VMs... wasn't too bad once I got it working... I'd also wanted a dnat for "internal" services, and that's where it got tricky.
I need to refresh myself as I'm wanting to move from a /29 to a /28 ... mostly been lazy about not getting it done, but actually mqking progress oo some hobby stuff with Claude Code... definitely a force multiplier, but I'm not quite at a "vibe code" level of trust, so it's still a bit of a slog.
You could just let the VMs be normal IPs on the network....
Where would those IPs route to/from if it didn't have a configured default gateway exactly?
The machine got a single IP, I had to route the CIDR block using that IP as the gateway in the host OS. The VMs wouldn't just get assigned additional real IPs.
KDE & Gnome are both guilty of the same.
On UI frameworks... mostly agree, I say this as a COSMIC user even... so many apps still don't show up right in the tray, but it's getting a bit better, I always found KDE to be noisy, and don't like how overtly political the Gnome guys are. So far Wayland hasn't been bad, X apps pretty much just work, even if they don't scale right.
I'm on a very large OLED 3440x1440 display and haven't had too many issues... some apps seem to just drop out, I'm not sure if they are on a different workspace or something as I tend to just stick to single screen, single display. I need to take the time to tweak my hotkeys for window pinning. I'll usually have my browser to half the screen and my editor and terminal on the other half... sometimes stretching the editor to 2/3 covering part of the browser. I'm usually zoomed in 25-30% in my editor and browser... I'd scale the UI 25% directly, like on windows or mac, but you're right it's worse.
For webcams, I don't use anything too advanced, but the Nexigo cams I've been using lately have been working very well... they're the least painful part of my setup, and even though I tend to use a BT headset, I use the webcam mic as switching in and out of stereo/mono mode for the headset mic doesn't always work right in Linux.
On audio filtering, I can only imagine... though would assume it's finally starting to get better with whatever the current standard is (pipewire?), which from what I understand is closer to what mac's interfaces are. I know a few audio guys and they hate Windows and mostly are shy to even consider Linux.
> * UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous me
I'd take balkanization over the "we force-migrate everyone to the hot new thing where nothing works".
> It'll probably work fine out of the box, but if it doesn't.
Drivers are a pain point and will probably stay so until the market share is too large for the hardware vendors to ignore. Which probably aren't happening any time soon, sadly.
This is not a driver issue I'm talking about. It's a "best way to adjust the white balance is with this GTK+-2.0 app that hasn't seen maintenance since the Bush administration" issue.
Yes, this one is quite a problem as well.
> I'd take balkanization over the "we force-migrate everyone to the hot new thing where nothing works".
The UI framework for macOS has not changed in any substantial design-update-requiring ways since OS X was first released. They did add stuff (animations as a core concept, most notably).
The UI framework for Windows has changed even less, though it's more of a mess because there are several different ones, with an unclear relationship to each other. win32 won't hurt though, and it hasn't changed in any significant ways since dinosaurs roamed the silicon savannahs.
The UI framework for Linux ... oh wait, there isn't one.
I had to dump a perfectly fine c.2012 workstation recently because of video driver limitations. Could no longer stay current on my flavor of Linux (OpenSUSE) and have better than hideous display resolution limited to just one monitor. NVIDIA’s proprietary drivers are great, but the limited support lifecycle plus poor open source coverage is actually making Linux turn fine systems into trash just the way Windows used to do.
>poor open source coverage is actually making Linux turn fine systems into trash just the way Windows used to do.
I'd blame Linux as a very small percentage of the problem here. This is on NVIDIA ensuring their hardware doesn't last to long and forcing you to throw it away eventually. Open source can make the monitor 'work' but really aren't efficient, and really can never be efficient because NVIDIA doesn't release the needed information and directly competes with their proprietary driver.
Couldn't you swap out for a now lower level AMD GPU? An RX 6600 should be under $200 and likely at least as good as what you were running... unless you were doing specific CUDA workloads. Even on PCIe 2/3, it should be fine.
> Wayland has fractional scaling as a sort-of workaround if you can tolerate the entire screen being blurry. Every other major OS can deal with this.
I think Windows is the only other one which really does this properly, macOS also does the hack where they simulate fractional scales by rendering with an integer scale at a non-native resolution then scaling it down.
> I think Windows is the only other one which really does this properly
Windows is the only one that does this properly.
Windows handles high pixel density on a per-application, per-display basis. This is the most fine-grained. It's pretty easy to opt in on reasonably modern frameworks, too; just add in the necessary key in the resource manifest; done. [1]
Linux + Xorg has a global pixel density scale factor. KDE/Qt handles this OK; GNOME/GTK break when the scaling factor is not an integer multiple of 96 and cause raster scaling.
Linux + Wayland has per-display scaling factors, but Chromium, GNOME, and GTK break the same way as the Xorg setup. KDE/Qt are a bit better, but I'm quite certain the taskbar icons are sharper on Xorg than they are on Wayland. I think this boils down to subpixel rendering not being enabled.
And of course, every application on Linux in theory can handle high pixel density, but there is a zoo of environment variables and command-line arguments that need to be passed for the ideal result.
On macOS, if the pixel density of the target display is at least some Apple-blessed number that they consider 'Retina', then the 'Retina' resolutions are enabled. At resolutions that are not integer multiples of the physical resolution, the framebuffer is four times the resolution of the displayed values (twice in each dimension), and then the final result is raster-scaled with some sinc/Lanczos algorithm back down to the physical resolution. This shows up as ringing artifacts, which are very obvious with high-contrast, thin regions like text.
On non-retina resolutions, there is zero concept of 'scaling factor' whatsoever; you can choose another resolution, but it will be raster-scaled (usually up) with some bi/trilinear filtering, and the entire screen is blurry. The last time Windows had such brute-force rendering was in Windows XP, 25 years ago.
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/win32/hidpi/settin...
> Windows is the only one that does this properly. Windows handles high pixel density on a per-application, per-display basis.
This is not our [0] experience. macOS handles things on a per-section-of-window, per-application, per-display basis. You can split a window across two monitors at two different DPIs, and it will display perfectly. This does not happen on Windows, or we have not found the right way to make it work thus far.
[0] ardour.org
> macOS handles things on a per-section-of-window, per-application, per-display basis.
No, it does not. If you have two displays with different physical pixel densities, and especially if they are sufficiently different that Apple will consider one 'Retina' and 'not Retina' (this is usually the case if, for instance, you have your MacBook's display—which probably is 'Retina'—beneath a 2560 × 1440, 336 × 597 mm monitor, which is 'not Retina'), then the part of the window on the non-Retina display will be raster-scaled to account for the difference. This is how KDE Plasma on Wayland handles it, too.
In my opinion, any raster-scaling of vector/text UI is a deal-breaker.
> Windows is the only one that does this properly.
How can you say this when applications render either minuscule or gigantic, either way with contents totally out of proportion, seemingly at random?
I don’t have to pull out a magnifying glass to notice those issues.
These were probably written against the old-school Win32. It's pretty easy to fix.
Done.For MMC snap-ins like `diskmgmt.msc`, `services.msc`, or `devmgr.msc`, there's a Registry key you can set. See this ServerFault question: https://serverfault.com/q/570785/535358
The 'doing it right' part is from how it should be done, but it still needs application support.
The thing is X11/Xorg can also theoretically do the same thing (and most likely Wayland too) but it needs, you guessed it, application (and window manager / compositor) support.
That's roughly what I did for my ANSI console/viewer... I started with EGA resolution, and each ega pixel renders 3x4 in its' buffer then a minor blur, then scaled to fit the render area. The effect is really good down to about 960px wide, which is a bit bigger in terms of real pixels than the original... at 640px wide, it's a little hard to make out the actual pixels... but it's the best way I could think of to handle the non-square pixels of original EGA or VGA... I went with EGA because the ratio is slightly cleaner IMO. It's also what OG RIPterm used.
I'm using KDE with Wayland and 2 non-standard DPI monitors (one at 100% the other at 150% scale). No workarounds needed, nothing is blurry. I think your experience comes from GNOME which lacks behind in this regard.
FWIW, I can do the same with KDE on Xorg with Gentoo Linux.
Since the introduction of the XSETTINGS protocol in like 2003 or 2005 or so to provide a common cross-toolkit mechanism to communicate system settings, the absence of "non-integer" scaling support has always been the fault of the GUI toolkits.
> I think your experience comes from GNOME which lacks behind in this regard.
When doesn't GNOME lag behind? Honestly, most of Wayland's problems have been because a project that expects protocol implementers and extenders to cooperate in order to make the project work set those expectations while knowing that GNOME was going to be one of those parties whose cooperation was required.
Mint/cinnamon here at 150%, X11, not blurry. It’s FUD.
The issue with X11 is that it's not dynamic. Think using a laptop, which you sometimes connect to a screen on which you require a different scale. X11 won't handle different scales, and it also won't switch from one to the other without restarting it.
> The issue with X11 is that it's not dynamic.
No, it is. Maybe you're using an ancient (or misconfigured) Xorg? Or maybe you've never used a GTK program? One prereq is that you have a daemon running that speaks the ~20 year old XSETTINGS protocol (such as 'xsettingsd'). Another prereq is that you have a DE and GUI toolkit new enough to know how to react to scaling changes. [0]
Also, for some damn reason, QT and FLTK programs need to be restarted in order to render with the new screen scaling ratio, but GTK programs pick up the changes immediately. Based on my investigation, this is a deficiency in how QT and FLTK react to the information they're being provided with.
At least on my system, the KDE settings dialog that lets you adjust screen scaling only exposes a single slider that applies to the entire screen. However, I've bothered to look at (and play with) what's actually going on under the hood, and the underlying systems totally expose per-display scaling factors... but for some reason the KDE control widget doesn't bother to let you use them. Go figure.
[0] I don't know where the cutoff point is, but I know folks have reported to me that their Debian-delivered Xorg installs totally failed to do "non-integer" scaling (dynamic or otherwise), but I've been able to do this on my Gentoo Linux machines for quite some time.
- Yes. I think big players in Linux should start supporting core functionalities in GNOME and KDE, and make it polished for laptops and desktops and that would be very cool. For a long time, KDE had a problem of having too many things under its umbrella. Now, with separation of Plasma Desktop and Applications, focusing on Plasma Desktop and KDE PIM should be a good step.
- Kind of ties to the old point: KDE on Wayland does this extremely well.
- You're back to 20 years because problems are exactly from 20 years ago. Vendors refusing to support linux with d rivers.
- Audio filtering? Interesting. I know people who use Pipewire + Jack quite reasonably. But may be you have usecase I am now aware of? Would be happy to hear some.
> Wayland has fractional scaling as a sort-of workaround if you can tolerate the entire screen being blurry
Not blurry for me on KDE and I wouldn't tolerate blurry, I'd prefer the imperfect solution of using bigger fonts.
KDE Plasma 6 might be the only desktop that does this right on Linux.
Hardware support for esoteric things such as the new generation of Wacom EMR is still awkward --- I was able to get the previous gen working on a ThinkPad X61T using Lubuntu --- wish that there was such an easy way to try out Linux on my Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360....
> * Support for non-standard DPI monitors sucks, mostly because of the previous point. Wayland has fractional scaling as a sort-of workaround if you can tolerate the entire screen being blurry. Every other major OS can deal with this.
This sounds like you're using some old software. GNOME and sway have clean fractional scaling without blurring, though that hasn't always been the case (it used to be terrible).
Fractional scaling on Wayland is only blurry for X apps, and even then, most apps have Wayland support at this point, so for the remaining apps, just turn off Xwayland scaling, and using native scaling through env vars and flags, and no more blurriness.
> UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous mess.
Amen.
But, which OS doesn't have this problem? I'm currently running windows on a work laptop and even freaking first-party apps have a different look and behave differently from one another. Teams can't even be assed to use standard windows notifications! And don't get me started on electron apps, of which most apps are nowadays, each coming with their own look and feel.
Also, have you tried switching from light to dark mode, say at night? The task manager changes only partially. The explorer copy info window doesn't even have a dark mode! On outlook the window controls don't change colour, so you end up with black on black or white on white. You can't possibly hold up windows as a model of uniform UI.
So while I agree that this situation is terrible, I wouldn't pin it on the linux ecosystem(s).
> Every other major OS can deal with [high dpi].
Don't know about mac os, but on Windows it's a shitshow. We use some very high DPI displays at work which I have to run at 200%, every other screen I use is 100%. Even the freaking start menu is blurry! It only works well if I boot the machine with the high-dpi display attached. If I plug it in after a while (think going to work with the laptop asleep), the thing's blurry! Some taskbar icons don't adapt, so I sometimes have tiny icons, or huge cropped ones if I unplug the external monitor. Plasma doesn't do this.
IME KDE/Plasma 6 works perfectly with mixed DPI (but I admit I haven't tried "fractional" scales). The only app which doesn't play ball 100% is IntelliJ (scaling works, it's sharp, but the mouse cursor is the wrong size).
> Audio filtering is a pain to set up.
What do you mean? I've been using easyeffects for more than five years now to apply either a parametric EQ to my speakers or a convolver to my headphones. Works perfectly for all the apps, or I can choose which apps it should alter. The PEQ adds a bit of a latency, but applications seem to be aware of it, so if I play videos (even youtube on firefox with gpu decoding!) it stays in sync. It detects the output and loads presets accordingly. I also don't have to reboot when I connect some new audio device, like BT headphones (well, technically, on Windows I don't anymore, either, since for some reason it can't connect to either of my headphones at all). I would love to have something similar on windows, but the best I found isn't as polished. It also doesn't support dark mode, so it burns my eyes at night.
I came to rely pretty heavily on Docker and WSL(2) in Windows. I was an insiders user for a bit over a decade, and worked with .Net and C# since it was "ASP+" ...
I had setup a dual boot when I swapped my old GTX 1080 for an RX 5700XT, figuring the "open source" drivers would give me a good Linux experience... it didn't. Every other update was a blank/black screen and me without a good remote config to try to recover it. After about 6 months it was actually stable, but I'd since gone ahead and paid too much for an RTX 3080, and gone back to my windows drive...
I still used WSL almost all day, relying mostly on VS Code and a Browser open, terminal commands through WSL remoting in Code and results etc. on the browser.
Then, one day, I clicked the trusty super/win menu and started typing in the name of he installed program I wanted to run... a freaking ad. In the start menu search results. I mean, it was a beta channel of windows, but the fact that anyone thought this was a good idea and it got implemented, I was out.
I rebooted my personal desktop back to Linux... ran all the updates and it's run smoothly since. My current RX 9070XT better still, couldn't be happier. And it does everything I want it to do, and there's enough games in Steam through Proton that I can play what I want, when I want. Even the last half year on Pop Coxmic pre-release versions was overall less painful than a lot of my Windows experiences the past few years. Still not perfect, but at least it's fast and doesn't fail in ways that Windows now seems to regularly.
Whoever is steering Windows development at Microsoft is clearly drunk at the wheel over something that should be the most "done" and polished product on the planet and it just keeps getting worse.
Yeah. The ads in he start menu are a sign that you are no longer the customer, you are the product. Windows has other similar “features”.
I do not have ads in my start menu, and no, I didn't "debloat" my PC. This is a base install where I flipped a couple of settings in the start menu options.
How generous of them to allow their paying user to disable the ads. It's only a matter of time until this either becomes some sort of premium feature.
It was a test they ran on Insiders channel to see how people reacted to them. It never mated it into GA, or for that matter the entire insiders channels... They'll feature gate things to some insiders users and A/B test them to see how the user response looks. There was a bit of an uproar at the time for those that saw them, including myself... I ditched windows altogether (except my assigned work laptop).
You're missing the point entirely.
The problem isn't that ads can be disabled. The problem is that a paid operating system ships with ads in the first place. Full stop. There's no universe where that's acceptable product design, and the fact that you can disable them (for now, at least) doesn't make it less offensive.
I don't understand why you're going to bat for a trillion-dollar corporation here. Your settings work now. Great. They won't after the next feature update, this is a well-documented pattern. Windows updates routinely re-enable telemetry, Bing integration, and promotional content that users explicitly disabled. You're not configuring your OS, you're fighting it.
The TPM2 requirement is pure planned obsolescence. Millions of perfectly good machines binned because Microsoft decided hardware from 2016 is suddenly "insecure"... whilst the actual benefit is DRM enforcement and remote attestation.
It's a corporate compliance tool, not a security feature.
The Insiders build being referenced had actual web advertisements in search results. That's where this is headed. If you're comfortable defending that trajectory, carry on flipping those settings.
>whilst the actual benefit is DRM enforcement and remote attestation.
This is not highlighted nearly enough. It's very bad.
You paid for windows 11? They basically give it away to end users.
Yes, I paid for Windows 11. It came bundled with the £1,900 laptop I bought. The fact that the licence cost is hidden in the hardware price doesn't make it free.
And even if it were free, which it isn't, that still wouldn't justify ads. Android is free. Linux is free. Neither ships with gambling app promotions in the system UI.
Microsoft made $20 billion in Windows revenue last year. They're not a scrappy startup looking for alternative monetisation. The ads exist because they can get away with it, not because they need to.
Not really. Only upgrading an existing Windows 10 installation is free.
> The problem is that a paid operating system ships with ads in the first place.
You never buy a laptop or pre-build? They are often full of ads that are not Microsoft Windows build in but add-on by the OEM.
Now i agree that Ads in your OS that you paid for, is a big nono. I never understood why Microsoft threats Home and Pro as almost the exact same. Sell Home for cheaper and with Ads, but keep the more expensive Pro clean. Microsoft can do that easily because Windows Server is just that ...
But on the Linux front, i have never been happy with the desktop experience. Often a lot of small details are missing, if the DE itself not outright crashes (KDE, master in Plasma/Widget crashes!). And so many other desktop feel like they have been made in the 90s (probably are) and never gotten updated.
And i do not run W11, still on old and very stable W10. There is no reason to upgrade that i see. Did the same with W7, for years after support ended (and by that time W10 was well polished and less buggy).
The problem is, what does Linux Desktop offer me more, then a few annoyances that i can remove after a fresh install? Often a lot more trouble with the need to use the terminal for things, that are ancient in Windows. That is the problem ... With Apple, you can get insane good M-CPU hardware (yes, mem/storage is insane), for the os/desktop switch.
I noticed that often the people who switch to Linux, are more likely to send more time into finetuning their OS, tinkering around, etc... aka people with more time on their hands. But when you get a bit older, you simply want something that works and gives you no trouble. I can literally upgrade my PC here from a NVidia to AMD or visa versa, and it will simply work with the correct full performance drivers. Its that convenience that is the draw to keep using (even ifs a older) Windows.
For now 25 years every few years, i look at upgrading to Linux permanently, install a few distro's and go back. Linus Desktop does not feel like you gain a massive benefit, if that makes sense? Especially not if your like me, who simply rides out Microsoft their bad OS releases. What is the killer features that you say, hey, Linux Desktop is insane good, it has X, Y, Z that Microsoft does not have, its ... That is the issue in my book. Yes, it has no adds but that is like 5 min work on a fresh install, a 2 min job of copy/past a cleanup script to remove the spyware and other crap and your good for year. So again, killer features?
Often a lot of programs that are less developed or stripped down compared to Windows, let alone way too often 90 style feels programs. You can tell its made by developers often, with no GUI / Graphical developers involved lol
I said it a 1000 times but Linux Desktop suffers from a lot of distro redoing the same time over and over again. Resulting in this lag ...
That is my yearly Linux rant hahaha. And yes, i know, W11 is a disaster but i simply wait it out on W10, and see what the future brings when the whole AI hype dies down and Microsoft loses too much customers. I am betting that somebody is going to get scared at MS and we then get a better W12 again.
I've been pretty happy with Pop in general, I did upgrade to COSMIC pre-release about 6 months ago, and although there have been rough edges, less than some of my Win11 experiences. I don't really fiddle that much in practice, I did spend a year with Budgie, but only the first week fiddling. Pop's out of the box is about 90% of what I want, which is better than most.
I do use a Macbook M1 Air for my personal laptop and have used them for work off and on over the years... I'm currently using a very locked down windows laptop assigned from work. Not having WSL and Docker have held me back a lot though.
In the end, I do most of my work in Linux anyway... it's where what I work on tends to get deployed and I don't really do much that doesn't work on Linux without issue at this point. Windows, specifically since Win11 has continued to piss me off and I jumped when I saw something that was just too much for me to consider dealing with. I ran insiders for years to get the latest WSL integrations and features. This bit me a few times, but was largely worth it, until it wasn't anymore.
C# work is paying the bills... would I rather work on Rust or TS, sure... but I am where I am. I'm similar to you in that I looked at Linux every few years, kicked the tires, ran it for a month or a couple weeks and always went back. This time a couple years ago... it stuck. Ironically, my grandmother used Linux much longer than I ever did on her computer that I maintained for her. For her, it just worked, and she didn't need much beyond the browser.
> You never buy a laptop or pre-build? They are often full of ads that are not Microsoft Windows build in but add-on by the OEM.
This was never acceptable, but we tolerated it because it subsidised the cost of the laptop, OEMs decided the trade-off and you could vote with your wallet for cleaner experiences (often with the same manufacturer).
Show me the ThinkPad T or X series (or EliteBook, or Precision/Latitude) that shipped with ads and I'll take it as a valid point. Otherwise, it's not valid.
For those that want to remove items, You can quickly disable these options by going into Settings > Personalization > Start and turn off "Show recommendations for tips, shortcuts, new apps, and more".
It's like a 10 second fix and basically everything is gone.
That's not what I'm referring to... it was a beta test that included actual internet ads in the start menu search results... It was literally a product I was looking at on the previous day.
Again, let's clarify here.
Microsoft implemented, in its Beta Windows Insider Channel in 2024, ads in the "Recommended" section of the Start Menu. The very section I just described pretty plainly how to turn off.
I mean I don't understand why everyone is so puffed up about this. You read some internet headline and start screeching about it on social media as if it doesn't take 2 seconds to literally turn off.
AGAIN this is NOT what I was referring to... I'm referring to when you start typing in the name of a program you have installed, and you get a short list of matches, with maybe additional results... not a PRODUCT ADVERTISEMENT (not software) from the internet at the top, which is what I got.
It's not a feature that should EVER exist at an OS level... I didn't even mind the adjacent product ads or the Recommended section you mention that much... but it's emphatically not what I'm fucking talking about.
The fact that this was even something that was implemented and tested means that I'm not someone who will buy or choose Microsoft Windows at all from here forward. I have over 3 decades of development experience on/for/with software that runs on Windows.
An even then... It doesn't matter if I can shut it off, it shouldn't have existed in the first place.
It might be different if they didn't push updates every other month that changed settings like default browser back to their products.
You're right that there are simple fixes but the point is that Microsoft is no longer on your side. You're now stuck defensivly scrambling for value in a product where you are no longer the customer.
The Ass-Fucker 3000 fucks you in the arse when you use your car ignition.
But don't get bent out of shape - you can disable it in settings. Takes 10 seconds. Assuming you know it exists and the option doesn't disappear in a future update.
And if it re-enables itself after the next patch? Well, at least the option to disable it still exists! Probably.
Why would you buy a different car? It's so easy to turn off. What, you want to use a BMW? Be a BMW-user? A sheep? All your tools already integrate with our car anyway. There's no real choice, is there - unless you want to be a try-hard. And maybe it doesn't even work properly. You don't want that hassle, do you? Just accept the Ass-Fucker 3000. Next week they'll add the Wife-Beater 2000, but don't worry -that'll have a toggle too.
Cope harder. I wish I had apologists like you for my software.
This sounds like Boeing MCAS cant.
It's really hard to maintain a product team where the mandate is just "don't break anything and keep the quality high". Especially something with as big of an installed base as Windows.
The team will look for excuses to build new and exciting stuff and new opportunities to increase revenue. Even if the product is pretty much "done".
I disagree, I think companies mostly just don't want to spend development money on existing "finished" products. That's the smell I'm getting from microsoft.
There are plenty of easily identifiable issues with performance in windows 11. There should be people in the windows team dedicated to eliminating "jank". MS product owners, on the other hand, are much more interested in getting copilot integrations into every menu. That's an "easy" task which looks good on a scorecard when you complete it.
No, it really shouldn't be... You can reduce headcount a lot, which they did, and concentrate on bugs (including security reports), while working with hardware vendors for if/when new features need to be integrated for better usability.
If/when you decide to do a redesign, it should be limited to a specific area, or done in such a way that all functionality gets moved to its' new UI/UX in a specified timeframe and released when done. Not, oh, here's a new right click menu that you now have an extra click 1/3 of the time for the old menu that has what you are actually looking for because the old extension interface was broken.
Want a real exercise in fun ... just for fun, because I know it's not as useful on a laptop, but was fun on desktops... get a screensaver working in windows that runs for an hour or so before going to sleep... just try it... that's a fun exercise in frustration... oh, it's still in there, but every third update will disable it all again. I get it... but you know what, I want my matrix screensaver to run when I'm only away for a few minutes or over lunch.
The mandate seams to be "squeeze everything for a subscription fee and keep the quality... actually just the first thing".
Every month more and more people switch to Linux and I just love it. I'm tired of one company controlling the core operating system of 85% of desktop computers and users being at their whim.
You want proprietary programs? Alright, fine, one can argue for that. But the central, core operating system of general purpose computers should be free and fully controllable by the users that own them!
> Every month more and more people switch to Linux
We've been hearing this for decades and yet the home Linux userbase is microscopic and somehow even smaller than ever. Unless we're going to count Google's Android and Chrome OS. Those are the only Linux-based distributions that have ever gained market share over desktop Windows.
Somehow I think the stars might be aligning this time though. People are genuinely fed up with Windows and governments around the world are loudly thinking about how to reduce dependence on US tech. And then there is Proton which makes it much easier for Gamers to jump ship. To me it feels like there is more momentum than ever for this.
On the other hand I am also a realist and I don't think that Linux will take over the Desktop, but it will certainly have its biggest growth year ever in 2026.
> Somehow I think the stars might be aligning this time though
> governments around the world are loudly thinking about how to reduce dependence on US tech
I am definitely sympathetic, after all, I worked for a major Linux company for quite a few years, started using Linux RH) in 1994, and even wrote some network related kernel modules.
However, this switch to Linux is not going to happen (apart from where it is already used heavily, from servers to many non-PC systems).
I have been in projects for large companies but also government on and off. Now, I manage the IT of a small (<50 employees) non-IT business with people in several countries.
People who actually comment in these discussions seem to be entirely focused on the OS itself. But that is what matters the least in business. Office is another, and even there most people who don't deal with it at scale are way too focused on some use case where individuals write documents and do some spreadsheeting. It's almost always about a very small setup, or even just a single PC.
However, the Microsoft stack is sooooo much more. ID management. Device management. Uncountable number of little helpers in form of software and scripts that you cannot port to a Linux based stack without significant effort. Entire mail domains are managed by Office 265 - you own the domain and the DNS records, you get licenses for Office365 from MS, you point the DNS records to Microsoft, you are done.
Sure, MS tools and the various admin websites are a mess, duplicating many things, making others hard to find. But nobody in the world would be able to provide soooo much stuff while doing a better job. The truth is, they keep continuously innovating and I can see it, little things just conveniently showing up, like that I now have a Teams button to create an AI script of my conversations, or that if more than one person opens an Office document that is stored in OneDrive we can see each other inside the document, cursor positions, and who has it open.
Nobody in their right mind will switch their entir4e org to Linux unless they have some really good reasons, a lot of resources to spare, and a lot of experience. Most businesses, for whom IT is not the be-all-end-all but just a tool will not switch.
But something can be done.
The EU could, for example, start requiring other stacks for new special cases. They cannot tell the whole economy to switch, not even a fraction of it, but they could start with new government software. Maybe - depends on how it has to fit into the existing mostly Microsoft infrastructure.
They could also require more apps to be web-only. I once wrote some code for some government agency to manage business registrations, and it was web software.
The focus would have to be to start creating strong niches for local business to start making money using other stacks, and to take the long road, slowly replace US based stacks over the next two or three decades. At the same time, enact policies that let local business grow using alternative stacks, providing a safe cache-flow that does not have to compete with US based ones.
The EU also needs some better scaling. The nice thing about the MS stack is that I can use it everywhere, in almost all countries. The alternative cannot be that a business would have to use a different local company in each country.
I read a month ago that EU travel to the US is down - by only ~3%. Just like with any calls for boycott of this and that, the truth is that those commenting are a very tiny fraction. The vast majority of people and businesses are not commenting in these threads (or at all), and their focus is on their own business and domain problems first of all. Switching their IT stack will only done by force, if the US were to do something really drastic that crashes some targeted countries Microsoft- and Cloud-IT.
> However, the Microsoft stack is sooooo much more. ID management. Device management. Uncountable number of little helpers in form of software and scripts that you cannot port to a Linux based stack without significant effort. Entire mail domains are managed by Office 265 - you own the domain and the DNS records, you get licenses for Office365 from MS, you point the DNS records to Microsoft, you are done.
Is there any bit of this that is not web based or does not support Linux nowadays? Office 365 runs on a browser, and even Intune supports some enterprise oriented distributions, like RH, so device management shouldn't be a problem. But even if none of that was true, there is certainly competition in the IT management space. Defaulting to Microsoft just because of a Windows based fleet doesn't sound like a great idea.
> The truth is, they keep continuously innovating and I can see it, little things just conveniently showing up, like that I now have a Teams button to create an AI script of my conversations, or that if more than one person opens an Office document that is stored in OneDrive we can see each other inside the document, cursor positions, and who has it open.
This is stuff other vendors have been offering for ages now.
The browser versions of the Office apps aren't comparable to the native apps, and also don't support whatever native integrations (like VBA add-ins) companies use.
They may not be, but I can almost guarantee that Microsoft will get rid of them sooner than later.
Trading dependency on a company in Redmond, WA, USA, for one in mountain view, CA, USA does nothing for moving away from USA in the dependency chain, but it proves that it's possible. And I know it's possible as there are several billion-dollar companies in Google Workspace I know of personally. And if it's possible for them, it means it's possible for the EU to get there. The only question is will they ever? Let's form a committee to schedule a meeting to look into that question.
"Possible" is everything that does not violate any laws of the universe, that is not a useful criterion!
Oh and thanks for ignoring everything I wrote I guess. Not that I expected anything different, it is always the same in these threads after all. Why bother with arguments, especially those of the person you respond to?
But you see, this "laziness" actually supports my point. Not even you want to do the hard thing and bother with what somebody else thinks when there is a much easier path. But you expect others to care about the things that you care about, without spending much effort even merely understanding their position.
Go and download the archives of Reddit, there are plenty of torrents out there. Filter to a sub like r/gaming. Relative frequency graph of Linux mentions. You'll see a magnitude increase over the last 12 months compared to years before. It's real.
Must admit, not sure if the data torrents are uptodate now that Reddit anti-scrapes so hard to raise their premium on the exclusive contract to the highest bidder, OpenAI.
Calling 4-5% marketshare microscopic is not fair. I get it if it was still stuck at 1%, but it's growing, and the rate of growth has been increasing too.
Is the desktop/laptop linux market share really over 4%? What is that based on?
At least according to Statcounter, Linux is currently at 3.86% worldwide: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide.
It's slightly larger in the US at 5.28%: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-st...
In India, where I live, it's surprisingly at 6.51%: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/india
Take this with a grain of salt, because numbers from Statcounter are not fully accurate. However, none of those numbers are small. 3.86% of the entire PC market is not something to scoff at.
There's also the people like me that couldn't historically run certain games well directly on Linux, so we have Windows virtual machines with GPU passthrough. Which would read as me being a Windows user in the Steam stats, but a Linux user in other stats.
The state of gaming has improved drastically since I started doing it that way, though, and I'm considering ditching the VM entirely. Multiplayer games seem to be getting the hint about anticheat exclusion on Linux. ARC Raiders, for example, is a competitive game and runs flawlessly directly on Linux.
Last time I looked on stat counter it showed 4 and something percent. That's where I pulled the number from. But it seems they updated it to 3.86 now. It's so over for the Linux community.
The high amount of "Unknown" is interesting. Especially as it doubled in the last 6-8 months.
The Steam survey has it at 3.6%, although that's obviously skewed towards gamers, and counts Steam Decks in addition to desktops.
According to Statcounter, Linux's share is 3.86% and rising; but I'd imagine that quite a bit of the almost 16% 'unknown' is also Linux.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
Not insignificant at all.
Its not ... The problem is that people do not realize that devices like Steam Deck are also considered Linux desktop devices in those numbers. Chrome tends to also inflate those numbers. Yes, they are Linux desktops but not in the way people are comparing Windows to Linux.
The real number is closer to 2.5% somewhere. What is still growth but nowhere the "year of the Linux desktop".
You tend to see a rather vocal minority that makes you feel like there is some major switch but looking here in the comments, people that switched 8 years, 12 year, 20 years ago are people that are part of the old statistics. There are some new converts but not what you expect to see despite Linux now also being more gaming compatible.
It still has minor issues (beyond anti-cheat), that involve people fixing things, less then the past. But its still not the often click and play, works under every resolution, has no graphic issue etc etc. That is the part people often do not tell you, because a lot of people are more thinkers, so a issue pops up, they fix it and forget about it.
Ironically, MacOS just dominates as the real alternative to Windows in so many aspects. If Apple actually got their act together about gaming, it can trigger a actual strong contender to Windows.
A growth of 4% over 20 years is not an increasing rate. And yes, 4% marketshare is microscopic. macOS has a bigger share but you wouldn't say macOS is massive. Posts like this are cheerleading OS's because everything needs to be a zero sum competition.
But it's also not not an increasing rate, there's not enough information to know if the rate is increasing or not.
As phones replace desktop computers for non-technical users, leaving a concentration of "skilled" users, my suspicion is that the pattern will resemble the quote "Slowly, then all at once."
I mean, this is literally false? Desktop Linux userbase is growing, it's bigger than it has ever been even without including ChromeOS, and more OEMs are shipping devices with desktop linux than ever before (Valve's suite of devices, multiple laptop vendors including major ones like Lenovo, a few SteamDeck competitors)
More and more desktop apps are just becoming websites. More and more desktop apps are using Electron rather than some native app. Windows is slowly becoming a dumpster fire in terms of usability and issues. Most games these days Just Work on Linux without any tinkering.
While I hardly think that this year will be "the year of the Linux desktop" or whatever, but if these trends keep going, I really foresee Linux market share growing, slowly, each year, until it's not so microscopic anymore.
I mean - steam deck was a pretty significant inflection point quite recently. Making gaming viable on linux via a popular consumer product is a huge deal and starts to kill one of desktop linux's single biggest barriers to adoption.
According to the Steam Hardware Survey (https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...) only ~3.6% Steam users use Linux and these statistics include the Steam Deck users. SteamOS accounts for ~26% of Linux users, which in turn brings down the count to ~2.6%. For comparision, MacOS is ~2.1% of the market share at the moment. Wake me up when Linux gets to 10%.
> You had unsaved work? Too bad, it's gone, get bent.
This has happened to me a couple of times. I put the PC to sleep and the next morning I discover it has decided to close everything to install an update.
Not using Windows ever again to do any work. Say what you will about Apple but at least they don't do crap like this.
I installed Windows Update Blocker (AKA "WUB") and i've stopped the nonsense shutdowns late at night.
That helped stopping the aggravation, but lets see how long I last. I do feel my next computer will be a Linux OS ... but i'm not a programmer and I wince at having to do all the wine installs fresh...
The fact that you leave unsaved work overnight is the actual crazy part.
Why though? On Mac, I have tons of unsaved work: many TextEdit windows which keep their state for many months, even through reboots. And it has been working like for at least 10 years. It's such a simple, little quality-of-life thing. And Microsoft just doesn't care.
This is what a computer should be doing: helping the user to get their work done, without the user having to worry about insignificant details about saving files. E.g. does Google Docs ever ask where to save a file before closing the browser or shutting down the computer? No you just get an untitled document that is automatically saved. If I want to rename it or save it in a different location, I am free to do so. But as long as I don't, it doesn't get in the way and just persists stuff automatically.
I don't disagree, but you have to know which applications reliably keep their state across restarts. You can't blindly rely on it on any desktop system. The Microsoft Office applications actually do auto-save documents since a couple of years ago, even though the revocery UX can be a bit awkward.
What Microsoft doesn't care about is that you may have applications running that don't do that, when Windows reboots for updates.
On macOS the feature is baked into the OS's APIs, the app developer just opts into using them. If they don't, quitting with unsaved work will prompt the user modally, and block the restart to the point where the OS will timeout the reboot process and give up. The only way to purposefully lose unsaved work in almsot every app I've ever used on macOS is to yank the power cable or hold the power button down.
Window locations and app state are written to plist files, again, using OS libraries and APIs for app resume. I can reboot my Mac and not even realize it happened sometimes it all comes back the way it was.
There's plenty of tasks that can take hours that don't save their progress. E.g. running a simulation, training an AI model, rendering video. Or, these days, leaving agentic AI models running in a loop implementing tasks.
Even if the state is recoverable, it doesn't mean that it's simple to recover.
I would be infuriated if my OS decided to shut itself down without permission.
I aspire to have your level of confidence in anything that amounts to leaving unsaved work in any sort of shape or form.
Happens to me way too often. And it is frustrating if backup auto save is not included in the system. I have disabled auto update because of this.
Happened to me just a few days ago. Woke up, turned on PC, all my open programs were gone due to a Windows Update...
Not just a couple of times. It happened to me countless times.
Meanwhile on macOS, modern apps will not lose data if the power is janked out at any point.
Shhh! Don’t tell anyone.
Years ago MS depended on Windows. It was the profit center. Everything MS did was a moat to sell more seats. Even MS-Exchange was just a ploy to force enterprises to stop deploying any other operating system.
That all changed with Azure.
MS realized they could make billions in Windows or trillions with Azure.
They changed the org structure. Now Azure is at the top and everything else is a moat or a way to draw people to Azure. They changed the sales commission (your multiplier doesn’t kick in unless you’ve sold enough cloud services).
Windows is no longer a profit center. It’s a cost center.
Anything that scares people away from using Windows is a benefit.
Let those other suckers spend money developing operating systems. As long as it runs on a VM in Azure, Microsoft will profit.
Windows being worse and worse isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.
I've been running Ubuntu Linux for a long time now (over a decade, started with 8.04). Linux still has it's fair share of bugs but I'll take having to deal with those over running Windows or MacOS any day.
For me the biggest thing is control, with Windows there are some things like updates that you have zero control over. It's the same issue with MacOS, you have more control than Windows but you're still at the whims of Apple's design choices every year when they decide to release a new OS update.
Linux, for all it's issues, give you absolute control over your system and as a developer I've found this one feature outweighs pretty much all the issues and negatives about the OS. Updates don't run unless I tell them to run, OS doesn't upgrade unless I tell it to. Even when it comes to bugs at least you have the power to fix them instead of waiting on an update hoping it will resolve that issue. Granted in reality I wait for updates to fix various small issues but for bigger ones that impact my workflow I will go through the trouble of fixing it.
I don't see regular users adopting Linux anytime soon but I'm quickly seeing adoption pickup among the more technical community. Previously only a subset of technical folks actually ran Linux because Windows/MacOS just worked but I see more and more of them jumping ship with how awful Windows and MacOS have become.
The control is both a blessing and a curse. It’s really easy to accidentally screw things up when e.g. trying to polish some of the rough edges or otherwise make the system function as desired. It also may not be of any help if the issue you’re facing is too esoteric for anybody else to have posted about it online (or for LLMs to be of any assistance).
It would help a lot if there were a distro that was polished and complete enough that most people – even those of us who are more technical and are more demanding – rarely if ever have any need to dive under the hood. Then the control becomes purely an asset.
This is literally Linux Mint, Zorin, and several other distros. I haven't had to "go under the hood" on my daily driver machines that run either of these distros for over 7 years.
I think at this point people are just (reasonably) making excuses not to change.
There's several distros that are fully usable without ever touching a terminal. The control is a gradient, some distros give you all the control and others (eg. SteamOS) lock down your root filesystem and sandbox everything from the internet.
> I've been running Ubuntu Linux for a long time now...Linux still has it's fair share of bugs...
> I don't see regular users adopting Linux anytime soon...
I can see why you think the second statement is true based on the first statements. When Ubuntu switched their desktop to Gnome, they gave up on being the best Linux desktop distro. I'd recommend you to try Linux Mint.
I'm curious, can you elaborate on why you believe that changing to Gnome meant they were giving up on being the best desktop distro?
Let me recommend Fedora to you Timbit.
Debian family is outdated and builds with bugs upon release.
I too was corrupted by Ubuntu's marketing strategy of being popular and using the misleading word 'Stable'.
I remember when Ubuntu decided to reroute apt installations into SNAP installs. So you install a package via apt and there was logic to see if they should disregard your command and install a SNAP instead. Do they still do that?
It annoyed me so much that I switched to mint.
I agree with the sentiment but I keep Snap disabled because I like Kubuntu (Ubuntu with KDE) for its rock solid stability.
>Linux still has it's fair share of bugs
>Linux, for all it's issues
You are confusing debian-family with Linux. Debian family is designed to be outdated upon release. When they say "Stable" it doesn't mean 'Stable like a table'. It means version fixed. You get outdated software that has bugs baked into it.
Fedora is modern and those bugs are fixed already.
Reminder Fedora is not Arch. Don't confuse the two.
Meh, I don't care much about control, I care more about getting my work done with the least amount of friction. Macs do that for me. Linux and Windows have too many barriers to make them a daily GUI driver.
[delayed]
Windows UI has also gotten progressively more ugly, buggy and laggy. From a cursory glance, Win 11 looks a lot cleaner than Win 10/8/7, but just opening the Start Menu is a chore. Rather than fix the underlying issue, Microsoft started pre-rendering the File Explorer in memory to improve launch times. It might've started with letting go of their QA team, but the engineering culture there seems completely broken and clueless.
I'm currently running Fedora on my gaming laptop, and while I do suffer some loss in FPS, it is relatively close to Windows and seems to be getting better.
My main machines have been running Linux for years now, but there are still some things that are really bothering me. For one, I think dealing with virtual machines are still somewhat painful on Linux. VM managers continue to be clunky (I believe KDE is working on a new one), and GPU passthrough, let alone partitioning, isn’t really a thing for Windows guests which is something that works out of the box on WSL. Another frustrating part is the lack of a proper alternative to Windows Hello that allows you to set up passkeys using TPMs.
Between using macOS at work and macOS at home, I really only had my Windows 10 PC for running games in Steam (and I don't even really game very much. I had originally built it with all new parts for Flight Simulator 2020) so its behavior was already becoming annoying whenever I went to use Windows such as the nagging and lack of consent implied with the "finish setting up your PC" window having "continue" (in a bold button) or whatever and "maybe later" (in a tiny link) as options, for example. (The linked article also pointed this out.)
So after making sure I had everything I wanted to keep copied off that computer, I was going to try out Bazzite, but something made me try out the plain old SteamOS steam deck installer first. To my surprise, it actually worked, but only because I had the exact type of system it expected:
64-bit Intel or AMD CPU. (I have AMD.)
AMD Radeon graphics.
NVMe SSD primary boot drive.
UEFI BIOS support
Even the wifi worked. Well, it didn't work the first time, so I thought it wasn't supported. So I hard wired it with Ethernet, but then I saw the Wifi was working. It's possible it updated something or maybe it just needed a reboot.
If it hadn't worked then Bazzite or something similar would have since it's designed to run Steam but with more driver support.
So my complete Windows history is: 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, 2000, XP (set to the classic GUI mode), 7, and finally 11, skipping all the others. Windows 7 was peak.
Apple forced me to switch to Linux!
Linux should consider paying Microsoft and Apple for new customers. Perhaps the customer acquisition funnel is quite long, at least it took 20 years of using Apple in my case before switching to Debian (Xfce), but it was worth it!
As a regular linux user for the last 20 years, who had used windows for games for about 25 of the last 30 years. When I had gotten a macbook pro for work in a company that was all apple there were three things that stood out: The M processors are amazing, the apple hardware is really good, and mac os is absolutely awful. I have no idea how people use mac.
> mac os is absolutely awful. I have no idea how people use mac.
I hear this from a lot of people when they get their first Mac. When they get specific about what their issues are, it tends to be that macOS doesn't do a thing how they are used to doing it, which is more of a learning curve issue, or rigid thinking. Apple software can be quite opinionated, those who fight against those opinions tend to have a hard time. This is true of any opinionated software.
> Apple software can be quite opinionated, those who fight against those opinions tend to have a hard time. This is true of any opinionated software.
And this is why many like me prefer Linux. We have our own opinions, and Linux enables us to enforce our opinions.
I've been a Linux guy for 25 years, and used Windows at work for the last 15. I now have to use MacOS at work.
I miss Windows. It wasn't totally better, but I managed to overcome most Windows headaches with workarounds. I haven't found the alternatives yet to MacOS.
From my perspective, both Windows and MacOS suck - but in different ways. I think the problem many Linux folks have with MacOS is that it is the "uncanny valley" of Linux. You get happy that you can use your usual UNIX flows, and then you find out that you can't.
I really want a good tiling window manager. I have yet to find one on MacOS that has the features AwesomeWM have.
It really sucks not being able to rebind keys to use Ctrl instead of Cmd in many apps. For basic tasks (opening/closing browser tabs), I have to use one set of keys in the daytime (at work), and another at night (at home). Why won't MacOS let me change them?
Most of the stuff isn't really personal preference, more like being temporarily used to a different way.
Btw search "modifier keys" in Mac sysprefs if you want to rebind command to control. I'm also sick of using separate shortcuts at work, but the other way around, gonna rebind Ubuntu.
I can give you a few examples:
Packages are not done well compared to linux. Brew is a poor replacement. It feels like the terminal and everything involved is constantly out of date.
The OS just has a lot of weird things, like the ribbon at the bottom taking up so much space. When I made is smaller and hidden except on mouse over it was incredibly rough.
Window management is decades behind windows or linux. It doesn't like maximizing windows and doesn't make partitioning screen space easy. I had to download a third party app to make it better, which was still worse than windows even in windows 7, and miles worse than linux with i3.
Mac has a lot of rough spots. I have two external monitors and occasionally after updates one monitor would be fuzzy or different resolutions, and it wouldn't go back until the next update.
There's something to it.
On that note, is there any GUI tool that allows me to browse my zip archives without unpacking them, and is also free?
Not just this. I'm linux/macos user since early 2000's and still sometimes hate macos because they have very annoying bugs that are never fixed, and annoying corpo decisions.
E.g. it keeps opening Music app whenever I connect bluetooth earbuds. I can't delete Music app, it just keeps popping up with imbecile message about "user is not logged in" or something. I run a script that monitors that Music.app is running and kills-9 it.
Or blinking desktop background issue, that's been there for years, accumulated many support threads, and still not fixed.
Random services like coreaudiod that suddenly start consuming 100% CPU for no apparent reason.
Macbook throttling (thanks God, gone with M cpu's)
I can keep going but my point is macos has legit problems that can't be simply shrugged off with "they just hold it the wrong way".
Like any other mass product tbh, except rare ideal products like Factorio game or sqlite.
MacOs is extraordinarily opinionated about how everything should work and frequently attempt to predict your workflow.
Linux/Windows (historically) were straightforawrd, each tool did exactly what it said it would do, and it was up to you to learn how to use the tools available.
On linux/windows, if a button was "capture image", it would just capture the image on the screen. On a mac a "capture image" button could do anything from displaying the image on the screen, to saving it in a photos folder, to saving and syncing it to an iCloud account. Whatever the apple PM decided the most common use case was, and god help you if you want to do something different.
If you've been in the mac ecosystem for a while, you've grown used to this and don't notice any longer. You may even occasionally express happiness when a function does something unexpected and helpful!
If you're coming from anywhere else, its unbelievably painful.
I’d frame it slightly differently.
With Linux/Windows you’re supplied with a toolbox and from that toolbox you’re expected to cobble together a workflow that works for you and maintain it.
I spent a significant amount of time trying to learn Tasks inside of Outlook and come up with a system that would make it remotely useful. I failed repeatedly. They eventually bought Wunderlist and replaced it with that, which still has some rough edges (last I tried) due to the legacy Outlook Tasks integration.
Apple, more often than not, is looking to identify a problem and give an opinionated solution on how to handle it. If you’re ok with their solution, great, problem solved. If you’re not, you end up either fighting with the Apple tools or finding a 3rd party toolbox style app that lets you cobble together a workflow. I found just going with the opinionated solution removes a lot of needless stress from my life. There are some places I do go 3rd party, but I reevaluate often to ask if I really need these things and if they’re worth the trouble.
It ends up being a question of what my goals are with the computer. Am I looking to work on the operating system and apps to tune them to exactly what I want, or am I just looking for the system to fade into the background so I can do other things. When I was younger, I found tweaking and playing with everything to be a bit of a hobby. These days, I just want to do what I need to get done and move on with my life.
> and mac os is absolutely awful. I have no idea how people use Mac.
Not sure about other people, but in my case I spend 99% of the time using software made by 3rd parties so my exposure to the OS is very limited.
Latest OS is making life miserable though, compared to all the previous releases.
Anything in particular? I get that it takes some tweaking but so does Linux. The biggest thing that you'll probably never get the way you want is window tiling - it's my personal bugaboo with MacOS. Maybe there's a way to get what I want ...
For me, the biggest pain point is the way it decides which window to bring to the front. If I minimize a window, and then click on the application in the bar, it won't show the window just minimized, instead it always seems to show the older window. Really annoying when using an app with many windows
right click on the app and select the window you want...
There are an absolute ton of very capable tiling window managers for macOS, posted here frequently. From yabi to aerospace to fully programmable ones like hammerspoon. A quick search will turn up plenty more. I would be shocked if none of them meet your needs.
Shouldn't need to install third party stuff for such a basic feature. One more thing that will possibly break with updates or not play nice with something.
Window wiling is a big one for me. I have tried the third party options, and nothing compares to i3.
There's a couple but nothing I've found at the level of i3 or whatever the hyprland equivalent is.
Fucking Finder. What a colossal dumpster fire. It drags that entire OS down.
Better than Windows Explorer
No it's not. It's one of very few things that Windows does better
Windows is such garbage, I can't understand how you think MacOS is worse lol. It's just Unix. Linux is definitely better than both though
They didn't say they think macOS is worse, though.
Windows is absolute garbage, I agree. But the application windows behave normally, maximize when I want them, will take half a screen, quarter screen, etc. with just a quick hotkey. Mac doesn't have that extremely basic functionality without a 3rd party extension, which is absurd. But I don't use windows other than if my work gives me one, I am purely linux otherwise.
Hover on the green button. Also, Mac has a really robust keyboard shortcut system. Including shortcuts for tiling.
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/tile-app-windows-mc...
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/create-keyboard-sho...
Man, we didn't have this all along.
Six years ago everything was stable and solid, but Apple's board of directors seems to have decided that new Mac users can't handle a computer interface anymore and started merging it with mobile OS interfaces. And the result is absolutely terrible.
They also decided that they have to capture React devs and everything should use a declarative UI, which has brought us the wonderful new Systems Settings.
> I have no idea how people use mac.
Meh, it has a terminal. Good enough for me. It's worth putting up with MacOS for the hardware.
It's only fair that Linux should pay 10% of the license fee for their software to Microsoft in exchange
For a long time, I had a MBP (this is in Intel days), with a Linux VM. It was like a reverse mullet, party in front (multimedia), work in back (dev).
And then:
So I switched to System76/Linux (Pop OS) and that has been wonderful, not to mention, much cheaper.- No esc
See I'm a ends justify the means guy:
The more people forced into the beautiful world of capslock is escape the better!
Your website has stained my screen. lol
background-image: radial-gradient(circle at 12% 24%, var(--text-primary) 1.5px, transparent 1.5px),
radial-gradient(circle at 73% 67%, var(--text-primary) 1px, transparent 1px),
radial-gradient(circle at 41% 92%, var(--text-primary) 1.2px, transparent 1.2px),
radial-gradient(circle at 89% 15%, var(--text-primary) 1px, transparent 1px);
As much as I love the idea of moving to Linux - Mac hardware is like two years ahead of PC currently in pretty much any regard aside from gaming. I keep looking for an iteration where it makes sense to switch but currently the intel core 3 stuff is at best comparable to M5 base. Strix Halo is much more power hungry and also not that impressive other than having a bunch of cores. Nothing comes close to the pro/max chips in M4 series. And with RAM/storage pricing Apple upgrades are looking reasonably priced (TBD when M5 Pro devices launch).
So I can either get a top tier tool when I upgrade this year or I can buy a subpar device, and the power management is going to likely be even worse on Linux.
I think this mostly only holds if you use local compute in a portable form factor.
Most of my personal development these days is done on my home server - 9995wx, 768GB, rtx 6000 pro blackwell GPU in headless mode. My work development happens in a cloud workstation with 64 cores and 128GB of ram but builds are distributed and I can dial up the box size on demand for heavier development.
I use laptops practically entirely as network client devices. Browser, terminal window, perhaps a VS Code based IDE with a remote connection to my code. Tailscale on my personal laptop to work anywhere.
I'm not limited by local compute, my devices are lightweight, cheap(ish) and replaceable, not an investment.
There is Asahi Linux project for Apple Silicon Macs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asahi_Linux
It's not really viable
So whatever resources you have, Apple will use them mostly to render 3D glass effects. With Debian (Xfce), I can't speak for other desktop environments, you need roughly three times fewer resources to run the OS itself.
Or you just don't run Tahoe?
Actually, you don't have this choice anymore.
Apple is disabling downgrading across all of iOS, and starting to do the same with MacOS. So you need to keep old hardware to run older MacOS versions, and it's only a matter of a few years before Tahoe is the latest OS you can run on your Mac.
> Actually, you don't have this choice anymore.
I must have taken some shrooms before I downgraded from Tahoe to Sequoia a few hours ago then.
Oh, I must be clear here: I'm not considering M1 Macs or later, since Apple closed the ecosystem with Apple Silicon.
What you did is a downgrade in what's called the supported OS.
However, if you decide to downgrade to Catalina on an M1 Mac, it's not possible — Big Sur is the earliest version that runs on Apple Silicon.
Anyway, you cannot downgrade to a macOS version older than what your Mac originally came with. So if you buy a Mac now, Tahoe will be the minimum option.
Old Macs can certainly be downgraded. iOS doesn’t allow it though and they pulled the latest security update which fucking sucks. And if you buy a M5, Tahoe is the only OS that’s available.
I have nothing against old Macs and MacOS, but I certainly won't be buying anything since the Apple Silicon switch, because now only Apple controls which OS you can run.
>If you buy a machine that isn't even released yet
Uhh, I guess.
AFAIK iOS has been very locked down wrt rolling back upgrades since forever and isn't super relevant to this thread. Happy to be corrected.
M5 MacBook Pros have been shipping for over three months now.
The M5 Pro/Max variants aren't; but an M5 Mac is a thing you could have bought for a good while now.
> Linux should consider paying Microsoft and Apple
Who or what is the "Linux" entity in this context?
Joking aside, I often hear people say "they should" when talking about GNU/Linux (for example: "they should just standardize on one audio stack"), as if there were a central authority making those decisions. What many don't realize is that with FOSS comes freedom of choice... and inevitably, an abundance of choice. That diversity isn't a flaw, it's a consequence of how the ecosystem works.
There's free choice for those OSes to use different kernels, but they don't, they all use the same Linux (rather than say BSD). There's a lot of advantage in getting aligned on things, even though anyone can choose not to.
It is true that Linux-based distributions have this thing in common: the Linux kernel. There have been some GNU/Hurd variants though...
I guess Linus Torvalds and co? First they'd need to standardize a Linux desktop OS.
Also who is paying "Linux" and for what?
Maybe the answer ends up being Valve.
Well at least Microsoft is a platinum member of the Linux Foundation for many years...
If Linux had a revenue stream and model, this would make sense. But the style of open-source is to make good software, and let others gravitate to you as a result.
If there was an easy and supported way to put linux on a macbook I'd be back on linux but I can't give up the hardware.
I am good laptop hardware away from making the move.
HP Zbook Ultra G1a, 128GB RAM. Add SSD to taste. HP supported (Canonical OEM) Ubuntu with KDE. Works great as a daily driver with a UGreen GAN charger.
I'm on frame.work with AMD, 96GB RAM. Using it with fedora+KDE Absolutely love it
Do they still use a paddle trackpad? Framework seems like its nearly perfect for me, even if I would miss Apple's displays on the MBP.
Frameworks are built like crap. Sorry for the language. Watch the laptop olympics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M96O0Sn1LXA
How likely is a future where Microsoft
(a) gives us back 2000/XP/7/11 options for UI,
(b) gives us a desktop-first experience when we have keyboard/mouse plugged in,
(c) stops turning every OS feature into an ad, and makes it utilitarian again,
(d) and focuses 100% on making a stable OS and high quality dev/office apps?
It would be so nice if they just forked a commit from ~2005 and started from there.
(Maybe Copilot will mess up & erase commits so they have to? One can only dream.)
> (c) stops turning every OS feature into an ad, and makes it utilitarian again
Microsoft and OpenAI have the same problem in that they have a massive userbase that costs them money but doesn’t generate any revenue. The only known ways of sustaining such a structure is ads or becoming a marketplace and they failed at the second so I doubt your wish will ever come true.
I'd be super happy if they left Windows alone and did just this for years to come. Use the other products to make money, and just maintain this Win 2000/7/10 type OS without new features, and stop trying to hide everything behind fancy UI. I still revert back to old control panels to do the necessary tweaks.
0%
I think the most likely thing that will happen is MS will have a hard split between the corporate and consumer OSes. Much like they tried to do with windows 2000 vs windows 9x.
And much like what happened with that split, I think you'll see consumers getting copies of corporate windows to get around/away from consumer windows.
Give me back the proper search which last worked Windows 7-ish (or XP?). And traditional Office interface (not stupid "context-specific" tiles).
Linux since 1996! In chronological order: Slackware, SuSE, DLD, LSF, Gentoo, Ubuntu (starting with 04.10!), eventually Debian 12, now 13.
Back in the days I compiled the kernel myself! :-D
Sure, occasionally I used Windows 3.11, 95, 98se, XP, Vista, 7 and 10, but never as my main system.
I am a software developer, but also do gaming, video production and audio producing. I never got the discussion, Linux works for me for almost 30 years now.
One day, I applied for a new job and was already on the company tour. When they told me that I could only use a Windows computer provided by them, I quickly said, ‘No, thank you,’ and left. The faces they made were truly priceless.
Another day, I applied for another job again and, after some hesitation, unfortunately said yes when they tried to foist a Windows computer on me, because the actual project was really cool. That was the worst year of my career, thanks to restricted Windows 10.
Out of curiosity, back when you were compiling the kernel yourself was it because you wanted to learn it or because you wanted to add more modules to the kernel that didnt exist there by default?
The kernel compilation had a configuration UI where you could select all the drivers you wanted to literally build in. So I selected just what I needed, to save memory, recompiled, waited an hour et voila. Kernel modules came later.
I never advocated for Windows, but I always used it because it "just worked". At a certain point, I realized - as OP had - that I was spending just as much time configuring Windows as I would be spending configuring Linux.
I've moved to Kubuntu and haven't looked back. Proton support is amazing, and Claude Code fixes the doc-diving problem that used to plague Linux. In fact, with Claude, I was able to get such a buttery smooth setup on Kubuntu - Wezterm auto-saving and restorable sessions (even with multiple windows), a working fading background switcher with history, automounting drives and vhdx images on startup - and these are all relatively simple things, but they were near-frictionless to set up and they don't break on a random Tuesday. I love it and would recommend anyone who is on Windows to reconsider.
Still reading the article, but early on it says:
"Also, is it weird that I still remember the specs of my first computer, 22 years later?"
My first computer was a TRS-80 Model 1, 1.78 Mz Z80 with 16 KB RAM.
That was 48 years ago. Is it weird that I remember that?
I still have my Mac 128k with external disk drive and printer. Bought new in Jan 1985 or late Dec 1984. I paid the exorbitant price to upgrade it to 512k during the first year I owned it. I think the RAM needed to be desoldered and new chips soldered in place so it needed to be returned to the store where I bought it.
Shout out to the author of the blog for writing an engaging post that accurately the MS experience. For me, switching is still a work in progress since I am the family troubleshooter and there are lots of things to mess with. It will happen because so far, the ones I have switched have no complaints.
They stick with you. I remember our first family computer well (an Acer 486 with 40MB drive and 32MB RAM.)
Same for my first computer I built myself out of a TigerDirect order. Made a few mistakes there (K6 generation.)
Having these computers was such a change in our lives that they should be somewhat indelible memories.
>an Acer 486 with 40MB drive and 32MB RAM.
32MB ram <-- no way. 4 and 8MB were the standard (8MB being grand), you could find 16MB on some Pentiums. So 40MB drive and 32MB RAM is an exceptionally unlikely combo.
32MB become norm around Pentium MMX and K6(-2).
Yeah, IIRC my first computer, or at least the first one I really maintained, was a Pentium 2 with 32MB of ram and a 2gb hard drive. Good ole gateway pcs.
The first first computer I had was an old IBM PC.
We had a 386 DX with 32MB of RAM. I don’t think it was that uncommon. DOOM still didn’t run super smoothly, though.
Haha, I wondered if someone would complain about 32MB. We had the board maxed out. My grandfather’s computer before ours.
A few months after taking possession, I upgraded the disk to a luxurious 400MB.
The classic NAND-me-down. My first personal computer was a "broken" 486 system I got for $25 at a yard sale. All it needed was a hard drive.
It could have been bought old and upgraded. Not everyone had the luxury of a brand new first computer.
Possibly, but even mother boards supporting 32MB would be rare. Perhaps on "DX3"?
As for a new computer and price - it was like $1000 to get AMD 486DX2-80 with 4MB RAM in '95...
So this depends if it was a 72 pin DIMM board. I don't think you could get there (easily?) on a 30 pin board, but 72 may have had native support for 64 out of the box.
TigerDirect? Wow. How did I forget the first place I used and instantly maxxed a credit card? I would look through that catalog right now if I had it.
My Dad had one of them. The first machine I actually purchased myself was a Dragon 32 (6809 processor, 32k RAM) sometime around 1981 - i can remember everything about it, including all the terrible cassette games I bought for it and the money I spent on ROM cartridges (word processor, assembler/debugger). These days I can't even remember what's in my Steam library.
22 years back is still this century, nothing weird about. As for remembering stuff 6502/48KB RAM (along with call -151) seems boring, I guess.
Interestingly I can't remember any specs since about 22 years ago.
First modern PC (dos/win3.1) I had a 12mhz 286, 1 meg of ram, AT keyboard, 40MB hard drive. This progressed via a 486/sx33/4m/170mb and at one point a pentium2 600 with (eventually) 96mb of ram, 2g hard drive, then a p3 of some sort, but after that it's just "whatever".
Amstrad 2286 PC, 4Mb RAM, 40Mb hard drive, 3.5" floppy.
40 Megabytes. I have photos that size these days.
Radio Shack PC-1 w/ the printer and cassette tape player --- really should have waited until the Model 100 was available....
I documented all of my early computers throughout early college, and I'm glad I did. I remember the first computers well, but without those notes, I wouldn't remember the first ten in so much detail. My first computer that was not a family computer was: UMAX 233mhz Pentium 2, 64Mb Ram, 8Gb HDD (was crushed when sat on by sibling)
First PC: 8088 with 640K, then a 286 with 2MB! The memory!
First own "PC": Atari ST 1040e, 1MB, with supercharger to run DOS and a 30MB hard disk the size of a regular PC. Donation from a family member.
First family PC was a used IBM PC XT, 8088 w/ 640kb ram and a cga card with an amber monochrome monitor attached. I remember getting a 14.4 modem on it, and it would freeze, had to force it to 9600bps. Then managed to wranle a 486sx w/ 4mb ram and an EGA card and display.
First decent computer I built was an AMD 5x86 133mhz with the larger cache module and a whopping 64mb ram that I'd traded for some ANSi work. The irony is for some things it ran circles around the Pentiums that friends had, for others it just slogged. Ran OS/2 warp like a beast though. Ever since then, I've mostly maxed out the ram in my systems... I wend from 128gb down to 96GB for my AM5 build though since the most I've ever used is around 75gb, and I wanted to stick to a single pair at a higher speed.
36 years ago: A Wyse branded AT clone 12.5MHz 286 with 1MB of ram, a 10MB hard drive and a Hercules graphics card (it was a decommissioned CAD machine from my dad's work).
I was late to the party with an Apple IIe. I've never managed to catch up since.
Nah, I think it's awesome. Great computer by the way. With all that raw power I bet you were doing tons of computering.
Mine was an Intel 386 DX 40MHZ with 2MB RAM and 80MB HD, bought in late 1993.
IBM PC XT 5150 4.77MHz, 640KB, no, not weird at all :)
There is no reason you would have forgotten.
ZX-81 with 1Kb RAM
I'm not against someone's preferences, but this looks like an anecdotal story. Windows, as much as it's hated here, still works fine for the vast majority of people. What's more, you have higher risk of having problems when running Linux.
Linux user since about 1998, leaning towards BSDs today. Network engineer + R&D + software dev. Daily driver (desktop) about 2002-2010 - work made it too difficult later. Very occasional gamer. Corporate world will give you a Windows VDI or web cloudy things if need be. Win10 on my laptop out of habit, mostly using terminals + WSL and a browser. Lightroom user, but flexible. None of the other gear I own runs Windows, and the numbers are significant (racks). I run my laptops until they die - the current one is 10y and hasn't died yet but won't run Win11 without going through hoops. Next laptop will not be running Windows outside of a VM.
Win7 was a workhorse, moving to win10 felt unnecessary - and I still remember how the laptop vendor had a system performance tuning app for win7 that you could use to put it into limp mode and have it run on battery for a full day and most of the night. No such thing on win10 on the same hardware. Everything has its time, and hopefully I'll never even get to experience the joy that apparently is win11. The times for software freedom of choice are as good as they have ever been.
I’m getting closer and closer to making the same decision.
I have a Surface Laptop 5 that won’t enable the AI cruft so I got somewhat lucky there.
But the copilot business is AAF.
And now that I use Claude Code in WSL or my Ubuntu server, I’m pretty much done with visual studio development.
Not sure what’s left.
Satya Nadala will have single-handedly destroyed the Windows ecosystem.
Like the author says:
> Linux is the preferred platform for development
Honestly I'm surprised he was using a non unix system this long, I guess it kinda proves his point that switching costs can seem huge
I'm basically developing on Linux despite running windows. I just set the terminal emulator to open wsl by default, and have VSCode connect to the WSL instance. This also gives you the "native docker" the author mentions, just ignore Docker for Windows exists and install docker in your wsl.
This does have downsides, and the author lists many. It also has some marginal upsides. For example running multiple distros for testing is trivial, and while the Windows file Explorer might be a shitshow that reached its peak over two decades ago it somehow seems to still be leagues ahead of the options in linux gui land. And of course the situation in gaming and content creation used to be way worse just a couple years ago, so for many switching only became viable relatively recently
> somehow seems to still be leagues ahead of the options in linux gui land
Hu... use Dolphin?
That seems to be the preferred path for many devs on Windows - unless you can get your hands on a Mac at work WSL is much better/easier. Most non-software companies may not even offer a Linux laptop.
I'd say even then it depends... for some things WSL+Docker on Windows is better thn certain headaches with Docker on arm Macs.
Which, similarly has more than convinced me to fight for PostgreSQL over MS-SQL everywhere possible.
Before MS really started mucking things up the past few years, I was referring to WSL as my favorite Linux distro... MS took a LOT of the rough edges off in terms of development.
I was using WSL for the longest time.
Both MacOS and Windows with wsl are perfectly fine for development. Especially MacOS.
There's literally nothing special about Linux when it comes to development. And there are quite a few downsides especially when it comes to some specialized tooling because many vendors often only have Windows tools for their devices.
I would have to agree with this. I don't understand people how say developing on Linux is somehow better. I have built C++ software across Windows, macOS and Linux and I can't say one is easier than the other at all. Perhaps it is because of the package management system that makes installing a compiler "easier" than downloading Xcode or downloading/running the Visual Studio installer??
I certainly don't find development tools better on Linux, particularly for C++ debugging. Windows/Visual Studio is the leader in that regard.
I have also done C#, PHP, Java, JS + web development across all 3 and don't see the difference.
I find a Linux host with a development guest OS the best to work in. It allows for snapshots, backups, and sharing development environments. Solution A might need a different environment than Solution B.
Funny enough, the bluetooth stack works better on a bare metal Linux box than a Windows one. Audio starts being played sooner.
> I find a Linux host with a development guest OS the best to work in.
I had a friend who runs Windows host (because of gaming) and Linux as a guest OS for development for the same reasons :)
This depends entirely on your stack and preferred workflow. MacOS is increasingly hostile to powerusers. If you don't mind following their golden path, all is fine, otherwise... I wonder how long before you have to enable a scary "developer mode" to install software outside the app store.
While that's true, I still don't have any issues running any stack on Mac (I've had Java, Python, C++, some Rust, Erlang/Elixir; previously I also had PHP and Ruby)
I guess I'd argue that "it depends on lot on what you mean by development".
For anyone hosting a product on servers (almost everything web related)... there IS something special about linux: It's where your product is going to run in production.
For folks who are doing work in other spaces, especially development that involves vendor provided physical devices: Then yes, I agree with you. Vendor support is almost always better for Windows, and sometimes entirely non-existent otherwise. I'll note this is starting to change, but it's not yet over the hump.
The only place I'd consider macOS as a "perfectly fine" linux alternative is mobile (and mainly because Apple forces it with borderline abusive policy/terms). Otherwise it's just a shittier version of linux on nice hardware, riddled with incompatible tooling, forced emulation problems, and a host of other issues. It's not really even "prettier" anymore.
> For anyone hosting a product on servers (almost everything web related)... there IS something special about linux: It's where your product is going to run in production.
I've been at several corporations and companies where the target OS doesn't matter in the least, and I've had multiple projects on my own where it was the same.
Most of development is so far removed from actual hardware and actual OS, it doesn't matter if your backend is developed on Mac and runs on Linux.
Citation needed. It's not. Linux is only good for hosting. Only very very few large companies gives laptops with Linux to developers.
Linux for desktop is a joke, always have been since at least Slackware 7.1 running at my 486
Did you have a particularly bad experience? Things have changed _a little_ since 1992.
I switched from Windows in 2018 because I was trying to install some Python packages, and it was hours of work to find the specific visual C++ runtimes that were needed to get them working.
On Linux: pip install, done.
Regarding high-quality commercial Linux software: SideFX Houdini offers a relatively affordable Indie license and is fantastic for most kinds of 3D work, compositing, and post-processing tasks. It’s also fully procedural and scriptable, which really makes my brain buzz.
I was away from Windows for the past 12 years. Recently we bought a desktop and had to install Wondows on it. I was just shocked by the level of shittification that happened. I can't even find a Solitaire game that is not littered with ads.
I was a big fan of Satya. I thought he had new vision that aligns with the emerging world. I saw some successes he had with cloud, office 365 etc. But when offered to take Altman in, I knew Satya is no longer maintaining the stature of the grand company built by Gates.
I think Linux is not quite there as gaming system. Simply due to games' compatibility (and I don't play latest and hottest titles, more like Cities-Skylines/Transport Fever/Anno/Satisfactory etc). Plus to my knowledge NVidia drivers are still an issue.
But for literally anything else I think it's ready. Just browsing? Office work (writing/spreadsheets/presentations/email)? Development? Media production? You're good.
For Linux-curious I'd advise to get a dedicated hardware, like 5/7 year old business machine (Thinkpad or even smth like Dell Latitude), they'll be under $300. Don't do Arch (unless you do that for the sake of being able to install Arch). Instead, get Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, Debian, Zorin (the last one specifically for Windows users), or one of many other beginner-friendly distros, and drive it for a bit. Get the software you want, see if it works for you, and if you don't like it, it's all good. If you do, you can gradually move all your stuff to the new machine, or install Linux on your main machine.
That's what I did (quite a) few years ago when I got fed up with Windows 8, took me about a year, but I've been on Mint Mate ever since. My gaming rig is still Windows 11 but all it has is my Steam collection.
That's not my experience at all. The majority of games, especially on Steam, work out of the box.
I would advise the opposite: Don't get an old box. Take your new box, take a new hard disk, and just install Bazzite (and pretend you don't know anything about Linux, just stick with the defaults).
My quick rebuttal is that gaming is pretty close to 'there' if you pick a distro that prioritizes it. I run bazzite-DX (nvidia rtx4070) for dev and pleasure and gaming there is ON POINT. I don't play any anti-cheat games, but Cities Skylines, Doom Eternal, Cyberpunk (with full raytracing and HDR), GTA5-Remaster, etc, all run like champs. As of last month, full HDR10 mode started working in chrome and video players too, so hdr videos get those popping brights.
I am thankful that so far Microsoft hasn't removed local admin capabilities of Windows, but I dread the day that happens (mainly because it remains the most consistent ways one can deny windows updates).
Because forcing updates down people's throat creates this, and boy do I hate Microsoft's insistence on doing this for drivers, where you get such fun things like Microsoft installing a different AMD GPU driver than the one that AMD gives out (this to be fair is partially to be blamed on AMD for not having just 1 versioning system) so then you have to go into safe mode, DDU, disconnect the internet, install the drivers, turn off automatic driver update in an obscure setting.
Meanwhile on Linux it's literally 1 version that exists in the kernel.
Ever since Wayland added support for changing mouse scroll speed & changing/customizing middle click behavior that is a lot more consistent, I've used Linux to daily drive, especially with immutable distros ensuring even IF an update breaks my system I can rollback.
It's not going to get any better. Microsoft's problem is tech debt. Copilot doesn't pay tech debt it creates it. It will only get worse faster.
Microsoft probably has a problem with tech debt, yes. That is however not the problem. Instead, the product strategy is. And it was bad even before LLMs.
Windows is under 10% of their revenue these days. It’s simply not important to leadership. Just like Xbox - just let it slowly die as you squeeze any last remaining cents out
There’s a lot of odd things said in this article. Like “no more file explorer hanging”, “no more waiting for the start menu to open” - is this something that actually happens to people? Perhaps on very old hardware I could see it, but it’s not my experience at all. Lots of weird emotional and very biased parts to this article.
But it’s just gonna take off here anyway because it’s a switching to Linux article which is like offering HN users free coke.
Of course those are things that happen to people, why would they make them up?! If anything, your reaction seems like an emotional and biased one, refusing to acknowledge the experiences of others when they conflict with your beliefs.
(and I say all this as a happy Windows user with no plans to move to Linux).
Ah, the Microsoft "updates".
After the last "update" the setting for turning windows "game optimization" on and off doesn't work anymore and made factorio unplayable (it MUST be off, otherwise it optimized lag and stuttering and it automatically turns on after every larger update). Since games was the only reason I still had a pc with windows it was time to move. For funzies it tried installing some updates on the last shutdown (it got wiped afterwards).
The only pc I now have with windows on it is a early 00's pc with 98SE on it.
You know what's funny about this article.... Back in 2012 I had the same problems with Windows Update and that is what forced me to go to a mac. I've never looked back.
I've been using Linux as my main system for ~25 years, but always kept Windows installed for games. On my latest computer I've build 3 years ago, thanks to Steam with Proton, I no longer have Windows and have been happily playing Windows-only games without major issues.
It’s sort of crazy how much changed in the past few years. The only things that don’t run well under wine/proton now I feel like are online games with kernel anticheat and products like Autodesk or Adobe.
There are some commercial Applications that just won't work on wine. But virt-manager makes Qemu/kvm backing images for windows 10 or 11 easy. Freezing Windows in time is an absolute must if you do builds with vendors badly maintained development software.
Dual booting off 2 SSD is good now, and the deciding factor on most of our laptop purchases. Windows is still necessary if you do serious heavy GPU CGI rendering, CAD/CAM work, or Games.
I like Linux when everything is working well, as getting work done with the shell CLI is important for handling "Big" problems. Cloning identical Linux environments across all team workstations also greatly simplifies project support. =3
The two things I find unacceptable are no local accounts and non consensual reboots. The latter may need legislation. They don’t even notify you that it happened. They try to restart apps and put things back the way they were but you can still tell that your house was broken into by the missing data that wasn’t saved.
You could say they broke the window(s)
> Adobe Suite: Runs via Winboat. Far from perfect (no video acceleration, laggy at times), but functional
That’s not acceptable to most professionals and one of the things holding me back on a Mac.
Adobe has so many different cross-platform layers that a solution like Proton may never be viable, practically speaking.
For Photoshop alone I remember reading that they still have some custom MacApp Pascal UI code, along with HTML/CSS/JS rendered by WebKit. And there used to be a flavor of Flash as well in mix, to name a few. Lightroom had its own custom Lua UI binding.
The only hope for fast and reliable Adobe-apps-on-Linux IMO is through a Windows VM with GPU pass-through and a focus on making that as easily and seamless as possible.
It seems to be, for most users who switch, that the driver is if they are primarily a consumer or creator. Unix systems have always been a preferred platform for some creators, but this effect seems to be multiplying as the focus for Windows become less and less creator friendly. Yeah, if you are a gamer and watch YouTube videos, then your path to least resistance is Windows; but if you are a software developer, web developer, music editor, video editor, et al... the ability to control, easily automate, and flexibility of your environment (not to mention the reduced system resources) become a huge advantage. There are reasons why MOST creators are moving away from Windows... and most consumers are becoming more and more comfortable with tablets and Chromebooks.
As an Ableton user myself, I’m pretty surprised that this musician could just… switch from Ableton to Bitwig. Goes to show how dire the situation was I guess.
I still have yet to hear any non-technical person I know encounter issues on Windows and seriously consider switching away. The learned helplessness instilled by Microsoft is very difficult to get people to shake off.
Bitwig was developed by ex-Ableton devs, and the layout is incredibly similar. It's a very easy transition compared to coming from a DAW like FL or Logic.
It's also a really attractive offering once you hear about it. It's intuitive, cross-platform, half the price of Ableton for a 3-device lifetime license without geofencing, and the software contains a modular software synth atop which most of the preset instruments are built that is so versatile that its value alone exceeds the price tag of the entire daw.
Big fan. Share your thoughts if you give it a whirl.
I came in here looking for this thread specifically (I can't imagine moving off of Ableton). Thanks for taking a sec to write this up! I might give it a try, just for the synth alone.
You're so welcome!
The soft modular synth is called The Grid, fyi. Little square button on the lower left corner of any instrument lets you see it in Grid form.
Oh, man, and just wait until you find out that you can modulate literally every control in the UI...
Have fun :)
My problem (having moved Win to Lin, Ableton to Bitwig too) is with sound. Latency is one and bad. Getting any sound at all on Bluetooth is also hard, where the latency is even worse. Wish there was a simple "apt install make-audio-work-well-for-daw" I could run on my KDE Ubuntu 24.04...
Hmm. I'm on a stock Arch install and had no latency or quality issues to speak of. Bluetooth works out of the box using `bluez` and `blueman`, though Bluetooth is still Bluetooth, with inherent latency. Some headphones have low-latency modes that can be activated in their respective apps at the expense of ANC/battery life, maybe that'll help?
The apt command you're looking for may be the audio backend, though. `apt install pipewire wireplumber -y`. Won't break your existing pulseaudio setup, but will allow low-latency operations. (I think--I avoid the dumpster fire that is Ubuntu like the plague, so ymmv)
He doesn't get into why he didn't switch to Apple. Kind of a middle ground - it's still got the maddening things about being from a corporate behemoth, but it's closer to Unix and you can run your audio software there. (I would be using Linux instead of Apple yesterday if it weren't for a single music program I can't live without).
Sort of funny that Nadella quotes Steve Jobs from 35 years ago with the "bicycles for the mind" quip. Given enough time, MSFT's marketing will eventually catch up with NeXT's marketing.
https://www.themarginalian.org/2011/12/21/steve-jobs-bicycle...
I tried to make this shift, but managed to somehow brick Linux Mint, so now I'm back on Windows for now...
I was already not very impressed when I attempted to okay a video file, and VLC told me I didn't have the right codec installed, and I had to run a shell command to get the codec... I have to open a shell to watch a common video file?
But then while attempting to install some packages to install Steam (which I also needed shell commands for...), I updated some kernel package, as instructed, rebooted my machine, and now Mint just sits there doing nothing right after I get through the bootloader. Can't seem to run any commands to recover either.
Bricking Mint is annoying, but I was much more astonished that I saw so many people hold up Mint as this beacon of user friendly Linux distros, but to do even the most basic things, I had to start running commands on the shell. That is NOT user friendly. I'll probably try again soon, but I'm pretty disappointed in my first experience.
No such thing as brick when you have a “live drive” available. Reinstall and be up again in a half hour.
The codec issues are caused by the companies that make them, not a free operating system. Next time download an open codec movie or install from the “store” GUI.
I think the steam thing was solved some years ago after being featured on LTT.
Speaking of "Content Creation", I'd also like to add the Affinity Suite. I don't particularly like it after being bought by Canva, but it works almost flawlessly on Linux.
You can even download a ready-to-run AppImage (no need to tinker with Wine settings) from here: https://github.com/ryzendew/Linux-Affinity-Installer/release...
I just wish Affinity would release a native port, but in the meantime, this works really good.
Worth clicking for the "Microslop" logo alone!
Shortcut: https://www.himthe.dev/img/blog/microslop/4.png
Curious to see how the Favicon will change too!
The only tools pinning me to Windows were photo editing apps (Capture One, Adobe), and some music apps (Reason, a whole bunch of other apps) that I barely used. Cut over to Debian about 4 years ago when my laptop started having thermal issues and Covid encouraged me to buy a tower desktop machine. Haven't looked back, it's been so much more productive. The strange and toxic-to-me design choices in the Win11 UI helped motivate the rapid transition.
The only thing that's caused any issue is power management, I'm fairly sure it's not optimal, but it's still better than Win11. That's purely down to lack of effort on my part, and basically setting it for max performance because it's not important to me for a desktop machine. Everything (and I mean everything - sound, video, wifi, bluetooth) else is 100% out of the box working on mid-range commodity hardware, albeit with excessive RAM for my needs. Some of it is a bit clumsy looking in places, but it did look weird on Windows too with some of the apps.
When I did have trouble, it was not like I could get support from Microsoft as the community forum is a joke, but with Linux at least I stand a fighting chance of working around any potential problems.
Is there anything on Windows I miss? No.
Is there anything on Mac that I miss? Yes, there's a few things that I like about MacOS (pre-glass) but I have a MacBook Air for those which is good for occasional use but not as a daily driver.
FYI: latest Photoshop should work on Wine as of this week, but of course that situation may be too subject to change for someone's main source of income.
For me I made the switch in 1998 when Windows Me was so terrible it was unusble. I went to CompUSA and found this cool box of cd roms with a lizard logo - suse linux and I was done with MS forever (except at work).
My Windows 11 installation broke down after one of the updates. Now I get "Please reinstall Windows" warning in Windows Update settings. And some error hex code which doesn't really help. I've installed like 5 different apps on this machine and never ran any "tweaking" scripts or apps.
I don't think I ever had to reinstall Windows 2000 but here we are.
Yeah Windows 2000 had countless software test engineers, I was one of them and on my team there were 5000 of us. I stared in tech support in 97 and moved into QA and always filed bugs on behalf of the customer, sadly everyone must code and customers must test. It's just not working out but Microsoft really only cares about Corporate America and Windows running on all the main languages. It's great to have alternatives and I've moved to MacOS after using Windows since 1.0.
Thank you for your service. :D Windows 2000 will always be my favorite version. I got a free copy as a university student and it was just awesome. XP was the era where things changed for the sake of change. In Windows 2000 you could learn where absolutely everything was and it was always there for you.
I still have my install CD, though it has suffered from bit-rot and can't be read properly. :(
Ha! You're very welcome! Ah the good ol' days of CD install media, CD Keys and install times that took hours!
RIP to your install CD!
I think the UI was reasonable and easily understood in 2000. After that it seems links and buttons became interchangeable, and now we end up in the mess where scrollbars may or may not be visible until you try fiddling with the UI etc.
Well, Linux reached ~5% market share in 2025. Imagine the incremental market share they have. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1lpepvq/linux_breaks...
My only issue is that i am not a developer, I am heavily reliant on Excel, i know it inside and out and just not sure whether OpenOffice supports excel files. In the past it barely did.
LibreOffice does fine, though you’ll probably be unhappy. What is more important to you? Freedom, privacy, consent, or spreadsheet features?
VMs are an option to partition your life as well.
Fedora + Google's Office Suite is the best way.
Don't bother with Libreoffice. Its trash. I'm convinced that Microsoft is deliberately sabotaging the project.
Had a similar experience in around ~2017 and switched over to Linux. At the time I didn't have the time to build my own and bought a mid-range System76 laptop.
Best computer decision I've ever made. I'm not a heavy gamer so the machine is still running fine. I've only had one time in the last 9 years where I had to drop everything and fix my computer vs Windows where it felt like once a year
Honestly that's what it feels like when something breaks. Linux - you see what's wrong, you fix it, it's done
Windows - you pull your hair out trying to figure out what caused the issue, you fix it, it's back with the next update
For literally decades we've hoped that Linux will get like Windows in some crucial areas like sleep and hibernations support for laptops, supported first-party drivers, correct and reliable multi-monitor setups, games, etc. Never ever could I imagine that Linux parity, which I'd like to argue is closer than ever before, would be reached by Windows getting worse in exactly those areas we, the Linux freaks, got told to get Windows for -- sleep not working, graphics drivers bringing whole systems down, incoherent configuration etc. Only games got better and we have to thank Valve for that.
On a modern laptop without S3 sleep, it works better for me on Linux than on Windows currently. So at least there's that.
I switched my parents to linux during the gnome 2 days and have given them a consistent environment ever since (kept them on mate).
It is true, they could not do this themselves and sometimes my mom can test my patience, but this is the way if you can do it. (Hint: get a remote desktop with shared view working first :).
Really, the stronghold for windows is their office suite (other family require Word/Excel for work), enterprise domain integration (work to home pc familiarity), and, to a weaker extent, gaming. Gaming is why I still keep an install of windows on my pc.
> All major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave) have native Linux builds. Full support. No compromises.
Full support ? I thought that the DRM were not the same (e.g. Disney+ and Amazon Prime limited to 480p on Linux which is a scam... At least, I remember having to hack something to use the Windows version of Chrome with WINE in order to get a decent image with Amazon Prime when I got a 6-month offered subscription a few years ago)
That's correct, proper open source Linux is always limited to the weakest tiers of streaming DRM (i.e. fully software based) which usually means you only get low resolution streams. Locked-down Linux derivatives like ChromeOS and Android can support the stronger DRM tiers of course but that's not the same thing.
Widevine on Linux now is 720p. I usually don’t notice, only once in a while that show is not full HD.
There was a post here a while back saying that Microsoft will eventually switch to Linux instead of maintaining Windows. Given all the negativity around Windows this seems more and more likely (I haven’t used Windows myself for over 20 years so I have no idea what its like now. Last time I used it, it was XP)
Unlikely but growing as profit dwindles. Previously it was unfathomable that Apple would offer RISC/Unix Workstations, or MS would jettison IE.
This is a simultaneously insane yet deeply delightful concept. Does anyone have the link to that discussion?
Except the problem is their UX more than the kernel itself. I don't see them keeping Gnome or KDE as a desktop UI even if they did fully adopt Linux for desktop usage.
MS should really just buckle down, finish simplifying the UI and make it consistent again... the last time it was mostly consistent was Windows 7, and even then.
I'm willing to bet that System76 gets COSMIC to the level that Win7 reached faster than MS can turn anything around in terms of Windows at this point.
If Microsoft vibe codes a Linux distro and calls it Windows 360 Copilot, I’m on board with the conspiracy theory that the Hadron Collider broke reality
> Actually, scratch that, I think it really started with the non-consensual updates
MS in general have idea of consent of an average rapist.
Yes/Remind me later is basically norm in their dark UI patterns, it bothered me for months to add copilot button to teams
Same on macOS — pestering me with the Tahoe update notification and the buttons are basically "now" or "later".
My main operating system is Linux since 2005 or so, or actually late 2004. I still use Win10 on my laptop, for various reasons; in part to test java code and ruby code on windows, in part due to elderly relatives.
Win11 really annoyed many users though. That's actually interesting, since Microsoft committed to it yet it gets harder for Microsoft to retain the people. Linux is unfortunately way too complex to really break the desktop system (and no, Wayland, GNOME, KDE, are not going to change any of that either), but if it were, Microsoft would probably have lost its de-facto monopoly already. Either way it is interesting how much people hate Win11. Microsoft really committed to driving down the cliff here.
It's funny, but I had my grandmother on Linux for about a long while before she passed... Wine managed to run the 3 Windows 9x era games games she was still playing into the 2010's (where real Windows wouldn't) and her browser/email. I wasn't even able to do that for myself. All I had to do was run updates for her every few months (because she didn't) and the one time she had a hardware failure, I'm the one who fixed it.
In the end, I'd say for most people, who aren't their own computer admins/repair anyway... Linux is probably fine. Since most people don't use more than the browser for the most part.
My other grandmother was on a docked Chromebook after the 5th time I had to clean malware off her computer, and she didn't need any windows apps anymore... she couldn't help but click on the "you might have a virus" ads.
I take tremendous umbrage at "femboy Thinkpad enjoyer."
A wonderful writeup.
Since most application run in the browser nowadays, the OS becomes less meaningful and more of a layer between browser and hardware.
If you see your PC as a tool, not a gimmick to consume, Linux is the only choice. Even MacOS crappifies over time and becomes a Windows copy over time.
I’ve asked before but the answer keeps changing before I get around to implementing it:
My kid wants to upgrade their PC from Windows 11 to Linux. They have a recent-ish Nvidia card. I’m very technical: I don’t mind doing whatever arcane thing needs done. They are not, yet.
I haven’t run Linux on my desktop in a decade and I’m completely out of date here. What should I steer my kid toward to run recent games?
Depends on the games. If your kid wants to play anything with kernel level anticheat, it will not work on Linux, period - these anticheats don't support Linux, and either prevent the game from running altogether or disable certain online modes.
Otherwise, CachyOS is extremely popular these days, and I suppose a valid choice.
Recommend making a live drive with Ventoy. Copy over latest .iso’s of Mint, Fedora, Bazzite? for gaming.
Give them all a test drive, see what you like before committing. After install try new things in VMs.
They lost me at Vista lol
In all honesty, it was easy for me to switch to Linux because I was always more interested in the computer itself rather than what useful things I could do with it, so I actually never missed a particular application. I also was more interested in making a game run in Wine with maximum effort rather than actually playing it (I did play countless hours of World of Warcraft though...)
Ironically for me Linux has become the obvious default for casual use - web browsing, entertainment, paying my bills etc. I only boot Windows when I need to do some weird nerdy stuff, like checking updating SSD firmware with some proprietary software available only for Windows.
I switched to Arch last Summer and I'm quite happy.
Even Steam games work, I was quite impressed.
> You might be thinking "just disable updates, man" or "just install LTSC", or "just run some random debloat script off of GitHub". Why? Why would I jump through all these hoops? I'd rather put in the effort for an OS that knows what consent is and respects me as a user.
The absolute choice quote here. Tattoo it on your forehead.
I can't believe how many times I have to click "decline" now to install Windows 11.
Office 365? no thanks. How about a cheaper version? No thanks. Did you know you could use it for free. Okay. How about XBox. No! Am I forgetting one?
All that before I can even use the computer. Ridiculous.
One of the things I like most about CachyOS is that the configuration is all just in text files, one of the things I like least is that I am never quite sure whether to modify the systemd unit settings that are usually in /usr/lib somewhere, the app settings in /etc or the personal configs in ~/.config. For packages that I am unfamiliar with, I usually end up trying all three locations until I notice that my changes seem to stick.
The installer also completely broke the Windows partition that came with the workstation even though I was planning on dual booting, but oh well, no great loss there.
Other than that, there are some small conveniences and apps that I miss from MacOS (the mac calendar and mail apps are just so nice!) but the Niri window manager is just so amazing that at this point I don't think there's anything that could make me switch back.
I don't understand why he thinks all users will use WSL in Windows. I have never ever touched it, and I've developed on Windows for decades (C++/C#/JS/web). It seems like trying to make Windows non-native or some semi-Linux.
I also have never touched Docker on Linux, despite having used that from RedHat 6.0 days (Fedora, Ubuntu LTS now).
Also, he missed out Shotcut as a decent video editor. It recently enabled a 10bit workflow (plus the Frei0r plugins are easy enough to write for it, if you so desire).
You've sold me. Does anyone have a lightweight guide or something of a no-nonsense tutorial on how to do this without causing an even bigger headache than using windows?
I have always used Linux personally, only work made me use Windows and Mac (controlled endpoints) for the past 20 years. For 4 years I have my own company, 100% Linux.
I know that some things are not as nice on Linux (ie you need to do MS365 in a browser for example, and MS365 files from a NAS in OnlyOffice is not great, etc). But other than that, I just love living in Gnome. What more do you need that just a clean desktop with some tiling, some virtual desktops, a clock, battery indicator and windows with your stuff? I don't even know. I like that I can set up Linux in 10 min.
I recently set up a Windows 11 machine for a neighbor, it took so long! And it offered dozens of things I didn't want, to the point that I began feeling a bit nervous towards my neighbor (no you don't need that, no not that, no that's just tracking, no why would you want your desktop in the cloud?). Then when finished... it wasn't finished, I need printer drivers, an HP package with drivers and stuff for the BIOS etc etc etc. So much time.
Every company I’ve worked at has used Google Docs anyway so the experience for me is the same on Linux. What’s so appealing about the classic Office suite?
Well, it's mostly annoying if people store office docs on some samba share instead of in SharePoint/Teams. Also Teams has issues on Firefox, and sometimes also in Chromium. But overall works well enough (even with my AirPods on Linux). Things like drawing in PowerPoint in the Browser have become significantly better over the last year, before that I avoided it like the plaque. Whats missing in MS365 online is numbered captions for figures (unforgivable!), or reference management. That just really annoying if people use those features. Also, I worked in an org still on Office 2019 but mixed it with MS365, that also lead to lot of pain. It's papercuts mostly, nothing fatal.
I'll copy my comment on another article here:
2025 has had some of the biggest Linux hype in recent times:
- Windows 10 went EOL and triggered a wave of people moving to Linux to escape Windows 11
- DHH's adventures in Linux inspired a lot of people (including some popular coding streamers/YouTubers) to try Linux
- Pewdiepie made multiple videos about switching to Linux and selfhosting
- Bazzite reported serving 1 PB of downloads in one month
- Zorin reported 1M downloads of ZorinOS 18 in one month and crossed the 2M threshold in under 3 months
- I personally recall seeing a number of articles from various media outlets of writers trying Linux and being pretty impressed with how good it was
- And don't forget Valve announced the Steam Machine and Steam Frame, which will both run Linux and have a ton of hype around them
In fact, I think that we will look back in 5 or 10 years and point at 2025 as the turning point for Linux on the desktop.
> Windows 10 went EOL
Kinda. But LTSC IoT is still on until 2032.
Another very important feature which does not get mentioned enough is Ubuntu launching Ubuntu Pro in 2022 which has an ordinary-user-affordable support option where $150 a year gets you what they call "full support" with a four hour ticket response time on weekdays. My time is way too valuable to deal with the driver problems Linux always has, community support is often best described as "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king" -- I once had a problem with a peripheral and people directed me to the Arch Wiki page that I wrote. I stopped using Linux as my main eight years ago and have been on W10/WSL since. I am considering Linux main in May when I get my new laptop if there's commercial support backing me up. I reached out to them with my list of current hardware and they didn't reply yet :( which doesn't bode well.
Example: Thunderbolt networking. Is there a kernel module for it? Yes. Is there experience with it? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I know we keep hearing about how their share holders are forcing this change of focus in order to monetize ai. I just fail to see how alienating developers and the gaming community in the process will ever help achieve that.
Just do it.
I bounced back and forth for a few years. Now? Not even dual boot, not even a VM. Maybe Linux did not get better than Windows, opinions differ. However, Windows certainly has gotten worse than Linux.
Just saw a video on YouTube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDwt9AiItqU - starts at 3:25) that talked about the windows experience in the present day and I totally forgot about booting up and magically having software appear I never asked for due to some partnerships Microsoft made. I've been on Mac for 16 years/iPhone for 10 years and have never looked back. The most annoying thing about Apple is when the OS updates and suddenly you have a different experience like liquid glass. But like all things I usually get used to it after about a week and most of the times I see the benefits (in this case, even more screen real estate).
Kind of interesting after using Manjaro recently, I had stayed away from Ubuntu for a while and started researching to see if it had gotten any better. I found a bunch of blog and reddit posts about how Linux sucks so bad and how much superior Windows and MacOS are.
Only to see this article today. lol
I guess at this point, whatever works for you and your situation is what you should use and ignore all the static. I use Linux for the majority of my dev work, but have the inability to move off Adobe products for the photo and video processing work I do. Something I've found that Linux doesn't compete very well with MS and Apple. I would love to finally get off of one or the other, but I have one foot in each because they both excel in different areas.
I’m kind of curious why Adobe hasn’t gone all-in on Linux by now. IIRC Adobe apps were built on cross-platform tooling like Java (InDesign) and AIR (all the CS UI, and then the underpinnings in C++).
I guess Adobe doesn't exactly have much to win by Windows failing, but their inaction does mean the open source alternatives will continue to get better, and that will hurt them.
Every few years someone posts the same thing in the Adobe forums which then piss off the moderators and Adobe "experts". They continue to say the same thing which makes zero sense.
I'm paraphrasing here but its something along the lines of: "Linux users are open source people and expect everything for free. They'll never pay for our products, so we see no need to port them for Linux users because so few of them would be willing to pay for our products."
A lot of other comments are cheeky ones like, "Adobe is already on a Linux OS, its called MacOS." - rolls eyes-
And you are correct, the OSS alternatives are getting better and closing the gap, but they're just not there yet - but I hold out hope they will be one day.
Welcome to the club. I started my Linux and BSD journey in ~1998 and I haven't really touched Windows since ~2001 except for the occasional brief interaction.
I've never missed it. Like at all. There have been instances where some piece of software didn't have a Linux alternative, that's mostly been a mild inconvenience. There have been cases where it's been a serious problem too, such as when my ever-so-wonderful government decided to start using e-ID which only worked on Windows (thanks, Wouter from grep.be for fixing that).
Mostly I enjoy how I'm in control of my machine, instead of having to rely on a bunch of untrustworthy moneygrabbers who seem hell-bent on making the worst possible decisions at every turn.
I always like to chime in on these things that I've been a delighted Arch user for about a year now, for similar reasons. Took a lot of setup, but it's dialed now and just works. My computer belongs to me again for the first time in years.
I should really do more to evangelize. It's not ok to use an OS monopoly to degrade and squeeze your users' often primary career and creative tool to your own short term ends, making their lives worse and worse. And it's such a delight to get out from under.
Not sure the situation for normies currently, but for power users, definitely dual boot and give it a try.
I really wish linux had a decent answer for DRM-protected VST plugins. Yes you can run stuff in WINE but I need to be able to use iLok and the bullshit DRM systems for about a dozen other publishers.
I am so glad that gaming on linux is viable. I wish my music production workflows were too.
Put that on a dedicated machine and move everything else, especially your personal files, over for privacy reasons.
> Windows is now also too much work.
Most people overlook that. I only ever see comments complaining about time spent to set up Linux. It's not the only variable, and for Windows it's the constant maintenance that's the issue. You are never just done setting up Windows.
I think I might be the only developer left on this forum, and maybe on the planet, who still uses Microsoft OS daily (for over 30 years). I rarely have issues with it, find it incredibly stable, and have made a lot of money using it.
Not sure why, I just felt the need to post this.
Oh, and just to make myself look even worse, Copilot in VS Code has been an amazing asset in my development.
FWIW for similar reasons I nuked my Windows install and installed CauchyOS. My main reason for not doing it earlier was concerns about game compatibility but so far the games I want to play either are working without any issue or work after enabling Steam's proton compatibility layer.
I just want to mention that most apps that would be laggy on Wine just work via https://flathub.org/en/apps/ru.linux_gaming.PortProton. Install PortProton double click .exe install app and off you go.
- xTool Studio - for laser engraver - ProppFrexx ONAIR - professional radio station
I think Linux adoption will rapidly grow with the adoption of LLMs.
Esoteric errors are now resolvable with a simple query. Often with just a few cut and paste commands.
This improves the rough edges to a point that Linux is now a reasonable option for a larger cohort of previously unfeasible users.
I also think LLMs are well suited to find niche strange bugs way quicker. User posts esoteric error on the issues page. LLM with proper context may converge quickly, allowing the programmer to implement a fix.
1. This is not a likely effect of LLM adoption.
2. Linux is already to the point of giving you about as many esoteric errors as Windows or macOS will.
People don't switch either because they are comfortable where they are and don't want to put forth the effort of changing their OS, or they are afraid of outdated criticism of Linux Desktops being error-filled nightmares.
My feeling is that I consistently find on-point solutions for my Linux problems with a quick search. However if my Windows install gets in trouble my search will yield some DISM.exe invocation which doesn't help at all. A bit anecdotal, but this is my experience. I've always been able to fix my Linux installs.
1. It is. It makes me more likely to use Linux, and I'm not that far from the average. On Reddit r/gaming I've seen people who literally made the step and say exactly this "I installed Linux and when I can't figure something out I ask an LLM and it has done a great job so far".
It's happening right now. Maybe you're so opposed to the concept that you hate to imagine it, but it's the reality.
> or they are afraid of outdated criticism of Linux Desktops being error-filled nightmares
Your concept of people installing Linux is behind because even just over the last 12 months things have changed a lot.
I want to switch to Linux for my EOL Windows 10 originally-built-for-gaming rig. It was “new” in 2016, so I hold out hope that there will be few compatibility issues. My biggest concerns are being able to play my library of steam games on it. Overall the problems I have are that last time I tried to put Linux on that machine I tried a dual boot system, and at the time UEFI did not play well with dual booting. I don’t know if it’s gotten better, but as of now I wouldn’t be dual booting anyway so conceivably it wouldn’t be an issue.
> I wouldn’t be dual booting anyway
This tends to be better overall anyway, if you are really looking to switch. Dual booting is enough of a hassle that I've always ended up staying in whatever OS I felt required me to think I needed to dual boot, and the other aspirational OS gets forgotten.
Going all-in requires that you figure out new workflows, find new software, or in some cases change what you use the computer for and accept it.
I tried building a gaming PC, but I hated PC gaming. It felt like it was half sys admin work, half gaming... if the sys admin work went well that day. I dual booted it for a while, then ran straight Linux on it, and eventually sold it. I liked the idea of one box that did everything, but the reality of it wasn't so great. I now have computers I don't care about gaming on, and have consoles that require 0 effort and let me play games when I feel like playing games.
I doubt the dual boot issue was due to UEFI. It's more likely, Windows was clobbering over GRUB and overwriting your bootloader, as it likes to do. Windows really wants to be the only OS on your drive.
Most reliable way I've ran dual boot systems is to have each OS on it's own separate drive, and then choose with the UEFI boot menu which one to boot instead of choosing in GRUB off a single drive.
As for games, plug them into protondb (https://www.protondb.com) to see compatibility & read through the comments
My desktop is a gaming-only machine, it’s still on Windows 10 and it will probably stay on Windows 10 until Steam stops working.
I haven't driven a Windows box since 2010 (and even then it was just a few months at work) and I'm perfectly happy! Except I'm on a Mac and have been at every job since 2006 when they came out with the Intel-based ones. I of course run Linux on VMs at work, but my daily driver has been and likely will forever be a Mac. I don't miss installing/tweaking video drivers or registry settings. Things just work 99.99% of the time for me. No one is perfect and Apple has made mistakes, but for me, I'm 100% satisfied.
How do you find macOS Tahoe? I have deliberately avoided installing it on my M3 MacBook Air that I use for work mainly due to the lack of attention to detail they seem to have dumped on the UI.
I have used a Mac at work on/off since the Snow Leopard days and I think Snow Leopard made the most sense from a UI point of view, without wedging in iCloud file nonsense.
I have a Windows 10 machine at home for gaming / development but my daily driver at home is a Linux M910 Lenovo (small enough and powerful enough for C++ dev), along with a Windows 11 mini Lenovo machine for GeForce Now usage on a TV in the house, but do I hate using Windows 11.
"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."
-- Napoleon.
I have been using Linux as a desktop operating system for what I believe is almost two decades. Recently(?) I see distro named like CashyOS and Bazzite being thrown around. Am I missing out on something?
There are many really good ones these days that will have a much better experience than windows. I’ve used Ubuntu, Pop, Mint and Fedora workstation in the last 5 years and all worked great. Personally Mint Cinnamon had the least issues so I tend to run that on my machines now.
Once SteamOS becomes generally available I’ll switch to that. It’s incredibly polished on Steam Deck
If you don't want the "hassle" of flag optimization when compiling binaries, CachyOS is basically Arch but with optimized binaries. Otherwise, Gentoo all the way, you just need a good machine.
FWIW, On Reddit, I am seeing more and more discussions on the Linux subreddits or people getting fed up with Windows and switching to Linux. Usually, it's the Windows 11 upgrade that finally did it.
My work-issued dev device is a Surface Pro 10. I can't use WSL2 for various regulatory reasons. I will never, ever work on software like this again. Worst development experience of my life because of what a miserable dev env windows is.
I know that's been a meme since forever, but my first hand experience supports it to the extreme.
I've been using Linux on my devices for quite some time now. I was pleasantly surprised when I had to start 4k video editing work and could just use Davinci Resolve. 2026 might not be the year of the Linux desktop, but it's getting better day by day.
Gentoo forced me to switch to Apple.
jk, I wanted to install Ableton and now it's been 15 years.
Yep, Ableton is why I have a Mac Mini on my KVM.
And you got Bitwig :)
I haven't even touched a Windows PC in years at this point. Don't know why you'd do that to yourself. I was hanging on to a gaming PC, but it broke during a move over 2 years ago now. I decided that was the last windows box I'd own at that point.
Microsoft has always been crap. It's success is contributed to hostile business practices and familiarity not quality of product. IBM and Gates partnered to have an OS installed on its computers to gain customers. With no actual OS Gates bought 86-DOS from Tim Patterson and partnered with IBM. This created a direct competitor to Apple. Then Gates partnered with all other PC manufacturers to do the same. This paved way for Microsoft to dominate Apple because they weren't tied to any specific hardware. Then came Active Directory to solidify business use. The businesses rolled with it and users learned Windows which deepened home PC use. Every app "just worked" BECAUSE of the popularity and developers directly targeted it since most people used it, not because it was a good product. Their file system NTFS is crap. Their registry is a mess. Everything about Windows is just awful.
macOS has been quite popular in the United States for a long time now (and I suspect it's not so popular in other region not due to product, but price), showing that things can exist without those "features".
I'm not even sure what macOS have for its own since I basically open either the browser or the terminal. I am vaguely aware that Finder exist when I accidentally open it maybe twice a month.
I think shortly we may see "Apple forced me to switch to Linux" because of Tahoe and subsequent releases.
Ah 3d is fine with Maya and all the real VFX running on Linux. And we haven't had problems with game dev for years on Linux. Agree otherwise good to see another join.
I spent over a decade developing rendering software used in VFX, and ran CentOS Linux as my development platform at work.
We tried to follow the VFX reference platform once that became a thing back in 2014.
https://vfxplatform.com/
Unity works fine for example. I used it for a bit over a year on a project we did for multiple platforms
Awesome, good to know that, and glad to be here
Houdini,3dcoat,Nuke are the three things we pay for, will use Maya when we work with Maya artists, but dcc is mostly 3dcoat-blender-houndini workflow.
I just have to figure out how to play a few of my games on Steam and I can move over. Unfortunately, a few titles are still PC only so I can't make the switch. I very much would love to, but I basically need a $600 PC at all times to play a few select titles that will never come to Linux due to anti-cheat.
Forced? It's been a delight. I'd say if anything, I've only ever felt forced to use MacOS or Windows, never forced to use Linux.
Anyone have a recommendation on a decent cloud-based file sync tool ala OneDrive? I use OneDrive extensively but there is no official client for Linux and the unofficial one has some major stability issues. I'm willing to change providers but not willing to put in the effort to roll-my-own.
Arch is great. However, I would never recommend Arch (or an Arch derivative) to a first-comer to Linux.
Ease in gently, with Ubuntu or Fedora. Get familiar. Then go crazy.
Ok so Arch apparently has an install script that does everything[0]. I tried it the other day and it's pretty flawless, albeit terminal-based so not for everyone I guess.
Pacman is _amazing_. Apt broke dependencies for me every few months & a major version Ubuntu upgrade was always a reformat. Plus, obviously, the Arch wiki is something else. I would go as far as to say you'll have an overall better Linux experience on Arch than Ubuntu and friends, even as a beginner.
[0]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Archinstall
Or ... like me, switch to Fedora full time 20 years ago and still use it (ok, I use AlmaLinux on my workstation and servers)...
Everyone says this but I have only ever used arch. Wiped windows and started with Manjaro. No VM to test straight to bare metal. I learned how Linux worked and then installed the base arch distro. If you can read a wiki, you can use arch. It's not rocket science. All the available arch flavored distros make it even easier today. I tried debian once and found it even more cumbersome. Is it apt or apt-get? is it install or update? Never stuck around to find out.
I started with Slackware Linux—something arguably even more “hard-core” than Arch.
What mattered most at the beginning was good installation documentation, and both Arch and Slackware delivered on that front. Slackware, however, had an additional appeal: it was intentionally simple, largely because it was created and maintained by a single person at the time. That simplicity made it feel conceivable that the system could be fundamentally understood by a single human mind.
Whether a newcomer appreciates the Slackware/Arch approach depends heavily on learning style and goals. You can click through a GUI installer and end up with a working distro, but then what? From a beginner’s perspective, you’ve just installed something somehow—and it looks like a crippled Windows machine with fewer buttons.
Starting with Slackware gave me a completely different starting reference point. Installing the system piece by piece was genuinely exciting, because every step involved learning what each component was and how it fit into the whole. The realization that Linux is essentially a set of Lego bricks—and that I might actually master the entire structure, or even build my own pieces—was deeply motivating.
That mindset was strongly shaped by how Slackware and similar distros present themselves. Even the lack of automatic dependency management acted as an early nudge toward thinking seriously about complexity, trade-offs, and minimalism, which stayed with me forever.
This post is so 2001
Every year is the year of linux desktop.
Keep these posts coming! More the merrier! :))
It's worth noting that if someone has the skill to install and run Linux with games, they probably have the skill to use massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts and ask AI to help bypass to install a local Windows account. And that probable takes less time.
For 3D modeling (assuming you want to do CAD), Onshape is a fantastic alternative to native applications.
Microsoft forced me to switch to Apple AND Linux.
"Video playback works flawlessly, with hardware acceleration even" not really, especially on Netflix
I'd be happy to switch to Linux, but my Macbook with M processor is a real work horse. First of all, everything works (bluetooth, headphones, camera, etc). Second of all, ARM based processor is a beast. Until someone release an ARM based laptop, I don't see myself switching to Linux.
It was a very entertaining read. I am just wondering if this one may be actionable:
"And worst of all, you're like a pit bull that has lock-jawed onto OpenAI's ballsack, and you're not letting go, not matter how much we tell you to."
My parents paying for One Drive when they didn't need it is why I finally moved them off Windows as well.
I saw the amount of ads they were getting on their laptops and One Drive was even advertising to them on Samsung Android phones.
it's really bad these days. even the teams web client doesn't work properly and when it does it is missing the most basic features like "test my audio." i don't understand what it is about how that company is organized that the software keeps coming out with interfaces and user experiences that look like they were created by 2023 era generative ai.
Audio latency on Linux was already very low long before PipeWire, thanks to JACK.
I really want to like Linux but every time I try it (and I tried a lot of distros and DEs) it is death by a thousand UX paper cuts.
I went from Linux to Mac to Windows and every single one is death by a thousand UX paper cuts.
If you were primarily targeting a Windows market for a desktop application, but want to develop under Linux, what tech stack would you choose?
EOL of Windows 10 forced me to, but I'm not mad - Desktop Linux is Great!
It's definitely the superior OS for modern development and general system admin, WSL/Docker always felt like an uncanny valley kludge.
Fwiw... I've been doing Leenucks since '92. Back when you had to install BSD first, compile the kernel and reverse engineer how to boot into the new kernel you just built with gcc. But it was cheaper than SunOS, and the developers mailing list was more active than the BSD lists. I still miss my 3B1.
Anyway... welcome to the party. We saved you a beer. Doesn't matter you came later than other people. It just matters you made it here eventually.
> my first computer was a Windows 98 machine
The moment your Commodore 64 made you old.
The most puzzling part is why someone would run Windows 98 on a machine built around 2002/2003 (according to the specs).
Yes, did the same thing for similar reasons. Everything works well. When with Arch Linux.
"Like digital herpes, I just couldn't get rid of it."
Made my day! :-D
I’ve been using a Mac for a about three years now, but every once in a while I use my old gaming laptop to play some games and every time I am reminded of how insufferable windows has become, using it feels I’m dumpster diving and the dumpster is asking me to sign into my Microsoft account. Apple gets a lot of shit for how they do things, but no one can deny that once you’re properly established in their ecosystem, it’s a phenomenal experience.
Wow gun to head and everything. Glad he survived the transition.
More seriously, editing is either a lost art or click bait headlines are more important than ever. The title is very immature.
lol! Sorry about the clickbait. Everyone's doing it nowadays, and I wanted to follow. Gonna think of a better title next time
The one thing holding me to M$ Windows is visual studio.
Yes, I am aware there are alternatives that others think are as good or better. No, I have not personally found that to be true.
I love the poem at the end
Ubuntu since 2011
Now if only "Linux" would make a good phone.
FSF is trying! https://librephone.org/
Android.
Now if only there was a good phone that runs GNU.
I've never heard of CachyOS. I'm amazed at how many Linux versions there are and how good they seem and it makes me wish I could try them all.
Gnome comes with built in virtual machine support with the Boxes app, just download an ISO and try as many as you want.
Oh, you can try them all. That's pretty much an entire hobby itself.
Timing of your post is spot on. I just emptied a drive to prep for a Linux switch this morning ( for the same reasons ) :D
Windows 11 was bad before AI. Press the Start menu? Wait. That much latency was never acceptable and Windows should die like desktop Java did.
I don't understand how it got so bad. On Windows 95 or 98, you knew that pressing Windows > P > across right > N would open Notepad in about 22 milliseconds of interaction. Things just worked and responded.
Today it's utter garbage.
For a creative, why not macOS?
Linux has plenty of video card driver issues too. Windows may suck, but Linux sucks in different ways. Windows suckage is solved by "buy a different machine and reinstall". Linux suckage is solved by weeks googling and trying technical fixes in consoles, installing different distributions and trying the same, then eventually buying a different machine.
Apple, for all its flaws, tends to not have the suckage of either. I don't like using Apple, but it does break a lot less. (One of the reasons is encompassed in this story... while Microsoft and Nvidia yell at each other, Apple makes both the OS and the graphics card, so they just solve the problem internally) Apple with VMs gives you everything without the hardware hassles.
Love that the Favicon for the blog is the Internet Explorer logo. Will that change?
I'm in the opposite position. Been a Linux user exclusively for 16+ years.
But I wanted to build some desktop apps and look at arcGIS so I finally installed Windows 11 on a laptop my first Windows in nearly 2 decades.
This was a month ago and I haven't opened the laptop since. But I'm going to soon maybe!
I'd switch if it weren't for anticheat breaking the games I play. I really, really hate Windows, and Windows 11 even more than normal levels of Windows hate. I had to do some really weird shit to get it to a place that feels sane.
"The only real limitation is that some games with anti-cheat like Valorant, Call of Duty or League of Legends won't run. But honestly I think not being able to launch League of Legends is actually a feature - one final reason to install Linux."
Fair point though :P
A few years ago, I would have said that any game that uses such a level of anticheat that makes wine/proton unable to play it (ie: kernel level anticheat) is basically malware and you _shouldn't_ play it anyway, out of both principle, and also because if they had a bug in their code, you're just opening up your device to an unnecessary privilege escalation vector that other malware can abuse to escalate their privileges. (This is not theoretical, this has happened before, eg: with Genshin. Though I believe just the mere existence of a signed driver was enough, since malware can just "Bring your own Driver" (BYOD) and download the driver, at least before it was revoked)
Now, I still hold this belief in most regards. But I do see the appeal, especially if your friends and peers are gamers and actively play these sorts of games, and you feel that you're missing out on socialising or making new friends in that aspect. But there are plenty of other games and consoles, if you could just convince them to switch...
I made the decision to just play a different game when I switched back in 2022 or so. Thankfully, the game in question supported Linux shortly after the switch even though I got used to not playing it and just don't anymore :) I still try any anti-cheat games I come across to see if they work and it's surprising how many actually do.
Nothing wrong with staying on Windows if compatibility is an issue, though.
> If 3 years ago you would have told me that Microsoft would singlehandedly sabotage their own OS, doing more Linux marketing than the most neckbearded Linux fanboy (or the most femboy Thinkpad enjoyer), I'd have laughed in your face
I have no idea what that Thinkpad burn is supposed to mean.
haha cool post btw RN not always runs on chromium/v8
Between all the telemetry and them separating workstation and server duties, Windows is a no go aside from a generic gaming console here.
> I'm gonna go full conspiracy nut here, but I bet it's because the LLM understands JavaScript better, and Microsoft can't be asked to pay actual humans to write proper native code.
Do LLMs like Claude really excel at JavaScript than other programming languages? Similarly does OpenAI prefers Python over other languages?
He's a musician, he's switched to Bitwig. Ok, but what about VSTs? I have a collection of instruments I can't leave behind, many are NI, so I'm currently forced to use Windows or Mac.
Iv'e switched all but my work laptop because of well work, but the push came after they seemed to 'dumb' down the OS.
The disjointed WebView mixed with old winforms for navigating simple things is infuriating alone. I've had a problem where the webview wouldn't render any of the display settings so my machine was stuck at a certain resolution and scale.
Simple things like accessing Environment Variables now is atrocious and hidden in the most obscure unintuitive way. That's to say nothing to the crashing. Linux desktop environments have come such a long way it's really any wonder anyone would put up with Windows anymore.
But then again, Microslop don't seem to care about the customer market much anymore anyway.
I did exactly the same some 16-17 years ago, when they forced windows 8 square design bullshit and announced that they'll ditch 7. Never looked back.
Windows servers are still pretty good imho.
> I installed CachyOS, a performance-focused Arch-based distribution
Ooph. It's frustrating to see the community starting (again) to get purchase in public mind share at exactly the moment when it's least prepared to accept new users.
The Linux desktop right now is a wreck. EVERYONE has their own distro, EVERYONE has their own opinions and customizations, and so everyone is being pulled in like 72 different directions when they show up with search terms for "How do I install Linux?"
For a while, 15-ish years ago, the answer was "Just Install Ubuntu". And that was great! No one was shocked. Those of us with nerd proclivities and strong opinions knew how to install what we wanted instead. But everyone else just pulled from Canonical, a reasonably big and reasonably funded organization with the bandwidth to handle that kind of support.
Now? CachyOS. Yikes.
I totally get that. But I read about it, and that custom kernel with the BORE scheduler really caught my eye, especially for music & gaming.
I know a lot of people suffer from shiny object syndrome, and to some extent I do too (realistically something like Ubuntu or Fedora would have served me well), but it is what it is.
There are at least a dozen very stable and reliable distros with decades of history and support in addition to the cool new “hey guys I made a OS!” types.
> There are at least a dozen very stable and reliable distros
Exactly. "WTF?! There are a dozen distributions?!" Users love customization and choice when they understand it. No one wants to be confused. The Linux desktop world is a confusing mess right now.
Also note that the distinction between "very stable and reliable" and "hey guys I made a OS!" is only obvious to people who know how the distro is put together.
I use it for a month as daily driver. For Linux it is ok.
Similar journey, different distro! I wanted a Linux gaming machine, but given my recent admission into the cult of NixOS, I went with Jovian.
Jovian is a NixOS module that sets up a SteamOS-like experience on top of your existing NixOS config. I was able to build & tweak the config before even building my PC. It booted first try and has since been working without hiccups. Now I am setting up emulators, which is relatively straightforward with nixpkgs :)
> Meanwhile, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote a blog post asking people to stop calling AI-generated content "slop" and to think of AI as "bicycles for the mind."
I can't believe Nadella stole Jobs "bicycles for the mind" metaphor without attribution.
The author tried everything except switching graphics drivers?! That's like listening to the top 10 hits on broken speakers and declaring all new music is terrible.
Uninstalled with DDU, switched to multiple versions back. But it wasn't the nvidia driver, and I proved that when I switched to an insider build and the flickers were gone :D
You didn't use a non Nvidia driver then. Sounds exactly like you were always using beta drivers.
Don't worry, microsoft is putting its rust all over open source.
Once again, I don't really understand people who say Windows is easier. Take printer drivers. In windows you have a 'simple' wizard to install a printer driver. Except in my experience... it never works the first time and you have to fiddle. On Linux... I just bought a new printer, and it worked out of the box. My experience with most hardware today on Linux is out-of-the-box support while windows requires endless 'driver' installs. Even driver installs on linux are easier. Usually just drop a binary blob somewhere if you really need it and modprobe...
Again it's 2026... why is this so hard. Usually paid software is actually better and more feature-ful, but Windows is just not useful at all. The best use of Windows is WSL2
Microsoft Windows is an entitled tenant that thinks it owns the property (your computer).
Ubuntu since 2012
Marvellous, spot on. 10+ fucking points.
I honestly don't understand the hatred that Microsoft gets for most of the work they're doing in Windows. As I've stated before, most 'problems' people ultimately have are either configuration issues or hardware issues. And I still stand by this even as I've had issues over the years here or there.
I think the most recent 'production' Windows issue I've had was OneDrive failing to recognize it was syncing my data even though it was syncing. The status symbols for the files and folders wasn't showing up. But that's about it.
My gaming desktop is stable, my PC is rock solid, I run VMs on it (game servers, dev/test environments), and overall just absolutely 0 problems with Windows or my OS at all.
I do, however, have hardware issues semi often. One of my monitors doesn't turn off its backlight, for example. I've had Razer devices just flat out quit on me over the years (multiple Razer mice, at least a couple of Nagas, etc.).
I contend that most people would do better with Windows if they just didn't mess with it (don't run any of those tools proclaiming to "debloat" your OS), and make sure you read the hardware compatibility list of your systems REALLY hard. Incompatible RAM can cause significant problems, a lot of which is completely avoidable if you just read the RAM QVL.
The only thing that I wish vendors would do more is work closer with Microsoft to provide BIOS updates over Windows Update. But, most of these motherboard IHVs are absolutely terrible about doing BIOS updates anyway and require specific mechanisms to keep going correctly. This is in contrast to the Enterprise/Business devices released by HP or Dell which have a usually solid BIOS update track. And again, the only issue I've ever had there was incompatible RAM.
>> I honestly don't understand the hatred that Microsoft gets for most of the work they're doing in Windows. As I've stated before, most 'problems' people ultimately have are either configuration issues or hardware issues.
And then you go on to describe your own hardware problems with windows. That's called "projection" - attributing your experience to everyone else. It's like you don't read the other complaints or somehow dismiss them. Have you not seen the ads yourself? Maybe you take the suggestions to use other Microsoft products as helpful suggestions rather than ads. Is that it? OneDrive failing? Try saying NO to using OneDrive - that's what some people would like to do and it'll keep advertising and trying to enable itself. Then when we do use it... well you've got issues with it not working right too.
Just run arch. (+1 for terrible advice)
Another day another "hey guys I switched Linux" post gets pushed to the top of the heap. These add nothing except create an echo chamber about great Linux is and Windows is the worst.
It's still disappointing how few folks know about gpedit and how much you can reclaim your own machine just by running through the local policies and setting them to "no, I call the shots".
Microsoft is its own worst enemy.
Microsoft had a chance make even better OS than XP and 7 and convince millions of users to use Windows.
Okay maybe with Office products the ocean was already red, but still, instead of disgusting its millions of users, they could make them happy.
I am not a firm believer that GNU/Linux distributions are a drop-in replacement for Windows. One can work around compatibility issues, but for non–tech-savvy people, it's just not feasible.
I switched to MacOS since the release of Windows 10 and never looked back, of course I did miss some apps, though using laggy windows was much more painful.
I’ve been working at a school that uses a mix of Surfacebooks, HP Elitebooks and MacBook Air M2s (now migrating everyone to M4s!).
I used to prefer Windows for work. After the absolutely abysmal performance using a SurfaceBook Pro, never again. I’ve never had to deal with such slow performance in my life. I literally cannot get work done. Staff with Windows have constant problems, updates take forever, reboots aren’t very fast, programs crash, and (not OS related) but the new Outlook is universally despised.
I’ve never seen a company shoot themselves in the foot so badly as I’ve seen Microsoft do this of late. More and more staff want MacBooks , and are even ok with using a remote session (ugh) to access the one app that relies on Windows.
My experience is more like:
"I'll switch when Linux supports X."
Linux still doesn't supports X.
"Okay, but how about my X?"
Linux still doesn't supports X.
"Well, X is still missing..."
Trados Studio, good luck finding equivalent, I tried, and the alternatives are horrendous and I'm not gonna run it in VM.
Also I tried at least for son on his old computer live distro Mint from USB drive, everything works fine (unlike Zorin, which had problem with sound I think), but when I try to install it of course it doesn't detect Windows, same with wife's laptop.
So I have 3 computers: son's old laptop where I could install Mint - Linux Mint doesn't detect Windows
wife's old laptop where I could install Mint - Linux Mint doesn't detect Windows
my daily driver where my work SW requires Windows and there is no point installing Mint - Linux Mint detects Windows
I will have look at it during CNY holidays, if I will be able to install it alongside Windows (I need there Windows in case something would happen with my daily driver laptop).
I also plan to switch my father's old desktop to Linux Mint, but somehow I already know what will be most likely Windows detection status over there as well after son's and wife's laptop experiences. It works where it's not needed and it doesn't work, where I could actually install it.
If the activities are distinct, dual boot. I do all my dev in linux and boot into windows for gaming.
Dev in linux is so much nicer for me than dev in Windows.
Maybe it's stockholm syndrome but I still have no interest in Linux. Are nvidia drivers still bad?
The driver situation on Linux is still pretty hit-or-miss, but thanks to Microsoft's recent efforts, Windows has reached the same level of reliability as well.
Depends on why they are bad.
If they're bad because they are proprietary, it is what it is. If they're bad because their dx12 performance is worse on linux than windows, supposedly the fixes for the vulkan descriptor boogeyman problem are just around the corner.
What do you mean by bad?
Is this an ideological question? They are still primarily closed source.
Is this an install difficulty question? If you can read you can install them.
Is this a performance question? If you're a normie they're good. If you're demanding the top fps at the top resolution in dx12 games then there is still a noticeable difference but it should be fixed this year.
One aspect I wonder about is not so much about whether the collective gaming-on-linux effort can close the performance/features gap, but keep it closed. The story has been that windows is the main target system for "PC" game development and hardware/drivers (for good reason, it has majority market share), and then linux lags behind as various efforts figure out what's missing and how to implement.
Right now and for the foreseeable near term (3 years or so?) it seems like the focus on GPU advancements isn't aimed at gaming so will be a period of stability, but I wonder if/when focus does come back to gaming, when there's a new round of consoles, when a company wants a new feature set to distinguish a new generation (like geforce 20 series versus 10 and earlier), what can be done to make sure linux users aren't second class citizens. I'd also wonder about development tools, to use the most popular engine as an example, what could change with unreal engine to make sure it builds software that plays nice with the linux ecosystem even if the tooling works best under windows.
Yeah the main reason to dislike Nvidia drivers on Linux these days from a regular user point of view (I am not a Wayland developer so I don’t have to deal with whatever technical annoyance there is there) is just the philosophical/potential-privacy annoyance of running closed source code on my open source system. This doesn’t give the entirely closed source OS any points.
> Is this an ideological question? They are still primarily closed source.
That's a decent enough reason for a linux user to buy an AMD GPU but it isn't a good reason not switch to linux from a closed source OS. I'm in the process of switching to linux full time (it shouldn't really take that long but I haven't had a solid chunk of time in a bit) and am using an NVidia GPU so I went from closed source windows drivers to closed source linux drivers.
You're the top comment that addresses this so I'm putting this here but not exactly replying to you.
Haven't really ever had much issues with nvidia drivers on Linux tbh, and I've been using it since the early 2000s.
Drivers are generally fine, but there's more to it than just switching. If you're not bothered by the Win11 stuff, switching is probably not for you. Perhaps you can look into Linux for your current use cases and see if it's at all attractive.
The nvidia gods smile upon me, zero issues except the one I mentioned in the article. They do have to fix VKD3D performance though, 10-30% perf loss on Intel/Nvidia hardware when playing DX12 games.
> Are nvidia drivers still bad?
Depends a ton hardware. Newer hardware has been playing well with the kernel but still not fully oss.
You’ll still have less trouble over all with amd though.
nvidia drivers are pretty easy to install now that all of AI is trained on nvidia drivers on linux