I switched all the machines at https://lanparty.house over to Linux a couple months ago. So far, we've experienced noticeably fewer problems on Linux compared to Windows. Stability and performance are better. I can't think of one game we tried that didn't work. And wow is it nice not to have all the ads and crapware in our faces anymore.
(I'm aware that Battlefield series and League of Legends won't work due to draconian anti-cheat -- but nobody in my group cares to play those I guess.)
Yes, on Linux I was able to move the copy-on-write overlays to use local disks, which is one reason it performs much better (admittedly not a reason that would affect most people).
I am just using dm-snapshot for this -- block device level, no fancy filesystems.
Yep, I've been gaming exclusively on Ubuntu (mainly because I want my desktop to match my servers) for several years. If you aren't playing the latest AAA FPS, then everything pretty much works.
As an aside..
I went down a mini-rabbit hole learning about the LAN Party House, read your website and about Sandstorm[0] and how that ended up with you at Cloudflare leading Workers. That’s a really cool and honestly inspirational path. Would love to learn more if you’ve written elsewhere…!
Battlefield 4's anticheat runs fine on Linux, if you end up needing one. It definitely slakes my BF fix, in the same way Deadlock is filling the LoL-shaped hole in my contemptible subsistence.
I find that Fedora hits the right balance of stability while being up to date for anything desktop and specifically gaming focused, Debian has different priorities and packages can be a bit too old. And it’s less of a faff than Arch.
Eh, aside from GPU drivers -- which I download directly from nvidia anyway -- I don't feel like gaming is much affected by the distro packages being a couple years old. We pretty much just run Steam, Discord, and Chrome on these things, and those all have their own update schedule independent of the distro.
I download the nvidia drivers directly from nvidia. Their installer script is actually pretty decent and then I don't have to worry about whether the distro packages are up-to-date.
Your house sounds like a great place to hold a fighting game local tournament (or something like the old Smash Summit series for Smash Bros Melee and Ultimate before Beyond The Summit shut down)
I think its interesting that mainstream PC gaming press is now talking about Linux. We have the benchmark Youtube channels doing some benchmarks of it as well and plenty of reports of "it just works", which is pretty promising at least for the games that aren't intentionally excluded by DRM. For me its still controllers and equipment incompatibility due to my VR headset and sim wheel/pedals setup, I use Linux everywhere else in my router and home servers. I just hope that Nvidia notices that there does appear to be a swing happening and improves their driver situation.
I'd say there are two remaining roadblocks. First and biggest is kernel level anti-cheat frameworks as you point out. But there's also no open source HDMI 2.1 implementation allowed by the HDMI cartel so people like me with an AMD card max out at 4K60 even for open source games like Visual Pinball (unless you count an adapter with hacked firmware between the card and the display). NVidia and Intel get away with it because they implement the functionality in their closed source blobs.
It's a blocker if you want to use a TV, there are almost 0 TVs with DP. This HDMI licensing crap is also the reason a Steam Deck can't output HDMI > 4K@60 unless you install Windows on it.
Up until a year or two ago, the majority of monitors (and graphic cards) used DisplayPort 1.4 and HDMI 2.1. With HDMI 2.1 (42 Gbps) having more bandwidth than the DisplayPort (26 Gbps).
This is my case with my relatively new/high-end RTX 4080 and OLED monitor. So until I upgrade both, I use HDMI to be able to drive a 1440p 240hz 10-bit HDR signal @ 30 Gbps.
Competent cheat makers don't have much difficulty in defeating in-kernel anticheats on Windows. With the amount of insight and control available on Linux anticheat makers stand little chance.
The best Valve could do is offer a special locked down kernel with perhaps some anticheat capabilities and lock down the hardware with attestation. If they offer the sources and do verified builds it might even be accepted by some.
Doubt it would be popular or even successful on non-Valve machines. But I'm not an online gamer and couldn't care less about anticheats.
Anticheat is one of those things where I probably sound really old, but man it’s just a game. If you hate cheating, don’t play on pub servers with randoms or find a group of people you can play with, like how real life works.
For competitive gaming, I think attested hardware & software actually is the right way to go. Don’t force kernel-level malware on everyone.
This seems both semi probably but also like maybe a bit of a critical moral hazard for Valve. Right now folks love Valve. They do good things for Linux.
Making a Valve-only Linux solution would take a lot of the joy of this moment away for many. But it would also help Valve significantly. It's very uncomfortable to consider, imo.
You don't have to play these specific games though. I mean, what's your privacy, what's not being bombarded by ads in your OS worth to you? Have you taken an honest thought about this?
If you want to play games with friends, you have to play whatever the group plays. This is especially problematic as the group tries out new games, increasing the chance you can’t join because you’re not on Windows.
My friends are understanding that I don't play games with rootkit anti cheat (whether on Linux or Windows). There are enough games that we can play other games together still, and when they want to play the games with such anti-cheat (e.g. Helldivers 2) they simply play without me. No big deal.
Personally I'd be interested to see what would happen if Sony/MS did what they could to make keyboard/mouse experience as good as possible on their consoles (I'm writing from a position of ignorance on the state of mouse/keys with current consoles) and encouraged developers to offer a choice in inputs, so that the locked-down machines can become the place for highest confidence in no/low cheaters. If other people want to pay through the nose to go beyond what consoles offer on the detail/resolution/framerate trifecta then I'm sure they could do so, but I really don't see how you lock down an open platform. That challenge has been going for decades.
This really depends on the friends you have. I've never encountered this limitation because no one in my friend group plays competitive ranked games. Basically anything with private sessions doesn't require anticheat, so Valheim, RV There Yet, Deep Rock Galactic, etc. all work fine.
Yes, but sometimes it is nice to socialize with other people and they might play these types of games. I don’t enjoy Call of Duty, but I’ll play it from time to time so I can chat with my brother (this is the only way to get him on the phone/microphone for some reason). I value the time I am spending with him more than a bit of privacy (in that context).
I am very pro-Linux and pro-privacy, and hope that the situation improves so I don’t have to continue to compromise.
besides ads and privacy concerns it's been such a delight not having to deal with unwanted updates, hunting phantom processes that take up cpu time, or the file explorer that takes forever to show ten files in the download folder. I cannot be paid to use windows at this point.
Another unresolved roadblock is Nvidia cards seriously underperforming in DX12 games under Proton compared to Windows. Implementing DX12 semantics on top of Vulkan runs into some nasty performance cliffs on their hardware, so Khronos is working on amending the Vulkan spec to smooth that over.
What percentage of games require DX12? From what I recall, a surprisingly large percentage of games support DX11, including Arc Raiders, BF6 and Helldivers 2, just to name a few popular titles.
At the same time, Vulkan support is also getting pretty widespread, I think notably idTech games prefer Vulkan as the API.
DX12 is overwhelmingly the default for AAA games at this point. The three titles you listed all officially require DX12, what DX11 support they have is vestigial, undocumented and unsupported. Many other AAAs have already stripped their legacy DX11 support out entirely.
Id Software do prefer Vulkan but they are an outlier.
DX12 is less and less the default, most gamedev that I’ve seen is surrounding Vulkan now.
DX12 worked decently better than openGL before, and all the gamedevs had windows, and it was required for xbox… but now those things are less and less true.
The playstation was always “odd-man-out” when it came to graphics processing, and we used a lot of shims, but then Stadia came along and was a proper linux, so we rewrote a huge amount of our render to be better behaved for Vulkan.
All subsequent games on that engine have thus had a vulkan friendly renderer by default, that is implemented cleaner than the DX12 one, and works natively pretty much everywhere. So its the new default.
I'm guessing "we" was Ubisoft going by your profile and their support for Stadia around that time? I can't see any sign of Vulkan maintaining any traction there after Stadia died, their newer games are all targeting DX12 exclusively, and although R6:Siege used to offer Vulkan on Windows it was eventually patched out in favor of more DX12.
Well yeah but then eBPF would not work and then the anti cheat could just show that it's not working and lock you out.
This isn't complicated.
Even the Crowdstrike falcon agent has switched to bpf because it lowers the risk that a kernel driver will brick downstream like what happened with windows that one time. I recently configured a corporate single sign on to simply not work if the bpf component was disabled.
Well but then attackers just compile a kernel with a rootkit that hides the hack and itself from the APIs of the BPF program, so it has to deal with that too or it's trivially bypassed.
Anticheat and antivirus are two similar but different games. It's very complicated.
The bpf api isn't the only telemetry source for an anti cheat module. There's a lot of other things you can look at. A bpf api showing blanks for known pid descendent trees would be a big red flag. You're right that it's very complicated but the toolchain is there if someone wanted to do the hard work of making an attempt. It's really telemetry forensics and what can you do if the cheat is external to the system.
I'd be less antianticheat if I could just select the handcuffs at boot time for the rare occasion where I need them.
Although even then I'd still have qualms about paying for the creation of something that might pave the path for hardware vendors to work with authoritarian governments to restrict users to approved kernel builds. The potential harms are just not in the same league as whatever problems it might solve for gamers.
Running an explicitly anti-user proprietary kernel module that does god-knows-what is not something I'd ever be willing to do, games be damned. It might just inject exploits into all of your binaries and you'd be none the wiser. Since it wouldn't work on VMs you'd have to use a dedicated physical machine for it. Seems to high of a price to play just a few games.
Yep, a plenty of prior art on how to implement the necessary attestations. Valve could totally ship their boxes with support for anticheat kernel-attestation.
Is it possible to do this in a relatively hardware-agnostic, but reliable manner? Probably not.
What do you mean? Ship computer with preinstalled Linux that you can't tamper? Sounds like Android. For ordinary computers, secure boot is fully configurable, so it won't work: I can disable it, I can install my own keys, etc. Any for any userspace way to check it I'll fool you, if I own the kernel.
No, just have the anti-cheat trust kernels signed by the major Linux vendors and use secure boot with remote attestation. Remote attestation can't be fooled from kernel space, that's the entire point of the technology.
That way you could use an official kernel from Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Arch etc. A custom one wouldn't be supported but that's significantly better than blocking things universally.
You can't implement remote attestation without a full chain of exploits (from the perspective of the user). Remote attestation works on Android because there is dedicated hardware to directly establish communication with Google's servers that runs independent (as a backchannel). There is no such hardware in PCs. Software based attestation is easily fooled on previous Android/Linux.
I wonder if you could use check-point and restore in userspace (https://criu.org/Main_Page) so that after the game boots and passes the checks on a valid system you can move it to an "invalid" system (where you have all the mods and all the tools to tamper with it).
I don't really care about games, but i do care about messing up people and companies that do such heinous crimes against humanity (kernel-level anti-cheat).
The war is lost. The most popular game that refuses to use kernel-level anti-cheat is Valve's Counter-Strike 2, so the community implemented it themselves (FaceIT) and requires it for the competitive scene.
Uh, you'd have to compile a Kernel that doesn't allow it while claiming it does ... And behaves as if it does - otherwise you'd just fail the check, no?
I feel like this is way overstated, it's not that easy to do, and could conceptually be done on windows too via hardware simulation/virtual machines. Both would require significant investments in development to pull of
Right, the very thing that works against AC on Linux also works for it. There are multiple layers (don't forget Wine/Proton) to inject a cheat, but those same layers could also be exploited to detect cheats (especially adding fingerprints over time and issuing massive ban-waves).
And then you have BasicallyHomeless on YouTube who is stimulating nerves and using actuators to "cheat." With the likes of the RP2040, even something like an aim-correcting mouse becomes completely cheap and trivial. There is a sweet-spot for AC and I feel like kernel-level might be a bit too far.
All it takes is going to cd usr src linux and running make menuconfig. Turning off a few build flags. Hitting save. And then running make to recompile. But that's like saying "well if I remove a fat32 support I can't use fat32". Yea it will lock you out showing you have it disabled. No big deal.
That would require that they actually make the effort to develop Linux support. The current "it just works" reality is that the games developers don't need to support running on Linux.
Clearly, when there will be enough Linux gamers another solution to the kernel-level anti-cheat issue will be found. After all, the most played competitive shooter is CS and Valve has does not use kernel-level AC.
> After all, the most played competitive shooter is CS and Valve has does not use kernel-level AC.
Valve doesn't employ kernel AC but in practice others have taken that into their own hands - the prevalence of cheating on the official CS servers has driven the adoption of third-party matchmaking providers like FACEIT, which layer their own kernel AC on top of the game. The bulk of casual play happens on the former, but serious competitive play mostly happens on the latter.
The best description I've been able to give of the dichotomy of CS is this: there is no way for a person to become good enough to get their signature into the game, without using kernel-level ACs.
The competitive CS leagues do use AC though. The big issue for these games is the free-to-play model does not work without anti-cheat. Having a ~$20 fee to cheat for a while before getting banned significantly reduces the number of cheaters, and that's what CS does with their prime server model.
And for what it's worth, I'm pretty sure Valorant is the most played competitive shooter at the moment.
I’ll keep repeating it: the more people vote with their wallet, the more game companies will deploy Linux - including the anticheat.
EAC has the support for Linux, you just have to enable it as a developer.
I know this, I worked on games that used this. EAC was used on Stadia (which was a debian box) for the division, because the server had to detect that EAC was actually running on the client.
I feel like I bring this up all the time here but people don’t believe me for some reason.
This does not mean it supports the full feature set as from EAC on Windows. As an analogy, it's like saying Microsoft Excel supports iPad. It's true, but without VBA support, there's not going to be many serious attempts to port more complicated spreadsheets to iPad.
The problem is that EAC-for-Linux is utterly trivial to bypass, that's why the developers have to opt-in. There's at least one case, with Apex Legends, where a developer did opt-in but ended up rescinding that later because it was so ineffective at detecting even simple freely available and open source hacks.
That was a non-issue on Stadia where users couldn't run their own code on the host, but it becomes an issue when they're running the game locally.
When that steam deck clone came out and games played better on SteamOS than on Windows on the exact same hardware, it woke a bunch of people up. Microsoft scrambled to bring the startup time and footprint down but shots had already been fired.
You don’t want a vendor you have to publically shame to get them to do the right thing. And that’s MS if any single sentence has ever described them without using curse words.
I've got the Legion Go S with Steam OS, and that shit is great. It's stable, my games run well, the OS is pretty much entirely in the background, but I can still access it fully if I need to. Love it.
I dont get the feeling they care. Microsoft is so lost under Satya at this point. Totally blinded by Azure and AI and stock price growth. At some point they're going to realize all the ground they've lost and it's going to be a real problem. They're repeating a lot of the same mistakes that cost them the browser and mobile market.
Yeah. MS must have been so hurt about losing to the iPhone, they really jumped the gun on AI as if to avoid a similar mistake. It's Satya's major play and I think they are already paying for that decision. xbox is hollowed out so that AI can be funded, while the pc/console hybrid project is doomed to fail because "windows everywhere" doesn't work if windows is crap. indeed, they might be left with just the cloud business in the end.
"Totally blinded by Azure and AI and stock price growth."
Stock price growth is their core business because that is how large firms operate.
MS used to embrace games etc because the whole point was all PCs should run Windows. Now the plan is to get you onto a subscription to their cloud. The PC bit is largely immaterial in that model. Enterprises get the rather horrible Intune bollocks to play with but the goal is to lock everyone into subs.
When the rumour was Windows 10 will be the last windows! I don't think people thought it would because of win11 would be so unbearable it would finally drive users to Linux.. but here we are. RIP.
If people were buying new PCs every year like they used to I'd be worth it. Turns out there isn't as much value having a "captive market" on a PC unless it's locked down.
The irony is that gaming on linux got better but the instigator was not the OSS community. All of it was funded by closed source software competing with other close source software. The OSS community by itself did not have the conviction to climb over this bulwark.
But when Steam started to develop Proton, WINE was 90% there! Valve only had to provide the remaining 90%.
The strength of Linux and Free software in general is not in that it's completely built by unpaid labor. It's built by a lot of paid, full-time labor. But the results are shared with everyone. The strength of Free software is that it fosters and enforces cooperation of all interested parties, and provides a guarantee that defection is an unprofitable move.
This is one of the reasons you see Linux everywhere, and *BSD, rarely.
Money and resources suddenly materialized once someone realized that there was profit in it is pretty much the expected way this goes. OpenTofu happened not because of some OSS force of will but because a group of companies needed it to exist for their business.
This flow is basically the bread and butter for the OSS community and the only way high effort projects get done.
This still has a "sometimes" on it, there are more then a few games that need magic proton flags to run well, nothing you can't go look up on protondb, but lots of games you would want to play with friends might have some nasty anti-cheat on it that just won't let you play it at all.
Gaming works fine with exception of things like BF6 that require kernel level anti cheat.
The one thing I haven’t been able to get working reliably is steam remote play with the Linux machine as host. Most games work fine, others will only capture black screens.
Proton has gotten so good now that I don't even bother checking compatibility before buying games.
Granted, I don't play online games, so that might change things, but for years I used to have to make a concession that "yeah Windows is better for games...", but in the last couple years that simply has not been true. Games seem to run better on Linux than Windows, and I don't have to deal with a bunch of Microsoft advertising bullshit.
Hell, even the Microsoft Xbox One controllers work perfectly fine with xpad and the SteamOS/tenfoot interface recognizes it as an Xbox pad immediately, and this is with the official Microsoft Xbox dongle.
At this point, the only valid excuses to stay on Windows, in my opinion, are online games and Microsoft Office. I don't use Office since I've been on Unixey things so long that I've more or less just gotten used to its options, but I've been wholly unable to convince my parents to change.
I love my parents, but sometimes I want to kick their ass, because they can be a bit stuck in their ways; I am the one who is expected to fix their computer every time Windows decides to brick their computer, and they act like it's weird for me to ask them to install Linux. If I'm the one who has to perform unpaid maintenance on this I don't think it's weird for me to try and get them to use an operating system that has diagnostic tools that actually work.
As far as I can tell, the diagnostic and repair tools in Windows have never worked for any human in history, and they certainly have never worked for me. I don't see why anyone puts up with it when macOS and Linux have had tools that actually work for a very long time.
I quit gaming a year ago and no longer have a consumer OS installed on any machine. I can't imagine ever willingly going back after getting used to being able to set my machine up any way I want, and know it will work exactly as I've specified, and won't ever spy on me or monetize my data, and actually has an ecosystem for extending it in basically any way I can imagine, with no bloatware, an app ecosystem with no bundled spyware or adware, etc.
I'm tired of people saying Steam on Linux just works. It doesn't.
Tried running Worms: instant crash, no error message.
Tried running Among Us: instant crash, had to add cryptic arguments to the command line to get it to run.
Tried running Parkitect: crashes after 5 minutes.
These three games are extremely simple, graphically speaking. They don't use any complicated anti-cheat measure. This shouldn't be complicated, yet it is.
Oh and I'm using Arch (BTW), the exact distro SteamOS is based on.
And of course, as always, those for which it works will tell you you're doing-it-wrong™ .
These games are all rated gold or platinum on protondb, indicating that they work perfectly for most people.
Hard to say what might be going wrong for you without more details. I would guess there's something wrong with your video driver. Maybe you have an nvidia card and the OS has installed the nouveau drivers by default? Installing the nvidia first-party drivers (downloaded from the nvidia web site) will fix a lot of things. This is indeed a sore spot for Linux gaming, though to be fair graphics driver problems are not exactly unheard of on Windows either.
Personally I have a bunch of machines dedicated to gaming in my house (https://lanparty.house) which have proven to be much more stable running Linux than they were with Windows. I think this is because the particular NIC in these machines just has terrible Windows drivers, but decent Linux drivers (and I am netbooting, so network driver stability is pretty critical to the whole system).
I imagine the people saying “it just works” are saying it because it does, at least for them.
SteamOS is based on Arch, but customized and aimed at specific hardware configurations. It’d be interesting to know what hardware you’re using and if any of your components are not well supported.
FWIW, I’ve used Steam on Linux (mostly PopOS until this year, then Bazzite) for years and years without many problems. ISTR having to do something to make Quake III work a few years ago, but it ran fine after and I’ve recently reinstalled it and didn’t have to fuss with anything.
Granted, I don’t run a huge variety of games, but I’ve finished several or played for many hours without crashes, etc.
I use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, and I've never had trouble running a game that's rated gold or above. I've even gotten an Easy AntiCheat game to work correctly.
I've been gaming on linux exclusively for about 8 years now and have had very few issues running windows games. Sometimes the windows version, run through proton, runs better than the native port. I don't tend to be playing AAA games right after launch day, though. So it could be taste is affecting my experience.
I just bought another second Dell workstation (admit I hated those) and can’t wait to install SteamOS when it is released to the public. I don’t care about AAA gaming but the integrated card should be able to handle most of the games from ten years ago.
I don't have your other games, but I do have a few Worms games and they worked out of the box for me with GE Proton on NixOS.
I'm not saying "you're doing it wrong", because obviously if you're having trouble then that is, if nothing else, bad UX design, but I actually am kind of curious as to what you're doing different than me. I have an extremely vanilla NixOS setup that boots into GameScope + Tenfoot and I drive everything with a gamepad and it works about as easily as a console does for me.
If anything this is the challenge with PC as a platform being so varied, any random software/hardware/config variation could bring a whole load of quirks.
That probably includes anything that isn't a PC in a time-capsule from when the game originally released, so any OS/driver changes since then, and I don't think we've reached the point where we can emulate specific hardware models to plug into a VM. One of the reasons the geforce/radeon drivers (eg, the geforce "game ready" branding) are so big is that they carry a whole catalogue of quirk workarounds for when the game renderer is coded badly or to make it a better fit to hardware and lets them advertise +15% performance in a new version. Part of the work for wine/proton/dxvk is going to be replicating that instead of a blunt translation strictly to the standards.
Yeah, I think Linus himself pointed out that the desktop is the hardest platform to support because it's unbelievably diverse and varied.
With regards to Linux I generally just focus on hardware from brands that have historically had good Linux support, but that's just a rule of thumb, certainly not perfect.
Arch is nice if you want to tinker. Based on your reasoning, I wouldn't recommend it.
But if you still want arch-based, I would recommend EndevourOS, and for even a simpler/better distro, Bazzite.
The games don't fail to run because they are so "graphically powerful" they fail to run because you chose to set up your system without the necessary runtime.
There are people who make stripped-down versions of windows. Is it fair to say that because these releases exist that windows isn't "just works" either?
Recently switched to Linux Mint from Windows and it has not only been good. It has been cathartic. I enjoy computers again! I am self-hosting some services, what an absolute joy.
I'm not against Wayland, but I think Wayland is currently not good for the Linux ecosystem. I've had lots of friends try Linux, and they've had issues with Discord global keyboard shortcuts not working, and window positions not restoring at application start, and lots of other small issues, which add up in the end. But once they switched to X11, they've all been very happy.
"window positions not restoring at application start"
Well you see, you are actually just silly for wanting this or asking for this, because it's actually just a security flaw...or something. I will not elaborate further.
I switched my desktop from macOS (10+ years) to Ubuntu 25 last year and I'm not going back. The latest release includes a Gnome update which fixed some remaining annoyances with high res monitors.
I'd say it pretty much "just works" except less popular apps are a bit more work to install. On occasion you have to compile apps from source, but it's usually relatively straightforward and on the upside you get the latest version :)
For anyone who is a developer professionally I'd say the pros outweigh the cons at this point for your work machine.
> The latest release includes a Gnome update which fixed some remaining annoyances with high res monitors.
Interesting, I've had to switch off from Gnome after the new release changed the choices for HiDPI fractional scaling. Now, for my display, they only support "perfect vision" and "legally blind" scaling options.
I switched in 1999. I've never really had any problems in all that time.
Although it was to BSDi then, and then FreeBSD and then OpenBSD for 5 years or so. I can't remember why I switched to Debian but I've been there ever since.
But what about laptops? I don’t use desktop machines anymore (last time was in 2012). Apple laptops are top notch. I use ubuntu as vm (headless) for software development tho
Best you can do is build a high end desktop at home and access it remotely with any laptop you desire. The laptop performance then becomes mostly irrelevant (even the OS is less relevant) and by using modern game streaming protocols you can actually get great image quality, low latency and 60+ fps. Though, optimizing it for low bandwidth is still a chore.
Have that desktop be reachable with SSH for all your CLI and sys admin needs, use sunshine/moonlight for the remote streaming and tailscale for securing and making sunshine globally available.
I did some investigation into this the other day. The short answer seems to be that if you like MacBooks, you aren't willing to accept a downgrade along any axis, and you really want to use Linux, your best bet today is an M2 machine. But you'll still be sacrificing a few hours of battery life, Touch ID support (likely unfixable), and a handful of hardware support edge cases. Apple made M3s and M4s harder to support, so Linux is still playing catch-up on getting those usable.
Beyond that, Lunar Lake chips are evidently really really good. The Dell XPS line in particular shows a lot of promise for becoming a strict upgrade or sidegrade to the M2 line within a few years, assuming the haptic touchpad works as well as claimed. In the meantime, I'm sure the XPS is still great if you can live with some compromises, and it even has official Linux support.
I don't have an x86 laptop at the moment so sticking with Macbook for now. My assumption is Mac laptops still are far superior given M-series chips and OS that are tuned for battery efficiency. Would love to find out this is no longer the case.
I've had Linux running on a variety of laptops since the noughties. I've had no more issues than with Windows. ndiswrapper was a bit shit but did work back in the day.
I have the HP Zbook Ultra G1a. AMD 395+, 129GB RAM, 4TB 2280 SSD. Works great with Ubuntu 24.04 and the OEM kernel. Plays Steam games, runs OpenCL AI models. Only nit is it is very picky on what USB PD chargers it will actually charge on at all. UGreen has a 140W that works.
Not working with Linux is a function of Apple, not Linux. There is a crew who have wasted the last half decade trying to make Asahi Linux, a distro to run on ARM macbooks. The result is after all that time, getting an almost reasonably working OS on old hardware, Apple released the M4 and crippled the whole effort. There's been a lot of drama around the core team who have tried to cast blame, but it's clear they are frustrated by the fact that the OEM would rather Asahi didn't exist.
I can't personally consider a laptop which can't run linux "top notch." But I gave up on macbooks around 10 years ago. You can call me biased.
I just put Asahi on an M2 Air and it works so incredibly well that I was thinking this might finally be the year linux takes the desktop .. I wasn't aware of the drama w/Apple but I imagine M2 hardware will become valuable and sought after over M3+ just for the ability to run Asahi
Again, I've had two 4k monitors on Linux for about ten years, and it has worked well the whole time. Back then I used "gnome tweak" to increase the size of widgets etc. Nowadays its built into mate, cinnamon, etc.
Did you start using Linux on the Mac hardware or on PC hardware? I have a late era Intel Macbook and was considering switching it to Ubuntu or Debian since it is getting kinda slow.
Not the OP, but I have a 2015 Macbook Pro and a desktop PC both running Linux. I love Fedora, so that's on the desktop, but I followed online recommendations to put Mint on the Macbook and it seems to run very well. However, I did need to install mbpfan (https://github.com/linux-on-mac/mbpfan) to get more sane power options and this package (https://github.com/patjak/facetimehd) to get the camera working. It runs better than Mac OS, but you'll need to really tweak some power settings to get it to the efficiency of the older Mac versions.
I switched to a new x86 machine. Running Linux on Mac just made things unnecessarily complicated and hurt performance. Im still open to using docker on Mac to run Linux containers but once you want a GUI life was simpler when I switched off.
Switched in, ooh i dunno, '98 or '99. Quality is about where it was then relatively speaking. Sure things have improved, mainly just systemd, and we got ACPI and later power management stuff for laptops.
Prior to that windows was better on laptops due to having the proprietary drivers or working ACPI. But it was pretty poor quality in terms of reliability, and the main problem of the included software being incredibly bare bones, combined with the experience of finding and installing software was so awful (especially if you've not got an unlimited credit card to pay for "big professional solutions").
Every time the year of the Linux desktop arrives, I'm baffled, since not much has changed on this end.
This is a strange statement for me, because I'd say that since '99 almost everything has changed. Maybe your definition of quality is a bit different than mine.
I tried to use Linux back in high school. I had a Pentium 4 computer which was pretty fast for its time. However, I had a dialip windows soft modem. You remember the driver situation. I had to boot to Windows to check my email.
Also, I was basically a child and had no idea what I was doing (I still don't but that's besides the point). Things have definitely gotten better.
I have always wanted to use linux as my main OS. I tried with Ubuntu twice the past and always ran into really painful hurdles or missing features. This year I tried again with Mint and it absolutely stuck the landing. I have completely switched my desktop and laptop (and plex server) to mint. I have never even booted back into windows. I have not had any big issues and have been able to make it better than my windows desktop ever was.
I made the move about a month ago to bazzite on my desktop with an nvidia graphics card. I still have my windows drive for when I need it but that's pretty rare. Bazzite isn't perfect but we've reached the point where the rough edges are less painful than the self sabotage microsoft has been inflicting on their users in recent versions of windows.
I tried bazzite but ended up on cachyos. The whole layered / immutable thing got a bit annoying. I'd rather just run snapshots and manage my packages more traditionally
I love the layered thing except for the rough edges. Unfortunately the rough edges for me are that Linux containerization and permissions are completely idiotic.
In Fedora Atomic it should be foolishly easy to set up a system account, with access to specific USB devices via group, and attach a volume that can easily be written to by a non-root user inside of the container.
I think we've reached a point where Windows is about as rough as Linux. But the problem is still that people are familiar with Windows and have learned how to deal with the roughness; not so on Linux. And so long as Windows owns the business and education sectors, it will always have the benefit of that familiarity.
(cue arrogance)
People on HackerNews complaining about Linux Desktop is pretty disappointing. You guys are supposed to be the real enthusiasts... you can make it work.
(cue superiority complex)
I've been using Linux Desktop for over 10 years. It's great for literally everything. Gaming admittedly is like 8/10 for compatibility, but I just use a VM with PCIe passthrough to pass in a gpu and to load up a game for windows or use CAD, etc. Seriously, ez.
Never had issues with NVIDIA GFX with any of the desktop cards. Laptops... sure they glitch out.
Originally Wine, then Proton, now Bazzite make it super easy to game natively.
The only issues I ever had with games were from the Kernel level anti-cheats bundled. The anti-cheats just weren't available for Linux, so the games didn't start. Anyone familiar with those knows its not a linux thing, it's a publisher/anti-cheat mechanism thing. Just lazy devs really.
(cue opinionated anti-corporate ideology)
I like to keep microsoft chained up in a VM where it belongs so can't do it's shady crap. Also with a VM you can do shared folders and clipboard. Super handy actually.
Weirdly enough, MacOS in a VM is a huge pita, and doesn't work well.
I've observed that most "enthusiasts" are really just brand ambassadors. They've been captured by some proprietary software that doesn't run on Linux, and that's the problem of Linux. The day their set of products runs perfectly on Linux is the day Linux will be ready for them.
That isn't weird. It's by design. MacOS is only designed to run on Apple hardware, and a VM, even if the host is Apple hardware isn't really Apple hardware.
Curious: do enterprises using Windows suffer through all the system-level ads and nagware? Or do they get a version that lets their employees actually focus on work instead of learning the many reasons they should consider switching back to Edge?
It’s all turned on by default even in Windows 11 Enterprise. You can turn everything off via AD Group Policy or your MDM but you have to go through the labyrinth of Windows policies and find them all. Thankfully you only have to do it once and then push it to all of your devices.
No nagware but, at least on the machines of my colleagues, an even worse enemy: Microsoft Defender with all the checkboxes ticked. Grinds the machine to an absolute halt for any development work - sometimes the responsible security department has mercy and gives exceptions for certain folders/processes, sometimes not.
My work machine is grossly slow due to all the various security software.
Loading Teams can take minutes. I'm often late to meetings waiting for the damn thing to load.
Feels like early 90s computing and that Moore's Law was an excuse for bad coding practices and pushing newer hardware so that "shit you don't care about but is 'part of the system'" can do more monitoring and have more control of 'your' computer.
You _can_ curate the Enterprise edition a lot more with group policy/intune and remove all that stuff but my experience has been most corporate IT departments don’t care/don’t know how to do it, and MS will just randomly enable new things without asking the same as home editions and you have to keep an eye on it and go to disable them.
Every year at around this time there is a lot of linux related content in tech media.
It's a slow moving evergreen topic perfect for a scheduled release while the author is on holiday. This is just filler content that could have been written at any point in the last 10 years with minor changes.
I've been working on the Linux desktop for 20 years, and I've been using it on the desktop since 1999, so I lived through the infamous "Year of the Linux Desktop" era.
I've not seen anything like the current level of momentum, ever, nor this level of mainstream exposure. Gaming has changed the equation, and 2026 will be wild.
Not just gaming. This year, both Windows and Mac OS had absolutely terrible years. The Mac effed up its UI with liquid glass, to the point where Alan Dye fled to Meta. Microsoft pushed LLMs and ads into everything, screwing up what was otherwise a decent release.
On the other hand, on the Linux side, we had the release of COSMIC, which is an extremely user-friendly desktop. KDE, Gnome, and others are all at a point where they feel polished and stable.
To be honest, I always figured we'd make it in the long run. We're a thrifty bunch, we aim to set up sustainable organizations, we're more enshittification-resistant by nature. As long as we're reliable and stick around for long enough.
I don't think the prevalence of these articles this time of year is because the authors go on holiday, but instead is because the new year is the perfect time to ponder: "Will this be the year of the Linux desktop?"
I guess everyone’s in a “fuck it I’m ready to try some new stuff” mood too so this content is perfectly suited for new years. Would never have noticed this without your comment.
Except every year you didn't have people like Pewdiepie and DHH pushing Linux. As as channels like GamersNexus doing Linux benchmarks. At the same time Windows and Mac making very dumb mistakes. So this time it does feel different, even if it might not be in the end.
Linux desktop is amazing. Coming from Debian, I installed Windows and had to quickly purge it from my hardware! Super bloated, slow, constantly phoned some CC center, automatically connected to OneDrive, …
Debian is a breath of fresh air in comparison. Totally quiet and snappy.
Debian (stable) is great but I wouldn't use it for a gaming PC on modern hardware. The drivers included are just too old. Bazzite or Arch (DIY option) seem better options.
Debian Stable gamer here, with modern hardware, having a great time.
> The drivers included are just too old.
This can usually be fixed by enabling Debian Backports. In some cases, it doesn't even need fixing, because userland drivers like Mesa can be included in the runtimes provided by Steam, Flatpak, etc.
Once set up, Debian is a very low-maintenance system that respects my time, and I love it for that.
We've made the switch and it's been great. On top of my that my partner who is not a computer person picked up Linux Mint to the level she can use Windows in a couple weeks.
I moved to linux this month for good once i realized I no longer needed microsft services (Excel for example "runs on Mac" but is missing important features). I chose redhat because its what I've been using for over a decade at work and feels like home. Only thing I miss is Capcut as that workflow was pretty ironed out. Getting the hang of KDENlive
I'm slowly de-Microsofting my computing. I've traded OneDrive for Syncthing. I ditched one PC for a Mac. I have the technical skills to run Linux effectively, but the biggest obstacle for my Linux adoption is distro fatigue. Run Ubuntu? Debian? Fedora? PopOS? Kubuntu? Arch? The article introduced yet another one to consider--Bazzite.
The Linux world is amazing for its experimentation and collaboration. But the fragmentation makes it hard for even technical people like me who just want to get work done to embrace it for the desktop.
Ubuntu LTS is probably the right choice. But it's just one more thing I have to go research.
As a beginner, just pick Ubuntu and get on with your life imo. Switching distros isn't that big of a lift later on and pretty much everything you learn carries over from one to the other. It's much more worthwhile to just pick _something_ and learn some basics and become comfortable with the OS imo.
I think fragmentation is the wrong way to look at it; they're all basically compatible at the end of the day. It's more like an endless list of people who want to min-max.
Any reasonably popular distro will have enough other users that you can find resources for fixing hitches. The deciding factor that made me go with EndeavourOS was that their website had cool pictures of space on it. If you don't already care then the criteria don't need to be any deeper than that.
Once you use it enough to develop opinions, the huge list of options will thin itself out.
Been so happy with my switch to Linux about 8 months ago. The nvidia gremlins that stopped me in prior years are all smoothed out.
One big plus with Linux, it's more amenable to AI assistance - just copy & paste shell commands, rather than follow GUI step-by-steps. And Linux has been in the world long enough to be deeply in the LLM training corpuses.
After a few months of testing the waters, I just moved my gaming PC over to full-time Linux this weekend. Proton has really been revolutionary, as I haven't yet encountered something in my Steam library that won't work.
HDR still doesn't really work on Linux w/ nVidia GPUs.
1. 10bpp color depth is not supported on RGB monitors, which are the majority of LCD displays on the market. Concretely, ARGB2101010 and XRGB2101010 modes are not supported by current nVidia Linux drivers - the drivers only offer ABGR2101010 and XBGR2101010 (See: https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/blob/main/...).
2. Common browsers like Chrome and Firefox has no real support for HDR video playback on nVidia Linux drivers. The "HDR" option appears on YouTube, but no HDR color can be displayed with an nVidia GPU.
Also, video backgrounds in Google Meet on Chrome are broken with nVidia GPUs and Wayland. Ironically it works on Firefox. This has been broken for a few years and no fix is in sight.
The "HDR" toggle you get on Plasma or Mutter is hiding a ton of problems behind the scenes. If you only have 8bpp, even if you can find an app that somehow displays HDR colors on nVidia/Wayland - you'll see artifacts on color gradients.
I have Interstellar on 4K UltraHD Blu-ray that features HDR on the cover, Sony 4K Blu-ray player (UBP-X700) and a LG G4 OLED television. I also have an AVR (Denon AVR-S760H 7.2 Ch) connecting both the Blu-ray and a PC running Linux with a RTX 3060 12GB graphic card to the television. I've been meaning to compare HDR on Linux with the Blu-ray. I guess now better than never. I'll reply back to my post after I am done.
Try it with different monitors you have. The current nVidia Linux drivers only has BGR output for 10bpp, which works on TVs and OLEDs but not most LCDs monitors.
My monitors (InnoCN 27M2V and Cooler Master GP27U) require RGB input, which means it's limited to 8bpp even with HDR enabled on Wayland. There's another commentator below who uses a Dell monitor and manages to get BGR input working and full HDR in nVidia/Linux.
They're also selling $3000 nVidia AI workstations that exclusively uses Linux. But what if you want to watch an HDR video on it? No. What if you want to use Google Meet on Chrome/Wayland? It's broken.
Funny how it went from "just get an Nvidia card for Linux" and "oh my god, what did I do to deserve fglrx?" to "just get an AMD card" and "it's Nvidia, what did you expect?"
I don't think this is true. I can go into my display settings in kde plasma and enable HDR and configure the brightness. I have a nvidia blackwell card.
You can enable, yes. But (assuming you're on an LCD display and not an OLED), you're likely still on XRGB8888 - i.e. 8-bit per channel. Check `drm_info`.
Do it once on "HDR" on Linux, and then on Windows. The "HDR" in nVidia/Linux is fake.
The brightness you see on Plasma or Mutter is indeed related to the HDR support in the driver. But - it's not really useful for the most common HDR tasks at the moment.
Your Display Configuration
Both monitors are outputting 10-bit color using the ABGR2101010 pixel format.
| Monitor | Connector | Format | Color Depth | HDR | Colorspace |
|------------------------|-----------|-------------|-------------|--------------|------------|
| Dell U2725QE (XXXXXXX) | HDMI-A-1 | ABGR2101010 | 10-bit | Enabled (PQ) | BT2020_RGB |
| Dell U2725QE (XXXXXXX) | HDMI-A-2 | ABGR2101010 | 10-bit | Disabled | Default |
* Changed the serial numbers to XXXXXXX
I am on Wayland and outputting via HDMI 2.1 if that helps.
EDIT: Claude explained how it determined this with drm_info, and manually verified it:
> Planes 0 and 3 are the primary planes (type=1) for CRTCs 62 and 81 respectively - these are what actually display your desktop content. The Format: field shows the pixel format of the currently attached framebuffer.
EDIT: Also note that I am slowbanned on this site, so may not be able to respond for a bit.
EDIT: You should try connecting with HDMI 2.1 (you will need a 8k HDMI cable or it will fall back to older standards instead of FRL).
EDIT: HDR on youtube appears to work for me. Youtube correctly indentifies HDR on only 1 of my monitors and I can see a big difference in the flames between them on this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjJWvAhNq34
I don't have a Dell U2725QE, but on InnoCN 27M2V and Cooler Master GP27U there's no ABGR2101010 support. These monitors would only work with ARGB2101010 or XRGB2101010 which nVidia drivers do not provide.
I don’t think your problem is RGB instead of BGR. That’s just the compositor’s work area and your monitor never sees it (it includes an alpha channel). Have you tried KDE Plasma? It sounds like KWin uses 10-bit planes by default when available. Maybe Ubuntu’s compositor (Gnome?) doesn’t support 30 bit color or must be configured? I actually think this is the most likely cause: that Gnome’s compositor has worse support or is fragile with 30-bit color.
One other thing of note is I am using a 120hz refresh which requires no DSC with 4k / 30-bit color / HDMI 2.1.
It's not obvious how to interpret the output. I pasted it into chatgpt and it thinks I am using "Format: ABGR2101010" for both monitors (only 1 has HDR on) so I don't trust it.
I've been really enjoying my experience using CachyOS on my (formerly Windows) gaming PC. I chose to use Limine and btrfs so now if it gets borked by a bad package install/uninstall I can roll back pretty easily. My next step is to replace my Nvidia GPU with an AMD one so I can stop worrying about that aspect in the future.
I've been on Linux desktop for ages, but it's not quite stable enough that I can recommend it to anyone. Space Marine 2 was the first game in quite a while than didn't just work out of the box, but...
E.g three weeks ago nvidia pushed bad drivers which broke my desktop after a reboot and I had to swap display (ctrl-alt-f3 etc), I never got into gnome at all, and roll back to an earlier version. Automatic rollback of bad drivers would have saved this.
It might depend on the distro, but were you running a 10 series or earlier? They dropped Pascal and earlier CPUs with the v590 driver, I know Arch migrated what the nvidia package installed in such a way that could leave someone without an appropriate driver unless they manually moved to a different source.
Then again Arch is one of those distros that has the attitude that you need to be a little engaged/responsible for ongoing maintenance of your system, which is why I'm against blind "just use (distro)" recommendations unless it's very basic and low assumptions about the user.
I've had mixed experiences with AMD. Back in the day - a bit after Linus told Nvidia to fuck off - I tried to get my Radeon 5850HD (i think?) working on Ubuntu. It was one of those things I spent the whole weekend (OS reinstalls really add up) trying to make work, to no avail. Relative to that nonsense, the equivalent proprietary Nvidia driver just worked after being installed.
A couple of months ago I bought a second hand RX 7800 XT, and prepared myself for a painful experience, but I think it just worked. Like I got frustrated trying to find out how to download and install the driver, when I think it just came with Linux Mint already.
I've been using a full amd build with arch on it for years now. never had graphics related issues after an update. my biggest gripe is with the hdmi organization and how we can't have proper support with open source drivers.
I'm glad that I am not the only one saying this. I made the switch 20+ years ago for my day to day use, and I have rarely experienced any problems with it.
I’d argue the majority of casual online PC discourse is driven by gaming. By the numbers LTT is the largest PC/IT/consumer computer YouTube channel and the majority of their content is focused on gaming.
Just recently started using the desktop machine (under my desk, as opposed to my laptop which sits on my desktop) and put NixOS on it, and found myself pleasantly surprised. There's certainly still some parts of NixOS that require some expertise and getting your head around its package model, but overall I was surprised at how idiotproof it was to install and use. I mostly play games on it with Steam, which also Just Works.
NixOS is really a profound experience, once you embrace it. I used Arch for ~3 years and ended up reinstalling it maybe 15 times on my desktop alone. Switched to NixOS and I've used the same installation for 3 years, synced with my laptop and server, switching from x11 to Wayland to KDE to GNOME then back again with no problem.
It doesn't feel real sometimes. My dotfiles are modularized, backed up in Github and versioned with UEFI rollback when I update. I might be using this for the rest of my life, now.
It is good, and for 99+% of use cases for 90+% of users (who mostly use nothing but the browser), they will hardly even notice a difference, besides the lack of obnoxious, instrusive MS behavior.
However, despite really, really wanting to switch (and having it installed on my laptop), I keep finding things that don't quite work right that are preventing me from switching some of my machines. My living room PC, which is what my TV is connected to, the DVR software that runs my TV tuner card doesn't quite work right (despite having a native linux installer), and I couldn't get channels to come through as clearly and as easily. I spent a couple of hours of troubleshooting and gave up.
My work PC needs to have the Dropbox app (which has a linux installer), but it also needs the "online-only" functionality so that I can see and browse the entire (very large) dropbox directory without needing to have it all stored locally. This has been a feature that has been being requested on the linux version of the app for years, and dropbox appears unlikely to add it anytime soon.
Both of these are pretty niche issues that I don't expect to affect the vast majority of users (and the dropbox one in particular shouldn't be an issue at all if my org didn't insist on using dropbox in a way that it is very much not intended to be used, and for which better solutions exist, but I have given up on that fight a long time ago), and like I said, I've had linux on my laptop for a couple of years so far without any issue, and I love it.
I am curious how many "edge cases" like mine exist out there though. Maybe there exists some such edge case for a lot of people even while almost no one has the same edge case issue.
FUSE will provide Dropbox in a more integrated way than Windows (eg. terminal) and a cursory Google revealed some projects for Dropbox that do the JIT download you are after - they are old, but I wager still work just fine (an inactive project can just mean that it's complete).
I just switched to Linux. It's a great gig, and I'm actively encouraging everyone I know still infected with the malware known as Windows 11 to switch.
But some of the drawbacks really aren't edge cases. Apparently there is still no way for me to have access to most creative apps (e.g. Adobe, Affinity) with GPU acceleration. It's irritating that so few Linux install processes are turnkey the way they are for Windows/Mac, with errors and caveats that cost less-than-expert users hours of experimenting and mucking with documentation.
I could go on, but it really feels like a bad time to be a casual PC user these days, because Windows is an inhospitable swamp, and Linux still has some sharp edges.
I use OneDrive and Google Drive heavily and there just are not good clients for Linux for those that I have found. Especially with the ability to not sync files but still "look" like they are there in the filesystem. That is my main stopper now.
There are plenty. I run only Linux at home but CAD software for hobbies (Fusion 360), most games that want kernel level anti cheat, some embedded DRM-enabled media, all sort of just fail. Other things, like GPU tuning or messing with your displays/drivers are harder than they should be. My Bluetooth earbuds just don't work with my Linux machines.
I permanently switched from Windows to Linux about five years ago. I had the same issue as you with Dropbox, so I switched to using the Maestral client for Dropbox instead which has support for selective sync. Works like a charm for me.
I agree, I'd cut off dual booting and go full Linux when the hardware and software I use supports it. One of which being a PCIe Elgato capture card, another being an audio mixer with no driver support and the alternatives are very hacky and too complicated for me.
I’ve been around the block with Linux distributions since 2020. I personally think that Bazzite is the way to go for most people coming from Windows, or people experienced with Linux that want something as close to “set and forget” as you can.
One thing that can be annoying is how quickly things have moved in the Linux gaming space over the past 5 years. I have been a part of conversations with coworkers who talk about how Linux gaming was in 2019 or 2020. I feel like anyone familiar with Linux will know the feeling of how quickly things can improve while documentation and public information cannot keep up.
Linux desktops have felt flaky for me for a few years now. I’m trying to figure out how much of that is bad choices vs real problems.
Ubuntu’s default desktop felt unstable in a macOS VM. Dual-booting on a couple of HP laptops slowed to a crawl after installing a few desktop apps, apparently because they pulled in background services. What surprised me was how quickly the system became unpleasant to use without any obvious “you just broke X” moment.
My current guess: not Linux in general, but heavy defaults (GNOME, Snap, systemd timers), desktop apps dragging in daemons, and OEM firmware / power-management quirks that don’t play well with Linux. Server Linux holds up because everything stays explicit. Desktop distros hide complexity and don’t give much visibility when things start to rot.
Does this line up with others’ experience? If yes, what actually works long-term? Minimal bases, immutable distros, avoiding certain package systems, strict service hygiene, specific hardware?
The only real obnoxious slow-down daemons I'm familiar with are the "system indexing" things (GNOME Tracker, KDE Baloo) -- highly recommend disabling them.
I've been using Kubuntu for years with good results. I prefer KDE to Gnome, which Kubuntu takes care of, and I normally add in the flatpak repositories so I don't need snap. That has generally worked well for me in the last 5 years.
For certain timeperiods I have needed to switch to Fedora, or the Fedora KDE spin, to get access to more recent software if I'm using newer hardware. That has generally also been pretty stable but the constant stream of updates and short OS life are not really what I'm looking for in a desktop experience.
There are three issues that linux still has, which are across the board:
- Lack of commercial mechanical engineering software support (CAD & CAE software)
- Inability to reliably suspend or sleep for laptops
- Worse battery life on laptops
If you are using a desktop and don't care about CAD or CAE software I think it's probably a better experience overall than windows. Laptops are still more for advanced users imho but if you go with something that has good linux support from the factory (Dell XPS 13, Framework, etc.) it will be mostly frictionless. It just sucks on that one day where you install an update, close the laptop lid, put it in your backpack, and find it absolutely cooking and near 0% when you take it out.
I also have never found something that gave me the battery life I wanted with linux. I used two XPS 13's and they were the closest but still were only like 75% of what I would like. My current Framework 16 is like 50% of what I would like. That is with always going for a 1080p display but using a VPN which doesn't help battery life.
We live in a world with the internet and distributed version control, so essentially every piece of software in the world has a tradeoff where the people maintaining it might push an update that breaks something at any time, but also those updates often do good things too, like add functionality, make stuff more efficient, fix bugs, or probably most crucially, patch out security vulnerabilities.
My experience with FOSS has mostly been that mature projects with any reasonable-sized userbase tend to more reliably not break things in updates than is the case for proprietary software, whether it's an OS or just some SaaS product. YMMV. However, I think probably the most potent way to avoid problems like this actually ever mattering is a combination of doing my updates manually (or at least on an opt-in basis) and being willing to go back a version if something breaks. Usually this isn't necessary for more than a week or so for well-maintained software even in the worst case. I use arch with downgrade (Which lets you go back and choose an old version of any given package) and need to actually use downgrade maybe once a year on average, less in the last 5
> Does this line up with others’ experience? If yes, what actually works long-term? Minimal bases, immutable distros, avoiding certain package systems, strict service hygiene, specific hardware?
No, not really. A Linux desktop with a DE will always be slower and more brittle than an headless machine due to the sheer number of packages/components, but something like Arch + Plasma Shell (without the whole KDE ecosystem) should be very stable and snappy. The headaches caused by immutable distros and flatpaks are not worth it IMO, but YMMV.
With debian and KDE (both personal preference), but no snap or flatpak, it works wonderfully. Power/sleep-management has become better than a default windows install. All hardware, including the fingerprint sensor, just works.
Not really, no. What did you install that slowed things down?
> If yes, what actually works long-term?
Plain ordinary Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, running on an ancient Thinkpad T430 with a whopping 8GB of RAM and an SSD (which is failing, but that's not Linux's fault, it's been on its way out for about a year and I should probably stop compiling Haiku nightlies on it).
Can you give an example of which desktop apps are "dragging in daemons"?
I've run Void Linux + Xmonad for many years without any such issues. I also recently installed CachyOS for my kid to game on (KDE Plasma) and it works super well.
If Microsoft could get their heads out of their rears, they could potentially get back to a better OS for gaming. The hybrid kernel Dave Cutler designed is in many ways still better than the Linux kernel. It's the userland that is the issue with Windows 11. Look just by enabling true nvme support you close the gap between Linux and Windows performance wise.
Hahaha. Try sharing a couple old printers and scanners connected to a Linux box on your home network. At best, when it’s working you get lowest common denominator functionality. Want to run some vms ? Works great until you update your distro and the vm hosts kernel modules aren’t compatible anymore. Oh, want to use a later version of some package like docker? Did I use apt or snap or flatpack???
Yes, you can get this stuff working, but if you enjoy doing other things in life, have a job and don’t life alone, it is SSSOOOOO much easier to get a Mac mini. Or even windows 11 if that’s your thing.
Sounds ultra-specific to your experience. VMs, package management and networking are all things that macOS and Windows stumble with for regular usage. I've used all three OSes professionally, and Linux requires the least configuration to get work done.
A long time ago when I was in University, I was a volunteer in the Ubuntu group. In addition to evangelizing Linux/OSS, We were trying to convince our University to switch to opensource software for at least some engineering education with only a little bit of success.
After a particularly busy OSS event a non-programmer friend of mine asked me, why is it that the Linux people seem to be so needy for everyone to make the same choices they make? trying to answer that question changed my perspective on the entire community. And here we are, after all these years the same question seems to still apply.
Why are we so needy for ALL users and use-cases to be Linux-based and Linux-centric once we make that choice ourselves? What is it about Linux? the BSD people seem to not suffer from this and I've never heard anyone advocate for migration to OSX in spite of it being superior for specific usecases (like music production).
IMO if you're a creator, operating systems are tools; use the tool that fits the task.
I've been sceptical of the 'Linux desktop' for a long time, but I recently started using Bazzite on my gaming PC and I'm super impressed. In just a few years since I last daily drove a Linux distro it's come such a long way. KDE Plasma is fast and beautiful.
So far all the games I want to play run really well, with no noticable performance difference. If anything, they feel faster, but it could be placebo because the DE is more responsive.
Honestly I loved it a lot more pre-2022, when Ubuntu added a super aggressive OOM killer that only operates on the level of an entire systemd run unit. Meaning that if you are running computation in, say, a shell and one for your subprocesses running computation takes too much memory, it takes out the entire shell and terminal window, leaving no trace of what happened, including all the terminal logs.
And if you are running Chrome, and something starts taking a lot of memory, say goodbye to the entire app without any niceties.
(Yes, this is a mere pet peeve but it has been causing me so much pain over the past year, and it's such an inferior way to deal with memory limits tha what came before it, I don't know why anybody would have taken OOM logic from systemd services and applied it to use launched processes.)
This is really annoying me as well. I use a program for work that can occasionally use a lot of ram, while saving or interpolating for example. On my little MacBook Air with just 8GB of ram everything works fine, it just swaps a whole lot more for a short period. On my desktop with 16GB ram and Ubuntu oom just kills it, my workaround is the swapspace package which adds swap files under high load, works so far.
I have to wonder if Ubuntu's prescriptive stance on things like this is becoming increasingly outdated in an age where there's actually a decent experience out of the box for a lot more stuff on Linux. I've long since moved on from using it personally for my devices, but I'm fairly certain my tolerance for spending effort tinkering to get things working like I want is a lot higher than even most Linux users, so it's hard for me to gauge if the window have moved significantly in that regard for the average Linux user.
It's not just Ubuntu, Arch is just as bad. The primary problem is systemd, which provided an adequate OOMd for daemons, but then all the distributions seem to be using it for interactively launched processes
If anybody can help me out with a better solution with a modern distribution, that's about 75% of the reason I'm posting. But it's been a major pain and all the GitHub issues I have encountered on it show a big resistance to having better behavior like is the default for MacOS, Windows, or older Linux.
It's funny how you say the way it used to be was better when people always complained about the OOM killer waiting until the system had entirely ground to a halt before acting, to the point some preferred to run with 0 swap so the system would just immediately go down instead.
Regardless, I believe EarlyOOM is pretty configurable, if you care to check it out.
It sounds like your primary issue is that you have a severe RAM deficiency for what you're trying to use your machine for. Any OOM killer, be it the kernel's per-process one or systemd-oomd's per-service one, only exists to try to recover from an out-of-memory scenario where the alternative is to kernel panic (in the case of the kernel's oom killer) or for the system to completely lock up (in the case of systemd-oomd).
My primary issue is that a system that did an OK job at dealing with low memory situations has been replaced with a completely inadequate system.
If your solution is "don't ever run out of memory" my solution is "I won't ever use your OS unless forced to."
Every other OS handles this better, and my work literally requires pushing the bounds of memory on the box, whether it's 64GB or 1TB of RAM. Killing an entire cgroup is never an acceptable solution, except for the long-running servers that systemd is meant to run.
The kernel OOM killer has never done an adequate job for me. It tends to hesitate to kill anything until the system has literally been completely 100% unresponsive for over half an hour. That's completely unacceptable. Killing a cgroup before the system becomes unresponsive is a million times more desirable default behaviour for a normal desktop system (which Ubuntu Desktop is).
Of course, if it's absolutely not compatible with your work, you can just disable systemd-oomd. I'm wondering though, what sort of work are you doing where you can't tune stuff to use 95% of your 1TB of memory instead of 105% of it?
As far as I know, Windows just grinds to a halt entirely, system processes start crashing, or you get a BSOD, and mobile OSes kill the app without any trace. I never had an OOM situation on Macs so I don't know about macOS.
Windows is unstable even if you have more than enough memory but your swap is disabled, due to how its virtual memory works. It generally behaves much worse than others under heavy load and when various system resources are nearly exhausted.
There are several advanced and very flexible OOM killers available for Linux, you can use them if it really bothers you (honestly you're the first I've seen complaining about it). Some gaming/realtime distros are using them by default.
Even NT4 handled OOM scenarios better than modern Linux. No, it didn't grind to a halt, it would grind the rust off of the spinning platters. But it would continue to run your applications until the application was finished or you intervened.
Linux is my main and sole desktop since around-2006. I needed windows for TurboTax a few hours a year in the past but that's it, I did not do PC games though, just regular desktop stuff including developing code.
What is really blocking the move for me is zScaler, Zoom (they may exist on Linux, not sure about how integrated they are) but especially Outlook (the client). The OWA version is subpar and without it I cannot function in a work environment.
> without it I cannot function in a work environment.
This is more about what you choose as your operating environment, not what your work imposes as your working environment.
Most places of work, mine included, run Microsoft services that lock them into the ecosystem incredibly tightly.
As per the article title, "if you want to feel like you actually own your PC", this is about your PC, not the one provided to you by your workplace (since it's likely owned by them).
One thing I'm worried about in my work environment is Microsoft enforcing the web versions of Office and deprecating the stand alone desktop applications. The web versions are a massive step down in terms of functionality and ease of use. Your mention of OWA makes me feel as if that is what Outlook will be sacrificed for at some point in the future anyway.
I had a similar issue, but I ended up installing Debian and running Windows 10 as a virtual machine with VirtualBox. The webcam can be accessed as if were installed on the guest OS and haven't had a problem with Zoom or Teams. Just sharing in case it helps.
Yes. The reason the year of the Linux desktop has yet to arrive is because most people don't understand this joke. Linux is powerful because it is made for power users (although certain distros are changing this)
I switched in 2020. I run Fedora and Arch. I don’t miss MacOS at all. The last Windows I used was 8, so my opinion is out of date, but yeah… I don’t miss Windows, either.
cachyos is a good os that is also performant. arch though so there are quirks around the rolling update model but you always have the newestish packages and if you update regularly there seems to be less headache.
I tried a number of distros and settled on Omarchy because it has a coherent design and nice aesthetics, but it has some weird quirks about messing with my dotfiles on updates. It's so new I suspect this will be ironed out soon.
There is a strange, but pleasant feeling when you hear someone claiming “they’re early to Linux” and think it’s going to be something big. (Happened recently.)
I love this. I spent my holidays hearing non-technical family members complain about their ever deteriorating Windows experiences, issues that make me righteously angry at Microsoft.
IMO the next important unblocker for Linux adoption is the Adobe suite. In a post-mobile world one can use a tablet or phone for almost any media consumption. But production is still in the realm of the desktop UX and photo/video/creative work is the most common form of output. An Adobe CC Linux option would enable that set of "power users". And regardless of their actual percentage of desktop users, just about ever YouTuber or streamer talking about technology is by definition a content creator so opening Linux up to them would have a big effect on adoption.
And yes I've tried most of the Linux alternatives, like GIMP, Inkscape, DaVinci, RawTherapee, etc. They're mostly /fine/ but it's one of the weaker software categories in FOSS-alternatives IMO. It also adds an unnecessary learning curve. Gamers would laugh if they were told that Linux gaming was great, they just have to learn and play an entirely different set of games.
Photoshop (for example) largely works in Wine, although it's not stable enough for production usage. The problem is the CC itself and the installer, which is unimaginably bloated and glued to the Internet Exp... I mean Edge Web View and many other Windows-only things.
An ex lease Thinkpad T Series with Intel graphics is a good choice for value and compatibility. eg a T490 or T14 era machine.
Using hardware at least 6-12 months old is a good way to get better compatibility.
Generally Linux drivers only start development after the hardware is available and in the hands of devs, while Windows drivers usually get a head start before release. Brand new hardware on a LTS (long term support) distro with an older kernel is usually the worst compatibility combo.
This is just not true anymore. The only things that don't work anymore are a few AAA titles that use particular types of anti-cheat systems that rely on Windows kernel drivers (League of Legends is one that comes to mind).
If I remember correctly, after the Crowdstrike BSOD-all-windows-instances update last year Microsoft wanted to make some changes to their kernel driver program and these anti-cheat measures on Windows might need to find a new mechanism soon anyway. That's a long way of saying, it's plausible that even that last barrier might come down sooner rather than later.
The personal desktop has fallen in relevance enough for that to be possible. The goalposts moved, now linux needs to have phone, tablet, and laptop with smooth effortless integration between them all.
I recently switched to using a thumb drive to transfer files to and from my phone/tablet, I became demoralized when faced with getting it all setup.
KDE has phone and laptop integrated well enough for me. It's worth giving it a try but the more devices you want integrated the more of a risk it is in case it doesn't quite work right. But I've got enough other devices in the house which I can't put KDE on (work laptop, Windows machine I need for some specific software) that I can recommend https://github.com/9001/copyparty over thumb drives.
I actually intended to set everything up but did not have time and needed to copy some files, so dusted off a thumb drive. I am liking it quite a bit and I think I prefer it to the alternatives.
YOTLD has nothing to do with my needs and wants and I am perfectly happy with my thumb drive and the weird little ways linux imposes itself on my life.
What amazes me is that on Steam they no longer make the distinction (in the standard library view) between Windows and Linux: every game is assumed to launch in Linux, using Proton behind the scenes it needed. There's still a "Linux games" toggle but now every game appears ungrayed by default.
And it mostly works! At least for my games library. The only game I wasn't able to get to work so far is Space Marine 2, but on ProtonDB people report they got it to work.
As for the rest: I've been an exclusive Linux user on the desktop for ~20 years now, no regrets.
I use a Linux PC every day but I wouldn't recommend it to normal people. They're not going to feel any renewed sense of ownership from it, just annoyance at having to think about technical gibberish when they just want to get on with using the computer.
Linux is not suitable for the average user. I use Xubuntu on all my old computers, but I am 100% sure a normie would not tolerate the tedium of it. People want shiny icons with animations and a bunch of garbage on their computers to make them feel they are doing something. Linux is too static for that.
If I have an issue with an application or if I want an application, I must use the terminal. I can't imagine a Mac user bothering to learn it. Linux is for people who want to maximize the use of their computer without being spied on and without weird background processes. Linux won't die, but it won't catch Windows or Mac in the next 5 decades. People are too lazy for it. Forget about learning. I bet you $100, 99% of the people in the street didn't even see Linux in their lives, nor even heard of it. It is not because of marketing, it is because people who tried it returned to Windows or Mac after deciding it is too hard to learn for them to install a driver or an application.
I would be 100% off Windows if it weren’t for Adobe Suite and Ableton Live not being ported to Linux. I’m guessing both of these companies are avoiding it not for technical reasons but because Linux is a support nightmare given all of the distros and variations of the platform.
What makes Linux a viable desktop for so many people now is the fact that they don’t need to run very much software anymore. It runs Chrome so you’re good.
Tried to switch to Linux plenty of times over the past few decades, this year it finally stuck. I can confidently say I’ll never install Windows again. Everything pretty much just works and any issues I’ve had have been quickly resolved with the help of LLM’s.
I've been giving Linux a go as a daily driver for a few months.
I tried Cinnamon and while it was pleasantly customizable, the sigle-threadedness of the UI killed it for me. It was too easy to do the wrong thing and lock the UI thread, including several desktop or tray Spices from the official repo.
I'm switching to KDE. Seems peppier.
Biggest hardware challenge I've faced is my Logitech mouse, which is a huge jump from the old days of fighting with Wi-Fi and sound support. Sound is a bit messy with giving a plethora of audio devices that would be hidden under windows (like digital and analog options for each device) and occasionally compatibility for digital vs analog will be flaky from a game or something, but I'll take it.
Biggest hassle imho is still installing non-repo software. So many packages offer a flatpak and a snap and and build-from-source instructions where you have to figure out the local package names for each dependency and they offer one .Deb for each different version of Debian and its derivatives and it's just so tedious to figure which is the right one.
I get people are tired of Year of Linux on Desktop, but I feel like last year it actually started happening for real. Mostly due to Arch which is not what I ever expected.
On one hand we have Steam that will make 1000s of games become available on easy to use platform based on Arch.
For developers, we have Omarchy, which makes experience much more streamlined and very pleasant and productive. I moved both my desktop and laptop to Omarchy and have one Mac laptop, this is really good experience, not everything is perfect, but when I switch to Mac after Omarchy, I often discover how not easy is to use Mac, how many clicks it takes to do something simple.
I think both Microsoft and Apple need some serious competition and again, came from Arch who turned out to be more stable and serious then Ubuntu.
My main joy of Linux is to have tilling manager and to have same machine on which I can both play games and work. Which since Windows I couldn't make happen.
Can I run Solidworks on Linux yet? Excel? Labview? Vivado? Adobe products? Altium Designer? (Matlab is mostly yes) Not everybody is just writing Javascript and PHP.
Can I get a laptop to sleep after closing the lid yet?
Not that long ago the answer to these questions was mostly no (or sort of yes... but very painfully)
> Can I get a laptop to sleep after closing the lid yet?
> on windows all of this just works
Disagree on the sleep one - my work laptop doesn’t go to sleep properly. The only laptop I’ve ever used that behaves as expected with sleep is a macbook.
Still no big CAD names that I'm aware of (annoyingly), Libre Calc works fine for me as an Excel alternative, I have used Matlab on it but not recently, not sure on the others.
Laptop sleep and suspend can still be finicky unfortunately.
I will say my experience using CAD or other CAE software on windows has gotten progressively worse over the years to the point that FEA is more stable on linux than on windows.
We do really need a Solidworks, Creo or NX on linux though. My hope has been that eventually something like Wine, Proton, or other efforts to bring windows games to linux will result in us getting the ability to run them. They are one of the last things holding me back from fully moving away from windows.
These are all pretty niche products at this point. For the true professionals that need these tools they're stuck but most people can find reasonable alternatives for their hobby or side hustle.
I have a Windows 11 PC strictly for gaming. Nearly every-time I interact with Windows it infuriates me with garbage code, Microsoft business BS and anti-privacy. I’d love to switch but has Linux gaming solved the anti-cheat requirement issue? Do Epic and EA games work on Linux?
I also play a decent amount of Flight Simulator 2024 and losing that is almost a non-starter for switching.
anticheat is not a linux issue, its a developers issue.
it seems facially easy to solve. pair players with the type of game they want.
turn on anticheat if you want to join no cheat sessions.
if you want a cheat game turn off anticheat and you join sessions with other cheat players.
the whole dilemma comes out of malignant users that enjoy destruction of other users ability to enjoy the game.
go nuclear on clients that manage to join anticheat sessions with cheats turned on.
Spoken like a true Windows UX aficionado. Who doesn't love multiple system settings apps, a mix of minimal new context menus and overcrowded legacy context menus just one more click away.
Only true if those inconsistencies actually matter to your workflow. Not going to deny that they exist, obviously, but their impact is largely overplayed (and gratuitously downplayed on Windows, in my experience).
The article's title - and the original title of the submission - was specific, bold, and contained a call to action. The new title is bland and unspecific (Linux has been "good" for servers for decades now).
Please revert this submission to use the correct title.
It's good until you boot your system and end up with an unrecoverable black screen that meeses your day of work for no good reason. Linux is free if you don't value your time.
You can't really make blanket statements like this about "Linux" in general because it depends on what distro you use. For example, in NixOS to fix this type of problem all you have to do is rollback to a previous configuration that is known to work. I've not used it, but I believe Arch has something similar.
Even with imperatively configured distros like Ubuntu, it's generally much easier to recover from a "screen of death" than in Windows because the former is less of a black box than the latter. This means its easier to work out what the problem is and find a fix for it. With LLMs that's now easier than ever.
And, in the worst case that you have to resort to reinstalling your system, it's far less unpleasant to do that in a Linux distro than in Windows. The modern Windows installer is painful to get through, and then you face hours or days of manually reinstalling and reconfiguring software which you can do with a small handful of commands in Linux to get back to a state that is reasonably similar to what you had before.
I spent years (maybe a decade) without seeing them in the Windows 7 and early 10 era, but in the last few years I have them sometimes. Many seem Nvidia-related, but I also remember some due to a bad update that broke things in some laptops.
I dunno, I spend less time fighting with any of my several linux systems than the macbook I'm required to use for work, even without trying to do anything new with it. I choose to view this charitably and assume most of the time investment people perceive when switching operating systems is familiarity penalties, essentially a switching cost. The longer this remains the case, the less charitably I'm willing to view this.
You can also mitigate a lot of the "familiarity penalties" by planning ahead. For example, by the time I made the decision to switch from Windows around 15 years ago, I'd already been preferring multi-platform FOSS software for many years because I had in mind that I might switch one day. This meant that when it came time to switch, I was able to go through the list of all the software I was using and find that almost all of it was already available in Linux, leaving just a small handful of cases that I was able to easily find replacements for.
The result was that from day 1 of using Linux I never looked back.
Of course, MS seems to enjoy inflicting familiarity penalties on its established user base every couple of years anyway. After having your skills negated in this way enough times, the jump to Linux might not look so bad.
Not in my experience. I've run both Windows and Linux for the last decade and Windows is the only OS that I ever have problems with updates wasting my time and breaking things. I've been running image-based Linux for the last two years and the worst case is rebooting to rollback to the last deployment. Before that it was booting a different btrfs snapshot.
Fun aside: I had a hardware failure a few years ago on my old workstation where the first few sectors of every disk got erased. I had Linux up and running in 10 minutes. I just had to recreate the efi partition and regenerate a UKI after mounting my OS from a live USB. Didn't even miss a meeting I had 15 minutes later. I spent hours trying to recover my Windows install. I'm rather familiar with the (largely undocumented) Windows boot process but I just couldn't get it to boot after hours of work. I just gave up and reinstalled windows from scratch and recovered from a restic backup.
Windows has recently been a complete shitshow - so even if Linux hasn't gotten any better (it has) it is now likely better than fiddling around with unfucking Windows, and Windows doing things like deleting all your files.
You can put some work into windows to slim it down some, a unattended generator to turn most of the crap off on install, then Shutup OO goes a long way
There's an ever growing list of things to do in order to fix Windows, and that list is likely longer than Linux. This whole "your time is free" argument hinges on Windows not having exactly the same issue, or worse.
(I'm aware that Battlefield series and League of Legends won't work due to draconian anti-cheat -- but nobody in my group cares to play those I guess.)
I am just using dm-snapshot for this -- block device level, no fancy filesystems.
Also, amazing house, my friend is enamored of the cat-transit. I used to live not too far from you :)
[0] https://sandstorm.io/news/
I download the nvidia drivers directly from nvidia. Their installer script is actually pretty decent and then I don't have to worry about whether the distro packages are up-to-date.
Pretty horrible technology, and unfortunately a good majority of the gaming industry by revenue relies on it.
This is my case with my relatively new/high-end RTX 4080 and OLED monitor. So until I upgrade both, I use HDMI to be able to drive a 1440p 240hz 10-bit HDR signal @ 30 Gbps.
The best Valve could do is offer a special locked down kernel with perhaps some anticheat capabilities and lock down the hardware with attestation. If they offer the sources and do verified builds it might even be accepted by some.
Doubt it would be popular or even successful on non-Valve machines. But I'm not an online gamer and couldn't care less about anticheats.
For competitive gaming, I think attested hardware & software actually is the right way to go. Don’t force kernel-level malware on everyone.
Making a Valve-only Linux solution would take a lot of the joy of this moment away for many. But it would also help Valve significantly. It's very uncomfortable to consider, imo.
But even then, when everyone is trying out a new indie game there’s a chance it won’t work on non-Windows. It’s happened to me.
I am very pro-Linux and pro-privacy, and hope that the situation improves so I don’t have to continue to compromise.
At the same time, Vulkan support is also getting pretty widespread, I think notably idTech games prefer Vulkan as the API.
Id Software do prefer Vulkan but they are an outlier.
DX12 worked decently better than openGL before, and all the gamedevs had windows, and it was required for xbox… but now those things are less and less true.
The playstation was always “odd-man-out” when it came to graphics processing, and we used a lot of shims, but then Stadia came along and was a proper linux, so we rewrote a huge amount of our render to be better behaved for Vulkan.
All subsequent games on that engine have thus had a vulkan friendly renderer by default, that is implemented cleaner than the DX12 one, and works natively pretty much everywhere. So its the new default.
https://godotengine.org/article/dev-snapshot-godot-4-6-dev-5...
Sure, except that anyone can just compile a Linux kernel that doesn't allow that.
Anti-cheat systems on Windows work because Windows is hard(er) to tamper with.
This isn't complicated.
Even the Crowdstrike falcon agent has switched to bpf because it lowers the risk that a kernel driver will brick downstream like what happened with windows that one time. I recently configured a corporate single sign on to simply not work if the bpf component was disabled.
Anticheat and antivirus are two similar but different games. It's very complicated.
Although even then I'd still have qualms about paying for the creation of something that might pave the path for hardware vendors to work with authoritarian governments to restrict users to approved kernel builds. The potential harms are just not in the same league as whatever problems it might solve for gamers.
Is it possible to do this in a relatively hardware-agnostic, but reliable manner? Probably not.
That way you could use an official kernel from Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Arch etc. A custom one wouldn't be supported but that's significantly better than blocking things universally.
I don't really care about games, but i do care about messing up people and companies that do such heinous crimes against humanity (kernel-level anti-cheat).
I feel like this is way overstated, it's not that easy to do, and could conceptually be done on windows too via hardware simulation/virtual machines. Both would require significant investments in development to pull of
And then you have BasicallyHomeless on YouTube who is stimulating nerves and using actuators to "cheat." With the likes of the RP2040, even something like an aim-correcting mouse becomes completely cheap and trivial. There is a sweet-spot for AC and I feel like kernel-level might be a bit too far.
Valve doesn't employ kernel AC but in practice others have taken that into their own hands - the prevalence of cheating on the official CS servers has driven the adoption of third-party matchmaking providers like FACEIT, which layer their own kernel AC on top of the game. The bulk of casual play happens on the former, but serious competitive play mostly happens on the latter.
And for what it's worth, I'm pretty sure Valorant is the most played competitive shooter at the moment.
https://github.com/JacKeTUs/linux-steering-wheels
Hopefully vr headset support will get better
EAC has the support for Linux, you just have to enable it as a developer.
I know this, I worked on games that used this. EAC was used on Stadia (which was a debian box) for the division, because the server had to detect that EAC was actually running on the client.
I feel like I bring this up all the time here but people don’t believe me for some reason.
This does not mean it supports the full feature set as from EAC on Windows. As an analogy, it's like saying Microsoft Excel supports iPad. It's true, but without VBA support, there's not going to be many serious attempts to port more complicated spreadsheets to iPad.
That was a non-issue on Stadia where users couldn't run their own code on the host, but it becomes an issue when they're running the game locally.
You don’t want a vendor you have to publically shame to get them to do the right thing. And that’s MS if any single sentence has ever described them without using curse words.
Stock price growth is their core business because that is how large firms operate.
MS used to embrace games etc because the whole point was all PCs should run Windows. Now the plan is to get you onto a subscription to their cloud. The PC bit is largely immaterial in that model. Enterprises get the rather horrible Intune bollocks to play with but the goal is to lock everyone into subs.
I thought all of them more or less have operated under Ponzinomics ever since Jack Welch showed that that worked in the short term.
The strength of Linux and Free software in general is not in that it's completely built by unpaid labor. It's built by a lot of paid, full-time labor. But the results are shared with everyone. The strength of Free software is that it fosters and enforces cooperation of all interested parties, and provides a guarantee that defection is an unprofitable move.
This is one of the reasons you see Linux everywhere, and *BSD, rarely.
This flow is basically the bread and butter for the OSS community and the only way high effort projects get done.
This is a far better user experience for Battlefield players than in Windows.
Have you ever actually attempted to play that half-assed buggy piece of shit?
The one thing I haven’t been able to get working reliably is steam remote play with the Linux machine as host. Most games work fine, others will only capture black screens.
Granted, I don't play online games, so that might change things, but for years I used to have to make a concession that "yeah Windows is better for games...", but in the last couple years that simply has not been true. Games seem to run better on Linux than Windows, and I don't have to deal with a bunch of Microsoft advertising bullshit.
Hell, even the Microsoft Xbox One controllers work perfectly fine with xpad and the SteamOS/tenfoot interface recognizes it as an Xbox pad immediately, and this is with the official Microsoft Xbox dongle.
At this point, the only valid excuses to stay on Windows, in my opinion, are online games and Microsoft Office. I don't use Office since I've been on Unixey things so long that I've more or less just gotten used to its options, but I've been wholly unable to convince my parents to change.
I love my parents, but sometimes I want to kick their ass, because they can be a bit stuck in their ways; I am the one who is expected to fix their computer every time Windows decides to brick their computer, and they act like it's weird for me to ask them to install Linux. If I'm the one who has to perform unpaid maintenance on this I don't think it's weird for me to try and get them to use an operating system that has diagnostic tools that actually work.
As far as I can tell, the diagnostic and repair tools in Windows have never worked for any human in history, and they certainly have never worked for me. I don't see why anyone puts up with it when macOS and Linux have had tools that actually work for a very long time.
Tried running Worms: instant crash, no error message.
Tried running Among Us: instant crash, had to add cryptic arguments to the command line to get it to run.
Tried running Parkitect: crashes after 5 minutes.
These three games are extremely simple, graphically speaking. They don't use any complicated anti-cheat measure. This shouldn't be complicated, yet it is.
Oh and I'm using Arch (BTW), the exact distro SteamOS is based on.
And of course, as always, those for which it works will tell you you're doing-it-wrong™ .
Hard to say what might be going wrong for you without more details. I would guess there's something wrong with your video driver. Maybe you have an nvidia card and the OS has installed the nouveau drivers by default? Installing the nvidia first-party drivers (downloaded from the nvidia web site) will fix a lot of things. This is indeed a sore spot for Linux gaming, though to be fair graphics driver problems are not exactly unheard of on Windows either.
Personally I have a bunch of machines dedicated to gaming in my house (https://lanparty.house) which have proven to be much more stable running Linux than they were with Windows. I think this is because the particular NIC in these machines just has terrible Windows drivers, but decent Linux drivers (and I am netbooting, so network driver stability is pretty critical to the whole system).
Woah, that is extremely cool. Very nice work, sir.
SteamOS is based on Arch, but customized and aimed at specific hardware configurations. It’d be interesting to know what hardware you’re using and if any of your components are not well supported.
FWIW, I’ve used Steam on Linux (mostly PopOS until this year, then Bazzite) for years and years without many problems. ISTR having to do something to make Quake III work a few years ago, but it ran fine after and I’ve recently reinstalled it and didn’t have to fuss with anything.
Granted, I don’t run a huge variety of games, but I’ve finished several or played for many hours without crashes, etc.
I've been gaming on linux exclusively for about 8 years now and have had very few issues running windows games. Sometimes the windows version, run through proton, runs better than the native port. I don't tend to be playing AAA games right after launch day, though. So it could be taste is affecting my experience.
I'm not saying "you're doing it wrong", because obviously if you're having trouble then that is, if nothing else, bad UX design, but I actually am kind of curious as to what you're doing different than me. I have an extremely vanilla NixOS setup that boots into GameScope + Tenfoot and I drive everything with a gamepad and it works about as easily as a console does for me.
That probably includes anything that isn't a PC in a time-capsule from when the game originally released, so any OS/driver changes since then, and I don't think we've reached the point where we can emulate specific hardware models to plug into a VM. One of the reasons the geforce/radeon drivers (eg, the geforce "game ready" branding) are so big is that they carry a whole catalogue of quirk workarounds for when the game renderer is coded badly or to make it a better fit to hardware and lets them advertise +15% performance in a new version. Part of the work for wine/proton/dxvk is going to be replicating that instead of a blunt translation strictly to the standards.
With regards to Linux I generally just focus on hardware from brands that have historically had good Linux support, but that's just a rule of thumb, certainly not perfect.
Its still open to customizing but out of the box is very damn usable and flexible.
There are people who make stripped-down versions of windows. Is it fair to say that because these releases exist that windows isn't "just works" either?
Well you see, you are actually just silly for wanting this or asking for this, because it's actually just a security flaw...or something. I will not elaborate further.
I'd say it pretty much "just works" except less popular apps are a bit more work to install. On occasion you have to compile apps from source, but it's usually relatively straightforward and on the upside you get the latest version :)
For anyone who is a developer professionally I'd say the pros outweigh the cons at this point for your work machine.
Interesting, I've had to switch off from Gnome after the new release changed the choices for HiDPI fractional scaling. Now, for my display, they only support "perfect vision" and "legally blind" scaling options.
Although it was to BSDi then, and then FreeBSD and then OpenBSD for 5 years or so. I can't remember why I switched to Debian but I've been there ever since.
I'm sat here now playing Oxygen Not Included.
Have that desktop be reachable with SSH for all your CLI and sys admin needs, use sunshine/moonlight for the remote streaming and tailscale for securing and making sunshine globally available.
Beyond that, Lunar Lake chips are evidently really really good. The Dell XPS line in particular shows a lot of promise for becoming a strict upgrade or sidegrade to the M2 line within a few years, assuming the haptic touchpad works as well as claimed. In the meantime, I'm sure the XPS is still great if you can live with some compromises, and it even has official Linux support.
I've had Linux running on a variety of laptops since the noughties. I've had no more issues than with Windows. ndiswrapper was a bit shit but did work back in the day.
What issues have you had?
Updated Mesa to the latest and the kernel too.
Not working with Linux is a function of Apple, not Linux. There is a crew who have wasted the last half decade trying to make Asahi Linux, a distro to run on ARM macbooks. The result is after all that time, getting an almost reasonably working OS on old hardware, Apple released the M4 and crippled the whole effort. There's been a lot of drama around the core team who have tried to cast blame, but it's clear they are frustrated by the fact that the OEM would rather Asahi didn't exist.
I can't personally consider a laptop which can't run linux "top notch." But I gave up on macbooks around 10 years ago. You can call me biased.
Amazing that high dpi still doesn’t work. I tried to run linux on 4k in around 2016-2017 and the experience was so bad I gave up.
Prior to that windows was better on laptops due to having the proprietary drivers or working ACPI. But it was pretty poor quality in terms of reliability, and the main problem of the included software being incredibly bare bones, combined with the experience of finding and installing software was so awful (especially if you've not got an unlimited credit card to pay for "big professional solutions").
Every time the year of the Linux desktop arrives, I'm baffled, since not much has changed on this end.
Also, I was basically a child and had no idea what I was doing (I still don't but that's besides the point). Things have definitely gotten better.
Bazzite is rough in the way that all distributions are, but I imagine Windows 11 is rougher.
In Fedora Atomic it should be foolishly easy to set up a system account, with access to specific USB devices via group, and attach a volume that can easily be written to by a non-root user inside of the container.
(cue superiority complex) I've been using Linux Desktop for over 10 years. It's great for literally everything. Gaming admittedly is like 8/10 for compatibility, but I just use a VM with PCIe passthrough to pass in a gpu and to load up a game for windows or use CAD, etc. Seriously, ez.
Never had issues with NVIDIA GFX with any of the desktop cards. Laptops... sure they glitch out.
Originally Wine, then Proton, now Bazzite make it super easy to game natively. The only issues I ever had with games were from the Kernel level anti-cheats bundled. The anti-cheats just weren't available for Linux, so the games didn't start. Anyone familiar with those knows its not a linux thing, it's a publisher/anti-cheat mechanism thing. Just lazy devs really.
(cue opinionated anti-corporate ideology) I like to keep microsoft chained up in a VM where it belongs so can't do it's shady crap. Also with a VM you can do shared folders and clipboard. Super handy actually.
Weirdly enough, MacOS in a VM is a huge pita, and doesn't work well.
That isn't weird. It's by design. MacOS is only designed to run on Apple hardware, and a VM, even if the host is Apple hardware isn't really Apple hardware.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(My customer demographic is seniors & casual users).
Loading Teams can take minutes. I'm often late to meetings waiting for the damn thing to load.
Feels like early 90s computing and that Moore's Law was an excuse for bad coding practices and pushing newer hardware so that "shit you don't care about but is 'part of the system'" can do more monitoring and have more control of 'your' computer.
It’s super annoying!
It's a slow moving evergreen topic perfect for a scheduled release while the author is on holiday. This is just filler content that could have been written at any point in the last 10 years with minor changes.
I've not seen anything like the current level of momentum, ever, nor this level of mainstream exposure. Gaming has changed the equation, and 2026 will be wild.
On the other hand, on the Linux side, we had the release of COSMIC, which is an extremely user-friendly desktop. KDE, Gnome, and others are all at a point where they feel polished and stable.
1. 'office' cloud services - now you just need a browser for majority of docs/sheet/slides tasks
2. gaming - while it was possible back, but it was really hit or miss with a game. Nowadays vast majority of games work on Linux out of the box.
The bloat is astounding. This is especially egregious now that RAM costs a fortune.
To be honest, I always figured we'd make it in the long run. We're a thrifty bunch, we aim to set up sustainable organizations, we're more enshittification-resistant by nature. As long as we're reliable and stick around for long enough.
Debian is a breath of fresh air in comparison. Totally quiet and snappy.
> The drivers included are just too old.
This can usually be fixed by enabling Debian Backports. In some cases, it doesn't even need fixing, because userland drivers like Mesa can be included in the runtimes provided by Steam, Flatpak, etc.
Once set up, Debian is a very low-maintenance system that respects my time, and I love it for that.
The Linux world is amazing for its experimentation and collaboration. But the fragmentation makes it hard for even technical people like me who just want to get work done to embrace it for the desktop.
Ubuntu LTS is probably the right choice. But it's just one more thing I have to go research.
Any reasonably popular distro will have enough other users that you can find resources for fixing hitches. The deciding factor that made me go with EndeavourOS was that their website had cool pictures of space on it. If you don't already care then the criteria don't need to be any deeper than that.
Once you use it enough to develop opinions, the huge list of options will thin itself out.
One big plus with Linux, it's more amenable to AI assistance - just copy & paste shell commands, rather than follow GUI step-by-steps. And Linux has been in the world long enough to be deeply in the LLM training corpuses.
1. 10bpp color depth is not supported on RGB monitors, which are the majority of LCD displays on the market. Concretely, ARGB2101010 and XRGB2101010 modes are not supported by current nVidia Linux drivers - the drivers only offer ABGR2101010 and XBGR2101010 (See: https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/blob/main/...).
2. Common browsers like Chrome and Firefox has no real support for HDR video playback on nVidia Linux drivers. The "HDR" option appears on YouTube, but no HDR color can be displayed with an nVidia GPU.
Also, video backgrounds in Google Meet on Chrome are broken with nVidia GPUs and Wayland. Ironically it works on Firefox. This has been broken for a few years and no fix is in sight.
The "HDR" toggle you get on Plasma or Mutter is hiding a ton of problems behind the scenes. If you only have 8bpp, even if you can find an app that somehow displays HDR colors on nVidia/Wayland - you'll see artifacts on color gradients.
My monitors (InnoCN 27M2V and Cooler Master GP27U) require RGB input, which means it's limited to 8bpp even with HDR enabled on Wayland. There's another commentator below who uses a Dell monitor and manages to get BGR input working and full HDR in nVidia/Linux.
Also, go to YouTube and play this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onVhbeY7nLM
Do it once on "HDR" on Linux, and then on Windows. The "HDR" in nVidia/Linux is fake.
The brightness you see on Plasma or Mutter is indeed related to the HDR support in the driver. But - it's not really useful for the most common HDR tasks at the moment.
I am on Wayland and outputting via HDMI 2.1 if that helps.
EDIT: Claude explained how it determined this with drm_info, and manually verified it:
> Planes 0 and 3 are the primary planes (type=1) for CRTCs 62 and 81 respectively - these are what actually display your desktop content. The Format: field shows the pixel format of the currently attached framebuffer.
EDIT: Also note that I am slowbanned on this site, so may not be able to respond for a bit.
EDIT: You should try connecting with HDMI 2.1 (you will need a 8k HDMI cable or it will fall back to older standards instead of FRL).
EDIT: HDR on youtube appears to work for me. Youtube correctly indentifies HDR on only 1 of my monitors and I can see a big difference in the flames between them on this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjJWvAhNq34
Here's what I'm getting on both monitors, with HDR enabled on Gnome 49: https://imgur.com/a/SCyyZWt
Maybe you're lucky with the Dell. But as I understand, HDR playback on Chrome is still broken.
I'm actually surprised that YouTube HDR works on your side - perhaps it's tied to the ABGR2101010 output mode being available.
That's still pretty crappy. Monitors do not say whether they support BGR input signals or not as opposed to RGB.
The GPU and monitor combination has full 10-bit HDR in Windows. But in Linux it's stuck at 8bpp due to nVidia driver not having 10-bit RGB output.
One other thing of note is I am using a 120hz refresh which requires no DSC with 4k / 30-bit color / HDMI 2.1.
EDIT: See my sibling comment.
Here's what I'm getting on an RTX 4090 / InnoCN 27M2V and Cooler Master Tempest GP27U.
https://imgur.com/a/SCyyZWt
E.g three weeks ago nvidia pushed bad drivers which broke my desktop after a reboot and I had to swap display (ctrl-alt-f3 etc), I never got into gnome at all, and roll back to an earlier version. Automatic rollback of bad drivers would have saved this.
Are Radeon drivers less shit?
Then again Arch is one of those distros that has the attitude that you need to be a little engaged/responsible for ongoing maintenance of your system, which is why I'm against blind "just use (distro)" recommendations unless it's very basic and low assumptions about the user.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1prm8rl/archanno...
A couple of months ago I bought a second hand RX 7800 XT, and prepared myself for a painful experience, but I think it just worked. Like I got frustrated trying to find out how to download and install the driver, when I think it just came with Linux Mint already.
Linux/x86 still is poor for battery life compared to Apple.
That’s my impression anyway.
It doesn't feel real sometimes. My dotfiles are modularized, backed up in Github and versioned with UEFI rollback when I update. I might be using this for the rest of my life, now.
However, despite really, really wanting to switch (and having it installed on my laptop), I keep finding things that don't quite work right that are preventing me from switching some of my machines. My living room PC, which is what my TV is connected to, the DVR software that runs my TV tuner card doesn't quite work right (despite having a native linux installer), and I couldn't get channels to come through as clearly and as easily. I spent a couple of hours of troubleshooting and gave up.
My work PC needs to have the Dropbox app (which has a linux installer), but it also needs the "online-only" functionality so that I can see and browse the entire (very large) dropbox directory without needing to have it all stored locally. This has been a feature that has been being requested on the linux version of the app for years, and dropbox appears unlikely to add it anytime soon.
Both of these are pretty niche issues that I don't expect to affect the vast majority of users (and the dropbox one in particular shouldn't be an issue at all if my org didn't insist on using dropbox in a way that it is very much not intended to be used, and for which better solutions exist, but I have given up on that fight a long time ago), and like I said, I've had linux on my laptop for a couple of years so far without any issue, and I love it.
I am curious how many "edge cases" like mine exist out there though. Maybe there exists some such edge case for a lot of people even while almost no one has the same edge case issue.
But some of the drawbacks really aren't edge cases. Apparently there is still no way for me to have access to most creative apps (e.g. Adobe, Affinity) with GPU acceleration. It's irritating that so few Linux install processes are turnkey the way they are for Windows/Mac, with errors and caveats that cost less-than-expert users hours of experimenting and mucking with documentation.
I could go on, but it really feels like a bad time to be a casual PC user these days, because Windows is an inhospitable swamp, and Linux still has some sharp edges.
One thing that can be annoying is how quickly things have moved in the Linux gaming space over the past 5 years. I have been a part of conversations with coworkers who talk about how Linux gaming was in 2019 or 2020. I feel like anyone familiar with Linux will know the feeling of how quickly things can improve while documentation and public information cannot keep up.
Ubuntu’s default desktop felt unstable in a macOS VM. Dual-booting on a couple of HP laptops slowed to a crawl after installing a few desktop apps, apparently because they pulled in background services. What surprised me was how quickly the system became unpleasant to use without any obvious “you just broke X” moment.
My current guess: not Linux in general, but heavy defaults (GNOME, Snap, systemd timers), desktop apps dragging in daemons, and OEM firmware / power-management quirks that don’t play well with Linux. Server Linux holds up because everything stays explicit. Desktop distros hide complexity and don’t give much visibility when things start to rot.
Does this line up with others’ experience? If yes, what actually works long-term? Minimal bases, immutable distros, avoiding certain package systems, strict service hygiene, specific hardware?
For certain timeperiods I have needed to switch to Fedora, or the Fedora KDE spin, to get access to more recent software if I'm using newer hardware. That has generally also been pretty stable but the constant stream of updates and short OS life are not really what I'm looking for in a desktop experience.
There are three issues that linux still has, which are across the board:
- Lack of commercial mechanical engineering software support (CAD & CAE software)
- Inability to reliably suspend or sleep for laptops
- Worse battery life on laptops
If you are using a desktop and don't care about CAD or CAE software I think it's probably a better experience overall than windows. Laptops are still more for advanced users imho but if you go with something that has good linux support from the factory (Dell XPS 13, Framework, etc.) it will be mostly frictionless. It just sucks on that one day where you install an update, close the laptop lid, put it in your backpack, and find it absolutely cooking and near 0% when you take it out.
I also have never found something that gave me the battery life I wanted with linux. I used two XPS 13's and they were the closest but still were only like 75% of what I would like. My current Framework 16 is like 50% of what I would like. That is with always going for a 1080p display but using a VPN which doesn't help battery life.
My experience with FOSS has mostly been that mature projects with any reasonable-sized userbase tend to more reliably not break things in updates than is the case for proprietary software, whether it's an OS or just some SaaS product. YMMV. However, I think probably the most potent way to avoid problems like this actually ever mattering is a combination of doing my updates manually (or at least on an opt-in basis) and being willing to go back a version if something breaks. Usually this isn't necessary for more than a week or so for well-maintained software even in the worst case. I use arch with downgrade (Which lets you go back and choose an old version of any given package) and need to actually use downgrade maybe once a year on average, less in the last 5
No, not really. A Linux desktop with a DE will always be slower and more brittle than an headless machine due to the sheer number of packages/components, but something like Arch + Plasma Shell (without the whole KDE ecosystem) should be very stable and snappy. The headaches caused by immutable distros and flatpaks are not worth it IMO, but YMMV.
Not really, no. What did you install that slowed things down?
> If yes, what actually works long-term?
Plain ordinary Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, running on an ancient Thinkpad T430 with a whopping 8GB of RAM and an SSD (which is failing, but that's not Linux's fault, it's been on its way out for about a year and I should probably stop compiling Haiku nightlies on it).
Can you give an example of which desktop apps are "dragging in daemons"?
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(computing)
If you think Gimp is terrible you'll hate something like DaVinci Resolve.
I've run Void Linux + Xmonad for many years without any such issues. I also recently installed CachyOS for my kid to game on (KDE Plasma) and it works super well.
Yes, you can get this stuff working, but if you enjoy doing other things in life, have a job and don’t life alone, it is SSSOOOOO much easier to get a Mac mini. Or even windows 11 if that’s your thing.
After a particularly busy OSS event a non-programmer friend of mine asked me, why is it that the Linux people seem to be so needy for everyone to make the same choices they make? trying to answer that question changed my perspective on the entire community. And here we are, after all these years the same question seems to still apply.
Why are we so needy for ALL users and use-cases to be Linux-based and Linux-centric once we make that choice ourselves? What is it about Linux? the BSD people seem to not suffer from this and I've never heard anyone advocate for migration to OSX in spite of it being superior for specific usecases (like music production).
IMO if you're a creator, operating systems are tools; use the tool that fits the task.
So far all the games I want to play run really well, with no noticable performance difference. If anything, they feel faster, but it could be placebo because the DE is more responsive.
And if you are running Chrome, and something starts taking a lot of memory, say goodbye to the entire app without any niceties.
(Yes, this is a mere pet peeve but it has been causing me so much pain over the past year, and it's such an inferior way to deal with memory limits tha what came before it, I don't know why anybody would have taken OOM logic from systemd services and applied it to use launched processes.)
If anybody can help me out with a better solution with a modern distribution, that's about 75% of the reason I'm posting. But it's been a major pain and all the GitHub issues I have encountered on it show a big resistance to having better behavior like is the default for MacOS, Windows, or older Linux.
Regardless, I believe EarlyOOM is pretty configurable, if you care to check it out.
Try doing less at once, or getting more memory.
If your solution is "don't ever run out of memory" my solution is "I won't ever use your OS unless forced to."
Every other OS handles this better, and my work literally requires pushing the bounds of memory on the box, whether it's 64GB or 1TB of RAM. Killing an entire cgroup is never an acceptable solution, except for the long-running servers that systemd is meant to run.
Of course, if it's absolutely not compatible with your work, you can just disable systemd-oomd. I'm wondering though, what sort of work are you doing where you can't tune stuff to use 95% of your 1TB of memory instead of 105% of it?
Windows is unstable even if you have more than enough memory but your swap is disabled, due to how its virtual memory works. It generally behaves much worse than others under heavy load and when various system resources are nearly exhausted.
There are several advanced and very flexible OOM killers available for Linux, you can use them if it really bothers you (honestly you're the first I've seen complaining about it). Some gaming/realtime distros are using them by default.
This is more about what you choose as your operating environment, not what your work imposes as your working environment.
Most places of work, mine included, run Microsoft services that lock them into the ecosystem incredibly tightly.
As per the article title, "if you want to feel like you actually own your PC", this is about your PC, not the one provided to you by your workplace (since it's likely owned by them).
One thing I'm worried about in my work environment is Microsoft enforcing the web versions of Office and deprecating the stand alone desktop applications. The web versions are a massive step down in terms of functionality and ease of use. Your mention of OWA makes me feel as if that is what Outlook will be sacrificed for at some point in the future anyway.
I've used Mint in the past, loved it until I spent a day trying to get scanner drivers to work. Don't know if that's changed now, was 4 years ago
I am using Fedora on machines with new hardware and liking it as well. It has small pluses/minuses vs Mint.
https://universal-blue.org/
IMO the next important unblocker for Linux adoption is the Adobe suite. In a post-mobile world one can use a tablet or phone for almost any media consumption. But production is still in the realm of the desktop UX and photo/video/creative work is the most common form of output. An Adobe CC Linux option would enable that set of "power users". And regardless of their actual percentage of desktop users, just about ever YouTuber or streamer talking about technology is by definition a content creator so opening Linux up to them would have a big effect on adoption.
And yes I've tried most of the Linux alternatives, like GIMP, Inkscape, DaVinci, RawTherapee, etc. They're mostly /fine/ but it's one of the weaker software categories in FOSS-alternatives IMO. It also adds an unnecessary learning curve. Gamers would laugh if they were told that Linux gaming was great, they just have to learn and play an entirely different set of games.
Using hardware at least 6-12 months old is a good way to get better compatibility.
Generally Linux drivers only start development after the hardware is available and in the hands of devs, while Windows drivers usually get a head start before release. Brand new hardware on a LTS (long term support) distro with an older kernel is usually the worst compatibility combo.
If I remember correctly, after the Crowdstrike BSOD-all-windows-instances update last year Microsoft wanted to make some changes to their kernel driver program and these anti-cheat measures on Windows might need to find a new mechanism soon anyway. That's a long way of saying, it's plausible that even that last barrier might come down sooner rather than later.
I recently switched to using a thumb drive to transfer files to and from my phone/tablet, I became demoralized when faced with getting it all setup.
No, thank you! The "smooth, effortless [, compulsory, mandated, enforced] integration" between my Apple devices is the very worst thing about them.
And it mostly works! At least for my games library. The only game I wasn't able to get to work so far is Space Marine 2, but on ProtonDB people report they got it to work.
As for the rest: I've been an exclusive Linux user on the desktop for ~20 years now, no regrets.
If I have an issue with an application or if I want an application, I must use the terminal. I can't imagine a Mac user bothering to learn it. Linux is for people who want to maximize the use of their computer without being spied on and without weird background processes. Linux won't die, but it won't catch Windows or Mac in the next 5 decades. People are too lazy for it. Forget about learning. I bet you $100, 99% of the people in the street didn't even see Linux in their lives, nor even heard of it. It is not because of marketing, it is because people who tried it returned to Windows or Mac after deciding it is too hard to learn for them to install a driver or an application.
I tried Cinnamon and while it was pleasantly customizable, the sigle-threadedness of the UI killed it for me. It was too easy to do the wrong thing and lock the UI thread, including several desktop or tray Spices from the official repo.
I'm switching to KDE. Seems peppier.
Biggest hardware challenge I've faced is my Logitech mouse, which is a huge jump from the old days of fighting with Wi-Fi and sound support. Sound is a bit messy with giving a plethora of audio devices that would be hidden under windows (like digital and analog options for each device) and occasionally compatibility for digital vs analog will be flaky from a game or something, but I'll take it.
Biggest hassle imho is still installing non-repo software. So many packages offer a flatpak and a snap and and build-from-source instructions where you have to figure out the local package names for each dependency and they offer one .Deb for each different version of Debian and its derivatives and it's just so tedious to figure which is the right one.
On one hand we have Steam that will make 1000s of games become available on easy to use platform based on Arch.
For developers, we have Omarchy, which makes experience much more streamlined and very pleasant and productive. I moved both my desktop and laptop to Omarchy and have one Mac laptop, this is really good experience, not everything is perfect, but when I switch to Mac after Omarchy, I often discover how not easy is to use Mac, how many clicks it takes to do something simple.
I think both Microsoft and Apple need some serious competition and again, came from Arch who turned out to be more stable and serious then Ubuntu.
It's funny they would choose this phasing.
This is exactly the way I described my decision to abandon windoze, and switch to linux, over 20 years ago...
Can I get a laptop to sleep after closing the lid yet?
Not that long ago the answer to these questions was mostly no (or sort of yes... but very painfully)
On Windows all of this just works.
> on windows all of this just works
Disagree on the sleep one - my work laptop doesn’t go to sleep properly. The only laptop I’ve ever used that behaves as expected with sleep is a macbook.
Laptop sleep and suspend can still be finicky unfortunately.
I will say my experience using CAD or other CAE software on windows has gotten progressively worse over the years to the point that FEA is more stable on linux than on windows.
We do really need a Solidworks, Creo or NX on linux though. My hope has been that eventually something like Wine, Proton, or other efforts to bring windows games to linux will result in us getting the ability to run them. They are one of the last things holding me back from fully moving away from windows.
I also play a decent amount of Flight Simulator 2024 and losing that is almost a non-starter for switching.
Instead of distro upgrades, spend 3 minutes disabling the newest AI feature using regedit.
But, as the author rightly notes: It's more about a "feeling." Well then, good luck.
Not up close due to the vast number of inconsistencies.
This could only be fixed by a user experience built from the ground up by a single company.
I get that you're making a Windows joke, but this describes Linux equally well.
The UX leaves a lot to be desired.
Even modern macs fall short of the UX Apple has traditionally been known for...
MacOS is highly consistent compared to Windows.
Perhaps Linux operating systems like Steam or ChromeOS might finally create a beautiful and consistent UI.
Please revert this submission to use the correct title.
Even with imperatively configured distros like Ubuntu, it's generally much easier to recover from a "screen of death" than in Windows because the former is less of a black box than the latter. This means its easier to work out what the problem is and find a fix for it. With LLMs that's now easier than ever.
And, in the worst case that you have to resort to reinstalling your system, it's far less unpleasant to do that in a Linux distro than in Windows. The modern Windows installer is painful to get through, and then you face hours or days of manually reinstalling and reconfiguring software which you can do with a small handful of commands in Linux to get back to a state that is reasonably similar to what you had before.
Incidentally, I can now honestly say I've had more driver issues with Windows than Linux.
The result was that from day 1 of using Linux I never looked back.
Fun aside: I had a hardware failure a few years ago on my old workstation where the first few sectors of every disk got erased. I had Linux up and running in 10 minutes. I just had to recreate the efi partition and regenerate a UKI after mounting my OS from a live USB. Didn't even miss a meeting I had 15 minutes later. I spent hours trying to recover my Windows install. I'm rather familiar with the (largely undocumented) Windows boot process but I just couldn't get it to boot after hours of work. I just gave up and reinstalled windows from scratch and recovered from a restic backup.
Windows has recently been a complete shitshow - so even if Linux hasn't gotten any better (it has) it is now likely better than fiddling around with unfucking Windows, and Windows doing things like deleting all your files.
That's exactly my point.
There's an ever growing list of things to do in order to fix Windows, and that list is likely longer than Linux. This whole "your time is free" argument hinges on Windows not having exactly the same issue, or worse.