Reading a lot of these comments I think people are under the wrong impression of the current state of Linux. I think you’ll have a better experience with a bleeding edge distro like Arch or Fedora.
A lot of your productivity apps are on Linux, a higher percentage of your games work than you think, and you could see a performance boost over windows. Plus there are multiple app alternatives that are even better.
I ditched Windows three years ago. 99% of my 450 Steam library works (yes AAA games) thanks to Valve with Proton. What doesn’t? Call of Duty, because of invasive kernel level anti-cheat and I’m good with that.
Steam, Zoom, Slack, Teams, Spotify, Plex, Jellyfin, Discord are all on Linux.
Edit: Also there is no “look/UI” to Linux. It’s your DE, and you’re free to choose one, or a Window Manager. Gnome, KDE, Cinnamon, XFCE, i3, Awesome, Openbox, XMonad, Sway, Hyprland.
I tried to install a package and apt started uninstalling my desktop. Maybe if I didn’t panic and hit Ctrl-C I would have gotten all the packages it was removing replaced with shiny new ones? I doubt it somehow.
All the customization you can do is neat, but after that I was pretty much done with fiddling with my OS and finding FOSS versions of stuff I was already used to and wanted something that would just work. These days I have a small form factor PC with Mint that I run some server apps on, but I’m holding off on making it my daily driver again until Microsoft really puts the screws on the consumer.
That seemed to be a major bug in POP_OS at one point, the youtuber Linus Tech Tips fell victim to it while trying it and it ended up being patched VERY fast
I’ll add one bit of info from me. I’ve installed aptitude on Mint, as it was supposedly the best package dependency conflict resolver. I don’t remember what conflict I had, but when I launched aptitude to fix that broken package, it begun to uninstall every package. After reinstall, I’ve been using Mint as computer for modifying bootloaders in phones, and some minor works, returning to modified windows 10.
Tbf I’ve had a similar thing happen like 6 years ago. I’ve been using Linux still but at the time I didn’t have much going on that system outside of a few games so it just turned into a long reinstall weekend. I forget exactly what happened but I also had another issue where I tried to install KDE Plasma desktop environment and it completely nuked my system. Idk if it was a user error or what.
I’m still a Linux fanboy but it’s not without its own set of issues. I try to be a bit more careful in the terminal after all that and I haven’t had any major issues since. I do need to do a fresh install sometime in the near future though.
Have a mouse? You need to find a driver Oh Is that a keyboard? Yeah you’ll need to get a driver for that too. Oh you have a monitor now? Guess what?.. Yeah go find a driver. But wait, there’s more. Oh you want to run that software? Yeah you’re gonna need to search for an hour for some random file so you can run it.
Well, that was my experience about 4 years ago, no idea which distro, but I just upped, left and felt warm and cosy in my fat bloated windows 🤷♂️
Four years ago this wasn’t even true on something quite minimalist like Arch. You installed a desktop environment and some generic drivers for stuff like audio and you had a working PC. If this was truly your experience I’m very curious about what your particular issues were.
Arch Linux based distros (arco, Manjaro, endeavor) have my favorite package manager in the world (not pacman) but yay. I’ve tried every package manager and for me nothing comes close to yay. But the sad part is arch updates have completely destroyed every arch based distro I’ve ever had. The last one (endeavor os) literally made me hate Linux for awhile, because I put a great deal of work and love into setting up a desktop environment, configuring the hell out of my terminal and my dev environment and one update just destroyed my whole desktop. It takes me more than 2 days to completely get my Linux desktop configured to where I like it, and endeavoros just breaking my desktop environment really demoralized me from trying to set up another Linux box again for a long time, so I just went back to my super stable MacBook that wasn’t as fun or ergonomic but at the end of the day it’s never given me serious issues. Of course I’m back to using Linux, this time with stable old Ubuntu.
Building WiFi kernel drivers myself where on Windows its a double click, finding a desktop environment that lets you add a 2nd taskbar in the GUI without losing certain important items like the start menu, system clock, or system tray (I always lost something), finding replacements for certain niche Windows programs is frustrating (VoiceMeeter -> PipeWire), or completely absent, as my Oculus Rift and the Adobe Suite (which I need for my job) was unusable, and my Razer, Logitech, TourBox, Xence, and Elsra devices aren’t programmable, missing or bad support for basic features like multiple monitors and HDR, having to manually set AppImages to run as an application and not open like a file (I know it’s a file), but in the end, needing 2 GPU’s to virtualize a Windows machine officially ended my Linux dreams for the near future.
Ah yes. Good ol Intel drivers or NDISwrapper. I’ve had zero issues these days, but it was bullshit in the past. Though saying that I think my wifi driver building was more to enable phy mode for messing with wifi hacking. WEP was broken beyond belief.
When I’ve tried Linux in the past, it’s way too much work with limited selection of apps. It’s more of a toy to play around with. Learning all the command line stuff, editing text files and selling up jobs, etc. It wasn’t for me.
Mind you, last time I seriously looked at Linux was when Red hat was still free. I know things have changed since then.
Oh boy have things changed. The big headline distros of today are more stable, functional and have a much wider variety of software than 2 years ago, let alone a decade ago.
Necessity. When most of the software you use is reliant on Windows it’s hard to make Linux your daily driver. That being said, the changes needed to make it worth it are already done in limited contexts. Steam deck is pure Linux, the user interface and everything is implemented in a way that the user does not have to deal with the complexity, but the underlying mechanisms for doing wonky shit is still there if you want to mess with it. It’s kinda the best of both worlds in that sense.
If we wanted a desktop experience to replicate that, you would just have to do the exact same thing. Abstract the user experience such that the layperson does not need to engage with the complicated bits, but leave them there for those that do want them. And arguably that is being done with some distros, but it’s just not quite there yet.
Steam works flawlessly with Linux now. If you have an Nvidia GFX card then you can even get a Pop!_OS install with the driver pre-configured. It’s pretty rad!
Necessity for me, too. After three years of using Linux, I went back to school and it was needlessly difficult trying to get everything to work together. The nail in the coffin was when I had to use some proctoring software and I couldn’t use a virtual machine. I just went back to Windows.
If I didn’t have to use Windows, I’d probably still use Linux. I really enjoyed how snappy it was.
Honestly Darktable works pretty damn well after you adjust to the work flow differences. I would still prefer Lightroom but after switching jobs and no longer using a company subscription for Adobe, Darktable is perfectly fine for my hobby photography.
I tried to switch a couple of times. The version I tried was not estable enough, too much crashes for my taste. Lightroom now has selecting automagically, now that I tried it I can no longer live without it.
I got my wife a netbook when they were popular. It came with Windows 7 Starter Edition. Shit was kind of slow, but it worked. I thought about installing Linux cause people say it’s lighter and faster. When I started looking up Linux there were so many versions. I can’t tell the difference between a Mint, Cinnamon, KDE, etc. As a noob (I’m still a noob) I don’t know which one to choose so I settled on Mint cause I liked the theme. After the install it was slower than Win7SE. VLC video playback was trash. At the time I was using Photoshop 6 and Gimp was a not so great alternative. In the end the experiment failed. The netbook ended up being donated to the sis in law (teen). Best thing about Linux is the ability to run it off a CD/thumb drive. I think I’m too use to Windows though… It’s not worth the headache to switch Operating System unless I have to. I won’t switch to Apple/iOS cause I’m use to Android. I currently run Win10 on my desktop/laptop and Win11 on my wife’s Surface laptop. I fucken hate how Windows is always asking me to sign on with their account. I probably switch to Linux if Windows ever goes full online subscription base.
I used Linux Mint for several years on a dual-boot laptop. I rarely found myself booting Windows. While there was a learning curve, Mint was fairly accessible out of the box and was generally a delight to use. Until it wasn’t. At some point, the drivers for my video card updated, and just flat broke everything. And I can’t really use a computer on which I can’t see the desktop. I waited. And waited. A fix for the driver may have eventually come, but after awhile, booting into Windows just became my default, until eventually I just wiped the Linux partition to recover the storage space.
It was fun while it lasted, and I may choose one day to give it another go for the fourth time. This wasn’t the first time I’ve had something like this happen. First time was with Fedora, and the second was Ubuntu. Each time, I had the same “it worked until it didn’t” experience, and each time it stopped working was usually some kind of broken driver making my hardware incompatible.
I use both. Linux as a homserver runs a bunch of docker containers and a Nas/personal cloud. Desktop and notebook runs Windows because compatibility and honestly Linux as a desktop still sucks ass. I tried it the first time in the mid 90s and even after all the promises and a quarter of a century later its still shit. Just take the L Linux and be what you are; the best server os.
See, I always find it funny when people say Linux is rubbish for desktop. I main Linux and boot Windows for some games, and Windows continues to find ways to bug me while my Linux desktop feels great.
I’m using Linux for desktop since years - even my non tech savvy girlfriend uses KDE without issues on her laptop.
What was your issue?
I can’t stand to work with Windows. Is gruesome slow and confusingly designed. Configuration is splittered across the system. Some parts in GUI setting tools, some part in registry, some part in specific files.
Error codes are completely useless under Windows. In Linux the error message gives me at least a clue what’s happening.
I can’t understand how anybody can really work with Windows. Gladly I can do 99% of everything in Linux. Only some industry hardware configuration tools are still stuck on Windows.
Video games for one. Hated the UI (only thing I’ve ever hated worse was the BS Windows pulled with 8, which I skipped). The GUI experience just felt… Like a very distant after thought. Only reason I use Linux at all is on servers (homelab) because… Well the cost is spot on and once I get it working I don’t have to deal with it anymore.
Which distros have you tried? I was given Ubuntu and thought I hated Linux. It turns out that I just hated the UI, and some other distros were actually ok.
Although I do use Linux (so should not respond here, I know), the reasons are probably similar to why Android vs iOS. They are different philosophies. No-one really is wrong, it is about personal fit.
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