My main issue was trying to get two monitors to work. I followed some guides on how to update the drivers and each time it broke to the point that it would only be a black screen. Not even a terminal to help troubleshoot.
I have a 3080 12GB and can’t use it on Linux. After about a week of trying I gave up.
A few apps like Photoshop and Fusion360 keep my running Windows. The graphics card situation is also a giant pain in the ass, my laptop has a Radeon and a RTX 3080 and I can't get any kind of prime offloading to work. I'd really like to use the radeon unless i'm running something intensive that needs 3d acceleration, but i think I'd likely have to reboot to switch between them.
That leaves me running the RTX chip the whole time so the laptop draws about 40W at idle, when running windows it's more like 10W because the nvidia chip is completely off.
Oh that’s a bummer. In my case, my system had a MUX switch, though I’m not fully familiar with it, it changed GPUs based on what the application demanded. It turned out to be a huge pain in the ass when the mighty Alienware turned out to be a bug riddled bloatware laptop and I had to disable the MUX switch to actually play games. Stuck with the dedicated GPU like you now, unfortunately.
I think the Intel/nvidia combo works (with a lot of caveats) but the amd/nvidia one seems way less supported. Not a massive deal for me as I mostly use it as a desktop replacement machine, but it does suck to only get about 2.5 hrs of battery life on the rare occasions that i'm untethered.
I’m actively trying to switch to Linux, so it’s not from a lack of effort.
The main two reasons are Photoshop and scanning. I’m a photographer, and I’m scanning and restoring old photos of the family. There’s no decent alternative to Photoshop, especially now that it has the neural filters, so editing and colouring photos is in a different league.
As far as scanning goes, I was getting better results in Windows 20 years ago. I’ve got an Epson scanner, and the software can automatically crop, as well as restore the colour balance of a photo. Using Linux, I was lucky to get more than a dodgy .bmp through an interface that would have looked clunky in the 90s. I could open it in GIMP, but then couldn’t save as a jpeg without either exporting the file or installing addons.
On top of problems like these, there are issues that crop up because of an apparent need to be different to Windows.
My Xubuntu server won’t let me resize windows unless I grab the top left corner. Any other edge of the window is apparently half a pixel thick, and too small for my mouse to register.
Smooth scrolling by clicking the mouse wheel has been replaced with the paste command, as if pasting into a browser window is something that people do dozens of times a day.
Mint’s settings window constantly resizes itself, no matter what I set it to. I can resize it, open a setting then click back, and it’s back to the default size again!
The universal paste keyboard shortcut, ctrl & v only works in some programs. Others need shift, ctrl, and v!
Silly little things like this spoil my workflow and take me out of what I’m doing. They’re the minor annoyances that frustrate people and encourage them to switch back to Windows. Yes, they can probably be changed, but why were they changed in the first place? I could paste with ctrl v in DOS 6.22 and could trust a window not to resize itself in Windows 3.1, long before any modern distro was dreamed up, so why are the basics different?
A few apps I needed didn’t work on Linux without a hassle and a lot of games I play with friends only run on Windows. I also found a lot of things were kind of a hassle on Linux, especially screen scaling. Fractional screen scaling straight up barely works and everything on my laptop screen was usually tiny.
I would totally go back when the experience is a bit nicer, I’m pretty frustrated with Windows. I think the Linux desktop experience isn’t totally ready imo.
Admittedly, it's been a long time since I did anything with linux, but I have done some. I'm not a developer, I don't know how to write any code. I know some DOS scripting and now some powershell. If I need to do anything slightly different with linux, it would require me to learn a whole new scripting language, and all of the documentation I've seen for anything linux seems to be written for an audience of people who already really know what they're doing in linux and just need a specific reference material.
I've had mainly Windows machines all my life, I have been forced by necessity to figure out how to do what I need on those. I imagine if I'd had linux machines since ... 1995? I would feel as comfortable with linux now. But the barrier to entry to even having a linux machine, let alone making it do what I needed it to do, back in the late 90s, early 2000s, was way higher than it was for Windows. It arguably still is.
Tried out a few times in the 90s and early 2000s and the biggest barrier was lack of support for video cards and other hardware that I needed for gaming. It was also more complex to set up at that time, and windows was both easier to work with and resolving issues was easier to figure out.
In all cases I was dual booting and after a while just stopped trying with Linux because the other option was easier, not because I disliked Linux.
Haven't tried recently because windows 10 and 11 have been rock stable for me and Windows Defender plus Firefox and ublock origin have made it safe to use windows. While I thought about giving it a go again recently, I just don't have a reason to switch when things are going to well and I don't have time anymore to just fiddle with it due to other priorities.
I do keep an eye out though in case I do a media server or something as that would be a good use case for another go.
For me it’s mostly been visual stuff.
There are native packages, Appimages, Flatpaks, Snaps. Native packages are GTK or Qt-based, so you could potentially have five different visual styles at the same time. Everything can be fixed, except for Appimages, but it requires some degree of tinkering which isn’t always guaranteed to work. For instance, I was looking for a feed reader and tried Fluent Reader: it is an Appimage based on Fluent Design, so it looks completely out of place if you don’t customize your desktop to make it look like Windows. Then I tried Akgregator: I picked the Flatpak version, and it was a complete mess even when using Flatseal (some backgrounds black, others white). Also, without proper configuration, the cursor theme may change according to the aforementioned app categories.
One last thing you may not like are icons. Most distributions come with some custom icon theme, which of course cannot reasonably apply to all applications out there: those that are not supported need to provide their own icon, which could look very bad depending on the desktop environment. For example, on Cinnamon they were very jagged, like their resolution was too high. This probably also depends on the application.
Another thing I usually notice is how slow the mouse wheel works in some apps, like Appimages for instance. And in general there’s no way to change the amount of lines scrolled per wheel click at OS level, while apps rarely give you the option to customize it. Firefox does though, and for me this mean I had to run Bitwarden, Telegram, WhatsApp, a feed reader all inside Firefox. Thanks but no thanks.
I’d say no particular changes are necessary to use Linux full time, you should just turn a blind eye to this stuff.
P.S. Also, everything looks way too large w.r.t. Windows. I tried Thunderbird on both systems, and for some reason the delete icon is 50% bigger on Linux (using the same density option)
I can’t use Fusion 360 on Linux, so I dual boot windows. But that’s the only time I ever go back. I don’t even run a bootloader with options and you’d never know Windows is on my machine unless you interrupted the boot process and checked boot drives. Getting into Windows is a manual process on my system.
I didn’t go back to Windows, at least not directly.
I was enjoying Linux on my old lap, but then I managed to get a MacBook Pro 2014 in that year and ditched Linux for macOS they are very alike although macOS is way more closed…
Then I discovered you can’t go full macOS either, that’s why I BootCamp as well with W10 installed, I barely touch it but it’s still there for simple things like running .bat scripts, having a no lame NTFS support, and some light Steam gaming and local government software gore.
Screen size problems. My PC is setup as gaming/HTPC for the living room.
Constantly having to fight with it reverting from the 1080 I set, to native 4k. Pretty jarring when you’re popping out of a game and expecting a different res.
Other than that my daughter plays Minecraft with her friends and needed windows for that because I’m not purchasing the game a third time.
WSL2 and work. Firstly at work i’m forced to use Windows since all the dev toolchains and deployement Tools are unfortunately Windows only… And secondly since I have be able to work from home (at night or afterwards) I need Windows on my Box as well. Thirdly, other than that my private coding projects all died since I just wanna switch off once I’m done and game a little… So there Windows also wins out. And lastly since all my Servers run Linux if i need to write a Script and test it WSL did the Job so far.
Very unfortunate since i enjoy using Linux (love i3) but i cant be bothered at the moment :( Maybe the next dev job allows for a Linux Environment :)
Hate to say it but, laziness… bought a new gaming laptop with windows 11. My old laptop was running Mint for a couple of years and I really loved it. Software wise everything I needed just worked.
Add comment