My “older” Matebook has a AMD Ryzen5, which is fine performance wise. Sadly there is a Bug preventing the use of nearly all powersafe states in the CPU resulting in random freezes. I try Linux distros and kernels periodically, but am amazed in how persistent and dificult this problem seems to be handeld
I need iRacing and the software for the rest of my sim rig to be fully supported. This means “SimHub” for my wind sim, the “SimRig” app for my motion actuators, “SimCommander” for my wheelbase, and there are a couple others like “The Crew Chief” etc. oh and whatever emulation layer for iRacing; as there’s no Linux version; would need to not get me banned from the anti-cheat software.
I put my money where my mouth was though! I used Manjaro+Gnome for 2 or 3 years on my main machine, dual booting Windows only to sim race. I quit Adobe and Maxon and switched to DarkTable and Blender for photos and 3D modeling. All my 3D printing software and slicers have native Linux versions. I used Chrome, Chromium, Firefox, Dropbox (have since switched to NextCloud self-hosted). Docker was a dream and so fucking fast for web development. I still keep a Linux VM around just for Docker web development.
Here’s the thing… on not one but two occasions my machine refused boot to a GUI. I’m speaking as someone who uses server Linux daily for work, Mac OS daily for work, and Windows daily for play. If Linux distros and GPU makers don’t get their shit together IT WILL NEVER be the year of Linux on the desktop. Exactly 0 times has Windows failed to boot to a GUI for me (short of a hdd or GPU hardware failure) and Mac OS has also not booted to a GUI 0 times. As long as seeing a desktop on boot is not a 100% guarantee when running Linux, it’ll remain as something only nerds or enthusiasts do.
I love Linux, but I’d say it’s a safe bet to say I’ll never sim race or run iRacing natively on Linux short of Microsoft and windows disappearing from existence overnight. It just won’t happen.
For web development or 3D modeling and hacking around? Gimme Linux or Mac OS! WSL is like 99% there but no where as performant as the aforementioned. Also with WSL simple fucking things like networking become a proxy-firewall-ssh-tunnel nightmare.
Nope. Been using the same installation of Windows 10 for years, and everything just works.
Even swapped the SSD from one laptop into another one. Added a UEFI boot entry, and it came right up.
I think the only problem I ever had was audio or Wi-Fi occasionally failing to work after resume. But that resolved itself after one of the major updates.
The only annoyance I've run into is the "Let's finish setting up your device" screen after feature updates. But you can disable that fairly easily.
I mainly use it as a glorified Chromebook though. Browser, Windows Terminal + WSL, maybe the occasional Inkscape or Lightroom. All the "interesting" stuff happens in Linux VMs atop ESXi running on an old desktop.
But for everyday use, it's nice to have something that "just works" when I pick it up.
I might check out Linux again in a few years though. From what I've read, PipeWire seems to be killing it in terms of progress on the audio side. So once the Wayland ecosystem matures, it should be fairly easy to get back that "just works" status with Linux.
In terms of performance, the main issue Windows really has is disk I/O. But a modern SSD fixes that easily. I am using a second-hand, nine-year-old Dell Latitude laptop, and it does everything I need it to do. Boots up in seconds. Has to stay plugged in though.
My pattern with linux is that I tinker with it until I eventually break it in a way I don’t have the knowledge or skill to repair, and then I balk at the thought of starting from scratch again, so I just put windows back on the machine…
I’ve used both regularly for years and went back to Windows when I switched to PC gaming and it’s just so much better. Everything just works on Windows.
Linux really needs to work on improving its user experience if it wants to be a true competitor to Mac and Windows. All these little config tweaks and command line prompts you have to do to get things working on Linux just isn’t going to win a bunch of people over who are used to things being a few clicks on a wizard to get working.
Edit: it’s been years since I last tried Linux so maybe things have changed.
It’s been too long so I don’t remember but there were several things I tried to install that required me to add a new repository, install from that, and then fiddle around with config files to get it to work.
Lots of people swear that Linux is easy but that’s never been my experience. It’s always command prompts and config files.
It’s been years since I last used Linux so maybe things have gotten better. I’ll likely be finding out eventually when Win 10 EOL comes because I don’t want Win 11.
fwiw, I’m now pretty darn happy with Linux and gaming. Granted, I use Steam, so there’s that.
There are issues sometimes, but I just keep a copy of windows around for windows-only things. Generally, Linux “just works” for me, but I’ve also learned to just skip it when something requires too much involvement to get working.
Programmer and big Linux fan here. I use Linux for multiple servers/vm’s. For a while I also had Linux on my desktop and using a Windows VM with PCI-passtrough for gaming. It works. However I came to the conclusion I was only using the PC for gaming (on the VM), and doing all my programming on my MacBook. So basically the Linux part on my desktop was just useless. Although I want to, I don’t have any use cases for Linux on the desktop.
Last time I tried Linux was about 10 years ago. I installed multiple different combinations until I found one I liked (I forget which though). I was attending university at the time (chemistry) and had it dual booting so I could switch back to Windows as needed. I really tried, but everything on the Linux side was just so buggy or complicated.
I was using Open Office or something similar, mainly for spreadsheets, and I just kept needing to switch back to Windows so I could spend my time getting the actual work done, rather than trying to figure out how to make the computer work. It was so long ago that I don't remember the details, but I vaguely remember it repeatedly freezing up on me for relatively simple spreadsheet tasks.. the kind of stuff they teach in beginners or maaaaybe intermediate Excel tutorials with 10-50 rows of data.
Eventually, I gave up on trying to do any of my work in Linux and figured I'd come back to it when I had some free time. When I finally had some free time, I decided to wipe the current Linux install and try something else. I had gone through the installation process so many times before that I thought I remembered the steps. Well, I didn't, and I managed to delete something super critical and couldn't even boot to Windows anymore. After much trial and error, some kind internet stranger offered to help walk me through it.. the only problem was that they were only familiar with Arch (?), so that was the distro we were going to use to get me back up and running. We got it fixed so that my computer dual boots, but I have to supervise the boot process every time since the default boot is Arch, and I'm just not ready to deal with that.
I've casually looked a few times to see if I can figure out how to change the boot order, but I'm too scared I'll end up worse off, so I've just left well enough alone since then.
I have an Android phone and rooting it is always the first thing I do, so it hasn't scared me off tinkering altogether, but I hardly touch a PC outside of work anymore, so there's just no motivation to try again.
I started using Linux desktops at work around 5 or 6 years ago, and even since then, the experience has improved greatly.
I’ve been on various distros with KDE over the past couple of years, but from what I’ve seen in passing, Gnome “just works” really well with most distros that use it. KDE requires some tweaking occasionally, but since 5.27, it’s been rock solid for me, and the KDE team seems really dedicated to making Plasma 6 stable and easy to use.
You might want to fire up a VM or throw Ubuntu on an old laptop and see how it feels. It really has gotten a lot better for the average user, and something like Mint, imo, is really easy to pick up and just use.
Personally, I really like customization, and I work as a DevOps engineer (formerly linux sysadmin), so I don’t mind getting really deep into the OS if necessary. But I don’t think you have to if you want to have a good experience.
I never tried Linux, but I consider it every few years. However if I weigh that
O&O Shutup10 and group policies can remove all the telemetry and intrusiveness from Windows +
most of my work involves Adobe products +
my main hobby is gaming, with the vast majority of my games not having a Linux port
there are simply too many factors that would make Linux to be more hassle, have less performance or downright impossible to serve as a substitute for Windows, while for me personally not really offering any practical benefits over Windows.
FIFA23. Yeah I know it’s a shit game but I just play it for the couch multiplayer experience! Anyway 22 was working great on linux but they added a new DRM so the new one doesn’t work anymore. Hopefully someone can get the next one to run on Linux so I can ditch windows again.
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.
I use Linux full time now, with the exception of the Adobe suite, which runs in a VM right now and will be changed to a dual boot once I installed a second hard drive. I use GIMP and Inkscape where I can, but i need the big evil Corp software for bigger projects where the Foss software falls short.
If the software runs on Linux natively someday or a Foss alternative is on par, I will gladly make the full switch.
I use autodesk products and other electrical engineering industrial products that require using windows. I’m mostly happy with being able to live in the mingw environment provided by git bash. Gives me most of what I need for a POSIX environment.
To switch to Linux full time I’d need to change jobs, lol.
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