My primary desktop is Windows 11, but literally no other computer I personally own runs Windows. Part of it is games, part of it is proprietary software (music production, dj, etc). I could probably game on Linux full time, but until the commercial software situation is improved I will always have an additional Windows or Mac computer.
I really don’t want to delve into details, but even when I made gpu work there was noticeable drop in performance in games compared to when I ran them under Windows
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.
Games (Blizzard and Riot) I have a linux laptop that I occasionally use. It is far better than it was years before, yet there are still occasions when it just does not work, or it refuses to update.
I used Linux for maybe 15 years and I have to say I absolutely love it. I even attended Fedora Flock conference, I was really into all the FOSS world. But at some point I guess I got really tired of editing text files on a command line and googling to solve specific problems or just plain OS settings.
I can’t say that I don’t miss it though and especially more now than ever the itch is there and I am curious to install and use Linux again, so I dunno…
I kept getting errors that no one else encountered :/
But that was way over a decade ago. Nowadays, I work from home with .NET legacy software, so I need to run Windows, only the modern .NET is crossplatform. The fact that 3 of my top 10 favourite pieces of software (DirectoryOpus, EmEditor, MediaMonkey) are Windows-only doesn’t help either.
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 used Linux desktop as my work rig for a year and a half. I absolutely hated it, had constant problems and lost time almost every day to stupid workarounds. When I tried to search or ask for help the answer I was usually met with was “your hardware is wrong” or “why do you want to do that” or more often than no “you’re using the wrong distro, you should use [different one every time]”. I also found the UI to be quite ugly and often obtuse, you can tell that there’s very few open source UI/UX designers. I switched back to windows and I’ve had better performance and less bugs.
Do you feel like you ever got over the initial setup period? A lot of what you are describing is what I encounter after a fresh install but I don’t typically have any issues after a little bit of tweaking.
Maybe because it was a work laptop I didn’t spend as much time on setup as I would for a personal computer. There’s were a lot of issues that I solved with tweaking at the start, but many of the lingering issues either had no solution or were so intermittent or complex that I couldn’t figure out how to word it in a way that would lead me to the solution.
Disable Intel Bluetooth device so the realtek one is the only one. (Now there is a new option to also disable Intel Wifi adapter in the same word~ document).
Change default display for “Lockscreen”
Change the local time ( timedatectl set-local-rtc 1 --adjust-system-clock enabled RTC in local time.
For Ryujinx I added this “vm.max_map_count=524288” to /etc/sysctl.conf because it was saying it fixes a crash with TOTK
Disk Performance (System hanging with encryption on the SSD): Disabled the ‘no-read-workqueue" and “no-write-workqueue” sudo gedit /etc/crypttab Added “discard” “no-read-workqueue” and “no-write-workqueue” at the end of the string.Looks like this: dm_crypt-0 UUID=4170cddc-59a8-4f4e-afdb-125f70004fef none luks,discard,no-read-workqueue,no-write-workqueue sudo update-initramfs -u -k all sudo reboot
Enable OC en AMD card (Source: linuxgamingcentral.com/…/increase-power-on-amd-gp…) sudo gedit /etc/default/grub Somewhere in that file should be a GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT= line, followed by a pair of quotation marks. In my case it looks like this: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=“quiet splash” We add amdgpu.ppfeaturemask=0xffffffff at the end. Example: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=“quiet splash amdgpu.ppfeaturemask=0xffffffff” Sudo update-grub
Install codec bluetooth AAC for Pixel Buds (codec is lighter than SBC-XQ)
Be sure that bluetooth dongle MPOW is on USB2 and no USB3 which causes interferences (at least in Linux I can suffer it, but not in Windows).
Do the tutorial to make BT devices to work with “Dual Boot” between Ubuntu and W11 without needing to re-pair them everytime (for dualsense and pixelbuds).
Simple compatibility and useability. It works with nothing and handles like I’m trying to have a debate over single channel walkie talkies. Does your audio interface work? Probably not. How about your keyboard software? Nope, not that either. Well surely it supports the most common GPUs for AI, gaming, and content development? No, it’s not officially supported. So when the only way you can use Linux without complications is just barebones equipment to edit flat text files or browse the internet in a web browser, you just ask yourself why bother when windows doesn’t force me to the terminal when I want to solve a simple problem.
I suppose I can technically answer this. I do use Linux full-time now and have for several years, but prior to that I had a few false starts where I’d switch back to Windows. Usually it was because I’d encounter some technical issue I just didn’t know how to fix besides reinstalling the whole OS, or a graphics driver issue. For example, at one point when I had an NVIDIA graphics card only the newest drivers from NVIDIA’s website supported it but the ‘stable’ drivers in Ubuntu’s repo didn’t, so I had to manually install the drivers. Except then whenever the kernel was updated by Ubuntu (basically every week) my display stopped working and I’d have to switch into a TTY and manually reinstall the drivers.
Now I know how I’d fix that (setup some rule to reinstall the drivers whenever the kernel updates, which I believe is now the default anyway), or use a PPA containing the latest NVIDIA drivers, or use AMD instead - but really any kind of problem that requires the user to both diagnose and fix the issue prevents non-technical people from adopting it.
Screens, scaling, nvidia drivers, games… Even spent an hour on gnome trying to get my desktop background image to fill the whole screen instead of repeating to fill the space. Solution ended up being download an image editor and resize the image to be the exact same size as my screen resolution. Tried KDE and kept hitting 100% CPU bug
In the end I just wanted a pc that worked, so went back to Windows with WSL.
Seems a perfect combo. Do my dev in WSL, and the desktop just works.
However I’m getting increasingly frustrated at every UI change Microsoft make… Which is what made me try Linux in the first place. If Microsoft Win7 and early 10 was great, I wish they’d stop touching UI and just improve under the hood
No, already burnt out from reinstalling different distros. I try Linux desktop every couple of years and it’s always the same frustrations. I’ll give it another go next year
ReactOS is fascinating, when I was younger and dumber I was optimistic about the project…but at it’s current rate it’ll never be an actual usable daily driver, and with Proton, the need for it is lessening, not growing.
I honestly get where you’re coming from as I went through a similar process of hating Windows, trying to make Linux work for me and just ending up back on Windows. I finally settled on Nobara Linux, but in my personal opinion it might be worth looking into Linux Mint for you if you want a rock solid distro. I installed Mint for my girlfriend not too long ago and everything magically worked with Nvidia drivers, wallpapers, Discord screen sharing, etc. I was so impressed that I considered distro hopping one last time.
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