My OS kept stalling/crashing on boot-up a few months into using it and I could not figure out why or how to fix it. Couldn’t log in or input any commands into the terminal to try out anything so I just gave up.
Luckily my important data was backed up and I had Windows on another drive. I thought the drive might have failed, but it hasn’t had any issues since on Windows. I’d love to return to Linux in the future but I think that experience wil haunt me for a while.
I have been using linux, mostly Pop OS, for the last several years. Haven’t really touched Windows since maybe Windows 8 came out. Very happy with linux.
I just bought a new laptop that had Windows 11 installed, and I was travelling, so I didn’t do the usual format and install linux right away. I thought I’ll maybe keep windows installed and then try to dual boot so if I need Windows for anything specific, I will still have it installed. And I thought I’ll just wait a few weeks until I get home to do that.
But with the Windows Subsytem for Linux thing they have now, I have an Ubuntu install running inside Windows and it works really well. Connects directly with VSCode, Ubuntu has access to Windows filesystem, Ubuntu comes up as my default when I open terminal, Oh-My-Zsh installed perfectly.
I’m sure at some point I’ll find something really annoying with Windows and just scrap it, but for now it’s easier to just keep running Windows and access Ubuntu through it.
I think they are talking about the features of the software. On Windows, both AMD & NVIDIA has a program suite that can do a lot of things that are much more convenient than installing multiple programs and trying to configure them all.
I think they are talking about the features of the software. On Windows, both AMD & NVIDIA has a program suite that can do a lot of things that are much more convenient than installing multiple programs and trying to configure them all.
I am running the RX6500XT graphics card, which if you try to use in a plug and play fashion, you’re completely out of luck when it comes to running any mildly new game out there in ultra or high settings.
However, the AMD Adrenaline software allows you to mess up with upscaling and many, many other goodies for you to fine tune performance and reach that ultra or high quality in (pretty much) all the games I usually play.
There’s no way I’m playing with low settings on Linux when AMD developed some amazing tools for people that like hacking around with their cards. It’s just a pity they still work only on Windows.
Edit: in my experience, ROCm didn’t work in my particular card. Moreover, in order to try an installation of those drivers I was forced to use distros I’m not familiar with like Ubuntu. I had to ssh to my university labs for any ML task.
Thanks for sharing. I have an RX 6800 and Ubuntu 23.04
To be honest the only thing I’m missing from the Control Panel (a thing that I always enable in all games) is “RIS” (Radeon Image Sharpening).
Control+Shift+O: I replaced it by running "Mangohud"
Radeon Chill (to cap FPS a bit below my max refresh rate, example 141 fps limit): I replaced it with "Mangohud"
FreeSync: Well I just have to enable it and run Gnome in Xorg on the logon screen… (instead of Ubuntu wayland).
Overclock: I’m not doing in Linux because I don’t run super heavy AAA like Warzone 2.0. But I have tried CoreCtrl and seems to work. (After enabling OC flag for amd).
Quick monitoring outside games: “Mission Center” I just installed and it’s very similar to W11 task manager in terms of monitoring.
ROCM: it was a pain in the ass to install. I installed some package that enables opencl / rocm while leaving the linux AMDGPU driver. But then it was still not working, and spend days until I finally discovered that I had to add my user to some groups “render” and “video”, something like that. Now I’ve been using it with CUDA apps like SDXL (in python) and it’s working like a charm.
That being said. My main os is W11. If I’m playing a game where my PC is overkill, I stay on Ubuntu (example Monster Hunter Rise or Elden Ring). If I’m playing a game where I need more fps, I go to windows 11 because there is still some % drop by using Proton/Wine etc. Sometimes 20% sometimes 10%. depends. Basically, If the game gives me < 100 FPS in Windows. I stay on Windows.
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.
games just don’t run as smooth and I can’t use gsync with how xorg works, also everything on windows just seems to work unlike Linux. although I’ve been running a Linux server for almost a year for myself and I’m now quite comfortable with the terminal
Basically photoshop and games. I was dual booting and when I switched computer it wasn't worth reinstalling because I spent most of my time in windows. This was a long time ago.
Now that windows is moving into subscription basis I keep thinking I should try getting into linux again but I don't have the time to fiddle around making stuff work.
Apart from Steam I mostly use consoles for gaming these days so it would only be Photoshop I guess ( I think ms office works on Linux now?). Gimp is cool but it still can't do everything photoshop does and I find the GUI counterintuitive.
The one thing I still do use Linux for is booting with a thumbdrive when a computer running Windows has a meltdown.
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 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.
Peripheral compatibility was my biggest issue. Most vendors just don’t make Linux versions. One that I couldn’t work around was my Razer Huntsman v2 Analog. While I was told about the open source Razer app alternatives, they were far from feature complete. My keyboard ended up defaulting to a profile where WASD emulated a controller instead, and the software didn’t have a way of changing it outside of windows.
Indie software is also a big miss. I play FF14. I use a Streamdeck with a custom plugin for hot keys. That is windows only. I use Teamcraft. Also windows only.
The problem is really one that I’m feeding into by going back to windows. There’s just not enough people on Linux to rationalize app development on smaller projects for it. I feel bad going to a one man Dev team and being like “Hey, you should stop everything and do this for just me, because no one else will use the Linux version”.
Could I work around some of these issues? Probably. Could I advocate for Linux software and put together my own alternatives? Probably. But by the time I’m done with work and just want to play a game…I don’t want to spend hours reinventing the wheel.
Ultimately windows is there, and I can make it do what I need it to do. While I’d love to use Linux, it’s just not a viable option for me.
My main device is Windows, but for peripherals for at least keyboards I have moved towards actively choosing those with qmk support since it got annoying needing dedicated software for corsair or Logitech or razor and so on.
Basically visual arts software and some writing software. Additionally I have a free version of Ableton Live Lite 11 (so one music-making application as well) that came with my keyboard.
I mostly do photography, writing, and other visual arts type work on my two computers. I use quite a few photography and painting applications (Photoshop, ArtRage, Rebelle, Lightroom, Inspirit, and a few others; I’m also looking at BlackInk), as well as Scrivener and MS Office when I’m writing. I don’t know if any of those run well or at all in Linux or in Wine, etc. Also I stopped flirting with learning programming and there wasn’t much point maintaining a Linux machine after that. I think Linux is better than Windows all around, and I hate Windows, but it’s just because I use certain apps and from what I’ve heard and seen the Linux apps just aren’t as good.
TLDR, creative software that won’t run on Linux (to my knowledge, anyway).
So I didn’t quite try it to switch, rather installed linux to dualboot specifically because one game had lag issues on windows, and ultimately there are just 2 things keeping me from making linux the main and windows the backup.
One is game compatibility, while linux has come a long way it’s simply more convenient to be on windows which can effectively run everything (even if there are a few more performance issues at times).
The other is that I couldn’t find a DE of which I liked the look that could handle high refresh rate monitors properly. LXDE works for my purpose and I think it looks ok, but by design it just doesn’t feel as nice to use as windows.
Hated gnomes UX, liked KDE but it couldn’t handle my monitor. Wouldn’t wanna bother with trying many more options unless I actually know it will work with my hardware.
I’m not sure what you mean with the monitor thing. I’ve got a 165hz 4K panel with adaptive frame rate and it works out of the box in KDE settings for all of it. The only issue I ran I to is when you use hidpi modes it changes the reported resolution in proton which can be fixed with super resolution I think. But it is a problem.
basically, all of this. My issue was that no matter what I tried, said game was clearly displayed at 60hz on my 240hz monitor (very fast movement so it’s extremely obvious, and it looked identical to if i set the monitor to 60hz in windows). Tried a few things but couldn’t get it to work.
I could never get my bluetooth microphone to work under Linux, and I was having to input my password many times every day just to accomplish simple tasks. Couldn’t even make the password into a PIN, that wasn’t allowed for some reason.
If you’re talking about using sudo you can edit your sudoers file to make it so that whenever you use sudo in a terminal session you don’t have to use the password for the remainder of that session. It’s not an immediately obvious solution to most people so I’m not saying this to downplay your experience by any means, just letting people know this stuff is changeable
LSB dependent printer driver (Epson M100)- (Debian has a love hate reatioship with LSB - Compat package), Display Link - official drivers available only for ubuntu LTS, and Hikvision CCTV cameras IVMS is not officially supported by linux. Basically corporates making bad decisions.
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