I guess it depends on what comes with the distro. If you start off with a basic Linux install and add a DE that is low on system resources, like LXQt, you can breathe life into a machine.
Bodhi, antiX and Linux Lite come to mind.
You can also start with a minimal base, Arch, Debian, Alpine, anything, and then add packages.
I think you’ll be waiting a pretty long time for high end RISC-V CPUs, unfortunately. I don’t particularly trust Qualcomm, but I’m really hoping to see some good arm laptops for Linux.
I kind of agree, in that ARM is even more locked down than x86, but if I could get an ARM with UEFI and all computational power is available to the Linux kernel, then I wouldn’t mind trying one out for a while.
But yes, I can’t wait for RISC-V systems to become mainstream for consumers.
Generally speaking, and I’m not talking about your Raspberry Pi’s, but even there we find some limitations for getting a system up and booting - and it’s not for lack of transistors.
But say if you take a consumer facing ARM device, almost always the bootloader is locked and apart of some read only ROM - that if you touch it without permission voids your warranty.
Compare that with an x86 system, whereby the boot loader is installed on an independent partition and has to be “declared” to the firmware, which means you can have several systems on the same machine.
Note how I’m talking about consumer devices and not servers for data centres or embedded systems.
And it needs even less memory than Electron, even if it runs as an own instance with a different profile! I replaced Discord with it a year ago and it’s much better in literally every way. I just wish there would be a FF alternative for Electron.
I just hope GNOME’s developers would stop being so insufferable. Lots of Wayland extensions and FreeDesktop portals unimplemented on GNOME because of the developers’ stubbornness. These also adversely affect to other DEs and WMs and Wayland’s evolution itself because other DEs would have less reasons to support a standard if one of the largest DEs themselves don’t support it.
I really love GNOME because it’s polished, but if KDE would be just as polished I will immediately switch. I know KDE works really hard to make the DE and the apps in general as polished and modern as possible, but I can’t still help but feel better at GNOME.
One example is the color scheming protocol by FreeDesktop. You can now make your apps look greenish or purplish or whatever color you want regardless of the toolkit they’re made with. Right? Well no, because the insufferable GNOME developers keep blocking the proposal because they want the colors to be hardcoded by the DE. They were offered a compromise where a DE can just offer a limited, curated color picker to the user when they go to the theming settings and allow any arbitrary color hidden behind commands, but the insufferable GNOME developers said no. And the proposal, last time I heard, is still stalled because of GNOME.
I think the reason Gnome is good is the same thing that makes them insufferable. They believe there is a right way to do things, sometimes those are things you like, sometimes they aren’t.
I actually installed 39 fresh on a asus gaming laptop and while before I had issues with multiple drivers not working correctly, this time it was incredibly painless and I haven’t has any issues with it.
I bought a System76 Darter a few months ago, it had problems with the screen brightness controls and external displays on Pop_OS. Installing 39 has been a breeze with everythibg just working so far.
I don’t think the issue is performance though. The unspoken part of this comparison is in bold:
“Linux vs Windows tested in 10 games. In the games we could find that work on linux, the performance was 17% faster on average. In all the rest of the games, Windows worked 100% better.”
Fortunately majority of games work on linux. The major pain point now is the anticheat used by multiplayer games. Single player games more or less work out of the box
To add on here, you can use the Are We Anti-Cheat Yet? site to track which games are not working due to anti-cheat. In my experience it’s extremely rare for “Linux” (aka Wine/DXVK/VKD3D/et al) to not support arbitrary games. If a game is not working on Linux it’s almost certainly because of an anti-cheat or some bloated/obscure DRM telling Linux “no you cannot run this”.
I really want to switch to Linux, but I’ve been told this before and then ended up spending hours trying to get everything to work, and usually give up … but it’s been a couple of years since I tried the last time, so is this the right time?
I have zero interest in the technical parts of Linux or setting things up. I want things to work out if the box. I may have to dual boot because of WoW and MS Flight Sim, but if everything else works it may be worth it.
Edit: wow thanks for the answers. You may have convinced me to try again.
Check out protondb to see how your game collection fares on linux. I personally just buy games without checking these days and play on linux but then again I buy older games. Although AAA games also tend to work these days within days of release
I can’t speak for both games you listed, however for WoW - Blizzard games tend to have a good reputation for running on Linux (one of the few good things I like about Blizzard). Sometimes there are a few bugs here and there (OW had a mouse cursor locking problem) but generally they’re pretty good.
I have been playing Diablo 3 on Linux for as long as I can remember, even before the massive rise of Linux gaming from the introduction of VKD3D/DXVK/Proton. I know D4 was working in Linux even during the betas, and I’ve heard StarCraft players who’ve said the same.
Of course, the system requirements never mention Linux as an officially supported platform, but I can’t say I’ve ever heard of a Blizzard game that doesn’t work on Linux (games they develop - games like CoD and originally Destiny 2 where they were only the publisher/launcher host is a different story) so I’d be very surprised if WoW doesn’t work.
IIRC Blizzard’s anti cheat (“Warden” I believe) is mostly server side which makes things way easier - I mean hell I know a lot of their games even supported Mac OS.
And as the others have linked, for MSFS you can check Proton but I hear the reception is good there too since it’s rated as Silver on there.
These days I’m usually just playing the Diablo games from them, and I just use the Bottles app which makes it really easy to play non-Steam games. It even has an option to install the Battle.net client for you, then you login, install the game, and click play - it’s super simple.
I used to use Inter Semibold as my main UI font but recently moved over to SF Pro Text Semibold. I've been consistently using the Nerd Fonts version of Fira Code for terminal/IDE
All I have to ask is why though? They already have access to skinned aosp and from there can(and do)quite a bit of tweaking on their own. Fireos has been a worse version of android for some time now and Im unsure what the benefit of making their own in house OS would be.
If it’s a true GNU/Linux OS with compatibility with linux programs, then that would be kind of neat, and if it’s open enough to let advanced users install flatpaks(I suspect it’s going to be immutable so at least flatpaks would be nice) then that could be neat. Currently it’s very easy to sideload on fireos devices and even install the play store in full so it’s possible the end product could be more like the steamdeckOS which is very much a user friendly store front end with a power user true linux experience underneath.
That said, for some reason I suspect that they will be locking things down even more and its going to be one of those many user facing linux devices that’s technically linux but very limited. Like a smart fridge interface or something. If this is the case then dropping android support would be a bad move. You lose easy/lazy portability to your store from developers who already have a product to sell and you lose many apps that already exist, and for power users you lose access to the many apps that can easily be side loaded like tachiyomi(though I imagine amazon would rather you buy from them than buy their subsidized $80 tablets to read pirated manga/comics and library books on libby)
But who knows if they actually do an OK job this could lead to a new wave of GNU compatible touch forward apps for the rest of us. Linux has gotten a lot better at touch forward design over the last 4 or 5 years on its own, but its still fairly rough.
I honestly really like Ubuntu, not sure why, but its very smooth. I kinda want to try using open dyslexic though… I currently use Fira code for monospace though.
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