I have the HP envy 360, I have the Ryzen 5000 series not Intel. I’m a software engineering student that also leans heavily into the enthusiast side in terms of any kind of software, and I haven’t ran into anything I can’t do with this. I don’t game on it though so I can’t speak to that, I use other hardware for it. The touchscreen works well, I picked up some styluses for it that have different tips based on what I’m doing and I’ve done anything from note taking to art. I also fold it for watching YouTube and stuff sometimes or reading. The battery life is pretty good, if I’m doing heavy stuff i usually have to plug it in before I hit the end of the day. Lightweight stuff I’ve had it last a couple days.
The laptop comes with windows 11 but I have a dual boot setup. It runs fantastic in Linux or windows, this thing is a little powerhouse. The only issue I had on install of linux (I’m using debian) was that it didn’t recognize my wifi adapter but it wasn’t a hard fix. Otherwise it just feels fantastic to use. Its light, sleek, and stylish in a modern way if those are bonuses for you. Feels good to type on, and has an aluminum case. Other than my steam deck it’s probably my favorite piece of tech I own.
I’d say make a wholehearted attempt to try open alternatives even if you stay on Windows for the time being. I had been doing so for a few years before I even considered Linux and by the time I finally did switch the transition was a lot smoother.
That being said I’ve been surprised by how much stuff actually does run under WINE!
All my games work with Steam/Proton (thanks Value!) and I mainly use my desktop as a gaming PC. I do some bussiness stuff but LibreOffice will work. Or I also use Google Docs to do things--can be saved as Microsoft Office file types or PDF.
But you are right, if you need a Windows only program, then Windows is the only option. I had to update the firmware on my Xbox controller that I use with Steam to play my games. I had to wipe one of my laptops and put a copy of Windows on there to get this done. Another time there was a free Baldurs Gate game from Amazon games I could get, BUT you needed the Amazon Game app to get it. And it only ran on Windows. I put Windows on a laptop, download the free game, then moved it to my Linux Gaming PC. After adding it to Steam as a non Steam game, I was exploring dugeons with elves and dwarves.
It's still a Windows world, but IF enough gamers switch to Linux that could change. And Microsoft is only going to get worse with ads.
Does anyone know how well this actually works? Ive been fighting with fusion 360 to work on linux. Yes i know about bottles and it works okish but it lags alot.
Are you looking to run games, or other software? ProtonDB has details of what games do and don’t work using it. Proton is also maintained by CodeWeavers, I think it’s basically the gaming support from CrossOver.
I have an NVIDIA and I dont understand why everyone says its buggy. What kind of problems are people having? I use Nobara for AV work + gaming, it installs the propritary drivers automatically. The few games I’ve tried worked flawless, better then on Windows on the same machine. There’s one game I’ve tried were I had to switch to X11 but all the others works on Wayland.
It’s far better than it used to be. They didn’t get the reputation for no reason. There were lots of Nvidia-specific bugs that have been slowly sorted out over the years. I’m told Wayland is even in a roughly usable state now. But it takes a lot of time to regain the lost trust. Let’s see how long it takes them to support HDR, and what that support looks like.
Well up until the last driver version I was scared of putting my lappy to suspend cuz it wouldn’t wake up sometimes and I’d have to directly power off sometimes causing a kernel panic. 545 was a blessing.
It depends on your card & if you’re using Nouveau or the proprietary driver. NVIDIA has always been far behind in terms of Wayland compatibility when compared to AMD or Intel. Recently they seem to be putting in a lot more effort and now after Fedora officially announced that they will be dropping X11 by default in the KDE Plasma 6 Fedora Spin 18 months from now, they’re likely going to be trying much harder as Fedora sets the precedent. Even if it works on your hardware rn, that doesn’t mean it’s yet feature complete or bug-less.
Unless you have very specialized requirements (and quite possibly you do) the solution is usually to unhook yourself from thinking of needing specific programs and to instead focus on needing to perform specific tasks. (Then finding the Linux way to perform that task.)
Barring that, the codeweavers suggestion is a good one. I used it in my early days when I thought I couldn't live without particular pieces of Windows software and although that was several years ago, even then it was pretty good about being able to easily run arbitrary Windows software. IMO it's cheap enough to be worth the investment.
If you truly have bespoke requirements that just can't be satisfied by either of the above, staying on Windows may legitimately be your best option.
More generally - if you decide to take this step, expect to have to learn to use a computer substantially differently than you have in the past. It's not harder; in many ways it's easier. But if you are very experienced and comfortable with Windows, a lot of concepts are going to feel foreign to you. Tackle one task at a time and your experiences will build upon each other. Go into it expecting to have to learn, and you'll do fine. Bizarrely I find the least tech-savvy folks sometimes have the easiest time transitioning.
My win11 VM sits on my disk, most days it stays off. It starts in 30 seconds and I use remina to remote into it. It sucks that I lose 60gb of disk, but it’s fast and everything just works.
macros created by different people on excel viewed differently on Libreoffice also Some of the excel formulas that is written on VBA does not work well on Libreoffice
I’m a software engineer, and I’ve used Linux on my computer for work before when my company allowed Linux installs on their computers (most don’t in my experience). I don’t recommend it for you.
For me, my main productivity tools, even proprietary ones, run natively on Linux. I very very rarely have to do anything involving word processing. When I do open source or in-browser word processors are enough. Windows can also be a constant headache to use in a lot of software development settings. It’s a horrible development environment. I try to avoid working on Windows as much as I can.
When something breaks (and on Linux, something eventually will), I have more than a decade of technical experience in computing I can fall back on to fix the issue myself. My work computer has failed to boot before and all I had to diagnose and fix the issue was a black screen with a terminal prompt. Even my company’s outsourced IT company had very little experience with Linux and I was largely on my own to fix it when things went wrong.
For you I don’t think it would make sense for basically all the opposite reasons. I imagine you’ll be doing heavy word processing and editing a lot of documents that need to be formatted correctly. Browser based and open source word processing are probably not going to cut it. I’m not sure if there are any proprietary file formats you may come across in the legal field, but if there are do you want to have to ask people “could you send that in a different format? I can’t open that on Linux.”
If something goes wrong on your machine you may not have all the experience to resolve it quickly on your own which could impact your business. Windows can break too but there’s a lot more support out there and the barrier is much lower to fix most issues (I can’t remember the last time I had to bust out a terminal to fix something on windows)
For all its faults, windows is pretty well set up for your typical use case.
If there’s a compromise here, you could try having a computer running windows and another running Linux. Having a backup in case something goes wrong isn’t a bad idea anyway. Dual booting is also an option. I made it through college for a CS degree with a dual boot Windows+Ubuntu laptop.
Whatever you end up doing, be sure to have a really good plan in place for backing up everything you need, especially files. Your computer can fail you at any time, Windows or Linux.
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