I could never go back to Windows, after having tasted the freedom of Linux.
Linux has its flaws, but so does Windows. And for me, the flaws in Windows became much more annoying than the ones in Linux. Game compatibility was the main factor that kept me backt from using it on a desktop, and that’s a non issue nowadays.
Game compatibility
Steam+Proton is pretty impressive. I can play Baldur’s Gate 3 on my Thelio. Does get a little toasty, though …
Why would you buy that? Overpriced and with that case it’s no wonder that things get toasty. There’s like fuck all for airflow. If you want a case with wood accents, there’s the North from Fractal Design, which have great airflow thanks to their open fronts.
I’m so happy something like this exists. I hate RGB and love wood on my electronics. Think I’m gonna pick one of these up.
I didn’t buy it for a gaming machine. I was pleasantly surprised that a fancy new Windows game ran on it at all!
I thought you were just being a dick but then I checked out the North from Fractal Design and wow it’s beautiful!
I’m just calling out those idiotic cases that completely choke your hardware of air. You want an open front (or similar depending on the form factor) to get a bunch of silent fans in to let your system breath properly. Bad airflow will just cause your temps to rise, which also severely increases the noise.
Yeah I mean you’re probably right. I think people just downvoted to hell because of how you phrased it.
At least not on kbin (18 vs 0).
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I don’t see any wood on that. Personally I had bad experiences with TT’s quality too, but that was admittedly a long time ago with the Shark.
Because it’s open source i.e. fully upgradable and repairable, and the mission behind the company is something I would want to support.
It’s a prebuilt company that doesn’t use proprietary garbage to force each and every customer to buy an entire new system when their original purchase starts to become obsolete.
I don’t own anything from system76, I’ve built my own my whole life, but I still believe prebuilts should be for people who can’t build their own, not a timeless and somehow socially acceptable way to scam your customer and still have them come back for more
Are there prebuilt desktop PCs that aren’t? I have personally yet to see one, even though I build my own. Maybe some small form-factor office rigs would be a hassle, but those are not really marketed to usecases where upgrading makes much sense anyway,
That doesn’t make sense. Many hardware stores offer an assembly of your hand picked hardware, which gives you 100% control over the components and actually fair prices, as well as the option to use a more sensible case. Of course it costs a bit extra to let them do that and you have to buy everything in one store, which might be more expensive than spreading it out, but it is still better than 90% of those prebuilt systems.
And nothing there is open source, you can install Linux on any computer you want, regardless of where it came from. They just save the Windows license costs.
Flaws I didn’t pay for piss me off a lot less.
While that’s certainly also part of it, I would still stand by my opinion even if Windows was completely free.
Raise your hand if you ever paid for that hot chunk
I consider myself forced to pay for it every time I buy a laptop whose price has to include Microsoft’s cut off the action.
You are not forced, plenty of manufacturers offer FreeDOS variants for so many years, just support them instead.
I bought myself a copy of NT 4.0 back in the day.
I’m still dualbooting Windows to play games with a controller until I can get off my ass and buy a USB hub. Reason being that the Xbox Series controllers has issues with my mobo’s Bluetooth chipset, even when updating the firmware. Bluetooth support is particularly inconsistent with these.
But outside of the odd app that needs Windows (and I can just boot a VM for that), Linux has been really good on the desktop.
I invested in an Icy Box IB-AC6110 powered 10 port usb hub a while ago too, but it is more for additional controllers, specifically joysticks and the likes. Mainboards just don’t have enough USB ports for all that. Dual sticks or a hotas? Two gone. Maybe some pedals? Now it is 3. How about a camera and a head tracker? Well, 4-5 depending on your product solution. Defo gives me some peace of mind to be good on USB ports.
yeah, thankfully I can go a bit more basic than that, I just need to figure out what hub, or even cable, I wanna get.
I have been using this hub. Works fine in Linux and windows.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0871ZHCKK?psc=1&ref=ppx_pop_mob_b_asin_title
I also use this usb dongle for my Xbox controller. It works fine in Linux. I really should try playing a few games on Linux.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0785SFKYF?psc=1&ref=ppx_pop_mob_b_asin_title
For me it’s the basic things that drive me crazy in Windows: the Start menu doesn’t work half of the time, and it shows web results above the program you want to run. File operations are slow and the File Explorer crashes a lot. Application windows constantly steal focus from the one I’m typing in, leading to passwords being typed into code, documents, web browsers or other unsafe places. Background indexing is constant and eats up CPU, and the file search still takes forever despite all this indexing.
These are all basic things that Microsoft has had decades to get working, and they’re all still broken. Microsoft always seem to be paying attention to anything but the quality of the user’s experience.
By contrast, Linux is just relaxing.
Man that MS indexing is so terrible. I shut it off because it was robbing my system when trying to work, and as you said it is slow anyway. Compared to GNOME desktop where the indexing is invisible to user, I hit the Suoer key type a few letters it instantly shows me results as you would expect indexing to work.
I don’t understand how Microsoft manage to make it so bad. What kind of index is it building that it can be so slow?
Asking the real questions
Mine is VST’s and games. Never had much luck using a vst bridge/wine, so i just went back to windows.
and that’s a non issue nowadays.
Again, this community is delusional lol. If you consider only about 5% of Steam games being Linux-friendly these days as “a non issue nowadays,” I’d hate to see your game library.
I game on linux regularly, primarily thanks to Valve. In the last 2 months steam lists 11 different games I’ve “Played Recently”.
- 7 worked flawlessly (Baldur’s Gate 3, Destroy All Humans!, Divinity: Original Sin 2, Besiege, Deep Rock Galactic, Shotgun King, Call of Cthulhu)
- 1 the native linux version doesn’t work, but the windows version works perfectly (Northgard)
- 1 didn’t initially work, but worked a month later after proton was updated. (Grounded)
- 1 I had to choose an older version of Proton (due to the external launcher breaking things), but with enough performance hitching during cutscenes that I chose to just play it on windows (Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order)
- 1 I couldn’t get to work, but I honestly don’t know if it’s a linux issue because the game’s discussion forums are full of people saying the game is riddled with game breaking bugs on windows (The Sinking City)
I’ve been gaming on linux for a couple of years now, over that time I’ve put many hours into WoW, Sea of Thieves, Rimworld, Golf with your Friends, Core Keeper, Outer Wilds, and dozens more without any issues at all. 90%+ of the time the game starts up and just works.
I’m just one datapoint, but yeah, Linux as a gaming platform is totally viable for me these days.
Also, protondb lists 19% Verified and 16% Playable, so your 5% number is just demonstrably wrong.
Cheers.
I had to choose an older version of Proton
Which in turn caused the performance problems. Fast shader compilation extensions are available only on Proton 8 and newer.
Not sure why you’re getting down voted, you’re totally right. I wish I could have gotten it running on current proton as the recent performance updates are massive. Alas, EA Play ruined it. I found a GitHub issue for it and gave as much data as I could to help debug it.
Side note, when I ran the game on windows, EA Play was not only installed, but automatically configured to launch on startup. I just can’t imagine an app ever doing that to me on Linux.
If you consider only about 5% of Steam games being Linux-friendly these days
No matter how you twist and turn things, this is just flat out wrong…
Survey says…No.
The only games that don’t work are essentially the ones using DRM/anticheat implementations that don’t support multiple platforms. Meaning more like 75% of all Windows titles work under Linux just fine.
Again, this community is delusional lol. If you consider only about 5% of Steam games being Linux-friendly these days as “a non issue nowadays,” I’d hate to see your game library.
Speaking of delusional. You don’t seem to have a whole lot of ideas about Linux gaming if you truly believe this ignorant nonsense.
79% of my library has a Silver or higher rating on ProtonDB, 65% are Gold or Platinum rated. For the Top 100 in Steam it’s even better with 89% Silver+ and 79% Gold+. Of the Top 1000 Steam games it is 87% Silver+ and 75% Gold+. Even if we look at the entire Steam catalog we have 13% & 11% respectively, and that’s only so low because there’s literally just no reports. Only 1% of the titles are considered to be “Borked”, another 1% are Bronze rated.
You can check the data for yourself here: https://www.protondb.com/
And again, that’s just Steam and what has been tested by people. Most titles just run, others require minimal tweaking, some require a little tinkering.I’m curious what the number is excluding top games with DRM or anti cheat incompatibility
DRM isn’t really an issue. The main one that’s used nowadays is Denuvo and that has no issues with Linux. Anticheat usually only for competitive games, which I personally don’t give a damn. Other multiplayer games and their anticheat work fine, since they aren’t on a kernel level type rootkit.
Most of what you are missing out on are games that require some form of anti cheat. Most other stuff just runs. Most new triple A games just run these days.
I always see people say this but does no one here use professional apps like solidworks or revit? Are there good Linux alternatives? I’d switch to Linux but I need solidworks for work I do.
Windows is the defacto standard for desktop PCs for a reason. In a corporate setting it’s kind of the ideal.
Because of the sheer number of users, most software is built with Windows in mind and therefore has the most support. It’s pretty rare that you find an application that doesn’t have a Windows build available.
On top of that tools like Active Directory, and group policy makes managing thousands of machines at scale a reasonably simple affair.
Microsoft is a corporation rather than a community so you can always expect their main goals to be profit-driven and that comes with some nasty baggage, but it’s not enough that it’s easy for professionals to make the switch.
Linux has made lightspeed progress over the last decade, especially with Proton making games mostly work cross platform, but outside of specialist use cases, the vast majority of business PCs and by extension home PCs will be running Windows for the foreseeable future.
The popularity of Windows is largely due to the fact it’s pre installed on most PC’s when you buy them, people literally think Windows ‘is the computer’. Such popularity has little to do with Windows being a great OS. In many ways Windows is like McDonalds: It’s not the best, it’s not the worst, it just fills that hump in the bell curve.
Due to the fact Linux has no marketing department, it’s unlikely this will ever change.
Windows comes pre-installed on PCs when you buy them because it’s what people are generally comfortable using, because it’s what they use at work too.
And Windows is used on business PCs largely because of how manageable they are at scale. Windows is expensive. Like, really expensive. If you have 1000 PCs that have Windows and Office E3, assuming a bulk discount, that’s an up front cost of ~$200000 with the subscription costing an additional ~$20000/month. If it was feasible for business to change to a free alternative, I guarantee they would’ve done so.
You’re right in that that Windows is not some super great OS, but it does some things way better than anything else that make it an ideal choice for business use.
No, Windows comes preinstalled on most PC’s due to clever marketing. As stated, it’s more a case of people thinking Windows is the computer as opposed to any form of comfort regarding a fragmented touch/desktop UI making poor use of screen real estate.
I come across a number of Mom and Dad, Grandma and Grandpa types that outright struggle with Windows; the device they feel comfortable with is the iPad.
No, Windows comes preinstalled on most PC’s due to clever marketing
I’d say it comes preinstalled because Microsoft has threatened OEMs to forbid Windows installations if they sell computers with Linux preinstalled.
The possibility does exist. I think the Adobe CC hasn’t been released under Linux for a similar reason, as Microsoft and Apple know that should Linux get the Adobe CC, people will flock to Linux.
A number of years back Adobe accidentally released a slide showing the Adobe CC running under Ubuntu, but strangely the product was never released on the platform.
And Windows is used on business PCs largely because of how manageable they are at scale.
… Linux being manageable at scale is kind of the reason why Linux is the standard for servers. Many enterprises run Linux workstation distros, and they can be managed at scale just fine, it’s just different tooling. You can deploy a Linux desktop OS with Ansible as easily as a Linux server.
You can replace pretty much the entire Office suite with Nextcloud and OnlyOffice, both of which can be easily hosted on-prem, for a fraction of the cost of paying MS for roughly the same thing on their awful infrastructure.
If it was feasible for business to change to a free alternative, I guarantee they would’ve done so.
They have. Just because you haven’t heard about it doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. It’s pretty easy (and inexpensive) these days to run Linux desktop OSes like RHEL, Debian or Ubuntu on a VM running on Proxmox or OpenShift, complete with multiple monitor support and GPU. Hell, you can even run a Windows VM if you want. All you need is a system (like a thin client) with enough grunt to run a browser, and enough ports to handle multiple monitors and USB accessories.
And businesses aren’t interested in “free”, they’re interested in support, which they are willing to pay for. This is how companies like Ubuntu, Red Hat and SUSE make their money. The OS is free, but you can pay for professional support.
I work in software and I haven’t touched windows in a very long time. Even back whenever I worked on FPGA development all of that software ram on Linux, so I think you’ll find that this is very field dependent.
Closest thing I use to a professional app is DaVinci Resolve Studio on a distribution that is not officially supported by Blackmagic. Not only does Resolve Studio work perfectly, I am able to use Blackmagic hardware (Intensity Pro 4k, Speed Editor) without having to mess around with settings, config files, permissions, packages, etc.
The caveat here is the initial setup: I use an AMD GPU, and it’s a bit of a pain to get the free and licensed versions of Resolve working with those under Linux. However, once that’s out of the way, it’s completely seamless.
As for CAD…yeah that’s where everything falls over. There are tons of FOSS alternatives out there but I have yet to see any of them in a professional setting. Even Fusion360 is hit or miss under Wine, I spun up a Windows VM just to use that for my 3D printer tinkering.
Idk is it CAD software? I know there are webapps for that now
Onshape web based CAD from former SW employees. or if work is paying licenses you can run Siemens NX12 on linux (REL, SUSE, or OpenSUSE)
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Windows with WSL became a lot better to what Windows used to be but with the TPM requirement Win11 became factually less compatible that modern Linux (at least without fiddling to override that requirement).
And even WSL is essentially just a Linux VM.
Enough with the fan wars. Let’s be perfectly honest for once. Windows, Linux, MacOS - they all suck. Sometimes in similar ways, sometimes in different ways. But they all suck.
Windows users - I get you, you use it because it sorta works 40%, of the time and sucks in the way you understand.
Linux users - I get you, you know all of the arcane incantations you need to quickly install, update, and troubleshoot your os in a terminal window. It works - once you apply your custom bash script that applies every change you need to get everything exactly how you like it. But again, it sucks in the way you understand.
MacOS users - well I don’t really get you. You know what you’ve done.
We deserve better than this, guys. We deserve an os that just works, is easy to use, easy to configure, doesn’t require an IT degree to use, and that we can recommend to our grandma without a second thought.
Windows: “We dropped support for that thing you bought brand new 5 years ago”
Linux: “We are considering dropping support for something that has existed for longer than you had”
I’ve worked exclusively with Linux servers since 2002 and exclusively Linux desktop since 2004 and I’ve come to the point where I prettyuch refuse to touch windows for fear it will infect me somehow.
I know most people don’t know any better but it’s insanity to me that anyone still pays money for windows. It’s a scam, no other words for it.
Don’t even get me started on Windows servers. It’s just sad to see how much money is spent on a company that has so litte focus on quality.
Even the online services suck. Dear God Microsoft, would it kill you to understand that people might have gasp TWO tabs open with your teams “app”?
Windows requirements: sprawling list of unsupported hardware based on an arbitrary requirment for a security chip that doesn’t actually improve security at all
Linux: CPU (optional)
carefully select hardware
lmao, i’ve exclusively run linux on franken pcs cobbled together out of mostly second hand parts
The first thing I installed windows on was an discarded office tower that I had to put new memory And hard drives in. Shit was ancient and specifically did not want anything but windows installed on it. Installed Linux anyway. Works great. No specific hardware
Pop OS has native drivers for nVidia GPUs even 😎🐧
Correction: POP!_OS has their own APT deb farm that has the latest hardware stack. This includes the proprietary 535 nvidia driver and later as well as the kernel and mesa.
This is part of the history of the distribution as it was made to support system76’s latest hardware lineup on top of an Ubuntu base.
Nouveau is the libre driver for Nvidia on GNU/Linux with Nvidia slowly segregating their proprietary driver into a firmware blob.
I think this is a bit misleading.
Most or at least the majority of distros offer the proprietary nvidia driver.
Pop, Zorin, Ubuntu, Garuda, etc just bundle it in the install media as an option.
I definitely had much less issues with my Nvidia card on pop os than I did with any of the other like 5 distros I tried.
have been using various distros over the years and never had issues with the nvidia driver on any of them 🤷♂️
Elementary OS didn’t work for me (broke during install – people online said it was video drivers), and on mint and Ubuntu gaming wasn’t working exactly right. In pop os 85% of my games run though
Do you game?
I did back then. Not such much these days.
Linux has always been my go to for that specific use case as well, and I honestly have very little Linux experience. Linux just makes bizarre half broken hardware, like bad ram, work.
I have a Jellyfin server running in the office. The video card is about 6 months old. The CPU, case, and motherboard are going on 12 years old.
That’s much easier grounds then… checks notes… a modern laptop straight from the factory.
I like Linux a lot, but saying you can’t understand why someone would run Windows on a server just shows a lack of knowledge. Linux is great in a lot of server applications in the application realm. However, it doesn’t get close to the power of Active Directory and Group Policy for Windows device management. Besides that, a lot of people are more comfortable with a UI for managing DHCP, DNA, etc in a SMB environment. Even if they prefer a command line for those tools PowerShell allows those people to coexist with those that prefer a GUI. Under certain circumstances, (mainly ones where a business is forgoing AD for AAD), Linux can be the right choice. Pretending that there’s no place for Windows Server, though, is asinine.
This community is very much a “Windows bad” community. I personally find that annoying as I use Windows and Linux. Both have their pros and cons. Windows though is seen here as the shitest OS out there which far from the truth.
PowerShell is amazing and I install it on my Linux desktop.
The main problem are companies forcing windows servers and technologies when they are not the good ones for the task.
If one needs to set up desktops for accounting, windows is fine. But I saw companies setting shared NFS drives used by Linux severs on windows machines! Not joking!
I know companies that even deploy kubernetes clusters on windows servers!
Just because finding cheap windows engineers is easy, everyone has had an experience on windows to put on a cv. Than some of that cheap labor go up the hierarchy as head of a random infrastructure team because all good sys engineers moved to manage linux servers after some time, he recruits people like-minded, and in few years you ends up with a team refusing to do the right thing because “we know windows and windows can do the same as Linux and Microsoft is good for governance and Linux bad”. Execs don’t understand the difference and force architecture to go along because they don’t believe it’s worthy to rebuild a team, we are anyway using windows for accounting and execs laptops, it can’t be that bad! Even accenture and mckinsey consultants us it! And they told us that wls2 is the holy grail
Corporate IT is the peak of suboptimal tools for the job because politics and money
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We use both. Its not my department but i know the server guys are using windows for some servers and linux for others and the decision is normally made based on which is going to be best for the specific needs of the function of that server.
Pretending one is outright better than the other is childish. Just use whats best at the time.
Have you used windows before? It’s flaming garbage. Been using various oses for decades and I still rediscover how shitty windows is on the regular.
Yeah, and Linux still doesn’t have a good answer to AD for managing suites of end user machines. Linux has a lot going for it - but windows isn’t strictly inferior or anything.
Honestly, the entire AD suite with auth and everything else built in is genuinely a good product. And if what you want is supported by Microsoft, their other services are decent as well.
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But if the windows fanboy doesn’t know about it, it’s not real. Or if it is, it’s not good! /s
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Notice how you’re ignoring the machine management and selectively choosing to focus on the user management. User management might be fine with Linux, but machine management can’t compete with GPOs, especially for managing Windows clients, which is what businesses are using for workstations whether we like it or not.
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freeipa is pretty good, although i agree that it’s easier to just use AD
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Lmao that’s not just for AD
I only know OpenLDAP and FreeIPA, if there are any other alternatives you got please mention them
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There’s this thing I notice. If windows asks you to learn something or put up with some BS it’s seen as the cost of business, reasonable, or simply not even noticed. If Linux requires you to learn something, like read one article about which distro might work best for you, it’s seen as an insurmountable difficulty or an absurd ask.
I upgraded my Intel system to AMD today. And I didn’t have to reinstall a damn thing, because my existing Linux installation Just Worked™. It really is to the point that I could never imagine going back to Windows.
I was flirting with Linux for 20 years. There was always something that put me off an I went back to Windows. Recently I installed ubuntu with Kde plasma and I’m not going back. It just works and is heaps faster on older hardware. The old driver issues are gone, compatibility is awesome. The only issue is getting used to new software names.
Everyone acts like nvidia support on linux is completely broken. I game with nvidia on mine regularly and have never had a driver bug.
You know, I’ve been using Linux on desktops and laptops for like 20 years now. I can count on one hand then number of times I’ve had hardware support issues. Outside of a fingerprint scanner, I’ve been able to solve all of those issues.
Meanwhile, my adventures across the years dealing with Windows drivers led me to finally say “fuck it” earlier this year and nuke the Windows install on my gaming rig in favor of Nobara.
I’ll take Linux hardware support over Microsoft any day of the week.
I have the opposite experience. For 15 years I’ve been installing windows on laptops and desktops. Never did I had to ‘solve’ driver issues. They were either easy to find, by clicking ‘search in windows update’ or were supported directly through windows itself. No need to solve anything…
The opposite was true for my few Linux (Ubuntu and Linux mint) adventures. Every time something would just not work. The most frustrating for me was the broken sleep function. There was no way to get my laptop to sleep properly. It would wake up at random times or just not boot anymore thereafter.
Just saying that these kind of things really depend on what you work with and what you want to get out of a system
That reminds me of a Microsoft-branded USB WiFi adapter that I was making heavy use of back in mid-2000s. The MN-510. You could buy it brand-new circa 2006. It had a $75 launch MSRP, about $114 adjusted for inflation. Come 2009, we find out that Windows 7 wasn’t going to support it. And given what we know about OS development cycles, they presumably made that call in '08 or even '07. Looking back on it, I think this was one of the major catalysts for me to reconsider Linux as a drop-in replacement. Because, wouldn’t you know, the adapter kept working just fine when I tried it out in Ubuntu. Support was simply there in the kernel. Plug-and-play. I suddenly had this whole other operating system providing an it-just-works network connection, for free. It was amazing. So I used that adapter for several more years until I could afford a network upgrade. And I’m still using Linux the majority of the time today.
I switched to arch using qtile wm a few months ago. Couldn’t be happier. If a game doesn’t run on my rig either though stream or lutris well I just don’t play it, there’s way more games to discover and play.
This! I literally give Windows a chance every version. I even kind of liked Windows 11 this go around.
But something always breaks and no matter how much I trouble shoot the fix is to reinstall windows. To which I say screw that and start distro hoping.
11 with 2022 gaming laptop just stopped updating. The only non native app I had on the thing was STEAM! I have been using Linux for 18 years because it’s the only way I know how to fix Windows.
It’s just when you have peripherals, you might just not find a driver for Linux at all
I’ll take Linux hardware support over Microsoft any day of the week.
I’m really undecided on this. It really depends on the type of hardware, for example when dealing with graphics card drivers, especially nvidia I’ll take windows over linux any day. On the other hand on Linux I don’t have to install drivers for almost anything and things mostly just work unless the device is brand new.
I’ve been using all of the major OSs and they’re all good and they all suck in their own way. Windows does suck a bit more than the others, but I don’t think it’s as terrible as diehard Linux fanboys make it out to be.
I still use Windows on my home PC because bideo gaems and music production. I’d prefer to use Linux instead but oh well it’s not the worst thing.
I have to use Windows and their extended malsoftware and I was checking if I could run some stuff necessary for my work on Linux but didn’t find info. I’m so tired of how low quality and buggy Microsoft stuff is.
I’d rather stick my head in the rotating blades of a combine harvester than deal with HP printer drivers…
Linux will run on anything
Ps3. Raspberry pi. Phones. All computers ive ever tried to install it on… and even M-chip macs.
The new CPU requirements for Windows 11 are why I wiped it and am now on Linux Mint. No dual-booting.
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