Comment by arcfour
6 months ago
You know, it's funny—I always hear people say they want to keep their Windows-only applications and run Linux alongside it, but I made the switch almost a decade ago and honestly can't say I'm worse off for it. And frankly, there's never been a better time to make that leap; the Linux desktop has finally hit its stride and become genuinely mature, with the polish and features one would expect from a modern operating system.
Apart from a handful of games, I haven't actually needed Windows for anything. So I'm curious—what Windows-only software is keeping you on it, OP?
Not OP, outside of games I keep a dual boot pretty much exclusively for Visual Studio - imo it's one of the best debuggers I've ever used. I know gdb is just as powerful if not more, but it is so much less ergonomic, even with the different frontends I've tried. Edit and continue for C/C++ is such a killer feature too. I stick away from msbuild or using it as an editors it's purely my debugher.
Granted it helps that a lot of the time I need "advanced" debugging relates to msvc/windows specific issues, which while I could run it in wine, it's just easier if I'm on windows anyway.
I’m not OP but for me I end up having trouble with games and maintaining dual boot for it isn’t worth it. Most recently I was trying to install gamescope on PopOS LTS for retro gaming, but it was too old of a distribution for gamescopes dependencies, so I upgraded to Cosmic and it broke my software KVM. I use PopOS because it has great NVIDIA support and I’ve run into issues before with other distros.
At that point I switched back to windows but I’ll try again after a few months. I always keep trying.
I think if I didn’t play games I’d be fine with Linux. I hate Windows except that everything just works.
With Steam, I haven't seen a game that doesn't work yet. I was just playing Clair Obscur yesterday, it worked great. I don't know about Gamescope, but I think you can run whatever Windows thing you want through Proton and it'll probably work well.
It’s been hit or miss for me. I mostly play strategy games. I often get weird game graphics, flickering and things like that that go away when I give up and reinstall windows.
If you play anything multiplayer (and especially anything competitive), it’ll break periodically or not work in the first place due to anti-cheat.
The remastered C&C used to work but now the launcher crashes. No idea why!
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Not OP, but for me is the music plugin industry that almost never provides a linux VST. Some will work with wine, some won’t.
But for everything else I’m on linux as well.
Even better, I have justification to buy yet more hardware synths I dont need
I absolutely love the direction KDE Plasma Wayland session is headed; I think it looks great, it definitely runs great, and it really is just packed with features. I do have some personal KDE gripes I'd like to work on, mainly just improving the KIO fuse integration more, but wow have things progressed fast.
Still, I caution people to not just jump to Linux. The actual very first problem is not software. It's hardware. Firstly, running cutting edge motherboards and GPUs requires a more bleeding edge setup than typical LTS distros give you; you'll be missing audio codec drivers and the GPU drivers will be missing important updates, if things even boot. Secondly, NVIDIA GPUs are currently in a weird place, leaving users with trade-offs no matter what choices they make, making it hard to recommend Linux to the vast majority of users with NVIDIA GPUs. Thirdly, and this one is extremely important, nobody, Nobody, should EVER recommend people run Linux on random Windows laptops. This is cruel and unusual punishment, and it's a bad idea. It's a bad idea even if Arch wiki says it works pretty good. It's a bad idea even if a similar SKU works well, or hell, even if a similar SKU ships with Linux out of the box. It's just a bad idea. The only two big vendors that even really do a good job here are System76 and Framework, and they still have to use a bunch of components from vendors that DGAF about desktop Linux. It is impressive that you can more or less run whatever desktop hardware and things usually work OK, but this logic doesn't apply to laptops. This point can't be stressed enough. I have extensive experience with people trying to switch from Windows to Linux and it's genuinely a challenge to explain to people how this doesn't work, they don't have the frame of reference to understand just how bad of an idea it is and learning the hard way will make them hate Linux for no reason.
Still, even with good hardware, there's plenty of software woes. You'll be missing VSTs. You might have to switch to Davinci Resolve to edit video, Krita to do digital painting, and Blender to do... Well, a lot of stuff. All good software, but a very non-trivial switch.
I'm really glad to see a lot more people interested in running Linux and I hope they have a good experience, but it's worse if they have inflated expectations of what they can do and still have a good experience with. Being misleading about how well Linux or WINE will work for a given task has never really helped the cause, and probably hurt it a lot.
I won't argue about Proton/Steam, though, that shit's miraculous. But honestly, a lot of people like playing competitive multiplayer games, and those anti-cheat vendors don't give a damn about your Linux, they're thrilled to start integrating Secure Boot with TPM attestation as it lets them try to milk more time out of the "maybe we can just secure the client" mindset. (I personally think it's going to die soon, in a world where ML has advanced to the point where we can probably do realtime aimbots that require absolutely no tampering with the client or the computer it runs on, but we'll see I guess.) But for me who doesn't care, yep, it's pretty good stuff. Whenever there's a hot new thing out chances are it already works on Proton; been playing a lot of Peak which was somewhat popular in the last couple months.
> (I personally think it's going to die soon, in a world where ML has advanced to the point where we can probably do realtime aimbots that require absolutely no tampering with the client or the computer
I pray you are right, I fear other bullshit excuses will be found though..
What issues have you seen recently in the wild where Linux just does not work on a laptop? I have pretty good experiences just putting Ubuntu on old laptops for people who asks me to fix their computer.
For old laptops it's significantly less bad, but definitely old. 5+ years old is usually a good start, though these days it may be better if it's even older.
The most significant issues:
- Peripherals simply don't work at all, as in, no touchpad or keyboard, or at least no touchscreen. This is definitely an issue with a variety of laptops including some Microsoft Surface and Dell laptops.
- Power management. Frequently, machines fail to sleep or resume reliably.
- Audio is low quality and quiet. This problem was publicized pretty well by the Asahi Linux project, but it is far from unique to MacBooks: a lot of laptops now require OS-level audio processing to have good audio quality. Even my Framework 16 partly has this issue, though it can be alleviated partly with a BIOS option. I believe this also impacts some System76 laptops.
- WiFi/Bluetooth instability. This issue is probably worst with some Realtek radios, but I've also seen it from time to time with Mediatek.
- Sometimes, issues booting at all. Yep. Sometimes it just won't boot, as sometimes the kernel will just break support, and maybe unbreak it later. That's the nature of just running random shit, though.
I think that illustrates enough so I'll stop there, but also don't forget the hurdles to even get started. Often times the very first thing you want to do is disable secure boot which differs a bit per system. This isn't always truly necessary, but even if you're using a Linux distribution that works with Secure Boot it's often a good idea, as there are a variety of things that you can't do easily with Secure Boot on Linux.
Older laptops are less of an issue since Linux tends to get a lot more mature with older hardware as time goes on, but it's still a little hit or miss, especially with vaguely recent laptop hardware that has weird stuff like Intel IPTS. But that having been said: Linux doesn't support old hardware literally forever, either. Old hardware sometimes stops working and gets pulled from the kernel, or moves out of mainline Mesa, and so forth. So even that isn't a 100% panacea.
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