I switched all the machines at https://lanparty.house over to Linux a couple months ago. So far, we've experienced noticeably fewer problems on Linux compared to Windows. Stability and performance are better. I can't think of one game we tried that didn't work. And wow is it nice not to have all the ads and crapware in our faces anymore.
(I'm aware that Battlefield series and League of Legends won't work due to draconian anti-cheat -- but nobody in my group cares to play those I guess.)
I used multi seat in Linux with SystemD, i just threw in some old grapchics cards and sound cards in my gaming PC so that the children could play on separate monitors while I worked. Multi seat is very cool. When upgrading to a new gaming PC it was much cheaper to build 4 separate machines because cpu's and motherboards with enough pcie lanes are very expensive.
GPU's still run at decent performance with half the pcie lanes available, so if you already got a gaming PC with many slots and dont need top performance it could still be worth it to get two more cheap gpus and use multi seats - for those building a mini lan gaming room at home.
One annoying thing is that linux cant run many different GPU drivers at the same time, so you have to make sure the cards work with the same driver.
Properitary 3rd party multi seat also exist for Windows, but Linux has built in support and its free.
I am super curious about your setup. I played with MS years ago, but I lost the need. It is a super cool tech that I'd love to see its efficiencies embraced in some way.
On a similar note, performance is sometimes better. As a direct comparison, the steam version of the Lenovos Legion S handheld is significantly more performant than the windows version. Like 20% better FPS and double the battery life. Literally the only difference between the two is the OS.
Though from what I've read, Microsoft could fix that relatively quickly, if they made some tweaks to Windows (and called it a special 'handheld gaming edition' or so).
For some reason, the Lenovo Legion S's Windows still comes with a lot of baggage and background services etc.
It keeps surprising me how many people don't care about some of the most popular games today. I mean I don't care about Battlefield or League of Legends neither, but in earlier decades of PC gaming, almost everyone had some of the most popular games. Doom, Half-Life (1 + 2) and such.
The games market today seems more similar to music in its fragmentation.
The addressable consumer market is just a lot bigger and more diverse than it used to be. You go back to the early late 90s and its a market dominated by teenage boys. Go back and look at some of the 00s and early 10s E3 presenations from the big three and its very cringe inducing how focused they are on a teenage boy demographic and appearing edgy and how blatantly sexist they are in their language. For example, at the E3 conference where MS announced xbox live (2004?) they explictly said that girls don't play games (there were actually plenty of girls that did play games at that time), but they might want to use xbox live to design t-shirts to sell to boys on their online marketplace. This was also still the era of booth babes trying to pull in men to booths with barely dressed women. Nearly every game ad was just a wall of exposions and violence or just the latest NFL game.
Today you have fully grown adults in their 30-50s with very different tastes and you have a lot lot more women and girls playing.
On top of we have a lot of diversity in who creates games and the kinds of games they can create and still be commerically successful. Lots of interesting narratively focused games, puzzles games, platformers, and more artsy games. But if you want your multiplayer shooter battlefield and CS2 are still there for you.
The reason some of the most popular games are popular isn't because they are fun, it's because they've built an esports industry. Those popular games get spectators which in turn makes the games more popular.
As an aside..
I went down a mini-rabbit hole learning about the LAN Party House, read your website and about Sandstorm[0] and how that ended up with you at Cloudflare leading Workers. That’s a really cool and honestly inspirational path. Would love to learn more if you’ve written elsewhere…!
I was also impressed by his wife's Chez JJ work. I suspect that she has done much more impressive stuff, but that kind of thing is a dime a dozen, in SV. The hacker housing stuff speaks to her humanity, and I like humans.
"And wow is it nice not to have all the ads and crapware in our faces anymore."
I don't understand this - and I'm not being a Windows defender here, I use Linux when I can (and promote its use).
But my Windows 11 installation has zero ads and zero "crapware". And it's a Dell!
Everything that I didn't want on the machine was removed when I purchased it (two years ago). I see no ads. If I did, this can be fixed easily by even non-technical users with OOShutUp10 or similar - or just edited with a registry change.
I've been using Windows since 3.1 and there were some ugly years but that is not the current state-of-the-state. I'm just calling it like I see it at this point.
The real problem is with trust and encroachment. I think a lot of people that spend a fair amount of time on their computers start to feel like their OS is their home and they go on excursions through apps. Previously, ads were limited to apps you had to go to yourself. Ads showing up as wallpaper in your house would be unsettling, and it reveals that your homeownership was illusory from the start: you never really controlled anything.
Yes, you can use cleanup software to fix the symptoms, but that's not the real issue here.
Edit: further research revealed my original first point was a false assumption.
We must be using different Windows 11 then. Last I booted up Windows instead of shoving Cortana everywhere now it's shoving Copilot. The telemetry sent would make spyware jealous.
The "current" state does not matter. What matters is that MS can shittify your experience at any time. Your machine can stop working if you don't agree to MS "updates". On Linux you have the assurance that the state of your machine can be preserved and you know exactly what's being installed on it.
The UI is full of Bing and Copilot tie-ins that I consider to be essentially ads. Recommended content in the start menu. The weather widget that shows you news headlines. The lock-screen-of-the-day with the text description that if you accidentally click on it, you open some Bing page. The Edge default home page. Everything is trying to push me towards engaging with Microsoft's online services, which I have never used and have no desire to use. These are ads.
It's probably the case that I could turn all of these off by hunting down the right config options, and if I used Windows as my primary desktop I'm sure I would. But it's just on my game machines which I don't want to spend a lot of time maintaining, and new crap keeps popping up in updates. It's exhausting.
A Debian Linux desktop, in comparison, is not trying to push you to anything. It's a breath of fresh air (not a term I use often but really fits here).
Note: I never made it to Windows 11, only Windows 10. But my understanding is that these things are getting worse, not better. And while not exactly the same thing, there has been a lot of talk lately about how the file explorer has become so bloated and slow that they have to preload it into memory at startup so that it can respond quickly when you click it... omg, I do not want that.
I did a clean Windows 11 install a few months ago. I expected to be bombarded with ads and all of the other things I kept reading about in comments here, but it’s been fine.
I do find it interesting that so many of the comments about how bad Windows 11 is are coming from comments that also admit they aren’t using Windows 11. Not everything in Windows 11 is my favorite design choice, but the anti Windows 11 comments have taken on a life of their own that isn’t always based in reality.
I see not being able to install invasive kernel level anti-cheat as a positive. I uninstalled all Riot games before they rolled it out. I would’ve been pretty miffed if I had accidentally gotten their kernel modules simply because I wasn’t reading tech news before the auto update.
Yes, on Linux I was able to move the copy-on-write overlays to use local disks, which is one reason it performs much better (admittedly not a reason that would affect most people).
I am just using dm-snapshot for this -- block device level, no fancy filesystems.
Yep, I've been gaming exclusively on Ubuntu (mainly because I want my desktop to match my servers) for several years. If you aren't playing the latest AAA FPS, then everything pretty much works.
The only game I tried on Steam that didn't work was Slave Zero, a game from the 90s. Unfortunately, I still have to use Windows for VR games. It is too troublesome on Linux (at least for the Meta Quest 2).
league of legends is basically the only thing holding me back from switching to Linux for myself :/ really want to just swap over to linux fully. love your website + house!
Great excuse to start learning DOTA. You won't regret it (until a few thousand hours of gameplay later you realise how much of your life you wasted on it).
I'm sorry if you hear this a lot, but your house is so cool, and I must admit I am more than a little jealous.
I've also said it here before but I will just give up on PC gaming wholesale before I go back to Windows. It's crazy how much gaming on Linux has improved in just the past couple years.
Battlefield 4's anticheat runs fine on Linux, if you end up needing one. It definitely slakes my BF fix, in the same way Deadlock is filling the LoL-shaped hole in my contemptible subsistence.
Does this mean the GitHub repo linked with the scripts now include up to date linux versions? Last time I looked it was all windows specific, but I'd love to setup something similar with stations for (much lower power) versions.
Sorry, I haven't gotten around to updating it yet, although it basically works to follow the same instructions except replace Windows with Linux and skip all the workarounds for Windows-specific bugs.
> (I'm aware that Battlefield series and League of Legends won't work due to draconian anti-cheat -- but nobody in my group cares to play those I guess.)
As I've said elsewhere, Battlefield 6 has got a far better user experience on Linux than Windows and I would recommend it to anyone.
what stability and performance? yeah, i dont see bsds but bluetooth doesnt work and it doesnt wake up after sleep 85 percent of the time. kind of crap really
Bluetooth is admittedly less snappy than on Mac or Windows, although it absolutely does work. As for wake after sleep, I've not had a single issue in five years of daily driving Linux. No idea what you're talking about.
Your house sounds like a great place to hold a fighting game local tournament (or something like the old Smash Summit series for Smash Bros Melee and Ultimate before Beyond The Summit shut down)
I think its interesting that mainstream PC gaming press is now talking about Linux. We have the benchmark Youtube channels doing some benchmarks of it as well and plenty of reports of "it just works", which is pretty promising at least for the games that aren't intentionally excluded by DRM. For me its still controllers and equipment incompatibility due to my VR headset and sim wheel/pedals setup, I use Linux everywhere else in my router and home servers. I just hope that Nvidia notices that there does appear to be a swing happening and improves their driver situation.
I'd say there are two remaining roadblocks. First and biggest is kernel level anti-cheat frameworks as you point out. But there's also no open source HDMI 2.1 implementation allowed by the HDMI cartel so people like me with an AMD card max out at 4K60 even for open source games like Visual Pinball (unless you count an adapter with hacked firmware between the card and the display). NVidia and Intel get away with it because they implement the functionality in their closed source blobs.
Competent cheat makers don't have much difficulty in defeating in-kernel anticheats on Windows. With the amount of insight and control available on Linux anticheat makers stand little chance.
The best Valve could do is offer a special locked down kernel with perhaps some anticheat capabilities and lock down the hardware with attestation. If they offer the sources and do verified builds it might even be accepted by some.
Doubt it would be popular or even successful on non-Valve machines. But I'm not an online gamer and couldn't care less about anticheats.
You don't have to play these specific games though. I mean, what's your privacy, what's not being bombarded by ads in your OS worth to you? Have you taken an honest thought about this?
Isn't it a more fundamental problem? I can imagine a cheating setup where you have a separate PC with a HDMI capture stick ("analog hole") and access to the controllers.
First, let's ask ourselves how many PCs have users play games with anti-cheat frameworks. I'm absolutely no expert, but if it's more than, what? 10%? let's even say 20% - I'd be surprised.
> and unfortunately a good majority of the gaming industry by revenue relies on it.
Well, it used to be the case that game makers relied on copy protection in floppy discs, and movie distributors on DVD/BluRay copy protection. Conditions changed and they adapted.
I always wondered. Isn't exactly what eBPF would allow you to do?
Assuming that cheats work by reading (and modifying) the memory of the game process you can you can attach a kprobe to the sys_ptrace system call. Every time any process uses it, your eBPF program triggers. You can then capture the PID and UID of the requester and compare it against a whitelist (eg only the game engine can mess with the memory of that process). If the requester is unauthorized, the eBPF program can even override the return value to deny access before the kernel finishes the request.
Of course there are other attack vectors (like spoofing PID/process name), but eBPF covers them also.
All of this to say that Linux already has sane primitives to allow that, but that, as long as devs don't prioritize Linux, we won't see this happening.
I am wondering can game be shipped with their own "kernel" and "hypervisor", basically an entire VM. Yes performance will take a hit, but in my experience with my own VM, it's like 15-20%.
Another unresolved roadblock is Nvidia cards seriously underperforming in DX12 games under Proton compared to Windows. Implementing DX12 semantics on top of Vulkan runs into some nasty performance cliffs on their hardware, so Khronos is working on amending the Vulkan spec to smooth that over.
Clearly, when there will be enough Linux gamers another solution to the kernel-level anti-cheat issue will be found. After all, the most played competitive shooter is CS and Valve has does not use kernel-level AC.
The Quest 3 works offline with ALVR streaming over a private (non-Internet connected) WiFi network. Together with my 3090 I get 8k @ 120fps with 20ms latency over a WiFi6e dongle. I had to manually install the dkms for the dongle on PopOs, but apart from that it just works. ALVR starts SteamVR and then I use Steam to start the game. Proton seems to use Vulcan for rendering.
> I just hope that Nvidia notices that there does appear to be a swing happening and improves their driver situation.
I firmly believe that Nvidia doesn't want the general public to ever have better hardware than what is current as people could just run their own local models and take away from the ridiculous money they're making from data centers.
In step they're now renting their gaming GPUs to players with their GeForce now package.
The market share for Nvidia of gamers is a rounding error now against ai datacenter orders. I won't hold my breath about them revisiting their established drivers for Linux.
> I firmly believe that Nvidia doesn't want the general public to ever have better hardware than what is current as people could just run their own local models and take away from the ridiculous money they're making from data centers.
You're underestimating them. They don't even want rich professional users to own hardware that could compete with their datacenter cash cow.
Take RTX 6000 Pro, a $10k USD GPU. They say in their marketing materials that these have fifth-generation tensor cores. This is a lie, as you can't really use any 5th-gen specific features.
Take a look at their PTX docs[1]. The RTX 6000 Pro is sm_120 in that table, while their datacenter GPUs are sm_100/sm110. See the 'tcgen05' instructions in the table? It's called 'tcgen05' because it stands for "Tensor Core GEN 05". And they're all unsupported on sm_120.
I’ll keep repeating it: the more people vote with their wallet, the more game companies will deploy Linux - including the anticheat.
EAC has the support for Linux, you just have to enable it as a developer.
I know this, I worked on games that used this. EAC was used on Stadia (which was a debian box) for the division, because the server had to detect that EAC was actually running on the client.
I feel like I bring this up all the time here but people don’t believe me for some reason.
This does not mean it supports the full feature set as from EAC on Windows. As an analogy, it's like saying Microsoft Excel supports iPad. It's true, but without VBA support, there's not going to be many serious attempts to port more complicated spreadsheets to iPad.
Funnily enough the most annoying things on my system at the moment is RGB and keyboard/mouse customisation.
I haven’t found a tool that can access all the extra settings of my Logitech mouse, not my Logitech speakers.
OpenRGB is amazing but I’m stuck on a version that constantly crashes; this should be fixed in the recent versions but nixpkgs doesn’t seem to have it (last I checked).
On the other hand I did manage to get SteamVR somewhat working with ALVR on the Quest 3, but performance wasn’t great or consistent at all from what I remember (RTX 3070, Wayland KDE).
When that steam deck clone came out and games played better on SteamOS than on Windows on the exact same hardware, it woke a bunch of people up. Microsoft scrambled to bring the startup time and footprint down but shots had already been fired.
You don’t want a vendor you have to publically shame to get them to do the right thing. And that’s MS if any single sentence has ever described them without using curse words.
I've got the Legion Go S with Steam OS, and that shit is great. It's stable, my games run well, the OS is pretty much entirely in the background, but I can still access it fully if I need to. Love it.
I dont get the feeling they care. Microsoft is so lost under Satya at this point. Totally blinded by Azure and AI and stock price growth. At some point they're going to realize all the ground they've lost and it's going to be a real problem. They're repeating a lot of the same mistakes that cost them the browser and mobile market.
The irony is that gaming on linux got better but the instigator was not the OSS community. All of it was funded by closed source software competing with other close source software. The OSS community by itself did not have the conviction to climb over this bulwark.
This still has a "sometimes" on it, there are more then a few games that need magic proton flags to run well, nothing you can't go look up on protondb, but lots of games you would want to play with friends might have some nasty anti-cheat on it that just won't let you play it at all.
Gaming works fine with exception of things like BF6 that require kernel level anti cheat.
The one thing I haven’t been able to get working reliably is steam remote play with the Linux machine as host. Most games work fine, others will only capture black screens.
Proton has gotten so good now that I don't even bother checking compatibility before buying games.
Granted, I don't play online games, so that might change things, but for years I used to have to make a concession that "yeah Windows is better for games...", but in the last couple years that simply has not been true. Games seem to run better on Linux than Windows, and I don't have to deal with a bunch of Microsoft advertising bullshit.
Hell, even the Microsoft Xbox One controllers work perfectly fine with xpad and the SteamOS/tenfoot interface recognizes it as an Xbox pad immediately, and this is with the official Microsoft Xbox dongle.
At this point, the only valid excuses to stay on Windows, in my opinion, are online games and Microsoft Office. I don't use Office since I've been on Unixey things so long that I've more or less just gotten used to its options, but I've been wholly unable to convince my parents to change.
I love my parents, but sometimes I want to kick their ass, because they can be a bit stuck in their ways; I am the one who is expected to fix their computer every time Windows decides to brick their computer, and they act like it's weird for me to ask them to install Linux. If I'm the one who has to perform unpaid maintenance on this I don't think it's weird for me to try and get them to use an operating system that has diagnostic tools that actually work.
As far as I can tell, the diagnostic and repair tools in Windows have never worked for any human in history, and they certainly have never worked for me. I don't see why anyone puts up with it when macOS and Linux have had tools that actually work for a very long time.
(cue arrogance)
People on HackerNews complaining about Linux Desktop is pretty disappointing. You guys are supposed to be the real enthusiasts... you can make it work.
(cue superiority complex)
I've been using Linux Desktop for over 10 years. It's great for literally everything. Gaming admittedly is like 8/10 for compatibility, but I just use a VM with PCIe passthrough to pass in a gpu and to load up a game for windows or use CAD, etc. Seriously, ez.
Never had issues with NVIDIA GFX with any of the desktop cards. Laptops... sure they glitch out.
Originally Wine, then Proton, now Bazzite make it super easy to game natively.
The only issues I ever had with games were from the Kernel level anti-cheats bundled. The anti-cheats just weren't available for Linux, so the games didn't start. Anyone familiar with those knows its not a linux thing, it's a publisher/anti-cheat mechanism thing. Just lazy devs really.
(cue opinionated anti-corporate ideology)
I like to keep microsoft chained up in a VM where it belongs so can't do it's shady crap. Also with a VM you can do shared folders and clipboard. Super handy actually.
Weirdly enough, MacOS in a VM is a huge pita, and doesn't work well.
I have been working professionally on Linux for many years. But about once a year I have to reinstall the os because it craps out for various reasons. The same story goes for most of my team, but for some reason they seem ok with this. My issue with Linux is this: I don’t feel like a consumer, but a janitor. I don’t want this. Yes you can do whatever you want, but I don’t want to do those things. I want to write code and play games, not maintain the intricacies of a running computer.
For a server there is no better choice than Linux, but for my desktop/laptop, I find other alternatives better. Perhaps I haven’t found «the right distro», if so let me know, but until Linux is as low maintenance as windows or macos, it will be for those with an interest in doing that maintenance.
I realize I have a love-hate relationship with Linux. It is perfect, but flawed.
> I don’t feel like a consumer, but a janitor. I don’t want this.
I think it was Jorge Castro, the creator of Universal Blue, who called it the sysadmin culture. Most Linux distros are made by sysadmins for sysadmins, and you're expected to change and configure your system. I was a sysadmin myself for a long time. I used Slackware; switched from the 2.4 kernel to 2.6; tweaked CFLAGS on Gentoo; replaced SysV init with systemd; used PipeWire from the earliest versions - you name it, I did it.
Nowadays I use https://aeondesktop.github.io/ - an immutable system with Btrfs snapshots. Everything is installed from Flathub. The major roadblock is that much of the Linux world expects you to modify the system one way or another, so your mileage may vary. I replaced my printer because I did not wanted to install binary blobs from HP/Samsung.
> Perhaps I haven’t found «the right distro»
I’d look at immutable or image-based offerings, which aims at low or no maintenance: Aeon Desktop, Universal Blue, Endless OS. There are reviews on sites like LWN.net
I'm not trying to "challenge" your experience, it's your experience. But mine is completely different so I'll offer it for anyone who might be reading along...
I've been using Linux at work and at home every day for 15 years and I think in that whole time I've only ever had to reinstall the OS due to system issues once.
(I ran an Ubuntu system update on my laptop while on low battery, and it died. The APT database was irrevocably fucked afterwards. I'm not even sure it's fair to blame the OS for this, it was a dumb thing for me to do. I would also not be at all surprised if it's possible to fuck up a Windows installation in a similar manner).
Nowadays I run NixOS and yes that requires quite regular attention. But I've also used Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian extensively and all of them are just completely stable all the time.
(Only exception I can think of: Ubuntu used to have issues with /boot getting full which was a PITA).
I don't know what you are doing but I have my Arch Linux running since about 2013. I needed to intervene a few times, I think 4 times in total but the base installation in from 2013, now nearly 13 years ago.
You mention the "right distro" but you did not mention what have you tried or with what you had problems with.
From my experience, some examples: for gentoo you are much more than a janitor - you must be everything all the time; for redhat based - you can get a major headache with some version upgrades; for arch (currently using, same install from 7 years) - update monthly and I had very few and minor issues
I tried running various Linux distros on my desktop some years ago and definitely agree on the crap-out experience and having to reinstall. Eventually settled on macOS and it's been okay.
The game changer for me has been Nix. It works on macOS. I have had coworkers use it on Ubuntu. I am soon planning to switch to NixOS.
People complain about the syntax but honestly AI gets you around that. You will still do janitorial work, but you mostly only need to do it once.
I've been using Fedora and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on my laptop and desktop respectively. Both are going around a year, and I haven't had major issues with them.
What? I have been using Linux daily for almost 20 years. I have typically only installed the OS fresh once each time. I've been using Fedora as my daily driver for well over a decade. I can't remember having to re-install a distro unless I was switching distros. My current system was installed in 2019, Fedora 30. Over a dozen painless upgrades, the last several of which have had Steam flatpak installed with no breakages.
Fully open source drivers using AMD video cards. It just works (minus the early x11/wayland debacle, I had to switch back to x11 for a while).
Perfect analogy. I'm using Debian for a few months now on my main laptop, and everything is flawed. Seriously, everything.
- Hybrid graphics simply doesn't work. The exception is when it works. Don't even try Wayland with it.
- Graphics card handling is still full with race conditions. It's random when everything works as intended without manual intervention.
- Switching monitors is pain. Sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. Waking up my laptop with a new monitor plugged in is a gamble.
- Energy efficiency was bad with hybrid graphics, but since I had to turn it off, I don't even try to optimize it since.
- It was a pain to make my laptop speakers work. A lot of searching, and applying random fixes until one worked (in reality two fixes together).
- My main bluetooth headset has a feature to mute itself, or stop the music when it's not on my head. Guess which is the only device which I have that have a problem with this? The funny thing is, that it's a random even again. The sound comes back about 10% of the time fully. In another 10% of the time, the sound from some apps comes back, in others doesn't. In the other 80%, I had to reconnect it.
- Don't even talk about printers. It's a gamble, again. Some printers worked at some point in time, some simply don't work, and never will, because nobody cares about them anymore enough.
- Game performance is simply worse than on Windows. First of all, it wasn't trivial to force some games to use my GPU when I had hybrid graphics. The internet is full with outdated information. But even after that, my FPS is consistently worse. I heard some others who have the opposite experience. But this tells me again, that the whole thing is a gamble. Probably it's also a gamble on the game.
- When I press the power off button to put it to sleep, or initiate a normal shutdown, I need to force shutdown the whole laptop. Sometimes I get a notification that text editor is preventing shutdown, and whether I want to force quit it, but it doesn't matter which I clicked, and the "it will be force quit in 60 seconds if I don't select something" is a lie, the whole X framework is killed after a few seconds, and the laptop remains powered on, with the lie "the computer will be shutdown now" in terminal. This happens even when I don't get notification about that something would prevent power off. The shutdown initiation from the OS menu is working, and closing the lid put it to sleep.
And this is my current laptop. I simply couldn't use my previous one with Linux, because some stupid problem with the video card, which I couldn't solve in months. Even installation was a challenge.
I've used Linux in the past 25 years from time to time. It's getting better, but still a long way. You need some janitorial work also with Windows, especially nowadays, but it's still way better experience to click on "leave me alone" once a month, than this constant tinkering, and daily annoyance. I want to build things, not fix things which should just work.
That said, tech folk routinely underestimate how much they rely on their own technical skill. Try using Linux for a week without ever opening a terminal. Terminal is a "f this I'm going back to Windows" button for most people.
I've observed that most "enthusiasts" are really just brand ambassadors. They've been captured by some proprietary software that doesn't run on Linux, and that's the problem of Linux. The day their set of products runs perfectly on Linux is the day Linux will be ready for them.
I think that if affinity chooses to make it work well on linux that would be a game changer for a lot of people. daVinci resolve works on linux for video so having a proper photo editor/illustrator tool that is not gimp would open up the option for most people to daily drive it. that's really the missing piece.
I mean, yes. That's how people work: They don't care about the OS for itself, the OS is a means to run the software they want to run, and it'll be ready when it runs that software.
(I'm typing this on my Linux desktop right now... but also have a separate Windows PC for running the games I want to run that don't work on Linux yet. When they work, I'll be thrilled to put Linux on that machine or its successor.)
I agree, this is why I also consider Windows barely working, I had to install 7 then 8 then 10 then 11 what's next? It should just turn on and work stop changing it around and making me install different random crap to get it working.
>but I just use a VM with PCIe passthrough to pass in a gpu and to load up a game for windows
Many games refuse to run in VM, even if that VM is windows one. I bet there is a trick to bypass, but then you are at risk of being banned or can't receive support when needed.
That isn't weird. It's by design. MacOS is only designed to run on Apple hardware, and a VM, even if the host is Apple hardware isn't really Apple hardware.
(cue nitpicking) Can Okular sign a damn pdf with a pfx certificate yet or do I still need a PhD to set that up? MS office has an online version now but it is arguably very ass and Libreoffice is not even worth a mention, using it feels like time travelling twenty years back.
Linux would be the desktop of choice years ago if anything from Adobe or Office actually worked on it, the two things that make the world go round. Valve has done their part to develop Proton, but there is no equal push for things people can't do work without.
Steve Burke from GamersNexus tested eight games from their benchmark suite on Linux last month. Although his conclusion was generally positive, there were problems with nearly every game:
- F1 2024 didn't load due to anti-cheat
- Dragon's Dogma 2 and Resident Evil 4 had non-functional raytracing
- Cyberpunk 2077 with raytracing on consistently crashes when reloading a save game
- Dying Light 2 occasionally freezes for a whole minute
- Starfield takes 25 minutes to compile shaders on first run, and framerates for Nvidia are halved compared to Windows
- Black Myth: Wukong judders badly on Nvidia cards
- Baldur's Gate 3 Linux build is a slideshow on Nvidia cards, and the Windows build fails for some AMD cards
If you research these games in discussion forums, you can find some configuration tweaks which might fix the issues. ProtonDB's rating is not a perfect indicator (BM:W is rated "platinum").
And while Steve says measurements from Linux and Windows are not directly comparable, I did so anyway and saw that Linux suffers a 10-30% drop in average FPS across the board when compared to Windows, depending on the game and video card.
AFAIK this comes down a lot to NVIDIA not doing enough efforts for the Linux drivers. There is a pretty well documented and understood reason for the perf hit NVIDIA GPUs get on Linux.
Honestly, considering where we came from, a 10-30% perf drop is good and is a reasonable tradeoff to consider. Especially for all the people that don't want to touch Windows 11 with a 11-foot pole (which I am), it's a more than decent path. I can reboot into my unsupported Win10 install if I really need the frames.
Really, Linux benchmarks need to be split between AMD and NVIDIA. Both are useful, as the "just buy an amd card lol" crowd is ignoring the actually large NVIDIA install base, and it's not like I'm gonna swap out my RTX 3090 to go Linux.
Thanks for the comparison! Would you have an apples to apples, or rather an NVIDIA to NVIDIA comparison instead of "across the board"? I'd suspect the numbers are worse for the pure NVIDIA comparison, for what I mentioned above.
> Baldur's Gate 3 Linux build is a slideshow on Nvidia cards
I played Baldur's Gate 3 on Linux on a GeForce GTX 1060 (which is almost 10 years old!) without a fan (I found later that it was broken) and I generally did not have issues (couple of times in the whole game slowed for couple of seconds, but nothing major).
The key word was Linux build. There's now an official Linux version so that BG3 runs better on Steam Deck. Everyone else should keep using Proton to run it like they've done this far.
Which applies to all the games, basically. I nowadays make sure to select Proton before even running the game for the first time, in case it has a Linux build -- that will invariably be the buggier experience so want to avoid it.
Thats the whole problem. No consistency. Some configurations work, others not - eventhough they should be way more capable.
That's not even limited to linux or gaming. A few weeks ago i tried to apply the latest Windows update to my 2018 lenovo thinkpad. It complained about insufficient space (had 20GB free). I then used a usb as swap (required by windows) and tried to install the update. Gave up after 1 hour without progress...
Hardware+OS really seems unfixable in some cases. I'm 100% getting a macbook next time. At least with Apple I can schedule a support appointment.
> Baldur's Gate 3 Linux build is a slideshow on Nvidia cards
Not at all my experience which makes me question the rest. Also https://www.protondb.com/app/1086940 most people seem quite happy with it so it's not a "me" problem.
Finally the "10-30% drop in average FPS across the board" might be correct, then so what? I understand a LOT of gamers want to have "the best" performance for what they paid good money for but pretty much NO game becomes less fun with even a 30% FPS drop, you just adjust the settings and go play. I think a lot of gamers do get confused and consider maximizing performances itself as a game. It might be fun, and that's 100% OK, but it's also NOT what playing an actual game is about.
> pretty much NO game becomes less fun with even a 30% FPS drop
I mostly play fighting games. A 7% drop in FPS is more than enough to break the whole game experience as combo rely on frame data. For example Street Fighter 6 is locked at 60 fps. A low punch needs 4 frames to launch and leaves a 4-frames window to land another hit.
If there was a 7% drop in FPS, you would miss your combo. Even the tiniest drop in FPS makes the game unplayable.
It's the same for almost every fighting games. I know it's a niche genre, but I'm quite sure it's the same for other genres. It's a complete dealbreaker for competitive play.
Those are mostly reports for the Windows build of Baldur's Gate 3, running through Proton/Wine. He's talking about the newer Linux native build of the game from 3 months ago.
I've been using Linux on all PC's for a long time.
Experience is slowly getting better. There is nothing I haven't been able to get to work, but with tricks or adjustments.
I think the "best bonus" is using LLM's in deep research mode to wade through all the blog post, reddit posts etc to get something to work by discovering forementioned tricks. Before, you had to do that by yourself and it sucked. Now I get 3 good ideas from Claude in "ranking order" of how likely it is to make it work => 99% of games I get to run in 5 minutes with a shell command or two. Lutris is also pretty good.
Omarchy on my laptop has finally made computers fun for me again, it's so great and nostalgic. Happy to be back after my brief work-mandated adventure into MacOS.
I'm tired of people saying Steam on Linux just works. It doesn't.
Tried running Worms: instant crash, no error message.
Tried running Among Us: instant crash, had to add cryptic arguments to the command line to get it to run.
Tried running Parkitect: crashes after 5 minutes.
These three games are extremely simple, graphically speaking. They don't use any complicated anti-cheat measure. This shouldn't be complicated, yet it is.
Oh and I'm using Arch (BTW), the exact distro SteamOS is based on.
And of course, as always, those for which it works will tell you you're doing-it-wrong™ .
These games are all rated gold or platinum on protondb, indicating that they work perfectly for most people.
Hard to say what might be going wrong for you without more details. I would guess there's something wrong with your video driver. Maybe you have an nvidia card and the OS has installed the nouveau drivers by default? Installing the nvidia first-party drivers (downloaded from the nvidia web site) will fix a lot of things. This is indeed a sore spot for Linux gaming, though to be fair graphics driver problems are not exactly unheard of on Windows either.
Personally I have a bunch of machines dedicated to gaming in my house (https://lanparty.house) which have proven to be much more stable running Linux than they were with Windows. I think this is because the particular NIC in these machines just has terrible Windows drivers, but decent Linux drivers (and I am netbooting, so network driver stability is pretty critical to the whole system).
> Installing the nvidia first-party drivers (downloaded from the nvidia web site) will fix a lot of things
Interesting. I saw somewhere else you're using Debian. Is it as opposed from Nouveau or the proprietary drivers from the Debian repos?
I'm currently testing to daily drive my desktop with linux on an NVIDIA GPU, and the Arch wiki explicitly recommends drivers from their repos. However, arch is rolling and the repo drivers are supposedly much more up to date than Debian's ones. Though, I'll keep your comment if I run into anything.
> Installing the nvidia first-party drivers (downloaded from the nvidia web site) will fix a lot of things.
Crazy—it used to be that nvidia drivers were by far the least stable parts of an install, and nouveau was a giant leap forward. Good to know their software reputation has improved somewhat
I imagine the people saying “it just works” are saying it because it does, at least for them.
SteamOS is based on Arch, but customized and aimed at specific hardware configurations. It’d be interesting to know what hardware you’re using and if any of your components are not well supported.
FWIW, I’ve used Steam on Linux (mostly PopOS until this year, then Bazzite) for years and years without many problems. ISTR having to do something to make Quake III work a few years ago, but it ran fine after and I’ve recently reinstalled it and didn’t have to fuss with anything.
Granted, I don’t run a huge variety of games, but I’ve finished several or played for many hours without crashes, etc.
I use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, and I've never had trouble running a game that's rated gold or above. I've even gotten an Easy AntiCheat game to work correctly.
I've been gaming on linux exclusively for about 8 years now and have had very few issues running windows games. Sometimes the windows version, run through proton, runs better than the native port. I don't tend to be playing AAA games right after launch day, though. So it could be taste is affecting my experience.
I just bought another second Dell workstation (admit I hated those) and can’t wait to install SteamOS when it is released to the public. I don’t care about AAA gaming but the integrated card should be able to handle most of the games from ten years ago.
As an Arch (btw) user myself, yes, you're doing something wrong.
Arch won't hold your hands to ensure everything required is installed, because many dependencies are either optional (you have to read the pacman logs) or just hidden (because it's in the game itself). Valve actually does a great job providing a "works everywhere" runtime as their games are distributed in a flatpak-like fashion, but things can seep through the cracks.
The compositor can have an effect. The desktop settings. The GPU drivers. What's installed as far as e.g. fonts go. RAM setup, with or without swap.
As for steamOS, the real difference, is that despite being Arch-based, you're not installing Arch, but steamOS. A pre-packaged pre-configured Arch linux, with a set of opinionated software and its set of pre-made config files, for a small set of (1) devices. It's not really Arch you're installing, but a full-blow distro that happens to be arch-based.
That said, I understand your frustration as I've hit this many times on a laptop with dual graphics. Getting PRIME to run with the very first drivers that supported it was fun. Oh and I'm likely to hit the same walls as you since I just switched my gaming rig to Arch. GLHF!
> And of course, as always, those for which it works will tell you you're doing-it-wrong™ .
This sounds like you are rejecting help because you have made up your mind in frustration already.
Because you are doing it wrong. If you want an OS that just works, you should use Ubuntu or Fedora. Why is SteamOS based on Arch then? Because Valve wants to tweak things in it and tinker with it themselves to get it how they like.
You don't.
So use an OS that requires less from you and that tries to just work out of the box, not one that is notorious for being something you break and tinker with constantly (Arch).
I've been using Arch for 15 years, it's not like I'm suddenly discovering the concept of the distro.
But when something crashes with no error message whatsoever, it makes it a tiny bit harder to troubleshoot.
Especially when so many people answer, just like I had predicted, "works on my machine". Which would only be a gotcha if I had implied it worked on no machine whatsoever. Which I didn't.
I'll tinker some more and I'll be sure to post my findings if I get these games to work.
I am using Arch and all the games I played on Steam (at least 20, not the ones mentioned above) worked perfectly.
One thing that I do though is get most games at least one year after release, when probably many issues are fixed. I had tons of issues many years ago, with buggy games bought immediately after release (on Windows back then), so now I changed strategy...
I don't have your other games, but I do have a few Worms games and they worked out of the box for me with GE Proton on NixOS.
I'm not saying "you're doing it wrong", because obviously if you're having trouble then that is, if nothing else, bad UX design, but I actually am kind of curious as to what you're doing different than me. I have an extremely vanilla NixOS setup that boots into GameScope + Tenfoot and I drive everything with a gamepad and it works about as easily as a console does for me.
If anything this is the challenge with PC as a platform being so varied, any random software/hardware/config variation could bring a whole load of quirks.
That probably includes anything that isn't a PC in a time-capsule from when the game originally released, so any OS/driver changes since then, and I don't think we've reached the point where we can emulate specific hardware models to plug into a VM. One of the reasons the geforce/radeon drivers (eg, the geforce "game ready" branding) are so big is that they carry a whole catalogue of quirk workarounds for when the game renderer is coded badly or to make it a better fit to hardware and lets them advertise +15% performance in a new version. Part of the work for wine/proton/dxvk is going to be replicating that instead of a blunt translation strictly to the standards.
Arch is nice if you want to tinker. Based on your reasoning, I wouldn't recommend it.
But if you still want arch-based, I would recommend EndevourOS, and for even a simpler/better distro, Bazzite.
You are definitely doing it wrong, I rarely have issues and when I do I just switch comparability tools. I play multiple indie games, marvel rivals, I played lots of among us on my machine in 2020. Running Pop OS
Well, but many games just work. Actually, I try starting the games without any tweaks before heading over to protondb.com, and often they run just fine.
But it is also true that many games still require minor tweaks. For example, just last week, I found out that I had to enable hardware acceleration for the webview within Steam, just to be able to log in to Halo Infinite. It was just clicking a checkbox, but otherwise, the game would not have been playable.
But I am always surprised when you find out you have those kinds of issues with Windows as well.
Yeah, the same. I sometimes google "wine WoW issues" and every time there are recent threads, so I don't even try. Linux has the long way to become gamer platform.
The games don't fail to run because they are so "graphically powerful" they fail to run because you chose to set up your system without the necessary runtime.
There are people who make stripped-down versions of windows. Is it fair to say that because these releases exist that windows isn't "just works" either?
I switched my desktop from macOS (10+ years) to Ubuntu 25 last year and I'm not going back. The latest release includes a Gnome update which fixed some remaining annoyances with high res monitors.
I'd say it pretty much "just works" except less popular apps are a bit more work to install. On occasion you have to compile apps from source, but it's usually relatively straightforward and on the upside you get the latest version :)
For anyone who is a developer professionally I'd say the pros outweigh the cons at this point for your work machine.
> The latest release includes a Gnome update which fixed some remaining annoyances with high res monitors.
Interesting, I've had to switch off from Gnome after the new release changed the choices for HiDPI fractional scaling. Now, for my display, they only support "perfect vision" and "legally blind" scaling options.
By default Gnome doesn’t let you choose any fractional scaling in the UI because it has some remaining TODOs on that front. So from the UI you choose 100% or 200%. But the code is there and it works if you just open a terminal and type a command to enable this “experimental” feature.
Now whether or not this feature should have remained experimental is a different debate. I personally find that similar to the fact that Gmail has labeled itself beta for many years.
I switched in 1999. I've never really had any problems in all that time.
Although it was to BSDi then, and then FreeBSD and then OpenBSD for 5 years or so. I can't remember why I switched to Debian but I've been there ever since.
But what about laptops? I don’t use desktop machines anymore (last time was in 2012). Apple laptops are top notch. I use ubuntu as vm (headless) for software development tho
My HP ZBooks have been a dream. My current Studio G10 with an i9-13900 and 4070M has largely Just Worked™ with recent versions of both Fedora and Ubuntu.
HP releases firmware updates on LVFS for both the ZBook and its companion Thunderbolt 4 dock(!). They also got it Ubuntu certified, like most of their business laptops.
Best you can do is build a high end desktop at home and access it remotely with any laptop you desire. The laptop performance then becomes mostly irrelevant (even the OS is less relevant) and by using modern game streaming protocols you can actually get great image quality, low latency and 60+ fps. Though, optimizing it for low bandwidth is still a chore.
Have that desktop be reachable with SSH for all your CLI and sys admin needs, use sunshine/moonlight for the remote streaming and tailscale for securing and making sunshine globally available.
I don't have an x86 laptop at the moment so sticking with Macbook for now. My assumption is Mac laptops still are far superior given M-series chips and OS that are tuned for battery efficiency. Would love to find out this is no longer the case.
I did some investigation into this the other day. The short answer seems to be that if you like MacBooks, you aren't willing to accept a downgrade along any axis, and you really want to use Linux, your best bet today is an M2 machine. But you'll still be sacrificing a few hours of battery life, Touch ID support (likely unfixable), and a handful of hardware support edge cases. Apple made M3s and M4s harder to support, so Linux is still playing catch-up on getting those usable.
Beyond that, Lunar Lake chips are evidently really really good. The Dell XPS line in particular shows a lot of promise for becoming a strict upgrade or sidegrade to the M2 line within a few years, assuming the haptic touchpad works as well as claimed. In the meantime, I'm sure the XPS is still great if you can live with some compromises, and it even has official Linux support.
Not working with Linux is a function of Apple, not Linux. There is a crew who have wasted the last half decade trying to make Asahi Linux, a distro to run on ARM macbooks. The result is after all that time, getting an almost reasonably working OS on old hardware, Apple released the M4 and crippled the whole effort. There's been a lot of drama around the core team who have tried to cast blame, but it's clear they are frustrated by the fact that the OEM would rather Asahi didn't exist.
I can't personally consider a laptop which can't run linux "top notch." But I gave up on macbooks around 10 years ago. You can call me biased.
Again, I've had two 4k monitors on Linux for about ten years, and it has worked well the whole time. Back then I used "gnome tweak" to increase the size of widgets etc. Nowadays its built into mate, cinnamon, etc.
Did you start using Linux on the Mac hardware or on PC hardware? I have a late era Intel Macbook and was considering switching it to Ubuntu or Debian since it is getting kinda slow.
Not the OP, but I have a 2015 Macbook Pro and a desktop PC both running Linux. I love Fedora, so that's on the desktop, but I followed online recommendations to put Mint on the Macbook and it seems to run very well. However, I did need to install mbpfan (https://github.com/linux-on-mac/mbpfan) to get more sane power options and this package (https://github.com/patjak/facetimehd) to get the camera working. It runs better than Mac OS, but you'll need to really tweak some power settings to get it to the efficiency of the older Mac versions.
I switched to a new x86 machine. Running Linux on Mac just made things unnecessarily complicated and hurt performance. Im still open to using docker on Mac to run Linux containers but once you want a GUI life was simpler when I switched off.
This may be an unpopular opinion but I feel Bazzite (and immutable distros in general) is the future for the normal users. Yes I know, they take the freedom of messing with the system core but for most people this is fine. All they need is a device that works without any problems.
First time I switched to asus kernel from the generic one was magic - I know asus-linux exists and following the instructions probably would have ended up in a working system, but with bazzite I wrote only one command and everything worked. It still feels weird not to monkey around with package installations (and this was a dangerous path, usually ended up with more work for me) but this is a tradeoff I can live with. The software I used - luckily - already moved to Flatpak so everything was a breeze. Also the fact that I can switch to a working state with one keypress is a stress reliever.
I agree. Linux is good now - for the common user. I still can't see immutable distros can be used for all scenarios but for gaming/home use, this is a methodology I can easily recommend for my friends and family who only want a computer that works without messing with console.
I'm not against Wayland, but I think Wayland is currently not good for the Linux ecosystem. I've had lots of friends try Linux, and they've had issues with Discord global keyboard shortcuts not working, and window positions not restoring at application start, and lots of other small issues, which add up in the end. But once they switched to X11, they've all been very happy.
Yup. I fully understand that X11 is a shitshow under the hood, but it works and Wayland frequently does not work. Screen recording, window positions, various multi-monitor and calibration issues, ...
On my laptop I use to write blog posts, that never ever gets plugged into a second screen? Sure, Wayland's great. On a computer that I expect normal people to be able to use without dumb problems? Hell no!
Comparing X11 and Wayland isn’t even correct because for a functional desktop you need Xwayland anyway. X11 never went away, we piled more code on top and now we have an eternal transitionary period and two ways of doing things.
I think Wayland is good for more technical users. Going from i3 to sway or bspwm to river feels like essentially nothing has changed. On the other hand, Gnome X11 to Wayland might be a bigger shock.
Unfortunately, Wayland inherently can't be like Pipewire, which instantly solved basically 90% of audio issues on Linux through its compatibility with Pulseaudio, while having (in my experience) zero drawbacks. If someone could make the equivalent of Pipewire for X11, that'd be nice. Probably far-fetched though.
It can absolutely be like that. Global keyboard shortcuts not working is a deliberate design choice in Wayland (as is non-foreground apps not having access to the clipboard).
"window positions not restoring at application start"
Well you see, you are actually just silly for wanting this or asking for this, because it's actually just a security flaw...or something. I will not elaborate further.
--geometry is an exploit that will end in your financial ruin. Spend your weekend figuring out which tiling manager and dbus commands will come close to approximating a replacement before giving up and realizing you can manually move windows for the rest of your life. Two plus two is five.
Curious: do enterprises using Windows suffer through all the system-level ads and nagware? Or do they get a version that lets their employees actually focus on work instead of learning the many reasons they should consider switching back to Edge?
It’s all turned on by default even in Windows 11 Enterprise. You can turn everything off via AD Group Policy or your MDM but you have to go through the labyrinth of Windows policies and find them all. Thankfully you only have to do it once and then push it to all of your devices.
No nagware but, at least on the machines of my colleagues, an even worse enemy: Microsoft Defender with all the checkboxes ticked. Grinds the machine to an absolute halt for any development work - sometimes the responsible security department has mercy and gives exceptions for certain folders/processes, sometimes not.
You _can_ curate the Enterprise edition a lot more with group policy/intune and remove all that stuff but my experience has been most corporate IT departments don’t care/don’t know how to do it, and MS will just randomly enable new things without asking the same as home editions and you have to keep an eye on it and go to disable them.
Been working and playing on Linux for years, from 2D indie e.g. Baba is You to AAA e.g. Elden Ring, BG3, Expedition 33 to AAA VR e.g. Half-life: Alyx to VR indie e.g. Cubism and my experience has just been great.
It's MY system and I do whatever the heck I want, from play boring stuff to weird prototyping. I get no, like literally 0, anti-feature. I'm not "scared" that an update will limit my agency. I'm just zen and that is priceless.
Also, quite importantly, it works wonderfully with all my other devices and peripherals. I go from Bluetooh headsets easily, I switch monitors, video projectors, XR devices, CV camera inputs, I share files with KDE Connect, I receive SMS notification from my (deGoogled) Android phone, I reply from my desktop, I get notification when my SteamDeck is soon out of battery, etc. ALL my devices play nicely with each other.
So yes, Linux is good now. It's been for a while but it's been even better for the last few years.
Switched in, ooh i dunno, '98 or '99. Quality is about where it was then relatively speaking. Sure things have improved, mainly just systemd, and we got ACPI and later power management stuff for laptops.
Prior to that windows was better on laptops due to having the proprietary drivers or working ACPI. But it was pretty poor quality in terms of reliability, and the main problem of the included software being incredibly bare bones, combined with the experience of finding and installing software was so awful (especially if you've not got an unlimited credit card to pay for "big professional solutions").
Every time the year of the Linux desktop arrives, I'm baffled, since not much has changed on this end.
This is a strange statement for me, because I'd say that since '99 almost everything has changed. Maybe your definition of quality is a bit different than mine.
I tried to use Linux back in high school. I had a Pentium 4 computer which was pretty fast for its time. However, I had a dialip windows soft modem. You remember the driver situation. I had to boot to Windows to check my email.
Also, I was basically a child and had no idea what I was doing (I still don't but that's besides the point). Things have definitely gotten better.
I'm sorry, but no. I ran Slackware 96, Red Hat 4.2, Mandrake 5.0, a bunch of Ubuntus from 12.04 onward, and Fedora now. It is absolutely, qualitatively different now than it was at the turn of the century.
In the Red Hat 4.2 days, it was something that I was able to use because I was a giant nerd, but I'd never ever ever have recommended it to a normal person. By Ubuntu 12.04, 15 years later, it was good enough that I'd recommend it to someone who didn't do any gaming and didn't need to use any of the desktop apps that were still then semi-common. In 2026, it's fine for just about anyone unless you are playing particular (albeit very popular) games.
I made the move about a month ago to bazzite on my desktop with an nvidia graphics card. I still have my windows drive for when I need it but that's pretty rare. Bazzite isn't perfect but we've reached the point where the rough edges are less painful than the self sabotage microsoft has been inflicting on their users in recent versions of windows.
I tried bazzite but ended up on cachyos. The whole layered / immutable thing got a bit annoying. I'd rather just run snapshots and manage my packages more traditionally
I think we've reached a point where Windows is about as rough as Linux. But the problem is still that people are familiar with Windows and have learned how to deal with the roughness; not so on Linux. And so long as Windows owns the business and education sectors, it will always have the benefit of that familiarity.
Long time Linux on the desktop
user here. I don't feel Linux has become significantly better recently. It's more that Windows reached a new low that is just below the threshold for many. Also, Apple, what are you doing?
A large part of it is that for most people, the vast majority of their computer use is in a web browser. Even "standalone" programs are often just an Electron app so they don't even have to use their computer differently than they are used to. Yes Windows has gotten bad, and Linux no longer has some of the major issues people would frequently run into (e.g. hardware compability is largely a non-issue, audio just works, etc.), but I think it is mostly that things are just way more platform agnostic today.
I'd say it's both... In particular 6.16 seems to be a defining point in terms of stability and performance at least for me. My RX 9070XT is finally running with no issues since 6.16 that I've noticed in any of the admittedly few games I play.
Mesa, the kernel drivers and Proton have all seen a lot of growth this past year combined with a bunch of garbage decisions MS has doubled down on... not to mention, enough Linux users in tech combined with Valve/Steam's efforts have made it visible enough that even normies are considering giving Linux a try.
Recently switched to Linux Mint from Windows and it has not only been good. It has been cathartic. I enjoy computers again! I am self-hosting some services, what an absolute joy.
For me like for many others anti-cheat support is what is still keeping me away. The vast majority of the games I play are incompatible because of this.
I think it will probably change at some point, but until then I just can't use it.
Linux desktop is amazing. Coming from Debian, I installed Windows and had to quickly purge it from my hardware! Super bloated, slow, constantly phoned some CC center, automatically connected to OneDrive, …
Debian is a breath of fresh air in comparison. Totally quiet and snappy.
Debian (stable) is great but I wouldn't use it for a gaming PC on modern hardware. The drivers included are just too old. Bazzite or Arch (DIY option) seem better options.
I don't game, but all my computers run Debian Stable, and my oldest child wastes considerable time gaming on Steam. I had to tweak one or two things for him early on, but it all seems to work fine.
People who don't use Debian misunderstand Stable. It's released every two years, and a subset of the software is kept up to date in Backports. For anything not included in Backports, its trivial to run Debian Testing or Unstable in a chroot on your Stable machine.
I moved to Debian Stable ~20 years ago because constant updates in other distros always screwed up CUPS printing (among other things). Curiously, I was using Ubuntu earlier this year and the same thing happened. Never going back.
Debian Stable gamer here, with modern hardware, having a great time.
> The drivers included are just too old.
This can usually be fixed by enabling Debian Backports. In some cases, it doesn't even need fixing, because userland drivers like Mesa can be included in the runtimes provided by Steam, Flatpak, etc.
Once set up, Debian is a very low-maintenance system that respects my time, and I love it for that.
No, it really isn't. I use Ubuntu daily and not a month passes without a serious issue that no normal user would be able to solve. Last week my desktop completely froze again (as it often does) and Linux broke a mounted NTFS partition when I shut off the power.
HDR still doesn't really work on Linux w/ nVidia GPUs.
1. 10bpp color depth is not supported on RGB monitors, which are the majority of LCD displays on the market. Concretely, ARGB2101010 and XRGB2101010 modes are not supported by current nVidia Linux drivers - the drivers only offer ABGR2101010 and XBGR2101010 (See: https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/blob/main/...).
2. Common browsers like Chrome and Firefox has no real support for HDR video playback on nVidia Linux drivers. The "HDR" option appears on YouTube, but no HDR color can be displayed with an nVidia GPU.
Also, video backgrounds in Google Meet on Chrome are broken with nVidia GPUs and Wayland. Ironically it works on Firefox. This has been broken for a few years and no fix is in sight.
The "HDR" toggle you get on Plasma or Mutter is hiding a ton of problems behind the scenes. If you only have 8bpp, even if you can find an app that somehow displays HDR colors on nVidia/Wayland - you'll see artifacts on color gradients.
I have Interstellar on 4K UltraHD Blu-ray that features HDR on the cover, Sony 4K Blu-ray player (UBP-X700) and a LG G4 OLED television. I also have an AVR (Denon AVR-S760H 7.2 Ch) connecting both the Blu-ray and a PC running Linux with a RTX 3060 12GB graphic card to the television. I've been meaning to compare HDR on Linux with the Blu-ray. I guess now better than never. I'll reply back to my post after I am done.
Try it with different monitors you have. The current nVidia Linux drivers only has BGR output for 10bpp, which works on TVs and OLEDs but not most LCDs monitors.
My monitors (InnoCN 27M2V and Cooler Master GP27U) require RGB input, which means it's limited to 8bpp even with HDR enabled on Wayland. There's another commentator below who uses a Dell monitor and manages to get BGR input working and full HDR in nVidia/Linux.
Television HDR mode is set to FILMMAKER,
OLED brightness 100%,
Energy Saving Mode is off.
Connected to AVR with HDMI cable that says 8K.
PC has Manjaro Linux with RTX 3060 12GB
Graphic card driver: Nvidia 580.119.02
KDE Plasma Version 6.5.4
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.21.0
Qt Version: 6.10.1
Kernel Version 6.12.63-1-MANJARO
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Display Configuration
High Dynamic Range: Enable HDR is checked
There is a button for brightness calibration that I used for adjustment.
Color accuracy: Prefer color accuracy
sRGB color intensity: This seems to do nothing (even after apply). I've set it to 0%.
Brightness: 100%
TV is reporting HDR signal.
AVR is reporting...
Resolution: 4KA VRR
HDR: HDR10
Color Space RGB /BT.2020
Pixel Depth: 10bits
FRL Rate 24Gbps
I compared Interstellar 19s into Youtube video in three different ways on Linux and 2:07:26 on Blu-ray.
For Firefox 146.0.1 by default there is no HDR option on Youtube. 4K video clearly doesn't have HDR. I enabled HDR in firefox by going to about:config and setting the following to true: gfx.wayland.hdr, gfx.wayland.hdr.force-enabled, gfx.webrender.compositor.force-enabled.
Color look completely washed out.
For Chromium 143.0.7499.169 HDR enabled by default. This looks like HDR.
I downloaded the HDR video from Youtube and played it using MPV v0.40.0-dirty with settings --vo=gpu-next --gpu-api=vulkan --gpu-context=waylandvk. Without these settings the video seems a little too bright like the Chromium playback. This was the best playback of the three on Linux.
On the Blu-ray the HDR is Dolby Vision according to both the TV and the AVR. The AVR is reporting...
Resolution: 4k24
HDR: Dolby Vision
Color Space: RGB
Pixel Depth 8bits
FRL Rate: no info
...I looked into this and apparently Dolby Vision uses RGB tunneling for its high-bit-depth (12-bit) YCbCr 4:2:2 data.
The Blu-ray looks like it has the same brightness range but the color of the explosion (2:07:26) seems richer compared to the best playback on Linux (19s).
I would say the colors over all look better on the Blu-ray.
I might be able to calibrate it better if the sRGB color setting worked in the display configuration. Also I think my brightness setting is too high compared to the Blu-ray. I'll play around with it more once the sRGB color setting is fixed.
*Edit: Sorry Hacker News has completely changed the format of my text.
I don't think this is true. I can go into my display settings in kde plasma and enable HDR and configure the brightness. I have a nvidia blackwell card.
You can enable, yes. But (assuming you're on an LCD display and not an OLED), you're likely still on XRGB8888 - i.e. 8-bit per channel. Check `drm_info`.
Do it once on "HDR" on Linux, and then on Windows. The "HDR" in nVidia/Linux is fake.
The brightness you see on Plasma or Mutter is indeed related to the HDR support in the driver. But - it's not really useful for the most common HDR tasks at the moment.
I quit gaming a year ago and no longer have a consumer OS installed on any machine. I can't imagine ever willingly going back after getting used to being able to set my machine up any way I want, and know it will work exactly as I've specified, and won't ever spy on me or monetize my data, and actually has an ecosystem for extending it in basically any way I can imagine, with no bloatware, an app ecosystem with no bundled spyware or adware, etc.
Just recently started using the desktop machine (under my desk, as opposed to my laptop which sits on my desktop) and put NixOS on it, and found myself pleasantly surprised. There's certainly still some parts of NixOS that require some expertise and getting your head around its package model, but overall I was surprised at how idiotproof it was to install and use. I mostly play games on it with Steam, which also Just Works.
NixOS is really a profound experience, once you embrace it. I used Arch for ~3 years and ended up reinstalling it maybe 15 times on my desktop alone. Switched to NixOS and I've used the same installation for 3 years, synced with my laptop and server, switching from x11 to Wayland to KDE to GNOME then back again with no problem.
It doesn't feel real sometimes. My dotfiles are modularized, backed up in Github and versioned with UEFI rollback when I update. I might be using this for the rest of my life, now.
I also have the same Arch install from 2014 on my main hardware. Each replacement computer is nothing more then taking the old drive out, placing it into an USB enclosure, booting a USB live, setting up the partitions on the new drive, and _rsync_ the content from the old to the new, finalizing with registering the UEFI boot loader.
One just need to make sure that you use the proper _rsync_ command options to preserve hard links or files will be duplicated.
After a few months of testing the waters, I just moved my gaming PC over to full-time Linux this weekend. Proton has really been revolutionary, as I haven't yet encountered something in my Steam library that won't work.
It is good, and for 99+% of use cases for 90+% of users (who mostly use nothing but the browser), they will hardly even notice a difference, besides the lack of obnoxious, instrusive MS behavior.
However, despite really, really wanting to switch (and having it installed on my laptop), I keep finding things that don't quite work right that are preventing me from switching some of my machines. My living room PC, which is what my TV is connected to, the DVR software that runs my TV tuner card doesn't quite work right (despite having a native linux installer), and I couldn't get channels to come through as clearly and as easily. I spent a couple of hours of troubleshooting and gave up.
My work PC needs to have the Dropbox app (which has a linux installer), but it also needs the "online-only" functionality so that I can see and browse the entire (very large) dropbox directory without needing to have it all stored locally. This has been a feature that has been being requested on the linux version of the app for years, and dropbox appears unlikely to add it anytime soon.
Both of these are pretty niche issues that I don't expect to affect the vast majority of users (and the dropbox one in particular shouldn't be an issue at all if my org didn't insist on using dropbox in a way that it is very much not intended to be used, and for which better solutions exist, but I have given up on that fight a long time ago), and like I said, I've had linux on my laptop for a couple of years so far without any issue, and I love it.
I am curious how many "edge cases" like mine exist out there though. Maybe there exists some such edge case for a lot of people even while almost no one has the same edge case issue.
There are plenty. I run only Linux at home but CAD software for hobbies (Fusion 360), most games that want kernel level anti cheat, some embedded DRM-enabled media, all sort of just fail. Other things, like GPU tuning or messing with your displays/drivers are harder than they should be. My Bluetooth earbuds just don't work with my Linux machines.
FUSE will provide Dropbox in a more integrated way than Windows (eg. terminal) and a cursory Google revealed some projects for Dropbox that do the JIT download you are after - they are old, but I wager still work just fine (an inactive project can just mean that it's complete).
I just switched to Linux. It's a great gig, and I'm actively encouraging everyone I know still infected with the malware known as Windows 11 to switch.
But some of the drawbacks really aren't edge cases. Apparently there is still no way for me to have access to most creative apps (e.g. Adobe, Affinity) with GPU acceleration. It's irritating that so few Linux install processes are turnkey the way they are for Windows/Mac, with errors and caveats that cost less-than-expert users hours of experimenting and mucking with documentation.
I could go on, but it really feels like a bad time to be a casual PC user these days, because Windows is an inhospitable swamp, and Linux still has some sharp edges.
I use OneDrive and Google Drive heavily and there just are not good clients for Linux for those that I have found. Especially with the ability to not sync files but still "look" like they are there in the filesystem. That is my main stopper now.
I agree, I'd cut off dual booting and go full Linux when the hardware and software I use supports it. One of which being a PCIe Elgato capture card, another being an audio mixer with no driver support and the alternatives are very hacky and too complicated for me.
I permanently switched from Windows to Linux about five years ago. I had the same issue as you with Dropbox, so I switched to using the Maestral client for Dropbox instead which has support for selective sync. Works like a charm for me.
I'm solo developing a spaceflight simulator on Linux (using the Godot engine), exporting binaries in both Linux and Windows. It turns out that I really didn't need to bother with the Linux export anyway because Steam runs the Windows version on Linux without any problems.
The ONLY thing I'm still having trouble with under Linux is Steam VR on the HTC Vive. It works. Barely.
Been so happy with my switch to Linux about 8 months ago. The nvidia gremlins that stopped me in prior years are all smoothed out.
One big plus with Linux, it's more amenable to AI assistance - just copy & paste shell commands, rather than follow GUI step-by-steps. And Linux has been in the world long enough to be deeply in the LLM training corpuses.
I've been on Linux desktop for ages, but it's not quite stable enough that I can recommend it to anyone. Space Marine 2 was the first game in quite a while than didn't just work out of the box, but...
E.g three weeks ago nvidia pushed bad drivers which broke my desktop after a reboot and I had to swap display (ctrl-alt-f3 etc), I never got into gnome at all, and roll back to an earlier version. Automatic rollback of bad drivers would have saved this.
It might depend on the distro, but were you running a 10 series or earlier? They dropped Pascal and earlier CPUs with the v590 driver, I know Arch migrated what the nvidia package installed in such a way that could leave someone without an appropriate driver unless they manually moved to a different source.
Then again Arch is one of those distros that has the attitude that you need to be a little engaged/responsible for ongoing maintenance of your system, which is why I'm against blind "just use (distro)" recommendations unless it's very basic and low assumptions about the user.
I've had mixed experiences with AMD. Back in the day - a bit after Linus told Nvidia to fuck off - I tried to get my Radeon 5850HD (i think?) working on Ubuntu. It was one of those things I spent the whole weekend (OS reinstalls really add up) trying to make work, to no avail. Relative to that nonsense, the equivalent proprietary Nvidia driver just worked after being installed.
A couple of months ago I bought a second hand RX 7800 XT, and prepared myself for a painful experience, but I think it just worked. Like I got frustrated trying to find out how to download and install the driver, when I think it just came with Linux Mint already.
I've been using a full amd build with arch on it for years now. never had graphics related issues after an update. my biggest gripe is with the hdmi organization and how we can't have proper support with open source drivers.
Linux is even getting more accessible. I'm thinking of Elementary OS which not only posted about their accessibility work, but linked to the articles which really fired things up. I'm a Fedora guy, mainly because I want the latest Orca, AT-SPI2 and such, so I don't feel like an Ubuntu dirivitive would work as well.
So I installed Fedora on my work machine and find that I can still get all of my work done. Well except the parts that require testing accessibility on Windows screen readers or helping with Windows-related issues.
The only thing I miss now are the many addons made for NVDA, especially the ones for image descriptions. But if I can get something to work with Wayland, I could probably vibe code some of them. Thank goodness for Claude Code.
- Firefox seems to be able to freeze both itself and, sometimes, the whole system. Usually while typing text into a large text box.
- Recently, printing didn't work for two days. Some pushed update installed a version of the CUPS daemon which reported a syntax error on the cupsd.conf file. A few days later, the problem went away, after much discussion on forums about workarounds.
- Can't use more than half of memory before the OOM killer kicks in. The default rule of the OOM killer daemon is that if a process has more than half of memory for a minute, kill it. Rust builds get killed. Firefox gets killed. This is a huge pain on the 8GB machine. Yes, I could edit some config file and stop this, but that tends to interfere with config file updates from Ubuntu and from the GUI tools.
The Gnome desktop environment usability degradation in recent releases (stuff like drag and dropping files and folders between the desktop and the file explorer not working anymore, or not being able to create new empty files with a right click by default without having to create custom templates, being unable to pin apps to the launcher without messing with files, and more) was so horrendous that it felt like actual sabotage was being committed. Who in their right mind would decide to make the UI actively worse?!
These seem annoying, but I'd argue that these problems are in some ways less significant on Linux than on Windows. If some function of Windows is broken or unsatisfactory, there is not necessarily a way to fix it.
But you can adjust your own system. It'd be unhelpful of me to suggest to an unhappy Windows user that they should switch to another operating system, as that demands a drastic change of environment. On the other hand, you're already familiar with Linux, so the switching cost to a different Linux distribution is significantly lower. Thus I can fairly say that "Ubuntu getting worse" is less of a problem than "Windows getting worse." You have many convenient options. A Windows user has fewer.
What are you talking about? Firefox hasn't been single process since more than 10 years ago. At most, it uses 7% for the main process and I have thousands of tabs open. I can't talk about the other two, but I've had processes use 60% of the system memory without problem (everything else is slow due swapping, but that's expected).
They were talking about instability. I had an old Radeon workstation card in my desktop at home for at least a decade, but with the most recent AMD drivers, Firefox (with hardware acceleration turned on) would crash Gnome and the system when watching videos on YouTube. So I wasted money on one of those new Intel graphics cards to get the stability back (in addition to the time wasted diagnosing the problem).
I'm glad that I am not the only one saying this. I made the switch 20+ years ago for my day to day use, and I have rarely experienced any problems with it.
A long time ago when I was in University, I was a volunteer in the Ubuntu group. In addition to evangelizing Linux/OSS, We were trying to convince our University to switch to opensource software for at least some engineering education with only a little bit of success.
After a particularly busy OSS event a non-programmer friend of mine asked me, why is it that the Linux people seem to be so needy for everyone to make the same choices they make? trying to answer that question changed my perspective on the entire community. And here we are, after all these years the same question seems to still apply.
Why are we so needy for ALL users and use-cases to be Linux-based and Linux-centric once we make that choice ourselves? What is it about Linux? the BSD people seem to not suffer from this and I've never heard anyone advocate for migration to OSX in spite of it being superior for specific usecases (like music production).
IMO if you're a creator, operating systems are tools; use the tool that fits the task.
When you (try to) use libre software, the problems you run into tend not to be related to insufficient engineering, but more societal and economic, where they would be less likely to appear if there were more people in your cohort.
Examples:
- An important document is sent to me in a proprietary format
- A streaming service uses a DRM service owned by a tech giant that refuses to let it work with open source projects
- A video game developer thinks making games work on Linux isn't worth getting rid of rootkit anticheat
The downside is Windows users would have to live in a world without subscription-based office suites, locked down media, and letting the CCP into your ring 0.
Because there are people who care about Free software from a philosophical standpoint on how societies should function and interact.
The community aspect of free software both pushes for more people to participate (and often for other groups to be excluded as "wrong" or "evil").
But that community only offers secondary benefits to those who are authors or painters or photographers rather than software developers - economic factors, risk aversion, functionality, and so on. The FLOSS communities are almost invariably driven toward hobbyists and developers rather than authors, artists, gamers, and the like - people whose interest lies outside of tinkering with and/or improving software.
The BSDs were never really a movement in that sense, and macOS is still just a product even if there are enthusiastic users of them both.
Similarly on the Linux side: Android, Steam Deck, and countless IoT devices are examples of successful products where the Linux aspect of them is not really even advertised.
It’s bad for society for the desktop OS market to be a proprietary monopoly. It basically allows Microsoft to extract rent from the public defender.
I do understand the evangelism being obnoxious. I don’t advocate for people to switch if they have key use cases that ONLY windows or OS X can meet. Certainly not good to be pushy. But otherwise, people are really getting a better experience by switching to Linux.
> why is it that the Linux people seem to be so needy for everyone to make the same choices they make?
This is the sort of question an apolitical person would ask a liberal (I am aware liberalism had been tainted in the recent times), like why is it you people are so needy and constantly preaching about democracy?
I moved to linux this month for good once i realized I no longer needed microsft services (Excel for example "runs on Mac" but is missing important features). I chose redhat because its what I've been using for over a decade at work and feels like home. Only thing I miss is Capcut as that workflow was pretty ironed out. Getting the hang of KDENlive
I use a Linux PC every day but I wouldn't recommend it to normal people. They're not going to feel any renewed sense of ownership from it, just annoyance at having to think about technical gibberish when they just want to get on with using the computer.
Yeah, because getting ads and pushed to use more Microsoft products all day long isn't an annoyance when they just want to get on with using the computer.
I've been really enjoying my experience using CachyOS on my (formerly Windows) gaming PC. I chose to use Limine and btrfs so now if it gets borked by a bad package install/uninstall I can roll back pretty easily. My next step is to replace my Nvidia GPU with an AMD one so I can stop worrying about that aspect in the future.
One thing I'm curious about: how is the laptop dual-GPU situation these days?
I opted to install Linux in a VM under Hyper-V on Windows to avoid hassles with the dual GPUs in my ThinkPad P52, but this comes with several other hassles I'd like to avoid. (Like no GPU access in Linux at all...)
Every year at around this time there is a lot of linux related content in tech media.
It's a slow moving evergreen topic perfect for a scheduled release while the author is on holiday. This is just filler content that could have been written at any point in the last 10 years with minor changes.
I've been working on the Linux desktop for 20 years, and I've been using it on the desktop since 1999, so I lived through the infamous "Year of the Linux Desktop" era.
I've not seen anything like the current level of momentum, ever, nor this level of mainstream exposure. Gaming has changed the equation, and 2026 will be wild.
Not just gaming. This year, both Windows and Mac OS had absolutely terrible years. The Mac effed up its UI with liquid glass, to the point where Alan Dye fled to Meta. Microsoft pushed LLMs and ads into everything, screwing up what was otherwise a decent release.
On the other hand, on the Linux side, we had the release of COSMIC, which is an extremely user-friendly desktop. KDE, Gnome, and others are all at a point where they feel polished and stable.
I don't think the prevalence of these articles this time of year is because the authors go on holiday, but instead is because the new year is the perfect time to ponder: "Will this be the year of the Linux desktop?"
I guess everyone’s in a “fuck it I’m ready to try some new stuff” mood too so this content is perfectly suited for new years. Would never have noticed this without your comment.
Except every year you didn't have people like Pewdiepie and DHH pushing Linux. As as channels like GamersNexus doing Linux benchmarks. At the same time Windows and Mac making very dumb mistakes. So this time it does feel different, even if it might not be in the end.
I have been using Linux since almost 23 years now. I don't praise it as flawless in any way, but compared to Microsoft it is a much more efficient operating system. Top 500 supercomputers also running Linux kind of hint that Linux is very good.
Despite this, Linux as ecosystem has numerous problems. The "wayland is the future" annoys me a lot. The wayland protocol was released in 2008. Now it is almost 20 years. I don't feel wayland is ever going to win a "linux desktop of the year" award. Things that work on xorg-server still do not work on wayland - and probably never will. I am not saying wayland is useless, I ran it for a while on KDE (though I actually don't use KDE, I use icewm typically), but it is just annoying how important things like GUI on Linux simply suck. In many ways Linux is kind of a server computer system, not really a desktop computer system. I use it as one, but the design philosophy is much more catering to the server or compute-work station objective.
Also, GTK ... this thing keeps on getting worse and worse with every new release. I have no idea what they are doing, but I have an old GTK2-based editor and this one consistently works better than the GTK3 or GTK4 ported version. It was a huge mistake to downgrade and nerf GTK to a gnomey-toolkit only. Don't even get me started on GNOME ...
I'm slowly de-Microsofting my computing. I've traded OneDrive for Syncthing. I ditched one PC for a Mac. I have the technical skills to run Linux effectively, but the biggest obstacle for my Linux adoption is distro fatigue. Run Ubuntu? Debian? Fedora? PopOS? Kubuntu? Arch? The article introduced yet another one to consider--Bazzite.
The Linux world is amazing for its experimentation and collaboration. But the fragmentation makes it hard for even technical people like me who just want to get work done to embrace it for the desktop.
Ubuntu LTS is probably the right choice. But it's just one more thing I have to go research.
Don't go for Ubuntu LTS. There are many choices that would work equally well for you. I'd go for Fedora KDE edition (but could easily be EndeavorOS or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed).
As a beginner, just pick Ubuntu and get on with your life imo. Switching distros isn't that big of a lift later on and pretty much everything you learn carries over from one to the other. It's much more worthwhile to just pick _something_ and learn some basics and become comfortable with the OS imo.
Pick a popular distro, and during installation, put your /home directory on its own partition. This way, you won't have much to reconfigure if you ever have a reason to switch distros. (You might not ever have a reason; they're all pretty capable.)
Ubuntu stopped caring about the desktop experience when the switched to Gnome. Now they have annoying SNAPs. They are a business and they are going to continue enshitifying it.
I haven't tried Bazzite because I'm not into gaming but Linux Mint is working very well for a lot of people coming from Windows. It just works and has great defaults. Windows users seem to pick it up pretty easily.
Also, Linux Mint upgrades very well. I've had a lot of success upgrading to new versions without needing to reinstall everything. Ubuntu and other distros I've tried often have failed during upgrading and I had to reinstall.
I think fragmentation is the wrong way to look at it; they're all basically compatible at the end of the day. It's more like an endless list of people who want to min-max.
Any reasonably popular distro will have enough other users that you can find resources for fixing hitches. The deciding factor that made me go with EndeavourOS was that their website had cool pictures of space on it. If you don't already care then the criteria don't need to be any deeper than that.
Once you use it enough to develop opinions, the huge list of options will thin itself out.
I’ve been around the block with Linux distributions since 2020. I personally think that Bazzite is the way to go for most people coming from Windows, or people experienced with Linux that want something as close to “set and forget” as you can.
One thing that can be annoying is how quickly things have moved in the Linux gaming space over the past 5 years. I have been a part of conversations with coworkers who talk about how Linux gaming was in 2019 or 2020. I feel like anyone familiar with Linux will know the feeling of how quickly things can improve while documentation and public information cannot keep up.
Linux is the best. Been using it since Slackware, RedHat first came out, now use Ubuntu or any distro which makes it easy to interact with its Desktop, e.g. GNOME :)
I've been sceptical of the 'Linux desktop' for a long time, but I recently started using Bazzite on my gaming PC and I'm super impressed. In just a few years since I last daily drove a Linux distro it's come such a long way. KDE Plasma is fast and beautiful.
So far all the games I want to play run really well, with no noticable performance difference. If anything, they feel faster, but it could be placebo because the DE is more responsive.
My company had an onsite where presenters were plugging their computers into a projector via HDMI. I watched seven individuals go up with their MacBook Pros, plug the cable in, then get confused why nothing was showing on the screen. Seven times in a row, someone had to run onto the stage and accept the permissions dialog on the Mac allowing the user to share their screen via HDMI. When the eighth presenter took the stage, he plugged the HDMI cable into his laptop running Linux, and the screen immediately output an image. Linux just works.
I switched full time to Linux in 2022 when Elden Ring launched and had better performance in its first week on Linux than on Windows. I personally switched over to KDE Plasma powered by Arch. The first thing I noticed was how perfectly it was immediately. So I'd push the title of the article on step further: Linux has been good for a while.
In the four years since switching over from a dual Windows (for gaming) and Mac (for programming, web browsing, and everything else), I have almost entirely had a better experience in every single area. I still use macOS daily for work, and it is constantly driving me mad. For every task I have thrown at it (from gaming to programming to game dev to photo editing), Linux just works.
On Mac it's more like, "there's an app for that". I have third party package managers on Mac. I use a third party app to display if my internet connection is using Ethernet. It yells at me to delete the CSV file that I created and requires an instruction manual with instructions for the Settings app that have changed three times in three years for how to open the file, add Bluetooth to the menu bar, etc. It even had a permanent red icon on the Settings about not being signed into an Apple ID. And once I signed in, the Settings app has a permanent red icon about paying for Apple Care. My parents have made comments about how they're worried as they get older that they won't be able to keep up with the constant updates and changes to macOS and iOS.
I don't have much to say about Windows besides good riddance. It was far less confusing to use than macOS but was filled with too much bloat and pop up notifications.
The final thing I'll mention is that the first time my girlfriend used my computer, she sat down, opened the browser, and completed her task. She thought that she was using Windows and was able to navigate the new interface without having to spend any time learning anything. For her regular use case of using the PC for an internet browser, Linux just worked. She even asked me afterwards to install it on her laptop to replace Windows! I can't believe we're in a world where that's asked by someone non-technical who just wants a computer to get out of their way so that they can perform their tasks.
If Microsoft could get their heads out of their rears, they could potentially get back to a better OS for gaming. The hybrid kernel Dave Cutler designed is in many ways still better than the Linux kernel. It's the userland that is the issue with Windows 11. Look just by enabling true nvme support you close the gap between Linux and Windows performance wise.
Linux desktops have felt flaky for me for a few years now. I’m trying to figure out how much of that is bad choices vs real problems.
Ubuntu’s default desktop felt unstable in a macOS VM. Dual-booting on a couple of HP laptops slowed to a crawl after installing a few desktop apps, apparently because they pulled in background services. What surprised me was how quickly the system became unpleasant to use without any obvious “you just broke X” moment.
My current guess: not Linux in general, but heavy defaults (GNOME, Snap, systemd timers), desktop apps dragging in daemons, and OEM firmware / power-management quirks that don’t play well with Linux. Server Linux holds up because everything stays explicit. Desktop distros hide complexity and don’t give much visibility when things start to rot.
Does this line up with others’ experience? If yes, what actually works long-term? Minimal bases, immutable distros, avoiding certain package systems, strict service hygiene, specific hardware?
The only real obnoxious slow-down daemons I'm familiar with are the "system indexing" things (GNOME Tracker, KDE Baloo) -- highly recommend disabling them.
I've been using Kubuntu for years with good results. I prefer KDE to Gnome, which Kubuntu takes care of, and I normally add in the flatpak repositories so I don't need snap. That has generally worked well for me in the last 5 years.
For certain timeperiods I have needed to switch to Fedora, or the Fedora KDE spin, to get access to more recent software if I'm using newer hardware. That has generally also been pretty stable but the constant stream of updates and short OS life are not really what I'm looking for in a desktop experience.
There are three issues that linux still has, which are across the board:
- Lack of commercial mechanical engineering software support (CAD & CAE software)
- Inability to reliably suspend or sleep for laptops
- Worse battery life on laptops
If you are using a desktop and don't care about CAD or CAE software I think it's probably a better experience overall than windows. Laptops are still more for advanced users imho but if you go with something that has good linux support from the factory (Dell XPS 13, Framework, etc.) it will be mostly frictionless. It just sucks on that one day where you install an update, close the laptop lid, put it in your backpack, and find it absolutely cooking and near 0% when you take it out.
I also have never found something that gave me the battery life I wanted with linux. I used two XPS 13's and they were the closest but still were only like 75% of what I would like. My current Framework 16 is like 50% of what I would like. That is with always going for a 1080p display but using a VPN which doesn't help battery life.
We live in a world with the internet and distributed version control, so essentially every piece of software in the world has a tradeoff where the people maintaining it might push an update that breaks something at any time, but also those updates often do good things too, like add functionality, make stuff more efficient, fix bugs, or probably most crucially, patch out security vulnerabilities.
My experience with FOSS has mostly been that mature projects with any reasonable-sized userbase tend to more reliably not break things in updates than is the case for proprietary software, whether it's an OS or just some SaaS product. YMMV. However, I think probably the most potent way to avoid problems like this actually ever mattering is a combination of doing my updates manually (or at least on an opt-in basis) and being willing to go back a version if something breaks. Usually this isn't necessary for more than a week or so for well-maintained software even in the worst case. I use arch with downgrade (Which lets you go back and choose an old version of any given package) and need to actually use downgrade maybe once a year on average, less in the last 5
> Does this line up with others’ experience? If yes, what actually works long-term? Minimal bases, immutable distros, avoiding certain package systems, strict service hygiene, specific hardware?
No, not really. A Linux desktop with a DE will always be slower and more brittle than an headless machine due to the sheer number of packages/components, but something like Arch + Plasma Shell (without the whole KDE ecosystem) should be very stable and snappy. The headaches caused by immutable distros and flatpaks are not worth it IMO, but YMMV.
With debian and KDE (both personal preference), but no snap or flatpak, it works wonderfully. Power/sleep-management has become better than a default windows install. All hardware, including the fingerprint sensor, just works.
Not really, no. What did you install that slowed things down?
> If yes, what actually works long-term?
Plain ordinary Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, running on an ancient Thinkpad T430 with a whopping 8GB of RAM and an SSD (which is failing, but that's not Linux's fault, it's been on its way out for about a year and I should probably stop compiling Haiku nightlies on it).
Can you give an example of which desktop apps are "dragging in daemons"?
I've run Void Linux + Xmonad for many years without any such issues. I also recently installed CachyOS for my kid to game on (KDE Plasma) and it works super well.
I am using Linux in different flavours for the past 10 years. It has become more reliable for the the time. The last 5 years had noticeable few issues across the distros.
I have always wanted to use linux as my main OS. I tried with Ubuntu twice the past and always ran into really painful hurdles or missing features. This year I tried again with Mint and it absolutely stuck the landing. I have completely switched my desktop and laptop (and plex server) to mint. I have never even booted back into windows. I have not had any big issues and have been able to make it better than my windows desktop ever was.
I switched in 2020. I run Fedora and Arch. I don’t miss MacOS at all. The last Windows I used was 8, so my opinion is out of date, but yeah… I don’t miss Windows, either.
The success measurements are quite strange. How am I supposed to think Linux is finally good when 96.8% of users do not care to adopt it. I can't think of anything else with that high of a rejection rate. The vast majority do not consider it good enough to use over Windows.
Now that Microsoft are removing support for Windows 10, which is still running on many not-that-old devices that don't support Windows 11, I think the correct, mainstream advice HAS to be to install Linux on those machines. Those are still perfectly usable machines that can be used for productivity or enjoy a massive catalog of games.
We've reached a point where Microsoft greed and carelessness is degrading Windows from all angles. With the constant forced Copilot, forced sign-ups, annoying pop-ups and ads, it is figuratively unusable; in the case of machines stuck on Windows 10 it is literally unusable.
They are now banking entirely on a captive market of Enterprise customers who have invested too much to quit. The enshittification is feature complete.
I have been switching between linux-windows for a while now, and i think 2026 is not the year of linux for now.
Linux still suffer from the same fragmentation issue: Oh you want to play game, you should use distro X, oh you want an average web-browsing, working, you should use distro Y, or for programming, use Z. Of course all of them can do what other can do, but the community decided that the way it is.
Yesterday i read a reddit thread about an user sharing his issue with pop-os, and most(if not all) comments saying he is using the wrong distro. He is using latest release (not the nightly build), which is a reasonably thing to do as new user.
Not sure if Linux Mint has changed this, but i remember having to add "non-free" repo to use official Nvidia driver. Not a big deal to people who know what they are doing, but still, that is unnecessary firction.
I just got a laptop for Christmas (first thing I've bought for myself in a good while) with 64GB of DDR5 RAM, a video card inside of it, AMD Ryzen 7 CPU, AMD Radeon 6550M. 144hz screen.
Not the best, but works for me.
I put CachyOS on it, using Steam just run the game's installer adding it as a game to your library -- you just select which proton you want (cachyos-proton) as a dropdown in the Properties in the Steam library. that's it.
it's lightweight, arch (I ditched manjaro), runs KDE and games perfectly, cursor IDE runs great, VMS run great.
first thing I did when I got it from fedex was remove Windows and put Linux on it. I thought 'maybe I'll just bite the bullet and sign up a Microsoft cloud account to be able to access ..my desktop' and 1/4 through its install I held the power button and popped a flash drive in. just say no to windows and you'll all be happy, trust me.
the only effort it required was for me to say f this on using Lutris and just use Steam as the wrapper.
2026 is definitely the year for linux. every year is. valve heavily invested in Arch, proton, and is using Linux on their devices and honestly: Windows is spyware, and after their vibe coded jank 25H2 update that broke a ton of things and Windows 10 being EOL, I hope more people get to enjoy throwing Ventoy on a USB stick with a bunch of linux isos copied over to it and boot and play with what they love.
so I disagree, 2026 is the year for Linux, and Linux is love.
There is a strange, but pleasant feeling when you hear someone claiming “they’re early to Linux” and think it’s going to be something big. (Happened recently.)
Deluding ourselves here it's nice to think the day has finally arrived but it hasn't
We need to address the problems rather than pretending it's already great
Shutting down your laptop and having to wait five minutes for systemd to shutdown because of some timeout when you need to get your flight is just one of those reasons you end up going back to windows
<< Deluding ourselves here it's nice to think the day has finally arrived but it hasn't
Apart from systemd, tell me what isn't great. The whole benefit of the ecosystem is that you can pick and choose your system components and if you don't like any of then, build your own. I am not trying to be dismissive, if I use a windows these days, it is for work and some errant vm to run windows specific app ( hr block comes to mind -- I am just not willing to spend time to run it any other way ).
An ex lease Thinkpad T Series with Intel graphics is a good choice for value and compatibility. eg a T490 or T14 era machine.
Using hardware at least 6-12 months old is a good way to get better compatibility.
Generally Linux drivers only start development after the hardware is available and in the hands of devs, while Windows drivers usually get a head start before release. Brand new hardware on a LTS (long term support) distro with an older kernel is usually the worst compatibility combo.
What is really blocking the move for me is zScaler, Zoom (they may exist on Linux, not sure about how integrated they are) but especially Outlook (the client). The OWA version is subpar and without it I cannot function in a work environment.
> without it I cannot function in a work environment.
This is more about what you choose as your operating environment, not what your work imposes as your working environment.
Most places of work, mine included, run Microsoft services that lock them into the ecosystem incredibly tightly.
As per the article title, "if you want to feel like you actually own your PC", this is about your PC, not the one provided to you by your workplace (since it's likely owned by them).
One thing I'm worried about in my work environment is Microsoft enforcing the web versions of Office and deprecating the stand alone desktop applications. The web versions are a massive step down in terms of functionality and ease of use. Your mention of OWA makes me feel as if that is what Outlook will be sacrificed for at some point in the future anyway.
I had a similar issue, but I ended up installing Debian and running Windows 10 as a virtual machine with VirtualBox. The webcam can be accessed as if were installed on the guest OS and haven't had a problem with Zoom or Teams. Just sharing in case it helps.
I considered that but is is such a waste of resources in my case: I deliberately use a lighter laptop that just covers my dev needs.
But yes, this is a possibility, or accessing the windows via rdp. The loss would be with the "always-handy" kind of setup, where Outlook is a click away and pops up its calendar reminder
We've made the switch and it's been great. On top of my that my partner who is not a computer person picked up Linux Mint to the level she can use Windows in a couple weeks.
Linux is my main and sole desktop since around-2006. I needed windows for TurboTax a few hours a year in the past but that's it, I did not do PC games though, just regular desktop stuff including developing code.
Yes. The reason the year of the Linux desktop has yet to arrive is because most people don't understand this joke. Linux is powerful because it is made for power users (although certain distros are changing this)
I love this. I spent my holidays hearing non-technical family members complain about their ever deteriorating Windows experiences, issues that make me righteously angry at Microsoft.
IMO the next important unblocker for Linux adoption is the Adobe suite. In a post-mobile world one can use a tablet or phone for almost any media consumption. But production is still in the realm of the desktop UX and photo/video/creative work is the most common form of output. An Adobe CC Linux option would enable that set of "power users". And regardless of their actual percentage of desktop users, just about ever YouTuber or streamer talking about technology is by definition a content creator so opening Linux up to them would have a big effect on adoption.
And yes I've tried most of the Linux alternatives, like GIMP, Inkscape, DaVinci, RawTherapee, etc. They're mostly /fine/ but it's one of the weaker software categories in FOSS-alternatives IMO. It also adds an unnecessary learning curve. Gamers would laugh if they were told that Linux gaming was great, they just have to learn and play an entirely different set of games.
Photoshop (for example) largely works in Wine, although it's not stable enough for production usage. The problem is the CC itself and the installer, which is unimaginably bloated and glued to the Internet Exp... I mean Edge Web View and many other Windows-only things.
Hahaha. Try sharing a couple old printers and scanners connected to a Linux box on your home network. At best, when it’s working you get lowest common denominator functionality. Want to run some vms ? Works great until you update your distro and the vm hosts kernel modules aren’t compatible anymore. Oh, want to use a later version of some package like docker? Did I use apt or snap or flatpack???
Yes, you can get this stuff working, but if you enjoy doing other things in life, have a job and don’t life alone, it is SSSOOOOO much easier to get a Mac mini. Or even windows 11 if that’s your thing.
Sounds ultra-specific to your experience. VMs, package management and networking are all things that macOS and Windows stumble with for regular usage. I've used all three OSes professionally, and Linux requires the least configuration to get work done.
cachyos is a good os that is also performant. arch though so there are quirks around the rolling update model but you always have the newestish packages and if you update regularly there seems to be less headache.
I tried a number of distros and settled on Omarchy because it has a coherent design and nice aesthetics, but it has some weird quirks about messing with my dotfiles on updates. It's so new I suspect this will be ironed out soon.
Honestly I loved it a lot more pre-2022, when Ubuntu added a super aggressive OOM killer that only operates on the level of an entire systemd run unit. Meaning that if you are running computation in, say, a shell and one for your subprocesses running computation takes too much memory, it takes out the entire shell and terminal window, leaving no trace of what happened, including all the terminal logs.
And if you are running Chrome, and something starts taking a lot of memory, say goodbye to the entire app without any niceties.
(Yes, this is a mere pet peeve but it has been causing me so much pain over the past year, and it's such an inferior way to deal with memory limits tha what came before it, I don't know why anybody would have taken OOM logic from systemd services and applied it to use launched processes.)
I have to wonder if Ubuntu's prescriptive stance on things like this is becoming increasingly outdated in an age where there's actually a decent experience out of the box for a lot more stuff on Linux. I've long since moved on from using it personally for my devices, but I'm fairly certain my tolerance for spending effort tinkering to get things working like I want is a lot higher than even most Linux users, so it's hard for me to gauge if the window have moved significantly in that regard for the average Linux user.
It's not just Ubuntu, Arch is just as bad. The primary problem is systemd, which provided an adequate OOMd for daemons, but then all the distributions seem to be using it for interactively launched processes
If anybody can help me out with a better solution with a modern distribution, that's about 75% of the reason I'm posting. But it's been a major pain and all the GitHub issues I have encountered on it show a big resistance to having better behavior like is the default for MacOS, Windows, or older Linux.
I find it interesting how many people have Ubuntu in mind when it comes to a Linux desktop when it hasn't been a great experience ever since they switched to Gnome. They don't really care about the desktop anymore. They are now a corporation that is enshitifying their product with things like SNAPs.
If you want a distro that really cares about the desktop experience today, try Linux Mint. Windows users seem to adapt to it quite quickly and easily. It's familiar and has really good defaults that match what people expect.
This is really annoying me as well. I use a program for work that can occasionally use a lot of ram, while saving or interpolating for example. On my little MacBook Air with just 8GB of ram everything works fine, it just swaps a whole lot more for a short period. On my desktop with 16GB ram and Ubuntu oom just kills it, my workaround is the swapspace package which adds swap files under high load, works so far.
It sounds like your primary issue is that you have a severe RAM deficiency for what you're trying to use your machine for. Any OOM killer, be it the kernel's per-process one or systemd-oomd's per-service one, only exists to try to recover from an out-of-memory scenario where the alternative is to kernel panic (in the case of the kernel's oom killer) or for the system to completely lock up (in the case of systemd-oomd).
My primary issue is that a system that did an OK job at dealing with low memory situations has been replaced with a completely inadequate system.
If your solution is "don't ever run out of memory" my solution is "I won't ever use your OS unless forced to."
Every other OS handles this better, and my work literally requires pushing the bounds of memory on the box, whether it's 64GB or 1TB of RAM. Killing an entire cgroup is never an acceptable solution, except for the long-running servers that systemd is meant to run.
What would that be useful for? A properly implemented software passkey like Keepassxc would be secure against anything short of a local root exploit. A TPM would not really help against that either.
Passkeys were designed to be bound to a device. Also I don't like using browser extensions as password managers or connecting them to a browser via an extension. It's been proven not to be safe many times.
The personal desktop has fallen in relevance enough for that to be possible. The goalposts moved, now linux needs to have phone, tablet, and laptop with smooth effortless integration between them all.
I recently switched to using a thumb drive to transfer files to and from my phone/tablet, I became demoralized when faced with getting it all setup.
KDE has phone and laptop integrated well enough for me. It's worth giving it a try but the more devices you want integrated the more of a risk it is in case it doesn't quite work right. But I've got enough other devices in the house which I can't put KDE on (work laptop, Windows machine I need for some specific software) that I can recommend https://github.com/9001/copyparty over thumb drives.
Linux is not suitable for the average user. I use Xubuntu on all my old computers, but I am 100% sure a normie would not tolerate the tedium of it. People want shiny icons with animations and a bunch of garbage on their computers to make them feel they are doing something. Linux is too static for that.
If I have an issue with an application or if I want an application, I must use the terminal. I can't imagine a Mac user bothering to learn it. Linux is for people who want to maximize the use of their computer without being spied on and without weird background processes. Linux won't die, but it won't catch Windows or Mac in the next 5 decades. People are too lazy for it. Forget about learning. I bet you $100, 99% of the people in the street didn't even see Linux in their lives, nor even heard of it. It is not because of marketing, it is because people who tried it returned to Windows or Mac after deciding it is too hard to learn for them to install a driver or an application.
I wouldn't recommend Xubuntu for the average user. What you feel is about Xubuntu, not Linux. Normies are doing well adapting to Linux Mint. It's easy for Windows users to get used to within a few days and it has sane defaults that match what users expect. It just works.
Spoken like a true Windows UX aficionado. Who doesn't love multiple system settings apps, a mix of minimal new context menus and overcrowded legacy context menus just one more click away.
Only true if those inconsistencies actually matter to your workflow. Not going to deny that they exist, obviously, but their impact is largely overplayed (and gratuitously downplayed on Windows, in my experience).
This is just not true anymore. The only things that don't work anymore are a few AAA titles that use particular types of anti-cheat systems that rely on Windows kernel drivers (League of Legends is one that comes to mind).
If I remember correctly, after the Crowdstrike BSOD-all-windows-instances update last year Microsoft wanted to make some changes to their kernel driver program and these anti-cheat measures on Windows might need to find a new mechanism soon anyway. That's a long way of saying, it's plausible that even that last barrier might come down sooner rather than later.
I probably sound like a hipster or something, but it really feels like many people are finally catching up to the way I've been working for the past 15 years.
I fully switched to GNU/Linux back then and have never looked back. Initially I was quite evangelical but got tired of it and gave up probably around 10 years ago thinking "oh well, their loss". But slowly more and more of the world has switched over, first servers, then developer workstations and now finally just "normal" users.
Similarly, I've always been hugely invested into my tools and have a strong distaste for manual labour. I often watch how others work and can't believe how slow and inefficient it is. Typing up repetitive syntax every time, copy/pasting huge blocks of code, performing repetitive actions when booting their PC etc. I simply haven't been doing this for my whole career, I've been writing scripts, using clever editors, using programming languages to their fullest etc.
I think this is why LLMs don't seem like such the huge breakthrough to me as they do to others. I wasn't doing this stuff manually before, that's ridiculous. I don't need to generate globs of code because I already know how to get the computer to do it for me, and I know how to do that in a sustainable and maintainable way too. It's sad that LLMs are giving people their first real sense of control, when it's actually been available for a very long by now, and in a way that you can actually own it, rather than paying for a service that might be taken away at any moment.
Still can’t play big titles with anti cheat like call of duty. Only reason I’m stuck on windows on the gaming PC is I’m somewhat addicted to BO7 zombies.
What amazes me is that on Steam they no longer make the distinction (in the standard library view) between Windows and Linux: every game is assumed to launch in Linux, using Proton behind the scenes it needed. There's still a "Linux games" toggle but now every game appears ungrayed by default.
And it mostly works! At least for my games library. The only game I wasn't able to get to work so far is Space Marine 2, but on ProtonDB people report they got it to work.
As for the rest: I've been an exclusive Linux user on the desktop for ~20 years now, no regrets.
Linux has been good for years. The only thing that's changed is that Valve put a bunch of effort into Proton so now Linux has enough game titles for that to no longer be an excuse to not switch.
I've been using Linux full-time (no other OSes at all) for nearly 20 years. Went through all my university education using only Linux. It's problem free if you use it like a grandma would (don't mess with the base system) and even if you mess with it, most things are easily reversible.
That being said, I have noticed that the newfound interest in Linux seems to be a result of big tech being SO abusive towards its customers that even normies are suddenly into computing "freedom".
Linux can't be a good desktop, almost by definition.
1. Look at commercial desktop OSes (Windows, MacOS). They spend hundreds of millions to develop and maintain the OS, do updates, quality assurance testing, working with hundreds of thousands of hardware vendors and enterprises, etc, just to try to not break things constantly. This is with "an ecosystem" that is one stack developed by one company. And even they can't get it right. Several Linux-Desktop companies have tried to mimic the commercial companies by not only custom-tailoring their own stack and doing QA, but sometimes even partnering on certified hardware. They're spending serious cash to try to do it right. But still there's plenty of bugs (go look at their issue trackers, community forums, package updates, etc) and no significant benefit over the competition.
2. There is no incentive for Linux to have consistency, quality, or a good UX. The incentive is to create free software that a developer wants. The entire ethos of the OSS community is, and has always been, I want the software, I make the software, you're welcome to use it too. And that's fine, for developers! But that's not how you make something regular people can use reliably and enjoyably. It's a hodge-podge of different solutions glued together. Which works up to a point, but then...
3. Eventually Linux desktop reaches a point where it doesn't work. The new mouse you bought's extra buttons don't work. Or the expensive webcam you bought can't be controlled because it requires a custom app only shipped on Windows/Mac. Or your graphics card's vendor uses proprietary firmware blobs causing bugs on only Linux for unknown reasons. Or your speakers sound like crap because they need a custom firmware blob loaded by the commercial OSes. Or your touchscreen can't be enabled/disabled because Wayland doesn't support the X extensions that used to allow that to work with xrandr. Or your need to look up obscure bootloader flags, edit the bootloader, and restart, to enable/disable some obscure fix for your hardware (lcd low power settings, acpi, disk controller, or any of a thousand other issues). Or, quite simply, the software you try to install just doesn't work; random errors are popping up, things are not working, and you don't know why. In any of these cases, your only hope is... to go on Reddit and ask for help from strangers. There's no customer support line. Your ISP ain't gonna help you. The Geek Squad just shrugs. You are on your own.
And this is the most frustrating part... the extremely nerdy core fan-group, like those on HN or Reddit, who are lucky enough not to be experiencing the problems unique to Linux, gaslight you and tell you all your problems are imagined or your fault.
> Linux can't be a good desktop, almost by definition.
By your problem statements 1, 2, and 3, there is never likely to be a great desktop OS. The best that we will ever have is a compromise (no cyber pun intended).
1) every OS is buggy, 2) every OS is a hotch-potch, and 3) users end up yelling at the clouds then forced to upgrade to the next version of frustration.
> who are lucky enough not to be experiencing the problems unique to Linux, gaslight you
It isn't just luck , people use Linux every day to do their jobs and pursue their interests. But if no GNU/Linux distro works for your uses, you have whatever commercial OS you are currently using to meet your needs.
As for actual gaslighting , yikes I hope that large groups of people are not conspiring to ruin your day. I personally react in a similar way when corporations tell me please wait, your call is important to us, our menu options have changed.
Unless one has a rack of older GPU hardware that uses an abandoned EOL NVIDIA kernel driver difficult to install past kernel 6.12.x Then one faces the harsh reality of Windows users rightfully laughing at a perpetually Beta Linux OS, as Win11 still boots with the older drivers. while the dkms build randomly implodes at some point.
People dual boot SSD OS for very good reasons, as kernel permutation is not necessarily progress in FOSS. Linux is usable by regular users these days, but "Good" is relative to your use case. YMMV =3
Well, until it is a native elf/linux game, because the shabby compatibility, not reliable in time, zero official technical support (which is legally required for paid games), proton(wine), ewwwww...
The only sane ways: either a 'correct' set of native elf/linux binaries, or proton = 0 bucks (namely only free-to-play, with 0 cent in any micro-transactions).
I would be 100% off Windows if it weren’t for Adobe Suite and Ableton Live not being ported to Linux. I’m guessing both of these companies are avoiding it not for technical reasons but because Linux is a support nightmare given all of the distros and variations of the platform.
What makes Linux a viable desktop for so many people now is the fact that they don’t need to run very much software anymore. It runs Chrome so you’re good.
Tried to switch to Linux plenty of times over the past few decades, this year it finally stuck. I can confidently say I’ll never install Windows again. Everything pretty much just works and any issues I’ve had have been quickly resolved with the help of LLM’s.
I've been giving Linux a go as a daily driver for a few months.
I tried Cinnamon and while it was pleasantly customizable, the sigle-threadedness of the UI killed it for me. It was too easy to do the wrong thing and lock the UI thread, including several desktop or tray Spices from the official repo.
I'm switching to KDE. Seems peppier.
Biggest hardware challenge I've faced is my Logitech mouse, which is a huge jump from the old days of fighting with Wi-Fi and sound support. Sound is a bit messy with giving a plethora of audio devices that would be hidden under windows (like digital and analog options for each device) and occasionally compatibility for digital vs analog will be flaky from a game or something, but I'll take it.
Biggest hassle imho is still installing non-repo software. So many packages offer a flatpak and a snap and and build-from-source instructions where you have to figure out the local package names for each dependency and they offer one .Deb for each different version of Debian and its derivatives and it's just so tedious to figure which is the right one.
Sadly the project feels semi-abandoned. No new releases so I had to build it from source. Also the PR board seems to be ignored (one or two of those are mine - I tried to fix the misleading button labels).
Can I run Solidworks on Linux yet? Excel? Labview? Vivado? Adobe products? Altium Designer? (Matlab is mostly yes) Not everybody is just writing Javascript and PHP.
Can I get a laptop to sleep after closing the lid yet?
Not that long ago the answer to these questions was mostly no (or sort of yes... but very painfully)
> Can I get a laptop to sleep after closing the lid yet?
> on windows all of this just works
Disagree on the sleep one - my work laptop doesn’t go to sleep properly. The only laptop I’ve ever used that behaves as expected with sleep is a macbook.
Still no big CAD names that I'm aware of (annoyingly), Libre Calc works fine for me as an Excel alternative, I have used Matlab on it but not recently, not sure on the others.
Laptop sleep and suspend can still be finicky unfortunately.
I will say my experience using CAD or other CAE software on windows has gotten progressively worse over the years to the point that FEA is more stable on linux than on windows.
We do really need a Solidworks, Creo or NX on linux though. My hope has been that eventually something like Wine, Proton, or other efforts to bring windows games to linux will result in us getting the ability to run them. They are one of the last things holding me back from fully moving away from windows.
These are all pretty niche products at this point. For the true professionals that need these tools they're stuck but most people can find reasonable alternatives for their hobby or side hustle.
I hear you, and also value Excel and a few other products, but I hit my perosnal limit with Windows enshittificatoion early last year and changed my daily driver at home to Linux.
I added a couple VMs running windows, linux, and whatever else I need in proxmox w/ xrdp/rdp and remina, and it's really the best of both worlds. I travel a good deal and being able to remotely connect and pick up where I left off while also not dealing with windows nagware has been great.
I get people are tired of Year of Linux on Desktop, but I feel like last year it actually started happening for real. Mostly due to Arch which is not what I ever expected.
On one hand we have Steam that will make 1000s of games become available on easy to use platform based on Arch.
For developers, we have Omarchy, which makes experience much more streamlined and very pleasant and productive. I moved both my desktop and laptop to Omarchy and have one Mac laptop, this is really good experience, not everything is perfect, but when I switch to Mac after Omarchy, I often discover how not easy is to use Mac, how many clicks it takes to do something simple.
I think both Microsoft and Apple need some serious competition and again, came from Arch who turned out to be more stable and serious then Ubuntu.
My main joy of Linux is to have tilling manager and to have same machine on which I can both play games and work. Which since Windows I couldn't make happen.
I have a Windows 11 PC strictly for gaming. Nearly every-time I interact with Windows it infuriates me with garbage code, Microsoft business BS and anti-privacy. I’d love to switch but has Linux gaming solved the anti-cheat requirement issue? Do Epic and EA games work on Linux?
I also play a decent amount of Flight Simulator 2024 and losing that is almost a non-starter for switching.
anticheat is not a linux issue, its a developers issue.
it seems facially easy to solve. pair players with the type of game they want.
turn on anticheat if you want to join no cheat sessions.
if you want a cheat game turn off anticheat and you join sessions with other cheat players.
the whole dilemma comes out of malignant users that enjoy destruction of other users ability to enjoy the game.
go nuclear on clients that manage to join anticheat sessions with cheats turned on.
It is interesting and fascinating to see the growth of Linux.
As many have pointed out, The biggest factor is obviously the enshittification of Microsoft. Valve has crept up in gaming. And I think understated is how incredibly nice the tiling WMs are. They really do offer an experience which is impossible to replicate on Mac or Windows, both aesthetically and functionally.
Linux, I think, rewards the power user. Microsoft and Apple couldn't give a crap about their power users. Apple has seemed to devolve into "Name That Product Line" fanboy fantasy land and has lost all but the most diehard fans. Microsoft is just outright hostile.
I'm interested to see what direction app development goes in. I think TUIs will continue to rise in popularity. They are snappier and overall a much better experience. In addition, they work over SSH. There is now an entire overclass of power users who are very comfortable moving around in different servers in shell. I don't think people are going to want to settle for AI SaaS Cloudslop after they get a taste of local first, and when they realize that running a homelab is basically just Linux, I think all bets are off as far as which direction "personal computing" goes. Also standing firmly in the way of total SSH app freedom are IPhone and Android, which keep pushing that almost tangible utopia of amazing software frustratingly far out of reach.
It doesn't seem like there is a clear winner for the noob-friendly distro category. It seems like theyre all pretty good. The gaming distros seem really effective. I finally installed Omarchy, having thought "I didn't need it, I can rice my own arch", etc, and I must say the experience has been wonderful.
I'm pretty comfortable at the "cutting edge" (read, with all my stuff being broken), so my own tastes in OS have moved from Arch to the systemd free Artix or OpenBSD. I don't really see the more traditional "advanced" Linuxes like Slackware or Gentoo pulling much weight. I've heard interesting things about users building declarative Nix environments and I think that's an interesting path. Personally, I hope we see some new, non-Unix operating systems that are more data and database oriented than file oriented. For now, OpenBSD feels very comfortable, it feels like I have a prayer of understanding what's on my system and that I learn things by using it, the latter of which is a feature of Arch. The emphasis on clean and concise code is really quite good, and serves as a good reminder that for all the "memory safe" features of these new languages, it's tough to beat truly great C developers for code quality. If you're going to stick with Unix, you might as well go for the best.
More and more I find myself wanting to integrate "personal computing" into my workflow, whether that's apps made for me and me alone, Emacs lisp, custom vim plugins, or homelab stuff. I look with envy at the smalltalks of the world, like Marvelous Toolkit, the Forths, or the Clojure based Easel. I really crave fluency - the ability for code to just pour out - none of the hesitation or system knowledge gaps which come from Stack Overflow or LLM use. I want mastery. I've also become much more tactical on which code I want to maintain. I really have tried to curb "not invented here" syndrome because eventually you realize you aren't going to be able to maintain it all. Really I just want a fun programming environment where I can read Don Knuth and make wireframe graphics demos!
The article's title - and the original title of the submission - was specific, bold, and contained a call to action. The new title is bland and unspecific (Linux has been "good" for servers for decades now).
Please revert this submission to use the correct title.
It's good until you boot your system and end up with an unrecoverable black screen that meeses your day of work for no good reason. Linux is free if you don't value your time.
You can't really make blanket statements like this about "Linux" in general because it depends on what distro you use. For example, in NixOS to fix this type of problem all you have to do is rollback to a previous configuration that is known to work. I've not used it, but I believe Arch has something similar.
Even with imperatively configured distros like Ubuntu, it's generally much easier to recover from a "screen of death" than in Windows because the former is less of a black box than the latter. This means its easier to work out what the problem is and find a fix for it. With LLMs that's now easier than ever.
And, in the worst case that you have to resort to reinstalling your system, it's far less unpleasant to do that in a Linux distro than in Windows. The modern Windows installer is painful to get through, and then you face hours or days of manually reinstalling and reconfiguring software which you can do with a small handful of commands in Linux to get back to a state that is reasonably similar to what you had before.
I dunno, I spend less time fighting with any of my several linux systems than the macbook I'm required to use for work, even without trying to do anything new with it. I choose to view this charitably and assume most of the time investment people perceive when switching operating systems is familiarity penalties, essentially a switching cost. The longer this remains the case, the less charitably I'm willing to view this.
You can also mitigate a lot of the "familiarity penalties" by planning ahead. For example, by the time I made the decision to switch from Windows around 15 years ago, I'd already been preferring multi-platform FOSS software for many years because I had in mind that I might switch one day. This meant that when it came time to switch, I was able to go through the list of all the software I was using and find that almost all of it was already available in Linux, leaving just a small handful of cases that I was able to easily find replacements for.
The result was that from day 1 of using Linux I never looked back.
Of course, MS seems to enjoy inflicting familiarity penalties on its established user base every couple of years anyway. After having your skills negated in this way enough times, the jump to Linux might not look so bad.
Not in my experience. I've run both Windows and Linux for the last decade and Windows is the only OS that I ever have problems with updates wasting my time and breaking things. I've been running image-based Linux for the last two years and the worst case is rebooting to rollback to the last deployment. Before that it was booting a different btrfs snapshot.
Fun aside: I had a hardware failure a few years ago on my old workstation where the first few sectors of every disk got erased. I had Linux up and running in 10 minutes. I just had to recreate the efi partition and regenerate a UKI after mounting my OS from a live USB. Didn't even miss a meeting I had 15 minutes later. I spent hours trying to recover my Windows install. I'm rather familiar with the (largely undocumented) Windows boot process but I just couldn't get it to boot after hours of work. I just gave up and reinstalled windows from scratch and recovered from a restic backup.
Windows has recently been a complete shitshow - so even if Linux hasn't gotten any better (it has) it is now likely better than fiddling around with unfucking Windows, and Windows doing things like deleting all your files.
You can put some work into windows to slim it down some, a unattended generator to turn most of the crap off on install, then Shutup OO goes a long way
Couple of nit picks with all these articles about trying Linux. They should explain words like "distro" before throwing them around. This one also uses "Debian" without explanation. If the audience really is Windows users these are going to be rather cryptic.
Linux is not good. Some hardware support is still reverse-engineering-based, or based on a few individuals best effort activity. Linux needs manufacturers' first hand commitment to quality opensource to be truly good.
Linux is not good. Some software is not on feature-parity among operating systems. With Linux being the software kingdom poor Cinderella. Linux needs software feature parity to be truly good.
Linux is not good. Because too much mainstream new PCs comes with some other operating system pre-installed (and paid for) even if you won't need it. Linux needs freedom of choice sing first PC power on, like a stub to download whatever OS you want (to pay for) or to boot from removable media for Linux to become truly good.
Linux is not good. Because there is still "stuff" that require some specific non-linux software running under some specific non-linux operating system to be made useful things. We need manufacturers to ditch this for linux to become truly good.
I am a happy user of Linux on my primary PC since 20+ years now. But I still have to fight for my freedom every now and again because of one or more of the above points.
Now let's jump back to gaming.
Linux is not good because game industry thinks proprietary platforms and operating systems are better for their business. There is only 1 platform fully supporting Linux and too few titles. Gaming Linux hardly hits 5% of the market share, basically the same as Desktop Linux. While Server Linux is beyond 75%.
I think reasons could be two-fold.
On one hand, Linux is not perceived by industry as attractive as other proprietary platforms. Maybe industry can squeeze much more money from the latter.
On the other hand, it could be that most of the development resources are NOT ORIENTED towards gaming and desktop, so these markets simply lag behind.
Of course, I could be totally wrong: these are my humble opinions with some facts backing them.
I switched all the machines at https://lanparty.house over to Linux a couple months ago. So far, we've experienced noticeably fewer problems on Linux compared to Windows. Stability and performance are better. I can't think of one game we tried that didn't work. And wow is it nice not to have all the ads and crapware in our faces anymore.
(I'm aware that Battlefield series and League of Legends won't work due to draconian anti-cheat -- but nobody in my group cares to play those I guess.)
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I used multi seat in Linux with SystemD, i just threw in some old grapchics cards and sound cards in my gaming PC so that the children could play on separate monitors while I worked. Multi seat is very cool. When upgrading to a new gaming PC it was much cheaper to build 4 separate machines because cpu's and motherboards with enough pcie lanes are very expensive. GPU's still run at decent performance with half the pcie lanes available, so if you already got a gaming PC with many slots and dont need top performance it could still be worth it to get two more cheap gpus and use multi seats - for those building a mini lan gaming room at home.
One annoying thing is that linux cant run many different GPU drivers at the same time, so you have to make sure the cards work with the same driver.
Properitary 3rd party multi seat also exist for Windows, but Linux has built in support and its free.
This is awesome!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiseat_configuration
I am super curious about your setup. I played with MS years ago, but I lost the need. It is a super cool tech that I'd love to see its efficiencies embraced in some way.
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On a similar note, performance is sometimes better. As a direct comparison, the steam version of the Lenovos Legion S handheld is significantly more performant than the windows version. Like 20% better FPS and double the battery life. Literally the only difference between the two is the OS.
Though from what I've read, Microsoft could fix that relatively quickly, if they made some tweaks to Windows (and called it a special 'handheld gaming edition' or so).
For some reason, the Lenovo Legion S's Windows still comes with a lot of baggage and background services etc.
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I might have to look into this for my ROG Ally X... it already runs pretty beastily but I'm never going to complain about better performance...
Edit: though, I'd have to give up my Fallout 4 with mods. (Don't judge me I know it sucks but it makes the dopamine go brrr)
It keeps surprising me how many people don't care about some of the most popular games today. I mean I don't care about Battlefield or League of Legends neither, but in earlier decades of PC gaming, almost everyone had some of the most popular games. Doom, Half-Life (1 + 2) and such.
The games market today seems more similar to music in its fragmentation.
Well yes.
The addressable consumer market is just a lot bigger and more diverse than it used to be. You go back to the early late 90s and its a market dominated by teenage boys. Go back and look at some of the 00s and early 10s E3 presenations from the big three and its very cringe inducing how focused they are on a teenage boy demographic and appearing edgy and how blatantly sexist they are in their language. For example, at the E3 conference where MS announced xbox live (2004?) they explictly said that girls don't play games (there were actually plenty of girls that did play games at that time), but they might want to use xbox live to design t-shirts to sell to boys on their online marketplace. This was also still the era of booth babes trying to pull in men to booths with barely dressed women. Nearly every game ad was just a wall of exposions and violence or just the latest NFL game.
Today you have fully grown adults in their 30-50s with very different tastes and you have a lot lot more women and girls playing.
On top of we have a lot of diversity in who creates games and the kinds of games they can create and still be commerically successful. Lots of interesting narratively focused games, puzzles games, platformers, and more artsy games. But if you want your multiplayer shooter battlefield and CS2 are still there for you.
There are simply too many games, and many genres are underserved by AAA studios.
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It's not surprising to me.
The reason some of the most popular games are popular isn't because they are fun, it's because they've built an esports industry. Those popular games get spectators which in turn makes the games more popular.
As an aside.. I went down a mini-rabbit hole learning about the LAN Party House, read your website and about Sandstorm[0] and how that ended up with you at Cloudflare leading Workers. That’s a really cool and honestly inspirational path. Would love to learn more if you’ve written elsewhere…!
[0] https://sandstorm.io/news/
I was also impressed by his wife's Chez JJ work. I suspect that she has done much more impressive stuff, but that kind of thing is a dime a dozen, in SV. The hacker housing stuff speaks to her humanity, and I like humans.
I've been down this rabbit hole too. I quite enjoyed Kenton's two episodes on SE Daily:
https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2017/12/18/protocol-buf...
https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2018/02/06/serverless-a...
"And wow is it nice not to have all the ads and crapware in our faces anymore."
I don't understand this - and I'm not being a Windows defender here, I use Linux when I can (and promote its use).
But my Windows 11 installation has zero ads and zero "crapware". And it's a Dell!
Everything that I didn't want on the machine was removed when I purchased it (two years ago). I see no ads. If I did, this can be fixed easily by even non-technical users with OOShutUp10 or similar - or just edited with a registry change.
I've been using Windows since 3.1 and there were some ugly years but that is not the current state-of-the-state. I'm just calling it like I see it at this point.
The real problem is with trust and encroachment. I think a lot of people that spend a fair amount of time on their computers start to feel like their OS is their home and they go on excursions through apps. Previously, ads were limited to apps you had to go to yourself. Ads showing up as wallpaper in your house would be unsettling, and it reveals that your homeownership was illusory from the start: you never really controlled anything.
Yes, you can use cleanup software to fix the symptoms, but that's not the real issue here.
Edit: further research revealed my original first point was a false assumption.
We must be using different Windows 11 then. Last I booted up Windows instead of shoving Cortana everywhere now it's shoving Copilot. The telemetry sent would make spyware jealous.
The "current" state does not matter. What matters is that MS can shittify your experience at any time. Your machine can stop working if you don't agree to MS "updates". On Linux you have the assurance that the state of your machine can be preserved and you know exactly what's being installed on it.
The UI is full of Bing and Copilot tie-ins that I consider to be essentially ads. Recommended content in the start menu. The weather widget that shows you news headlines. The lock-screen-of-the-day with the text description that if you accidentally click on it, you open some Bing page. The Edge default home page. Everything is trying to push me towards engaging with Microsoft's online services, which I have never used and have no desire to use. These are ads.
It's probably the case that I could turn all of these off by hunting down the right config options, and if I used Windows as my primary desktop I'm sure I would. But it's just on my game machines which I don't want to spend a lot of time maintaining, and new crap keeps popping up in updates. It's exhausting.
A Debian Linux desktop, in comparison, is not trying to push you to anything. It's a breath of fresh air (not a term I use often but really fits here).
Note: I never made it to Windows 11, only Windows 10. But my understanding is that these things are getting worse, not better. And while not exactly the same thing, there has been a lot of talk lately about how the file explorer has become so bloated and slow that they have to preload it into memory at startup so that it can respond quickly when you click it... omg, I do not want that.
> But my Windows 11 installation has zero ads
I did a clean Windows 11 install a few months ago. I expected to be bombarded with ads and all of the other things I kept reading about in comments here, but it’s been fine.
I do find it interesting that so many of the comments about how bad Windows 11 is are coming from comments that also admit they aren’t using Windows 11. Not everything in Windows 11 is my favorite design choice, but the anti Windows 11 comments have taken on a life of their own that isn’t always based in reality.
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You can turn them off, but the start menu definitely shows you "recommended" content by default.
I see not being able to install invasive kernel level anti-cheat as a positive. I uninstalled all Riot games before they rolled it out. I would’ve been pretty miffed if I had accidentally gotten their kernel modules simply because I wasn’t reading tech news before the auto update.
Did you ever get those local SSDs as copy-on-write overlays on Linux? I imagine it'd be easier with btrfs support for seeding device: https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Seeding-device.html
Yes, on Linux I was able to move the copy-on-write overlays to use local disks, which is one reason it performs much better (admittedly not a reason that would affect most people).
I am just using dm-snapshot for this -- block device level, no fancy filesystems.
Yep, I've been gaming exclusively on Ubuntu (mainly because I want my desktop to match my servers) for several years. If you aren't playing the latest AAA FPS, then everything pretty much works.
I’ve used Ubuntu since 7.04 and recently jumped from Ubuntu to Debian. It feels more like home than ever before.
All the things you’re used to without the corporate “sugarcoating”.
How much work is it to get snaps out of your way? Canonical seems to be going all in on them as their business strategy.
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I recently heard that Star Citizen of all things, still in eternal development hell, runs really well on Linux.
Also, amazing house, my friend is enamored of the cat-transit. I used to live not too far from you :)
cat-transit
You cannot say such things without more info. I envision cats sitting on small trollies.
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Hey man can I be your friend? That is a super sick setup and I love how you've done it!
The only game I tried on Steam that didn't work was Slave Zero, a game from the 90s. Unfortunately, I still have to use Windows for VR games. It is too troublesome on Linux (at least for the Meta Quest 2).
VR on Linux is probably going to be the main reason the Steam Frame is going to be a day one pre-order for me
league of legends is basically the only thing holding me back from switching to Linux for myself :/ really want to just swap over to linux fully. love your website + house!
Some would consider not being able to play that game a feature!
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Moved everything over a few months ago, and I still have a game or two that requires Windows... but so far dual-booting has been more than enough.
In some ways, the minor barrier is almost beneficial, in terms of clearly separating work-time and play-time.
Great excuse to start learning DOTA. You won't regret it (until a few thousand hours of gameplay later you realise how much of your life you wasted on it).
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I'm sorry if you hear this a lot, but your house is so cool, and I must admit I am more than a little jealous.
I've also said it here before but I will just give up on PC gaming wholesale before I go back to Windows. It's crazy how much gaming on Linux has improved in just the past couple years.
> I'm aware that Battlefield series and League of Legends won't work
I consider this a feature, not a bug
Battlefield 4's anticheat runs fine on Linux, if you end up needing one. It definitely slakes my BF fix, in the same way Deadlock is filling the LoL-shaped hole in my contemptible subsistence.
Does this mean the GitHub repo linked with the scripts now include up to date linux versions? Last time I looked it was all windows specific, but I'd love to setup something similar with stations for (much lower power) versions.
Sorry, I haven't gotten around to updating it yet, although it basically works to follow the same instructions except replace Windows with Linux and skip all the workarounds for Windows-specific bugs.
> (I'm aware that Battlefield series and League of Legends won't work due to draconian anti-cheat -- but nobody in my group cares to play those I guess.)
As I've said elsewhere, Battlefield 6 has got a far better user experience on Linux than Windows and I would recommend it to anyone.
what stability and performance? yeah, i dont see bsds but bluetooth doesnt work and it doesnt wake up after sleep 85 percent of the time. kind of crap really
Bluetooth is admittedly less snappy than on Mac or Windows, although it absolutely does work. As for wake after sleep, I've not had a single issue in five years of daily driving Linux. No idea what you're talking about.
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What distro?
Debian... mostly just because it's what I'm most familiar with. I don't have strong opinions on distros.
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Your house sounds like a great place to hold a fighting game local tournament (or something like the old Smash Summit series for Smash Bros Melee and Ultimate before Beyond The Summit shut down)
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I think its interesting that mainstream PC gaming press is now talking about Linux. We have the benchmark Youtube channels doing some benchmarks of it as well and plenty of reports of "it just works", which is pretty promising at least for the games that aren't intentionally excluded by DRM. For me its still controllers and equipment incompatibility due to my VR headset and sim wheel/pedals setup, I use Linux everywhere else in my router and home servers. I just hope that Nvidia notices that there does appear to be a swing happening and improves their driver situation.
The last remaining roadblock is kernel level anti-cheat frameworks.
Pretty horrible technology, and unfortunately a good majority of the gaming industry by revenue relies on it.
And native GNU/Linux games instead of depending on Windows.
I'd say there are two remaining roadblocks. First and biggest is kernel level anti-cheat frameworks as you point out. But there's also no open source HDMI 2.1 implementation allowed by the HDMI cartel so people like me with an AMD card max out at 4K60 even for open source games like Visual Pinball (unless you count an adapter with hacked firmware between the card and the display). NVidia and Intel get away with it because they implement the functionality in their closed source blobs.
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Competent cheat makers don't have much difficulty in defeating in-kernel anticheats on Windows. With the amount of insight and control available on Linux anticheat makers stand little chance.
The best Valve could do is offer a special locked down kernel with perhaps some anticheat capabilities and lock down the hardware with attestation. If they offer the sources and do verified builds it might even be accepted by some.
Doubt it would be popular or even successful on non-Valve machines. But I'm not an online gamer and couldn't care less about anticheats.
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You don't have to play these specific games though. I mean, what's your privacy, what's not being bombarded by ads in your OS worth to you? Have you taken an honest thought about this?
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Isn't it a more fundamental problem? I can imagine a cheating setup where you have a separate PC with a HDMI capture stick ("analog hole") and access to the controllers.
But is that really a roadblock?
First, let's ask ourselves how many PCs have users play games with anti-cheat frameworks. I'm absolutely no expert, but if it's more than, what? 10%? let's even say 20% - I'd be surprised.
> and unfortunately a good majority of the gaming industry by revenue relies on it.
Well, it used to be the case that game makers relied on copy protection in floppy discs, and movie distributors on DVD/BluRay copy protection. Conditions changed and they adapted.
I always wondered. Isn't exactly what eBPF would allow you to do?
Assuming that cheats work by reading (and modifying) the memory of the game process you can you can attach a kprobe to the sys_ptrace system call. Every time any process uses it, your eBPF program triggers. You can then capture the PID and UID of the requester and compare it against a whitelist (eg only the game engine can mess with the memory of that process). If the requester is unauthorized, the eBPF program can even override the return value to deny access before the kernel finishes the request.
Of course there are other attack vectors (like spoofing PID/process name), but eBPF covers them also.
All of this to say that Linux already has sane primitives to allow that, but that, as long as devs don't prioritize Linux, we won't see this happening.
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The Linux kernel has eBPF now so if they wanted to start spying on everything you do they can just do it.
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I am wondering can game be shipped with their own "kernel" and "hypervisor", basically an entire VM. Yes performance will take a hit, but in my experience with my own VM, it's like 15-20%.
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Another unresolved roadblock is Nvidia cards seriously underperforming in DX12 games under Proton compared to Windows. Implementing DX12 semantics on top of Vulkan runs into some nasty performance cliffs on their hardware, so Khronos is working on amending the Vulkan spec to smooth that over.
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Clearly, when there will be enough Linux gamers another solution to the kernel-level anti-cheat issue will be found. After all, the most played competitive shooter is CS and Valve has does not use kernel-level AC.
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Games being playable also rely on it.
Well, if you go by revenue, mobile gaming dwarfs all else.
I actually think it’s better to exclude the AAA games from Linux.
The Quest 3 works offline with ALVR streaming over a private (non-Internet connected) WiFi network. Together with my 3090 I get 8k @ 120fps with 20ms latency over a WiFi6e dongle. I had to manually install the dkms for the dongle on PopOs, but apart from that it just works. ALVR starts SteamVR and then I use Steam to start the game. Proton seems to use Vulcan for rendering.
Overall, I had a pretty bad experience with ALVR. I never managed to figure out the cause of stuttering on mine. I wished Meta would support Linux.
This is a big reason I’m excited for Steam Frame - high quality VR on the Linux desktop.
AND high quality Linux desktop on the VR :)
> I just hope that Nvidia notices that there does appear to be a swing happening and improves their driver situation.
I firmly believe that Nvidia doesn't want the general public to ever have better hardware than what is current as people could just run their own local models and take away from the ridiculous money they're making from data centers.
In step they're now renting their gaming GPUs to players with their GeForce now package.
The market share for Nvidia of gamers is a rounding error now against ai datacenter orders. I won't hold my breath about them revisiting their established drivers for Linux.
> I firmly believe that Nvidia doesn't want the general public to ever have better hardware than what is current as people could just run their own local models and take away from the ridiculous money they're making from data centers.
You're underestimating them. They don't even want rich professional users to own hardware that could compete with their datacenter cash cow.
Take RTX 6000 Pro, a $10k USD GPU. They say in their marketing materials that these have fifth-generation tensor cores. This is a lie, as you can't really use any 5th-gen specific features.
Take a look at their PTX docs[1]. The RTX 6000 Pro is sm_120 in that table, while their datacenter GPUs are sm_100/sm110. See the 'tcgen05' instructions in the table? It's called 'tcgen05' because it stands for "Tensor Core GEN 05". And they're all unsupported on sm_120.
[1] - https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/parallel-thread-execution/#rele...
I’ll keep repeating it: the more people vote with their wallet, the more game companies will deploy Linux - including the anticheat.
EAC has the support for Linux, you just have to enable it as a developer.
I know this, I worked on games that used this. EAC was used on Stadia (which was a debian box) for the division, because the server had to detect that EAC was actually running on the client.
I feel like I bring this up all the time here but people don’t believe me for some reason.
> EAC has the support for Linux
This does not mean it supports the full feature set as from EAC on Windows. As an analogy, it's like saying Microsoft Excel supports iPad. It's true, but without VBA support, there's not going to be many serious attempts to port more complicated spreadsheets to iPad.
I'm surprised to hear you are having trouble with wheels / pedals, we should be there already!
https://github.com/JacKeTUs/linux-steering-wheels
Hopefully vr headset support will get better
Funnily enough the most annoying things on my system at the moment is RGB and keyboard/mouse customisation.
I haven’t found a tool that can access all the extra settings of my Logitech mouse, not my Logitech speakers.
OpenRGB is amazing but I’m stuck on a version that constantly crashes; this should be fixed in the recent versions but nixpkgs doesn’t seem to have it (last I checked).
On the other hand I did manage to get SteamVR somewhat working with ALVR on the Quest 3, but performance wasn’t great or consistent at all from what I remember (RTX 3070, Wayland KDE).
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For VR support Monado works very well for me with both Pimax (base-station tracked) and WMR (inside-out tracked) headsets.
When that steam deck clone came out and games played better on SteamOS than on Windows on the exact same hardware, it woke a bunch of people up. Microsoft scrambled to bring the startup time and footprint down but shots had already been fired.
You don’t want a vendor you have to publically shame to get them to do the right thing. And that’s MS if any single sentence has ever described them without using curse words.
I've got the Legion Go S with Steam OS, and that shit is great. It's stable, my games run well, the OS is pretty much entirely in the background, but I can still access it fully if I need to. Love it.
Gaming now works better on Linux than it does on Windows. This must be upsetting for Microsoft, but it was their game to lose.
I dont get the feeling they care. Microsoft is so lost under Satya at this point. Totally blinded by Azure and AI and stock price growth. At some point they're going to realize all the ground they've lost and it's going to be a real problem. They're repeating a lot of the same mistakes that cost them the browser and mobile market.
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The irony is that gaming on linux got better but the instigator was not the OSS community. All of it was funded by closed source software competing with other close source software. The OSS community by itself did not have the conviction to climb over this bulwark.
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This still has a "sometimes" on it, there are more then a few games that need magic proton flags to run well, nothing you can't go look up on protondb, but lots of games you would want to play with friends might have some nasty anti-cheat on it that just won't let you play it at all.
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Gaming works fine with exception of things like BF6 that require kernel level anti cheat.
The one thing I haven’t been able to get working reliably is steam remote play with the Linux machine as host. Most games work fine, others will only capture black screens.
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Proton has gotten so good now that I don't even bother checking compatibility before buying games.
Granted, I don't play online games, so that might change things, but for years I used to have to make a concession that "yeah Windows is better for games...", but in the last couple years that simply has not been true. Games seem to run better on Linux than Windows, and I don't have to deal with a bunch of Microsoft advertising bullshit.
Hell, even the Microsoft Xbox One controllers work perfectly fine with xpad and the SteamOS/tenfoot interface recognizes it as an Xbox pad immediately, and this is with the official Microsoft Xbox dongle.
At this point, the only valid excuses to stay on Windows, in my opinion, are online games and Microsoft Office. I don't use Office since I've been on Unixey things so long that I've more or less just gotten used to its options, but I've been wholly unable to convince my parents to change.
I love my parents, but sometimes I want to kick their ass, because they can be a bit stuck in their ways; I am the one who is expected to fix their computer every time Windows decides to brick their computer, and they act like it's weird for me to ask them to install Linux. If I'm the one who has to perform unpaid maintenance on this I don't think it's weird for me to try and get them to use an operating system that has diagnostic tools that actually work.
As far as I can tell, the diagnostic and repair tools in Windows have never worked for any human in history, and they certainly have never worked for me. I don't see why anyone puts up with it when macOS and Linux have had tools that actually work for a very long time.
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My VR glasses work on Omarchy, to my surprise, I plugged them and they work. I have XReal, older model.
Aren't the XReals just displays in the glasses? If they work with other devices, it's no surprise linux can just use a display standard.
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(cue arrogance) People on HackerNews complaining about Linux Desktop is pretty disappointing. You guys are supposed to be the real enthusiasts... you can make it work.
(cue superiority complex) I've been using Linux Desktop for over 10 years. It's great for literally everything. Gaming admittedly is like 8/10 for compatibility, but I just use a VM with PCIe passthrough to pass in a gpu and to load up a game for windows or use CAD, etc. Seriously, ez.
Never had issues with NVIDIA GFX with any of the desktop cards. Laptops... sure they glitch out.
Originally Wine, then Proton, now Bazzite make it super easy to game natively. The only issues I ever had with games were from the Kernel level anti-cheats bundled. The anti-cheats just weren't available for Linux, so the games didn't start. Anyone familiar with those knows its not a linux thing, it's a publisher/anti-cheat mechanism thing. Just lazy devs really.
(cue opinionated anti-corporate ideology) I like to keep microsoft chained up in a VM where it belongs so can't do it's shady crap. Also with a VM you can do shared folders and clipboard. Super handy actually.
Weirdly enough, MacOS in a VM is a huge pita, and doesn't work well.
I have been working professionally on Linux for many years. But about once a year I have to reinstall the os because it craps out for various reasons. The same story goes for most of my team, but for some reason they seem ok with this. My issue with Linux is this: I don’t feel like a consumer, but a janitor. I don’t want this. Yes you can do whatever you want, but I don’t want to do those things. I want to write code and play games, not maintain the intricacies of a running computer.
For a server there is no better choice than Linux, but for my desktop/laptop, I find other alternatives better. Perhaps I haven’t found «the right distro», if so let me know, but until Linux is as low maintenance as windows or macos, it will be for those with an interest in doing that maintenance.
I realize I have a love-hate relationship with Linux. It is perfect, but flawed.
> I don’t feel like a consumer, but a janitor. I don’t want this.
I think it was Jorge Castro, the creator of Universal Blue, who called it the sysadmin culture. Most Linux distros are made by sysadmins for sysadmins, and you're expected to change and configure your system. I was a sysadmin myself for a long time. I used Slackware; switched from the 2.4 kernel to 2.6; tweaked CFLAGS on Gentoo; replaced SysV init with systemd; used PipeWire from the earliest versions - you name it, I did it.
Nowadays I use https://aeondesktop.github.io/ - an immutable system with Btrfs snapshots. Everything is installed from Flathub. The major roadblock is that much of the Linux world expects you to modify the system one way or another, so your mileage may vary. I replaced my printer because I did not wanted to install binary blobs from HP/Samsung.
> Perhaps I haven’t found «the right distro»
I’d look at immutable or image-based offerings, which aims at low or no maintenance: Aeon Desktop, Universal Blue, Endless OS. There are reviews on sites like LWN.net
I'm not trying to "challenge" your experience, it's your experience. But mine is completely different so I'll offer it for anyone who might be reading along...
I've been using Linux at work and at home every day for 15 years and I think in that whole time I've only ever had to reinstall the OS due to system issues once.
(I ran an Ubuntu system update on my laptop while on low battery, and it died. The APT database was irrevocably fucked afterwards. I'm not even sure it's fair to blame the OS for this, it was a dumb thing for me to do. I would also not be at all surprised if it's possible to fuck up a Windows installation in a similar manner).
Nowadays I run NixOS and yes that requires quite regular attention. But I've also used Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian extensively and all of them are just completely stable all the time.
(Only exception I can think of: Ubuntu used to have issues with /boot getting full which was a PITA).
I don't know what you are doing but I have my Arch Linux running since about 2013. I needed to intervene a few times, I think 4 times in total but the base installation in from 2013, now nearly 13 years ago.
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When I use Windows, I feel like a product, not a consumer. There's always macOS.
You mention the "right distro" but you did not mention what have you tried or with what you had problems with.
From my experience, some examples: for gentoo you are much more than a janitor - you must be everything all the time; for redhat based - you can get a major headache with some version upgrades; for arch (currently using, same install from 7 years) - update monthly and I had very few and minor issues
re: on feeling like a janitor
I tried running various Linux distros on my desktop some years ago and definitely agree on the crap-out experience and having to reinstall. Eventually settled on macOS and it's been okay.
The game changer for me has been Nix. It works on macOS. I have had coworkers use it on Ubuntu. I am soon planning to switch to NixOS.
People complain about the syntax but honestly AI gets you around that. You will still do janitorial work, but you mostly only need to do it once.
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LLMs have made it so much easier thankfully. The janitorial overhead was a nightmare pre-2024.
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I've been using Fedora and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on my laptop and desktop respectively. Both are going around a year, and I haven't had major issues with them.
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What? I have been using Linux daily for almost 20 years. I have typically only installed the OS fresh once each time. I've been using Fedora as my daily driver for well over a decade. I can't remember having to re-install a distro unless I was switching distros. My current system was installed in 2019, Fedora 30. Over a dozen painless upgrades, the last several of which have had Steam flatpak installed with no breakages.
Fully open source drivers using AMD video cards. It just works (minus the early x11/wayland debacle, I had to switch back to x11 for a while).
> it craps out for various reasons.
What does that even mean though? Under what circumstances? In what way?
> working professionally on Linux for many years.
Not enough to say which distribution... or do you mean you do kernel development work?
I agree that it’s not quite grandma-safe but I’d like to know which distros you’re using that can’t even last a year.
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> janitor
Perfect analogy. I'm using Debian for a few months now on my main laptop, and everything is flawed. Seriously, everything.
- Hybrid graphics simply doesn't work. The exception is when it works. Don't even try Wayland with it.
- Graphics card handling is still full with race conditions. It's random when everything works as intended without manual intervention.
- Switching monitors is pain. Sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. Waking up my laptop with a new monitor plugged in is a gamble.
- Energy efficiency was bad with hybrid graphics, but since I had to turn it off, I don't even try to optimize it since.
- It was a pain to make my laptop speakers work. A lot of searching, and applying random fixes until one worked (in reality two fixes together).
- My main bluetooth headset has a feature to mute itself, or stop the music when it's not on my head. Guess which is the only device which I have that have a problem with this? The funny thing is, that it's a random even again. The sound comes back about 10% of the time fully. In another 10% of the time, the sound from some apps comes back, in others doesn't. In the other 80%, I had to reconnect it.
- Don't even talk about printers. It's a gamble, again. Some printers worked at some point in time, some simply don't work, and never will, because nobody cares about them anymore enough.
- Game performance is simply worse than on Windows. First of all, it wasn't trivial to force some games to use my GPU when I had hybrid graphics. The internet is full with outdated information. But even after that, my FPS is consistently worse. I heard some others who have the opposite experience. But this tells me again, that the whole thing is a gamble. Probably it's also a gamble on the game.
- When I press the power off button to put it to sleep, or initiate a normal shutdown, I need to force shutdown the whole laptop. Sometimes I get a notification that text editor is preventing shutdown, and whether I want to force quit it, but it doesn't matter which I clicked, and the "it will be force quit in 60 seconds if I don't select something" is a lie, the whole X framework is killed after a few seconds, and the laptop remains powered on, with the lie "the computer will be shutdown now" in terminal. This happens even when I don't get notification about that something would prevent power off. The shutdown initiation from the OS menu is working, and closing the lid put it to sleep.
And this is my current laptop. I simply couldn't use my previous one with Linux, because some stupid problem with the video card, which I couldn't solve in months. Even installation was a challenge.
I've used Linux in the past 25 years from time to time. It's getting better, but still a long way. You need some janitorial work also with Windows, especially nowadays, but it's still way better experience to click on "leave me alone" once a month, than this constant tinkering, and daily annoyance. I want to build things, not fix things which should just work.
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Big fan of Linux. Use various distros daily.
That said, tech folk routinely underestimate how much they rely on their own technical skill. Try using Linux for a week without ever opening a terminal. Terminal is a "f this I'm going back to Windows" button for most people.
I've observed that most "enthusiasts" are really just brand ambassadors. They've been captured by some proprietary software that doesn't run on Linux, and that's the problem of Linux. The day their set of products runs perfectly on Linux is the day Linux will be ready for them.
I think that if affinity chooses to make it work well on linux that would be a game changer for a lot of people. daVinci resolve works on linux for video so having a proper photo editor/illustrator tool that is not gimp would open up the option for most people to daily drive it. that's really the missing piece.
> I've observed that most "enthusiasts" are really just brand ambassadors.
Well said, and in the tech community that's predominantly Apple. We need to change this.
I mean, yes. That's how people work: They don't care about the OS for itself, the OS is a means to run the software they want to run, and it'll be ready when it runs that software.
(I'm typing this on my Linux desktop right now... but also have a separate Windows PC for running the games I want to run that don't work on Linux yet. When they work, I'll be thrilled to put Linux on that machine or its successor.)
> Originally Wine, then Proton, now Bazzite make it super easy to game natively.
For many people, this is called "barely working at all." And as I get older I am becoming one of those people so quickly.
I agree, this is why I also consider Windows barely working, I had to install 7 then 8 then 10 then 11 what's next? It should just turn on and work stop changing it around and making me install different random crap to get it working.
>but I just use a VM with PCIe passthrough to pass in a gpu and to load up a game for windows
Many games refuse to run in VM, even if that VM is windows one. I bet there is a trick to bypass, but then you are at risk of being banned or can't receive support when needed.
> Weirdly enough, MacOS in a VM is a huge pit
That isn't weird. It's by design. MacOS is only designed to run on Apple hardware, and a VM, even if the host is Apple hardware isn't really Apple hardware.
(cue nitpicking) Can Okular sign a damn pdf with a pfx certificate yet or do I still need a PhD to set that up? MS office has an online version now but it is arguably very ass and Libreoffice is not even worth a mention, using it feels like time travelling twenty years back.
Linux would be the desktop of choice years ago if anything from Adobe or Office actually worked on it, the two things that make the world go round. Valve has done their part to develop Proton, but there is no equal push for things people can't do work without.
Try OnlyOffice. It is more polished than Libreoffice and can sign pdfs.
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Steve Burke from GamersNexus tested eight games from their benchmark suite on Linux last month. Although his conclusion was generally positive, there were problems with nearly every game:
- F1 2024 didn't load due to anti-cheat
- Dragon's Dogma 2 and Resident Evil 4 had non-functional raytracing
- Cyberpunk 2077 with raytracing on consistently crashes when reloading a save game
- Dying Light 2 occasionally freezes for a whole minute
- Starfield takes 25 minutes to compile shaders on first run, and framerates for Nvidia are halved compared to Windows
- Black Myth: Wukong judders badly on Nvidia cards
- Baldur's Gate 3 Linux build is a slideshow on Nvidia cards, and the Windows build fails for some AMD cards
If you research these games in discussion forums, you can find some configuration tweaks which might fix the issues. ProtonDB's rating is not a perfect indicator (BM:W is rated "platinum").
And while Steve says measurements from Linux and Windows are not directly comparable, I did so anyway and saw that Linux suffers a 10-30% drop in average FPS across the board when compared to Windows, depending on the game and video card.
AFAIK this comes down a lot to NVIDIA not doing enough efforts for the Linux drivers. There is a pretty well documented and understood reason for the perf hit NVIDIA GPUs get on Linux.
Honestly, considering where we came from, a 10-30% perf drop is good and is a reasonable tradeoff to consider. Especially for all the people that don't want to touch Windows 11 with a 11-foot pole (which I am), it's a more than decent path. I can reboot into my unsupported Win10 install if I really need the frames.
Really, Linux benchmarks need to be split between AMD and NVIDIA. Both are useful, as the "just buy an amd card lol" crowd is ignoring the actually large NVIDIA install base, and it's not like I'm gonna swap out my RTX 3090 to go Linux.
Thanks for the comparison! Would you have an apples to apples, or rather an NVIDIA to NVIDIA comparison instead of "across the board"? I'd suspect the numbers are worse for the pure NVIDIA comparison, for what I mentioned above.
>a 10-30% perf drop is good and is a reasonable tradeoff to consider
You are either trolling or completely out of your mind. You simply cannot be serious when saying stuff like this.
To each their own, but Windows 11 runs flawlessly on my machine with high-end specs and a 240 Hz monitor.
The Start menu works great with no lag, even immediately after booting.
The only thing that I consider annoying would be the 'Setup' screens that sometimes show up after bigger updates.
---
Would I trade it all to get on Bazzite DX:
- lower game compatibility and potential bugs
- subpar NVIDIA drivers with the risk of performance degradation
- restricted development in dev containers relying on VS Code Remote
- Loss of the Backblaze Unlimited plan
+ system rollbacks if an update fails
---
That does not seem worth it to me.
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> Baldur's Gate 3 Linux build is a slideshow on Nvidia cards
I played Baldur's Gate 3 on Linux on a GeForce GTX 1060 (which is almost 10 years old!) without a fan (I found later that it was broken) and I generally did not have issues (couple of times in the whole game slowed for couple of seconds, but nothing major).
The key word was Linux build. There's now an official Linux version so that BG3 runs better on Steam Deck. Everyone else should keep using Proton to run it like they've done this far.
Which applies to all the games, basically. I nowadays make sure to select Proton before even running the game for the first time, in case it has a Linux build -- that will invariably be the buggier experience so want to avoid it.
Thats the whole problem. No consistency. Some configurations work, others not - eventhough they should be way more capable.
That's not even limited to linux or gaming. A few weeks ago i tried to apply the latest Windows update to my 2018 lenovo thinkpad. It complained about insufficient space (had 20GB free). I then used a usb as swap (required by windows) and tried to install the update. Gave up after 1 hour without progress...
Hardware+OS really seems unfixable in some cases. I'm 100% getting a macbook next time. At least with Apple I can schedule a support appointment.
It's a CPU bound game
> Baldur's Gate 3 Linux build is a slideshow on Nvidia cards
Not at all my experience which makes me question the rest. Also https://www.protondb.com/app/1086940 most people seem quite happy with it so it's not a "me" problem.
Finally the "10-30% drop in average FPS across the board" might be correct, then so what? I understand a LOT of gamers want to have "the best" performance for what they paid good money for but pretty much NO game becomes less fun with even a 30% FPS drop, you just adjust the settings and go play. I think a lot of gamers do get confused and consider maximizing performances itself as a game. It might be fun, and that's 100% OK, but it's also NOT what playing an actual game is about.
> pretty much NO game becomes less fun with even a 30% FPS drop
I mostly play fighting games. A 7% drop in FPS is more than enough to break the whole game experience as combo rely on frame data. For example Street Fighter 6 is locked at 60 fps. A low punch needs 4 frames to launch and leaves a 4-frames window to land another hit. If there was a 7% drop in FPS, you would miss your combo. Even the tiniest drop in FPS makes the game unplayable.
It's the same for almost every fighting games. I know it's a niche genre, but I'm quite sure it's the same for other genres. It's a complete dealbreaker for competitive play.
Those are mostly reports for the Windows build of Baldur's Gate 3, running through Proton/Wine. He's talking about the newer Linux native build of the game from 3 months ago.
There's a few reports there for the native version of the game: https://www.protondb.com/app/1086940#9GT638Fuyx , with similar Nvidia GPU issues and a fix.
You're talking about the Proton version, parent was talking about the Linux native build that is optimized for Steam Deck.
I've been using Linux on all PC's for a long time.
Experience is slowly getting better. There is nothing I haven't been able to get to work, but with tricks or adjustments.
I think the "best bonus" is using LLM's in deep research mode to wade through all the blog post, reddit posts etc to get something to work by discovering forementioned tricks. Before, you had to do that by yourself and it sucked. Now I get 3 good ideas from Claude in "ranking order" of how likely it is to make it work => 99% of games I get to run in 5 minutes with a shell command or two. Lutris is also pretty good.
Omarchy on my laptop has finally made computers fun for me again, it's so great and nostalgic. Happy to be back after my brief work-mandated adventure into MacOS.
I'm tired of people saying Steam on Linux just works. It doesn't.
Tried running Worms: instant crash, no error message.
Tried running Among Us: instant crash, had to add cryptic arguments to the command line to get it to run.
Tried running Parkitect: crashes after 5 minutes.
These three games are extremely simple, graphically speaking. They don't use any complicated anti-cheat measure. This shouldn't be complicated, yet it is.
Oh and I'm using Arch (BTW), the exact distro SteamOS is based on.
And of course, as always, those for which it works will tell you you're doing-it-wrong™ .
These games are all rated gold or platinum on protondb, indicating that they work perfectly for most people.
Hard to say what might be going wrong for you without more details. I would guess there's something wrong with your video driver. Maybe you have an nvidia card and the OS has installed the nouveau drivers by default? Installing the nvidia first-party drivers (downloaded from the nvidia web site) will fix a lot of things. This is indeed a sore spot for Linux gaming, though to be fair graphics driver problems are not exactly unheard of on Windows either.
Personally I have a bunch of machines dedicated to gaming in my house (https://lanparty.house) which have proven to be much more stable running Linux than they were with Windows. I think this is because the particular NIC in these machines just has terrible Windows drivers, but decent Linux drivers (and I am netbooting, so network driver stability is pretty critical to the whole system).
> Installing the nvidia first-party drivers (downloaded from the nvidia web site) will fix a lot of things
Interesting. I saw somewhere else you're using Debian. Is it as opposed from Nouveau or the proprietary drivers from the Debian repos?
I'm currently testing to daily drive my desktop with linux on an NVIDIA GPU, and the Arch wiki explicitly recommends drivers from their repos. However, arch is rolling and the repo drivers are supposedly much more up to date than Debian's ones. Though, I'll keep your comment if I run into anything.
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> Personally I have a bunch of machines dedicated to gaming in my house (https://lanparty.house)
Woah, that is extremely cool. Very nice work, sir.
> Installing the nvidia first-party drivers (downloaded from the nvidia web site) will fix a lot of things.
Crazy—it used to be that nvidia drivers were by far the least stable parts of an install, and nouveau was a giant leap forward. Good to know their software reputation has improved somewhat
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I imagine the people saying “it just works” are saying it because it does, at least for them.
SteamOS is based on Arch, but customized and aimed at specific hardware configurations. It’d be interesting to know what hardware you’re using and if any of your components are not well supported.
FWIW, I’ve used Steam on Linux (mostly PopOS until this year, then Bazzite) for years and years without many problems. ISTR having to do something to make Quake III work a few years ago, but it ran fine after and I’ve recently reinstalled it and didn’t have to fuss with anything.
Granted, I don’t run a huge variety of games, but I’ve finished several or played for many hours without crashes, etc.
I use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, and I've never had trouble running a game that's rated gold or above. I've even gotten an Easy AntiCheat game to work correctly.
I've been gaming on linux exclusively for about 8 years now and have had very few issues running windows games. Sometimes the windows version, run through proton, runs better than the native port. I don't tend to be playing AAA games right after launch day, though. So it could be taste is affecting my experience.
I just bought another second Dell workstation (admit I hated those) and can’t wait to install SteamOS when it is released to the public. I don’t care about AAA gaming but the integrated card should be able to handle most of the games from ten years ago.
As an Arch (btw) user myself, yes, you're doing something wrong.
Arch won't hold your hands to ensure everything required is installed, because many dependencies are either optional (you have to read the pacman logs) or just hidden (because it's in the game itself). Valve actually does a great job providing a "works everywhere" runtime as their games are distributed in a flatpak-like fashion, but things can seep through the cracks.
The compositor can have an effect. The desktop settings. The GPU drivers. What's installed as far as e.g. fonts go. RAM setup, with or without swap.
As for steamOS, the real difference, is that despite being Arch-based, you're not installing Arch, but steamOS. A pre-packaged pre-configured Arch linux, with a set of opinionated software and its set of pre-made config files, for a small set of (1) devices. It's not really Arch you're installing, but a full-blow distro that happens to be arch-based.
That said, I understand your frustration as I've hit this many times on a laptop with dual graphics. Getting PRIME to run with the very first drivers that supported it was fun. Oh and I'm likely to hit the same walls as you since I just switched my gaming rig to Arch. GLHF!
> And of course, as always, those for which it works will tell you you're doing-it-wrong™ .
This sounds like you are rejecting help because you have made up your mind in frustration already.
Because you are doing it wrong. If you want an OS that just works, you should use Ubuntu or Fedora. Why is SteamOS based on Arch then? Because Valve wants to tweak things in it and tinker with it themselves to get it how they like.
You don't.
So use an OS that requires less from you and that tries to just work out of the box, not one that is notorious for being something you break and tinker with constantly (Arch).
I've been using Arch for 15 years, it's not like I'm suddenly discovering the concept of the distro.
But when something crashes with no error message whatsoever, it makes it a tiny bit harder to troubleshoot.
Especially when so many people answer, just like I had predicted, "works on my machine". Which would only be a gotcha if I had implied it worked on no machine whatsoever. Which I didn't.
I'll tinker some more and I'll be sure to post my findings if I get these games to work.
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Ubuntu is based on Debian Sid which is considered as the least stable release in Debian community.
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I am using Arch and all the games I played on Steam (at least 20, not the ones mentioned above) worked perfectly.
One thing that I do though is get most games at least one year after release, when probably many issues are fixed. I had tons of issues many years ago, with buggy games bought immediately after release (on Windows back then), so now I changed strategy...
I don't have your other games, but I do have a few Worms games and they worked out of the box for me with GE Proton on NixOS.
I'm not saying "you're doing it wrong", because obviously if you're having trouble then that is, if nothing else, bad UX design, but I actually am kind of curious as to what you're doing different than me. I have an extremely vanilla NixOS setup that boots into GameScope + Tenfoot and I drive everything with a gamepad and it works about as easily as a console does for me.
If anything this is the challenge with PC as a platform being so varied, any random software/hardware/config variation could bring a whole load of quirks.
That probably includes anything that isn't a PC in a time-capsule from when the game originally released, so any OS/driver changes since then, and I don't think we've reached the point where we can emulate specific hardware models to plug into a VM. One of the reasons the geforce/radeon drivers (eg, the geforce "game ready" branding) are so big is that they carry a whole catalogue of quirk workarounds for when the game renderer is coded badly or to make it a better fit to hardware and lets them advertise +15% performance in a new version. Part of the work for wine/proton/dxvk is going to be replicating that instead of a blunt translation strictly to the standards.
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Arch is nice if you want to tinker. Based on your reasoning, I wouldn't recommend it. But if you still want arch-based, I would recommend EndevourOS, and for even a simpler/better distro, Bazzite.
Split the difference, Fedora. its cutting edge but not in a way that can lead you to make mistakes like arch (BTW).
Its still open to customizing but out of the box is very damn usable and flexible.
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some people want machines that do everything but don't want to do everything to maintain them or even set them up
You are definitely doing it wrong, I rarely have issues and when I do I just switch comparability tools. I play multiple indie games, marvel rivals, I played lots of among us on my machine in 2020. Running Pop OS
I use EndeavourOS, I just installed Worms and Among Us and they are playing right out of the box for me.
Well, but many games just work. Actually, I try starting the games without any tweaks before heading over to protondb.com, and often they run just fine.
But it is also true that many games still require minor tweaks. For example, just last week, I found out that I had to enable hardware acceleration for the webview within Steam, just to be able to log in to Halo Infinite. It was just clicking a checkbox, but otherwise, the game would not have been playable.
But I am always surprised when you find out you have those kinds of issues with Windows as well.
You can force a Proton version in the game settings. "Proton Experimental" almost always fixes any issue you may have.
Ironically, quite a few Linux-compatible games only work for me in compatibility mode.
Yeah, the same. I sometimes google "wine WoW issues" and every time there are recent threads, so I don't even try. Linux has the long way to become gamer platform.
> Worms, Among Us, Parkitect
All three games works perfectly well on both Steam OS and on my kid's PC running CachyOS without any intervention.
As other have said, it's usually driver or configuration issue, which is why I prefer using the prebuilt, pre-installed steam deck.
Don't use Arch unless you don't mind spending time troubleshooting and configuring.
The games don't fail to run because they are so "graphically powerful" they fail to run because you chose to set up your system without the necessary runtime.
There are people who make stripped-down versions of windows. Is it fair to say that because these releases exist that windows isn't "just works" either?
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I switched my desktop from macOS (10+ years) to Ubuntu 25 last year and I'm not going back. The latest release includes a Gnome update which fixed some remaining annoyances with high res monitors.
I'd say it pretty much "just works" except less popular apps are a bit more work to install. On occasion you have to compile apps from source, but it's usually relatively straightforward and on the upside you get the latest version :)
For anyone who is a developer professionally I'd say the pros outweigh the cons at this point for your work machine.
> The latest release includes a Gnome update which fixed some remaining annoyances with high res monitors.
Interesting, I've had to switch off from Gnome after the new release changed the choices for HiDPI fractional scaling. Now, for my display, they only support "perfect vision" and "legally blind" scaling options.
By default Gnome doesn’t let you choose any fractional scaling in the UI because it has some remaining TODOs on that front. So from the UI you choose 100% or 200%. But the code is there and it works if you just open a terminal and type a command to enable this “experimental” feature.
Now whether or not this feature should have remained experimental is a different debate. I personally find that similar to the fact that Gmail has labeled itself beta for many years.
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I switched in 1999. I've never really had any problems in all that time.
Although it was to BSDi then, and then FreeBSD and then OpenBSD for 5 years or so. I can't remember why I switched to Debian but I've been there ever since.
I'm sat here now playing Oxygen Not Included.
But what about laptops? I don’t use desktop machines anymore (last time was in 2012). Apple laptops are top notch. I use ubuntu as vm (headless) for software development tho
My HP ZBooks have been a dream. My current Studio G10 with an i9-13900 and 4070M has largely Just Worked™ with recent versions of both Fedora and Ubuntu.
HP releases firmware updates on LVFS for both the ZBook and its companion Thunderbolt 4 dock(!). They also got it Ubuntu certified, like most of their business laptops.
Best you can do is build a high end desktop at home and access it remotely with any laptop you desire. The laptop performance then becomes mostly irrelevant (even the OS is less relevant) and by using modern game streaming protocols you can actually get great image quality, low latency and 60+ fps. Though, optimizing it for low bandwidth is still a chore.
Have that desktop be reachable with SSH for all your CLI and sys admin needs, use sunshine/moonlight for the remote streaming and tailscale for securing and making sunshine globally available.
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I don't have an x86 laptop at the moment so sticking with Macbook for now. My assumption is Mac laptops still are far superior given M-series chips and OS that are tuned for battery efficiency. Would love to find out this is no longer the case.
Works well if the laptop has hardware designed to support Linux. Framework stuff is great, for instance.
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I did some investigation into this the other day. The short answer seems to be that if you like MacBooks, you aren't willing to accept a downgrade along any axis, and you really want to use Linux, your best bet today is an M2 machine. But you'll still be sacrificing a few hours of battery life, Touch ID support (likely unfixable), and a handful of hardware support edge cases. Apple made M3s and M4s harder to support, so Linux is still playing catch-up on getting those usable.
Beyond that, Lunar Lake chips are evidently really really good. The Dell XPS line in particular shows a lot of promise for becoming a strict upgrade or sidegrade to the M2 line within a few years, assuming the haptic touchpad works as well as claimed. In the meantime, I'm sure the XPS is still great if you can live with some compromises, and it even has official Linux support.
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>Apple laptops are top notch.
Not working with Linux is a function of Apple, not Linux. There is a crew who have wasted the last half decade trying to make Asahi Linux, a distro to run on ARM macbooks. The result is after all that time, getting an almost reasonably working OS on old hardware, Apple released the M4 and crippled the whole effort. There's been a lot of drama around the core team who have tried to cast blame, but it's clear they are frustrated by the fact that the OEM would rather Asahi didn't exist.
I can't personally consider a laptop which can't run linux "top notch." But I gave up on macbooks around 10 years ago. You can call me biased.
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I love Linux, it was all I ran for years. But, unfortunately, I needed the better hardware more and haven't been able to find a viable way back.
> On occasion you have to compile apps from source
That's fine for people on hn, but it instantly wipes out any chance of non technical users on Windows and Mac. It's a total deal breaker.
I use Nix (the package manager), works on pretty much any distro and has the largest package set of any package manager.
> The latest release includes a Gnome update which fixed some remaining annoyances with high res monitors.
Amazing that high dpi still doesn’t work. I tried to run linux on 4k in around 2016-2017 and the experience was so bad I gave up.
Again, I've had two 4k monitors on Linux for about ten years, and it has worked well the whole time. Back then I used "gnome tweak" to increase the size of widgets etc. Nowadays its built into mate, cinnamon, etc.
What issues? I’m running Mint on a 4k monitor and haven’t had any issues in years
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Did you start using Linux on the Mac hardware or on PC hardware? I have a late era Intel Macbook and was considering switching it to Ubuntu or Debian since it is getting kinda slow.
Not the OP, but I have a 2015 Macbook Pro and a desktop PC both running Linux. I love Fedora, so that's on the desktop, but I followed online recommendations to put Mint on the Macbook and it seems to run very well. However, I did need to install mbpfan (https://github.com/linux-on-mac/mbpfan) to get more sane power options and this package (https://github.com/patjak/facetimehd) to get the camera working. It runs better than Mac OS, but you'll need to really tweak some power settings to get it to the efficiency of the older Mac versions.
I switched to a new x86 machine. Running Linux on Mac just made things unnecessarily complicated and hurt performance. Im still open to using docker on Mac to run Linux containers but once you want a GUI life was simpler when I switched off.
This may be an unpopular opinion but I feel Bazzite (and immutable distros in general) is the future for the normal users. Yes I know, they take the freedom of messing with the system core but for most people this is fine. All they need is a device that works without any problems.
First time I switched to asus kernel from the generic one was magic - I know asus-linux exists and following the instructions probably would have ended up in a working system, but with bazzite I wrote only one command and everything worked. It still feels weird not to monkey around with package installations (and this was a dangerous path, usually ended up with more work for me) but this is a tradeoff I can live with. The software I used - luckily - already moved to Flatpak so everything was a breeze. Also the fact that I can switch to a working state with one keypress is a stress reliever.
I agree. Linux is good now - for the common user. I still can't see immutable distros can be used for all scenarios but for gaming/home use, this is a methodology I can easily recommend for my friends and family who only want a computer that works without messing with console.
I'm not against Wayland, but I think Wayland is currently not good for the Linux ecosystem. I've had lots of friends try Linux, and they've had issues with Discord global keyboard shortcuts not working, and window positions not restoring at application start, and lots of other small issues, which add up in the end. But once they switched to X11, they've all been very happy.
Yup. I fully understand that X11 is a shitshow under the hood, but it works and Wayland frequently does not work. Screen recording, window positions, various multi-monitor and calibration issues, ...
On my laptop I use to write blog posts, that never ever gets plugged into a second screen? Sure, Wayland's great. On a computer that I expect normal people to be able to use without dumb problems? Hell no!
Comparing X11 and Wayland isn’t even correct because for a functional desktop you need Xwayland anyway. X11 never went away, we piled more code on top and now we have an eternal transitionary period and two ways of doing things.
I think Wayland is good for more technical users. Going from i3 to sway or bspwm to river feels like essentially nothing has changed. On the other hand, Gnome X11 to Wayland might be a bigger shock.
Unfortunately, Wayland inherently can't be like Pipewire, which instantly solved basically 90% of audio issues on Linux through its compatibility with Pulseaudio, while having (in my experience) zero drawbacks. If someone could make the equivalent of Pipewire for X11, that'd be nice. Probably far-fetched though.
It can absolutely be like that. Global keyboard shortcuts not working is a deliberate design choice in Wayland (as is non-foreground apps not having access to the clipboard).
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"window positions not restoring at application start"
Well you see, you are actually just silly for wanting this or asking for this, because it's actually just a security flaw...or something. I will not elaborate further.
--geometry is an exploit that will end in your financial ruin. Spend your weekend figuring out which tiling manager and dbus commands will come close to approximating a replacement before giving up and realizing you can manually move windows for the rest of your life. Two plus two is five.
Thats not true. You are mistaking allowing the application itself to set window position, which obviously is a security flaw.
Spot on.
Which desktop environment do your friends use?
They started with Hyprland, GNOME or KDE Plasma. Most of them have ended up using Cinnamon, and the rest use XFCE.
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I'm a Windows/macOS developer, but I strongly feel that all national governments need to convert to Linux, for strategic sovereignty.
(My customer demographic is seniors & casual users).
Curious: do enterprises using Windows suffer through all the system-level ads and nagware? Or do they get a version that lets their employees actually focus on work instead of learning the many reasons they should consider switching back to Edge?
It’s all turned on by default even in Windows 11 Enterprise. You can turn everything off via AD Group Policy or your MDM but you have to go through the labyrinth of Windows policies and find them all. Thankfully you only have to do it once and then push it to all of your devices.
No nagware but, at least on the machines of my colleagues, an even worse enemy: Microsoft Defender with all the checkboxes ticked. Grinds the machine to an absolute halt for any development work - sometimes the responsible security department has mercy and gives exceptions for certain folders/processes, sometimes not.
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You _can_ curate the Enterprise edition a lot more with group policy/intune and remove all that stuff but my experience has been most corporate IT departments don’t care/don’t know how to do it, and MS will just randomly enable new things without asking the same as home editions and you have to keep an eye on it and go to disable them.
It’s super annoying!
Enterprise and ltsc have none of the nagware or tracking. Ai is still there though
Been working and playing on Linux for years, from 2D indie e.g. Baba is You to AAA e.g. Elden Ring, BG3, Expedition 33 to AAA VR e.g. Half-life: Alyx to VR indie e.g. Cubism and my experience has just been great.
It's MY system and I do whatever the heck I want, from play boring stuff to weird prototyping. I get no, like literally 0, anti-feature. I'm not "scared" that an update will limit my agency. I'm just zen and that is priceless.
Also, quite importantly, it works wonderfully with all my other devices and peripherals. I go from Bluetooh headsets easily, I switch monitors, video projectors, XR devices, CV camera inputs, I share files with KDE Connect, I receive SMS notification from my (deGoogled) Android phone, I reply from my desktop, I get notification when my SteamDeck is soon out of battery, etc. ALL my devices play nicely with each other.
So yes, Linux is good now. It's been for a while but it's been even better for the last few years.
Switched in, ooh i dunno, '98 or '99. Quality is about where it was then relatively speaking. Sure things have improved, mainly just systemd, and we got ACPI and later power management stuff for laptops.
Prior to that windows was better on laptops due to having the proprietary drivers or working ACPI. But it was pretty poor quality in terms of reliability, and the main problem of the included software being incredibly bare bones, combined with the experience of finding and installing software was so awful (especially if you've not got an unlimited credit card to pay for "big professional solutions").
Every time the year of the Linux desktop arrives, I'm baffled, since not much has changed on this end.
This is a strange statement for me, because I'd say that since '99 almost everything has changed. Maybe your definition of quality is a bit different than mine.
I tried to use Linux back in high school. I had a Pentium 4 computer which was pretty fast for its time. However, I had a dialip windows soft modem. You remember the driver situation. I had to boot to Windows to check my email.
Also, I was basically a child and had no idea what I was doing (I still don't but that's besides the point). Things have definitely gotten better.
I'm sorry, but no. I ran Slackware 96, Red Hat 4.2, Mandrake 5.0, a bunch of Ubuntus from 12.04 onward, and Fedora now. It is absolutely, qualitatively different now than it was at the turn of the century.
In the Red Hat 4.2 days, it was something that I was able to use because I was a giant nerd, but I'd never ever ever have recommended it to a normal person. By Ubuntu 12.04, 15 years later, it was good enough that I'd recommend it to someone who didn't do any gaming and didn't need to use any of the desktop apps that were still then semi-common. In 2026, it's fine for just about anyone unless you are playing particular (albeit very popular) games.
I made the move about a month ago to bazzite on my desktop with an nvidia graphics card. I still have my windows drive for when I need it but that's pretty rare. Bazzite isn't perfect but we've reached the point where the rough edges are less painful than the self sabotage microsoft has been inflicting on their users in recent versions of windows.
This is the key. It’s not that 2026 is the year of the Linux desktop, but rather 2026 is very much not the year of the Windows desktop.
Bazzite is rough in the way that all distributions are, but I imagine Windows 11 is rougher.
I tried bazzite but ended up on cachyos. The whole layered / immutable thing got a bit annoying. I'd rather just run snapshots and manage my packages more traditionally
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I think we've reached a point where Windows is about as rough as Linux. But the problem is still that people are familiar with Windows and have learned how to deal with the roughness; not so on Linux. And so long as Windows owns the business and education sectors, it will always have the benefit of that familiarity.
Long time Linux on the desktop user here. I don't feel Linux has become significantly better recently. It's more that Windows reached a new low that is just below the threshold for many. Also, Apple, what are you doing?
A large part of it is that for most people, the vast majority of their computer use is in a web browser. Even "standalone" programs are often just an Electron app so they don't even have to use their computer differently than they are used to. Yes Windows has gotten bad, and Linux no longer has some of the major issues people would frequently run into (e.g. hardware compability is largely a non-issue, audio just works, etc.), but I think it is mostly that things are just way more platform agnostic today.
I'd say it's both... In particular 6.16 seems to be a defining point in terms of stability and performance at least for me. My RX 9070XT is finally running with no issues since 6.16 that I've noticed in any of the admittedly few games I play.
Mesa, the kernel drivers and Proton have all seen a lot of growth this past year combined with a bunch of garbage decisions MS has doubled down on... not to mention, enough Linux users in tech combined with Valve/Steam's efforts have made it visible enough that even normies are considering giving Linux a try.
Recently switched to Linux Mint from Windows and it has not only been good. It has been cathartic. I enjoy computers again! I am self-hosting some services, what an absolute joy.
Same! I made a comment earlier that it's now very easy to navigate bash with guidance from ChatGPT.
For me like for many others anti-cheat support is what is still keeping me away. The vast majority of the games I play are incompatible because of this.
I think it will probably change at some point, but until then I just can't use it.
Linux desktop is amazing. Coming from Debian, I installed Windows and had to quickly purge it from my hardware! Super bloated, slow, constantly phoned some CC center, automatically connected to OneDrive, …
Debian is a breath of fresh air in comparison. Totally quiet and snappy.
Debian (stable) is great but I wouldn't use it for a gaming PC on modern hardware. The drivers included are just too old. Bazzite or Arch (DIY option) seem better options.
I don't game, but all my computers run Debian Stable, and my oldest child wastes considerable time gaming on Steam. I had to tweak one or two things for him early on, but it all seems to work fine.
People who don't use Debian misunderstand Stable. It's released every two years, and a subset of the software is kept up to date in Backports. For anything not included in Backports, its trivial to run Debian Testing or Unstable in a chroot on your Stable machine.
I moved to Debian Stable ~20 years ago because constant updates in other distros always screwed up CUPS printing (among other things). Curiously, I was using Ubuntu earlier this year and the same thing happened. Never going back.
Debian Stable gamer here, with modern hardware, having a great time.
> The drivers included are just too old.
This can usually be fixed by enabling Debian Backports. In some cases, it doesn't even need fixing, because userland drivers like Mesa can be included in the runtimes provided by Steam, Flatpak, etc.
Once set up, Debian is a very low-maintenance system that respects my time, and I love it for that.
No, it really isn't. I use Ubuntu daily and not a month passes without a serious issue that no normal user would be able to solve. Last week my desktop completely froze again (as it often does) and Linux broke a mounted NTFS partition when I shut off the power.
HDR still doesn't really work on Linux w/ nVidia GPUs.
1. 10bpp color depth is not supported on RGB monitors, which are the majority of LCD displays on the market. Concretely, ARGB2101010 and XRGB2101010 modes are not supported by current nVidia Linux drivers - the drivers only offer ABGR2101010 and XBGR2101010 (See: https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/blob/main/...).
2. Common browsers like Chrome and Firefox has no real support for HDR video playback on nVidia Linux drivers. The "HDR" option appears on YouTube, but no HDR color can be displayed with an nVidia GPU.
Also, video backgrounds in Google Meet on Chrome are broken with nVidia GPUs and Wayland. Ironically it works on Firefox. This has been broken for a few years and no fix is in sight.
The "HDR" toggle you get on Plasma or Mutter is hiding a ton of problems behind the scenes. If you only have 8bpp, even if you can find an app that somehow displays HDR colors on nVidia/Wayland - you'll see artifacts on color gradients.
I have Interstellar on 4K UltraHD Blu-ray that features HDR on the cover, Sony 4K Blu-ray player (UBP-X700) and a LG G4 OLED television. I also have an AVR (Denon AVR-S760H 7.2 Ch) connecting both the Blu-ray and a PC running Linux with a RTX 3060 12GB graphic card to the television. I've been meaning to compare HDR on Linux with the Blu-ray. I guess now better than never. I'll reply back to my post after I am done.
Try it with different monitors you have. The current nVidia Linux drivers only has BGR output for 10bpp, which works on TVs and OLEDs but not most LCDs monitors.
My monitors (InnoCN 27M2V and Cooler Master GP27U) require RGB input, which means it's limited to 8bpp even with HDR enabled on Wayland. There's another commentator below who uses a Dell monitor and manages to get BGR input working and full HDR in nVidia/Linux.
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Television HDR mode is set to FILMMAKER, OLED brightness 100%, Energy Saving Mode is off. Connected to AVR with HDMI cable that says 8K.
Display Configuration
TV is reporting HDR signal.
AVR is reporting...
I compared Interstellar 19s into Youtube video in three different ways on Linux and 2:07:26 on Blu-ray.
For Firefox 146.0.1 by default there is no HDR option on Youtube. 4K video clearly doesn't have HDR. I enabled HDR in firefox by going to about:config and setting the following to true: gfx.wayland.hdr, gfx.wayland.hdr.force-enabled, gfx.webrender.compositor.force-enabled. Color look completely washed out.
For Chromium 143.0.7499.169 HDR enabled by default. This looks like HDR.
I downloaded the HDR video from Youtube and played it using MPV v0.40.0-dirty with settings --vo=gpu-next --gpu-api=vulkan --gpu-context=waylandvk. Without these settings the video seems a little too bright like the Chromium playback. This was the best playback of the three on Linux.
On the Blu-ray the HDR is Dolby Vision according to both the TV and the AVR. The AVR is reporting...
...I looked into this and apparently Dolby Vision uses RGB tunneling for its high-bit-depth (12-bit) YCbCr 4:2:2 data. The Blu-ray looks like it has the same brightness range but the color of the explosion (2:07:26) seems richer compared to the best playback on Linux (19s).
I would say the colors over all look better on the Blu-ray.
I might be able to calibrate it better if the sRGB color setting worked in the display configuration. Also I think my brightness setting is too high compared to the Blu-ray. I'll play around with it more once the sRGB color setting is fixed.
*Edit: Sorry Hacker News has completely changed the format of my text.
I find that running HDR games in standalone steam gamescope works great for my OLED tv. Not perfect, but great.
nvidia
The way it's not meant to be played.
Right, it IS nvidia's fault at this point, but its still like what? 90% of the consumer GPU market.
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I don't think this is true. I can go into my display settings in kde plasma and enable HDR and configure the brightness. I have a nvidia blackwell card.
You can enable, yes. But (assuming you're on an LCD display and not an OLED), you're likely still on XRGB8888 - i.e. 8-bit per channel. Check `drm_info`.
Also, go to YouTube and play this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onVhbeY7nLM
Do it once on "HDR" on Linux, and then on Windows. The "HDR" in nVidia/Linux is fake.
The brightness you see on Plasma or Mutter is indeed related to the HDR support in the driver. But - it's not really useful for the most common HDR tasks at the moment.
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I quit gaming a year ago and no longer have a consumer OS installed on any machine. I can't imagine ever willingly going back after getting used to being able to set my machine up any way I want, and know it will work exactly as I've specified, and won't ever spy on me or monetize my data, and actually has an ecosystem for extending it in basically any way I can imagine, with no bloatware, an app ecosystem with no bundled spyware or adware, etc.
This is really shaping up to be the Century of Linux on the Desktop.
Adoption has really picked up since 1900.
Previous millennium adoption also really pales in comparison to current millennium. Let's hope it keeps going strong in the next millennium
Just recently started using the desktop machine (under my desk, as opposed to my laptop which sits on my desktop) and put NixOS on it, and found myself pleasantly surprised. There's certainly still some parts of NixOS that require some expertise and getting your head around its package model, but overall I was surprised at how idiotproof it was to install and use. I mostly play games on it with Steam, which also Just Works.
NixOS is really a profound experience, once you embrace it. I used Arch for ~3 years and ended up reinstalling it maybe 15 times on my desktop alone. Switched to NixOS and I've used the same installation for 3 years, synced with my laptop and server, switching from x11 to Wayland to KDE to GNOME then back again with no problem.
It doesn't feel real sometimes. My dotfiles are modularized, backed up in Github and versioned with UEFI rollback when I update. I might be using this for the rest of my life, now.
I also have the same Arch install from 2014 on my main hardware. Each replacement computer is nothing more then taking the old drive out, placing it into an USB enclosure, booting a USB live, setting up the partitions on the new drive, and _rsync_ the content from the old to the new, finalizing with registering the UEFI boot loader.
One just need to make sure that you use the proper _rsync_ command options to preserve hard links or files will be duplicated.
I've heard of people doing this and I'm really interested in this. Can you recommend a write up on this or further reading?
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As a counter point I had the same arch install from 2014 until 2024, when I switched to NixOS
And still, look at all the comments on the article bashing Linux because of compatibility, driver and hardware issues.
Still less than the number of people bashing windows.
[flagged]
Please avoid sneering and internet tropes on HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
After a few months of testing the waters, I just moved my gaming PC over to full-time Linux this weekend. Proton has really been revolutionary, as I haven't yet encountered something in my Steam library that won't work.
It is good, and for 99+% of use cases for 90+% of users (who mostly use nothing but the browser), they will hardly even notice a difference, besides the lack of obnoxious, instrusive MS behavior.
However, despite really, really wanting to switch (and having it installed on my laptop), I keep finding things that don't quite work right that are preventing me from switching some of my machines. My living room PC, which is what my TV is connected to, the DVR software that runs my TV tuner card doesn't quite work right (despite having a native linux installer), and I couldn't get channels to come through as clearly and as easily. I spent a couple of hours of troubleshooting and gave up.
My work PC needs to have the Dropbox app (which has a linux installer), but it also needs the "online-only" functionality so that I can see and browse the entire (very large) dropbox directory without needing to have it all stored locally. This has been a feature that has been being requested on the linux version of the app for years, and dropbox appears unlikely to add it anytime soon.
Both of these are pretty niche issues that I don't expect to affect the vast majority of users (and the dropbox one in particular shouldn't be an issue at all if my org didn't insist on using dropbox in a way that it is very much not intended to be used, and for which better solutions exist, but I have given up on that fight a long time ago), and like I said, I've had linux on my laptop for a couple of years so far without any issue, and I love it.
I am curious how many "edge cases" like mine exist out there though. Maybe there exists some such edge case for a lot of people even while almost no one has the same edge case issue.
There are plenty. I run only Linux at home but CAD software for hobbies (Fusion 360), most games that want kernel level anti cheat, some embedded DRM-enabled media, all sort of just fail. Other things, like GPU tuning or messing with your displays/drivers are harder than they should be. My Bluetooth earbuds just don't work with my Linux machines.
How did you get Fusion 360 running? I've tried multiple times but it always gets stuck at the installer.
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Bluetooth is such a crapshoot for me, I feel like everyone else must be using the single blessed chip and forgot to share the memo.
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FUSE will provide Dropbox in a more integrated way than Windows (eg. terminal) and a cursory Google revealed some projects for Dropbox that do the JIT download you are after - they are old, but I wager still work just fine (an inactive project can just mean that it's complete).
I just switched to Linux. It's a great gig, and I'm actively encouraging everyone I know still infected with the malware known as Windows 11 to switch.
But some of the drawbacks really aren't edge cases. Apparently there is still no way for me to have access to most creative apps (e.g. Adobe, Affinity) with GPU acceleration. It's irritating that so few Linux install processes are turnkey the way they are for Windows/Mac, with errors and caveats that cost less-than-expert users hours of experimenting and mucking with documentation.
I could go on, but it really feels like a bad time to be a casual PC user these days, because Windows is an inhospitable swamp, and Linux still has some sharp edges.
I use OneDrive and Google Drive heavily and there just are not good clients for Linux for those that I have found. Especially with the ability to not sync files but still "look" like they are there in the filesystem. That is my main stopper now.
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I agree, I'd cut off dual booting and go full Linux when the hardware and software I use supports it. One of which being a PCIe Elgato capture card, another being an audio mixer with no driver support and the alternatives are very hacky and too complicated for me.
I permanently switched from Windows to Linux about five years ago. I had the same issue as you with Dropbox, so I switched to using the Maestral client for Dropbox instead which has support for selective sync. Works like a charm for me.
+1 for Maestral, have been using it for about a year on my Linux install and it works seamlessly.
Irony: https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/pc-gaming/windows-11-s...
I'm solo developing a spaceflight simulator on Linux (using the Godot engine), exporting binaries in both Linux and Windows. It turns out that I really didn't need to bother with the Linux export anyway because Steam runs the Windows version on Linux without any problems.
The ONLY thing I'm still having trouble with under Linux is Steam VR on the HTC Vive. It works. Barely.
Interesting, do you think game devs in future will just target windows/proton and not bother with native Linux ports?
Been so happy with my switch to Linux about 8 months ago. The nvidia gremlins that stopped me in prior years are all smoothed out.
One big plus with Linux, it's more amenable to AI assistance - just copy & paste shell commands, rather than follow GUI step-by-steps. And Linux has been in the world long enough to be deeply in the LLM training corpuses.
I've been on Linux desktop for ages, but it's not quite stable enough that I can recommend it to anyone. Space Marine 2 was the first game in quite a while than didn't just work out of the box, but...
E.g three weeks ago nvidia pushed bad drivers which broke my desktop after a reboot and I had to swap display (ctrl-alt-f3 etc), I never got into gnome at all, and roll back to an earlier version. Automatic rollback of bad drivers would have saved this.
Are Radeon drivers less shit?
It might depend on the distro, but were you running a 10 series or earlier? They dropped Pascal and earlier CPUs with the v590 driver, I know Arch migrated what the nvidia package installed in such a way that could leave someone without an appropriate driver unless they manually moved to a different source.
Then again Arch is one of those distros that has the attitude that you need to be a little engaged/responsible for ongoing maintenance of your system, which is why I'm against blind "just use (distro)" recommendations unless it's very basic and low assumptions about the user.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1prm8rl/archanno...
I'm on bog standard Ubuntu (25.04 maybe?) because it's what I know and I don't really care about it as long as it works. Which... well, seems above :}
I've had mixed experiences with AMD. Back in the day - a bit after Linus told Nvidia to fuck off - I tried to get my Radeon 5850HD (i think?) working on Ubuntu. It was one of those things I spent the whole weekend (OS reinstalls really add up) trying to make work, to no avail. Relative to that nonsense, the equivalent proprietary Nvidia driver just worked after being installed.
A couple of months ago I bought a second hand RX 7800 XT, and prepared myself for a painful experience, but I think it just worked. Like I got frustrated trying to find out how to download and install the driver, when I think it just came with Linux Mint already.
I've been using a full amd build with arch on it for years now. never had graphics related issues after an update. my biggest gripe is with the hdmi organization and how we can't have proper support with open source drivers.
Linux is even getting more accessible. I'm thinking of Elementary OS which not only posted about their accessibility work, but linked to the articles which really fired things up. I'm a Fedora guy, mainly because I want the latest Orca, AT-SPI2 and such, so I don't feel like an Ubuntu dirivitive would work as well.
So I installed Fedora on my work machine and find that I can still get all of my work done. Well except the parts that require testing accessibility on Windows screen readers or helping with Windows-related issues.
The only thing I miss now are the many addons made for NVDA, especially the ones for image descriptions. But if I can get something to work with Wayland, I could probably vibe code some of them. Thank goodness for Claude Code.
If only.
Ubuntu seems to be slowly getting worse.
- Firefox seems to be able to freeze both itself and, sometimes, the whole system. Usually while typing text into a large text box.
- Recently, printing didn't work for two days. Some pushed update installed a version of the CUPS daemon which reported a syntax error on the cupsd.conf file. A few days later, the problem went away, after much discussion on forums about workarounds.
- Can't use more than half of memory before the OOM killer kicks in. The default rule of the OOM killer daemon is that if a process has more than half of memory for a minute, kill it. Rust builds get killed. Firefox gets killed. This is a huge pain on the 8GB machine. Yes, I could edit some config file and stop this, but that tends to interfere with config file updates from Ubuntu and from the GUI tools.
None of these problems existed a year ago.
The Gnome desktop environment usability degradation in recent releases (stuff like drag and dropping files and folders between the desktop and the file explorer not working anymore, or not being able to create new empty files with a right click by default without having to create custom templates, being unable to pin apps to the launcher without messing with files, and more) was so horrendous that it felt like actual sabotage was being committed. Who in their right mind would decide to make the UI actively worse?!
These seem annoying, but I'd argue that these problems are in some ways less significant on Linux than on Windows. If some function of Windows is broken or unsatisfactory, there is not necessarily a way to fix it.
But you can adjust your own system. It'd be unhelpful of me to suggest to an unhappy Windows user that they should switch to another operating system, as that demands a drastic change of environment. On the other hand, you're already familiar with Linux, so the switching cost to a different Linux distribution is significantly lower. Thus I can fairly say that "Ubuntu getting worse" is less of a problem than "Windows getting worse." You have many convenient options. A Windows user has fewer.
What are you talking about? Firefox hasn't been single process since more than 10 years ago. At most, it uses 7% for the main process and I have thousands of tabs open. I can't talk about the other two, but I've had processes use 60% of the system memory without problem (everything else is slow due swapping, but that's expected).
They were talking about instability. I had an old Radeon workstation card in my desktop at home for at least a decade, but with the most recent AMD drivers, Firefox (with hardware acceleration turned on) would crash Gnome and the system when watching videos on YouTube. So I wasted money on one of those new Intel graphics cards to get the stability back (in addition to the time wasted diagnosing the problem).
It's been good for twenty years, the only difference is that OP finally gave it a fair go.
I'm glad that I am not the only one saying this. I made the switch 20+ years ago for my day to day use, and I have rarely experienced any problems with it.
Proton for games had changed things dramatically. Gamers can legit switch to Linux with barely a second thought, without being technical.
Linux/x86 still is poor for battery life compared to Apple.
Most people don’t care about gaming, so they shouldn’t care about proton. What changed recently for those who don’t care about gaming?
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But now it is good and also has working networking, audio and you can watch videos and scroll webpages without screen tearing.
A long time ago when I was in University, I was a volunteer in the Ubuntu group. In addition to evangelizing Linux/OSS, We were trying to convince our University to switch to opensource software for at least some engineering education with only a little bit of success.
After a particularly busy OSS event a non-programmer friend of mine asked me, why is it that the Linux people seem to be so needy for everyone to make the same choices they make? trying to answer that question changed my perspective on the entire community. And here we are, after all these years the same question seems to still apply.
Why are we so needy for ALL users and use-cases to be Linux-based and Linux-centric once we make that choice ourselves? What is it about Linux? the BSD people seem to not suffer from this and I've never heard anyone advocate for migration to OSX in spite of it being superior for specific usecases (like music production).
IMO if you're a creator, operating systems are tools; use the tool that fits the task.
When you (try to) use libre software, the problems you run into tend not to be related to insufficient engineering, but more societal and economic, where they would be less likely to appear if there were more people in your cohort.
Examples:
- An important document is sent to me in a proprietary format
- A streaming service uses a DRM service owned by a tech giant that refuses to let it work with open source projects
- A video game developer thinks making games work on Linux isn't worth getting rid of rootkit anticheat
The downside is Windows users would have to live in a world without subscription-based office suites, locked down media, and letting the CCP into your ring 0.
Because there are people who care about Free software from a philosophical standpoint on how societies should function and interact.
The community aspect of free software both pushes for more people to participate (and often for other groups to be excluded as "wrong" or "evil").
But that community only offers secondary benefits to those who are authors or painters or photographers rather than software developers - economic factors, risk aversion, functionality, and so on. The FLOSS communities are almost invariably driven toward hobbyists and developers rather than authors, artists, gamers, and the like - people whose interest lies outside of tinkering with and/or improving software.
The BSDs were never really a movement in that sense, and macOS is still just a product even if there are enthusiastic users of them both.
Similarly on the Linux side: Android, Steam Deck, and countless IoT devices are examples of successful products where the Linux aspect of them is not really even advertised.
It’s bad for society for the desktop OS market to be a proprietary monopoly. It basically allows Microsoft to extract rent from the public defender.
I do understand the evangelism being obnoxious. I don’t advocate for people to switch if they have key use cases that ONLY windows or OS X can meet. Certainly not good to be pushy. But otherwise, people are really getting a better experience by switching to Linux.
> Why are we so needy for ALL users and use-cases to be Linux-based and Linux-centric once we make that choice ourselves? What is it about Linux?
Software freedom is A Good Thing.
And if you want my help, don't ask me to support the garbage that $OSCORP is foisting on you.
Because we want the best for other people.
> why is it that the Linux people seem to be so needy for everyone to make the same choices they make?
This is the sort of question an apolitical person would ask a liberal (I am aware liberalism had been tainted in the recent times), like why is it you people are so needy and constantly preaching about democracy?
I moved to linux this month for good once i realized I no longer needed microsft services (Excel for example "runs on Mac" but is missing important features). I chose redhat because its what I've been using for over a decade at work and feels like home. Only thing I miss is Capcut as that workflow was pretty ironed out. Getting the hang of KDENlive
I use a Linux PC every day but I wouldn't recommend it to normal people. They're not going to feel any renewed sense of ownership from it, just annoyance at having to think about technical gibberish when they just want to get on with using the computer.
They remain consumers at their peril.
Yeah, because getting ads and pushed to use more Microsoft products all day long isn't an annoyance when they just want to get on with using the computer.
However, they don't need to learn YAML or read configuration manuals to dismiss an ad.
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Thanks for the counterbalancing post. Linux isn't quite there yet.
I've been really enjoying my experience using CachyOS on my (formerly Windows) gaming PC. I chose to use Limine and btrfs so now if it gets borked by a bad package install/uninstall I can roll back pretty easily. My next step is to replace my Nvidia GPU with an AMD one so I can stop worrying about that aspect in the future.
One thing I'm curious about: how is the laptop dual-GPU situation these days?
I opted to install Linux in a VM under Hyper-V on Windows to avoid hassles with the dual GPUs in my ThinkPad P52, but this comes with several other hassles I'd like to avoid. (Like no GPU access in Linux at all...)
It's not like Windows comes with built in support for running linux with gpu support.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/tutorials/gui-...
Every year at around this time there is a lot of linux related content in tech media.
It's a slow moving evergreen topic perfect for a scheduled release while the author is on holiday. This is just filler content that could have been written at any point in the last 10 years with minor changes.
I've been working on the Linux desktop for 20 years, and I've been using it on the desktop since 1999, so I lived through the infamous "Year of the Linux Desktop" era.
I've not seen anything like the current level of momentum, ever, nor this level of mainstream exposure. Gaming has changed the equation, and 2026 will be wild.
Not just gaming. This year, both Windows and Mac OS had absolutely terrible years. The Mac effed up its UI with liquid glass, to the point where Alan Dye fled to Meta. Microsoft pushed LLMs and ads into everything, screwing up what was otherwise a decent release.
On the other hand, on the Linux side, we had the release of COSMIC, which is an extremely user-friendly desktop. KDE, Gnome, and others are all at a point where they feel polished and stable.
Windows 8 era had the same vibe.
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I wouldn’t agree.
The level of momentum feels roughly equivalent to the era of Ubuntu coming around in the mid-2000s. We have been here before.
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Gaming, and Microsoft enshittifying Windows 11 to an absurd degree.
The bloat is astounding. This is especially egregious now that RAM costs a fortune.
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I don't think the prevalence of these articles this time of year is because the authors go on holiday, but instead is because the new year is the perfect time to ponder: "Will this be the year of the Linux desktop?"
I guess everyone’s in a “fuck it I’m ready to try some new stuff” mood too so this content is perfectly suited for new years. Would never have noticed this without your comment.
2026, the year of linux
Perhaps it could have been written, but it would have been far less accurate.
What an abysmally cynical take. More good stuff is good. Be happy about it.
Except every year you didn't have people like Pewdiepie and DHH pushing Linux. As as channels like GamersNexus doing Linux benchmarks. At the same time Windows and Mac making very dumb mistakes. So this time it does feel different, even if it might not be in the end.
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Gaming should be a no brainer. Windows dual boot and license is cheap enough.
Windows for gaming, Ubuntu as desktop default, Arch Linux on Laptop, MacOS on the other Laptop.
Games are not the problem, but that one game i want to play on a saturday evening when i have time, is the problem. That one i haven't tried out yet.
I have been using Linux since almost 23 years now. I don't praise it as flawless in any way, but compared to Microsoft it is a much more efficient operating system. Top 500 supercomputers also running Linux kind of hint that Linux is very good.
Despite this, Linux as ecosystem has numerous problems. The "wayland is the future" annoys me a lot. The wayland protocol was released in 2008. Now it is almost 20 years. I don't feel wayland is ever going to win a "linux desktop of the year" award. Things that work on xorg-server still do not work on wayland - and probably never will. I am not saying wayland is useless, I ran it for a while on KDE (though I actually don't use KDE, I use icewm typically), but it is just annoying how important things like GUI on Linux simply suck. In many ways Linux is kind of a server computer system, not really a desktop computer system. I use it as one, but the design philosophy is much more catering to the server or compute-work station objective.
Also, GTK ... this thing keeps on getting worse and worse with every new release. I have no idea what they are doing, but I have an old GTK2-based editor and this one consistently works better than the GTK3 or GTK4 ported version. It was a huge mistake to downgrade and nerf GTK to a gnomey-toolkit only. Don't even get me started on GNOME ...
I'm slowly de-Microsofting my computing. I've traded OneDrive for Syncthing. I ditched one PC for a Mac. I have the technical skills to run Linux effectively, but the biggest obstacle for my Linux adoption is distro fatigue. Run Ubuntu? Debian? Fedora? PopOS? Kubuntu? Arch? The article introduced yet another one to consider--Bazzite.
The Linux world is amazing for its experimentation and collaboration. But the fragmentation makes it hard for even technical people like me who just want to get work done to embrace it for the desktop.
Ubuntu LTS is probably the right choice. But it's just one more thing I have to go research.
Don't go for Ubuntu LTS. There are many choices that would work equally well for you. I'd go for Fedora KDE edition (but could easily be EndeavorOS or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed).
As a beginner, just pick Ubuntu and get on with your life imo. Switching distros isn't that big of a lift later on and pretty much everything you learn carries over from one to the other. It's much more worthwhile to just pick _something_ and learn some basics and become comfortable with the OS imo.
Ubuntu is optimised for corporations, as this is the main source of income for Canonical. Try Debian _testing_.
Pick a popular distro, and during installation, put your /home directory on its own partition. This way, you won't have much to reconfigure if you ever have a reason to switch distros. (You might not ever have a reason; they're all pretty capable.)
If using Ubuntu LTS for gaming, you might want to add a newer kernel: https://ubuntu.com/kernel/lifecycle
Linux Mint would also be a reasonable pick.
Ubuntu stopped caring about the desktop experience when the switched to Gnome. Now they have annoying SNAPs. They are a business and they are going to continue enshitifying it.
I haven't tried Bazzite because I'm not into gaming but Linux Mint is working very well for a lot of people coming from Windows. It just works and has great defaults. Windows users seem to pick it up pretty easily.
Also, Linux Mint upgrades very well. I've had a lot of success upgrading to new versions without needing to reinstall everything. Ubuntu and other distros I've tried often have failed during upgrading and I had to reinstall.
I think fragmentation is the wrong way to look at it; they're all basically compatible at the end of the day. It's more like an endless list of people who want to min-max.
Any reasonably popular distro will have enough other users that you can find resources for fixing hitches. The deciding factor that made me go with EndeavourOS was that their website had cool pictures of space on it. If you don't already care then the criteria don't need to be any deeper than that.
Once you use it enough to develop opinions, the huge list of options will thin itself out.
With LLMs it's now much easier to navigate Linux and bash. Definitely happy with Linux Mint as a Windows alternative.
I’ve been around the block with Linux distributions since 2020. I personally think that Bazzite is the way to go for most people coming from Windows, or people experienced with Linux that want something as close to “set and forget” as you can.
One thing that can be annoying is how quickly things have moved in the Linux gaming space over the past 5 years. I have been a part of conversations with coworkers who talk about how Linux gaming was in 2019 or 2020. I feel like anyone familiar with Linux will know the feeling of how quickly things can improve while documentation and public information cannot keep up.
For single player gaming, probably. Actual desktops still suffer from significant technical and design issues.
Wayland spent a decade to be mostly usable with rough edges, Flatpak sandbox is really rough and most things are designed by amateurs.
Still Windows destroying itself made the gap closer than ever, right now is a great chance to gain market share and funding and professionals.
Linux is the best. Been using it since Slackware, RedHat first came out, now use Ubuntu or any distro which makes it easy to interact with its Desktop, e.g. GNOME :)
I've been sceptical of the 'Linux desktop' for a long time, but I recently started using Bazzite on my gaming PC and I'm super impressed. In just a few years since I last daily drove a Linux distro it's come such a long way. KDE Plasma is fast and beautiful.
So far all the games I want to play run really well, with no noticable performance difference. If anything, they feel faster, but it could be placebo because the DE is more responsive.
My company had an onsite where presenters were plugging their computers into a projector via HDMI. I watched seven individuals go up with their MacBook Pros, plug the cable in, then get confused why nothing was showing on the screen. Seven times in a row, someone had to run onto the stage and accept the permissions dialog on the Mac allowing the user to share their screen via HDMI. When the eighth presenter took the stage, he plugged the HDMI cable into his laptop running Linux, and the screen immediately output an image. Linux just works.
I switched full time to Linux in 2022 when Elden Ring launched and had better performance in its first week on Linux than on Windows. I personally switched over to KDE Plasma powered by Arch. The first thing I noticed was how perfectly it was immediately. So I'd push the title of the article on step further: Linux has been good for a while.
In the four years since switching over from a dual Windows (for gaming) and Mac (for programming, web browsing, and everything else), I have almost entirely had a better experience in every single area. I still use macOS daily for work, and it is constantly driving me mad. For every task I have thrown at it (from gaming to programming to game dev to photo editing), Linux just works.
On Mac it's more like, "there's an app for that". I have third party package managers on Mac. I use a third party app to display if my internet connection is using Ethernet. It yells at me to delete the CSV file that I created and requires an instruction manual with instructions for the Settings app that have changed three times in three years for how to open the file, add Bluetooth to the menu bar, etc. It even had a permanent red icon on the Settings about not being signed into an Apple ID. And once I signed in, the Settings app has a permanent red icon about paying for Apple Care. My parents have made comments about how they're worried as they get older that they won't be able to keep up with the constant updates and changes to macOS and iOS.
I don't have much to say about Windows besides good riddance. It was far less confusing to use than macOS but was filled with too much bloat and pop up notifications.
The final thing I'll mention is that the first time my girlfriend used my computer, she sat down, opened the browser, and completed her task. She thought that she was using Windows and was able to navigate the new interface without having to spend any time learning anything. For her regular use case of using the PC for an internet browser, Linux just worked. She even asked me afterwards to install it on her laptop to replace Windows! I can't believe we're in a world where that's asked by someone non-technical who just wants a computer to get out of their way so that they can perform their tasks.
If Microsoft could get their heads out of their rears, they could potentially get back to a better OS for gaming. The hybrid kernel Dave Cutler designed is in many ways still better than the Linux kernel. It's the userland that is the issue with Windows 11. Look just by enabling true nvme support you close the gap between Linux and Windows performance wise.
Linux desktops have felt flaky for me for a few years now. I’m trying to figure out how much of that is bad choices vs real problems.
Ubuntu’s default desktop felt unstable in a macOS VM. Dual-booting on a couple of HP laptops slowed to a crawl after installing a few desktop apps, apparently because they pulled in background services. What surprised me was how quickly the system became unpleasant to use without any obvious “you just broke X” moment.
My current guess: not Linux in general, but heavy defaults (GNOME, Snap, systemd timers), desktop apps dragging in daemons, and OEM firmware / power-management quirks that don’t play well with Linux. Server Linux holds up because everything stays explicit. Desktop distros hide complexity and don’t give much visibility when things start to rot.
Does this line up with others’ experience? If yes, what actually works long-term? Minimal bases, immutable distros, avoiding certain package systems, strict service hygiene, specific hardware?
The only real obnoxious slow-down daemons I'm familiar with are the "system indexing" things (GNOME Tracker, KDE Baloo) -- highly recommend disabling them.
I've been using Kubuntu for years with good results. I prefer KDE to Gnome, which Kubuntu takes care of, and I normally add in the flatpak repositories so I don't need snap. That has generally worked well for me in the last 5 years.
For certain timeperiods I have needed to switch to Fedora, or the Fedora KDE spin, to get access to more recent software if I'm using newer hardware. That has generally also been pretty stable but the constant stream of updates and short OS life are not really what I'm looking for in a desktop experience.
There are three issues that linux still has, which are across the board:
- Lack of commercial mechanical engineering software support (CAD & CAE software)
- Inability to reliably suspend or sleep for laptops
- Worse battery life on laptops
If you are using a desktop and don't care about CAD or CAE software I think it's probably a better experience overall than windows. Laptops are still more for advanced users imho but if you go with something that has good linux support from the factory (Dell XPS 13, Framework, etc.) it will be mostly frictionless. It just sucks on that one day where you install an update, close the laptop lid, put it in your backpack, and find it absolutely cooking and near 0% when you take it out.
I also have never found something that gave me the battery life I wanted with linux. I used two XPS 13's and they were the closest but still were only like 75% of what I would like. My current Framework 16 is like 50% of what I would like. That is with always going for a 1080p display but using a VPN which doesn't help battery life.
We live in a world with the internet and distributed version control, so essentially every piece of software in the world has a tradeoff where the people maintaining it might push an update that breaks something at any time, but also those updates often do good things too, like add functionality, make stuff more efficient, fix bugs, or probably most crucially, patch out security vulnerabilities.
My experience with FOSS has mostly been that mature projects with any reasonable-sized userbase tend to more reliably not break things in updates than is the case for proprietary software, whether it's an OS or just some SaaS product. YMMV. However, I think probably the most potent way to avoid problems like this actually ever mattering is a combination of doing my updates manually (or at least on an opt-in basis) and being willing to go back a version if something breaks. Usually this isn't necessary for more than a week or so for well-maintained software even in the worst case. I use arch with downgrade (Which lets you go back and choose an old version of any given package) and need to actually use downgrade maybe once a year on average, less in the last 5
> Does this line up with others’ experience? If yes, what actually works long-term? Minimal bases, immutable distros, avoiding certain package systems, strict service hygiene, specific hardware?
No, not really. A Linux desktop with a DE will always be slower and more brittle than an headless machine due to the sheer number of packages/components, but something like Arch + Plasma Shell (without the whole KDE ecosystem) should be very stable and snappy. The headaches caused by immutable distros and flatpaks are not worth it IMO, but YMMV.
With debian and KDE (both personal preference), but no snap or flatpak, it works wonderfully. Power/sleep-management has become better than a default windows install. All hardware, including the fingerprint sensor, just works.
Could you share the model of your laptop?
> Does this line up with others’ experience?
Not really, no. What did you install that slowed things down?
> If yes, what actually works long-term?
Plain ordinary Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, running on an ancient Thinkpad T430 with a whopping 8GB of RAM and an SSD (which is failing, but that's not Linux's fault, it's been on its way out for about a year and I should probably stop compiling Haiku nightlies on it).
Can you give an example of which desktop apps are "dragging in daemons"?
Edited: My bad, I misread, started ranting about Gimp, how terrible this software was
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Not at all.
I've run Void Linux + Xmonad for many years without any such issues. I also recently installed CachyOS for my kid to game on (KDE Plasma) and it works super well.
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I am using Linux in different flavours for the past 10 years. It has become more reliable for the the time. The last 5 years had noticeable few issues across the distros.
Insights from discussion threads (updated just now): https://hn-discussions.top/linux-desktop-2026/
Im really glad Linux is getting more attention now. Thanks Microsoft.
+1 for CachyOS. I also recommend Mint and Pop!_OS if you prefer Debian based distros.
I have always wanted to use linux as my main OS. I tried with Ubuntu twice the past and always ran into really painful hurdles or missing features. This year I tried again with Mint and it absolutely stuck the landing. I have completely switched my desktop and laptop (and plex server) to mint. I have never even booted back into windows. I have not had any big issues and have been able to make it better than my windows desktop ever was.
Once a company releases a MacBook quality Linux laptop, I’m in!
I switched in 2020. I run Fedora and Arch. I don’t miss MacOS at all. The last Windows I used was 8, so my opinion is out of date, but yeah… I don’t miss Windows, either.
It’s been good for quite awhile now.
>3.2% of overall Steam users.
The success measurements are quite strange. How am I supposed to think Linux is finally good when 96.8% of users do not care to adopt it. I can't think of anything else with that high of a rejection rate. The vast majority do not consider it good enough to use over Windows.
From what I've heard most of that 3% is steam decks, so the growth isn't exactly people switching their daily OS driver.
The phoronix story re: steam stats has actual data on that. It's just a fifth.
Now that Microsoft are removing support for Windows 10, which is still running on many not-that-old devices that don't support Windows 11, I think the correct, mainstream advice HAS to be to install Linux on those machines. Those are still perfectly usable machines that can be used for productivity or enjoy a massive catalog of games.
We've reached a point where Microsoft greed and carelessness is degrading Windows from all angles. With the constant forced Copilot, forced sign-ups, annoying pop-ups and ads, it is figuratively unusable; in the case of machines stuck on Windows 10 it is literally unusable.
They are now banking entirely on a captive market of Enterprise customers who have invested too much to quit. The enshittification is feature complete.
I have been switching between linux-windows for a while now, and i think 2026 is not the year of linux for now.
Linux still suffer from the same fragmentation issue: Oh you want to play game, you should use distro X, oh you want an average web-browsing, working, you should use distro Y, or for programming, use Z. Of course all of them can do what other can do, but the community decided that the way it is.
Yesterday i read a reddit thread about an user sharing his issue with pop-os, and most(if not all) comments saying he is using the wrong distro. He is using latest release (not the nightly build), which is a reasonably thing to do as new user.
Not sure if Linux Mint has changed this, but i remember having to add "non-free" repo to use official Nvidia driver. Not a big deal to people who know what they are doing, but still, that is unnecessary firction.
I just got a laptop for Christmas (first thing I've bought for myself in a good while) with 64GB of DDR5 RAM, a video card inside of it, AMD Ryzen 7 CPU, AMD Radeon 6550M. 144hz screen.
Not the best, but works for me.
I put CachyOS on it, using Steam just run the game's installer adding it as a game to your library -- you just select which proton you want (cachyos-proton) as a dropdown in the Properties in the Steam library. that's it.
it's lightweight, arch (I ditched manjaro), runs KDE and games perfectly, cursor IDE runs great, VMS run great.
first thing I did when I got it from fedex was remove Windows and put Linux on it. I thought 'maybe I'll just bite the bullet and sign up a Microsoft cloud account to be able to access ..my desktop' and 1/4 through its install I held the power button and popped a flash drive in. just say no to windows and you'll all be happy, trust me.
the only effort it required was for me to say f this on using Lutris and just use Steam as the wrapper.
2026 is definitely the year for linux. every year is. valve heavily invested in Arch, proton, and is using Linux on their devices and honestly: Windows is spyware, and after their vibe coded jank 25H2 update that broke a ton of things and Windows 10 being EOL, I hope more people get to enjoy throwing Ventoy on a USB stick with a bunch of linux isos copied over to it and boot and play with what they love.
so I disagree, 2026 is the year for Linux, and Linux is love.
There is a strange, but pleasant feeling when you hear someone claiming “they’re early to Linux” and think it’s going to be something big. (Happened recently.)
It’s year of the Linux desktop!
Deluding ourselves here it's nice to think the day has finally arrived but it hasn't
We need to address the problems rather than pretending it's already great
Shutting down your laptop and having to wait five minutes for systemd to shutdown because of some timeout when you need to get your flight is just one of those reasons you end up going back to windows
<< Deluding ourselves here it's nice to think the day has finally arrived but it hasn't
Apart from systemd, tell me what isn't great. The whole benefit of the ecosystem is that you can pick and choose your system components and if you don't like any of then, build your own. I am not trying to be dismissive, if I use a windows these days, it is for work and some errant vm to run windows specific app ( hr block comes to mind -- I am just not willing to spend time to run it any other way ).
What pc would someone recommend as someone who just wants to toy around and dont necessarily need the power?
An ex lease Thinkpad T Series with Intel graphics is a good choice for value and compatibility. eg a T490 or T14 era machine.
Using hardware at least 6-12 months old is a good way to get better compatibility.
Generally Linux drivers only start development after the hardware is available and in the hands of devs, while Windows drivers usually get a head start before release. Brand new hardware on a LTS (long term support) distro with an older kernel is usually the worst compatibility combo.
Some N100 based mini PC.
Grab one of the old Windows 10 machines which are showing up from corporations upgrading to Windows 11.
Steam Deck. It has been my main computing device for 2 years.
Just use macOS or Windows.
What is really blocking the move for me is zScaler, Zoom (they may exist on Linux, not sure about how integrated they are) but especially Outlook (the client). The OWA version is subpar and without it I cannot function in a work environment.
> without it I cannot function in a work environment.
This is more about what you choose as your operating environment, not what your work imposes as your working environment.
Most places of work, mine included, run Microsoft services that lock them into the ecosystem incredibly tightly.
As per the article title, "if you want to feel like you actually own your PC", this is about your PC, not the one provided to you by your workplace (since it's likely owned by them).
One thing I'm worried about in my work environment is Microsoft enforcing the web versions of Office and deprecating the stand alone desktop applications. The web versions are a massive step down in terms of functionality and ease of use. Your mention of OWA makes me feel as if that is what Outlook will be sacrificed for at some point in the future anyway.
I could use whatever in my job, I just need access to these key tools.
I have the same concern regarding the Outlook desktop client. I briefly used the web based one and it is way less convenient in a work setting.
I had a similar issue, but I ended up installing Debian and running Windows 10 as a virtual machine with VirtualBox. The webcam can be accessed as if were installed on the guest OS and haven't had a problem with Zoom or Teams. Just sharing in case it helps.
I considered that but is is such a waste of resources in my case: I deliberately use a lighter laptop that just covers my dev needs.
But yes, this is a possibility, or accessing the windows via rdp. The loss would be with the "always-handy" kind of setup, where Outlook is a click away and pops up its calendar reminder
The only thing that still makes me maintain a Windows installation is playing League of Legends. Everything else (I mean, real work) is done on Linux
We've made the switch and it's been great. On top of my that my partner who is not a computer person picked up Linux Mint to the level she can use Windows in a couple weeks.
Linux is my main and sole desktop since around-2006. I needed windows for TurboTax a few hours a year in the past but that's it, I did not do PC games though, just regular desktop stuff including developing code.
Same here, since 1997 though, running the tax software in a virtual machine with Linux as host.
Windows is so bad that I think there end game is that they are trying to push everyone to cloud apps. At that point it doesn't matter what OS you use.
echo "$((( $(date +%Y) + 1 ))) will be the year of the linux desktop"
Yes. The reason the year of the Linux desktop has yet to arrive is because most people don't understand this joke. Linux is powerful because it is made for power users (although certain distros are changing this)
Year of the Linux desktop!
I love this. I spent my holidays hearing non-technical family members complain about their ever deteriorating Windows experiences, issues that make me righteously angry at Microsoft.
IMO the next important unblocker for Linux adoption is the Adobe suite. In a post-mobile world one can use a tablet or phone for almost any media consumption. But production is still in the realm of the desktop UX and photo/video/creative work is the most common form of output. An Adobe CC Linux option would enable that set of "power users". And regardless of their actual percentage of desktop users, just about ever YouTuber or streamer talking about technology is by definition a content creator so opening Linux up to them would have a big effect on adoption.
And yes I've tried most of the Linux alternatives, like GIMP, Inkscape, DaVinci, RawTherapee, etc. They're mostly /fine/ but it's one of the weaker software categories in FOSS-alternatives IMO. It also adds an unnecessary learning curve. Gamers would laugh if they were told that Linux gaming was great, they just have to learn and play an entirely different set of games.
Photoshop (for example) largely works in Wine, although it's not stable enough for production usage. The problem is the CC itself and the installer, which is unimaginably bloated and glued to the Internet Exp... I mean Edge Web View and many other Windows-only things.
Your entire comment could be written 20 years ago and it would just about fit perfectly.
Hahaha. Try sharing a couple old printers and scanners connected to a Linux box on your home network. At best, when it’s working you get lowest common denominator functionality. Want to run some vms ? Works great until you update your distro and the vm hosts kernel modules aren’t compatible anymore. Oh, want to use a later version of some package like docker? Did I use apt or snap or flatpack???
Yes, you can get this stuff working, but if you enjoy doing other things in life, have a job and don’t life alone, it is SSSOOOOO much easier to get a Mac mini. Or even windows 11 if that’s your thing.
Sounds ultra-specific to your experience. VMs, package management and networking are all things that macOS and Windows stumble with for regular usage. I've used all three OSes professionally, and Linux requires the least configuration to get work done.
Any recommendations for a distro?
I've used Mint in the past, loved it until I spent a day trying to get scanner drivers to work. Don't know if that's changed now, was 4 years ago
Yes, Mint for most people.
I am using Fedora on machines with new hardware and liking it as well. It has small pluses/minuses vs Mint.
cachyos is a good os that is also performant. arch though so there are quirks around the rolling update model but you always have the newestish packages and if you update regularly there seems to be less headache.
Today I'd recommend CachyOS. While I haven't connected a scanner, everything else I've tried just seems to work.
Simple, Debian with i3-wm
You're going to get everyone's opinion here. Try a bunch of the major ones and see what works best. I did this and landed on Fedora but ymmv
Omarchy is pretty streamlined for developers and you can play games as well as they work well.
I tried a number of distros and settled on Omarchy because it has a coherent design and nice aesthetics, but it has some weird quirks about messing with my dotfiles on updates. It's so new I suspect this will be ironed out soon.
the Universal Blue project has got a great suite of distributions:
https://universal-blue.org/
All I want for Christmas is a M4 MacBook Air with Linux that works with perfectly with all the hardware.
Adobe keeps me on macOS, otherwise I’d love to use something like Ubuntu as a daily driver.
Windows is just that bad.
Honestly I loved it a lot more pre-2022, when Ubuntu added a super aggressive OOM killer that only operates on the level of an entire systemd run unit. Meaning that if you are running computation in, say, a shell and one for your subprocesses running computation takes too much memory, it takes out the entire shell and terminal window, leaving no trace of what happened, including all the terminal logs.
And if you are running Chrome, and something starts taking a lot of memory, say goodbye to the entire app without any niceties.
(Yes, this is a mere pet peeve but it has been causing me so much pain over the past year, and it's such an inferior way to deal with memory limits tha what came before it, I don't know why anybody would have taken OOM logic from systemd services and applied it to use launched processes.)
I have to wonder if Ubuntu's prescriptive stance on things like this is becoming increasingly outdated in an age where there's actually a decent experience out of the box for a lot more stuff on Linux. I've long since moved on from using it personally for my devices, but I'm fairly certain my tolerance for spending effort tinkering to get things working like I want is a lot higher than even most Linux users, so it's hard for me to gauge if the window have moved significantly in that regard for the average Linux user.
It's not just Ubuntu, Arch is just as bad. The primary problem is systemd, which provided an adequate OOMd for daemons, but then all the distributions seem to be using it for interactively launched processes
If anybody can help me out with a better solution with a modern distribution, that's about 75% of the reason I'm posting. But it's been a major pain and all the GitHub issues I have encountered on it show a big resistance to having better behavior like is the default for MacOS, Windows, or older Linux.
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I find it interesting how many people have Ubuntu in mind when it comes to a Linux desktop when it hasn't been a great experience ever since they switched to Gnome. They don't really care about the desktop anymore. They are now a corporation that is enshitifying their product with things like SNAPs.
If you want a distro that really cares about the desktop experience today, try Linux Mint. Windows users seem to adapt to it quite quickly and easily. It's familiar and has really good defaults that match what people expect.
This is really annoying me as well. I use a program for work that can occasionally use a lot of ram, while saving or interpolating for example. On my little MacBook Air with just 8GB of ram everything works fine, it just swaps a whole lot more for a short period. On my desktop with 16GB ram and Ubuntu oom just kills it, my workaround is the swapspace package which adds swap files under high load, works so far.
It sounds like your primary issue is that you have a severe RAM deficiency for what you're trying to use your machine for. Any OOM killer, be it the kernel's per-process one or systemd-oomd's per-service one, only exists to try to recover from an out-of-memory scenario where the alternative is to kernel panic (in the case of the kernel's oom killer) or for the system to completely lock up (in the case of systemd-oomd).
Try doing less at once, or getting more memory.
My primary issue is that a system that did an OK job at dealing with low memory situations has been replaced with a completely inadequate system.
If your solution is "don't ever run out of memory" my solution is "I won't ever use your OS unless forced to."
Every other OS handles this better, and my work literally requires pushing the bounds of memory on the box, whether it's 64GB or 1TB of RAM. Killing an entire cgroup is never an acceptable solution, except for the long-running servers that systemd is meant to run.
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> getting more memory
A bit hard to do now :(
How does Mint work? I recommended it regardless for removing snap.
Unfortunately, TPM based Passkeys still are not a thing on Linux.
What would that be useful for? A properly implemented software passkey like Keepassxc would be secure against anything short of a local root exploit. A TPM would not really help against that either.
Passkeys were designed to be bound to a device. Also I don't like using browser extensions as password managers or connecting them to a browser via an extension. It's been proven not to be safe many times.
I wouldn't mind and wouldn't be surprised by Valve phone at some point
2026 YOTLD?
The personal desktop has fallen in relevance enough for that to be possible. The goalposts moved, now linux needs to have phone, tablet, and laptop with smooth effortless integration between them all.
I recently switched to using a thumb drive to transfer files to and from my phone/tablet, I became demoralized when faced with getting it all setup.
KDE has phone and laptop integrated well enough for me. It's worth giving it a try but the more devices you want integrated the more of a risk it is in case it doesn't quite work right. But I've got enough other devices in the house which I can't put KDE on (work laptop, Windows machine I need for some specific software) that I can recommend https://github.com/9001/copyparty over thumb drives.
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> smooth effortless integration between them all
No, thank you! The "smooth, effortless [, compulsory, mandated, enforced] integration" between my Apple devices is the very worst thing about them.
What integration between phone and desktop would you like to see?
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Android is Linux, so it does have a phone, tablet and many other form factors like television.
Its going to be a decade, the slow erosion of Window's market share, and we might already be in it.
2026 YOLOTD!
Linux is not suitable for the average user. I use Xubuntu on all my old computers, but I am 100% sure a normie would not tolerate the tedium of it. People want shiny icons with animations and a bunch of garbage on their computers to make them feel they are doing something. Linux is too static for that.
If I have an issue with an application or if I want an application, I must use the terminal. I can't imagine a Mac user bothering to learn it. Linux is for people who want to maximize the use of their computer without being spied on and without weird background processes. Linux won't die, but it won't catch Windows or Mac in the next 5 decades. People are too lazy for it. Forget about learning. I bet you $100, 99% of the people in the street didn't even see Linux in their lives, nor even heard of it. It is not because of marketing, it is because people who tried it returned to Windows or Mac after deciding it is too hard to learn for them to install a driver or an application.
I wouldn't recommend Xubuntu for the average user. What you feel is about Xubuntu, not Linux. Normies are doing well adapting to Linux Mint. It's easy for Windows users to get used to within a few days and it has sane defaults that match what users expect. It just works.
Outdated view. Regular people ask for help at the genius bar or IT poindexter all the time. And pretty icons are plentiful.
I bet you $100 you can't find a single person on the street using Linux. It is that rare.
Linux is a viable alternative to Windows/MacOS if you stand back and squint.
Not up close due to the vast number of inconsistencies.
This could only be fixed by a user experience built from the ground up by a single company.
Spoken like a true Windows UX aficionado. Who doesn't love multiple system settings apps, a mix of minimal new context menus and overcrowded legacy context menus just one more click away.
> Who doesn't love multiple system settings apps, a mix of minimal new context menus and overcrowded legacy context menus just one more click away.
I get that you're making a Windows joke, but this describes Linux equally well.
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To be clear, are you suggesting Windows is the standard of consistency?
Even modern macs fall short of the UX Apple has traditionally been known for...
Only true if those inconsistencies actually matter to your workflow. Not going to deny that they exist, obviously, but their impact is largely overplayed (and gratuitously downplayed on Windows, in my experience).
Yes Windows also sadly has become very inconsistent.
MacOS is highly consistent compared to Windows.
Perhaps Linux operating systems like Steam or ChromeOS might finally create a beautiful and consistent UI.
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Please give an example of an "inconsistency" which makes Linux not a "viable alternative to Windows/MacOS"
Have you worked with windows recently? It basically consists entirely of inconsistensies
Linux _is_ good now. It was good before but it's good now too.
Anybody that plays games (e.g. ages 1 to 30) will be hard-pressed to use linux. It's just not an option, and dual-booting has high friction.
This is just not true anymore. The only things that don't work anymore are a few AAA titles that use particular types of anti-cheat systems that rely on Windows kernel drivers (League of Legends is one that comes to mind).
If I remember correctly, after the Crowdstrike BSOD-all-windows-instances update last year Microsoft wanted to make some changes to their kernel driver program and these anti-cheat measures on Windows might need to find a new mechanism soon anyway. That's a long way of saying, it's plausible that even that last barrier might come down sooner rather than later.
Anticheat has very different requirements to antimalware.
Some interesting reads on what modern anticheats do:
https://github.com/0avx/0avx.github.io/blob/main/article-3.m...
https://github.com/0avx/0avx.github.io/blob/main/article-5.m...
https://reversing.info/posts/guardedregions/
https://game-research.github.io/ (less in detail and less IDA pseudo)
I probably sound like a hipster or something, but it really feels like many people are finally catching up to the way I've been working for the past 15 years.
I fully switched to GNU/Linux back then and have never looked back. Initially I was quite evangelical but got tired of it and gave up probably around 10 years ago thinking "oh well, their loss". But slowly more and more of the world has switched over, first servers, then developer workstations and now finally just "normal" users.
Similarly, I've always been hugely invested into my tools and have a strong distaste for manual labour. I often watch how others work and can't believe how slow and inefficient it is. Typing up repetitive syntax every time, copy/pasting huge blocks of code, performing repetitive actions when booting their PC etc. I simply haven't been doing this for my whole career, I've been writing scripts, using clever editors, using programming languages to their fullest etc.
I think this is why LLMs don't seem like such the huge breakthrough to me as they do to others. I wasn't doing this stuff manually before, that's ridiculous. I don't need to generate globs of code because I already know how to get the computer to do it for me, and I know how to do that in a sustainable and maintainable way too. It's sad that LLMs are giving people their first real sense of control, when it's actually been available for a very long by now, and in a way that you can actually own it, rather than paying for a service that might be taken away at any moment.
When I got a steamdeck I open excel and started playtesting a few games, to many bugs, so I sold it
The second Eternal September has truly kicked off
Still can’t play big titles with anti cheat like call of duty. Only reason I’m stuck on windows on the gaming PC is I’m somewhat addicted to BO7 zombies.
It’s good on desktops. Laptops are another story
"Bazzite"
You know this is a psyop when they can't resist mentioning Microsoft's product
What amazes me is that on Steam they no longer make the distinction (in the standard library view) between Windows and Linux: every game is assumed to launch in Linux, using Proton behind the scenes it needed. There's still a "Linux games" toggle but now every game appears ungrayed by default.
And it mostly works! At least for my games library. The only game I wasn't able to get to work so far is Space Marine 2, but on ProtonDB people report they got it to work.
As for the rest: I've been an exclusive Linux user on the desktop for ~20 years now, no regrets.
Linux has been good for years. The only thing that's changed is that Valve put a bunch of effort into Proton so now Linux has enough game titles for that to no longer be an excuse to not switch.
I've been using Linux full-time (no other OSes at all) for nearly 20 years. Went through all my university education using only Linux. It's problem free if you use it like a grandma would (don't mess with the base system) and even if you mess with it, most things are easily reversible.
That being said, I have noticed that the newfound interest in Linux seems to be a result of big tech being SO abusive towards its customers that even normies are suddenly into computing "freedom".
Linux can't be a good desktop, almost by definition.
1. Look at commercial desktop OSes (Windows, MacOS). They spend hundreds of millions to develop and maintain the OS, do updates, quality assurance testing, working with hundreds of thousands of hardware vendors and enterprises, etc, just to try to not break things constantly. This is with "an ecosystem" that is one stack developed by one company. And even they can't get it right. Several Linux-Desktop companies have tried to mimic the commercial companies by not only custom-tailoring their own stack and doing QA, but sometimes even partnering on certified hardware. They're spending serious cash to try to do it right. But still there's plenty of bugs (go look at their issue trackers, community forums, package updates, etc) and no significant benefit over the competition.
2. There is no incentive for Linux to have consistency, quality, or a good UX. The incentive is to create free software that a developer wants. The entire ethos of the OSS community is, and has always been, I want the software, I make the software, you're welcome to use it too. And that's fine, for developers! But that's not how you make something regular people can use reliably and enjoyably. It's a hodge-podge of different solutions glued together. Which works up to a point, but then...
3. Eventually Linux desktop reaches a point where it doesn't work. The new mouse you bought's extra buttons don't work. Or the expensive webcam you bought can't be controlled because it requires a custom app only shipped on Windows/Mac. Or your graphics card's vendor uses proprietary firmware blobs causing bugs on only Linux for unknown reasons. Or your speakers sound like crap because they need a custom firmware blob loaded by the commercial OSes. Or your touchscreen can't be enabled/disabled because Wayland doesn't support the X extensions that used to allow that to work with xrandr. Or your need to look up obscure bootloader flags, edit the bootloader, and restart, to enable/disable some obscure fix for your hardware (lcd low power settings, acpi, disk controller, or any of a thousand other issues). Or, quite simply, the software you try to install just doesn't work; random errors are popping up, things are not working, and you don't know why. In any of these cases, your only hope is... to go on Reddit and ask for help from strangers. There's no customer support line. Your ISP ain't gonna help you. The Geek Squad just shrugs. You are on your own.
And this is the most frustrating part... the extremely nerdy core fan-group, like those on HN or Reddit, who are lucky enough not to be experiencing the problems unique to Linux, gaslight you and tell you all your problems are imagined or your fault.
> Linux can't be a good desktop, almost by definition.
By your problem statements 1, 2, and 3, there is never likely to be a great desktop OS. The best that we will ever have is a compromise (no cyber pun intended).
1) every OS is buggy, 2) every OS is a hotch-potch, and 3) users end up yelling at the clouds then forced to upgrade to the next version of frustration.
> who are lucky enough not to be experiencing the problems unique to Linux, gaslight you
It isn't just luck , people use Linux every day to do their jobs and pursue their interests. But if no GNU/Linux distro works for your uses, you have whatever commercial OS you are currently using to meet your needs.
As for actual gaslighting , yikes I hope that large groups of people are not conspiring to ruin your day. I personally react in a similar way when corporations tell me please wait, your call is important to us, our menu options have changed.
Yes, it's good. Also agreed that AMD would be best GPU experience.
Unless one has a rack of older GPU hardware that uses an abandoned EOL NVIDIA kernel driver difficult to install past kernel 6.12.x Then one faces the harsh reality of Windows users rightfully laughing at a perpetually Beta Linux OS, as Win11 still boots with the older drivers. while the dkms build randomly implodes at some point.
People dual boot SSD OS for very good reasons, as kernel permutation is not necessarily progress in FOSS. Linux is usable by regular users these days, but "Good" is relative to your use case. YMMV =3
Well, until it is a native elf/linux game, because the shabby compatibility, not reliable in time, zero official technical support (which is legally required for paid games), proton(wine), ewwwww...
The only sane ways: either a 'correct' set of native elf/linux binaries, or proton = 0 bucks (namely only free-to-play, with 0 cent in any micro-transactions).
Only compared to windows. Sadly, we're still stuck with a PC clone for the near future.
Sounds like Darwin is finally meeting it's nominal fate.
I would be 100% off Windows if it weren’t for Adobe Suite and Ableton Live not being ported to Linux. I’m guessing both of these companies are avoiding it not for technical reasons but because Linux is a support nightmare given all of the distros and variations of the platform.
All Linux desktop has to do is stay still and it will catch up with Windows, which is progressively getting worse.
What makes Linux a viable desktop for so many people now is the fact that they don’t need to run very much software anymore. It runs Chrome so you’re good.
> actually own your PC
It's funny they would choose this phasing.
This is exactly the way I described my decision to abandon windoze, and switch to linux, over 20 years ago...
Tried to switch to Linux plenty of times over the past few decades, this year it finally stuck. I can confidently say I’ll never install Windows again. Everything pretty much just works and any issues I’ve had have been quickly resolved with the help of LLM’s.
I've been giving Linux a go as a daily driver for a few months.
I tried Cinnamon and while it was pleasantly customizable, the sigle-threadedness of the UI killed it for me. It was too easy to do the wrong thing and lock the UI thread, including several desktop or tray Spices from the official repo.
I'm switching to KDE. Seems peppier.
Biggest hardware challenge I've faced is my Logitech mouse, which is a huge jump from the old days of fighting with Wi-Fi and sound support. Sound is a bit messy with giving a plethora of audio devices that would be hidden under windows (like digital and analog options for each device) and occasionally compatibility for digital vs analog will be flaky from a game or something, but I'll take it.
Biggest hassle imho is still installing non-repo software. So many packages offer a flatpak and a snap and and build-from-source instructions where you have to figure out the local package names for each dependency and they offer one .Deb for each different version of Debian and its derivatives and it's just so tedious to figure which is the right one.
> Biggest hardware challenge I've faced is my Logitech mouse
In case it helps:
https://github.com/libratbag/piper
Sadly the project feels semi-abandoned. No new releases so I had to build it from source. Also the PR board seems to be ignored (one or two of those are mine - I tried to fix the misleading button labels).
Can I run Solidworks on Linux yet? Excel? Labview? Vivado? Adobe products? Altium Designer? (Matlab is mostly yes) Not everybody is just writing Javascript and PHP.
Can I get a laptop to sleep after closing the lid yet?
Not that long ago the answer to these questions was mostly no (or sort of yes... but very painfully)
On Windows all of this just works.
> Can I get a laptop to sleep after closing the lid yet?
> on windows all of this just works
Disagree on the sleep one - my work laptop doesn’t go to sleep properly. The only laptop I’ve ever used that behaves as expected with sleep is a macbook.
That's funny - my work MBP won't go to sleep properly, lol. Often come back to work after the weekend to find a dead laptop.
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Still no big CAD names that I'm aware of (annoyingly), Libre Calc works fine for me as an Excel alternative, I have used Matlab on it but not recently, not sure on the others.
Laptop sleep and suspend can still be finicky unfortunately.
I will say my experience using CAD or other CAE software on windows has gotten progressively worse over the years to the point that FEA is more stable on linux than on windows.
We do really need a Solidworks, Creo or NX on linux though. My hope has been that eventually something like Wine, Proton, or other efforts to bring windows games to linux will result in us getting the ability to run them. They are one of the last things holding me back from fully moving away from windows.
These are all pretty niche products at this point. For the true professionals that need these tools they're stuck but most people can find reasonable alternatives for their hobby or side hustle.
Or... they can use Windows and not have to bend over backwards. I know this because I keep trying and giving up believe me.
I hear you, and also value Excel and a few other products, but I hit my perosnal limit with Windows enshittificatoion early last year and changed my daily driver at home to Linux.
I added a couple VMs running windows, linux, and whatever else I need in proxmox w/ xrdp/rdp and remina, and it's really the best of both worlds. I travel a good deal and being able to remotely connect and pick up where I left off while also not dealing with windows nagware has been great.
Adobe works
I get people are tired of Year of Linux on Desktop, but I feel like last year it actually started happening for real. Mostly due to Arch which is not what I ever expected.
On one hand we have Steam that will make 1000s of games become available on easy to use platform based on Arch.
For developers, we have Omarchy, which makes experience much more streamlined and very pleasant and productive. I moved both my desktop and laptop to Omarchy and have one Mac laptop, this is really good experience, not everything is perfect, but when I switch to Mac after Omarchy, I often discover how not easy is to use Mac, how many clicks it takes to do something simple.
I think both Microsoft and Apple need some serious competition and again, came from Arch who turned out to be more stable and serious then Ubuntu.
My main joy of Linux is to have tilling manager and to have same machine on which I can both play games and work. Which since Windows I couldn't make happen.
Between this and the dual boot diaries podcast it's great to see mainstream PC outlets covering Linux more broadly.
now if only Thinkpads were good again :-/
I have a Windows 11 PC strictly for gaming. Nearly every-time I interact with Windows it infuriates me with garbage code, Microsoft business BS and anti-privacy. I’d love to switch but has Linux gaming solved the anti-cheat requirement issue? Do Epic and EA games work on Linux?
I also play a decent amount of Flight Simulator 2024 and losing that is almost a non-starter for switching.
anticheat is not a linux issue, its a developers issue. it seems facially easy to solve. pair players with the type of game they want.
It is interesting and fascinating to see the growth of Linux.
As many have pointed out, The biggest factor is obviously the enshittification of Microsoft. Valve has crept up in gaming. And I think understated is how incredibly nice the tiling WMs are. They really do offer an experience which is impossible to replicate on Mac or Windows, both aesthetically and functionally.
Linux, I think, rewards the power user. Microsoft and Apple couldn't give a crap about their power users. Apple has seemed to devolve into "Name That Product Line" fanboy fantasy land and has lost all but the most diehard fans. Microsoft is just outright hostile.
I'm interested to see what direction app development goes in. I think TUIs will continue to rise in popularity. They are snappier and overall a much better experience. In addition, they work over SSH. There is now an entire overclass of power users who are very comfortable moving around in different servers in shell. I don't think people are going to want to settle for AI SaaS Cloudslop after they get a taste of local first, and when they realize that running a homelab is basically just Linux, I think all bets are off as far as which direction "personal computing" goes. Also standing firmly in the way of total SSH app freedom are IPhone and Android, which keep pushing that almost tangible utopia of amazing software frustratingly far out of reach.
It doesn't seem like there is a clear winner for the noob-friendly distro category. It seems like theyre all pretty good. The gaming distros seem really effective. I finally installed Omarchy, having thought "I didn't need it, I can rice my own arch", etc, and I must say the experience has been wonderful.
I'm pretty comfortable at the "cutting edge" (read, with all my stuff being broken), so my own tastes in OS have moved from Arch to the systemd free Artix or OpenBSD. I don't really see the more traditional "advanced" Linuxes like Slackware or Gentoo pulling much weight. I've heard interesting things about users building declarative Nix environments and I think that's an interesting path. Personally, I hope we see some new, non-Unix operating systems that are more data and database oriented than file oriented. For now, OpenBSD feels very comfortable, it feels like I have a prayer of understanding what's on my system and that I learn things by using it, the latter of which is a feature of Arch. The emphasis on clean and concise code is really quite good, and serves as a good reminder that for all the "memory safe" features of these new languages, it's tough to beat truly great C developers for code quality. If you're going to stick with Unix, you might as well go for the best.
More and more I find myself wanting to integrate "personal computing" into my workflow, whether that's apps made for me and me alone, Emacs lisp, custom vim plugins, or homelab stuff. I look with envy at the smalltalks of the world, like Marvelous Toolkit, the Forths, or the Clojure based Easel. I really crave fluency - the ability for code to just pour out - none of the hesitation or system knowledge gaps which come from Stack Overflow or LLM use. I want mastery. I've also become much more tactical on which code I want to maintain. I really have tried to curb "not invented here" syndrome because eventually you realize you aren't going to be able to maintain it all. Really I just want a fun programming environment where I can read Don Knuth and make wireframe graphics demos!
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If people put half the amount of their time into fixing Windows as they do installing software on Linux, it'd be way better.
Instead of distro upgrades, spend 3 minutes disabling the newest AI feature using regedit.
But, as the author rightly notes: It's more about a "feeling." Well then, good luck.
The article's title - and the original title of the submission - was specific, bold, and contained a call to action. The new title is bland and unspecific (Linux has been "good" for servers for decades now).
Please revert this submission to use the correct title.
It's good until you boot your system and end up with an unrecoverable black screen that meeses your day of work for no good reason. Linux is free if you don't value your time.
You can't really make blanket statements like this about "Linux" in general because it depends on what distro you use. For example, in NixOS to fix this type of problem all you have to do is rollback to a previous configuration that is known to work. I've not used it, but I believe Arch has something similar.
Even with imperatively configured distros like Ubuntu, it's generally much easier to recover from a "screen of death" than in Windows because the former is less of a black box than the latter. This means its easier to work out what the problem is and find a fix for it. With LLMs that's now easier than ever.
And, in the worst case that you have to resort to reinstalling your system, it's far less unpleasant to do that in a Linux distro than in Windows. The modern Windows installer is painful to get through, and then you face hours or days of manually reinstalling and reconfiguring software which you can do with a small handful of commands in Linux to get back to a state that is reasonably similar to what you had before.
"Screen of death" in Windows? I haven't heard of one of those in over a decade.
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I dunno, I spend less time fighting with any of my several linux systems than the macbook I'm required to use for work, even without trying to do anything new with it. I choose to view this charitably and assume most of the time investment people perceive when switching operating systems is familiarity penalties, essentially a switching cost. The longer this remains the case, the less charitably I'm willing to view this.
You can also mitigate a lot of the "familiarity penalties" by planning ahead. For example, by the time I made the decision to switch from Windows around 15 years ago, I'd already been preferring multi-platform FOSS software for many years because I had in mind that I might switch one day. This meant that when it came time to switch, I was able to go through the list of all the software I was using and find that almost all of it was already available in Linux, leaving just a small handful of cases that I was able to easily find replacements for.
The result was that from day 1 of using Linux I never looked back.
Of course, MS seems to enjoy inflicting familiarity penalties on its established user base every couple of years anyway. After having your skills negated in this way enough times, the jump to Linux might not look so bad.
Not in my experience. I've run both Windows and Linux for the last decade and Windows is the only OS that I ever have problems with updates wasting my time and breaking things. I've been running image-based Linux for the last two years and the worst case is rebooting to rollback to the last deployment. Before that it was booting a different btrfs snapshot.
Fun aside: I had a hardware failure a few years ago on my old workstation where the first few sectors of every disk got erased. I had Linux up and running in 10 minutes. I just had to recreate the efi partition and regenerate a UKI after mounting my OS from a live USB. Didn't even miss a meeting I had 15 minutes later. I spent hours trying to recover my Windows install. I'm rather familiar with the (largely undocumented) Windows boot process but I just couldn't get it to boot after hours of work. I just gave up and reinstalled windows from scratch and recovered from a restic backup.
Never had that happen to me in 25 years of Linux use.
You aren't comparing Linux to anything here.
Windows has recently been a complete shitshow - so even if Linux hasn't gotten any better (it has) it is now likely better than fiddling around with unfucking Windows, and Windows doing things like deleting all your files.
You can put some work into windows to slim it down some, a unattended generator to turn most of the crap off on install, then Shutup OO goes a long way
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Couple of nit picks with all these articles about trying Linux. They should explain words like "distro" before throwing them around. This one also uses "Debian" without explanation. If the audience really is Windows users these are going to be rather cryptic.
Let me put gaming aside for a minute.
Linux is not good. Some hardware support is still reverse-engineering-based, or based on a few individuals best effort activity. Linux needs manufacturers' first hand commitment to quality opensource to be truly good.
Linux is not good. Some software is not on feature-parity among operating systems. With Linux being the software kingdom poor Cinderella. Linux needs software feature parity to be truly good.
Linux is not good. Because too much mainstream new PCs comes with some other operating system pre-installed (and paid for) even if you won't need it. Linux needs freedom of choice sing first PC power on, like a stub to download whatever OS you want (to pay for) or to boot from removable media for Linux to become truly good.
Linux is not good. Because there is still "stuff" that require some specific non-linux software running under some specific non-linux operating system to be made useful things. We need manufacturers to ditch this for linux to become truly good.
I am a happy user of Linux on my primary PC since 20+ years now. But I still have to fight for my freedom every now and again because of one or more of the above points.
Now let's jump back to gaming.
Linux is not good because game industry thinks proprietary platforms and operating systems are better for their business. There is only 1 platform fully supporting Linux and too few titles. Gaming Linux hardly hits 5% of the market share, basically the same as Desktop Linux. While Server Linux is beyond 75%.
I think reasons could be two-fold.
On one hand, Linux is not perceived by industry as attractive as other proprietary platforms. Maybe industry can squeeze much more money from the latter.
On the other hand, it could be that most of the development resources are NOT ORIENTED towards gaming and desktop, so these markets simply lag behind.
Of course, I could be totally wrong: these are my humble opinions with some facts backing them.
Live Long, Linux!
> I am a happy user of Linux on my primary PC since 20+ years now. But I still have to fight for my freedom every now and again
And this is a problem with Linux ?
Yes it is. Linux is one of my main means to fight or my freedom. Anytime I need to cope with those things, I feel less free.