Commercial OSes (both Windows and MacOS) now feel so insanely agenda driven, and the agenda no longer feels like anything close to making the user happy and productive. For Mac, it feels like Apple wants to leverage what came out of VisionOS and unify the look and feel of mobile and desktop--two things no one asked for. For Windows, it feels like ads for their partners and ensuring they don't fumble the ai/agent transition the way they did with mobile.
Linux is SUCH a breath of fresh air. No one wants it to be anything other than what you want it to be. Modern desktop Linux has a much improved out of the box experience with good support for all the hardware I've thrown at it. And Claude Code makes it very fast and trivial to personalize, adapt, automate, etc.
Ubuntu also tried this with Unity. They were hoping that Ubuntu would become more popular on tablets if they had a more tablet-friendly UI... They imposed this on desktop users even though nobody asked for it and basically nobody used Linux on a tablet. It was kind of a disaster. Ubuntu is a commercial entity though, so yeah, prone to the same kind of bad management decisions. as Microsoft and Apple. At least with Linux you have options. Personally I just want Linux to keep becoming more reliable over time, and have better support for energy-saving features on laptops. It's sad that Ubuntu still has issues waking up from sleep mode in 2025. Somehow those problems haven't been fixed in 20 years.
I'm old enough to remember everyone praising Apple for not following Microsoft and making iOS it's own separate thing.
It's totally mad that they're now trying to converge their two differentiated, successful, and (mostly) well-liked OSes with the new one they just made for a $3000 headset nobody bought and even fewer people use with any regularity.
You can't seriously compare how inappropriate Windows 8 was on desktop to the latest macOS. Bad UI aside, the OS is effectively the same OS X from 2001 with some fresh skin.
Also a lot of people hate on macOS changes, I myself did not upgrade to the latest version.
Honestly, forced to use a macbook for work and I get incredibly strong "windows 8" vibes from macos.
Apple still has pretty incredible hardware, although it's definitely priced with that in mind - but the software has been a constant slog. Change for change's sake, needless shifting in settings/config menus. Weird "we tried to make this similar to mobile" themes in some places but not others. Overly complex os navigation, without clear goals or direction.
Frankly - the OS apple is producing for their traditional computers feels like garbage. I use Arch/Gnome on my personal hardware and I feel like some time in the last 5ish years my opinion swapped - I used to think Gnome was mostly copying Apple design choices, but slightly worse. Now I think Gnome is just a more clear, more usable DE than what Apple is releasing. I moved my wife to Arch/Gnome on her personal laptop last year, and the sure sign was that she hasn't really had any problems with it.
All that said... I still keep a laptop around with Windows 11 on it, because I have a couple of legacy tools (CNCs, solar inverters) that still want it, and holy shit is modern Windows just absolute trash. I grew up on Windows, from windows 3.1 to windows 10, and it's the worst of the 3 by a good distance right now.
You know something's gone wrong with commercial tech companies when the only OS that actually feels like it's intentionally designed for users is the free product.
Except that GNOME Mobile is actually pretty close to achieving that right now, and runs quite well on any reasonably up-to-date mobile hardware if the kernel-level support is there.
Effectively no one is arguing Apple is “inventing” this, and tons of people—especially the most ardent Apple fans—hate this direction. Adoption of the 26 OSs is lower than others in recent memory. Even the comment you’re replying to is critical of it.
There are a lot of legitimate reasons to criticise Apple, especially under Tim Cook. Let’s please not do this obvious rage bait where you fabricate that a group has a singular unified hypocritical opinion which is the opposite of what we’re seeing just so you can hate on them.
What even is the point? For the past twenty years, I have never seen an Apple fan being as close to annoying as the haters are. Same thing with other groups like vegans: There are more people loudly proclaiming that vegans are annoying than there are annoying vegans in the world.
Why must we keep defining ourselves by hating on others? As long as they’re not causing harm, let people be. “Why are you so angry?”
Yep, I'm in this boat. After years of macs my next will be a FreeBSD Desktop.
edit: Although phone is much harder. I guess I'll just turn all the 'stuff' like icloud off, use only signal and my banking/etc apps, and get a separate camera.. Anyone found a less painful way to live without an iPhone/Android?
However if we don't get something like SuSE desktops and laptops at Media Markt and friends, most people won't care.
In fact I know of library that rolled back to Windows kiosk mode, from a previous SuSE deployment, because it wasn't what library users were expecting.
Yeah. The TechBros changed things globally. I can not support their Evilness, so I also need to get people to commit to having viable alternatives, e. g. improving LibreOffice to the point where the proprietary office suites from US corporations are no longer needed.
Mac feels like it is constantly trying to sell you on their cloud services. A few times a day it will tell me that I haven't backed up to the cloud.
Windows is strangely less direct, but will regularly automatically try to save something to onedrive and force a subscription. Plus, it is just full of ads and nonsense.
I’ve noticed on my work machine, it really really really wants me to save my new document to one drive. It was about three clicks in the save dialog to get back to a local drive.
They were sneaky about it, with a switch to “turn on autosave” only working when you save to the cloud.
as a dude who uses all three heavily for work & personal (windows/linux/macos) macos doesnt even come close to windows in the "trying to sell me on the cloud services" front. microsoft ddos's my brain with sign in with an o365 account at every corner of computing now. microsoft products are actually insane now.
i have quite a few mac vms for development things and ive had no issue just disabling all the icloud pieces & my usage in these environments seems to be pretty damn quiet the way i like it. windows has gone completely bonkers damn file explore has network service call stacks summoning bing wtf is going on there.
feel like i have to shower after using windows now it's crazy. reminds me of early 2000s when HP laptops were just filled with bloatware when you bought them, except microsoft has now baked this unforgettable experience into their operating system.
i will remain on macos for my personal device until other hardware manufs make great hardware. i have the pleasure (or displeasure) of using lots of different devices for work so ive got a stack of thinkpads and surfaces and a couple frameworks even and apple is still leading the charge on the bonkers hardware that fits in my backpack. im loyal to no one in the end and have no dog in this fight, but i would really enjoy if someone could catch up to apples chip developments for mobile desktop computing. id love something that is as refined and performant+efficient as my m4max pro but runs linux.
all in all i think device/manuf tribalism is the lamest part of computing and it's always been in my best interests to try them all myself and switch on a whim to whatever feels like it meets my needs. im in a unique position to use a lot of diff devices and os's with what i do and there's undoubtedly frustrations with all of them. there's always going to be a free spirit inside me that champions linux to the ends of the horizons though, but apple is undeniably in a unique position to r&d bankroll tsmc, design their own soc, develop hardware and software and marry all of those things together. it's cool shit, and they'd score a lot of goodwill if they just documented their damn stuff so linux distributions could just work on these devices rather than requiring some crazy reverse engineering effort and all the associated mailing list drama that came with asahi.
Ugh it annoys me so much that the desktop etc is all in one drive without me setting it that way. But then there is still a desktop/documents directory in the usual spot under your profile, just the files don’t appear if you actually look at the desktop.
Even within the range of Linux distros there are some that feel more agenda-driven than others. That's the absolute wonder of it. One can sidestep the flamewars and just use another distro that suits likeminded people.
On the other hand I think this makes it difficult to provide a perfect experience - you have to stay closer to the herd if you want trouble free computing. You have the choice.
I think it's great that there are Linux projects where the people in the project are obviously unhinged fanatical idealists sent on a mission by god to do <whatever> in the One True Way. I wouldn't use any of those projects, but it's great that they exist, and sometimes their good ideas percolate out to projects that I do use.
Like fine, they're gonna make a distro that only uses software under one of the FSF's free as in freedom copy-left open source licenses, not just excluding closed source software, but also binary blob device firmware and software distributed under one of those filthy permissive licenses. That's great. It's fucking unusable, but it's awesome that it exists and it's great that they're doing it.
> Claude Code makes it very fast and trivial to personalize, adapt, automate
I used Claude to define some CS exam computers using NixOS; it was just GNOME, but with a few tweaks made via dconf. For example, add a maximize icon next to the X (close) in the menubar, make the dashbar behave like a dock with smart autohiding. On a Tailscale VPN so I can service them. And with a few programs preinstalled, preconfigured and pinned to the dock. System users for every student. And with mirroring the screen at a certain resolution by default.
Anything I hadn’t tried before, I just asked it to make. The dconf tweaking in particular was so much easier than when I tried to do this manually.
Windows is a bizarre product at this point; it is what the company is famous for, but it is small beans next to Azure, right?
Nobody would get into the Operating System business to make money I think, the going rate is $0, subsidized by something (an ad company, a hardware company, or general kindness and community spirit).
No, Windows still has Windows tax, which is why I always choose "No OS" when buying a machine. MacOS/iOS/iPadOS were never for sale separately, so we can't judge the price. Android sure is subsidized though.
Productivity and Cloud have a revenue of about 30B each while personal computing only was 13.5B (that includes windows Xbox and search + advertising) according to ms earnings report q4 25
If you want the "Home" version of Windows, you'll get ads and crap, but the cost will be free/low. If you don't want the ads and need a more professional setup, then you can pay for Windows "Pro" version. They also have server versions that cost a lot more, so yes, Microsoft can and does make money from their OS. No, it's probably not as much as they make from Azure now, but in the past it made them a lot of money. It's estimated Windows brings in ~$20 billion for Microsoft, which is nothing to balk at. Azure brings in ~$75 billion. $20 billion isn't "small beans" in this equation, it's substantial.
It's interesting to think how incredibly clunky, unintuitive, difficult, unpleasant to the eye, and just generally painful the Linux desktop experience used to be. These days Linux has proved it's usefulness on the desktop, both to novices and power users alike. I have no doubt that 2030s will be the decade of the Linux desktop. Perhaps until 2038 anyway.
I feel like cli agents are the main benefit of going back to Linux. It’s such a joy to have all the solutions to customizations and fixes I want completely automated, using an agent that can control anything I permit and understands my OS completely.
MS was almost two decades early to the mobile party, and still fumbled it. Because they didn't have the usability insights around touchscreens that others pioneered.
I turn on my computer, the desktop shows up…and that’s it. No random windows, no popups about some bundled software I don’t use or how my subscription for X service I don’t want isn’t activated. A chime and a blank screen. Bazzite made my computer fun again.
Obviously, you can't build something as complex as a modern operating system without intention, and therefore an "agenda" but I have a feeling you know what OP was getting at.
I also know that the impulse to be a pedant is strong because I fight it every day, ha!
By agenda-driven, I think they mean the commercial operating systems are designed with the intention of improving the uptake of other products and services by the companies that sell them.
I think you are referencing something more like a political agenda. And Linux to some extent, GNU even more so are motivated by a political agenda: user empowerment. It is just… a good agenda.
Was going to say, the online help always baits you into using OpenJDK which doesn't work for random stuff, or in older times there was those non-default "non free" repos you needed to add if you wanted wifi to work.
I find it so odd that Apple put so much weight behind the VisionOS design, rolling it out to all platforms, considering so few people have Vision Pro. The justification for bringing some iOS ideas to macOS made sense, because everyone knows how to use iOS and is familiar with those conventions.
I’m curious if we’ll see another major shift with the new deign lead, or if the higher ups will want to run with Liquid Glass for a while after so much investment, and not wanting to alienate users by radically changing design direction too often. Or if Liquid Glass is here to stay as long as we have Vision Pro, because VR/AR demand that style of UI, so everything else needs to fall in line for consistency’s sake.
I think I’d be more apt to switch to Linux if it wasn’t for all the mobile integration macOS and iOS have. Giving that up is a tough sell. It also means finding new solutions for managing photos, music, notes, and a bunch of other things. I also struggle to find non-Apple hardware I find acceptable. I’ve used Linux on and off for over 20 years, and in the past few years is gotten to the point where I think I could daily drive it with little to no compromise, in a bubble. But mobile really bursts that bubble.
> I find it so odd that Apple put so much weight behind the VisionOS design, rolling it out to all platforms, considering so few people have Vision Pro.
I suspect they began working on Liquid Glass before the Vision Pro was publicly unveiled, so they didn't know what the public response would be.
What I honestly find more baffling is that they thought the Vision Pro would sell well. It just isn't a good product.
Perhaps they're still banking on a future where the Vision Pro becomes a pair of real glasses. In which case, Liquid Glass is the type of interface you'd want to have.
I agree with you. Microsoft really has gotten bad in this regard. In the past, the operating system was kind of semi-useful. Now one has to wonder what the real agenda is. For me the quitting point was the recall-sniffing on everyone; I don't care if this can be disabled. To me it means that the USA wants to monitor me non-stop. That's a no go. (I was already using Linux before, so I don't depend on Microsoft anyway, but it now meant that I also need to stop using secondary computers with a Microsoft-tainted operating system. I can not trust the USA in any regard anymore with the TechBros in charge. They killed all goodwill and reputation.)
Windows has evolved into the world's highest security risk. MacOS feels like Eye Candy due to its increasingly inaccessible price for people with low resources. So, price and security are the reasons why I switched to Linux.
Getting a macbook is cheaper than it has ever been. You can get a new m4 macbook air for around 750 on amazon. The prices of apple laptops have been dropping every year despite inflation in the rest of the economy....
It's typical business logic. It's not enough to focus on making the product better than the user, you must have a "big" product vision and you're only allowed make changes that align with that product vision.
So when that vision is something that users are ambivalent on (3D TV, AI operating system, etc...), well tough, that's still all they're getting until it hurts the company financially or the next executive has a different "big idea". :(
I’m stuck in a world of AirDrop and expecting my phone to know the Wi-Fi password on my laptop, so I’m not gonna leave MacOS but it absolutely does suck. It used to be that Spotlight file finding was broken, but as of the last today Finder file finding is broken too. This is on multiple new Macs.
Come back when I can run Linux on a laptop that has 12+ hours battery life, runs fast, that’s lightweight, quiet and doesn’t cause infertility from the heat when I put it on my lap….
Using an x86 laptop in 2025 is like using a flip phone 6 years after the iPhone came out.
Of course if you are a gamer, ignore everything I just wrote.
Given that this is your stance and demands for laptop hardware I have to assume that you have never once participated in the laptop market prior to the M1 releasing?
That’s the only way your unrealistic expectations make sense.
Of course, people have been parroting that about Linux on laptops for over a decade. I never understood it, since I’ve never had any significant issues with Linux on my laptops.
A. ACPI which is a sprawling, overengineered mess created by Microsoft, Intel, and Toshiba, and
B. ACPI-specific things like sleep and power being tested only for Windows
B is a direct result of two things: 1) crappy outsourced firmware developers, and 2) Microsoft's 1990s strategy of disallowing OEMs from offering systems with other operating systems preinstalled.
So, not really Linux's fault. If the interfaces that controlled all the laptop goodies were exposed as normal hardware (and documented) instead of gatekept behind ACPI methods that have to be written by firmware vendors that can often barely spell the menu options correct in the setup screens, then this issue would not exist.
UEFI is ACPI's successor and carries on this legacy. It's disappointing that it's seeping into the ARM world.
I think that the ThinkPad X13s Gen1 might meet these requirements. It is my favorite ARM Linux laptop I've ever used. It has great support in Debian 13 (trixie), and it feels pretty smooth and fast. It doesn't have any fans, stays cool, and I regularly get a full day's worth of battery life out of it with margin to spare (10-12 hours). It's better than the newer Snapdragon X1 Elite based ThinkPads, in my opinion, even though it isn't quite as fast because it is passively cooled, is easily fast enough that I've never noticed it feeling "slow", has good driver support in mainline Linux and Mesa (which took a few years to be fully worked out, but is there now), and it's readily available for a good price (on eBay).
I love my expensive Macbook at work, but at home old my old Thinkpad running Linux is a godsend. The performance is perfectly adequate for all my daily non-work needs, battery lasts several hours, and since the thing has little monetary value, I can be pretty careless with it, in an environment with small kids running around and doing random things. At this rate, I think it will last me well into 2030's.
I'm not going to buy a new Macbook with my own money as long as I can't install Linux on it. I don't want perfectly fine machines to turn into e-waste, or at least become insecure once the original manufacturer decides not to offer OS updates anymore.
I recently switched to Debian on my laptop (Zephyrus G14) because it was the only way I could get it to NOT run into the problems you described. Went from ~2 hours of battery life to 10, and no more of the constant jet engine level fan activity I experienced with windows.
Besides the 12+ hour battery life which is only achievable with ARM processors, everything described can be accomplished easily for the typical slightly above average computer user with Kubuntu today.
I installed latest Kubuntu on my old 2015 MacBook Pro and it runs ice cold now when playing YouTube videos with Firefox whereas before it ran hot even with a Mac fan control app
Why would anyone come back? Nobody is bothered by you having a device that you like, and nobody cares if you replace it.
People without this particular 12 hour battery life requirement (which is quite niche, most of us live near plugs) are talking about what works for them.
Bro I don't care how long the battery life is. I use my laptop plugged in 90% of the time. The portability is so I can change what location I'm sitting at, not so I can be unplugged constantly.
Linux will run on most platforms, so just pick up a fast, lightweight laptop, and select a conservative power profile for longer battery life and less heat, and don't run 32-thread machine learning jobs on it.
A 12-hour laptop battery life is a little bit of a red herring: yes, you can get it on efficient ultrabooks and MacBooks, with light use like web browsing or office work, on low brightness and minimal background apps. This is true on MacOS, Windows and Linux. The first two may be better at handling low power modes on hardware peripherals, but OTOH on Linux I have a better control over background tasks.
I have an absolute trash travel laptop from last decade, running Fedora Linux, and it lasts for multiple days if I keep it mostly closed and just open it for whatever browsing/editing I need on the road.
The big challenge in linux (at least for me) is to connect and work with devices like printers or scanners. It is weird but when I connected my (now old) printer a decade ago its setup was easier and more stable. After several years and ubuntu upgrades at some point I wasn't managed to make it work at all.. And I had no luck with my scanner at all.. Luckily I don't need to use neither printer neither scanner these days but I still keep a laptop (also old) with win7 and all original drivers for such devices.
Linux is one of the last strong defenses for the idea that people should control the computers they own. On desktops and servers, root access is normal, and attempts to take it away do not work because software freedom is well established. On phones, that never happened. There is no real, mainstream “Linux for mobile,” and the result is a world of locked-down platforms where things like “sideloading” are treated as scary security risks instead of basic user rights. This makes it much easier for lawmakers to argue for removing root access on mobile devices, even though the same idea would be unrealistic on desktop systems.
A great deal of gratitude is owed to all the people who volunteer their free time to create the stable desktop environment we have free access to on Linux in 2026.
If you're interested in this aspect of user agency, you might like the "trustworthy technology" site a few friends and I are working on: https://aol.codeberg.page/eci/
"There is no real, mainstream “Linux for mobile,”"
Probably need to clarify since Android is Linux. Assume you're referring to community run distros. Unfortunately the issue is usually proprietary hardware that has to be reverse engineered and nobody willing to pay engineers full time to do that.
This completely breaks the Linux experience for anybody living in a reasonably populous area. The issue has 3 upvotes.
I also put a 400 $ bounty on it, if anybody wants to give it a shot. (Given that AI is supposed to replace 90% of programmers last year, making the Wifi list stay visible should be easy, right?)
This worked fine 10 years ago.
Most of my gripes are around some UI garbage behaviour like that. I have a file manager on one PC (I think it's the Ubuntu one where some "GUI in Snap" stuff breaks the GUI) breaks the file picker dialogue, so that when pasting a directory path in to navigate there, at the exact instant you press Enter, it autocompletes the first file so that that gets selected, leading you to upload a file you didn't want to upload.
That said, all of that feels like really high quality compared to when once per year I click the Wifi menu on some Windows and it take 20 seconds to appear at all.
If you are sensitive to these issues, unfortunately you need to go with a mainstream linux distribution and use near-default settings.
It's great that you can customize everything and use your own window manager, compositor, etc ... but these issues are the price you pay. It is unfair to compare this to Windows, where you don't even have these customization options.
Specifically for the network manager applet, it is not fixed because it's not really used anymore. GNOME Shell has it's own network selection menu that does not use the applet. It is the default on most systems, so users don't face this issue by default.
I jumped on the Linux bandwagon with my main work laptop last week, when my perfectly fine (I thought) Windows 11 installation nuked itself without warning (possibly related to merely opening Teams).
I somewhat randomly chose Mint, and a few oddities aside; it’s been a pretty good experience.
It takes skill to make a GUI that integrates dynamic information a good UX. For things like WiFi I discovered that modifying config files is an infinitely better experience than any GUI on Linux.
Also for some reason DE's sometimes fail to automatically connect to an AP when it's right there and I have to click for them to do it. This issue literally never happened to me when just using wpa_supplicant, for years whenever an AP is operational then so is the connection without fail.
Last time I tried Linux I was so done with Windows I installed Arch. Couldn't connect to Wifi. I figured it was Arch, so I installed Ubuntu. Literally the same problem. So I got a new USB wifi adaptor that said it supported Linux...same problem. I gave up and have been using a MacBook ever since lol.
Last summer Manjaro released usual heavy update and suddenly wifi on my old spare mbp was gone. Luckily digging around I found that a firmware was available in aur so I had to just plug ethernet in, install the package and reboot the system. But then another smaller update out of blue made system unbootable so instead of doing "forensics" I went by the easiest way of reinstalling the system and wifi again was working out of the box.
Re: "I gave up and have been using a MacBook ever since lol."
I'm curious. What will you do when Apple too starts shoehorning AI into every part of MacOS and when Apple introduces increasingly unpalatable or government-mandated surveillance functionality like Microsoft is doing with Recall?
Also the latest KDE UI that inserts a tiny password input box below the SSID when you click the SSID, and doesn't scroll it into view, so you're left wondering what's going on
I've been a Linux admin for 25 years but up until a few months ago my personal computer has been windows (gaming desktop) or Mac (laptop).
I decided to give desktop Linux another shot and I'm glad I did. I was prepared for a lot of jankiness but figured I have enough experience to fix whatever needs fixing. Surprisingly, this has not been the case at all, the PC has been not only as stable as Windows or Mac but also performs better and is much more comfortable and intuitive to use. I never really want to "work on" my personal computer, I want it to just be there for me reliably. I've always had a soft spot for free software, but I just couldn't justify the effort until now.
So I guess this is my love letter to all the devs that have made the modern Linux desktop possible. Even compared to just a few years ago, the difference is immense. Keep up the good work.
I've been running a Linux desktop for about 13 years. There are still "moments" where you have to work on it and it can be more opaque than Windows/Mac. But you have the control to do what you need to do, which is one huge factor for me in Linux's favor.
I moved my immediate and mostly non-tech family to all run Linux including an aging relative who needed a locked-down Firefox install to keep her from falling victim to predatory sites and extensions. Pretty easy to script the entirety of the OS install and lockdown so that it was documented and repeatable. Can't do that without techie roots but I love that it's possible and mostly straightforward from a scripting perspective. It's almost exclusively get the right file with the right config in the right place and restart a service.
The only major day-to-day downside IMO is battery life on Linux laptops. Can't compare to current generation of Macs but that's true for Windows too.
I have been using desktop Linux for about the same amount of time and the way I see it now, even on the occasion where I have to troubleshoot something weird (which has maybe been one or two times in the past few years), it doesn't sound any different from the issues people are having with Windows and Mac these days—and at least I can fix it!
I managed to get around ~7W idle on a 2024 dgpu/igpu laptop, with room to further optimize. From my limited casual checks (nowhere near proper benchmark), it's better than windows.
But yes it's an area that still requires tweaking, which is a cost I don't want to incur. Also just within this year I got a regression (later fixed) because of a bug in nvidia-open driver so it stopped going into low power state giving me a toaster on the go. These are still very obscure to root cause and fix.
In my experience, the remaining difficulties with Linux tend to revolve around managing ownership and permissions of files and directories.
I recently plugged in my external hard drive into my Linux PC and it just wouldn't read it. "You do not have permission to access this drive" or something like that. The solution after googling ended up being (for some reason) some combination of sudo chown -R user /dev/sda1 and unplugging and reconnecting the drive.
No way to do that from the GUI (on KDE at least) and I'm not sure how I'd even solve that problem if I didn't know the super user password.
Still glad to be using Linux, of course, but sometimes these problems still pop up.
I've been on Mint for nearly 4 years now,. migrating from Windows.
The only hiccup I had was botched updates once, and the OS would error during boot.
The fix was easy, boot to terminal, fiddle with timeshift to restore to the point prior to update, then apply de updates carefully with a few reboots in between.
Now, was that easy? For someone well versed in the technicalities, yes. For a layman, probably not.
Now, that said, it was the only problem I had in 4 years. It has been very smooth sailing besides that.
My experience with Windows prior to that was always horrible. Yearly clean installs because after a while the computer felt extremely sluggish. Random blue screens for god knows what reason.
I've been running desktop Linux for about eighteen years, though I did take a break and run a Macbook for about four years.
It's a little upsetting that Windows has gotten so terrible, because I think in a lot of ways the NT Kernel is a better piece of software than the Linux kernel. Drivers are simply easier to install and they generally don't require a reboot and they don't require messing with kernel modules, IO is non-blocking by default, and a bunch of other things that are cool and arguably better than Linux.
The problem is that, while the kernel is an important part of an operating system, it's not the only part. Even if the NT kernel were the objectively best piece of software ever to be written by humans, that still doesn't change the fact that Windows has become a pretty awful mess. They have loaded the OS with so much crap (and ads now!), the Windows Update tool routinely breaks your computer, their recovery/repair tools simply do not work, their filesystem is geriatric and has been been left behind compared to stuff like ZFS, btrfs, and APFS, and they don't really seem determined to fix any of this stuff.
Even if the Linux kernel were to be slightly worse, it's still good enough. Even if you do have to muck with kernel modules it's not that hard now with DKMS. Even if the IO is blocking by default epoll has been around for decades and works fine.
So at that point, if the kernel is good enough, and if we can get userland decent enough, then desktop Linux is better than Windows. Linux is good enough, without ads, with recovery tools that actually work, and performs comparably or better than Windows.
My experience, as a software developer, is that both Windows and Linux desktop are great. The biggest advantage Windows has is better support for desktop applications that are used by a lot of people, which is just the nature of Windows being more popular for desktop users, and is why I use it. With Linux, it's more likely you'll have to be a bit more savvy with occasional issues.
To note, with official Linux support on Windows, it's trivial for me to get everything I want as a developer on Windows, so that's never been a hard blocker for me.
> To note, with official Linux support on Windows, it's trivial for me to get everything I want as a developer on Windows, so that's never been a hard blocker for me.
Maybe not as a developer, but as a user I still think WSL is only kind of superficially a solution. You still are stuck with an update process that happens automatically and can brick your computer and recovery tools that, as far as I can tell, have never actually worked for anyone in history. You're still stuck with NTFS, which was a perfectly fine filesystem thirty years ago but now is missing basic features, like competent snapshotting/backups, and instead you have to rely on System Restore, which again doesn't actually work.
I mean, yeah, you can do `sudo apt install neovim`, and that's kind of cool I guess, but the problems with Windows, to me are far deeper and cannot be solved with a virtualization layer on top.
I've been using Linux as a desktop for that entire time, and actually, it was better before. The hardware was simpler, more compatible, and relied less on firmware blobs, so making Linux drivers was way easier. And the software was simpler because GUI makers weren't trying to be fancy. The peak of Linux desktop stability and ease of use was in 2002. It's been downhill from there.
The fact that you now need an account for almost any piece of hardware, including computers, phones etc is a major drawback that arrived with the internet era. Linux has been able to avoid that temptation.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves here. 15 years ago I was still looking up installation and driver procedures and workarounds to install Linux on my devices. I failed to install arch in college because I didn't have a driver for my SATA drive for example.
Today though. Yeah totally easy. Especially if you get one of the many machines with Linux support. Smooth sailing all around.
The only reason I haven't gone over to Linux is gaming with my RTX card. Interested to know your gaming setup and distro. Any stability/compatibility issues?
> The biggest issue I’ve had so far is Minecraft: Bedrock Edition. For some reason, Microsoft hasn’t prioritized making a Linux version of Bedrock. Java Edition works fine in Linux, but I play Minecraft with my kids, and they’re on Bedrock Edition on their iPads. There’s supposed to be a way to run the Android app with MCPE Launcher, but I couldn’t get it to work.
The launcher was somewhat pretty stable all along, until Microsoft enabled Google's Integrity Protection "DRM" into it. [0]
Fortunately, they have found a way to run it even with that added in after a couple of weeks later since they added that at Q3/4 last year.
> but I couldn’t get it to work.
From what I've seen, the game will crash when vibrant visuals (a built-in alternative rendering option with shaders-like experience in Minecraft Bedrock) volumetric fog is enabled. [1]
>I picked CachyOS rather than a better-known distro like Ubuntu because it’s optimized for modern hardware,
>First challenge: My mouse buttons don’t work. I can move the cursor, but can’t click on anything.
Maybe should've picked Ubuntu? I suspect this is the Linus (tech tips, not Torvalds) strategy of picking up an obscure distro for content purposes. Can't really have an article if everything just works, right
I suspect they sincerely picked CachyOS because they read people advocating for it, and were convinced by the advocacy. People advocate all kinds of distros, and all of them except the one I advocate are bad choices.
There's this reply in the comments from the author.
> Nah, it’s a problem with this particular mouse in X and Wayland and it’s been seen on Fedora and OpenSuse almost since the mouse came out. Not a Cachy issue, a nonstandard USB HID implementation by the vendor
Tbh, I don't even know what a distro would have to do to break this.
It’s not exactly obscure. It’s Arch with a nice installer and binaries with compiler optimizations for the latest hardware. It’s not a crazy choice if you have very new hardware. It feels exactly like Arch because it is.
I don't think PopOS could be called "obscure". At the time that the LTT video came out, PopOS and Manjaro (IIRC) were the distros to game on, if you wanted up-to-date OOTB working drivers.
Even so, it was hard to take LTT's attempt at using linux seriously when part of it included Linus bitching about how right clicking a list of files on github and clicking "save link as..." didnt give him a copy of the file. It just highlighted how utterly clueless he was and made it clear he couldn't be trusted for the rest of the video either.
Yeah, if the goal of the article was to convince Windows users to switch to Linux then Ubuntu would provide as frictionless an install as Windows. Since the author chooses CachyOS, of course there's going to be some important steps during installation that need to be handled with some forethought and extra software to handle all hardware issues. After all, CachyOS is based on Arch Linux and inherits it's minimal mindset. But the article about switching from Windows to Ubuntu has been already written a thousand times.
Ubuntu's UI isn't particulates intuitive for people coming from Windows anymore (it hasn't been for the past 13 years tbf).
Mint is the best default to advise to someone switching to Linux (it's mostly Ubuntu under the hood, but without the snap nonsense and with a less imaginative UI).
I really struggle when folks recommend a distro that is only now getting itself unstuck from a decade++ of inaction, starting an advance that other distros have been up to for decades.
Starting people out on a dinosaur has some advantages yes but personally I think it's malpractice, setting users up to have to make major painful shifts in the future to update all the derelict knowledge they gain.
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=449033
For not much prior research, he sure has done a lot of prior research to even know about desktop environments or bootloaders compared to your average windows user. This article read like every other promising Linux is user friendly and easy, then proceeding with the author fixing issues the average user wouldn’t be able to even diagnose.
I think anyone technically savvy enough to follow the article is already aware Linux is a viable primary OS, the question is can you manage it without having to become a Linux nerd? I want to be able to tell normal people they can use Linux.
What's funny is, the author is only having these questions because they chose a wacky Arch-based ultra-techie distro that I'd never even heard of.
If they'd just installed normal Ubuntu or Fedora, they wouldn't even know what a bootloader was, and they'd just use whatever desktop environment (probably GNOME, maybe KDE) came with it.
For real. I should write a blog post about my expierience but it would only be like 2 sentences. "Hey! I switched to Linux. I bought a desktop from System76 and it all just worked."
I use Linux exclusively for almost 20 years. I can tackle any tinkering of almost anything in a Linux environment, alongside of heavy use of Vim and Emacs.
Nowadays every time I want to run a non-trivial command of a program, configure a file somewhere, customize using code Emacs or anything else, I always put the LLMs to do it. I do almost nothing by myself, except check if said file is indeed there, open the file and copy paste the new configuration, restart the program, copy paste code here and there and so on.
No need to be a nerd to use Linux, that's so 2021. LLMs are the ultimate nerds when it comes to digging into manuals, scour the internet and github for workarounds, or tips and tricks and so on.
If you get someone to help you with the installation, or buy a pre-installed Linux, then yes I believe this to be true. I only have anecdotal evidence, but I have my dad who is very non-tech savvy who after about a day with gnome actually said it's the first desktop environment that he liked more than Windows 95. There has been one time in 5 years that he had to reach out for technical assistance. It turned out that he had been misled by a prompt to buy Ubuntu pro and had gotten into a weird state. I blame that one solely on canonical, not on Linux in general. After that I switched him to Fedora, and he's been running that now for a few years and didn't even realize I had changed his underlying OS. He is able to install anything he wants from the graphical storefront, and same with updates. In the early days we did have some trouble getting his printer to work, though once we switched him to Fedora everything on that printer worked out of the box. When my sister came over to his house with her MacBook, she had to mess with the Mac to get the printer working for over an hour, and it was still pretty hit or miss. It would lose half the jobs she tried to send to it. It truly is remarkable how usable Linux is for the average person now. For people that have to run software that only runs on Windows or Linux, excluding games of course since steam and other game managers handle those wonderfully now, there is definitely still a bit of pain. But for people who can get by with cloud-based or Linux friendly software, it's really quite good.
Printers. It always haunts us. I have exclusively bought Brother for home and work for close to two decades at this point because they follow CUPS standards requiring no fidgeting, and their modern offerings all have AirPrint, which eliminates the need for drivers. It's 2026, and the normies still think you cannot print from your phone because printers suck so much.
> but I have my dad who is very non-tech savvy who after about a day with gnome actually said it's the first desktop environment that he liked more than Windows 95.
more anecdotes, but I had the same experience with getting my mother in law on Linux. she is 75, and hadn't used a computer since her old job, and she used Windows XP, i believe she said, there. a couple of years ago, she wanted a bigger screen device to use for her internetting since her eyesight isn't what it used to be (her primary computing device was always her Android phone otherwise). my wife and I got her a thinkpad t440p, set her up with Debian GNOME, showed her how to use the Software Centre and install her stuff and update the machine, and off she went. haven't had a call to fix anything at all. she says she likes the experience better than the computers she remembers using at work running Windows.
My sister was the same, she brought her machine over, I booted a Ubuntu disk and did the disk config in the install and then she set the rest of the stuff up and I haven’t heard from her about it for 5 years, other than that I check if she’s still using it now and again.
> after about a day with gnome actually said it's the first desktop environment that he liked more than Windows 95.
You have to choose that?
I'm a long-time Linux user, and I don't like GNOME better as a desktop environment. I'll take a Windows 95-like desktop UI over GNOME any day of the week...
Snark aside, I really really don’t understand the aversion, even within the tech community, to learning new skills especially as it pertains to Linux.
Would having new knowledge be such a burden? Why is it something to avoid? Why is it not a good thing if normal people learn more about computing?
Do we want a population of iPad baby Linux users? Normal people can use it now, don’t gate keep.
We have people going “I don’t have to read, I could just have the AI do it for me” and pretty soon they’re not gonna be able to think. People don’t want to think or learn because we have such a cultural aversion to being a nerd. Nerd is not a bad thing.
Partly, the issue isn't "they would have to learn about Linux, and that's bad", it's "they would have to learn about Linux, and they wouldn't want do that, and so they would get frustrated and quite likely give up on it, and my recommendation would have been a waste of their time".
The other part is that they're not necessarily wrong not to want to learn about Linux! Learning is great, when it's something interesting or valuable. But if I'm not interested in the thing, and my time and mental resources are limited, and I have a good enough alternative, I think it's absolutely fine to avoid it.
Most of us choose to drive a car that just works, and take it to a mechanic when it doesn't, rather than buying one that requires and rewards tinkering. Maybe you're into cars, I don't know, but I bet you take this attitude to at least some of the useful objects in your life.
Because although sometimes annoying, people already have a good alternative making the hours required to invest in something they're not interested in a very high price.
It's the same reason why as a software developer I use Visual Studio Code and don't plan to learn (neo)vim.
I (like many who'd have to learn Linux) have better things to do.
It should be a choice, not a requirement. With Windows you can get your work done without knowing much about Windows itself, but with Linux you're forced to understand every level of the entire OS so you can debug it first and then maybe get your work done. For an OS built around user freedom Linux sure doesn't give its users much choice on how to use it.
My Dad managed to install linux (Q4OS) on his computer in a dual-boot setup, having never even touched Linux before. He hasn't asked me for help once, whereas historically I've been his tech support when he was running Windows. He's loving the linux experience.
I believe if my Dad is able to install, use and benefit from Linux, anyone can.
Windows is worse , just latest example: a USB WiFi antenna for the PC, on Linux it just works, on Windows you need either to buy a CD drive to install the drivers - not sure if your grandma can buy a cd drive, install it and install drivers. On Linux it just works.
People like buy a computer and use whatever is on it, they can't manage to install windows, the drivers needed for the hardware, I had to setup emails, or other online accounts for this kind of people so give them a preinstalled Linux and they should manage,.
You would never use the cd lol, it would auto install - and if it didn’t you’d download the drivers online though if it’s such a piece of junk as to need that then it’s a junk piece of hardware anyway.
Linux is a lot more user-friendly than Windows, with generally useful error messages when things go wrong.
How do you fix Windows when it breaks every couple of weeks and the only information you get is a bright blue screen with a couple of lines of hexadecimal on it?
You run memtest86 to rule out a RAM issue, then check with your system reseller or mobo vendor for BIOS mitigations for the latest round of Intel CPU bugs. If you are able to rule out the RAM and CPU, try a different power supply. Failing that, the motherboard itself may be causing the issue.
Unfortunately there are few good ways to narrow down intermittent hardware failures (which is what you are experiencing) beyond these common steps.
“Linux is so easy and great, my mouse didn’t even work and I have it unplugged to this day, and I can’t even play minecraft!” - I use every OS and have arch on my gaming pc (dual booted I’ll admit), but this is both one of the worst articles advocating for desktop Linux and one of the best at the same time, because it shows the harsh truth a lot of people experience and us Linux users don’t even want to admit exists.
I used to concede that yeah, Linux is more hassle than the average person is going to feel like dealing with, but at this point, Windows is so damn bad that you could grab literally any Linux distro and have an easier time with it, and even better, it won't delete all your stuff in the middle of the night due to a forced update either.
I agree. Yet another "Linux is great! The only issues I had were A, B, C, D, E...".
I also use every OS and Windows 11 is still the most hassle free and reliable (at least if you install the IoT version using Rufus). I still have to use X because Wayland has a couple of remaining issues. Also most distros inexplicably use Gnome despite KDE being significantly better. Why?
"Windows is great… you only need to… install the IoT version using Rufus"
Oh and tweak 24 settings with these powershell scripts, and better run them after every update to ensure they weren't changed back on purpose. Otherwise, totally hassle free.
KDE 5 wasn't much better than GNOME 3, it's the main reason behind GNOME default I think. It's only til KDE 6 they got back up on their feet and solved the most egregious design issues, many more still linger.
GNOME/Red Hat for a long time is the only one even trying to figure out a solution for some of the longstanding issues like application distribution and sandboxing. Those rant articles about GNOME unfortunately went nowhere since the other desktops were all stuck. KDE Discover eventually supported Flatpak which was advocated by GNOME for years, SteamOS using Flatpak ended up being the decisive push.
GNOME having better enterprise support can be another factor.
> I picked CachyOS rather than a better-known distro like Ubuntu because it’s optimized for modern hardware
So this isn't a usual comparison, as the vast majority of users will choose Ubuntu, Fedora, or Mint. CachyOS is also a new distro, meaning it won't last long (most distributions, like small businesses, only last a few years). It's also Arch-based, meaning the user is going to get constant updates, which leads to problems. Finally, Cachy is optimized for speed and security, not hardware.
> First challenge: My mouse buttons don’t work. I can move the cursor, but can’t click on anything. I try plugging in a mouse (without unplugging the first one), same deal. Not a major issue; I can get around fine with just the keyboard
I've been using nothing but Linux on my desktop since 2013. Converted my parents around 2015. Rarely a complaint from them and I haven't even once considered switching back to Windows. My shiny new Macbook Air is collecting dust. Almost all of my gaming is done on a SteamDeck or a Linux desktop. The only applications that I can think of where Windows or Mac are still relevant would be CAD and Audio/Video production. And even those are use-cases where Linux has viable options. Actually, Video probably doesn't even belong here since one of the most popular video packages (DaVinci Resolve) has Linux support and there are multiple open source options like Kdenlive. For music, it's really hard to beat Apple's ecosystem: Mac and iOS have an incredible variety of affordable and really high quality audio applications, however, the gap is narrowing with lots of great music software on Linux as well. There are free software options for CAD and 3d Modeling (Blender, Freecad) but most of the popular CAD software is either Windows only or Windows/Mac. Some of this may be possible to get working under Wine but I haven't tried.
This mirrors my experience. Most stuff you do on Windows "just works" on Linux nowadays, and when it doesn't, there are low-friction alternatives.
The one pain point for me is film and book scanning. AFAICT there are exactly zero Linux software packages that will play nice with my Epson V800 or my Fujitsu SV600. I keep a Windows laptop around (second-gen ThinkPad X1 since you asked) and its only job is to talk to those devices. Firewall doesn't let it get on the internet, its only network access is to move scans onto my NAS.
For film scanning (which I do only very rarely) I've resorted to just using my digital camera with a light box to illuminate the film and a nice macro lens to focus on the frame.
Back in the days of Unity I decided to make a full switch to Linux and it just worked. The UX was unfamiliar but it had a cohesiveness that made sense. I use macOS for the past 10 years as my main system (work stuff needs Mac-specific things) but switching to a decent Linux distro would honestly feel like an upgrade. Windows continues being a shitshow and I want nothing to do with it.
What I think could really push Linux desktop forward is if various PC gaming influencers started doing content on how to game on Linux. Given that it is not just viable now but actively sometimes better than on Windows it would make for good content AND show people an alternative. And soon as AAA games start being created for Linux first and run on Windows in some sort of compatibility or emulation mode that will really start turning the tides.
> What I think could really push Linux desktop forward is if various PC gaming influencers started doing content on how to game on Linux. Given that it is not just viable now but actively sometimes better than on Windows it would make for good content AND show people an alternative.
Not exactly what you are looking for, but Gamers Nexus at 2.57M subscribers is working on Linux Gaming Benchmarks with help from Wendel at Level1Techs [0]. Steve bemoans the shitshow that Windows has become all the time.
I think this is both the blessing and the curse of the incredible work that wine and steam has done. Unless and until we get the Linux packaging stuff figured out in a way that developers can target Linux instead of having to target each individual distro, I think the clear incentive for the vast majority of gaming companies will be to target windows even if they ultimately care more about Linux, because wine and proton are so good and so much easier to support than each individual distro natively.
Don't get me wrong, I rejoice when I get a native Linux game. I buy nearly every native Linux game I can find that is reasonably priced and sounds remotely interesting. I have a couple dozen games in my GOG backlog that I haven't even tried to run yet, but I bought on a sale or something because they were relatively cheap and supported Linux natively. So I would love a world where it was Linux first and Windows second.
> My goal here is to see how far I can get using Linux as my main OS without spending a ton of time futzing with it
> First challenge: My mouse buttons don’t work. [...] Not a major issue; I can get around fine with just the keyboard.
> Then I remember that my root partition is only 100GB. I reboot back into the Cachy live image and use the Parted utility to increase it to 1TB, then make a second btrfs partition in the remaining space.
I don't think the goal was achieved here. For most people it still takes some dedication and a lot of computer knowledge to switch successfully.
But I expect things to continue to improve now that Valve has solved the single major blocker for a large chunk of people, that being running their back catalog of games. It's an amazing gift to the community that we should all be very thankful for.
I recently switched to linux from windows. The only reason I was sticking with windows was because hoyoverse refuses to support linux. I finally decided I need some break from them anyways and took the plunge.
First, I tried to install fedora atomic cosmic. It kind of worked but I could not get it to work with my dock + external monitors at all. Now that I am used to that setup, I can't go back.
Not wanting to spend time figuring it out, I just installed Ubuntu instead. Thankfully, that worked out though it's not perfect. Everytime I turn on my laptop, I need to spend 10-15 minutes turning the monitors on and off until ubuntu recognises them correctly and also sends dp output (it shows the monitor in settings and I can open windows on it but the monitor doesn't actually show anything; other times, it reads the monitor as something nvidia with the lowest resolution).
I tried to install genshin anyways on ubuntu. I couldn't get it to work via wine/lutris. Virtualbox doesn't support gpu passthrough so I tried using virt-manager. The setup was too hard and it didn't work anyways. I gave up on hoyo at this point and install steam instead.
Honestly, ubuntu is rough and Linux as a whole is very rough. But on the whole, I would still pick this over dealing with windows any longer.
check out the launchers here for hoyo stuff, i haven't tried the genshin one but zzz worked nearly out of the box (had to change the wine version it was using iirc) https://github.com/an-anime-team
I was watching the Lenovo CES keynote and couldn’t believe how hard they were selling Qira on Lenovo computers and Motorola phones. All the major players have platform specific Windows features that can’t possibly meet their success criteria in terms of ROI. Lenovo isn’t Apple or Google or Microsoft, and even the latter two have trouble selling fully integrated platform services on hardware.
All this time, money, dev energy, and marketing to keep trying to find a magical bean in their stalk and they still just won’t support open hardware and open source OSes with vigor.
Apple people tend to buy Apple products generation over generation, and none of the Windows hardware manufacturers are even close to having that rep. Even in this thread people are recommending Gen 1 Thinkpads, but Lenovo’s heart really isn’t in it across the board. Dell went simple with the revived XPS but the release versions don’t offer Linux in the BYO order flow.
The "do something" is support open hardware, sell more machines, provision fewer product variations.
I get that these are the immovable objects and sacred cows of the management ranks ..new executives need to try, try, try again. All these features just sit in the "update" queue advertising their uselessness, and eventually highlight their abandonment.
There's no soul in major OSes these days - Windows is a big bloatware and macOS's aesthetics is the result of design for the sake of the design instead of any practical use. No wonder we're seeing this sentiment for an alternative growing.
My personal experience with using macOS (m1 2020-) Windows 10 (2018-2020) and Linux (for the last 16-17 years on off) -
If you want to do basic stuff like browsing streaming learning video calls etc, get a non Linux computer with decent specs with some headroom. These operating systems are for people who just want to use that ecosystem and not need to manage anything themselves. Battery life is exceptional. Most people I know need a one or two step process to do things (like backup photos contacts documents etc) and Apple google Microsoft offer you that. It’s not perfect but it’s easy to manage. People really have gotten used to someone managing it for them and these things do fine in that regard. It’s better than people having 5 hard drives with photos and misplacing them imo. I’ve had people in 2000s connect drives to my computers and find private pictures and contacts and files etc I need not be having access to. iCloud and Google Photos offer you that peace of mind. With 2FA you’d rather lose it all than fall into the wrong hands. People have all kinds of stuff on their phones and computers that should not leave their computers and accounts. Imagine having your kids classmates find your intimate pictures on some drive they used to copy something your kid gave them. All this has reduced with cloud managed services with activation locks and 2FA and password mangers built into them. Yes they can lock you out one day, but it’s better than people having access to it.
If you are serious about your personal computer, switch to Linux before you start hating those companies. You are not the target audience anymore and you shouldn’t be disappointed about it.
I use Linux for most things, macOS for streaming and surfing the web (private relay and 4k native works great on M1) and windows when I have to deal with others having windows only accounting software sometime.
I switched from Windows to Linux ~20 years ago because and never came back to Windows. First years I used Ubuntu and experimented with Xubuntu, Lubuntu etc. Later went to Fedora Linux with Gnome Desktop which is still my preferred Linux Distribution. Nice to see so many people thinking about free and open alternatives to big tech!
Still, every computer I buy comes with Microsoft tax and their OS preinstalled. In all these years I always left a small Windows partition, in case I need it. Never booted it.
Moved my Framework laptop to Bluefin and my gaming desktop to Bazzite early last year. Zero regrets, zero issues. I'm not new to Linux by any means, I've been dabbling since a kid. But in adulthood, I had given up on having Linux as my daily driver because I just wanted my main computers to work, I didn't want maintaining them to be a hobby. That's not been an issue with Bluefin or Bazzite. I'm sure it's not for a lot of modern Linuxes, but these ones I can vouch for at least!
Bazzite is my first immutable distro. Idk that I would want this for my dev machine - but for a gaming/general desktop usage it’s pretty amazing. If they exposed more of the maintenance tooling and stuff like adding RPM layers via the UI then I think they’d have a really compelling OS for non-technical users.
I agree, if you have a specific dev flow that is compatible with the immutable OS approach, then these can be wonderful dev machines, but personally I don't want to change my workflow to fit the OS, I prefer the OS to fit my workflow.
At some point I I'm pretty confident that I will switch to an immutable version of Fedora and relearn my workflow in a distro box like world as I do see some real benefits to doing so, but I'm not in a hurry
For all who switched to Linux: which distro did you choose and why?
Fedora: wanted to have the newest kernel and updates due to new hardware - so far i am really satisfied; the only issue i have is that the printer does not work everytime… as a workaround i print with my iphone instead.
Best Linux experience I've ever had. Using it for a few years now, but wish I switched sooner (been using various distros since Ubuntu 8.04). Dnf is GOAT, upgrades don't break shit, moderately up-to-date, but not bleeding-edge, vanilla Gnome, no bloat, full systemd commitment, btrfs, few idiosyncrasies, RPMs are widely available, flatpak for the rest. (Don't have a printer tho...)
However, due to e.g. the need to install the Fusion repo for non-free software, I don't think it's suitable for total non-tech beginners, who don't want to touch the terminal at all. Don't get me wrong, Fedora is extremely hands-off, default is bliss experience, but because of their software license policies you likely have to install the Fusion repo at some point and that's not the most straight-forward thing to do.
Only negative for me: The GUI updater wants to install updates during shutdown frequently, which is mighty annoying with full-disk encryption. I live dangerously and do my updates live with dnf, which by the way can be configured to fetch packages in the background, making updating super fast, no need for permanent internet connection.
If you are annoyed by Ubuntu, not old enough for Debian, but already fed up with Arch, please, do try Fedora!
Nobara 43 with KDE Plasma, which is a Fedora variant. I switched in October as a lifelong Windows user and was looking for some distro that would make my transition smooth, I didn't want to start my Linux experience with double pain: learn new OS and have to deal with various kinks. It was more than smooth: Nvidia 5090 with no hitch except a new driver - no prob. My old Kyocera printer worked on first try (never did with Windows). Nobara has a really competent and supportive Discord Community where you can get instant help - which I needed for the upgrade from 42 to 43. It's a small community of 30K people but there's always someone online to help. I appreciate that very much. Best decision ever. Next step: degoogle.
Debian Stable is my distro of choice these days, mainly because it respects my time by avoiding frivolous changes, without getting in my way when I want to change specific things.
Setting it up for modern gaming hardware required a couple of extra steps, which I found to be worthwhile. I now have a system that has proved dependable whenever I need to get work done immediately, and very capable whenever I just want to have fun. (The Backports repository makes bridging that gap easy in most cases.)
Linux Mint is what I suggest to new users. It's based on the widely supported Ubuntu distro, has a good sized community, and seems aimed at people who don't already know unix. It also makes a point of stripping out problematic Ubuntu-isms, and has a Debian-based edition waiting in the wings in case that ever becomes unmanageable.
My desktop environment is KDE Plasma, which you can install on just about any distro even if it's not the default. It has a wealth of useful features, lets me tweak or disable them as I see fit, and avoids trying to turn my desktop into a mobile phone interface. (I used Xfce in the past, but its adoption of Gtk 3 transformed it into something that I found frustrating.)
Debian stable with KDE Plasma. Plasma is similar in feel to Win 10, but far more customizable. It's the first Linux desktop I've used that feels professional and polished.
Short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZ6bojRSIw0
100%. I run this combo on my 12 year old Chromebook and it's a very solid web browsing and thin client system. Audio works, Wi-Fi works, Bluetooth works, everything just works, and works well.
I switched fully to Linux about four years ago. I chose Kubuntu. I had previously used Linux Mint for quite a while, but on a computer that wasn't my main one. I downloaded some ISOs and tried out a few distros in VMs.
I definitely find KDE the most appealing. I'm one of these people who feels like desktop UI pretty much peaked around Win98 or Win2000, and KDE more or less lets me have that experience. It's customizable and works well. It has occasional problems and annoyances, but over time I find they're comparable in magnitude to what I had with Windows.
It always seems like Ubuntu has the best compatibility with stuff overall, in the sense that anything that has a Linux version will almost always explicitly say they support Ubuntu. I looked at some other KDE-based distros but Kubuntu seemed like the safest choice. I had used Linux Mint KDE in the past and was bummed to see it go away; if that still existed I might well have chosen it.
Notably, I had attempted to switch to Linux several years before (around 2014), but wound up going back to Windows because I just encountered too many gotchas. But things were much smoother this time. The main reason I switched was because I felt Windows 10 was getting too intrusive and user-hostile, and also no longer made it easy for me to get the "Windows classic" look and feel that I wanted. I'm glad I switched when I did, because since then those trends have become even more pronounced; I'd probably be pulling my hair out if I were using Windows now. I still have a Win10 VM for situations where I need Windows, but I rarely use it.
NixOS. Had prior Linux experience, so wasn't too worried about learning multiple new major paradigms in parallel. Also had been running a lil' NixOS server for half a year before that, so I could carry over most of my configuration.nix from there, and also the safe feeling of knowing that if I do mess up stuff, I could with very high probability just reboot to a previous generation and have everything back to working exactly the same as before.
Edit: the two configuration.nixen has since been merged in a single dotfiles repo, which also covers my Macbook via https://nix-darwin.org.
I swapped to Bazzite on my gaming rig (5800x3D, 64gb DDR4, 4080 Super 16gb) and it's been fantastic. I tried going with Omarchy for a bit to try and have that machine do double duty as a dev/gaming machine, but I felt like the gaming experience on Omarchy is a second-class citizen compared to what the Bazzite experience is optimizing for, and I realized that the Hyprland setup and tiling window manager adds a lot more friction for my normal gaming needs. (I just want to have a few Path of Exile 2 windows open to tab between while gaming, and the tiling window setup in Omarchy had me hitting more hiccups between fullscreen and windowed mode than I care to troubleshoot on my gaming rig).
Immutability in OS updates is also something I didn't know I needed until I experienced it on Bazzite; pretty advantageous as a gamer using Linux with nVidia hardware these days.
This is my second go around on Bazzite, YMMV but I opted for Gnome over KDE this time and have had zero issues running the games I am into (WoW, PoE2) and no funky window management issues that I seemed to run into with KDE.
I'm considering a move to a Framework machine in the very near future, and still need to settle on a distro for dev; most of that is done on an M3 Max Macbook these days.
I don't really recommend this route, but I will say that the experience has been pretty great. Once setup the regular maintenance is just boring update commands. Most days, it's a less than 1 minute affair to get everything compiled and up to date.
Arch would be a pretty equivalent experience as would be using bin packages with gentoo.
I guess i've never really "switched" - I've always used Linux desktops together with Windows desktops - each to the strengths that they are good at it. And this goes back to the late 1990's. There are times I've used more than the other.
But yes Fedora - I have traditionally worked on "Enterprise" Linux where RHEL is the standard, so I track Fedora for bleeding edge development work and target EL for "production".
Don't get me wrong I'm just as comfortable on Debian systems or even building Linux-from-scratch type systems but I really don't have a day to day use case for Linux distributions outside of Fedora/Redhat, they cover all my needs.
The printer also was my reason I picked Ubuntu over Arch / Endeavour OS :)
I don't want to tweak hours and Ubuntu was so far always a no brainer. At some point, probably 5 years ago after they switched to GNOME Shell, I even stopped switching the desktop manager and kept using the default one.
Started with Debian 10 GNOME, switched to KDE 5 for its features, went back because of the design issues(KDE 6 is much better). After a few years I switched and settled on Fedora Silverblue.
With rpm-ostree automatic updates are so reliable it's a set and forget experience.
Kubuntu. I wanted the compatibility of Ubuntu, but not the horrible UI.
It's not without its problems, though:
Snaps completely bork the system, so you need to remove snap entirely on Kubuntu (good riddance anyway - snaps are a plague).
Idle suspend is flaky. Sometimes it won't come back. Better to just disable it.
Sometimes the machine just freezes up. Either it completely freezes, or the mouse slows down to 1fps with the entire movement queued up (move the mouse and it'll go exactly where you told it to, over 2-3 minutes).
WIFI was a nightmare, but I switched to ethernet so it's not an issue for me anymore (desktop machine).
Bluetooth is iffy. I just switched to wired speakers.
Pop!OS (22.04) nearly 2 years ago, after having read generally favorable reviews on HN and getting a sense of "monernity/stability/mainstream'ness of Ubuntu without snap and with closer-to-leading-edge kernels" on an Asus Vivobook 17 (my daily personal/WFH driver).
Later (on repurposed low-spec Chromebooks, then on newer deployments just because I came to like it) Crunchbang++ (12, then 13) which is Debian-based.
I avoid printing like the plague, and keep a long-remaining-AUE Chromebook around almost solely for its ability to WiFi-print to our aging Brother laser printer.
Mint because I am a filthy casual. I love Mint. It has been smooth sailing for the past 4 years running it on a 2019 Dell X5. Part of why I lack any motivation to get a new machine is because it still runs very smooth with Mint.
I plan on getting a new machine in the near future. Then I'll use my old Dell as a testing ground for other Distros. Was thinking of testing Tumbleweed first.
I started with Ubuntu but had some problems installing software. Then I moved to Mint and it stuck with me. I converted 6 virtual machines from Windows to Mint Linux, and it's been great.
I then moved my main server that runs the VMs from Windows to Linux Mint, and that went far better than expected, basically no problems at all. I had two LSI x8 SAS RAID cards, each running an 8 disk RAID 10 array. Moving over to Linux there was nothing to do except plug them in, and they just worked. No drivers to install. I did have to find a copy of the management software, but that runs exactly the same as it did on Windows.
The last VM I have is running a somewhat complex IIS web server setup that I have to move over to Linux, and I haven't had the time to dig in on that yet, but I will do it this year.
The last system I have on Windows is my laptop/workstation. It doesn't behave that well on Linux with my 3 displayport monitors, and a few other things. I have it dual-booting to Mint, so I will keep trying. There's really not much software that I need that only runs on Windows (I do not play any games).
What are peoples' thoughts on which style of distro is best to hand over to a non-techie user for the least amount of hand-holding?
I re-install so much that I don't know how easy it is, or how the distros prompt, when something like Debian Stable or Fedora need to update to the next version. With Arch, you constantly get the "updates ready" and it is always fresh.
I came from windows to MacOS so despite what folks bemoan about MacOS ... I still love it and it is problem free enough that I don't feel the need to do the lifting to go to Linux.
I think that's a common thing for those of who maybe haven't ridden MacOS for so long.
Windows for me is on a whole several levels of worse when I have to dive back into it. Windows feels like an OS POINTED AT ME rather than for me.
I used to love macOS, back in the Mojave days. You could run almost anything you wanted, and still get work done on a decently made machine. Those were the days when the grass truly felt greener to me, macOS for creative work simply annihilated any other option on the table.
Then Catalina stripped out 32-bit compatibility, ruining my Ableton Live project folder and Steam library. And Big Sur removed the sleek, professional-looking UI that I loved. Apparently Tahoe is infecting it with the glass disease, but I've long since migrated to Bitwig and Steam on Linux.
macOS taught me, ultimately, that any feature you take for granted can be removed to fulfill someone's OKR.
> macOS taught me, ultimately, that any feature you take for granted can be removed to fulfill someone's OKR.
100% this. Recent macOS releases really feel like this. For me it was the notification popup UI downgrade, they literally introduced a perfect UI and then botched it in a following release.
You use the platform you use ... until it doesn't work for you. I did that for Windows and now I'm on MacOS. Maybe one day Linux, maybe I pick a flavor there that doesn't work for me eventually.
This was my stance for the past couple years, but I moved to Linux (PopOS) 3 months ago because wsl2 kept crashing from OOM (even though I had allocated excess ram). I kept having to manually manage my memory usage by choosing which apps, containers etc to run.
There's nuisances in popos, but I am generally thrilled.
My Linux evenings usually appear 6 months down the road. It's the big updates that cause system breakdowns. This is like saying I got married in November and everything is going great. Far too early to know how far your patience will be tested before you leave.
What's the best backup software on Linux? Something that works like Time Machine on macOS or Veeam on Windows. So one full backup then incremental ones at any given X hours/days and also browsable on file level for individual file restoring.
My mother in law asked for help with her computer. I went in dreading the whole windows mess - only to find somebody had set her up with Linux Mint - I was actually able to help her with her internet issue, and am so happy for that unsung hero.
I've done the same, though I've used Linux in work and home for 22 years (I think 2004 was my first install).
At home I consistently gave up on Linux due to hardware and game compatibility issues.
A combination of buying a steam deck plus windows 11 pushed me back to Linux.
It is oddly peaceful using mint Linux. No adverts. No "like what you see" wall paper click bait. No news site click bait. No register with an online Microsoft account that doesn't have a no button. Just my computer.
The one annoying thing is, some games just don't play nice with wine / proton (for some reason I want to play soldier of fortune, even though I know it's not great). Others are a pain to set up. But mainly it is good enough. (I'm a gog.com junkie). So I may end up installing windows 11 lts. Though I did that with windows 10 and it was lacking some DLLs that some old games needed and was pretty much unfixable.
People interested in similar experiences should check out this podcast/series of videos where two Windows/Mac users try desktop Linux and report out on their experiences.
I hadn't run desktop Linux in several years now. (I've run it server-side for decades.)
Out of the increasingly loud outpouring of support for desktop Linux over the past year, I went ahead and installed some distros to get back in on the action. I came to four conclusions:
1) You can play games on desktop Linux now other than Tux Racer. Cool!
2) There's less weird X11-wrangling. Thank god.
3) It's otherwise still pretty much the desktop Linux I've always known and felt mildly annoyed by.
4) The current versions of Windows and macOS have gotten to be so unbelievably annoying for no good reason that a mildly improved desktop Linux now actually seems far less annoying than the mainstream options do.
Good job, Microsoft and Apple, for giving us the year of retreating in disgust to the Linux desktop.
I recently rebuilt my home rig with some hardware upgrades, including a motherboard and cpu upgrade.
I use a MacBook and spend a majority of my workday in Ubuntu Linux.
The absolute only reason I installed windows on the home machine is because gaming is still essentially nonexistent in the Linux sphere.
If a flavor of Linux can catch up and run everything that can be run on windows I’d happily switch. I imagine a good chunk of the windows market would as well.
I have old computers. Windows 10 is dead and Windows 11 will not install on old hardware. I put Debian 13 on my wife’s computer.
At first she found it really frustrating, but then reality set in: she didn’t really know Windows either. On Linux there is pretty broad capability to solve your own problem if you can get over fear of a terminal.
Her favorite game runs faster on Debian so that helps.
In case of small enterprises, what are the options for migrating to Ubuntu for all remote users?
How does one have an MDM solution? Most of the solutions out there are poor on Ubuntu or need lots of work to get things right.
Can anyone provide a reference architecture/solution that allows them to be SOC2 compliant? But also not have high friction for developers and more importantly not have bigger overheads on process or investment?
Yeah, I requested to have a Linux desktop from my employer and was flatly told "NO". None of our many security applications supports it, which is a real shame. As we use Windows and MacOS, I can't see how we'll really be more secure on those platforms, even with the security theater applications they force us to use.
Throughout my university years, I used Ubuntu daily on both my laptop and desktop. Even when I had to play World of Warcraft with classmates, I used a virtual machine on Ubuntu. Around 2009, I switched to Mac OS, and I was perfectly happy with it until recently.
What I find most annoying is that I have several very old iMacs. Apple disallows their OS upgrading, even though their hardware is still perfectly fine. I've been using them, which means I've been stuck working on Mac OS 10.15, and now I can't install many applications, including some basic libraries, because they're no longer compatible with 10.15. I don't want to just throw away my perfectly good computers, and considering I do most of my work in the terminal, and I'm shocked by Apple's recent UI updates on iPhones(They've got to be kidding), so after 17 years away from Ubuntu as my daily OS, I'm now considering seriously going back to it.
There have been leaps and bounds of progress in the last few years. Youtube hardware acceleration works perfectly in chrome/firefox now (assuming you have working video drivers).
As far as I know netflix still limits you to 720p under most browsers (although their support page shows that opera of all things supports 1080p)
On the desktop. Laptop/mobile devices still significantly suffer under Linux compared to proprietary operating systems. The author even admits: "Tried getting Linux on my laptop over Christmas. Didn’t work." We have a lot more work remaining to claim any sort of victory.
Been running Linux Mint on this ThinkPad A485 for 1.5 yrs, problem-free. There is no feature that doesn't work. Even the media keys and stuff like the wifi-toggle function key work. Still, yeah, there are some things that are perennial problems for open source OSes, particularly wifi. Nice presentation on the topic: "All types of wireless in Linux are terrible and why the vendors should feel bad" @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwIFz9na2lE
May I ask how long the battery lasts under lid suspension? And how quickly does wifi connect after wake? These two issues alone drove me begrudgingly to macOS.
> I reboot, log into Epic and GOG, and start downloading The Outer Worlds, a game from 2019 I’ve been playing a bit lately. It runs fine with Proton, and I can even sync my saves from the cloud. I play it for a few minutes with my trackball, remember I hate gaming on a trackball, and plug my gaming mouse back in. It works fine as long as I’m in the game, but outside the game, mouse clicks stop working again. It makes sense — the bug is on the desktop, not in games — but it’s very funny to have a gaming mouse that only works for gaming.
What is it with mice and OSes?
Windows is the only OS I can seem to configure to get low latency, high accuracy, linear movement with, and it's not for lack of effort.
I struggled for several years to do SWE work on a Mac and no 3rd party program could get it working the way it does on Windows. I tried Linear Mouse and many others. I eventually gave up, went against the prevailing (90%) culture where I work, and exchanged my mac for a windows laptop. I haven't measured it, but I feel more productive simply because I can click what I want to click marginally faster.
Is something in Mac drivers performing non-linear mapping? Why?
Based on the quote above it seems like Linux hasn't even gotten up to par with Mac for mice.
The best litmus test for an OS for me is whether I could play an RTS or FPS competitively with it, even though I haven't played either for years.
I have been primarily in the tiling window manager space for the past 5 years… that said I’ve been driving Cosmic on my NixOS workstation and I’m really impressed… it looks great, is simple, performs well and does tiling quite well. It’s not going to take me away from Niri, but it’s my goto suggestion now for any one getting into Linux.
I moved from 15 years of macOS to Linux (Omarchy in my case). I was mostly using the terminal and am therefore super happy with my choice now. I wrote more at https://www.ssp.sh/blog/macbook-to-arch-linux-omarchy/, in case of interest.
I ran Archlinux as my main driver on both PC and Laptop for more than a decade but after having the opportunity to use a Windows machine with WSL and eventually WSL2, I felt like I had access to the best of both worlds: a Linux terminal for development (bash + tmux + vim, now bash + zellij + neovim) without the hassle of updates breaking things every few months and a out-of-the-box native gaming experience.
But with the enshitification of Windows (first all the spam and ads on the Start menu, then Microsoft forcing you to have an account to be able to use the machine and the expensive license for Windows Professional if you want access to Hyper-V, which I did), I did some research, tried a few new distros (Manjaro, Bazzite and CachyOS) and settled for CachyOS (gaming support was the main driver, based on Archlinux was secondary).
I do everything I did on Windows and some more: all the terminal stuff plus browsing, CAD modeling, 3D printing / slicing, Office stuff... I miss nothing. No more double partition to boot into Windows when I want to game.
My RX 9070 XT runs smoothly with no driver issues whatsoever. I even have tested the waters running some LLMs with LM Studio and that also worked out of the box.
The only thing that has been a bit meh are Teams and Slack and I believe that has to do with the fact that I ran them in Firefox. Once I ran Slack on Chromium, noise canceling was again available.
2009 was the year of Linux on desktop for me.
17 years later, after going back and forth between macOS and Windows, it feels good to be back home.
One last note in my random ramble is that I do not have as much spare time as before, and I had heard this from other people back in the day whenever I'd say I ran Archlinux on my machines, so I am going to repeat what others have said to me: it's really nice to not have to worry about much, be able to sit down and get productive right away. To me, CachyOS and KDE have made that idea my actual experience and for that I am grateful.
If only I could use recent Apple hardware with Linux :)
A year ago I was about to switch from Linux to Mac for that reason after 25 years using Linux (although I really don't like MacOS). But then Apple released their Glassy OS and so I just bought a used Lenovo for 300€ with 1 year warranty ...
I have been using Fedora comfortably as my main os on a framework for the last 18 months and I have had no issues. I do just think for all that I do, lab work, coding, and gaming. I also run debian on mnt pocket reform and tbh I think it is OSes' like Linux that allow devices like that to exist. Windows and Mac just aren't options.
Throwing in opencloud here. I ran nextcloud self hosted for many years. If you need only file sharing on a webui with users, then opencloud is faster, more stable and less resource hungry.
In general, people just use noIP home router VPN, ssh/sftp host on LAN, and a sshfs client on their iOS/Android device or MacOS/Windows/Linux. It will look like any other network shared drive in the native OS.
For paid services, there are also native Dropbox client support in MATE, Ubuntu, or Mint desktop file managers etc.
Practically speaking, I often recommend dual booting from 2 ssd drives for windows and Linux. There are just some commercial software/games that can't run properly within a linux environment (programs like Wine do allow running some Windows native programs, but YMMV.)
Why Bedrock? Get the kids a Steam Deck, Prism Launcher, open a local server and boom :) It‘s not iOS convenience but they‘ll sure love to tinker with all the mods you can install.
Alternatively one could spin up a local Java Edition server and install GeyserMC translation layer plugin[0] into it. That way, both iOS and Linux PC could cross-play to each other without the need of another new device.
Mint is much better unless you need the very newest versions of packages. In which case I'd recommend to augment with flatpak or use Debian testing over Ubuntu. Basically Ubuntu is over for me since snap and they went back to Gnome3.
Not a desktop thing (digital out-of-home signage) but we’re dropping Windows like it’s flaming dogshit. Minimal Linux install with X, Blackbox and player software (and management/monitoring stuff obvs) on all new assets and the thousands of extant ones will get replaced as soon as feasible.
I replaced Windows with Linux about 6 months ago. Then I ran into a game I really wanted to play but it didn’t run well with Proton (not kernel anti-cheat, just bad performance) after all the tweaks so I just reserved to dual booting with Windows 10.
After not using Windows for so long, I came to realize that Windows is just as much a mess as Linux just in different ways. You get used to the quirks so you don’t notice them after a while but they are definitely there.
Most of my games work just fine or even better on Linux. Some of my older games don’t even work on Windows that work perfectly under Wine/Proton which is truely miraculous. The Wine team and Valve have made some incredible contributions to the preservation of games on PC, it can’t be understated.
So I daily drive Linux and play those handful of games on Windows, and I’ll probably stay this way for now and try the proton situation again in a few years.
The game is called HROT it’s an indie “boomer shooter”. The game was first locked to 30fps which is horrible for an FPS. Then I got that figured out, but FPS was all over the place and it felt basically unplayable to me even though I was often getting 100+ FPS. Frame pacing was absolutey FUBAR’d no matter which version of Proton or Wine, so even though frames were high it still felt terrible to play. So I just decided to create a Windows dual-boot just for the odd game. Now I can get a locked framerate to my monitor refresh and the game feels great to play.
It’s basically “Soviet Quake”. Very moody atmosphere with just weird random details in the game. Amazing level design.
On the flip side. The original Max Payne does not play on Windows but it works perfectly on Linux for me.
If you need Windows these days just install virt-manager and load the version of Windows you need.
It's really fast and lightweight (my laptop stays cold at idle while running the Windows VMs) with all the HV enlightenments for good computational efficiency.
Installing and using the virtio drivers is key for many useful features such as memory ballooning, fast networking with low computational overhead, and virtiofs which is used to mount a virtual drive in the Windows guest in a way that it's not a "network" drive.
KVM/QEMU is the only logical and sane choice on Linux, unless some tooling you're using requires VirtualBox. The key is to optimize and tweak all your host and guest settings, installing the guest tools too. Once you have it optimized it purrs.
Article reads like an anti-Linux post because the author goes on about, "muh mouse buttons" and "how many desktop environments?" Screw that, do something simple like Ubuntu that just works without decision paralysis. The whole piece reads like, "Linux is good if you're smart so git gud" esp. since he makes a point of crowing how it's Arch-based.
How do you do taxes in Linux? Install a windows VM? I don't want to use the web version. With Google docs being good enough, I don't really need windows for anything else. Last time I checked, the tax software didn't run under wine.
I hope not because I’ve been doing my US taxes on Linux for 15 years.
It’s probably a specific windows desktop app, probably TurboTax by intuit, the company that lobbies to make filing your taxes hard and to destroy any free simple government app to file taxes.
So, not sure why they’d complain about not being able to help shoot their foot off but we all have preferences. :shrug:
Yes, it is the unfortunate reality of the US. You either fork over all your data to tax preparation companies on the web or pay them to use windows/MacOS software. There is still paper filing by doing taxes by hand, but that's a bit too inconvenient. Free online filing is restricted to $89k annual income.
I installed a dual boot on my gaming machine last year when the Win10 support ended, and I have also had basically no issues. Something something HDR in certain video games is the biggest complaint I have, which is not all that important and will be higher priority for developers in future as more gamers leave the sinking Windows ship.
Microsoft has really, really fucked up windows 11, and ultimately abandoning it is the only recourse the consumers have.
I installed Omarchy last year when it come out (Arch distro for devs) on laptop and December I installed it on desktop machine, the powerful one.
Now I can play and work on a same machine for the first time in like 15+ years since I switched to Mac so I can work.
It isn't smooth sailing, I have bluetooth speakers and headphones, switching is not easy experience. Vibe coding, audio dictation works on Thinkpad which is underpowered compared to desktop, but it isn't working there. In fact this is more troublesome issue then headphones.
But for most part I could live with those issues and hopefully they get resolved.
Macs are just annoying, updates are for things I don't care and everything is about pushing me towards some subscription or other. I don't see future there for myself
It's great that we are already in such a strong spot! I'm also excited for how LLM's can help folks administer & setup systems.
There's still a lot of folks who bounce of setting up this or that thing that requires editing some config file. We're really good now about making most things pretty well UI'ee up, but Linux is such a malleable platform (complementary): LLM's decondtrain what users can do from what UI has been built. That's super exciting.
Step 1 of folks being able to use Linux as a desktop is going pretty well these days. With some AI hope, I hope folks get more and more enticed into setting up some devices. Once you're up with TailScale and have a service or two deployed, it can be very addictive to keep going. LLM's can make setting up & customizing the desktop easier, & they can help operate & admin services too. Strong hopes users will have much more agency, with where we are going.
It's quite interesting to see all these people switching to Linux on the desktop and realizing it works. Some of us are using Linux on the desktop since more than ... a quarter of a century.
Everytime I read such an article I'm thinking "duh, of course it works" but apparently people still think it's not the case.
I do really, really, really wonder what's going to happen once battery usage is more efficient on Linux than on Windows. For in every thread about Linux on the desktop, there seems to be an endless flow of comments saying "I can get 11 hours of battery time on Windows, but I only get 10h40 minutes on Linux".
Linux powers billions, if not tens of billions of devices by now: trust me, it can power your desktop/laptop just fine.
It is a bit of a pain to set up though, especially for a laptop - I just switched to fedora+ gnome, and going through configuring the power settings to allow for suspend-then-hibernate was annoying.
Figuring out the luks + page file + hibernate resume configuration is non intuitive, and is only viable for me to figure out due to my Linux based day job.
Probably could have gone bazzite and had things just work, but I need a Linux dev box locally and was not sure about dev on bazzite.
I have used Linux my entire adult life. Honestly never really had any issue with setup. Everything just works without having to do anything. Much easier than windows usually.
I noticed the blog post said nothing about working with documents, i.e. the office suite the poster was using. Or - maybe he wasn't at all? I wonder. Same goes for email, although perhaps he was just using webmail.
Have you ever heard of Thunderbird? There's to my knowledge no other mail client besides maybe mutt that offers more features and flexibility.
For office, LibreOffice doesn't feel very modern but is capable of a lot of things.
This is a thread that's certainly going to go over well.
There are some valid criticisms of Microsoft, and a great many criticisms that are unfounded or are often misdirected. Or in some cases, the vast majority of folks don't use enough of their operating environments to encounter the same types of problems. After all, it's not like Linux operating systems are "perfect". Especially when you begin to push the platforms beyond the most basic functions, problems quickly become apparent.
Microsoft's largest challenge in the Wintel environment is the diversity of hardware, software, and skill levels involved in making it all work together. And quite frankly, most often people trying to cut corners in places they shouldn't or don't know they shouldn't.
On the hardware front, there's a lot of cheap nonsense out there. And lots of folks clamor for cheaper hardware. For example, my $500 Asus motherboard has a checks Device Manager Mediatek Wifi 7 card in it. Now, the reality is that Intel, widely seen as an incredible network chip manufacturer (both ethernet and wlan), doesn't have a Wifi 7 chip available for 3rd parties (i.e. AMD boards). So in order for Asus to get Wifi 7, they have to look elsewhere.
Mediatek's website appears that they focus on supporting new standards first, often before they're stable or solidified, but simultaneously does not provide a robust driver environment that supports multiple platforms.
At any rate, this is just one example. There are many thousands more. Much of this is driven by consumers either wanting features faster, platform vendors aiming for differentiation, or both clamoring for some middle ground between cost and margin. And Microsoft is stuck in the middle.
Maybe the current driver that Mediatek has released through IHVs doesn't have fixes for certain bugs. Perhaps the IHV (motherboard makers, etc.) doesn't have a robust enough team to want to package and release regular driver updates released by the vendor.
But again, Microsoft often gets the blame for problems with this type of hardware (vendors that barely support it, etc.) whereas on Linux it's totally acceptable to say "yeah just ditch that and go buy an Intel Wifi NIC" or something and people just accept that as being a totally okay answer. And then suddenly the hardware problem just 'disappears'.
As far as things that are a bit more in Microsoft's control, for example, requiring cloud accounts to log in and use the computer. I still stand by that this is far less important than the shriekers on the internet make it out to be. But it's most often one of the most primary arguments (because there are actually very few to really make).
Google and Apple require you to login with a cloud account on any of their devices and platforms. In fact, I'd wager that the vast majority of you reading this page right now have Google Chrome signed in with a Google Account that's syncing your history, favorites, passwords, autofill, and tabs right now. You effectively can't use an iPhone without signing in with an iCloud account, and Google is just about ready to force that direction as well by disabling the ability to sideload applications in Android. They already long effectively killed rooting devices (although it is possible in specific circumstances).
In fact, every time you visit a Google property using any other browser than Chrome, Google makes sure to tell you that you really should be using Chrome. And any time you visit a Google property using Chrome, they insist you sign in using Chrome (to your Google account, no less.)
So I really don't get the abject hatred for Microsoft on this front. After all, once you light up Windows Hello on a modern system with TPM2.0 and Windows 11 24H2 or newer, you effectively get free software passkey support (pending the web application properly supports it and isn't using an ancient FIDO2 library that insists on hardware tokens).
For the aforementioned Google account: I'm using a Microsoft Account sign-in to my desktop with Windows Hello, with a TPM-protected passkey to sign into the aforementioned Google account. I get SSO to all Microsoft properties, and "soft" passkey support for all of my Google accounts as-needed, with unlimited passkey storage. No USB dongles required (although I have those, too).
About the only other end user facing problem that is well within Microsoft's control is the amount of Copilot and AI nonsense. I contend that Satya Nadella is well beyond what his tenure should be at Microsoft, but can you blame them for having FOMO? I mean after all, the mobile phone and tablet markets were hundreds of billions of dollars that they missed out on. They also missed the mark on cloud platforms where Amazon raked in hundreds of billions. If they flood the zone with their AI products, and AI happens to catch on somewhere eventually, they're well-positioned to take advantage of it.
Microsoft also lost out on being the primary development environment, when they stopped innovating in the computer browser and software development space, effectively handing the keys to the kingdom over to Google. They only partially regained that with VSCode (which was the perfect blend between their full-fledged commercial IDE and the text-driven IDEs used prior to VSCode's dominance such as Textmate).
As far as "ads" on the platform, I don't really have any. But I turn a lot of stuff like the widgets off. At least the widget bar is isolated and isn't annoyingly embedded into the software like you'll find the ample ad-based notifications being spammed at you via mobile phone notifications. And unable to disable them because you also need those same notifications to actually get time critical information (here's looking at you, Doordash).
This is ultimately a long conversation and has many layers to it. But what I've found in reality is that software of all sorts and all platforms isn't as rosy as the people pitching them as solutions tend to tell you. I think it's silly, for example, on Linux that you have to split your engineering between multiple software development stacks to accomplish typical systems administrator goals (Ansible/Python, Bash, perhaps some Go thrown in there if someone on your team wants to mess around, tons of YAML and JSON). Whereas on Windows it's pretty well unified behind PowerShell and .NET.
To be fair, I often encounter situations where available Powershell tooling doesn't exist and I need to call .NET APIs anyway, or if I really want to secure the environment I need to drop the ability to use Add-Type and end up having to create proper powershell modules anyway. But at least the paradigm and language used is mostly the same.
I'd advise against it on Linux these days. Intel made their recent WiFi chips incompatible with AMD systems (yes, that's not a joke). So Mediatek or Qualcomm are the only decent WiFi options for AMD users, but obviously, do some research about what works anyway, before buying.
This is a non-issue if your files are stored in a partition separate from your OS, and is infeasible otherwise.
* If you have a separate partition, you can replace your OS and your file remain untouched.
* If you don't have a separate partition, your OS and your files will be replaced by the Linux installation. The only way to preserve your files is to copy to some external media before installation. Even if the Linux installer could retain files while reformatting a partition (which might be technically feasible), it would have no way of knowing which files to retain: the user could easily keep important files in arbitrary directories, not just in their designated C:\User\Patrick directory, and they would be understandably irate if the installer promised to keep files but didn't. To say nothing of adding complications of copying files that Windows has pushed to OneDrive.
> This is a non-issue if your files are stored in a partition separate from your OS, and is infeasible otherwise.
That is one of the biggest ifs of 2026. I don't think any major PC laptop vendor has ever sold consumer laptops with anything but one-big-partition layout. For the average user, their files are not stored in any partition, they are stored "right there on my desktop, with a separate folder for photos and bills"
What files? Where would the files be originally for this to be a concern? I’ve switched OS many times but I don’t think I’ve ever thought about moving any files.
I can't say I understand the prevalence of Windows-esque UI theming/refits beyond short-lived novelty- are people out there actually trying to make their UIs look like Windows XP and then using them like that on a daily basis?
I configured gnome to look like win 95/98, tried to use it for a while but the novelty wore off quite fast. Weirdly the mouse pointer still looks like win95 randomly in certain applications, guess I didn't clean up thoroughly!
https://archive.is/CEsFK
Commercial OSes (both Windows and MacOS) now feel so insanely agenda driven, and the agenda no longer feels like anything close to making the user happy and productive. For Mac, it feels like Apple wants to leverage what came out of VisionOS and unify the look and feel of mobile and desktop--two things no one asked for. For Windows, it feels like ads for their partners and ensuring they don't fumble the ai/agent transition the way they did with mobile.
Linux is SUCH a breath of fresh air. No one wants it to be anything other than what you want it to be. Modern desktop Linux has a much improved out of the box experience with good support for all the hardware I've thrown at it. And Claude Code makes it very fast and trivial to personalize, adapt, automate, etc.
>unify the look and feel of mobile and desktop
Lol, that's what Microsoft tried 10+ years ago and everybody gave them shit for it, especially Apple fans. Now Apple is "inventing" this again.
Ubuntu also tried this with Unity. They were hoping that Ubuntu would become more popular on tablets if they had a more tablet-friendly UI... They imposed this on desktop users even though nobody asked for it and basically nobody used Linux on a tablet. It was kind of a disaster. Ubuntu is a commercial entity though, so yeah, prone to the same kind of bad management decisions. as Microsoft and Apple. At least with Linux you have options. Personally I just want Linux to keep becoming more reliable over time, and have better support for energy-saving features on laptops. It's sad that Ubuntu still has issues waking up from sleep mode in 2025. Somehow those problems haven't been fixed in 20 years.
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I'm old enough to remember everyone praising Apple for not following Microsoft and making iOS it's own separate thing.
It's totally mad that they're now trying to converge their two differentiated, successful, and (mostly) well-liked OSes with the new one they just made for a $3000 headset nobody bought and even fewer people use with any regularity.
You can't seriously compare how inappropriate Windows 8 was on desktop to the latest macOS. Bad UI aside, the OS is effectively the same OS X from 2001 with some fresh skin.
Also a lot of people hate on macOS changes, I myself did not upgrade to the latest version.
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They also seem to be reinventing Windows Vista (visually).
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Honestly, forced to use a macbook for work and I get incredibly strong "windows 8" vibes from macos.
Apple still has pretty incredible hardware, although it's definitely priced with that in mind - but the software has been a constant slog. Change for change's sake, needless shifting in settings/config menus. Weird "we tried to make this similar to mobile" themes in some places but not others. Overly complex os navigation, without clear goals or direction.
Frankly - the OS apple is producing for their traditional computers feels like garbage. I use Arch/Gnome on my personal hardware and I feel like some time in the last 5ish years my opinion swapped - I used to think Gnome was mostly copying Apple design choices, but slightly worse. Now I think Gnome is just a more clear, more usable DE than what Apple is releasing. I moved my wife to Arch/Gnome on her personal laptop last year, and the sure sign was that she hasn't really had any problems with it.
All that said... I still keep a laptop around with Windows 11 on it, because I have a couple of legacy tools (CNCs, solar inverters) that still want it, and holy shit is modern Windows just absolute trash. I grew up on Windows, from windows 3.1 to windows 10, and it's the worst of the 3 by a good distance right now.
You know something's gone wrong with commercial tech companies when the only OS that actually feels like it's intentionally designed for users is the free product.
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Except that GNOME Mobile is actually pretty close to achieving that right now, and runs quite well on any reasonably up-to-date mobile hardware if the kernel-level support is there.
Lots of Apple fans are giving Apple shit for it now too.
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Effectively no one is arguing Apple is “inventing” this, and tons of people—especially the most ardent Apple fans—hate this direction. Adoption of the 26 OSs is lower than others in recent memory. Even the comment you’re replying to is critical of it.
There are a lot of legitimate reasons to criticise Apple, especially under Tim Cook. Let’s please not do this obvious rage bait where you fabricate that a group has a singular unified hypocritical opinion which is the opposite of what we’re seeing just so you can hate on them.
What even is the point? For the past twenty years, I have never seen an Apple fan being as close to annoying as the haters are. Same thing with other groups like vegans: There are more people loudly proclaiming that vegans are annoying than there are annoying vegans in the world.
Why must we keep defining ourselves by hating on others? As long as they’re not causing harm, let people be. “Why are you so angry?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExEHuNrC8yU&list=PLJA_jUddXv...
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Commercial OSes (both Windows and macOS) are also both American, and lots of people are trying to de-Americanize.
Yep, I'm in this boat. After years of macs my next will be a FreeBSD Desktop.
edit: Although phone is much harder. I guess I'll just turn all the 'stuff' like icloud off, use only signal and my banking/etc apps, and get a separate camera.. Anyone found a less painful way to live without an iPhone/Android?
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However if we don't get something like SuSE desktops and laptops at Media Markt and friends, most people won't care.
In fact I know of library that rolled back to Windows kiosk mode, from a previous SuSE deployment, because it wasn't what library users were expecting.
Yeah. The TechBros changed things globally. I can not support their Evilness, so I also need to get people to commit to having viable alternatives, e. g. improving LibreOffice to the point where the proprietary office suites from US corporations are no longer needed.
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Linux is also realistically American since the largest contributors are American corporations and the dictator for life lives on Portland oregon.
America has a monopoly on software essentially.
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Mac feels like it is constantly trying to sell you on their cloud services. A few times a day it will tell me that I haven't backed up to the cloud.
Windows is strangely less direct, but will regularly automatically try to save something to onedrive and force a subscription. Plus, it is just full of ads and nonsense.
I’ve noticed on my work machine, it really really really wants me to save my new document to one drive. It was about three clicks in the save dialog to get back to a local drive.
They were sneaky about it, with a switch to “turn on autosave” only working when you save to the cloud.
I miss my Linux work machine with Libre office..
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-office/mi...
It makes sense. Services is their second largest division, and it accounts for just under a quarter of their annual revenue (and growing).
as a dude who uses all three heavily for work & personal (windows/linux/macos) macos doesnt even come close to windows in the "trying to sell me on the cloud services" front. microsoft ddos's my brain with sign in with an o365 account at every corner of computing now. microsoft products are actually insane now.
i have quite a few mac vms for development things and ive had no issue just disabling all the icloud pieces & my usage in these environments seems to be pretty damn quiet the way i like it. windows has gone completely bonkers damn file explore has network service call stacks summoning bing wtf is going on there.
feel like i have to shower after using windows now it's crazy. reminds me of early 2000s when HP laptops were just filled with bloatware when you bought them, except microsoft has now baked this unforgettable experience into their operating system.
i will remain on macos for my personal device until other hardware manufs make great hardware. i have the pleasure (or displeasure) of using lots of different devices for work so ive got a stack of thinkpads and surfaces and a couple frameworks even and apple is still leading the charge on the bonkers hardware that fits in my backpack. im loyal to no one in the end and have no dog in this fight, but i would really enjoy if someone could catch up to apples chip developments for mobile desktop computing. id love something that is as refined and performant+efficient as my m4max pro but runs linux.
all in all i think device/manuf tribalism is the lamest part of computing and it's always been in my best interests to try them all myself and switch on a whim to whatever feels like it meets my needs. im in a unique position to use a lot of diff devices and os's with what i do and there's undoubtedly frustrations with all of them. there's always going to be a free spirit inside me that champions linux to the ends of the horizons though, but apple is undeniably in a unique position to r&d bankroll tsmc, design their own soc, develop hardware and software and marry all of those things together. it's cool shit, and they'd score a lot of goodwill if they just documented their damn stuff so linux distributions could just work on these devices rather than requiring some crazy reverse engineering effort and all the associated mailing list drama that came with asahi.
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Ugh it annoys me so much that the desktop etc is all in one drive without me setting it that way. But then there is still a desktop/documents directory in the usual spot under your profile, just the files don’t appear if you actually look at the desktop.
Even within the range of Linux distros there are some that feel more agenda-driven than others. That's the absolute wonder of it. One can sidestep the flamewars and just use another distro that suits likeminded people.
On the other hand I think this makes it difficult to provide a perfect experience - you have to stay closer to the herd if you want trouble free computing. You have the choice.
I think it's great that there are Linux projects where the people in the project are obviously unhinged fanatical idealists sent on a mission by god to do <whatever> in the One True Way. I wouldn't use any of those projects, but it's great that they exist, and sometimes their good ideas percolate out to projects that I do use.
Like fine, they're gonna make a distro that only uses software under one of the FSF's free as in freedom copy-left open source licenses, not just excluding closed source software, but also binary blob device firmware and software distributed under one of those filthy permissive licenses. That's great. It's fucking unusable, but it's awesome that it exists and it's great that they're doing it.
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> Claude Code makes it very fast and trivial to personalize, adapt, automate
I used Claude to define some CS exam computers using NixOS; it was just GNOME, but with a few tweaks made via dconf. For example, add a maximize icon next to the X (close) in the menubar, make the dashbar behave like a dock with smart autohiding. On a Tailscale VPN so I can service them. And with a few programs preinstalled, preconfigured and pinned to the dock. System users for every student. And with mirroring the screen at a certain resolution by default.
Anything I hadn’t tried before, I just asked it to make. The dconf tweaking in particular was so much easier than when I tried to do this manually.
Windows is a bizarre product at this point; it is what the company is famous for, but it is small beans next to Azure, right?
Nobody would get into the Operating System business to make money I think, the going rate is $0, subsidized by something (an ad company, a hardware company, or general kindness and community spirit).
No, Windows still has Windows tax, which is why I always choose "No OS" when buying a machine. MacOS/iOS/iPadOS were never for sale separately, so we can't judge the price. Android sure is subsidized though.
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Productivity and Cloud have a revenue of about 30B each while personal computing only was 13.5B (that includes windows Xbox and search + advertising) according to ms earnings report q4 25
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If you want the "Home" version of Windows, you'll get ads and crap, but the cost will be free/low. If you don't want the ads and need a more professional setup, then you can pay for Windows "Pro" version. They also have server versions that cost a lot more, so yes, Microsoft can and does make money from their OS. No, it's probably not as much as they make from Azure now, but in the past it made them a lot of money. It's estimated Windows brings in ~$20 billion for Microsoft, which is nothing to balk at. Azure brings in ~$75 billion. $20 billion isn't "small beans" in this equation, it's substantial.
It's interesting to think how incredibly clunky, unintuitive, difficult, unpleasant to the eye, and just generally painful the Linux desktop experience used to be. These days Linux has proved it's usefulness on the desktop, both to novices and power users alike. I have no doubt that 2030s will be the decade of the Linux desktop. Perhaps until 2038 anyway.
Windows and macOS are now sales funnels for the various subscriptions Microsoft and Apple offer.
I feel like cli agents are the main benefit of going back to Linux. It’s such a joy to have all the solutions to customizations and fixes I want completely automated, using an agent that can control anything I permit and understands my OS completely.
> and ensuring they don't fumble the ai/agent transition
They've already fumbled it.
> the way they did with mobile.
It's the exact same way they fumbled with mobile. They were very late to the party and decided to buy their way in. It _never_ works.
MS was almost two decades early to the mobile party, and still fumbled it. Because they didn't have the usability insights around touchscreens that others pioneered.
Also could never name things—they named it Wince.
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I turn on my computer, the desktop shows up…and that’s it. No random windows, no popups about some bundled software I don’t use or how my subscription for X service I don’t want isn’t activated. A chime and a blank screen. Bazzite made my computer fun again.
As if Linux was/is not agenda driven. People really forgot I guess.
Obviously, you can't build something as complex as a modern operating system without intention, and therefore an "agenda" but I have a feeling you know what OP was getting at.
I also know that the impulse to be a pedant is strong because I fight it every day, ha!
By agenda-driven, I think they mean the commercial operating systems are designed with the intention of improving the uptake of other products and services by the companies that sell them.
I think you are referencing something more like a political agenda. And Linux to some extent, GNU even more so are motivated by a political agenda: user empowerment. It is just… a good agenda.
Was going to say, the online help always baits you into using OpenJDK which doesn't work for random stuff, or in older times there was those non-default "non free" repos you needed to add if you wanted wifi to work.
I find it so odd that Apple put so much weight behind the VisionOS design, rolling it out to all platforms, considering so few people have Vision Pro. The justification for bringing some iOS ideas to macOS made sense, because everyone knows how to use iOS and is familiar with those conventions.
I’m curious if we’ll see another major shift with the new deign lead, or if the higher ups will want to run with Liquid Glass for a while after so much investment, and not wanting to alienate users by radically changing design direction too often. Or if Liquid Glass is here to stay as long as we have Vision Pro, because VR/AR demand that style of UI, so everything else needs to fall in line for consistency’s sake.
I think I’d be more apt to switch to Linux if it wasn’t for all the mobile integration macOS and iOS have. Giving that up is a tough sell. It also means finding new solutions for managing photos, music, notes, and a bunch of other things. I also struggle to find non-Apple hardware I find acceptable. I’ve used Linux on and off for over 20 years, and in the past few years is gotten to the point where I think I could daily drive it with little to no compromise, in a bubble. But mobile really bursts that bubble.
> I find it so odd that Apple put so much weight behind the VisionOS design, rolling it out to all platforms, considering so few people have Vision Pro.
I suspect they began working on Liquid Glass before the Vision Pro was publicly unveiled, so they didn't know what the public response would be.
What I honestly find more baffling is that they thought the Vision Pro would sell well. It just isn't a good product.
Perhaps they're still banking on a future where the Vision Pro becomes a pair of real glasses. In which case, Liquid Glass is the type of interface you'd want to have.
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KDE Connect
It’s not actually really the same as the visionOS design, merely inspired by it.
I agree with you. Microsoft really has gotten bad in this regard. In the past, the operating system was kind of semi-useful. Now one has to wonder what the real agenda is. For me the quitting point was the recall-sniffing on everyone; I don't care if this can be disabled. To me it means that the USA wants to monitor me non-stop. That's a no go. (I was already using Linux before, so I don't depend on Microsoft anyway, but it now meant that I also need to stop using secondary computers with a Microsoft-tainted operating system. I can not trust the USA in any regard anymore with the TechBros in charge. They killed all goodwill and reputation.)
Commercial OS's are terrible, but theres nothing that gets me on guard more than someone claiming theres an "agenda". The word has lost all meaning.
Windows has evolved into the world's highest security risk. MacOS feels like Eye Candy due to its increasingly inaccessible price for people with low resources. So, price and security are the reasons why I switched to Linux.
Getting a macbook is cheaper than it has ever been. You can get a new m4 macbook air for around 750 on amazon. The prices of apple laptops have been dropping every year despite inflation in the rest of the economy....
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>price and security are the reasons why I switched to Linux
What measures do you take to insulate yourself from desktop Linux's really bad security?
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> Windows has evolved into the world's highest security risk.
It has always been.
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It's typical business logic. It's not enough to focus on making the product better than the user, you must have a "big" product vision and you're only allowed make changes that align with that product vision.
So when that vision is something that users are ambivalent on (3D TV, AI operating system, etc...), well tough, that's still all they're getting until it hurts the company financially or the next executive has a different "big idea". :(
I’m stuck in a world of AirDrop and expecting my phone to know the Wi-Fi password on my laptop, so I’m not gonna leave MacOS but it absolutely does suck. It used to be that Spotlight file finding was broken, but as of the last today Finder file finding is broken too. This is on multiple new Macs.
Windows 10 and Sequoia are the last two versions before the complete and utter enshittification of these operating systems.
Come back when I can run Linux on a laptop that has 12+ hours battery life, runs fast, that’s lightweight, quiet and doesn’t cause infertility from the heat when I put it on my lap….
Using an x86 laptop in 2025 is like using a flip phone 6 years after the iPhone came out.
Of course if you are a gamer, ignore everything I just wrote.
Given that this is your stance and demands for laptop hardware I have to assume that you have never once participated in the laptop market prior to the M1 releasing?
That’s the only way your unrealistic expectations make sense.
Of course, people have been parroting that about Linux on laptops for over a decade. I never understood it, since I’ve never had any significant issues with Linux on my laptops.
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Most of Linux's laptop woes is due to two things:
A. ACPI which is a sprawling, overengineered mess created by Microsoft, Intel, and Toshiba, and
B. ACPI-specific things like sleep and power being tested only for Windows
B is a direct result of two things: 1) crappy outsourced firmware developers, and 2) Microsoft's 1990s strategy of disallowing OEMs from offering systems with other operating systems preinstalled.
So, not really Linux's fault. If the interfaces that controlled all the laptop goodies were exposed as normal hardware (and documented) instead of gatekept behind ACPI methods that have to be written by firmware vendors that can often barely spell the menu options correct in the setup screens, then this issue would not exist.
UEFI is ACPI's successor and carries on this legacy. It's disappointing that it's seeping into the ARM world.
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>is like using a flip phone 6 years after the iPhone came out.
I was doing this and it was great. I only had to get a smart phone for work, and I hate the stupid thing.
You mean the framework Ive been running for the past 4 years or so?
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I think that the ThinkPad X13s Gen1 might meet these requirements. It is my favorite ARM Linux laptop I've ever used. It has great support in Debian 13 (trixie), and it feels pretty smooth and fast. It doesn't have any fans, stays cool, and I regularly get a full day's worth of battery life out of it with margin to spare (10-12 hours). It's better than the newer Snapdragon X1 Elite based ThinkPads, in my opinion, even though it isn't quite as fast because it is passively cooled, is easily fast enough that I've never noticed it feeling "slow", has good driver support in mainline Linux and Mesa (which took a few years to be fully worked out, but is there now), and it's readily available for a good price (on eBay).
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I love my expensive Macbook at work, but at home old my old Thinkpad running Linux is a godsend. The performance is perfectly adequate for all my daily non-work needs, battery lasts several hours, and since the thing has little monetary value, I can be pretty careless with it, in an environment with small kids running around and doing random things. At this rate, I think it will last me well into 2030's.
I'm not going to buy a new Macbook with my own money as long as I can't install Linux on it. I don't want perfectly fine machines to turn into e-waste, or at least become insecure once the original manufacturer decides not to offer OS updates anymore.
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I recently switched to Debian on my laptop (Zephyrus G14) because it was the only way I could get it to NOT run into the problems you described. Went from ~2 hours of battery life to 10, and no more of the constant jet engine level fan activity I experienced with windows.
Just buy any modern Laptop? What you describe hasn't been an issue for at least ten years now.
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Like the ThinkPad T14s or any other Snapdragon X Elite, or better? Apple chips are great in this space but they're not alone.
Xiaomi, Honor and Huawei make ARM-based notebooks like that. The closest to your description is probably the Qingyun line of laptops.
Besides the 12+ hour battery life which is only achievable with ARM processors, everything described can be accomplished easily for the typical slightly above average computer user with Kubuntu today.
I installed latest Kubuntu on my old 2015 MacBook Pro and it runs ice cold now when playing YouTube videos with Firefox whereas before it ran hot even with a Mac fan control app
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I was doing that on my Thinkpad X220 a decade ago.
Why would anyone come back? Nobody is bothered by you having a device that you like, and nobody cares if you replace it.
People without this particular 12 hour battery life requirement (which is quite niche, most of us live near plugs) are talking about what works for them.
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Bro I don't care how long the battery life is. I use my laptop plugged in 90% of the time. The portability is so I can change what location I'm sitting at, not so I can be unplugged constantly.
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One good thing is choice. You are free to use macOS or even windows.
But this battery argument is bull shit
15 years ago it was so difficult to find charging points.
Not now. I have never ever been in a situation the I needed to be away from charging for > 6 hours. 6-10 hours is really possible.
If your working or life demands that then pity you. I have better life/work.
And again choice. You are free to use macOS or even windows.
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Linux will run on most platforms, so just pick up a fast, lightweight laptop, and select a conservative power profile for longer battery life and less heat, and don't run 32-thread machine learning jobs on it.
A 12-hour laptop battery life is a little bit of a red herring: yes, you can get it on efficient ultrabooks and MacBooks, with light use like web browsing or office work, on low brightness and minimal background apps. This is true on MacOS, Windows and Linux. The first two may be better at handling low power modes on hardware peripherals, but OTOH on Linux I have a better control over background tasks.
I have an absolute trash travel laptop from last decade, running Fedora Linux, and it lasts for multiple days if I keep it mostly closed and just open it for whatever browsing/editing I need on the road.
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The big challenge in linux (at least for me) is to connect and work with devices like printers or scanners. It is weird but when I connected my (now old) printer a decade ago its setup was easier and more stable. After several years and ubuntu upgrades at some point I wasn't managed to make it work at all.. And I had no luck with my scanner at all.. Luckily I don't need to use neither printer neither scanner these days but I still keep a laptop (also old) with win7 and all original drivers for such devices.
Linux is one of the last strong defenses for the idea that people should control the computers they own. On desktops and servers, root access is normal, and attempts to take it away do not work because software freedom is well established. On phones, that never happened. There is no real, mainstream “Linux for mobile,” and the result is a world of locked-down platforms where things like “sideloading” are treated as scary security risks instead of basic user rights. This makes it much easier for lawmakers to argue for removing root access on mobile devices, even though the same idea would be unrealistic on desktop systems.
A great deal of gratitude is owed to all the people who volunteer their free time to create the stable desktop environment we have free access to on Linux in 2026.
If you're interested in this aspect of user agency, you might like the "trustworthy technology" site a few friends and I are working on: https://aol.codeberg.page/eci/
"There is no real, mainstream “Linux for mobile,”"
Probably need to clarify since Android is Linux. Assume you're referring to community run distros. Unfortunately the issue is usually proprietary hardware that has to be reverse engineered and nobody willing to pay engineers full time to do that.
Android is Linux. There could easily be a secure-boot desktop Linux too if companies cared to target that platform with things like banking apps.
>Linux is one of the last strong defenses for the idea that people should control the computers they own.
Please run Kate/Kwrite as root and then we will talk on the topic. Or pipe password to ssh
That's the good thing with open source. You can theoretically fork it and remove what prevents you from using Kate as root.
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You dont have to use that software. Who even would? You're an adult, presumably, so use vim.
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Kate/Kwrite will ask to escalate to root if permissions are not sufficient. If it's not available to you, that's because your distro patched it out.
For ssh - sshpass.
I'm using Linux on the desktop for 15 years and I still sometimes cannot connect to Wifi.
This is because the list of network refreshes (and disappears) before I can find and click the correct Wifi:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/network-manager-applet/-/issu...
This completely breaks the Linux experience for anybody living in a reasonably populous area. The issue has 3 upvotes.
I also put a 400 $ bounty on it, if anybody wants to give it a shot. (Given that AI is supposed to replace 90% of programmers last year, making the Wifi list stay visible should be easy, right?)
This worked fine 10 years ago.
Most of my gripes are around some UI garbage behaviour like that. I have a file manager on one PC (I think it's the Ubuntu one where some "GUI in Snap" stuff breaks the GUI) breaks the file picker dialogue, so that when pasting a directory path in to navigate there, at the exact instant you press Enter, it autocompletes the first file so that that gets selected, leading you to upload a file you didn't want to upload.
That said, all of that feels like really high quality compared to when once per year I click the Wifi menu on some Windows and it take 20 seconds to appear at all.
If you are sensitive to these issues, unfortunately you need to go with a mainstream linux distribution and use near-default settings.
It's great that you can customize everything and use your own window manager, compositor, etc ... but these issues are the price you pay. It is unfair to compare this to Windows, where you don't even have these customization options.
Specifically for the network manager applet, it is not fixed because it's not really used anymore. GNOME Shell has it's own network selection menu that does not use the applet. It is the default on most systems, so users don't face this issue by default.
I use ubuntu and the default remote desktop just stopped working since 24: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/rdp-stopped-working-after-upg...
With Linux, you just have to be prepared to hit a bug and find no help coming anytime.
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I've been recommending Mint/Cinnamon over Ubuntu for years now. Its wifi widget does not do this, nor does it use snap.
I jumped on the Linux bandwagon with my main work laptop last week, when my perfectly fine (I thought) Windows 11 installation nuked itself without warning (possibly related to merely opening Teams).
I somewhat randomly chose Mint, and a few oddities aside; it’s been a pretty good experience.
I was really surprised with how well polished Mint is. Everything worked out of the box very snappy.
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Mint is really polished
PR on the way
PR created https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/network-manager-applet/-/merg...
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Well, huge shoutout to you for following up on your word!
https://gitlab.gnome.org/rickyb/network-manager-applet/-/com...
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It takes skill to make a GUI that integrates dynamic information a good UX. For things like WiFi I discovered that modifying config files is an infinitely better experience than any GUI on Linux.
Also for some reason DE's sometimes fail to automatically connect to an AP when it's right there and I have to click for them to do it. This issue literally never happened to me when just using wpa_supplicant, for years whenever an AP is operational then so is the connection without fail.
Have you tried KDE Plasma? I have loved it since coming from GNOME. Install it atop Debian 13 and everything just works.
Last time I tried Linux I was so done with Windows I installed Arch. Couldn't connect to Wifi. I figured it was Arch, so I installed Ubuntu. Literally the same problem. So I got a new USB wifi adaptor that said it supported Linux...same problem. I gave up and have been using a MacBook ever since lol.
Last summer Manjaro released usual heavy update and suddenly wifi on my old spare mbp was gone. Luckily digging around I found that a firmware was available in aur so I had to just plug ethernet in, install the package and reboot the system. But then another smaller update out of blue made system unbootable so instead of doing "forensics" I went by the easiest way of reinstalling the system and wifi again was working out of the box.
Perhaps you could have checked if the firmware was installed? Most distros have non free firmware in their packages, it just needs to be installed.
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Re: "I gave up and have been using a MacBook ever since lol."
I'm curious. What will you do when Apple too starts shoehorning AI into every part of MacOS and when Apple introduces increasingly unpalatable or government-mandated surveillance functionality like Microsoft is doing with Recall?
What will you do then?
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That sounds like a GNOME problem, not a Linux problem.
You should give KDE a go.
Also the latest KDE UI that inserts a tiny password input box below the SSID when you click the SSID, and doesn't scroll it into view, so you're left wondering what's going on
Really really bad WiFi connection UI all over
I've been a Linux admin for 25 years but up until a few months ago my personal computer has been windows (gaming desktop) or Mac (laptop).
I decided to give desktop Linux another shot and I'm glad I did. I was prepared for a lot of jankiness but figured I have enough experience to fix whatever needs fixing. Surprisingly, this has not been the case at all, the PC has been not only as stable as Windows or Mac but also performs better and is much more comfortable and intuitive to use. I never really want to "work on" my personal computer, I want it to just be there for me reliably. I've always had a soft spot for free software, but I just couldn't justify the effort until now.
So I guess this is my love letter to all the devs that have made the modern Linux desktop possible. Even compared to just a few years ago, the difference is immense. Keep up the good work.
I've been running a Linux desktop for about 13 years. There are still "moments" where you have to work on it and it can be more opaque than Windows/Mac. But you have the control to do what you need to do, which is one huge factor for me in Linux's favor.
I moved my immediate and mostly non-tech family to all run Linux including an aging relative who needed a locked-down Firefox install to keep her from falling victim to predatory sites and extensions. Pretty easy to script the entirety of the OS install and lockdown so that it was documented and repeatable. Can't do that without techie roots but I love that it's possible and mostly straightforward from a scripting perspective. It's almost exclusively get the right file with the right config in the right place and restart a service.
The only major day-to-day downside IMO is battery life on Linux laptops. Can't compare to current generation of Macs but that's true for Windows too.
I have been using desktop Linux for about the same amount of time and the way I see it now, even on the occasion where I have to troubleshoot something weird (which has maybe been one or two times in the past few years), it doesn't sound any different from the issues people are having with Windows and Mac these days—and at least I can fix it!
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I managed to get around ~7W idle on a 2024 dgpu/igpu laptop, with room to further optimize. From my limited casual checks (nowhere near proper benchmark), it's better than windows.
But yes it's an area that still requires tweaking, which is a cost I don't want to incur. Also just within this year I got a regression (later fixed) because of a bug in nvidia-open driver so it stopped going into low power state giving me a toaster on the go. These are still very obscure to root cause and fix.
In my experience, the remaining difficulties with Linux tend to revolve around managing ownership and permissions of files and directories.
I recently plugged in my external hard drive into my Linux PC and it just wouldn't read it. "You do not have permission to access this drive" or something like that. The solution after googling ended up being (for some reason) some combination of sudo chown -R user /dev/sda1 and unplugging and reconnecting the drive.
No way to do that from the GUI (on KDE at least) and I'm not sure how I'd even solve that problem if I didn't know the super user password.
Still glad to be using Linux, of course, but sometimes these problems still pop up.
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Current Intel chips get 20h of regular laptop usage. For real: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-empire-strikes-back-with...
The upciming Intel and Qualcomm CPUs are even better. They really caught up with Apple.
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> Pretty easy to script the entirety of the OS install and lockdown so that it was documented and repeatable.
What distro? It's niche enough of a use case. Have you considered releasing the code?
I've been on Mint for nearly 4 years now,. migrating from Windows.
The only hiccup I had was botched updates once, and the OS would error during boot.
The fix was easy, boot to terminal, fiddle with timeshift to restore to the point prior to update, then apply de updates carefully with a few reboots in between.
Now, was that easy? For someone well versed in the technicalities, yes. For a layman, probably not.
Now, that said, it was the only problem I had in 4 years. It has been very smooth sailing besides that.
My experience with Windows prior to that was always horrible. Yearly clean installs because after a while the computer felt extremely sluggish. Random blue screens for god knows what reason.
I've been running desktop Linux for about eighteen years, though I did take a break and run a Macbook for about four years.
It's a little upsetting that Windows has gotten so terrible, because I think in a lot of ways the NT Kernel is a better piece of software than the Linux kernel. Drivers are simply easier to install and they generally don't require a reboot and they don't require messing with kernel modules, IO is non-blocking by default, and a bunch of other things that are cool and arguably better than Linux.
The problem is that, while the kernel is an important part of an operating system, it's not the only part. Even if the NT kernel were the objectively best piece of software ever to be written by humans, that still doesn't change the fact that Windows has become a pretty awful mess. They have loaded the OS with so much crap (and ads now!), the Windows Update tool routinely breaks your computer, their recovery/repair tools simply do not work, their filesystem is geriatric and has been been left behind compared to stuff like ZFS, btrfs, and APFS, and they don't really seem determined to fix any of this stuff.
Even if the Linux kernel were to be slightly worse, it's still good enough. Even if you do have to muck with kernel modules it's not that hard now with DKMS. Even if the IO is blocking by default epoll has been around for decades and works fine.
So at that point, if the kernel is good enough, and if we can get userland decent enough, then desktop Linux is better than Windows. Linux is good enough, without ads, with recovery tools that actually work, and performs comparably or better than Windows.
My experience, as a software developer, is that both Windows and Linux desktop are great. The biggest advantage Windows has is better support for desktop applications that are used by a lot of people, which is just the nature of Windows being more popular for desktop users, and is why I use it. With Linux, it's more likely you'll have to be a bit more savvy with occasional issues.
To note, with official Linux support on Windows, it's trivial for me to get everything I want as a developer on Windows, so that's never been a hard blocker for me.
> To note, with official Linux support on Windows, it's trivial for me to get everything I want as a developer on Windows, so that's never been a hard blocker for me.
Maybe not as a developer, but as a user I still think WSL is only kind of superficially a solution. You still are stuck with an update process that happens automatically and can brick your computer and recovery tools that, as far as I can tell, have never actually worked for anyone in history. You're still stuck with NTFS, which was a perfectly fine filesystem thirty years ago but now is missing basic features, like competent snapshotting/backups, and instead you have to rely on System Restore, which again doesn't actually work.
I mean, yeah, you can do `sudo apt install neovim`, and that's kind of cool I guess, but the problems with Windows, to me are far deeper and cannot be solved with a virtualization layer on top.
I've been using Linux as a desktop for that entire time, and actually, it was better before. The hardware was simpler, more compatible, and relied less on firmware blobs, so making Linux drivers was way easier. And the software was simpler because GUI makers weren't trying to be fancy. The peak of Linux desktop stability and ease of use was in 2002. It's been downhill from there.
It's been like that for 15 years or more.
The fact that you now need an account for almost any piece of hardware, including computers, phones etc is a major drawback that arrived with the internet era. Linux has been able to avoid that temptation.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves here. 15 years ago I was still looking up installation and driver procedures and workarounds to install Linux on my devices. I failed to install arch in college because I didn't have a driver for my SATA drive for example.
Today though. Yeah totally easy. Especially if you get one of the many machines with Linux support. Smooth sailing all around.
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The only reason I haven't gone over to Linux is gaming with my RTX card. Interested to know your gaming setup and distro. Any stability/compatibility issues?
Not the op, I've been gaming on Linux for over 10 years I think, I have an rtx2080, and using Arch Linux, Nvidia support has gotten better by a lot.
Steam performs exceptionally well. Initially there were issues, but I haven't face any for really long time now.
I don't play mp games though. So that part I can't say much.
> The biggest issue I’ve had so far is Minecraft: Bedrock Edition. For some reason, Microsoft hasn’t prioritized making a Linux version of Bedrock. Java Edition works fine in Linux, but I play Minecraft with my kids, and they’re on Bedrock Edition on their iPads. There’s supposed to be a way to run the Android app with MCPE Launcher, but I couldn’t get it to work.
The launcher was somewhat pretty stable all along, until Microsoft enabled Google's Integrity Protection "DRM" into it. [0]
Fortunately, they have found a way to run it even with that added in after a couple of weeks later since they added that at Q3/4 last year.
> but I couldn’t get it to work.
From what I've seen, the game will crash when vibrant visuals (a built-in alternative rendering option with shaders-like experience in Minecraft Bedrock) volumetric fog is enabled. [1]
[0]: https://github.com/minecraft-linux/mcpelauncher-manifest/iss... [1]: https://github.com/minecraft-linux/mcpelauncher-manifest/iss...
>I picked CachyOS rather than a better-known distro like Ubuntu because it’s optimized for modern hardware,
>First challenge: My mouse buttons don’t work. I can move the cursor, but can’t click on anything.
Maybe should've picked Ubuntu? I suspect this is the Linus (tech tips, not Torvalds) strategy of picking up an obscure distro for content purposes. Can't really have an article if everything just works, right
I suspect they sincerely picked CachyOS because they read people advocating for it, and were convinced by the advocacy. People advocate all kinds of distros, and all of them except the one I advocate are bad choices.
There's this reply in the comments from the author.
> Nah, it’s a problem with this particular mouse in X and Wayland and it’s been seen on Fedora and OpenSuse almost since the mouse came out. Not a Cachy issue, a nonstandard USB HID implementation by the vendor
Tbh, I don't even know what a distro would have to do to break this.
It’s not exactly obscure. It’s Arch with a nice installer and binaries with compiler optimizations for the latest hardware. It’s not a crazy choice if you have very new hardware. It feels exactly like Arch because it is.
I don't think PopOS could be called "obscure". At the time that the LTT video came out, PopOS and Manjaro (IIRC) were the distros to game on, if you wanted up-to-date OOTB working drivers.
Even so, it was hard to take LTT's attempt at using linux seriously when part of it included Linus bitching about how right clicking a list of files on github and clicking "save link as..." didnt give him a copy of the file. It just highlighted how utterly clueless he was and made it clear he couldn't be trusted for the rest of the video either.
Yeah, if the goal of the article was to convince Windows users to switch to Linux then Ubuntu would provide as frictionless an install as Windows. Since the author chooses CachyOS, of course there's going to be some important steps during installation that need to be handled with some forethought and extra software to handle all hardware issues. After all, CachyOS is based on Arch Linux and inherits it's minimal mindset. But the article about switching from Windows to Ubuntu has been already written a thousand times.
Ubuntu's UI isn't particulates intuitive for people coming from Windows anymore (it hasn't been for the past 13 years tbf).
Mint is the best default to advise to someone switching to Linux (it's mostly Ubuntu under the hood, but without the snap nonsense and with a less imaginative UI).
Agreed. As a long time windows user, I never liked ubuntu much (and always had issues with my hardware too). Mint has been amazing for me.
I really struggle when folks recommend a distro that is only now getting itself unstuck from a decade++ of inaction, starting an advance that other distros have been up to for decades.
Starting people out on a dinosaur has some advantages yes but personally I think it's malpractice, setting users up to have to make major painful shifts in the future to update all the derelict knowledge they gain. https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=449033
For not much prior research, he sure has done a lot of prior research to even know about desktop environments or bootloaders compared to your average windows user. This article read like every other promising Linux is user friendly and easy, then proceeding with the author fixing issues the average user wouldn’t be able to even diagnose.
I think anyone technically savvy enough to follow the article is already aware Linux is a viable primary OS, the question is can you manage it without having to become a Linux nerd? I want to be able to tell normal people they can use Linux.
What's funny is, the author is only having these questions because they chose a wacky Arch-based ultra-techie distro that I'd never even heard of.
If they'd just installed normal Ubuntu or Fedora, they wouldn't even know what a bootloader was, and they'd just use whatever desktop environment (probably GNOME, maybe KDE) came with it.
For real. I should write a blog post about my expierience but it would only be like 2 sentences. "Hey! I switched to Linux. I bought a desktop from System76 and it all just worked."
I use Linux exclusively for almost 20 years. I can tackle any tinkering of almost anything in a Linux environment, alongside of heavy use of Vim and Emacs.
Nowadays every time I want to run a non-trivial command of a program, configure a file somewhere, customize using code Emacs or anything else, I always put the LLMs to do it. I do almost nothing by myself, except check if said file is indeed there, open the file and copy paste the new configuration, restart the program, copy paste code here and there and so on.
No need to be a nerd to use Linux, that's so 2021. LLMs are the ultimate nerds when it comes to digging into manuals, scour the internet and github for workarounds, or tips and tricks and so on.
If you get someone to help you with the installation, or buy a pre-installed Linux, then yes I believe this to be true. I only have anecdotal evidence, but I have my dad who is very non-tech savvy who after about a day with gnome actually said it's the first desktop environment that he liked more than Windows 95. There has been one time in 5 years that he had to reach out for technical assistance. It turned out that he had been misled by a prompt to buy Ubuntu pro and had gotten into a weird state. I blame that one solely on canonical, not on Linux in general. After that I switched him to Fedora, and he's been running that now for a few years and didn't even realize I had changed his underlying OS. He is able to install anything he wants from the graphical storefront, and same with updates. In the early days we did have some trouble getting his printer to work, though once we switched him to Fedora everything on that printer worked out of the box. When my sister came over to his house with her MacBook, she had to mess with the Mac to get the printer working for over an hour, and it was still pretty hit or miss. It would lose half the jobs she tried to send to it. It truly is remarkable how usable Linux is for the average person now. For people that have to run software that only runs on Windows or Linux, excluding games of course since steam and other game managers handle those wonderfully now, there is definitely still a bit of pain. But for people who can get by with cloud-based or Linux friendly software, it's really quite good.
Printers. It always haunts us. I have exclusively bought Brother for home and work for close to two decades at this point because they follow CUPS standards requiring no fidgeting, and their modern offerings all have AirPrint, which eliminates the need for drivers. It's 2026, and the normies still think you cannot print from your phone because printers suck so much.
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> but I have my dad who is very non-tech savvy who after about a day with gnome actually said it's the first desktop environment that he liked more than Windows 95.
more anecdotes, but I had the same experience with getting my mother in law on Linux. she is 75, and hadn't used a computer since her old job, and she used Windows XP, i believe she said, there. a couple of years ago, she wanted a bigger screen device to use for her internetting since her eyesight isn't what it used to be (her primary computing device was always her Android phone otherwise). my wife and I got her a thinkpad t440p, set her up with Debian GNOME, showed her how to use the Software Centre and install her stuff and update the machine, and off she went. haven't had a call to fix anything at all. she says she likes the experience better than the computers she remembers using at work running Windows.
My sister was the same, she brought her machine over, I booted a Ubuntu disk and did the disk config in the install and then she set the rest of the stuff up and I haven’t heard from her about it for 5 years, other than that I check if she’s still using it now and again.
> after about a day with gnome actually said it's the first desktop environment that he liked more than Windows 95.
You have to choose that?
I'm a long-time Linux user, and I don't like GNOME better as a desktop environment. I'll take a Windows 95-like desktop UI over GNOME any day of the week...
Well said. There’s a lot of angry comments below but it’s all people who don’t want to deal with these hard truths.
*GASP* OH NO THEY MIGHT LEARN A SKILL!!!!
Snark aside, I really really don’t understand the aversion, even within the tech community, to learning new skills especially as it pertains to Linux.
Would having new knowledge be such a burden? Why is it something to avoid? Why is it not a good thing if normal people learn more about computing?
Do we want a population of iPad baby Linux users? Normal people can use it now, don’t gate keep.
We have people going “I don’t have to read, I could just have the AI do it for me” and pretty soon they’re not gonna be able to think. People don’t want to think or learn because we have such a cultural aversion to being a nerd. Nerd is not a bad thing.
Partly, the issue isn't "they would have to learn about Linux, and that's bad", it's "they would have to learn about Linux, and they wouldn't want do that, and so they would get frustrated and quite likely give up on it, and my recommendation would have been a waste of their time".
The other part is that they're not necessarily wrong not to want to learn about Linux! Learning is great, when it's something interesting or valuable. But if I'm not interested in the thing, and my time and mental resources are limited, and I have a good enough alternative, I think it's absolutely fine to avoid it.
Most of us choose to drive a car that just works, and take it to a mechanic when it doesn't, rather than buying one that requires and rewards tinkering. Maybe you're into cars, I don't know, but I bet you take this attitude to at least some of the useful objects in your life.
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Because although sometimes annoying, people already have a good alternative making the hours required to invest in something they're not interested in a very high price.
It's the same reason why as a software developer I use Visual Studio Code and don't plan to learn (neo)vim.
I (like many who'd have to learn Linux) have better things to do.
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It should be a choice, not a requirement. With Windows you can get your work done without knowing much about Windows itself, but with Linux you're forced to understand every level of the entire OS so you can debug it first and then maybe get your work done. For an OS built around user freedom Linux sure doesn't give its users much choice on how to use it.
My Dad managed to install linux (Q4OS) on his computer in a dual-boot setup, having never even touched Linux before. He hasn't asked me for help once, whereas historically I've been his tech support when he was running Windows. He's loving the linux experience.
I believe if my Dad is able to install, use and benefit from Linux, anyone can.
Windows is worse , just latest example: a USB WiFi antenna for the PC, on Linux it just works, on Windows you need either to buy a CD drive to install the drivers - not sure if your grandma can buy a cd drive, install it and install drivers. On Linux it just works.
People like buy a computer and use whatever is on it, they can't manage to install windows, the drivers needed for the hardware, I had to setup emails, or other online accounts for this kind of people so give them a preinstalled Linux and they should manage,.
You would never use the cd lol, it would auto install - and if it didn’t you’d download the drivers online though if it’s such a piece of junk as to need that then it’s a junk piece of hardware anyway.
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Nowadays these things contain a hidden storage partition to install a driver.
Linux is a lot more user-friendly than Windows, with generally useful error messages when things go wrong.
How do you fix Windows when it breaks every couple of weeks and the only information you get is a bright blue screen with a couple of lines of hexadecimal on it?
I don’t think you’ve used windows in 20 years by the sounds of it
You run memtest86 to rule out a RAM issue, then check with your system reseller or mobo vendor for BIOS mitigations for the latest round of Intel CPU bugs. If you are able to rule out the RAM and CPU, try a different power supply. Failing that, the motherboard itself may be causing the issue.
Unfortunately there are few good ways to narrow down intermittent hardware failures (which is what you are experiencing) beyond these common steps.
“Linux is so easy and great, my mouse didn’t even work and I have it unplugged to this day, and I can’t even play minecraft!” - I use every OS and have arch on my gaming pc (dual booted I’ll admit), but this is both one of the worst articles advocating for desktop Linux and one of the best at the same time, because it shows the harsh truth a lot of people experience and us Linux users don’t even want to admit exists.
I used to concede that yeah, Linux is more hassle than the average person is going to feel like dealing with, but at this point, Windows is so damn bad that you could grab literally any Linux distro and have an easier time with it, and even better, it won't delete all your stuff in the middle of the night due to a forced update either.
I agree. Yet another "Linux is great! The only issues I had were A, B, C, D, E...".
I also use every OS and Windows 11 is still the most hassle free and reliable (at least if you install the IoT version using Rufus). I still have to use X because Wayland has a couple of remaining issues. Also most distros inexplicably use Gnome despite KDE being significantly better. Why?
"Windows is great… you only need to… install the IoT version using Rufus"
Oh and tweak 24 settings with these powershell scripts, and better run them after every update to ensure they weren't changed back on purpose. Otherwise, totally hassle free.
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KDE 5 wasn't much better than GNOME 3, it's the main reason behind GNOME default I think. It's only til KDE 6 they got back up on their feet and solved the most egregious design issues, many more still linger.
GNOME/Red Hat for a long time is the only one even trying to figure out a solution for some of the longstanding issues like application distribution and sandboxing. Those rant articles about GNOME unfortunately went nowhere since the other desktops were all stuck. KDE Discover eventually supported Flatpak which was advocated by GNOME for years, SteamOS using Flatpak ended up being the decisive push.
GNOME having better enterprise support can be another factor.
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> I picked CachyOS rather than a better-known distro like Ubuntu because it’s optimized for modern hardware
So this isn't a usual comparison, as the vast majority of users will choose Ubuntu, Fedora, or Mint. CachyOS is also a new distro, meaning it won't last long (most distributions, like small businesses, only last a few years). It's also Arch-based, meaning the user is going to get constant updates, which leads to problems. Finally, Cachy is optimized for speed and security, not hardware.
> First challenge: My mouse buttons don’t work. I can move the cursor, but can’t click on anything. I try plugging in a mouse (without unplugging the first one), same deal. Not a major issue; I can get around fine with just the keyboard
And this is where I stop reading
If you hold out for a few more paragraphs until he gets past the installer there is closure:
The issue is that he was using an obscure gaming mouse, and the solution was to use a different mouse.
> and the solution was to use a different mouse.
Or make a small edit to a config file, to work around that nonstandard mouse vendor's mistake.
I've been using nothing but Linux on my desktop since 2013. Converted my parents around 2015. Rarely a complaint from them and I haven't even once considered switching back to Windows. My shiny new Macbook Air is collecting dust. Almost all of my gaming is done on a SteamDeck or a Linux desktop. The only applications that I can think of where Windows or Mac are still relevant would be CAD and Audio/Video production. And even those are use-cases where Linux has viable options. Actually, Video probably doesn't even belong here since one of the most popular video packages (DaVinci Resolve) has Linux support and there are multiple open source options like Kdenlive. For music, it's really hard to beat Apple's ecosystem: Mac and iOS have an incredible variety of affordable and really high quality audio applications, however, the gap is narrowing with lots of great music software on Linux as well. There are free software options for CAD and 3d Modeling (Blender, Freecad) but most of the popular CAD software is either Windows only or Windows/Mac. Some of this may be possible to get working under Wine but I haven't tried.
This mirrors my experience. Most stuff you do on Windows "just works" on Linux nowadays, and when it doesn't, there are low-friction alternatives.
The one pain point for me is film and book scanning. AFAICT there are exactly zero Linux software packages that will play nice with my Epson V800 or my Fujitsu SV600. I keep a Windows laptop around (second-gen ThinkPad X1 since you asked) and its only job is to talk to those devices. Firewall doesn't let it get on the internet, its only network access is to move scans onto my NAS.
For film scanning (which I do only very rarely) I've resorted to just using my digital camera with a light box to illuminate the film and a nice macro lens to focus on the frame.
Back in the days of Unity I decided to make a full switch to Linux and it just worked. The UX was unfamiliar but it had a cohesiveness that made sense. I use macOS for the past 10 years as my main system (work stuff needs Mac-specific things) but switching to a decent Linux distro would honestly feel like an upgrade. Windows continues being a shitshow and I want nothing to do with it.
What I think could really push Linux desktop forward is if various PC gaming influencers started doing content on how to game on Linux. Given that it is not just viable now but actively sometimes better than on Windows it would make for good content AND show people an alternative. And soon as AAA games start being created for Linux first and run on Windows in some sort of compatibility or emulation mode that will really start turning the tides.
> What I think could really push Linux desktop forward is if various PC gaming influencers started doing content on how to game on Linux. Given that it is not just viable now but actively sometimes better than on Windows it would make for good content AND show people an alternative.
Not exactly what you are looking for, but Gamers Nexus at 2.57M subscribers is working on Linux Gaming Benchmarks with help from Wendel at Level1Techs [0]. Steve bemoans the shitshow that Windows has become all the time.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovOx4_8ajZ8
I think this is both the blessing and the curse of the incredible work that wine and steam has done. Unless and until we get the Linux packaging stuff figured out in a way that developers can target Linux instead of having to target each individual distro, I think the clear incentive for the vast majority of gaming companies will be to target windows even if they ultimately care more about Linux, because wine and proton are so good and so much easier to support than each individual distro natively.
Don't get me wrong, I rejoice when I get a native Linux game. I buy nearly every native Linux game I can find that is reasonably priced and sounds remotely interesting. I have a couple dozen games in my GOG backlog that I haven't even tried to run yet, but I bought on a sale or something because they were relatively cheap and supported Linux natively. So I would love a world where it was Linux first and Windows second.
Steam runs plenty well on Linux and has for a while but I guess developers might want more than one option for distribution.
But to me it seems like in the long run emulating Linux on Windows is easier than the other way around.
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> My goal here is to see how far I can get using Linux as my main OS without spending a ton of time futzing with it
> First challenge: My mouse buttons don’t work. [...] Not a major issue; I can get around fine with just the keyboard.
> Then I remember that my root partition is only 100GB. I reboot back into the Cachy live image and use the Parted utility to increase it to 1TB, then make a second btrfs partition in the remaining space.
I don't think the goal was achieved here. For most people it still takes some dedication and a lot of computer knowledge to switch successfully.
But I expect things to continue to improve now that Valve has solved the single major blocker for a large chunk of people, that being running their back catalog of games. It's an amazing gift to the community that we should all be very thankful for.
I recently switched to linux from windows. The only reason I was sticking with windows was because hoyoverse refuses to support linux. I finally decided I need some break from them anyways and took the plunge.
First, I tried to install fedora atomic cosmic. It kind of worked but I could not get it to work with my dock + external monitors at all. Now that I am used to that setup, I can't go back.
Not wanting to spend time figuring it out, I just installed Ubuntu instead. Thankfully, that worked out though it's not perfect. Everytime I turn on my laptop, I need to spend 10-15 minutes turning the monitors on and off until ubuntu recognises them correctly and also sends dp output (it shows the monitor in settings and I can open windows on it but the monitor doesn't actually show anything; other times, it reads the monitor as something nvidia with the lowest resolution).
I tried to install genshin anyways on ubuntu. I couldn't get it to work via wine/lutris. Virtualbox doesn't support gpu passthrough so I tried using virt-manager. The setup was too hard and it didn't work anyways. I gave up on hoyo at this point and install steam instead.
Honestly, ubuntu is rough and Linux as a whole is very rough. But on the whole, I would still pick this over dealing with windows any longer.
Not only you could escape from Windows, you are now free from Genshin dark patterns.
check out the launchers here for hoyo stuff, i haven't tried the genshin one but zzz worked nearly out of the box (had to change the wine version it was using iirc) https://github.com/an-anime-team
GPU passtrough on a laptop? If GPU is not in a separate IOMMU group I wouldn't even try.
Sadly. For streaming (pcpanel, streamdeck, avermedia cards) is bad :/ is the only reason I kept a win11 partition arround
I was watching the Lenovo CES keynote and couldn’t believe how hard they were selling Qira on Lenovo computers and Motorola phones. All the major players have platform specific Windows features that can’t possibly meet their success criteria in terms of ROI. Lenovo isn’t Apple or Google or Microsoft, and even the latter two have trouble selling fully integrated platform services on hardware.
All this time, money, dev energy, and marketing to keep trying to find a magical bean in their stalk and they still just won’t support open hardware and open source OSes with vigor.
Apple people tend to buy Apple products generation over generation, and none of the Windows hardware manufacturers are even close to having that rep. Even in this thread people are recommending Gen 1 Thinkpads, but Lenovo’s heart really isn’t in it across the board. Dell went simple with the revived XPS but the release versions don’t offer Linux in the BYO order flow.
And no, I don’t think Framework is good enough.
Gotta be doing something, elsewise it's layoffs for your business unit
The "do something" is support open hardware, sell more machines, provision fewer product variations.
I get that these are the immovable objects and sacred cows of the management ranks ..new executives need to try, try, try again. All these features just sit in the "update" queue advertising their uselessness, and eventually highlight their abandonment.
There's no soul in major OSes these days - Windows is a big bloatware and macOS's aesthetics is the result of design for the sake of the design instead of any practical use. No wonder we're seeing this sentiment for an alternative growing.
My personal experience with using macOS (m1 2020-) Windows 10 (2018-2020) and Linux (for the last 16-17 years on off) -
If you want to do basic stuff like browsing streaming learning video calls etc, get a non Linux computer with decent specs with some headroom. These operating systems are for people who just want to use that ecosystem and not need to manage anything themselves. Battery life is exceptional. Most people I know need a one or two step process to do things (like backup photos contacts documents etc) and Apple google Microsoft offer you that. It’s not perfect but it’s easy to manage. People really have gotten used to someone managing it for them and these things do fine in that regard. It’s better than people having 5 hard drives with photos and misplacing them imo. I’ve had people in 2000s connect drives to my computers and find private pictures and contacts and files etc I need not be having access to. iCloud and Google Photos offer you that peace of mind. With 2FA you’d rather lose it all than fall into the wrong hands. People have all kinds of stuff on their phones and computers that should not leave their computers and accounts. Imagine having your kids classmates find your intimate pictures on some drive they used to copy something your kid gave them. All this has reduced with cloud managed services with activation locks and 2FA and password mangers built into them. Yes they can lock you out one day, but it’s better than people having access to it.
If you are serious about your personal computer, switch to Linux before you start hating those companies. You are not the target audience anymore and you shouldn’t be disappointed about it.
I use Linux for most things, macOS for streaming and surfing the web (private relay and 4k native works great on M1) and windows when I have to deal with others having windows only accounting software sometime.
I switched from Windows to Linux ~20 years ago because and never came back to Windows. First years I used Ubuntu and experimented with Xubuntu, Lubuntu etc. Later went to Fedora Linux with Gnome Desktop which is still my preferred Linux Distribution. Nice to see so many people thinking about free and open alternatives to big tech!
I switched 25 years ago.
Still, every computer I buy comes with Microsoft tax and their OS preinstalled. In all these years I always left a small Windows partition, in case I need it. Never booted it.
I would gladly move to Linux from macOS if only I could get the same energy efficiency on the arm MacBooks.
You can, current Intel lineup does 20h on battery: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-empire-strikes-back-with...
Their upcoming CPUs are even better. Also Qualcomm might actually finally offer good support on Linux and their new X2 is amazing.
It's a catch 22.
The way to make Linux easy to use is basically just to pre-install it and ensure the hardware is compatible.
System 76 does this, and charges 3x as much as other OEMs.
At this point if I'm a consumer ohh Linux is 3x the price.
If you install Linux on a refurbished Thinkpad, most of the time you can get something very nice for 500$ or less.
I often dream, if I had money, of buying and refurbishing hundreds of laptops per year. Installing Linux and giving them out.
Would be better than cities handing out Chromebooks.
If I buy a laptop from Lenovo today, buying it without an OS or with Linux is cheaper than Windows.
Depends on the model.
The vast vast majority of Thinkpads on the US Lenovo website don't even offer Linux.
Moved my Framework laptop to Bluefin and my gaming desktop to Bazzite early last year. Zero regrets, zero issues. I'm not new to Linux by any means, I've been dabbling since a kid. But in adulthood, I had given up on having Linux as my daily driver because I just wanted my main computers to work, I didn't want maintaining them to be a hobby. That's not been an issue with Bluefin or Bazzite. I'm sure it's not for a lot of modern Linuxes, but these ones I can vouch for at least!
Bazzite is my first immutable distro. Idk that I would want this for my dev machine - but for a gaming/general desktop usage it’s pretty amazing. If they exposed more of the maintenance tooling and stuff like adding RPM layers via the UI then I think they’d have a really compelling OS for non-technical users.
I agree, if you have a specific dev flow that is compatible with the immutable OS approach, then these can be wonderful dev machines, but personally I don't want to change my workflow to fit the OS, I prefer the OS to fit my workflow.
At some point I I'm pretty confident that I will switch to an immutable version of Fedora and relearn my workflow in a distro box like world as I do see some real benefits to doing so, but I'm not in a hurry
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I had the dilemma of choosing between Bazzite and CachyOS or Manjaro for my workstation, which is also my gaming rig.
The whole immutable distro felt like a hinder for my workflow (running docker containers, etc.), so that's why I went for CachyOS.
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For all who switched to Linux: which distro did you choose and why?
Fedora: wanted to have the newest kernel and updates due to new hardware - so far i am really satisfied; the only issue i have is that the printer does not work everytime… as a workaround i print with my iphone instead.
Fedora.
Best Linux experience I've ever had. Using it for a few years now, but wish I switched sooner (been using various distros since Ubuntu 8.04). Dnf is GOAT, upgrades don't break shit, moderately up-to-date, but not bleeding-edge, vanilla Gnome, no bloat, full systemd commitment, btrfs, few idiosyncrasies, RPMs are widely available, flatpak for the rest. (Don't have a printer tho...)
However, due to e.g. the need to install the Fusion repo for non-free software, I don't think it's suitable for total non-tech beginners, who don't want to touch the terminal at all. Don't get me wrong, Fedora is extremely hands-off, default is bliss experience, but because of their software license policies you likely have to install the Fusion repo at some point and that's not the most straight-forward thing to do.
Only negative for me: The GUI updater wants to install updates during shutdown frequently, which is mighty annoying with full-disk encryption. I live dangerously and do my updates live with dnf, which by the way can be configured to fetch packages in the background, making updating super fast, no need for permanent internet connection.
If you are annoyed by Ubuntu, not old enough for Debian, but already fed up with Arch, please, do try Fedora!
Nobara 43 with KDE Plasma, which is a Fedora variant. I switched in October as a lifelong Windows user and was looking for some distro that would make my transition smooth, I didn't want to start my Linux experience with double pain: learn new OS and have to deal with various kinks. It was more than smooth: Nvidia 5090 with no hitch except a new driver - no prob. My old Kyocera printer worked on first try (never did with Windows). Nobara has a really competent and supportive Discord Community where you can get instant help - which I needed for the upgrade from 42 to 43. It's a small community of 30K people but there's always someone online to help. I appreciate that very much. Best decision ever. Next step: degoogle.
Debian Stable is my distro of choice these days, mainly because it respects my time by avoiding frivolous changes, without getting in my way when I want to change specific things.
Setting it up for modern gaming hardware required a couple of extra steps, which I found to be worthwhile. I now have a system that has proved dependable whenever I need to get work done immediately, and very capable whenever I just want to have fun. (The Backports repository makes bridging that gap easy in most cases.)
Linux Mint is what I suggest to new users. It's based on the widely supported Ubuntu distro, has a good sized community, and seems aimed at people who don't already know unix. It also makes a point of stripping out problematic Ubuntu-isms, and has a Debian-based edition waiting in the wings in case that ever becomes unmanageable.
My desktop environment is KDE Plasma, which you can install on just about any distro even if it's not the default. It has a wealth of useful features, lets me tweak or disable them as I see fit, and avoids trying to turn my desktop into a mobile phone interface. (I used Xfce in the past, but its adoption of Gtk 3 transformed it into something that I found frustrating.)
Debian stable with KDE Plasma. Plasma is similar in feel to Win 10, but far more customizable. It's the first Linux desktop I've used that feels professional and polished. Short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZ6bojRSIw0
100%. I run this combo on my 12 year old Chromebook and it's a very solid web browsing and thin client system. Audio works, Wi-Fi works, Bluetooth works, everything just works, and works well.
I switched fully to Linux about four years ago. I chose Kubuntu. I had previously used Linux Mint for quite a while, but on a computer that wasn't my main one. I downloaded some ISOs and tried out a few distros in VMs.
I definitely find KDE the most appealing. I'm one of these people who feels like desktop UI pretty much peaked around Win98 or Win2000, and KDE more or less lets me have that experience. It's customizable and works well. It has occasional problems and annoyances, but over time I find they're comparable in magnitude to what I had with Windows.
It always seems like Ubuntu has the best compatibility with stuff overall, in the sense that anything that has a Linux version will almost always explicitly say they support Ubuntu. I looked at some other KDE-based distros but Kubuntu seemed like the safest choice. I had used Linux Mint KDE in the past and was bummed to see it go away; if that still existed I might well have chosen it.
Notably, I had attempted to switch to Linux several years before (around 2014), but wound up going back to Windows because I just encountered too many gotchas. But things were much smoother this time. The main reason I switched was because I felt Windows 10 was getting too intrusive and user-hostile, and also no longer made it easy for me to get the "Windows classic" look and feel that I wanted. I'm glad I switched when I did, because since then those trends have become even more pronounced; I'd probably be pulling my hair out if I were using Windows now. I still have a Win10 VM for situations where I need Windows, but I rarely use it.
Originally started with Xubuntu 22.04, but switched to Mint at the start of March last year since it (Xubuntu) was going to EoL.
Mint does everything I need it to, so there's no need for me to hop.
NixOS. Had prior Linux experience, so wasn't too worried about learning multiple new major paradigms in parallel. Also had been running a lil' NixOS server for half a year before that, so I could carry over most of my configuration.nix from there, and also the safe feeling of knowing that if I do mess up stuff, I could with very high probability just reboot to a previous generation and have everything back to working exactly the same as before.
Edit: the two configuration.nixen has since been merged in a single dotfiles repo, which also covers my Macbook via https://nix-darwin.org.
I swapped to Bazzite on my gaming rig (5800x3D, 64gb DDR4, 4080 Super 16gb) and it's been fantastic. I tried going with Omarchy for a bit to try and have that machine do double duty as a dev/gaming machine, but I felt like the gaming experience on Omarchy is a second-class citizen compared to what the Bazzite experience is optimizing for, and I realized that the Hyprland setup and tiling window manager adds a lot more friction for my normal gaming needs. (I just want to have a few Path of Exile 2 windows open to tab between while gaming, and the tiling window setup in Omarchy had me hitting more hiccups between fullscreen and windowed mode than I care to troubleshoot on my gaming rig).
Immutability in OS updates is also something I didn't know I needed until I experienced it on Bazzite; pretty advantageous as a gamer using Linux with nVidia hardware these days.
This is my second go around on Bazzite, YMMV but I opted for Gnome over KDE this time and have had zero issues running the games I am into (WoW, PoE2) and no funky window management issues that I seemed to run into with KDE.
I'm considering a move to a Framework machine in the very near future, and still need to settle on a distro for dev; most of that is done on an M3 Max Macbook these days.
Gentoo with KDE plasma, because I can :)
I don't really recommend this route, but I will say that the experience has been pretty great. Once setup the regular maintenance is just boring update commands. Most days, it's a less than 1 minute affair to get everything compiled and up to date.
Arch would be a pretty equivalent experience as would be using bin packages with gentoo.
I guess i've never really "switched" - I've always used Linux desktops together with Windows desktops - each to the strengths that they are good at it. And this goes back to the late 1990's. There are times I've used more than the other.
But yes Fedora - I have traditionally worked on "Enterprise" Linux where RHEL is the standard, so I track Fedora for bleeding edge development work and target EL for "production".
Don't get me wrong I'm just as comfortable on Debian systems or even building Linux-from-scratch type systems but I really don't have a day to day use case for Linux distributions outside of Fedora/Redhat, they cover all my needs.
The printer also was my reason I picked Ubuntu over Arch / Endeavour OS :)
I don't want to tweak hours and Ubuntu was so far always a no brainer. At some point, probably 5 years ago after they switched to GNOME Shell, I even stopped switching the desktop manager and kept using the default one.
Switched back in 2009 and back then Ubuntu was the easiest to get running.
And I've stuck with it ever since while trying Fedora, Arch and a few others along the way.
I guess it just works for me, know my way around the tooling and can use that knowledge on my Debian servers.
PopOS is what I've picked (using it ~6 years). Their new distribution is called Cosmic (Wayland). They've moved away from Gnome to a rust based Iced.
Debian. Rock solid, dependable. If you need new features, use backports.
Started with Debian 10 GNOME, switched to KDE 5 for its features, went back because of the design issues(KDE 6 is much better). After a few years I switched and settled on Fedora Silverblue.
With rpm-ostree automatic updates are so reliable it's a set and forget experience.
Kubuntu. I wanted the compatibility of Ubuntu, but not the horrible UI.
It's not without its problems, though:
Snaps completely bork the system, so you need to remove snap entirely on Kubuntu (good riddance anyway - snaps are a plague).
Idle suspend is flaky. Sometimes it won't come back. Better to just disable it.
Sometimes the machine just freezes up. Either it completely freezes, or the mouse slows down to 1fps with the entire movement queued up (move the mouse and it'll go exactly where you told it to, over 2-3 minutes).
WIFI was a nightmare, but I switched to ethernet so it's not an issue for me anymore (desktop machine).
Bluetooth is iffy. I just switched to wired speakers.
On the plus side, AI works great!
I also use Fedora only because it seems like Debian's nvidia driver installation is a big pain, Fedora made it as easy as Ubuntu.
Pop!OS (22.04) nearly 2 years ago, after having read generally favorable reviews on HN and getting a sense of "monernity/stability/mainstream'ness of Ubuntu without snap and with closer-to-leading-edge kernels" on an Asus Vivobook 17 (my daily personal/WFH driver).
Later (on repurposed low-spec Chromebooks, then on newer deployments just because I came to like it) Crunchbang++ (12, then 13) which is Debian-based.
I avoid printing like the plague, and keep a long-remaining-AUE Chromebook around almost solely for its ability to WiFi-print to our aging Brother laser printer.
Fedora 43 with KDE. It's almost perfect.
Mint because I am a filthy casual. I love Mint. It has been smooth sailing for the past 4 years running it on a 2019 Dell X5. Part of why I lack any motivation to get a new machine is because it still runs very smooth with Mint.
I plan on getting a new machine in the near future. Then I'll use my old Dell as a testing ground for other Distros. Was thinking of testing Tumbleweed first.
I started with Ubuntu but had some problems installing software. Then I moved to Mint and it stuck with me. I converted 6 virtual machines from Windows to Mint Linux, and it's been great.
I then moved my main server that runs the VMs from Windows to Linux Mint, and that went far better than expected, basically no problems at all. I had two LSI x8 SAS RAID cards, each running an 8 disk RAID 10 array. Moving over to Linux there was nothing to do except plug them in, and they just worked. No drivers to install. I did have to find a copy of the management software, but that runs exactly the same as it did on Windows.
The last VM I have is running a somewhat complex IIS web server setup that I have to move over to Linux, and I haven't had the time to dig in on that yet, but I will do it this year.
The last system I have on Windows is my laptop/workstation. It doesn't behave that well on Linux with my 3 displayport monitors, and a few other things. I have it dual-booting to Mint, so I will keep trying. There's really not much software that I need that only runs on Windows (I do not play any games).
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CachyOS KDE. My first time using Arch family after meant years of Debian and some Fedora. Honestly fedora is great, and I wanted to try something new.
You know what's fun? Being able to change system fonts, which you can't do on Windows.
I'm using the IBM Plex fonts and they are so good looking.
edit: after "many" years.
What are peoples' thoughts on which style of distro is best to hand over to a non-techie user for the least amount of hand-holding?
I re-install so much that I don't know how easy it is, or how the distros prompt, when something like Debian Stable or Fedora need to update to the next version. With Arch, you constantly get the "updates ready" and it is always fresh.
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Linux Mint because it works and doesn't get in my way.
My experience:
I came from windows to MacOS so despite what folks bemoan about MacOS ... I still love it and it is problem free enough that I don't feel the need to do the lifting to go to Linux.
I think that's a common thing for those of who maybe haven't ridden MacOS for so long.
Windows for me is on a whole several levels of worse when I have to dive back into it. Windows feels like an OS POINTED AT ME rather than for me.
> it is problem free enough
The money's paw curls.
I used to love macOS, back in the Mojave days. You could run almost anything you wanted, and still get work done on a decently made machine. Those were the days when the grass truly felt greener to me, macOS for creative work simply annihilated any other option on the table.
Then Catalina stripped out 32-bit compatibility, ruining my Ableton Live project folder and Steam library. And Big Sur removed the sleek, professional-looking UI that I loved. Apparently Tahoe is infecting it with the glass disease, but I've long since migrated to Bitwig and Steam on Linux.
macOS taught me, ultimately, that any feature you take for granted can be removed to fulfill someone's OKR.
> macOS taught me, ultimately, that any feature you take for granted can be removed to fulfill someone's OKR.
100% this. Recent macOS releases really feel like this. For me it was the notification popup UI downgrade, they literally introduced a perfect UI and then botched it in a following release.
Yeah I mean that's the software life right?
You use the platform you use ... until it doesn't work for you. I did that for Windows and now I'm on MacOS. Maybe one day Linux, maybe I pick a flavor there that doesn't work for me eventually.
Ableton supports 64 bit. How did that ruin your projects?
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WSL and Windows Terminal has done a fantastic job at delaying my move to Linux as my primary desktop but Microsoft seems hellbent on ruining Windows.
This was my stance for the past couple years, but I moved to Linux (PopOS) 3 months ago because wsl2 kept crashing from OOM (even though I had allocated excess ram). I kept having to manually manage my memory usage by choosing which apps, containers etc to run.
There's nuisances in popos, but I am generally thrilled.
Even Microsoft often doesn't use its own servers for critical infrastructure.
It is a fools errand. =3
My Linux evenings usually appear 6 months down the road. It's the big updates that cause system breakdowns. This is like saying I got married in November and everything is going great. Far too early to know how far your patience will be tested before you leave.
In my experience, it's not so much the updates as the upgrades but even upgrades are smooth with Linux Mint.
What's the best backup software on Linux? Something that works like Time Machine on macOS or Veeam on Windows. So one full backup then incremental ones at any given X hours/days and also browsable on file level for individual file restoring.
My mother in law asked for help with her computer. I went in dreading the whole windows mess - only to find somebody had set her up with Linux Mint - I was actually able to help her with her internet issue, and am so happy for that unsung hero.
I've done the same, though I've used Linux in work and home for 22 years (I think 2004 was my first install).
At home I consistently gave up on Linux due to hardware and game compatibility issues.
A combination of buying a steam deck plus windows 11 pushed me back to Linux.
It is oddly peaceful using mint Linux. No adverts. No "like what you see" wall paper click bait. No news site click bait. No register with an online Microsoft account that doesn't have a no button. Just my computer.
The one annoying thing is, some games just don't play nice with wine / proton (for some reason I want to play soldier of fortune, even though I know it's not great). Others are a pain to set up. But mainly it is good enough. (I'm a gog.com junkie). So I may end up installing windows 11 lts. Though I did that with windows 10 and it was lacking some DLLs that some old games needed and was pretty much unfixable.
People interested in similar experiences should check out this podcast/series of videos where two Windows/Mac users try desktop Linux and report out on their experiences.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2888221/check-out-pcworlds-n...
I hadn't run desktop Linux in several years now. (I've run it server-side for decades.)
Out of the increasingly loud outpouring of support for desktop Linux over the past year, I went ahead and installed some distros to get back in on the action. I came to four conclusions:
1) You can play games on desktop Linux now other than Tux Racer. Cool!
2) There's less weird X11-wrangling. Thank god.
3) It's otherwise still pretty much the desktop Linux I've always known and felt mildly annoyed by.
4) The current versions of Windows and macOS have gotten to be so unbelievably annoying for no good reason that a mildly improved desktop Linux now actually seems far less annoying than the mainstream options do.
Good job, Microsoft and Apple, for giving us the year of retreating in disgust to the Linux desktop.
... and considering the GTK file picker we still have to live with, that's saying something.
File pickers are an XDG standard, you can replace it whenever you want: https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/docs/doc-org.fr...
I recently rebuilt my home rig with some hardware upgrades, including a motherboard and cpu upgrade.
I use a MacBook and spend a majority of my workday in Ubuntu Linux.
The absolute only reason I installed windows on the home machine is because gaming is still essentially nonexistent in the Linux sphere.
If a flavor of Linux can catch up and run everything that can be run on windows I’d happily switch. I imagine a good chunk of the windows market would as well.
Huh? This wave of "Linux is good now" articles are driven largely from the fall of Window's lock on games. i.e. Steam by Valve, and more.
I have old computers. Windows 10 is dead and Windows 11 will not install on old hardware. I put Debian 13 on my wife’s computer.
At first she found it really frustrating, but then reality set in: she didn’t really know Windows either. On Linux there is pretty broad capability to solve your own problem if you can get over fear of a terminal.
Her favorite game runs faster on Debian so that helps.
In case of small enterprises, what are the options for migrating to Ubuntu for all remote users?
How does one have an MDM solution? Most of the solutions out there are poor on Ubuntu or need lots of work to get things right. Can anyone provide a reference architecture/solution that allows them to be SOC2 compliant? But also not have high friction for developers and more importantly not have bigger overheads on process or investment?
The industry standard endpoint security solutions all run on either Windows or Mac. Endpoint security is an absolute MUST for a corporate environment.
Crowdstrike Falcon runs on Linux.
Edit: that's probably a bad thing, lol
What is RHEL, chopped liver?
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Yeah, I requested to have a Linux desktop from my employer and was flatly told "NO". None of our many security applications supports it, which is a real shame. As we use Windows and MacOS, I can't see how we'll really be more secure on those platforms, even with the security theater applications they force us to use.
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Throughout my university years, I used Ubuntu daily on both my laptop and desktop. Even when I had to play World of Warcraft with classmates, I used a virtual machine on Ubuntu. Around 2009, I switched to Mac OS, and I was perfectly happy with it until recently.
What I find most annoying is that I have several very old iMacs. Apple disallows their OS upgrading, even though their hardware is still perfectly fine. I've been using them, which means I've been stuck working on Mac OS 10.15, and now I can't install many applications, including some basic libraries, because they're no longer compatible with 10.15. I don't want to just throw away my perfectly good computers, and considering I do most of my work in the terminal, and I'm shocked by Apple's recent UI updates on iPhones(They've got to be kidding), so after 17 years away from Ubuntu as my daily OS, I'm now considering seriously going back to it.
Since it is paid, how is he going with hardware accelerated video decoding on YouTube, Netflix or Amazon Prime?
Which I never got to work properly on the laptop/netbook I owned until 2024.
I watch Freetube and Netflix on my Starlite tablet and it works well. Works on the laptop too, though I don't watch there.
libva is usually installed these days but you can install it manually. For Netflix you'll need to install widevine.
There have been leaps and bounds of progress in the last few years. Youtube hardware acceleration works perfectly in chrome/firefox now (assuming you have working video drivers).
As far as I know netflix still limits you to 720p under most browsers (although their support page shows that opera of all things supports 1080p)
Who knows, it's 2026 now.
Yeah, and still it isn't the Year of Linux Desktop for 90% of the world, unless it is hosted on a VM.
Being generous with Steam hardware survey numbers for GNU/Linux.
Proof that this is the year of Linux on the Desktop!
[dead]
On the desktop. Laptop/mobile devices still significantly suffer under Linux compared to proprietary operating systems. The author even admits: "Tried getting Linux on my laptop over Christmas. Didn’t work." We have a lot more work remaining to claim any sort of victory.
Been running Linux Mint on this ThinkPad A485 for 1.5 yrs, problem-free. There is no feature that doesn't work. Even the media keys and stuff like the wifi-toggle function key work. Still, yeah, there are some things that are perennial problems for open source OSes, particularly wifi. Nice presentation on the topic: "All types of wireless in Linux are terrible and why the vendors should feel bad" @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwIFz9na2lE
May I ask how long the battery lasts under lid suspension? And how quickly does wifi connect after wake? These two issues alone drove me begrudgingly to macOS.
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I replaced windows with linux 30 years ago.
Then i replaced linux with mac os.
Cook, keep in mind that if you keep dumbing down Mac OS I can switch back to linux in 24 hours.
> I reboot, log into Epic and GOG, and start downloading The Outer Worlds, a game from 2019 I’ve been playing a bit lately. It runs fine with Proton, and I can even sync my saves from the cloud. I play it for a few minutes with my trackball, remember I hate gaming on a trackball, and plug my gaming mouse back in. It works fine as long as I’m in the game, but outside the game, mouse clicks stop working again. It makes sense — the bug is on the desktop, not in games — but it’s very funny to have a gaming mouse that only works for gaming.
What is it with mice and OSes?
Windows is the only OS I can seem to configure to get low latency, high accuracy, linear movement with, and it's not for lack of effort.
I struggled for several years to do SWE work on a Mac and no 3rd party program could get it working the way it does on Windows. I tried Linear Mouse and many others. I eventually gave up, went against the prevailing (90%) culture where I work, and exchanged my mac for a windows laptop. I haven't measured it, but I feel more productive simply because I can click what I want to click marginally faster.
Is something in Mac drivers performing non-linear mapping? Why?
Based on the quote above it seems like Linux hasn't even gotten up to par with Mac for mice.
The best litmus test for an OS for me is whether I could play an RTS or FPS competitively with it, even though I haven't played either for years.
I have been primarily in the tiling window manager space for the past 5 years… that said I’ve been driving Cosmic on my NixOS workstation and I’m really impressed… it looks great, is simple, performs well and does tiling quite well. It’s not going to take me away from Niri, but it’s my goto suggestion now for any one getting into Linux.
I moved from 15 years of macOS to Linux (Omarchy in my case). I was mostly using the terminal and am therefore super happy with my choice now. I wrote more at https://www.ssp.sh/blog/macbook-to-arch-linux-omarchy/, in case of interest.
I ran Archlinux as my main driver on both PC and Laptop for more than a decade but after having the opportunity to use a Windows machine with WSL and eventually WSL2, I felt like I had access to the best of both worlds: a Linux terminal for development (bash + tmux + vim, now bash + zellij + neovim) without the hassle of updates breaking things every few months and a out-of-the-box native gaming experience.
But with the enshitification of Windows (first all the spam and ads on the Start menu, then Microsoft forcing you to have an account to be able to use the machine and the expensive license for Windows Professional if you want access to Hyper-V, which I did), I did some research, tried a few new distros (Manjaro, Bazzite and CachyOS) and settled for CachyOS (gaming support was the main driver, based on Archlinux was secondary).
I do everything I did on Windows and some more: all the terminal stuff plus browsing, CAD modeling, 3D printing / slicing, Office stuff... I miss nothing. No more double partition to boot into Windows when I want to game.
My RX 9070 XT runs smoothly with no driver issues whatsoever. I even have tested the waters running some LLMs with LM Studio and that also worked out of the box.
The only thing that has been a bit meh are Teams and Slack and I believe that has to do with the fact that I ran them in Firefox. Once I ran Slack on Chromium, noise canceling was again available.
2009 was the year of Linux on desktop for me. 17 years later, after going back and forth between macOS and Windows, it feels good to be back home.
One last note in my random ramble is that I do not have as much spare time as before, and I had heard this from other people back in the day whenever I'd say I ran Archlinux on my machines, so I am going to repeat what others have said to me: it's really nice to not have to worry about much, be able to sit down and get productive right away. To me, CachyOS and KDE have made that idea my actual experience and for that I am grateful.
> without the hassle of updates breaking things every few months
That's not so much a Linux issue as an Arch issue.
I switched my main everyday machine to Ubuntu last May, no regrets, it's a superior experience day to day.
If only I could use recent Apple hardware with Linux :)
A year ago I was about to switch from Linux to Mac for that reason after 25 years using Linux (although I really don't like MacOS). But then Apple released their Glassy OS and so I just bought a used Lenovo for 300€ with 1 year warranty ...
I have been using Fedora comfortably as my main os on a framework for the last 18 months and I have had no issues. I do just think for all that I do, lab work, coding, and gaming. I also run debian on mnt pocket reform and tbh I think it is OSes' like Linux that allow devices like that to exist. Windows and Mac just aren't options.
I came back to Windows when Windows 10 came out and everything is going great too.
Everything just works. Snappy. Professional awesome native tools (Office, Affinity series, Directory Opus, Visual Studio, AutoHotkey,...)
I've really been enjoying Linux since I started using it back in mid 2024.
Although I was trying to shift to Linux slowly at the time, I honestly wish I'd switched sooner.
Is there a secure and good replacement for OneDrive on Linux?
NextCloud?
Throwing in opencloud here. I ran nextcloud self hosted for many years. If you need only file sharing on a webui with users, then opencloud is faster, more stable and less resource hungry.
In general, people just use noIP home router VPN, ssh/sftp host on LAN, and a sshfs client on their iOS/Android device or MacOS/Windows/Linux. It will look like any other network shared drive in the native OS.
For paid services, there are also native Dropbox client support in MATE, Ubuntu, or Mint desktop file managers etc.
iOS sftp:
https://www.photosync-app.com/home
Android sftp:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.bukacek.fil...
Practically speaking, I often recommend dual booting from 2 ssd drives for windows and Linux. There are just some commercial software/games that can't run properly within a linux environment (programs like Wine do allow running some Windows native programs, but YMMV.)
https://www.linuxmint.com/ or https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop is a great starter OS.
If you already use a posix system like MacOS, than the workflow will seem more familiar. =3
Why Bedrock? Get the kids a Steam Deck, Prism Launcher, open a local server and boom :) It‘s not iOS convenience but they‘ll sure love to tinker with all the mods you can install.
Alternatively one could spin up a local Java Edition server and install GeyserMC translation layer plugin[0] into it. That way, both iOS and Linux PC could cross-play to each other without the need of another new device.
[0]: https://geysermc.org/
Did this in 91 as well. Going well ever since.
What's the better choice among mint and Ubuntu for a software engineering students? Any advice?
Mint is much better unless you need the very newest versions of packages. In which case I'd recommend to augment with flatpak or use Debian testing over Ubuntu. Basically Ubuntu is over for me since snap and they went back to Gnome3.
Not a desktop thing (digital out-of-home signage) but we’re dropping Windows like it’s flaming dogshit. Minimal Linux install with X, Blackbox and player software (and management/monitoring stuff obvs) on all new assets and the thousands of extant ones will get replaced as soon as feasible.
I replaced Windows with Linux about 6 months ago. Then I ran into a game I really wanted to play but it didn’t run well with Proton (not kernel anti-cheat, just bad performance) after all the tweaks so I just reserved to dual booting with Windows 10.
After not using Windows for so long, I came to realize that Windows is just as much a mess as Linux just in different ways. You get used to the quirks so you don’t notice them after a while but they are definitely there.
Most of my games work just fine or even better on Linux. Some of my older games don’t even work on Windows that work perfectly under Wine/Proton which is truely miraculous. The Wine team and Valve have made some incredible contributions to the preservation of games on PC, it can’t be understated.
So I daily drive Linux and play those handful of games on Windows, and I’ll probably stay this way for now and try the proton situation again in a few years.
I saw a gal say that a Windows VM worked solid for gaming, after passing through a GPU.
EDIT: I hunted for the link, to deliver it to you! https://astrid.tech/2022/09/22/0/nixos-gpu-vfio/
> Then I ran into a game I really wanted to play but it didn’t run well with Proton
Out of curiosity, which game?
I promise I am not asking as a gotcha. Just genuinely curious.
I don't play many new games on PC (normally I play recent games on consoles). What I play on PC is older/niche games.
I have a couple of oddballs that I could not make work on Proton. Others had weird issues that got fixed over time.
Sometimes there is a fix, such as fiddling with different Proton versions, etc. Lutris makes this somewhat straightforward.
The game is called HROT it’s an indie “boomer shooter”. The game was first locked to 30fps which is horrible for an FPS. Then I got that figured out, but FPS was all over the place and it felt basically unplayable to me even though I was often getting 100+ FPS. Frame pacing was absolutey FUBAR’d no matter which version of Proton or Wine, so even though frames were high it still felt terrible to play. So I just decided to create a Windows dual-boot just for the odd game. Now I can get a locked framerate to my monitor refresh and the game feels great to play.
It’s basically “Soviet Quake”. Very moody atmosphere with just weird random details in the game. Amazing level design.
On the flip side. The original Max Payne does not play on Windows but it works perfectly on Linux for me.
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What's a better choice among mint and Ubuntu for software engineering students?
Very good.
Some advice for Linux newcomers - use AMD, avoid Nvidia. Use something like KDE Plasma for best experience.
I can't switch to Linux because I am so dependent on Visual Studio.
Wish I could. Until Ableton and Creative Cloud are native, I'm stuck with WinBlows.
If you need Windows these days just install virt-manager and load the version of Windows you need.
It's really fast and lightweight (my laptop stays cold at idle while running the Windows VMs) with all the HV enlightenments for good computational efficiency.
Installing and using the virtio drivers is key for many useful features such as memory ballooning, fast networking with low computational overhead, and virtiofs which is used to mount a virtual drive in the Windows guest in a way that it's not a "network" drive.
How does this work compared to VirtualBox?
KVM/QEMU is the only logical and sane choice on Linux, unless some tooling you're using requires VirtualBox. The key is to optimize and tweak all your host and guest settings, installing the guest tools too. Once you have it optimized it purrs.
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Seems to be just as fast or faster and doesn't require proprietary software.
Article reads like an anti-Linux post because the author goes on about, "muh mouse buttons" and "how many desktop environments?" Screw that, do something simple like Ubuntu that just works without decision paralysis. The whole piece reads like, "Linux is good if you're smart so git gud" esp. since he makes a point of crowing how it's Arch-based.
How do you do taxes in Linux? Install a windows VM? I don't want to use the web version. With Google docs being good enough, I don't really need windows for anything else. Last time I checked, the tax software didn't run under wine.
In years that my taxes are simple - I open up my browser and go to FreeTaxUSA. In years that my taxes are complex - I pay a CPA. What do you use?
Personally I’m fine using the web version. If you arbitrarily cut out solutions, you will be sure to find unsolvable problems.
Where do you need windows to do your taxes? Is this a US thing?
I hope not because I’ve been doing my US taxes on Linux for 15 years.
It’s probably a specific windows desktop app, probably TurboTax by intuit, the company that lobbies to make filing your taxes hard and to destroy any free simple government app to file taxes.
So, not sure why they’d complain about not being able to help shoot their foot off but we all have preferences. :shrug:
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Yes, it is the unfortunate reality of the US. You either fork over all your data to tax preparation companies on the web or pay them to use windows/MacOS software. There is still paper filing by doing taxes by hand, but that's a bit too inconvenient. Free online filing is restricted to $89k annual income.
What tax software are you running? Basically all of the tax software for individuals is a browser-based SaaS.
I’m getting closer with every update Apple pushes
this is the tech equivalent of "I'm a strong, independent nerd and I don't need no windows"
And you cant gamr so now your gpu is useless
Im pretty happy with bazzite after getting used to the atomic fedora underpinning and how it changes the way I have to organize and install some stuff
I installed a dual boot on my gaming machine last year when the Win10 support ended, and I have also had basically no issues. Something something HDR in certain video games is the biggest complaint I have, which is not all that important and will be higher priority for developers in future as more gamers leave the sinking Windows ship.
Microsoft has really, really fucked up windows 11, and ultimately abandoning it is the only recourse the consumers have.
When you think about it, lots of Linux and Unix devices.
I installed Omarchy last year when it come out (Arch distro for devs) on laptop and December I installed it on desktop machine, the powerful one.
Now I can play and work on a same machine for the first time in like 15+ years since I switched to Mac so I can work.
It isn't smooth sailing, I have bluetooth speakers and headphones, switching is not easy experience. Vibe coding, audio dictation works on Thinkpad which is underpowered compared to desktop, but it isn't working there. In fact this is more troublesome issue then headphones.
But for most part I could live with those issues and hopefully they get resolved.
Macs are just annoying, updates are for things I don't care and everything is about pushing me towards some subscription or other. I don't see future there for myself
It's great that we are already in such a strong spot! I'm also excited for how LLM's can help folks administer & setup systems.
There's still a lot of folks who bounce of setting up this or that thing that requires editing some config file. We're really good now about making most things pretty well UI'ee up, but Linux is such a malleable platform (complementary): LLM's decondtrain what users can do from what UI has been built. That's super exciting.
Step 1 of folks being able to use Linux as a desktop is going pretty well these days. With some AI hope, I hope folks get more and more enticed into setting up some devices. Once you're up with TailScale and have a service or two deployed, it can be very addictive to keep going. LLM's can make setting up & customizing the desktop easier, & they can help operate & admin services too. Strong hopes users will have much more agency, with where we are going.
It's quite interesting to see all these people switching to Linux on the desktop and realizing it works. Some of us are using Linux on the desktop since more than ... a quarter of a century.
Everytime I read such an article I'm thinking "duh, of course it works" but apparently people still think it's not the case.
I do really, really, really wonder what's going to happen once battery usage is more efficient on Linux than on Windows. For in every thread about Linux on the desktop, there seems to be an endless flow of comments saying "I can get 11 hours of battery time on Windows, but I only get 10h40 minutes on Linux".
Linux powers billions, if not tens of billions of devices by now: trust me, it can power your desktop/laptop just fine.
It is a bit of a pain to set up though, especially for a laptop - I just switched to fedora+ gnome, and going through configuring the power settings to allow for suspend-then-hibernate was annoying.
Figuring out the luks + page file + hibernate resume configuration is non intuitive, and is only viable for me to figure out due to my Linux based day job.
Probably could have gone bazzite and had things just work, but I need a Linux dev box locally and was not sure about dev on bazzite.
Try KDE Plasma on Debian 13
I have used Linux my entire adult life. Honestly never really had any issue with setup. Everything just works without having to do anything. Much easier than windows usually.
"Continue reading with a Verge subscription"
Well ...
My gaming PC now runs Zorin, my dev box rund Omarchy. It is time. Commercial OSes are dead.
I noticed the blog post said nothing about working with documents, i.e. the office suite the poster was using. Or - maybe he wasn't at all? I wonder. Same goes for email, although perhaps he was just using webmail.
LibreOffice local, or onlyoffice browser.
If tied to MS, Office online is an option, if you must.
Have you ever heard of Thunderbird? There's to my knowledge no other mail client besides maybe mutt that offers more features and flexibility. For office, LibreOffice doesn't feel very modern but is capable of a lot of things.
We use OneDrive/Teams/Office365 at work. I think this will be difficult with Linux. Doable with Mac.
In think MacBook Air + Microsoft365 may be the cheapest startup IT setup that doesn’t require windows itself.
I'm mostly happy with OneDrive on Mac. I lead a major competitor to OneDrive back in the day, so that's saying a lot.
I still have to restart it from time to time, though.
You use your private hardware at work?
This is a thread that's certainly going to go over well.
There are some valid criticisms of Microsoft, and a great many criticisms that are unfounded or are often misdirected. Or in some cases, the vast majority of folks don't use enough of their operating environments to encounter the same types of problems. After all, it's not like Linux operating systems are "perfect". Especially when you begin to push the platforms beyond the most basic functions, problems quickly become apparent.
Microsoft's largest challenge in the Wintel environment is the diversity of hardware, software, and skill levels involved in making it all work together. And quite frankly, most often people trying to cut corners in places they shouldn't or don't know they shouldn't.
On the hardware front, there's a lot of cheap nonsense out there. And lots of folks clamor for cheaper hardware. For example, my $500 Asus motherboard has a checks Device Manager Mediatek Wifi 7 card in it. Now, the reality is that Intel, widely seen as an incredible network chip manufacturer (both ethernet and wlan), doesn't have a Wifi 7 chip available for 3rd parties (i.e. AMD boards). So in order for Asus to get Wifi 7, they have to look elsewhere.
Mediatek's website appears that they focus on supporting new standards first, often before they're stable or solidified, but simultaneously does not provide a robust driver environment that supports multiple platforms.
At any rate, this is just one example. There are many thousands more. Much of this is driven by consumers either wanting features faster, platform vendors aiming for differentiation, or both clamoring for some middle ground between cost and margin. And Microsoft is stuck in the middle.
Maybe the current driver that Mediatek has released through IHVs doesn't have fixes for certain bugs. Perhaps the IHV (motherboard makers, etc.) doesn't have a robust enough team to want to package and release regular driver updates released by the vendor.
As it stands, Mediatek doesn't offer a driver for this card for Linux, either: https://github.com/openwrt/mt76/issues/927
But again, Microsoft often gets the blame for problems with this type of hardware (vendors that barely support it, etc.) whereas on Linux it's totally acceptable to say "yeah just ditch that and go buy an Intel Wifi NIC" or something and people just accept that as being a totally okay answer. And then suddenly the hardware problem just 'disappears'.
As far as things that are a bit more in Microsoft's control, for example, requiring cloud accounts to log in and use the computer. I still stand by that this is far less important than the shriekers on the internet make it out to be. But it's most often one of the most primary arguments (because there are actually very few to really make).
Google and Apple require you to login with a cloud account on any of their devices and platforms. In fact, I'd wager that the vast majority of you reading this page right now have Google Chrome signed in with a Google Account that's syncing your history, favorites, passwords, autofill, and tabs right now. You effectively can't use an iPhone without signing in with an iCloud account, and Google is just about ready to force that direction as well by disabling the ability to sideload applications in Android. They already long effectively killed rooting devices (although it is possible in specific circumstances).
In fact, every time you visit a Google property using any other browser than Chrome, Google makes sure to tell you that you really should be using Chrome. And any time you visit a Google property using Chrome, they insist you sign in using Chrome (to your Google account, no less.)
So I really don't get the abject hatred for Microsoft on this front. After all, once you light up Windows Hello on a modern system with TPM2.0 and Windows 11 24H2 or newer, you effectively get free software passkey support (pending the web application properly supports it and isn't using an ancient FIDO2 library that insists on hardware tokens).
For the aforementioned Google account: I'm using a Microsoft Account sign-in to my desktop with Windows Hello, with a TPM-protected passkey to sign into the aforementioned Google account. I get SSO to all Microsoft properties, and "soft" passkey support for all of my Google accounts as-needed, with unlimited passkey storage. No USB dongles required (although I have those, too).
About the only other end user facing problem that is well within Microsoft's control is the amount of Copilot and AI nonsense. I contend that Satya Nadella is well beyond what his tenure should be at Microsoft, but can you blame them for having FOMO? I mean after all, the mobile phone and tablet markets were hundreds of billions of dollars that they missed out on. They also missed the mark on cloud platforms where Amazon raked in hundreds of billions. If they flood the zone with their AI products, and AI happens to catch on somewhere eventually, they're well-positioned to take advantage of it.
Microsoft also lost out on being the primary development environment, when they stopped innovating in the computer browser and software development space, effectively handing the keys to the kingdom over to Google. They only partially regained that with VSCode (which was the perfect blend between their full-fledged commercial IDE and the text-driven IDEs used prior to VSCode's dominance such as Textmate).
As far as "ads" on the platform, I don't really have any. But I turn a lot of stuff like the widgets off. At least the widget bar is isolated and isn't annoyingly embedded into the software like you'll find the ample ad-based notifications being spammed at you via mobile phone notifications. And unable to disable them because you also need those same notifications to actually get time critical information (here's looking at you, Doordash).
This is ultimately a long conversation and has many layers to it. But what I've found in reality is that software of all sorts and all platforms isn't as rosy as the people pitching them as solutions tend to tell you. I think it's silly, for example, on Linux that you have to split your engineering between multiple software development stacks to accomplish typical systems administrator goals (Ansible/Python, Bash, perhaps some Go thrown in there if someone on your team wants to mess around, tons of YAML and JSON). Whereas on Windows it's pretty well unified behind PowerShell and .NET.
To be fair, I often encounter situations where available Powershell tooling doesn't exist and I need to call .NET APIs anyway, or if I really want to secure the environment I need to drop the ability to use Add-Type and end up having to create proper powershell modules anyway. But at least the paradigm and language used is mostly the same.
> go buy an Intel Wifi NIC
I'd advise against it on Linux these days. Intel made their recent WiFi chips incompatible with AMD systems (yes, that's not a joke). So Mediatek or Qualcomm are the only decent WiFi options for AMD users, but obviously, do some research about what works anyway, before buying.
It's kind of concerning to me that Ubuntu has started paywalling some package updates behind Ubuntu Pro. Thinking of switching to Debian.
Do any of the main-stream Linux installers make any attempt at bringing over your files?
I have seen so many ”anyone can switch to Linux” articles, and none of them seem to mention ”all of your files are going to be utterly lost”
This is a non-issue if your files are stored in a partition separate from your OS, and is infeasible otherwise.
* If you have a separate partition, you can replace your OS and your file remain untouched.
* If you don't have a separate partition, your OS and your files will be replaced by the Linux installation. The only way to preserve your files is to copy to some external media before installation. Even if the Linux installer could retain files while reformatting a partition (which might be technically feasible), it would have no way of knowing which files to retain: the user could easily keep important files in arbitrary directories, not just in their designated C:\User\Patrick directory, and they would be understandably irate if the installer promised to keep files but didn't. To say nothing of adding complications of copying files that Windows has pushed to OneDrive.
> This is a non-issue if your files are stored in a partition separate from your OS, and is infeasible otherwise.
That is one of the biggest ifs of 2026. I don't think any major PC laptop vendor has ever sold consumer laptops with anything but one-big-partition layout. For the average user, their files are not stored in any partition, they are stored "right there on my desktop, with a separate folder for photos and bills"
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What files? Where would the files be originally for this to be a concern? I’ve switched OS many times but I don’t think I’ve ever thought about moving any files.
What desktop OS offers file migration from a different desktop OS during installation on the same machine? Windows and macOS definelty not...
Windows definitely keeps your files right there in your Desktop / Documents folder when you update from Windows 10 to Windows 11.
Like it or not, Aunt Clara is going to expect the same when she "upgrades" to Ubuntu.
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Congratulations and welcome to the club!
But please, do not push to make Linux into a Windows Clone :)
I can't say I understand the prevalence of Windows-esque UI theming/refits beyond short-lived novelty- are people out there actually trying to make their UIs look like Windows XP and then using them like that on a daily basis?
I configured gnome to look like win 95/98, tried to use it for a while but the novelty wore off quite fast. Weirdly the mouse pointer still looks like win95 randomly in certain applications, guess I didn't clean up thoroughly!
To me it is adding things that windows love to do.
Examples: binary log files, binary configuration, .ini files, hidden options.
Many people have already done and still do and will keep doing it. But yeah it's doesn't add much value.
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can we just boot to a browser sandbox and call it a day? ditch all the old bloatware. we do not need native apps.