Comment by ainar-g
3 hours ago
> This constant slide in quality over the past few years has me looking to Linux as an option.
Just out of curiosity, what's holding you back? I'm not trying to evangelize or something, it's more of a personal collection of reasons various people have provided that I have.
It is very hard to debug and fix stuff on Linux if something goes wrong. One can be a greatest network specialist and know all the innards of Linux tools, but then Nvidia driver glitches and whoops... Or dist-upgrade craps DE. or package manager spits out some circular errors with no way to untangle them for a non-expert. Stuff like that.
Basically the problem is not that the "floor" difficulty is a little above "very easy". Linux distributive maintainers and developers have succeeded in lowering the "floor" almost to the Mac or Win levels these past years.
The problem is the "ceiling" is too high, "very hard" in other words.
Also apparently Linux has quite a few failure modes when graphical DEs are run inside VM, to the point of r/Linux just outright telling me "I'm holding it wrong"... ahem... telling me that VMs are unreliable for desktop and I should run it natively. But due to those same personally experienced VM issues, I'm vary about going all-in on native install. Yes, there is dual boot too and I do know the correct order to it (at a guess, not many Win users would, and then risk wiping their old MBR), but for now I'm delaying trying native install (again). A lot of hassle unfortunately, and I'm a procrastinator.
For me, it's gaming, drivers, and still too much Windows-only software.
Wine/Proton has gotten really good, but still requires tinkering, and still sometimes has really bad performance.
WiFi/BT drivers continue to be really terrible, there's connectivity but speed and reliability sometimes aren't there. Peripherals and motherboard chipset functionality still mostly won't work.
Desktop environments are still clunky and rough around the edges. Maybe I don't get along with KDE/Gnome and just need to shop around for another DE.
Have you had recent experiences? I thought the same until I tried it out, on decision stable no less. The driver support nowadays is incredibly good on Linux (my desktop Bluetooth didn't work under Windows with official drivers; just works without any tinkering under Linux).
One of my machines is always Linux desktop; I've been using it to see if it's ready enough for my main desktop to switch over and so far my verdict has been it's not.
Last weekend I tried updating to Linux 7.2, and WiFi drivers failed to compile, so it's been fun.
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I am running Linux, but I had to spend a solid month researching laptops before buying, and I didn't get up-streamed webcam support for a year after purchase.
The driver situation is a better but for cheap hardware it's so hit and miss, and when you mention this they shame the user for not knowing better and that isn't their fault.
At least if they buy a mac they know it's going to work otherwise you need to buy a computer that's two years old.
What kind of research did you do?
I only ask because if you're buying it on a big site like Amazon you can search reviews for "Linux" and see what pops up. Ideally you're looking for people who have said they installed it successfully and haven't run into compatibility issues.
Nowadays I'd say it's worth spending time on finding the specs you want at a price you're open to paying. There's a really high chance it'll work fine with Linux and if not you can always put the factory Windows install back on and return it.
I'm really thankful I picked one up in August 2025 for $580 before prices went crazy. It's a Nimo N155 15.6" Ryzen 7 6800H with 32 GB of RAM (DDR5), 1 TB NVME SSD and an AMD Radeon 680M that lets you allocate up to 8 GB of VRAM.
It's beyond ridiculous that the RAM alone is worth more than the entire laptop today, but they still have laptops today in the $600-700 range with solid specs. Tons of them with 16 GB of memory at that price.
I’m lazy and don’t want to spend the rest of the year trying to get Linux running on my Alienware desktop. I think most of the software I use is available on Linux, I just need to find the time to get started.
Any random thread with "Microsoft" in the title from the last few years is likely to include a decently representative library of reasons. Seriously: it's always the same, trite talking points being brought up, most often hijacking the subject of discussion.
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