Yeah, the Linux community has done a shitload of work to bring Linux up to as good as windows (in the technical sense) and better than windows (regarding the often hostile user experience).
Microsoft is now helping with the marketing by making the windows experience even worse, driving more people to “take the plunge” only for them to realize there isn’t a place where the floor suddenly drops away and you’re left helpless, and that that actually is a better description for using windows outside of the rails MS wants.
If you use an AMD gpu, there’s actually fewer steps to go from empty disk to playing a game, assuming that game isn’t trying to do things with the kernel or is one of the rare games that aren’t compatible for reasons other than anti-cheat (I’ve seen one game like that so far, forget the name of it but a logistics game that needed some dotnet library or something and I ended up giving up and refunding it rather than troubleshooting it until it worked, though others on protondb did say they got it working).
The days where windows gives an easier or better experience are gone, even ignoring all the next level enshitification of win 11. I’ve been on Linux for about a year now but wish I had switched sooner.
If you use an AMD gpu, there’s actually fewer steps to go from empty disk to playing a game
That’s the theory, assuming that the Amd Gpu works with Linux. It might also just crash your system, which is a know problem of the driver, which hasn’t been fixed. You have to semi-randomly pass parameters to the kernel, hoping to find something that works.
Been using linux exclusively for personal computing since 2019 and don’ miss windows either.
Not exclusively but almost exclusively since 2004 here, the time when there was a thing similar to wine for printer drivers
Would be nice to be able to read the article. This hiding shit behind an account just guarantees I’ll never read it on your site.
Here you go:
Thanks!
I think this is a result of much site traffic being AI search agents or crawlers nowadays, which doesn’t generate any ad income for sites. So they don’t really have a choice
Yeah, that makes sense. I get it, I just despise it, lol.
A lot of misinformation and people going about things wrong in the comments.
Do y’all not do research before buying a house, buying a car, or applying to a new job?
Y’all need to go back and learn critical thinking.
Enlightening
The only problem I’ve had so far on Linux was due to my RAM breaking. Same shit could’ve happened on Windows. As much as everyone talks about needing “manual intervention” in Arch, I had to do the same shit on Windows after a bad update pushed unsigned USB drivers (which I was unaware of, I only saw the blue screen) then once I did a system restore it just failed after wiping my hard drive despite only using tools from Windows itself. I ended up having to get a third party tool to fix it all, because the vhdx files Windows made assumed my computer was UEFI despite only supporting BIOS. It was a mess.
The moral of the story is: Windows still has these problems, people are just more used to solving them so it doesn’t feel like they’re solving a problem.
I’m about a year in. I started with mint and I’m on endeavor now. It can be a bit fiddly to get setup. Once setup it behaves the same way, but less ads and copilot/edge aren’t forced on you non stop.
The only issue we have is anticheat, and that only affects games like battlefield/cod. So not much of a loss there.
Mainly music devices
To me it was like, oh, you made it different and that makes so much more sense, why are they not doing it like that in Windows? Or just during university; there is a tool for that format? And it is already installed? Nice.
paywalled
Here you go:
Disable javascript
So I’ve gone back to linux for my daily but holy hell the driver support is very much still not there, especially for gaming.
The wifi driver is flakey and drops connection requiring a disable/re-enable every so often, power management doesn’t work quite right with sleep mode locking up the system every so often, keyboard no use of most of the advanced features, same for the mouse and never mind about the other various nits that I end up finding that honestly don’t have much info because there’s no official driver support from the companies, just mostly wonderful people who are making things work but don’t have that industrial knowledge and limited time.
Still, absolutely no regrets in moving back to Linux because Windows has been just horrible since 7 and 11, which I still have to use at work, is just absolute crap.
Standby with nvidia gpus is broken still, but everything external I’ve plugged into my system works first time.
Nvidia works fine on my end, just installed the latest drivers and been running fine since I switched (~1.5yrs)
Is it? Got a 3080 and my pc goes to sleep and wakes up without issues. Or do you mean a specific mode? I just use whatever cachy with KDE uses as standard.
2080S currently, though I’ve had others before, can’t wake up from standby with the power button or USB. On the other hand, once it’s in standby, it’ll turn itself back on after 30 minutes or so. The firmware on nvidia cards has always played badly though. I had an 8800 that I’d have to turn on several times each day before it would POST.
Dunno about this wifi driver stuff. The only issue I had with my own was the flakey hardware on an old box and it didn’t work in windows or Linux so I can’t fault Linux for that. Anyways got a new box, so far everything has been working so far so good.
I’m not sure what distro you’re using or what hardware you have. But you must either have bad luck or choose bad cheap hardware.
I’ve been using wifi on Linux since the ndiswrapper days. I haven’t had a wifi issue in many many years using Lenovo, Dell, Panasonic laptops and various self built servers (but they tend to be wired)
the wifi driver
Holy fuck, really? The lack of working wifi or gpu drivers is why I never stayed with Linux for daily use outside of my media server box. And the last time I tried using it for my main gaming PC was over 10 years ago.
GPU drivers, at least on AMD’s side, have been solid and Nvidia has been generally decent and getting a lot better with the new process they’re doing for the newer cards. But my scenario might be more unique to the MB implementation of the wifi chipset since when I posted on other boards, others with different MB’s/cards using the same driver aren’t seeing the same issues.
And of course the other downside is that the wifi 7 driver for that chip is not available for windows 10 and is windows 11 only and I do not want to use that as my daily even if the driver is solid and honestly I’m not a huge perpetual online gamer so it’s not impacting my ability to use and enjoy my Bazzite instance.
At this point, the remaining voluntary (as in: not forced by work) windows users are one giant ass Stockholm syndrome victim group/
Almost everything in Linux is easier to set up than on Windows, and thanks to the command line and basic architecture not changing, 10-15 year old tips are still valid today more often than not. Unlike Windows.
And Windows users who would fail to set up Linux from scratch & read online references to fill their knowledge gaps have most definitely never set up a Windows machine themselves, and are instead using preinstalled OSes, and buy a new computer when they need to upgrade to a newer OS version, as well as take their computer to an IT service person when something breaks.
I’ve been running debian as my main and my home-server OS for a couple years now. And I’m really happy for it.
But it hasn’t been smooth sailing. I’m even on fully AMD systems. There’s a bunch of stuff, biometrics and otherwise, that just doesn’t work without random workarounds or even not at all.
And this elitist approach and tone is what turns a lot of folks away from even trying linux. Also, sure CLI might be great for a lot of devs, but regular users do need a GUI. And that is not fully there yet.
“Almost everything on Linux is easier to set up than on windows” has me rolling. This shit is exactly why people dismiss Linux as an option - linux enthusiasts refuse to accept the flaws in the OS, and that means those flaws never get addressed. God, or they’ve never had to deal with a driver incompatibility before, maybe they’re just leading a charmed life…
And this is from someone that’s daily driven Linux for well over a decade. Like it’s a better option than windows, but it’s not so great that there’s not aspects that need to be improved.
It appears you have not installed any Windows from scratch in a long time, or tried to harden it, or solve a driver problem there. That’s why you get confused. I was not saying Linux is always easy, I was saying it has overtaken Windows in almost every aspect, also because on Windows things have become more complex.
And this elitist approach and tone is what turns a lot of folks away from even trying linux. Also, sure CLI might be great for a lot of devs, but regular users do need a GUI. And that is not fully there yet.
Regular users who “need a GUI” would be completely unable to install Windows at all, because the setup including activation (or workarounds) is way too complex for them. They might be able to install Linux from scratch though, because various distributions have good GUI installers and/or live images.
The average user doesn’t install windows though. They buy the pc/laptop with Windows on it already, and use it till it’s in the ground.
And I cannot just install ubuntu/mint on a laptop for someone and walk away either, cause if/when anything breaks, the fix isn’t approachable. And trying to tell someone to use the CLI when they’re not tech savvy is not user friendly.
I’m not changing until they make a “Linus Proof” distro…
Why not try immutable distros? Fedora silver blue/kionote or bazzite have immutable system images. You cannot break them.
I will wait until they thrust it upon Linus. If it
passessurvives him. I will look into it.
I really wish we stopped linking users to random niche distros, its just much more common to run into bugs due to less users.
Only problem I have with Linux is it not working on my hardware. Windows of course works fine. So many stories of a Thinkpad T480 and Linux being such a dream, until you try it and it doesn’t work.
OH! And the constant nagging for a password, literally to do anything at all. Open a browser, enter password. Install an app, enter a password. Uninstall an app, enter a password. Wake from sleep, enter a password. I thought windows was bad, I had no idea how much better it was until I tried Linux.
You are definitely doing something wrong. Does it really ask for a password to open a browser? Windows always asks for a password for all that other stuff if you’re not using an administrative account, which is supposed to happen. Unless you’re fine with anyone that happens to get access to your computer being able to install/uninstall stuff.
Yes it does. I’ve never had to enter a password to uninstall anything from Windows before.
If you’re using an administrator account it won’t ask for a password but it will put up a UAC prompt. If you’re not using an administrator account, it puts up a UAC prompt with a password.
Chromium has done that to me before when I didn’t setup its keyring properly. I would just hit ESC three times to get past its dialog. Now I make sure to use an empty password for its keyring because I only use Chomium when something doesn’t work in Firefox.
KDE Plasma has also asked me many times for opening its keyring and that has pissed me off. I don’t use KDE Plasma other than on one server though.
Some of the other password requests you can disable in the graphical system settings (like asking for password coming out of suspend).
For the rest, those are just the same as Windows UAC which asks whether you want to give something adminstrator privileges. There’s probably a way to set up that experience if you’d rather click ‘yes’ in a popup than type your password.
It could be the browser’s password manager triggering the system keyring to unlock.
Possibly, but that can be disabled
Wait, does it not work on your hardware, or are you using it frequently enough to be bothered by passwords?
It mostly works. I have it set to dual boot and spend more time in Linux than in windows, forcing myself to use it. I also have a desktop that I use for windows on.
Linux can be intimidating. And there is going to be a learning curve. Especially if you’re the kind of windows user who’s familiar with gpedit and has custom .bat files.
But what get’s left out is the joy and satisfaction that comes with learning how to Linux. I just re-installed my OS a week ago, and I was able to recognize and resolve dependency and permissions issues without having to look anything up. I also finally learned and started using rsync for backups over SSH/SAMBA. I know it’s not much, but it made me feel like a real hackerman.
The only thing I learned in my last few years of Windows was how to disable features that annoyed me.
I agree that the puzzle solving is a huge factor in my enjoyment of Linux, and is the same for friends of mine who hopped over. But sometimes I have to remember there are some people who despise puzzles and they are not going to have a good time.
I would think someone who is taking advantage of bat files would feel right at home with shell scripts in Linux. In my experience, shell was much easier to pick up than batch
Batch is probably the same, but what always made me laugh about shell scripts is you could ask a bunch of people how to do something, and they’d all have a different way, it’s like there’s always a new tool to learn and try to fit into your workflow if you want, I love it
I think I agree with this. I believe that if you are heavily into group policy or a centralized registry it would be a harder conversion. But you can even “hack” bat files to work for both Linux and Windows depending on what launches it. I had to do that with a testing bot that I sometimes ran on windows, sometimes ran on Linux. It involves abusing the label system on bat (which translates to a command true which accepts no arguments on sh). Granted you are still writing both files but, using this method you can have the windows version of it on the same page as the bash version so you can go line by line instead of having a second file open
i was that person. i had my own custom windows isos to remove the bloatware.
its frustrating as fuck at first because linux does some things completely differently, in a way that does look weird as hell for power-windows people. i banged my head at it for a couple of years before i had that level of comfort again.
but once you get the hang of it oh boy. it’s a blast and you ask yourself why you didn’t do this sooner. it truly changed computers for me and renewed my love for them, who would have thought computers can be so awesome when they aren’t enshittified.
bazzzite bazzzite bazzzite bazzzite bazzzite bazzzite bazzzite bazzzite BAZZITE BAZZITE BAZZITE BAZZITE BAZZITE BAZZITE BAZZITE BAZZITE
ok?
Yup. Bazzite for the battlestation and productivity, NixOS for goofing around.
No. Bazzite is pretty good at one thing and that thing is gaming. If you want do anything else and there is no flatpack/appimage for it you’re shit out of luck, unless you want to ostree and thereby breaking the reason for using an immutable distro in the first place. That is the whole reason I tried and switched my main rig over to Fedora 43 KDE so I could at least use a normal package manager.
like what?
Well it started with my graphics driver for the AMD RX 6800 XT that cause compositor freezes on Wayland so my panels just froze for no reason, fix -> switch to X11.
Browser was hogging an insane amount of cpu to just render Youtube, reason was the hardware video encoder was not enabled, tried to install mesa drivers and you can only do that with rpm-ostree (first breakage of immutable) spend two days debugging and flatpack overwrites to try and fix it to no avail, left it as is.
Next wanted NordVPN because I’ve been useing their service for forever, no official flatpack so I needed to use distrobox which is a vm running on my machine with another os in it to run a simple program or use rpm-ostree to install the nordvpn normal linux package (second breakage).
Has some issues with getting a network share to work, ended up having to make a script that mounted the drive on boot. My normal Linux distro just used fstab and it worked.
Next issue installing Bambulabs software, appimage doesn’t work because it depends on gtk, rpm-ostree install number 3, it didn’t take so I gave up after a week of fighting the OS and just installed Fedora KDE Plasma.
I’m not new to Linux, hell I’ve been on and off it since Fedora Red Hat 8.0 played around with enough Debian (Ubuntu) based distro’s as well. Three years ago I switch my working machine over to Pop_OS! had some issues but non breaking ones that I could always fix. Wanted to switch over my main home machine over from Windows 10 to Bazzite because that one is mainly used for gaming, but I wanted to be able to do other things with it as well.
Linux isn’t especially complicated on a daily basis, but you have to be willing to solve your own problems
Who was solving your problems before then?
To give the author credit, ignoring the other flaws with windows, most things “just worked” and generally either didn’t have an issue or if it did, fixed it’s own issues. I didn’t really have to resolve any issues or anything. Heck it even fixed itself if it failed to update, rolling back the changes and alerting the user next boot (which I usually just ignored and let fix itself which it generally did after a few days/tries! lol)
My current rig had Windows as the primary OS from 2016 to about 2024, during that time I don’t recall any times I had to actually look up any issues unless I personally created the problem. I think the most extensive issue I had was my 5700xt crashing under high load but that wasn’t something I could fix anyway as it was a driver issue, or when i made the entire system unbootable cause I messed up making a recovery partition
When I swapped back to Linux (Linux Mint at first, then Linux Mint DE, then Debian 12, now Debian 13), I had multiple hurdles from my headset not functioning, to my video card not being supported, no login screen(this surprised me as I had thought Debian was supposed to be stable), etc, these issues didn’t fix themselves, I had to fix them. Granted some were easier to fix (like the no login screen was a super simple edit to a config file), but it wasn’t something I had to deal with on windows.
Linux isn’t going to hold your hand like Windows does with issues. So yea you need to resolve your own issues, Linux isn’t going to do it for you, the most it will do is post a command in the log saying “issue X expected, run this command to fix”
Running windows is like playing with an action figure. You take it out of the box and it does what it’s supposed to. Linux I consider more like a Lego set. Sure you have to put some stuff together before you really play with it, but it’s YOUR creation by the time your done with it and you can modify to suit your use case. If you have no interest in tinkering with ur OS windows or Mac is just a better option, if you want to tailor your experience how you’d like Linux is the way. I run W11 on my gaming PC because I don’t have time to mess with it and experiment anymore. I have played with so many Linux distros but never had one work flawless out of the gate, and always reserved it for my secondary fuck around rigs because if I wanted to fuck around I could but I do want something that i can press the power button and evrything works fine without use of my brain after working a 13 hour day where i might get lucky to play for 40 mins lol. My fuck around time these days is totally sapped by project vehicles and house issues the last think I wanna do is play around in terminal when I have 10k other more important things to do :c
I’m not sure I entirely agree anymore. I’ve installed Mint OS on both my mother’s and my grandmother’s computers and neither of them have complained a single time about it to me. Setting up a printer was even easier, I tried helping an acquaintance with W11 set up a printer and it was hell, with Mint it just figured out everything relevant on its own, I just had to confirm that it was correct.
No kidding! W11 and w10 always worked with all of my printers (Canon) out of the box, once the printer was connected to WiFi they always just picked them up and worked! Last time I tried to get a cheap wifi card (Linksys) to work on Ubuntu however, not so lucky lol.
Fellow project car and house enthusiast here!!
I sometimes forget others dont have these massive time sucks and can afford to troubleshoot for hours. I cant! Even though its kind of fun, I have shit to do.
No kidding! I never feel like I have enough time, always feel like I’m behind on all my projects and spreading myself thin. When I had less money and less projects and didn’t own a house I played so much more video games and messed around Linux installing new distro every couple weeks on my old rigs or laptops that had fallen into my lap. Now my times all tied up with all the messes I have gotten myself into, speaking of which I should probably be putting the new exhaust fan in my bathroom that’s been sitting new in the box for 6 months or something instead of fucking off in the fediverse :'(
Ame here on every front. You’re literally me or im you! Haha. Hello friend
Fully agree. When I mention switching to Linux on the rare occasion it comes up I make sure to mention that you can do basically anything on the platform, but with that customization comes drawbacks. If you are afraid to research an issue then I would not recommend full stop. I also mention not to be afraid of needing to use the terminal if needed. Don’t expect a 1:1 it’ll do most things you can do on Windows, but there will be some things you just can’t
Running windows is like playing with an action figure. You take it out of the box and it does what it’s supposed to. Linux I consider more like a Lego set. Sure you have to put some stuff together before you really play with it, but it’s YOUR creation by the time your done with it and you can modify to suit your use case
I really love this analogy, and plan to steal it for future use.
This is a common misconception I think. “Stable” from a development point of view (which is what Debian is) is not the same as “Stable” from a user point of view. It can be, as long as no other variables are changing. But a typical desktop user IS a variable, and they change other variables all the time. “Stable” makes sense on a server, where the server has a defined role and a specific purpose that basically never changes. It’s “stable” and if the OS is also “stable” that gives you assurance that nothing is going to break unexpectedly… ONCE you have it tested and set up properly to be stable in the first place.
But installing on a fresh system where you’ve never run this OS before is the antithesis of stable. You are initially in an “experimental” state, and you may need the latest updates and patches to even be compatible with the hardware you’re running. Then you’re going to use this system daily, downloading stuff, installing new apps and tools regularly, changing configurations when you feel like it. None of this is stable. And that’s fine, it’s not wrong, it’s just the reality of being a user with a desktop system. It’s not stable, it’s not supposed to be. It’s your daily driver.
To paraphrase George Carlin, a bad driver, driving a safe car doesn’t really make you safe, at all. First, learn to drive THEN get your safe car. A stable distribution like Debian is for people who already know how to find all the compatible-by-default hardware and do the configuration necessary to make things safe and stable and using Debian assures them that once they have got it into that state, Debian isn’t going to undo their work and make unexpected changes.
For users, especially on the desktop, you often want bleeding edge latest updates to fix these kind of compatibility issues as soon as they’re identified, even without absolutely rigorous testing and validation that it won’t mess up someone’s “stable” configuration. You really do want the opposite of “stable” development, in order to make your own system more stable as quickly and reliably as possible in the circumstances. It will never be as stable as Debian running on a server, but that’s normal, and expected. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
Debian is a good OS, but as a desktop user, on your main system, it might be counterproductive. For what it’s worth, I run PikaOS, which is a gaming-focused distro derived from Debian (Debian’s stable foundation is a huge asset for people building distros on top of it) but provides prompt access to all the latest updates and patches needed for gaming and includes configurations and drivers for supporting the latest consumer level hardware and all the common tools and things that power users want, that are becoming popular day by day. This is the opposite of “stable development” but it’s perfect for a desktop system in my opinion and they do a great job.
Yea, I get that. Stable is from the developer POV, my expectation though was that I could at least finish the install process without running into an issue. I didn’t expect that a built in driver would decide to just black screen and the official driver to just not work period(Linux Mint), or that the installer wouldn’t be smart enough to properly configure the X server to allow for a login(Debian 12).
I somewhat expected it of Mint, but for Debian 12 I was pretty surprised to see it. You would think something that was good enough to reach a point where they did a package freeze would be able to at least reach a desktop before showing signs of an issue. But I guess considering that the installer itself crashes if you try to manually partition a server, and then decide to go back in and set up luks in the installer, I shouldn’t be too surprised.
Being said,
I have not heard ofDid not know that PikaOs it was a Debian derivative, I might actually look into that one then. (and yes before you ask it is exclusively because it contains “Pika” so I think it would be funny to try it 😂)edit: I realized after seeing the logo I had heard of it, just didn’t know it was based off debian.
I just put my desktop on pika, its nice. Maybe a little better performance than stock Debian in games, but i could be imagining things.
I like the bird sounds it uses as system sounds. Drives my dog crazy looking for whats making tge sound.
Haha I just noticed your name, that’s a funny coincidence. But yeah I’m a big fan of Debian in general. The problem, as you noticed, is often it doesn’t have great support for the latest hardware. On the other hand, it often has great support for older hardware, and PikaOS refuses to install at all on some of my older, less capable systems, so those are running Debian right now. So it’s kind of a “right tool for the job” sort of situation. They have their purposes, it’s definitely not one-size-fits-all.
Who was solving your problems before then?
Every tech company in existence, in exchange for all of your privacy and now subscription fee.
For the low low price of all of your money and privacy you can avoid having to figure out how to backup your own files and have a team of developers ensuring that any kind of difficulty that you have will be fixed before you even realize it was a problem.
Once it is ensured that you will never develop those skills you are completely dependent on their services and they can keep jacking up the price.
Hate Netflix’s price increase, or password sharing restrictions? Too bad you spent 8 years not learning how to setup streaming media that you control. Hate listening to ads in order to listen to music? Well, it looks like Spotify doing everything for you has paid off for them.
Everyone has traded their privacy for convenience, if you want your privacy back then you have to give back the convenience and learn to do things for yourselves.
The entire internet? Whatever problem you had on windows you can just Google it and there’s either a YouTube video, reddit thread, or some obscure forum post that fixes your exact issue by copy and pasting some Powershell commands or a random bat file or GitHub project.
Linux? It’s gotten better, but the community side can get quite toxic or outright ignorant of how to troubleshoot any kind of issues tbh.
Same with Linux. Is there a problem Search it. Someone had that problem before. Shit even basic AI can help you out if you can’t quickly solve the issue.
Yeah, they had the same problem… 13 years ago, and their solution doesnt work on modern OS’s due to package changes and command depreciations.
Thats how about 99% of my internet searches for linux problems end up.
For me I got better results if I used the actual distro + version in the search, Linux is to general a term, but say Fedora 43 + problem would really narrow down the amount of results and also prevent really old answers to pop up.
That’s probably the opposite of my experience and an experience of everyone I know.
With Windows problems you do get a lot of very, very long youtube videos that says a lot of things, but unless your problem is trivial, the shit wouldn’t work, and random bat files aren’t working for unexpected problems, or are just viruses. More often then not though, you get a question on Microsoft forum, with one answer asking you to run that windows repair bullshit that never actually solves anything. And then you just accept that it’s not something you can do and move on with your life, thinking that ignoring the problem is actually solving it. Alternatively there is for some reason very expensive program that does what you wanted badly, while using 20% of your machine’s resources, but you’re so exhausted at this point, that you pretend it’s normal.
With Linux you will get snarky answers telling you that you’re an idiot for not reading the error message on your screan (which is, yeah, you are), or that you’re an idiot for not reading the first page of man (which is, yeah, see above), or the most detailed explanation of inner workings of this specific thing that is giving you troubles, and you pretend to understand all of it while just copying and pasting all the random commands from the answer like an idiot that you are. But if you actually want to learn, you just do that, and then your problem is solved and you’re a bit more knowledgeable in the end.
Every time people talk about how Linux community is unhelpful, I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. How can I always find help and support no matter how weird and obscure or banal and trivial my problem is, am I special or do people don’t know how to google? I mean, snarky and condescending? Yeah, that happens. But unhelpful? Never in my experience.
Some random Indian guy on YouTube with a tutorial that somehow perfectly solves your weird issue.
