The best thing to happen to Linux Desktop is Windows 11, with perfect timing too as modern Linux has been a joy to use as a daily driver.
Normally I'd be unhappy when a sleazy corp forces me to give up on 25 years of muscle memory of using my preferred OS, but I'm thankful they gave me the push I needed to rip off the ad/spyware laced Windows Band-Aid that I only need to do once in my life.
It's been over a year since I switched to Linux which has been a breath of fresh-air, all my dev tools work natively, the console is far superior and I'm still able to play all my favorite Steam games.
Best of all I'm not reminded daily that I'm using an OS that works against my best interests, I can actually use an App Store again that's been designed for the benefit of its Users, imagine that.
I supported enterprise Windows systems for a decade, although I had Unix and Linux experience as well and liked all of them.
I skipped Windows 8 entirely. For the 10 era, I had at least one Linux VM on each of my systems, and migrated to open-source where possible even on the host OS (Blender, Inkscape, etc.).
Windows 11 pushed me to flip things around - Linux as the host OS, and a Windows VM or dual-boot if I absolutely need to do something with that system that only runs well on Windows. These days, that list is very short.
All of the many frustrations of 11 become much less pressing when it's just throwing a temper tantrum in its playpen instead of interrupting serious work; the effect is magnified by rarely needing to interact with it at all anymore on my personal devices.
Linux still has a few quirks, but IMO there are fewer and fewer of those every year, while they seem to be increasing on Windows. The most recent 11 update has made Windows Explorer unreliable for me. I'm still stunned. The last time I saw stability issues with Explorer was on 98 SE.
Regards " stability issues with Explorer", I doubt it is Explorer itself.
2 thoughts:
1. Possibly something hooked into Explorer. Not necessarily malicious but could be like an acrobat extension or image editor extension or similar that helps to make thumbnails/previews. Or a context menu hook in.
Use Sysinternals Autoruns [0] to have a look. It is a free diagnostics tool from MS that shows everything that loads on startup. It looks at Start menu Startup folder, registry run and runonce keys and a bunch more places where things are hooked in. No restarts or anything required simply to look. It will show plugins/addons to Explorer too. Easy disable/re-enable process allows for somewhat easy troubleshooting. You'll have to restart Explorer after a "disable" step to see the results though.
Be sure to use the "hide microsoft entries" option if you want to narrow it down some.
2. Filesystem filters - things like antivirus "scan on read". If a "scan on read" goes to an antivirus that is not playing ball it will halt the "file open" request for example.
The command "fltmc" will list filesystem filter drivers. But making sense of which one belongs to what software is a further exercise. Which is why I suggest this investigative path as number 2...
I switched to Ubuntu on my main machine this year and even as a heavy 365 user it's better. Battery life is massively improved. I even still run the odd game on cs2. 11 feels like toy town in comparison.
PWA for Outlook and Teams, just straight web access for everything else. You can also access onedrive etc via the nautilus file manager as a onedrive:// url which is easier for some things.
Not OP but 365 has web apps for every software offered. The only disadvantage is that the web apps require an internet connection and the native windows apps don't.
Speak for yourself, I tried again to switch to Linux last year with standard Ubuntu and had multiple issues, the machine wouldn’t wake from sleep, would lock up with a grey graphics glitched login screen when locked, I tried to upgrade the OS and it broke all my graphics drivers, after I spent another few hours trying to fix it (and seeing a lot of very unfriendly and unwelcoming “help” from the Linux community), and running into other issues I didn’t list here, I gave up and switched back.
I’ve been a multi-os user for years, tried Linux on and off, but for now I have a windows machine I just use for gaming and a mac that I use for development and everything else. The truth if I struggled as much as I did and I’m a software developer with years of experience with this stuff, the dream of the general public using Linux is doomed. Every few years I hope Linux has gotten its act together so that it can actually grow again, but it’s still behind the times.
But my experiences aside, the truth is 99% of people would rather just make a Microsoft account than have to learn and switch to a whole new OS. It might be the breaking point for you, but that doesn’t mean it’s the breaking point for many. If the Linux community continues to stay blind about this and about the very real problems people experience that they insist aren’t problems, then they’ll continue to have a tiny market share, that’s all there is to it.
Ok and I had the opposite issue of installing windows and not being able to get a lot of drivers work. Also getting issues with Bluetooth all the time that had me install and uninstall drivers. With linux I had no issues.
How much care did you take in getting a machine for running Linux? Did you get one specifically with that in mind? Or did you slap it on the machine you already had?
Endless raving about how painless and troubleshoot-free Linux is and then you try installing it on your very standard-built PC and face major glaring issues and then get told you're the idiot for not junking your perfectly good GPU from the most popular GPU maker and most valuable company on the planet.
I'm sure it's Nvidia's fault for whatever reason but Linux proselytizers need to stop being so dishonest about how pain-free switching is.
It is painless on hardware that's compatible. Nvidia issues are well known too.
It's like you running Windows 7 on a PC designed with Windows 11 in mind and expecting a good time. If you wanted a good Windows 7 experience you'd want a PC with parts that are actually compatible and have good drivers. Linux is the same.
If you have all kinds of issues when installing Linux, “oh Linux bad”, “Linux not ready” etc. If you have the same with windows, it is normal, sometimes happens with certain hardware, it is manufacturer’s fault etc.
I used my perfectly normal PC that has absolutely bog standard components that any decent OS should run on. I’m not about to throw my whole computer out just to switch.
This is the exact attitude that keeps people away from Linux. The moment someone points out practical problems with Linux, it's users get all defensive and elitist about it. Sigh, if at least this changed more people would use Linux.
You don't have to throw out your whole PC. Could you have waited for the next time you upgraded and thought about it then? Maybe if it's a desktop swapped out the GPU and kept the rest of the components?
It wasn't even clear from your original post that you even kept the same PC FFS. Nor did you clarify what "bog standard" PC components you used. Just expected perfection.
Getting a 5090 and 5k2k monitor is what forced me back off of Linux last time I switched. I'm used to crappy "cutting edge" hardware support in Linux and routinely bounce back and forth between Windows and Linux as the different annoyances build up. Yes, I know Linux has issues with NVidia. But AMD doesn't make a comparable card period.
Which distros have you tried? The new nVidia open drivers work so much more better in Linux these days than the fully proprietary ones (still not as good as AMD, but it's pretty decent).
Also there are distros which handle cutting edge hardware much better than others (like Fedora/based or Arch/based), and some are infamous for always lagging behind (Ubuntu/Debian based). Choosing the right distro can make a huge difference to your Linux experience.
This was literally about three months ago on NixOS. The upgrade also toasted the boot from USB linux distros that have smaller and older kernels to reduce file size.
NixOS is pretty niche and getting nVidia to work properly on it is a PITA. I would recommend using CachyOS instead (since you sound like an advanced user), it has excellent nVidia support - you don't need to do anything special to get it going.
“You used the wrong distro” is literally the GO TO answer and to be honest I’m sick of hearing it. You get it from the Linux community no matter how major or popular a distro you use.
That the Linux community is elitist and will treat you like the issues you have are always your fault no matter what. If I used a niche distro, people would tell me I should’ve gone with a more mainstream one. You literally can’t win.
Also if the most major distros are still bad also, then why the heck would anyone switch? lol.
Yes there are some elitist users but what I've stated has nothing to do with elitism, it's just the way things are. Do your research and you can see for yourself how bad Ubuntu is. And you do have a point about niche distros as well.
Unfortunately you can't just dive into Linux blindly by choosing a random distro to run on random hardware, you'll likely not have a good time. You need to do your research and talk to a veteran user first for advice.
Yes and do you really expect a non-tech-savvy newbie to suddenly download and switch to Linux? That's never gonna happen, unless they're the really curious and determined type, the kind who loves to tinker/break/fix.
Therefore it falls upon veterans like us to guide the newbies so they have a smooth transaction and don't fall down the wrong path.
I’m confused, because you’re acting like you disagree with me but the things you’re saying are basically my entire set of points. Linux is unapproachable for newbies, Linux has an elitism problem in the community and therefore I think veterans should guide newbies to have a smooth transition…
And also we should make Linux more approachable and reliable.
Telling people “you downloaded the wrong distro” when they download a popular one isn’t helpful, as many others with give contradictory advice - in fact Ubuntu is very often stated as a newbie friendly distro, relatively speaking. Also saying it’s outright “bad” or “terrible” is also hyperbole that they don’t have the context to parse. It’s just super unhelpful and unapproachable as a response to someone to start with “the distro you chose despite being a popular one is wrong because I said so”.
Your words and your actions are at odds with one another.
I re-read my comment chain and I don't see where I've acted in a conflicting way? I started by asking tstrimple which distros they've tried, and stated that some distros are better suited for handling cutting edge hardware, and finally concluded by saying that choosing the right distro makes a huge difference. I don't see what I did wrong here.
But then you suddenly started to pick a fight with me out of the blue, when I was merely trying to point OP in the right direction. So perhaps you're the one who needs to explain why you commented the way you did.
Hmm, I’m sorry, I seem to have confused you with another comment that was insisting Ubuntu was a terrible distro at me.
My bad, I’ll delete my comment.
EDIT: I forgot you can’t delete comments past a certain time. I’ll just have to offer my apology.
Linux is generally a rock solid delight on any AMD desktop, but insists on being at least an occasional pain in the ass on basically every laptop in the world and anything with Nvidia.
Yep I only buy laptops/computers that are known to be compatible with linux or outright allow it as an option. Drivers are the biggest issue by far, especially video and power suspend modes. Life gets a bit easier when you get windows off the brain
That's cool, just don't expect linux to handle infinite hardware, it will never happen. Windows doesn't either, your hardware was likely designed to handle windows from the beginning. We as a community welcome people but we aren't obligated to make their computers compatible because that's an impossible goal
Perhaps, but I also have been told that nvidia should work now and works for many people yet I keep running into issues. Also, many of my issues were unrelated to the graphics card.
Full Intel or full AMD laptops are usually fine in my experience. It's when you have both an integrated and a discrete GPU, especially Nvidia, that things start to fall apart.
"the truth is 99% of people would rather just make a Microsoft account than have to learn and switch to a whole new OS."
First, I am writing this reply in Pale Moon browser running on Arch (KDE Plasma), so I'm a pretty diehard Linux user and have been so for years. That said, I still use Windows as I'll explain.
You are absolutely correct, switching to Linux from Windows is still very hard for many people—likely the majority—for a multitude of reasons, there being too many to give full justice to here. Several stand out however, such as having to learn the idiosyncrasies of a new operating system and adapting to new apps that do not have the same feature set as their Windows counterparts, for those wishing to switch compatibility issues are still a significant headache.
Nevertheless, users within corporate environments usually find switching to Linux easier by virtue of having a more controlled set of applications as well as having access to training and helpdesk facilities. For example, switching from MSO/Outlook to say LibreOffice/Thunderbird ought not be too arduous, also their Linux environment is managed by their IT departments. On the other hand, home users and small businesses aren't afforded such 'luxuries' and have to manage everything for themselves. Unless one is technical or reasonably computer-literate converting can be not only challenging but also very time-consuming.
Clearly, Microsoft is aware of the resistance to change factor and is leveraging the fact to its full advantage. When it comes to switching from Windows to Linux I think many Linux users underestimate how important these differences are to Windows users. As mentioned, I still use Windows on a number of systems and I even balk at the changes between the way different Windows versions work at the GUI level let alone the differences between it and Linux (it's why on Windows I restored Quick Launch when MS removed it and why I use that wonderful program Classic Shell by Ivo Beltchev to make the GUIs of my different Win versions all look like XP). Suffice to say, I prefer the old Windows Task Bar to KDE Plasma's Panel; for me, it's ergonomically more functional (even after having made many tweaks to the former).
The same goes for certain important (well-loved) Windows applications, whilst some key programs such as LibreOffice are native to both Windows and Linux, others remain Windows-only apps sans native Linux equivalents but which are arguably substantially better any Linux program with the same or similar functions. No doubt, many Linux-only users will likely differ from that view but that's irrelevant, here it's the perception of Windows users that actually counts—if they cannot run their favourite programs on Linux (or close equivalents) then they will stubbornly resist changing operating systems. I say that from experience, I used to head an IT department and users can make management's life very difficult when forced to make changes against their will. Also, I'm reminded of someone at Microsoft whose name temporarily escapes me saying that the Win32 API was one of the company's most valuable assets. Very true indeed!
Putting a Windows hat on here with some examples, from my experience there is no equivalent or near equivalent native Linux program that is as good or as ergonomically functional as say the Windows file search program Everything, same goes for the excellent image viewer IrfanView, and to a lesser extent same for XnView (if necessary I can justify those claims). Similarly, when it comes to file managers nothing else comes close to Directory Opus in either Windows or Linux, if it were available for Linux I'd buy it immediately.
OK, Linux-only users will immediately retort "just use Wine and your problems will be solved". Right, Wine is great for many 'self-contained' programs but Wine's a pain and essentially incompatible with programs that make certain demands of the operating system outside of those normally handled (or not well implemented) by Wine. For instance, IrfanView allows the viewed image to be edited by an external image editor which here would likely be the native Linux version of GIMP. Attempting to get that to work from within IrfanView whilst running under Wine/Linux is a major headache, just check the many online requests from frustrated users who have been looking for a solution. Similarly, Everything's search relies on accessing NTFS's MFT (thus even on Windows it won't work in FAT32, simply forget any notion of using it with, say, Btrfs).
So we are back to the fundamental problem of incompatibility between Windows and Linux hence the many requests we've seen over the years to make Linux more compatible with Windows. Linux developers rightly say they're happy with their ecosystem and that any further moves in that direction would not only complicate matters but also require much additional work not to mention they'd likely make Linux less secure. That's also pretty much my position.
With these factors in mind it's clear Microsoft has no qualms about implementing changes to Windows that benefit itself even if they are to the considerable disadvantage of users (that's the inevitable outcome with monopolies). Thus, fallout from this latest change will be minimal, yes MS will lose a small percentage of users like those here on HN who are both outraged and technical enough to make the change, but as you say with no other practical option available the vast majority will simply fall into line with Microsoft's demands. In the wash-up, Microsoft will have done the sums and in the end it'll be further ahead.
Given the never-ending issues many users have with Microsoft's administration of Windows and the way it treats its users with abusive contempt, something has perplexed me for years which is why there has been so little support for the FOSS Windows lookalike, ReactOS, it's been in gestation for so long—over quarter-century—that I call it the "Going Nowhere Project". It's damned annoying ReactOS is still not available, if I could get a reasonably stable version I'd use it immediately for all that legacy Windows stuff that refuses to die.
It's not as if ReactOS doesn't have potential, it does and I've actually had various alpha versions running, although they weren't very stable. When I've queried the reasons for its snaillike development more often than not online commentators say it's because MS would sue it if it actually worked as intended. Possibly, but I reckon there's more to it than that which I'll not address here.
Nevertheless, with this latest edict from Microsoft it's clear to me that more than ever we urgently need an operating system that's capable of running the Win API without any Microsoft involvement. As I've shown, Linux can help many but not all Windows users escape Microsoft's clutches, that means we still need a more general/practical solution for ordinary users. Unfortunately, the only suitable project seemingly on the horizon is ReactOS, but it will never become a viable option unless it's put on a much more solid foundation and made into a well-supported mainstream FOSS project.
I have been a software developer "for many years" and I have been using Linux full-time since 2007.
I rarely have issues with Linux, and some of those systems also had nVidia Graphics cards.
One time I had an issue was my wireless network, which the linux kernel did not support for that particular distro. That wasn't the end of the world -- I was using ethernet for it, anyway.
- My Wife has Linux
- My Daughter (now) has Linux -- after soo much annoyance with Windows 11 originally.
While more people are (slowly) going to Linux, we still have Convenience dominating over ethics/pride/politics/freedom/etc.
The Convenience Microsoft has right now is familarity. The Non-PC technies understand enough about the Start button, or Drive C: etc. However... and most importantly... is this reason:
New PCs (desktop or laptop) comes with Windows installed. Most of the Non-PC techs do not know any better, and will just follow like sheep each instructions to completing their Windows installation. Yes, even if it is "Oh, you need to create a Microsoft account with us"
The typical shops people buy their new desktop or laptops will encourage Windows as it is their job as well pushing for anti-virus and Office pack add-ons. They won't want you to say "don't worry, I am going to install Linux"
Imagine if new desktops and laptops provide a choice in main computer shops? I do wonder how many people will choose Linux as it does not cost extra? It does make you wonder. Sure, I am not expecting this to a 50/50 split - but I am sure Microsoft would notice a decline in various areas.
Anyway - I remember buying a laptop in a shop.. a laptop for my Wife.
Staff - "Would you like XYZ software for extra protection.. etc"
Me - "No thank you. I wont be using Windows"
Staff - [pause] "What are you using, sir?"
Me - "Linux"
Staff - "You wont be able to install these software and you will not have the security Windows can offer"
Me - "I know what I am doing, thank you"
Staff - [Goes to get laptop, return 10 mins later] "I just spoke with my manager and we can offer you a discount for out XYZ security software and include Microsoft Office"
Me - "This has not interest to me as I will be running Linux"
Staff - "You wont need to install Linux. You can keep Windows, sir"
Me - "Eh.. No thank you"
Staff walks to the counter with this look on his face. Yes.. yes.. he knows better, right?
Unfortunately you tried the worst possible distro out of them all - Ubuntu is infamous for being the Windows of the Linux world (for all the wrong reasons), and Canonical is getting worse every year. Still nowhere as bad as Microsoft, but they're getting there.
I would highly recommend using a sane newbie-friendly distro which bundles all relevant drivers, like Aurora[1]- they even have a developer edition which may be of interest to you. If you're a gamer though, Bazzite[2] may be a better option - comes with drivers for all popular game controllers and hardware and includes Steam and other stuff so you can get gaming in no time at all.
My 70yr old mum uses Aurora and she has zero issues. She surfs the web, edits documents, prints and scans, backs up and organised photos etc. Pretty much all your basic PC user stuff. If my mum can use Linux, so can anyone else.
“Ubuntu” is the largest and most popular distro. Saying it’s the worst one I could use is ridiculous. If your community’s biggest distro is “the worst one you can use” then that is actually a bigger problem than everything else.
I can't really blame anybody for using Ubuntu, and many ways of "doing it wrong" should even be possible in the first place. But there definitely is badly & unsupported hardware you can really blame Linux for. That's on hardware manufacturers.
I used Windows since always and switched to Linux two months ago. On one hand I still run into lots of Linuxisms on daily basis and I cannot recommend the system to a non-IT personn - bluetooth crashes, GPU driver crashes, applications crash, devices crash, all that stuff that's always been there. At the same time I have to say that the switch was easier than expected, and last weekend I removed Windows from my drive. I thought I'd keep dual-booting for a while, but no. Wine and Proton are marvelous pieces of software, pure magic. Moreover, I cannot recommend Linux to my parents until it gets MS Office. My parents specifically need MS Office.
I personally migrated to seniors (70+) to Linux. They both enjoyed it for years. One even found and installed a new driver for their printer when he switched. Plus most ChromeOS users can easily migrate to Linux. For Office I recommend ONLYOFFICE as that looks and behaves mostly the same as Microsoft Office. I haven't experience any issues with drivers but then again I never use NVIDEA, I used AMD and currently an Intel ARC.
When I put my computer to sleep and then wake it up, sometimes there's no video output until I switch to a different terminal and then back to GUI. How on Earth is a non-IT person supposed to figure this out.
Also, my parents bring home documents from work, and they often get documents from different institutions, which means they already hit edge cases of compatibility issues between different office suites, and telling them "this one sometimes reads docx correctly" is hard sell.
The issue is that it costs money while pirated offline installation only costs you your morality. Which is not a lot, considering that it's Microsoft we're talking about.
Well I never had any issue as I never put my machine to sleep. I actually turn my machine off and on. Yes that includes my laptops, sbc's and desktops. I also advise everyone (even Microsoft users) to never use hibernation. It's not that faster than a full reboot cycle and can cause issues you really do not want. Sorry I am old-fashioned.
I understand the sentiment but I never started using hibernate; it's not in my system. I grew up without it and never used it when it was introduced. Keep in mind that I started software development when laptops did not exist yet.
What? Zero crashes here, for decades. Maybe I bought specific hardware, dell and framework. Normies tend to use the web version of office these days don’t they?
I made the jump to Linux 3 years ago, when I learned that Windows 10 support was coming to an end, and I really didn't like what Windows 11 looked like.
3 years, and not a single time I had any regrets. Not a single time I thought about moving back.
I went for Mint because I am a filthy casual, and as you put it, that system is a joy to use. On Windows I needed to do yearly fresh installs as I could feel performance degrading as time went on, On Linux the laptop is performing as well if not better than when I freshly installed it.
It's so good that I even donate 20 bucks to the project every year. It has no right of being that good and also free.
About games - not only I can play basically everything in my Steam library, but even installing things from other sources is very easy with minor tinkering. At least to me, Windows became nearly superfluous nowadays.
I daily drive Ubuntu, the user experience is comparable (in many cases better) to Windows 11. The only sticking point for me is display drivers. HDR on Wayland is barely functional (in my experience), and getting things like hardware accelerated AV1 encoding, full Vulkan API support etc to work has been extremely difficult. Every time I login using a Wayland desktop, only my main monitor is detected and it defaults to 60hz. I have to go through a whole process of unplugging the "undetected" monitors and plugging them back in. X11 doesn't suffer from this, but of course does not support HDR.
Yes, this is almost entirely Nvidia's fault, and yes I should know better than to use NV graphics cards on Linux distros; but frankly, the barrier to entry should not be having to replace an expensive piece of hardware to achieve feature parity. (Obligatory "Nvidia, f*k you!")
> Every time I login using a Wayland desktop, only my main monitor is detected and it defaults to 60hz. I have to go through a whole process of unplugging the "undetected" monitors and plugging them back in.
Are you using GNOME? mutter has this problem where it does not retry commit on the next CRTC: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/3833. If this is actually what's happening on your system, switching to KDE should solve it.
> HDR on Wayland is barely functional (in my experience)
This also sounds specific to GNOME, as mutter still doesn't have color management. You'll get a better HDR experience with KDE.
GNOME is typically the worst of all the options if you need feature support. They aggressively nack wayland proposals, and subsequently don't implement those proposals - while almost the entirety of the ecosystem does.
No, having the bare minimum "HDR support" does not mean it works fine. I have a 27-inch 4K 144Hz monitor with P3 wide color gamut and HDR600. This monitor is connected to 2 PCs, one running Arch Linux with GNOME as the DE and one with Windows 11.
Since Windows 11 24H2, with the new color management feature turned on, I can get correct colors on the monitor in both SDR and HDR modes. So it ends up with HDR on at all times, and mpv can play HDR videos with no color or brightness issues.
GNOME, on the other hand, is stuck with sRGB output in SDR mode, so you get oversaturated colors. With HDR on, SDR content will no longer be oversaturated, but if you play HDR videos with mpv, the image looks darkened and wrong. I've tried setting target-peak and target-contrast to match the auto-detected values on Windows, but the video still looks off.
In my experience, hardware support with drivers is far better with Ubuntu than with any of the 'consumer operating systems'. Display drivers, Nvidia in particular, have been a problem though, which I avoid by just going for integrated graphics (Intel). This worked well since I don't play games, however, then I got into Blender, which really needs a proper GPU (with drivers).
This summer I tried to interest a relative in using a Wacom tablet on their Apple computer. In linux-world you just plug the thing in and the job is done. Yet on the Apple computer I was having to hunt down drivers and install stuff, taking me out of my comfort zone. We didn't get the Wacom tablet to work (it is a decade old) and gave up.
All operating systems will inevitably force their ways of working on you to some extent and it is 'better the devil you know' for most people, myself included. My first OS that 'didn't get in the way' of what I wanted to do was SGI Irix. I think Ubuntu has that aspect of not getting in the way, however, I am confidently able to use the command line to type in installation instructions. Text instructions for installing stuff is brilliant since you can reproduce results consistently with not much more than 'cut and paste' needed. As soon as you move to a consumer OS then this becomes murkier, particularly if you have to use things like 'Homebrew'. An Apple user will quibble with me that this is difficult, but each to their own.
Along the way I have invariably kept the standard Windows installation, to never use it, ever. I thought I would need dual boot to hop into Photoshop, Word or some other Windows application, however, this has proven to not be the case.
The time has come for me to delete those Windows partitions and get my disk space back. In so doing I will also be excluding myself from any of those AI integrations that must be polluting Windows these days.
All of my problem was solved by disabling hybrid graphics and use the dedicated card only. I had not a single bug since then on X11 (I didn’t try Wayland yet, because it was almost completely unusable with hybrid config). The only drawback is battery life, but that wasn’t great even before. I could never reach the ~4 hours, which was possible with Windows. Even with the dedicated card disabled. So, I’m not entirely sure that it’s entirely on Nvidia.
Same, on my laptop. Hybrid graphics destabilised both Debian (with Nvidia drivers installed) and the Windows 11 installation I have on there for SharpCap. Switching to Nvidia GPU only made everything rock solid.
This was my first experience with hybrid graphics, and so far I'm not impressed.
Hybrid graphics had troubles last spring, but in my case it was fixed around late July. I still launch steam with weird env variables (i don't often change my shortcuts), but i'm not sure it's needed.
Are you using a ThinkPad? My work laptop has this issue too, on windows 11. 75% of the time I have to unplug the monitor after waking up the laptop. 20% of the time it works. 5% of the time it has 640x480 resolution, and I have to unplug it again.
HDR is unusable on Windows too. I finally decided to sell my HDR monitor after like a year because it was a massive pain in the ass from the moment I bought it. One of my biggest wastes of money ever.
Is Linux gaming on Steam actually competitive in performance and availability to what you'll get on Windows? I'm looking into building a gaming computer I'm surprised to hear I could roll with Linux for it.
Essentially, the only games that doesn't work nowadays are the ones that intentionally break it by adding Linux-incompatible anti-cheat. This is common among the big AAA-games that are multiplayer (think Fortnite).
Riot games did this on purpose too. League worked perfectly fine on Linux for years until they decided that kernel level spying on users was absolutely necessary to play a moba. For some reason my one friend thinks I'll run windows just for one game.
I'd sooner get a console, personally. The only legitimate use case I have for a console (nintendo notwithstanding) is to sandbox invasive anticheat in multiplayer games. I don't really have a ton of free time or friend group into multiplayer video games, so it's not happening for me. Smart console makers would lean into this.
Yup, I've also gone with a console for all my gaming needs, and keep my computer as just a productivity machine. As a result I don't need nearly as beefy machine and don't need to grind my teeth in bitterness using Windows.
> ones that intentionally break it by adding Linux-incompatible anti-cheat.
That's an interesting way to phrase it. It's like you're implying the company intentionally did not want to run it on anything but Windows (aka software is incompatible with non-Windows OSes) rather than trying to implement an effective anti-cheat (arguable) that works for their customers.
Pre-Wine, would you have argued that a software vendor is intentionally preventing their software from running on any non-Windows OS?
Or was it just that their audience wasn't on said non-Windows OS?
> That's an interesting way to phrase it. It's like you're implying the company intentionally did not want to run it on anything but Windows (aka software is incompatible with non-Windows OSes) rather than trying to implement an effective anti-cheat (arguable) that works for their customers.
Not OP, but this is true depending on the game. For instance, when Rockstar added BattlEye to GTA V Online, they broke Linux support, and blatantly lied about Linux not supporting BattleEye, when that's just not true - they just needed to enable that option, but they just straight up lied saying BattlEye doesn't support Linux.
> BattlEye on Proton integration has reached a point where all a developer needs to do is reach out BattlEye to enable it for their title. No additional work is required by the developer besides that communication.
So all Rockstar had to do was reach out to BattlEye to enable it, but they couldn't be bothered to do so. Their anti-Linux stance here is pretty obvious.
Rockstar aside, there are other studios/publishers that have been openly hostile against Linux, like Epic for instance - Tim Sweeny has made scathing remarks against Linux, so it's clear where he/Epic stands on that front.
I’m using Bazzite now for about 8 months, and I have a dual boot Windows drive. I haven’t used the Windows drive once. Windows was my daily driver for 3 decades.
Performance wise, there’s no degradation. I can run games at 4k or bonkers FPS just like I did on Windows, no input lag, etc.
Bazzite also has a very active discord for support with issues. I highly recommend.
> Bazzite originally was developed for the Steam Deck targeting users who used their Steam Deck as their primary PC. Bazzite is a collection of custom Fedora Atomic Desktop images built with Universal Blue's tooling (with the power of OCI) as opposed to using an Arch Linux base with A/B updates utilizing RAUC. The main advantages of Bazzite versus SteamOS is receiving system packages in updates at a much faster rate and a choice of an alternative desktop environment.
It is a Linux distribution, that aims to compete with Valve's SteamOS Linux distribution supplied with the Steam Deck (which itself is based on Arch Linux). Like SteamOS, it can be used on a regular desktop PC as well... but they are mainly aiming to run on the Steam Deck:
> The purpose of Bazzite is to be Fedora Linux, but provide a great gaming experience out of the box while also being an alternative operating system for the Steam Deck and other handheld devices.
Effectively they have taken Fedora Linux, and added to it the same sort of setup and programs that you get out-of-the-box with SteamOS as well.
For the most part, it is not the people offering Bazzite that are doing the hard job of providing security updates, etc., they are hoping that being based on Fedora will provide that assurance. They merely supply and configure some extras on top (e.g. the Steam client software)
What I meant is not "I can't find what it is", but that the landing page of Bazzite says this:
"The next generation of Linux gaming - Bazzite makes gaming and everyday use smoother and simpler across desktop PCs, handhelds, tablets, and home theater PCs.
Play your favorite games - Bazzite is designed for Linux newcomers and enthusiasts alike with Steam pre-installed, HDR & VRR support, improved CPU schedulers for responsive gameplay, and numerous community-developed tools and tweaks to streamline your gaming and streaming experience."
In the first 5 words after the 1st title there should be mentioned "Linux distribution". It's not even in the 2nd paragraph, now.
If this is the clarity of the landing page, I suspect documentation is equally user-hostile/inaccessible, which is why 2025 is still not the year of the Linux desktop... in the Linux world there's still an abundance of great developers, and a terrible lack of HCI/UX expertise.
Basically the only games that don't work are those which include anticheat which intentionally borks Linux. Check https://www.protondb.com/ for any game you're interested in to see if it'll run or not.
>Anything that has a kernel level anti check (Valorant) will always be a resounding No.
Please stop repeating this long outdated information. The two most widely used kernel anti cheat provider easyanticheat and battle eye support linux with a user space component which needs to be enabled by the developer and has been in many games.
Tools like Battle eye and EAC are not just one tool that gives a binary answer, they are tools that detect a huge range of heuristics about the device and how easy it is to interfere with the memory.
While they have been ported to Linux, an awful lot of those bits of telemetry simply don't give the desired answer, or even any answer at all, because that is very hard to so when there aren't proprietary drivers signed down to the hardware root of trust by a third party (and certainly the average Linux user on HN wouldn't want there to be!).
It's really not a matter of "enabled by the developer", it's entirely dependent on what your threat model is.
None of this is relevant to the original point of "kernel anti cheats don't work" when yes the two most widely used ACs do work despite being kernel level.
>It's really not a matter of "enabled by the developer", it's entirely dependent on what your threat model is.
I should have added “sometimes”. It worked fine that way with most games (I have the same CPU), but Cyberpunk 2099 in particular really doesn’t like that configuration.
Depends on what you like to play. Some games are heavily encumbered with either copy protection like denuvo or anti-cheat and those either don't support linux or flat out try to sniff out linux and refuse to run on anything but windows. Otherwise its great, you can check protondb and winehq for reports of compatibilty.
Dogs will always bark. I daily drive linux, and I am happy with it. Majority will not make the switch because they either are dependent on the office, adobe, or video editing software.
Linux user base grows. One tiny percent of percent every year. Too little to make a dent.
It's been two to three years now for me. I'm never going back. The only time I use Windows is on employer provided hardware. If given the choice I'd rather get a Mac or be allowed to smash over Windows with Linux (which most employers wont allow anyway).
Indeed. I always dabbled with Linux here and there. W11 was the final straw for me as well. I feel like LLMs help a ton too, not only do they make initial troubleshooting much easier, they also are pretty great at generating simple scripts that enhance the system.
I'm so happy to have made the swap, using my system is now much more enjoyable and if I don't like some aspect of it I can change it up with MUCH less effort than in Windows.
Also I'm positively surprised how good gaming on Linux is now. It was always a big blocker to full commitment to Linux.
I did it 15 years ago and never looked back. Vista was enough to give me the nudge. On the occasion I've had to use Windoze over the years I've laughed harder and harder each time. It's hard to explain to people who only know Windoze, but it's just really nice to use software made by people who don't hate you.
While I don't disagree with you at all, I'd advise against calling the OS “Windoze” (or “Winblows”, or the company “Micro$oft”). This gives off a very “From my parent's basement, I stab at thee!” impression and reduces how seriously a lot of people will take you and what you are saying, and those people could apply the same impression to the rest of us too. I used to do the same thing, about 1½-to-2 decades ago.
I'm not talking about “the suits” and what they think.
I'm talking about the people, the home users nominally in control of their own machines, who are on the edge of considering Linux, or something else non-MS, who might be put off if they see something that reinforces a negative stereotype that they've been fed elsewhere (for instance, that the surrounding community is mostly a bunch of undeservedly cocksure 14-year-olds or practically indistinguishable from the same).
You might consider it childish but it's the way I am and it's not just me. I've been masking it for decades but I'm sick of it. I won't use their carefully crafted marketing language. The internet was more fun when people could just be themselves and not try to be beige for fear of scaring people away. We need more variety in the world, not less.
You've got that barse akwards. They aren't telling you how to talk, they are walking away because of how you talk. You are inadvertently gatekeeping, basically working to help “the suits” you are railing against.
To jama211 and everyone else: we aren't all like this, honest!
To globular-toast; this brings to mind the old aphorism:
Always be yourself.
Unless you are a bit of a dick,
in which case please try to be someone better.
Congrats.
I had the same thought when Windows XP came out in 2001. I triple booted OS/2 Warp with Win98 and Linux for a couple years. Linux only since 2003, I guess I missed a lot of MS fun.
What do you mean? My Intel MacBook Pro works better on Linux than it works on the latest supported macOS (Big Sur in my case). It works longer, and fans almost always stay silent. I have a fairly minimal sway setup, however.
I mean, when you have an Mx notebook there is no step back regarding energy management and duration. It is a hardware innovation first but the macOS helps. We need the same for Linux.
Sadly, as a developer there is no beating Visual Studio. Microsoft still makes the best developer IDE that unfortunately only runs on their worst OS. But as a C++ developer there is just no substitute(imho). Not to mention some development toolchains only work on windows(for playstation/xbox/switch) so if you work in games there is very little choice.
I left Visual Studio for Rider long before I gave up Windows, IMO it's far superior to VS for everything other than GUI Apps or Blazor hot reloading (which is basically broken in both).
JetBrains seem to have the best IDE for every language I've tried: Rider / IntelliJ / Android Studio / PyCharm / PhpStorm / RubyMine. Never tried CLion though, but given they all share the same base I'd thought it would be of a equally high standard?
My bad. I naively assumed the successful developer-focued tools company with 25 years experience in parsing programming languages and building IDEs with advanced AST/refactoring tooling, that I've been happily using for 8 years had a great C/C++ story based on my experience of having used 7 of their other IDEs (built from the same platform base), were all best-in-class.
Maybe that's why I ended my thought with a question mark? i.e. So C/C++ developers with experience in both can clarify what makes VS so much better than CLion. Or if they haven't tried CLion that it would be a good alternative on Linux to try given all JetBrains other IDEs are of high quality.
Visual Studio is nice for C++ if you target Windows and CLR languages but for the rest it’s pretty abysmal. I personally generally prefer IntelliJ and used to find CLion nicer for C++ but that was a long time ago.
Anyway, Windows has become a pain for normal user but remains fine if you are a company user. The management tools will strip away most if not all the annoyance people are complaining about here. I think Microsoft knows where the money comes from.
You know, I think that's the key - I'm on Windows Enterprise and it just works. I start my PC, I code for 8 hours a day, I switch it off - it just works.
If your target platform is MS Windows only or only supported by MS Windows like with your examples, by all means, use Visual Studio. If Visual Studio is dictating your choice of platform, I'd consider the tradeoffs.
I use Emacs. It does need some fine tuning, tree-sitter installation, etc. but after that, I cannot understand colleges using VS. I have seen no feature in VS not available in Emacs.
Some colleges have switched from years VS to Emacs and after a week won’t look back.
Can you share what the experience is like debugging with gdb directly?
I'm new enough that my first debugger experience was Visual Studio, and I currently use IntelliJ IDEs which provide a similar experience. That experience consisting of: setting breakpoints in the gutter of the text editor, visually stepping through my source files line by line when a breakpoint is hit, with a special-purpose pane in the IDE visible, showing the call stack and the state of all local variables (and able to poke at that state any point higher up in the stack by clicking around the debug pane), able to execute small snippets of code manually to make evaluations/calculations based on the current program state.
I'm not so naive to believe that effective debugging tools didn't exist before GUIs became commonplace, but I have a hard time seeing how anything TUI-based can be anywhere near as information-dense and let you poke around at the running program like I do with my GUI-based IDEs.
(Pasting this comment under a few others because I genuinely want to hear how this works in the real world!)
Some emacs-fans really like emacs and will invent any justification for its shortcomings. You are 100% right it has a subpar debugging experience. There were better debuggers 20 years ago than emacs has now.
Stallman himself wrote it so it lies at the intersection of that camp and the lisp cultists (though Ig they are mostly extinct post-LLM), but they used to have a really strong belief that lisp was the path to AI because of it's homoiconicity.
What should be said in it's favor is that due to its architecture it is crazy extensible and hackable. And the fact that the line between configuration and code is very blurry really encourages you to dive into that.
The choice of lisp also helps ensure user freedom as it's a quite simple language - ensuring that compilers and interpreters are a commodity. You don't like one, pick another. Contrast that with say Rust where if you don't like the official Rust you are shit out of luck. It's also a rolling release deal so you can't even easily stay on an old version.
Maybe is personal preference? I like better gdb directly to VC.
I’ve tried to debug with VC, but I felt slow working with it. After several tries, I gave up.
Most of my colleagues never use a debugger even though they use vscode. I (the weird emacs user) actually had to show them how to use one, but they still don't.
Are they actually programmers? Or just people who pretend to know how to code? How can you be a professional programmer and not use a debugger? Also not sure what VS Code has to do with it, it's not Visual Studio proper.
I know plenty of professional programmers (job title states so) that not even they do not use a debugger, many don’t even know how to install/use one or even the very concept of “execute step by step”. Plenty of python users don’t know what pdb is (as matter of fact, have never met one that does know it!). Also plenty of embedded developers writing C or C++ or Java
They go all the time adding hundreds of print(f) of log_* function calls. Often they don’t care to remove them after the fact, as I ask them to, often comes “can/will be useful to detect future bugs”
I’m in the automotive industry, where is known to be a disaster in topic SW. but I think it is also common in other industries. I have seen it in telco already.
While I agree that knowing a debugger is important, and as a leader won’t hire somebody who do not use it, is a fact that many people don’t use it, and are doing ok.
Last but not least, it must be said sometimes you have to go to prints: in fact yesterday I had to, as I was debugging a library with sockets, which would timeout pretty quickly. I used dprintf in gdb, but the advantage to simple prints was not huge.
>>Last but not least, it must be said sometimes you have to go to prints
Well yes, obviously - it's an indespensible tool in any arsenal, I just cannot fathom(as a C++ low level engineer) how someone can be a professional programmer where they are paid for their job and they don't know to use a debugger even to just do a basic pause and step through flow. But then again I don't work with any python programmers, so maybe that's why.
They managed to grow a career out of a minimum set of skills, printf was enough I guess. Also they leverage stupid IT shops where squeaky wheel gets the grease.. being efficient at debugging would almost prove harmful in their world.
Just wait for it, from what I know Sony uses clang for it toolchain, don't know about the others so if enough studios start to switch they will start to offer the tools.
Side note: I have been using msvc in wine for almost 5 years now, so if that works I don't know why the Sony/Nintendo/Xbox toolchain wouldn't.
Have you tried the intellij IDEs? I thought that they were pretty similar in terms of experience, although I have used them for java/dotnet primarily.
I guess downvotes come from people that believe vim + grep + printf debugging is peak development environment. Quite amazing that they even go for something such advanced as vim, instead of sticking with ed, for I believe there exists some Linux user claiming that ed doesn't lack anything that VS has.
No you’re just completely ignorant. You can trivially set breakpoints, use conditional breakpoints, watch variables, step over, through, and into in exactly the same way.
Hell, even raw-dogging lldb directly on the CLI is incredibly user friendly, fast, and has a ton features you wish were more exposed by common IDEs. Don’t feel like debugging right now? Take a heap snapshot and do it later! Don’t even need to launch the process.
Visual Studio is ridiculously overrated, and this is coming from someone that works at Microsoft and forced to use it every day. What really kills me are the insanely complicated and unmodifiable shortcut keys for common tasks. Killing the process is like some finger breaking ctrl+alt+function key nonsense? Seriously wtf? Oh to debug multiple binaries simultaneously in the same solution requires launching multiple instances of the entire IDE? Why??
Can you share what the experience is like debugging with gdb directly?
I'm new enough that my first debugger experience was Visual Studio, and I currently use IntelliJ IDEs which provide a similar experience. That experience consisting of: setting breakpoints in the gutter of the text editor, visually stepping through my source files line by line when a breakpoint is hit, with a special-purpose pane in the IDE visible, showing the call stack and the state of all local variables (and able to poke at that state any point higher up in the stack by clicking around the debug pane), able to execute small snippets of code manually to make evaluations/calculations based on the current program state.
I'm not so naive to believe that effective debugging tools didn't exist before GUIs became commonplace, but I have a hard time seeing how anything TUI-based can be anywhere near as information-dense and let you poke around at the running program like I do with my GUI-based IDEs.
(Pasting this comment under a few others because I genuinely want to hear how this works in the real world!)
I much prefer lldb over gdb, but why don’t you just try it and see for yourself?
Of course setting a gutter breakpoint is easier in an IDE, and that’s irrelevant to my point. OP made this aabout vim/emacs versus VisualStudio as if the former doesn’t have gutter-clicking capabilities. Which is ridiculous
The keyboard layout change is not on my version (dogfood) for some reason, maybe because I have to use Remote Desktop and it doesn’t detect a physical keyboard. But fine, I’ll take that back. I even asked AssPilot for help and it was predictably useless.
And cmon modify the registry to debug multiple processes? People work together in teams and share a common tooling that ideally tries to minimize the friction required to get work done. Think about that while contrasting the steps required in that article with the alternative of“launch the app a couple more times, then…”
* "Sometimes, you might need to debug the startup code for an app that is launched by another process. Examples include services and custom setup actions"
Starting multiple copies of the IDE wouldn't handle these scenarios either
> It's been over a year since I switched to Linux which has been a breath of fresh-air, all my dev tools work natively, the console is far superior and I'm still able to play all my favorite Steam games.
I moved back to Linux Mint with Cinnamon yesterday, because my boot drive with Windows got fried and the replacement will only be here on Thursday. It doesn't feel like the OS is trying to make my life worse, it just sucks sometimes.
Note: this ended up being a bit long, there's a summary at the bottom. Apologies.
It doesn't save window positions after boot properly (I'd probably have to look in the direction of devilspie2 for that, admittedly I was using FancyZones on Windows as well). The grouped window list Applet in the panel doesn't show windows on the correct screen even if I move them from one monitor to the other and then back. This is really annoying because I have 4 monitors and want each of them have a panel and half of those being wrong about what is where sucks, admittedly Windows sometimes had a similar issue with its taskbar, BUT it resolved itself by just dragging the windows across monitors, instead of needing to refresh the entire applet.
The sound output default is something called Line Out Starship/Matisse HD Audio Controller which works fine, but there's no obvious way for me to disable HDMI/DisplayPort output devices so programs can't pick those by accident. Whereas for input I have Rear Microphone Starship/Matisse HD Audio Controller but that one makes the sound horrible, so I instead need to switch over to Microphone USB PnP Audio Device and hope that will be fine. Better than the issues with audio on Fedora years ago, still not great.
Software availability varies - some stuff is in the regular repositories, some software needs PPAs, some comes in Flatpaks, other software needs AppImages. I still appreciate that I can get most stuff running, but there's occasional weirdness, like KeePassXC starting up with the wrong theme, for example, the light mode kinda burns my eyes. Speaking of which, I no longer need Redshift because Mint comes with a built in Night Light, except that when it toggles on and fades the screen color, it makes the CPU usage spike (Ryzen 7 5800X) and renders the whole system unusable. Oh and speaking of which there is something weird with the CPU scheduler or something, because when I launch some intensive task, it makes even the desktop environment freeze entirely (and voice calls stall) for seconds at a time. Windows wasn't amazing at this, but could definitely be made even better with Process Lasso.
Oh and I tried some gaming with Steam: out of 20 games I tried only 6 worked. Turns out that if I mount my NTFS drives then Wine will get confused and claim I don't own the directory (which I only figured out by enabling Proton logging), which is funny for something that's supposed to provide Windows compatibility and could probably be resolved by UID/GID in the drive mount config... but even so some games like Mashinky just crash the desktop - I get a screen with the OS desktop background and a pointer, much like the login screen, but nothing reacts to input, no ability to close the game or switch to other windows. At the end of it, to even get some games running, I have to put them on the only ext4 drive that I have... which is also only 256 GB and the reason for me picking Linux in the first place until the 1 TB replacement drive arrives. And other games just don't launch no matter how much you babysit them, for example, I couldn't get Motor Town: Behind the Wheel working at all, but maybe because I don't have a lot of time to tinker.
I also miss software like SourceTree (used to pay for GitKraken, cool software, now just have Git Cola), MobaXTerm (way better than Remmina), SteelSeries Sonar, GlassWire and some other packages that don't have direct equivalents. I really like the more consistent approach to theming and fonts, though. Also, way nicer that I don't have to jump through hoops with setting up dev tools and now what's running locally can be closer to what's either on the server or inside of the containers I build. Oddly enough, I didn't find a way to change the default width of the Cinnamon terminal to 120 characters instead of 80. Also I still like how nice updates generally are and how the system seems to have less bitrot and uses less space and resources, even with a midweight DE like Cinnamon (would have gone for XFCE otherwise). Maybe KDE some day.
Summary:
This isn't really meant to be a hit piece or condemnation, but there's plenty of real problems that I still very much encounter for my preferences and desires of using an OS, there are probably solutions and to someone else these might not be problems. The difference is that Windows feels purposefully enshittified and works against me even when the software ecosystem (and stuff like support for games) is good. If they didn't try to make the OS bad with their bullshit and incentives, it would blow the Linux experience out of the water in quite a few regards.
At the same time, Linux distros feel like they're trying to be good and the OS generally respects you as the user... but there's a lot of moving pieces and lots of stuff breaks and some things (like anti-cheat support for games) won't be fixed because that's out of the control of the community and depends on corpos. Same for running Windows software, if Wine has issues you're often on your own, or just have to get used to the closest Linux software equivalent if you want fewer issues. I will say that it constantly feels like it's getting better, though.
In the limited subset of things that "just work" (generally webdev and DevOps stuff, without venturing too far off the beaten path), I have to say that I prefer Linux distros to both Windows and macOS though.
The best thing to happen to Linux Desktop is not that it has improved but that its biggest competitor has dropped the ball? That’s not really praising it.
Linux is the better OS. Windows 11 just forces people to evaluate other OS's to experience the latest Linux for themselves.
I didn't have the time as a working Adult for distro hopping and Gentoo compiles, but the thought of having to live with Windows 11 made me try out modern linux again, glad I did.
Linux is now the better OS, after the other one got significantly worse than it used to be, and even that is close call depending on what you need Linux to do.
IMO, it was definitely the better OS even going back to 15 years ago. People use Windows only because of the network effect of people being school-taught how to use computers on Windows, which leads to a positive feedback loop of more software being made for it which locks-in people further.
I remember after learning Linux, how much of a toy Windows felt, with my needing to grab windows by the bar to move them around (instead of grabbing from anywhere), and trying to resize them by the thin corner (instead of resizing from anywhere), having no concept of workspaces, having no choice of window manager while Linux could engulf windows in flames and render them in a cube, only being able to backspace single characters at a time, no choice of file manager, files having weird limitations on their names, having nothing like bash (pre-powershell) while Linux had multiple shells, no block devices (this could be expanded into a lot of points), no simple way to work the partition tables, not being able to mount things wherever, not being able to treat a regular file like a disk, no real choices of filesystems, poor network utilities, ping only pings an arbitrary 3 times by default instead of just going on indefinitely, no package managers and repos, etc. I could go on a lot more probably, but this is enough. Windows XP was a toy compared to Linux.
Also not to forget the 260 character file path limitation, which still haunts Windows till date! You can lift the limits via a registry key, but programs still need support for it. Forget third-party programs, even many first-party Microsoft apps like Explorer itself still can't handle long paths.
But my biggest pet peeve with Windows is updates. Updates, updates, updates, it's such an underrated thing that Linux does so much better, I wish more folks would speak about this:
1. You only really need to reboot for kernel updates
2. Updates aren't forced upon you
3. You're in full control of the whole process - you can even decide to hold back certain packages, , or choose a different flavour that suits your needs better
4. Update everything - including thirdparty apps - from either the CLI or GUI (KDE Discover or Gnome Software etc)
5. Unlike Windows, updates rarely slow down your system, and if anything, they tend to make your system faster and better.
6. Most Linux users actually look forward to updates, whereas Windows users groan and swear at them, praying and hoping they MS doesn't break anything or add more crap/anti-features
7. When you reboot after updates, it's instant - no annoying "configuring... please don't turn of your computer" message that hijack your system when you need it the most.
8. If you've got an immutable distro, updates are atomic and can't break your system.
9. Many decent mutable distros also have the option to instantly snapshot the OS before an update, and allow you to rollback right from the boot menu.
Honestly, updates for me is easily the top reason why I feel Linux is a superior experience to Windows, I could write a whole essay on this.
No it doesn't. You can navigate to long paths, but try doing any file operations (like renaming a file) and you'll see it doesn't work.
Also, the rest of my points are end user impacting. Updates impact everyone and is a very important part of an OS experience. I used to work on a helpdesk for an MSP, and you've no idea the number calls we used to get from users frustrated about updates for various reasons. Hell, we use Windows at work and I still get annoyed as a user.
Just to clarify, this was actually like most of Windows. You could (in XP at least via Disk Manager), but they made it harder than it needed to be.
Multiple workspaces was a thing as well that came with XP Power Toys and was a feature in later versions, but not simple to access, and mostly broken because they never test it.
I made my final transition during Vista. Touching 7, 10 and 11 for work purposes means I can see that I don't miss any of it.
Windows is awful, and has terrible discovery for features, and anything off the main "happy path" is usually broken. This isn't a new thing since they fired their QA folks, it's always been bad.
It is just the "Windows can't do this" statements, when it can.
The average windows users wants it to run the software they want and not completely fucking shit the bed. Windows is allowed to be designed poorly, and it is.
But, shockingly, despite Windows goals being so small and easily achievable, Microsoft still fucks it up.
Wine is a better Win32 implementation than Win32. And Microsoft just can't help making the OS worse. Every new feature is basically strictly worse than the stuff before.
All they have to do is do nothing and continue making the same things work. But no.
Though you might not notice the last result ever if you always run it from the GUI run box instead of a console, as the resulting console in that instance closes pretty instantly after the fourth result is displayed.
As someone who was burned by it during the 2010s, this is no longer the case. My Bazzite install worked out-of-the-box with no tweaking whatsoever. I've been on this install since April 2024.
Better hardware support, more funding and development on the desktops, Flatpak, more apps being web apps, Proton, everything converged finally.
What's odd is this machine does not work seamlessly under Windows, it doesn't support the wifi or ethernet driver out of the box and refuses to load it during Windows setup, and that of course requires an internet connection to complete now. This works fine under Linux.
I'm afraid you are not going to convince anyone like that who was not already convinced.
I've been using both Windows and Linux for the past decade, and I think we have to acknowledge that both have their strengths and weaknesses. For instance, there is no doubt that the Linux UX is less polished or that Windows makes UI customization more difficult (it is possible but you have to write dlls instead of css).
But the points you make do not really touch the core of the difference. The ability to drag windows from any point? That's horrible for people who like to click on stuff without intention to drag a window. It's like the shitty toolbars in Office 95 that were not 'locked' by default so you would accidentally move them around all the time.
Backspace only single characters? Windows 2000 already supported ctrl+bs/del, so not sure where this is going. Same for block devices, those were supported for an eternity, and were contributing to make Windows more prone to rootkits. And so on for most of the points you made - they are simply not true, perhaps because you are not familiar with Windows :(
I do agree that Linux should be preferred today for most people who are just starting out on computers. So let's get the facts straight and leave out controversial and opinionated topics that only let Windows fanboys go "Akshually".
> I do agree that Linux should be preferred today for most people who are just starting out on computers.
As someone who's used a variety of OSes (ranging from FreeBSD to Windows and macOS) on desktops and laptops, including trying out 6 Linux distros in the past couple of years (Arch, Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Bluefin, and currently NixOS), I honestly don't understand how you end up with "Linux is the best choice for people who are just starting out".
I'm experienced and I prefer Linux, but the amount of time investment I've needed to put into troubleshooting and customizing any of these distros (from Mint having the least to NixOS having the most) has been higher than either Windows (10 or 11) or macOS.
Depends on what you’re customizing them toward. If you want to make it act exactly like macOS, that’s going to be a lifelong struggle. (The opposite is also true: I hated my Mac until I stopped trying to make it work like my Linux desktop and started doing things its way.)
> The ability to drag windows from any point? That's horrible for people who like to click on stuff without intention to drag a window.
Not OP, but that's not the way it works - you'll need to press a modifier key (typically Alt or Win/Meta) along with the drag operation, so you can't do it accidentally. And you can always turn it off from the settings if you don't like this behaviour.
> I do agree that Linux should be preferred today for most people who are just starting out on computers
Why just single out newbies? Even old fogies can switch to Windows. My 70yr old mum used all versions of Windows from 3.1 - 7, and she switched to Linux about a decade ago, starting with Mint, and now on Aurora. She does all the basic tasks most PC users do (surfing the web, editing docs, printing/scanning, backing up photos etc) and has zero issues. If my mum - and old school Windows user - can use Linux, so can anyone else.
Just use a sensible distro with sane defaults (like Aurora), or a DE with a sane GUI (KDE or XFCE) and you'll be fine. The core UI /UX paradigms is the same as Windows, you just need to have an open mind and take your time getting used to the differences.
Naturally there are some people who can't deal with change, so Linux may never be an option for them, but for other folks, unless the have a legit reason to stick to Windows (like dependency on some proprietary app/workflow), Linux is a pretty viable option these days.
That's uncharitable: Stability matters, and Linux just doesn't give a fuck about breaking the environment since software is of course FOSS and can just be recompiled from sauce, right?
Meanwhile try to launch a proprietary app and have it work after some years? Lol, good luck unless you constantly update it. Windows, you can still run ancient apps because key parts of the system are stable.
Very subjective. I made the switch to Linux from Windows 7 over 10 years ago and even at that time I found Linux to be orders of magnitude better in almost every aspect, and those few areas where it was worse (which, aside from games, I'm struggling to even think of any now) were well worth the trade-off.
People use Windows because of the software, not because of the operating system itself. The best thing windows can do is not assert itself and hide as much as possible. As soon as you have to start interacting with any windows systems, it becomes clear how hacky and poorly conceptualized the OS is.
The best versions of Windows were the least annoying.
Windows wasn’t fully usable until the terminal and WSL shipped. And now isn’t due to adverts and loss of local accounts, and other hostile anti-features.
Windows 7 was the first version that gave me stability that made Linux feel like less of a must-have / only option.
Windows 11 largely gives me no problems and has worked perfectly fine with the hardware I've thrown at it, with no effort on my part. WSL is definitely a bonus.
The same just has not been true of Linux for me during the same time period with the same pieces of hardware.
I still happen to run NixOS on my laptop (the most recent of 6 distros, and Windows, I've tried over the past couple of years). It's not been entirely trouble-free but (thanks to the Arch wiki, mostly), it's in a decent state now.
And you are right about the hostile anti-features, though, and that promises to only get worse.
My windows PC has been relegated to games and will likely get whatever first stable, headache free SteamOS+NVIDIA incarnation turns up.
I've got no more affection for Windows than for Linux. There are just cases where the former has given me fewer headaches than the latter.
Sounds like a hardware issue on the Linux side. Been using Dell developers for decades and recently Frameworks and had only temporary issues with brand-new chipsets. Star labs tablet is great as well.
On the Windows side NT 3.5 was rock solid with limited software selection, 4 was decent, XP was fine for me behind a firewall but not everyone was so lucky on the security angle. No one liked Vista but I don't remember it being due to crashing.
Sounds like the wireless card issue of a few years back. Believe it was fixed by replacing the cheaper module with an Intel wireless card. Never affected me.
My first attempt at Linux was installing Mandrake sometime circa 2002. I was only a kid that liked computers back then, not really an advanced user. I could not make the mouse work, and gave up. Probably for a more advanced user that was not an issue, and Linux was better already.
Many years later, around 2015, I had the option to work from a Linux environment at my workplace, and went for it. Ubuntu this time around, during Windows 7 days. Many consider Windows 7 to be peak Windows, and I found Ubuntu to be much, much better. At least for regular use and Dev work. The only thing that kept me from using it on my own PC was that running my game library was not possible back then. I did keep it on dual boot for a few years though.
What allowed me to move for good was Proton. In some ways, that is the point where I can say, without any caveats or asterisks, that Linux is definitely better.
My experience is kinsa similar to yours, started around 98/99 with Red Hat and Mandrake. Linux was just so clunky at the time. I could never take it seriously, having to compile the kernel for getting something basic going was not very fun. Although it was pretty fun trying out all the various distros that would come on free CDs bundled with computer magazines (remember those?!).
I was in fact playing around with several alternate OSes at the time, and the ones which really impressed me the most were QNX and BeOS. I absolutely loved QNX for being so performant - especially at multitasking, was smooth as butter my humble 450MHz PIII. QNX solved the desktop interactivity problem more than two *decades* before Linux did, and I think that's pretty damn impressive. And BeOS blew me away with its multimedia performance.
It wasn't until Windows 7 came out, that I decided to switch to Linux full time (started with SuSE, then Fedora and switched to Arch a few years later). Basically my reason for switching was because I wasn't eligible for Microsoft's student discount and I couldn't afford to pay the full price for 7, and I was actually really looking forward to it and really wanted to buy it instead of pirating it, thinking I could get the student discount... but no. I got really ticked off at Microsoft and decided to just format my PC and switch to Linux for good.
I agree, but that's possibly because my experience with Linux in the age of 95 and 98 was Dragon Linux, which was adapted to sitting next to a Windows installation on a FAT partition and had some limitations and instabilities.
Once I got my first consumer high end PC that was really my own and payed for with my own money, with one of the early hyperthreading CPU:s, it didn't take long until I made the move from Windows to Slackware and never looked back. I've used later Windows versions quite a lot, but spent more time in Putty sessions against Linux and BSD boxes than anything else on them.
it was the better os for me in 2005 because it allowed me to do everything I needed for class on the only laptop I could afford at the time. windows mistake edition just didn't work at all beyond booting and running a browser and even that caused it to crash several times per hour.
Linux has remained the best operating system for me since that time despite multiple upgrades to more powerful machines. everything I needed was available in the package manager. when I turned it on to work, it turned on and I worked. when I turned it off, it turned off. it didn't start upgrading and then hang, like my friends computers.
In fact I kept supporting friends on windows for a few more years, but after that I just told them I didn't know how it worked, because windows was just such mess to support.
Linux is now the better OS on the desktop for many more people after the other one got significantly¹ worse than it used to be.
It has been the better OS server-side and for appliance applications (routers, media players, …) for a long time, Windows may be drawing equal but does that count if some of it is due to WSL?
It has been the better OS, or often just the equal OS for a lot of desktop users for a fair while also, particularly non-gamers who don't need other specific tools that don't have a sufficiently compatible Linux offering/alternative. Many use it because the cost is hidden and might use something else given a properly informed choice.
I wouldn't put it in front of my Dad, even though pretty much all he does is no different on Windows than Linux and has been for years, because of compatibility concerns with printers/scanners and because there are others in the family able+willing to support Windows so he isn't stuck waiting for me if he ever has trouble while I'm difficult to contact.
I don't run Linux on my main desktop due to inertia (games are largely what kept me with Windows long enough to have to make the 8->10 transition) but that is not enough any more, partly because it just isn't really there (lack of things keeping me on Windows because they don't work well easily elsewhere, and irritations with Win11 applying a noticeable retrograde force) and partly because my use patterns have changed (modern games are not a thing in my life ATM, my hobbies have changed considerably in the last decade). That machine will be switching over to Linux when I get around to it, or it might just be shut off (almost all data is on Linux on the little house server, and off-site copies, already anyway) in which case the laptop will just gain a dock so it can better use the big screens & whatnot.
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[1] I might also take issue with significantly, as that might imply the change is sudden and due specifically to the Win10 EOL. Windows, both 11 & 10 and 8 before them, has been going downhill slowly enough that each extra irritation has faded into something that people put up with before the next one comes along. Recent changes (more ads etc) are generally small² but are the final straw.
[2] Recall (and the justified consternation it creates) is the one recent change that I would call significant in its own right. As irritating as the other AI stuff nagging us to give it something to do is to those of use that don't want it, in many places it just feels like an evolution of Cortana's presence from a UX PoV more than a revolution in its own right, and doesn't feel nearly as invasive overall as the Recall subset does on its own.
I think the better way to look at is that no matter how good Linux gets, if MS didn't shoot themselves in the foot it would always struggle to make headway. Even the modest headway it's made over the last couple years.
It's not about quality, it's about market dominance. Walk into any major retailer, 95% of the computers they sell have Windows on them (100% if they don't sell Apple). Go to any company and see what they run on almost all their computers, Windows. Go to any school, probably the same thing (though years ago Apple would have had a strong presence too).
And that's not even talking about business software like Office. MS built that dominance back when Linux was almost entirely focused on the server space. What Desktops did exist where mostly hobby projects or relatively small companies. Shit Linux itself was a hobby project lol.
MS has had that position for over 20 years. Windows is the Xerox of computers. A lot of people don't even realize there are options out there. In that environment, even if the Linux Desktops got better than Windows, it should have taken an absolute killer app or some big evolution in the space to get people switching. All MS had to do was keeping offering a competent product. Or even a kind of shitty one that didn't actively give people a reason to switch.
But they can't help themselves. Most of the money isn't enough, they need all the money. And they've degraded their product to the point where it is actively driving people away. And even now it'll probably take another decade for Linux Desktops to break the 10% mark.
Modern Ubuntu, for me, is akin to Windows 7 (peak Windows), but with some added benefits like real package management and mnemonics (the underlined letters in menus you can access with alt+underlined letter), and other cool things like middle-click anywhere on the window to resize.
Even Mac is pretty bad by comparison.
Again, this is just me, but I wonder if people saying Linux is bad are really just complaining it's different? It does help that I only buy hardware I know works.
Linux desktop has improved a lot, but the huge momentum of the competitor has prevented many people (including OP) from switching or even remotely considering it. Anything that decreases the momentum of Windows lets the improvements of Linux show.
I think it has improved significantly. For the last few years KDE has been great and getting more polished.
The pain points are nothing worse than the crap Windows 11 throws at you. The only difference for the average person is that their go to tech support person might not know Linux. And paid support options like the India call centre stuff that gets thrown in with a laptop purchase for a month or so doesn't exist for Linux.
As with anything, there are transition costs. If your current solution becomes worse, those transition costs become relatively lower. So it says a lot more an issue of moving over than anything about linux
Yes, of course? Linux could be immaculate, but having less than 5% user share is a bigger issue that is best solved by the current market leader cratering.
Linux being the best OS didn't just "happen". It was a long process in many fronts (usability, devices, drivers, games, etc). But despite that, people are still reluctant to even try Linux, so Windows screwing around is the best thing that can happen to Linux.
I think it counts. If the most popular airline in the world suddenly started forcing you to commit to a subscription model to travel, one would consider less popular airlines going forward. Sometimes consistency of doing the job without adding hassle is more important than arriving at every destination under the sun. The problem with the Linux Desktop is it that it has a reputation as a scrappy alternative until it hits that random problem that grounds it. It will never replace Windows but it can take bigger and bigger chunks of users out of it.
The argunent is that it forced people to break their habit. Which is always the main hurdle for adoption. There is nothing innovative about Linux 2025 compared to 2024 or 2023, Windows just got worse. I say this as a 12+ years linux user. The biggest shift for the normies was Proton, and we got steam to thank for that. But Linux is more secure, reliable and hard tested as ever.
I think you missed the point. Linux was already good: it didn't become good because its competitor became worse. Rather, the competitor becoming worse gives some people the push they finally needed to make the switch.
As a long term Linux desktoppy, I find this a mixed blessing.
I fear Linux will get ruined by the influx of windows runaways. Enterprise managers will start enforcing their braindead ideas. Group policies, DRM, security scanner slowness, ads, they will all start to appear. Banks will start to 'secure' yoyr desktop. Then politicians will come in and require the KDEs of this world to implement chat control-like things. Eternal september awaits.
Linux is still reasonably controlled by the end user. The powers that be only allow that if we are a fringe group. The golden cage to lock down Linux is already built or being built, and letting us keep the key to it is not something that will be tolerated.
They'd have to outlaw compilers to make that work.
Say (hypothetically) they forced KDE and Gnome to do that - they are open source, you can't hide that it was done, someone will rip out that part and either compile and release a new distro or post the git somewhere outside that jurisdiction and someone else will do it.
This isn't a new thing even - we've had free/non-free/rpmfusion and the like for decades - hell back in the day I had to pull and compile freetype because of the patent on subpixel hinting that was valid in the US and not in the EU.
The one that does worry me more is that they straight up just start locking down the hardware more strictly - a mobile phone style attestation/locked bootloaders would be a major challenge to open computing.
I am confused. What "Linux"? There are many distributions. There is the kernel (many versions). Maybe even today they are some distributions that are as you described, used in certain companies or states or whatever. But you can choose another one and you will still be fine.
Yes and no. There are many distros, but they all use the same components. If outside entities only allow you to run specific distros or configs, you're done. Some examples:
* My jobs VPN only runs on Ubuntu. There is code in there that checks your OS.
* My bank wants the chrome browser. Messing with headers makes it work on firefox. But that's for now and needs me spending time fighting them.
* sssd is starting some light GPO enforcement on my laptop.
* systemd slowly moves towards encrypted home dirs and a fully validated boot chain. That's a golden cage with a lock to which we have the key. Microsoft can take the key away, and governements can make them do this.
* Android is also theoretically multi distro, but Google is the only one that matters. And they just decided they want developers identity.
* Most if the big sites make you jump trough hoops for non-chrome browsers. Facebook, cloudflare, Teams...
Computers are now part of networks, a bit like their own societies. These will force you to use their rules or isolate you. And that's assuming you can keep buying machines that are open or legally jailbreakable.
> If outside entities only allow you to run specific distros or configs, you're done
For many years the only thing "allowed" was Windows. There was a big effort done by some people to push back against that.
> My jobs VPN only runs on Ubuntu
Does your job allow a personal device? For many jobs I got a company laptop and that was it. No choice of OS/distro or anything. And to be honest, I find this reasonable considering how "careful" are people with their devices.
> My bank wants the chrome browser
From the banks I tried (I ended up with 6 accounts) in the last 3 years, only one had some issues with Firefox. So, for me, there was (still) plenty of option.
> Most if the big sites make you jump trough hoops for non-chrome browsers
And whoever cares should push back (I mean Facebook? I stopped using it because is crap ignoring any browser/os behavior). It was much worse, I am honestly amazed that we managed to arrive were we are.
Just as an example: in the 2000 I had to wait one month to get a laptop without Windows pre-installed, and need to travel one hour because they would not deliver at home, then install a Linux distro myself. Would you have said then "but we have no option, everything that comes to my doorstep tomorrow is Windows" ? You can say "but not everybody can do that", sure, but if people that can, don't, then wo will?
Normally I'd be unhappy when a sleazy corp forces me to give up on 25 years of muscle memory of using my preferred OS, but I'm thankful they gave me the push I needed to rip off the ad/spyware laced Windows Band-Aid that I only need to do once in my life.
It's been over a year since I switched to Linux which has been a breath of fresh-air, all my dev tools work natively, the console is far superior and I'm still able to play all my favorite Steam games.
Best of all I'm not reminded daily that I'm using an OS that works against my best interests, I can actually use an App Store again that's been designed for the benefit of its Users, imagine that.