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I love Linux, but it isn’t ready.
Two weeks ago my side mouse buttons started working (they require Logitech software on Windows, wasn’t expecting them to work). Last week they stopped. This week they work again.
Is this major? Not at all. Would it drive my mother-in-law into a rage rivaling that of Cocaine Bear? Absolutely. Spare me from the bear, keep Linux for the tinkerers.
they require Logitech software on Windows
This seems more like a logitech issue than a linus issue.
The issue isn’t that they didn’t work, as I said I wasn’t expecting them to when I bought the mouse.
The issue is their behavior has started changing with updates. I don’t mind, but I’m a tinkerer. My wife, my MiL, most of my friends, absolutely do not want to deal with an inconsistent computer experience.
Different definitions of ‘ready’ I guess. Been using primarily Linux for years, so it was ‘ready’ for me back then - but nothing has changed in the mean time that would change my recommendation for people who just want a boring stable computer.
Was the logitech mouse not supported by libratbag (backend of Piper)?
This sentence alone is why Linux is a hard sell for the average person.
Sounds more like your hardware isn’t ready for Linux.
I tried switching to linux like 10 years ago, but then, all the games i played didn’t work. I tried switching again a month ago, but my cpu (i honestly don’t remember) wasn’t compatible. I watched youtube videos for a workaround, and that was way above my paygrade, because i’m worried i’m gonna skullfuck my computer by changing random ini files because a youtuber said so. I tried it on the laptop and i kinda just didn’t work either for a diffrent reason. I don’t care as much about my laptop, so i’ll try again. As much as i hate windows, and i really really do, you hit a button and it’s installed.
What distro are you on? I’ve been out of Linux for like 3 months now but never had issues with my mouse randomly changing behavior in the year or so prior to that. Whether they work or not is up in the air, but random behavior changes seems like a weird practice
Same. I have a Kensington trackball with a decent config and button mapping software in Windows that I will NOT give up. I tried Mint for a few weeks, but it just became too stupidly cumbersome to Google every single thing. Like I wanted to implement the Windows PIN thing for startup on my PC… Yeah no.
Linux has come a long way but it’s not ready for the commoners like me. And a free open source OS probably cannot be developed for the masses without some major funding with a dedicated team.
So back to Win 10, Enterprised with massgrave.
You don’t see how terrible Windows is until you’ve switched to another OS and need to interact with it again.
The constant pop-ups, the ads everywhere, the settings hidden away.
It really feels like your PC isn’t yours.
I have to use Windows at work. Once, apropos of nothing at all, a system pop-up asked me if I wanted to buy an XBox controller. When I lock the screen and come back, sometimes Edge will have opened all by itself, presenting me with the Bing homepage. Nice try, Microsoft!
I used to think I could just stick to macOS. But I don’t trust the USA and by extension, I don’t trust Apple.
Switching to Linux isn’t a choice anymore. It’s a requirement for freedom.
Yeah, Apple will just cave when necessary. Honestly, even if the USA is removed from the equation, nobody is really safe from any government or corporation. We’re only in better and worse condition because no one has done the unthinkable yet. The UK online safety bill, Signal’s threat to leave Sweden, France busting activists using Swiss VPN. If you can’t host it yourself, secure it yourself, rebuild it yourself, you can’t trust businesses and governments to do these things for you in the long run.
Hell, it’s starting to feel a lot less like freedom and more about the ability to hide, even if you’re doing nothing wrong, because someone may eventually decide that what you’re doing was wrong.
Encrypting your chats to keep them from being sold/mined for government oversight? ILLEGAL!
I think you’re 100% correct.
With all my Apple stuff I thought we were headed for a Star Trek federation. Instead we’re getting a starship troopers federation 😞
Linux is American by that definition
I’ll bite. How? It’s open source software championed by a Finnish academic professor.
Yeah that makes zero sense to me
Lots of the money comes from the US and US companies. But as you said, it is open source.
US corporations donate to the Linux Foundation, and in fact all the Platinum members of the Linux Foundation (donors of $500k or more/year) are corporations - although I don’t think they’re all American. But the Linux Foundation has no control over the code, it merely promotes use of Linux. Did you mean something else by, “Lots of money comes from…”?
That was pretty much what I meant.
I think by America they pretty clearly meant corporate America and its corporate-owned government, neither of which controls how Linux works.
Linux was awesome 15 years ago. They probably just had driver problems. Those used to be much worse.
In the command-line-only world of the 80s I thought Unix was awesome already!
It was.
I mean, the core utilities are all from then and there.
Month and a half into using Mint Cinnamon… frankly it’s hard to feel like I’m not still using Win10. What comes to mind immediately is that file management dialogs in apps are less consistent with how the file manager itself works, whereas in Windows it’s all more uniform. But IMO that’s very minor. Overall UX feels the same to me.
Note: I am not a computer gamer so can’t comment on how games work on Linux, and also I’ve used Ubuntu and BSD in the past. Just had Windows at home to be consistent with work. I retired several years ago and it still took me this long to switch over.
My first trial (after 2 months) was installing something that was not on the software manger. With installation instructions writen for Arch. That needed Python to work. It stops feeling like windows real quick then :-)
I felt that way when I tried to get setup on Windows to do Python programming on Arduino. In fact I gave up. Yesterday when I installed GIMP 3.0 on Mint it took a minute of research to decide which thing to download. It turned out that Flatpak is installed on Mint by default, so I just clicked on the Flatpak download for GIMP and boom, painless installation.
But another difference between Mint and Windows for me is Arduino development. Uploading code to microcontrollers on Windows was always a crapshoot - the Arduino IDE would be unable to connect to a COM port, or couldn’t see a COM port at all. On Mint it’s pure smooth sailing.
Hey I’ve got them beat I’ve never tried Linux!
(I need to though, I really do.)
I think once Valve polishes SteamOS for desktop environments there will be actual largescale migration.
Will ValveOS be useful for anything besides playing games?
If it is useful at only playing games I think it will be a popular option nonetheless.
Sure, lots of people mainly use their computers for games, but I would think even they would demand at least a web browser and/or social media apps.
I thought the holdup was the graphics drivers (Nvidia mostly) not the de. Normal desktop mode with KDE works fine on my steamdeck.
Fair point. But even so I think SteamOS has the most viable potential to achieve something like a 5-10% adoption rate that could get entities like nVidia to pay more attention.
Only a small fraction of people use Steam so I don’t see that happening.
Steam apparently has about 130 million monthly active users and about 70 million daily active users. About half the planet has a computer at home. So, Steam users are somewhere between say 2% and 10% of the world’s active PC users.
If someone is a daily active steam user, they spend a lot of time on the computer. If they have to make sure their drivers are up to date and their frame rate is high enough to support their games, they’ve probably developed a bit of knowledge about the system. My guess is that people who play Steam games tend to be the tech support people for their friends and family more often than not.
So, it’s a small group, but it’s an influential group. If enough of that group becomes comfortable with SteamOS, they may be comfortable setting it up (or a variant of it) for a friend or family member, even if that friend or family member only uses their computer to watch videos, check emails, etc. In a world where Windows was free and just worked, that might not happen. But, in this world Windows 10 is about to lose support, and Microsoft is suggesting that if your computer can’t run Windows 11 you should just throw it away and upgrade. In that world, more people might end up switching to Linux.
Maybe. I just mean once(if) there becomes an OS that reliably runs Steam and the games on Steam, there will be a viable alternative to Windows for a significant population of users.
Proton covers most games that I play, only a couple exceptions involving heavy handed anti-cheat stuff like League of Legends has now. For non-gaming Windows stuff that doesn’t work in Linux I would guess that a virtual machine might work.
Based Linux wont run riot games
Is that a bad thing?
Dont get me wrong, I love the IP for League, but the I would never reccomend the game to anyone.
That’s why it is based.
league of legends used to work on linux. they removed the compatibility, explicitly.
They’re just trying to match the toxicity of their players.
can’t be done, but they’re making an admirable go of it.
With the most braindead reason,
There are barely any Linux users…
Riot… I quit the game because I didn’t want to bother with proton and get mad when it goes wrong. And I knew kernel anti cheat would come. And all the Linux fans who are addicted enough are running the game on windows specifically. I literally have a friend with a windows VM with graphic card passthrough to play league of legends… That guy gets counted as a windows User…
Fucking idiot create the most toxic environment for Linux users and then say they don’t attempt to support Linux because the Linux users didn’t bother to fight their shit enough in a detectable way.
well it’s good for us, I think. it wasn’t fun anymore last time I played it, and it was never a healthy habbit.
whoa gpu pss through is wild, how well does it work ?
Some would say that League not working with proton is a blessing.
Because it is.
Same goes for Valorant, I hear.
Playing Valorant is like opening port 22 and having “password” as your root password.
Not to mention the backdoor it opens into your soul, for the toxic commumity to pour their verbal detritus into.
It was Valorant first, because of the kernel anticheat, which they eventually brought to league too
The joke is that the games are bad, and the communities too toxic, to be a healthy hobby.
Thereby, a person being prevented from playing is being blessed, not because there is no longer a backdoor into their system. But because they will no longer have to endure the verbal abuse of temmates and opponents.
The windows user brain cannot comprehend actually enjoying to use a computer.
As a Windows & Linux user, I can, in the same way that I get that car people love working on cars.
I still really don’t ever want to work on cars but I understand.
I largely use technology of any kind for the applications of its use, not because of an intrinsic desire to knee deep in technical work.
It is funny to watch old Windows admins bring all sorts of bad habits to Linux
Like what? Genuinely asking as a Windows user with a few Linux machines.
File extensions, wanting a GUI for everything, running some random threat detection software, assuming that Linux is lightweight so therefore it will make old machines have modern performance… The list goes on
yeah this was the thing.
it’s not even about whether linux is ready. windows got sloppy drunk and rode its motorcycle into a brick wall. it’s linux or nothing now.
Obligatory (semi)relevant XKCD
Classic.
Last time I tried was last autumn. It didn’t go well (again). I try regularly because computer OS is pretty much the last thing I have to switch to get rid of spytech. I suppose I’m not skilled enough, but it’s not fair to suppose that people don’t switch to linux on pc because they’re lazy, or ignorant, or bad or things like that.
Sadly I’m still not sure if it is ready. I installed Mint to a couple systems this year and am really disappointed at how much tinkering and troubleshooting I have had to do. Like I had to order a specific wifi card because almost nobody makes linux compatible wifi usb adapters. My brand new computer couldn’t connect to the internet despite me already having an expensive wifi dongle.
The linux community will do anything besides improve the usability of their technology in their quest to get people to use their inferior technology.
Post less memes, make an OS that is stable, has a navicable UI, and runs the things people want to run.
Crazy how different our experiences have been. Over the last decade I’ve hopped from Ubuntu to Mint, Debian, Fedora, Nobara, and currently on Bazzite. Never had an issue connecting to the internet. (shrugs)
I hate to be one of the “Linux isn’t ready” people, but I have to agree. I love Linux and have been using it for the last 15 years. I work in IT and am a Windows and Linux sysadmin. My wife wanted to build a new gaming PC and I convinced her to go with Linux since she really only wanted it for single player games. Brand new build, first time installing an OS (chose Bazzite since it was supposed to be the gaming distro that “just works”). First thing I did was install a few apps from the built in App Store and none of them would launch. Clicking “Launch” from the GUI app installer did nothing, and they didn’t show up in the application launcher either. I spent several hours trying to figure out what was wrong before giving up and opening an issue on GitHub. It was an upstream issue that they fixed with an update.
When I had these issues, the first thing my wife suggested was installing Windows because she was afraid she may run into more issues later on and it “just works”. If I had never used Linux and didn’t work in IT and decided to give it a try because all the cool people on Lemmy said it was ready for prime time, and this was the first issue I ran into, I would go back to Windows and this would sour my view of Linux for years to come.
I still love Linux and will continue to recommend moving away from Windows to my friends, but basic stuff like this makes it really hard to recommend.
Alright, I have shared my unpopular opinions on Lemmy, I’m ready for my downvotes.
I just recently installed Bazzite and I have to say that your experience was unusual. Installing apps from the built in Software Center (it’s not really an app store, because it’s not really a store), just worked for me.
But, I’ll agree with you that Linux isn’t quite ready for mass adoption. Currently I’m tracking an nVidia bug that results in my GPU locking up when doing pretty normal things. The bug was reported 3 weeks ago, and is affecting a lot of people with more than 1 monitor, but still hasn’t been fixed. I’m also tracking 2 annoying but not system-crashing bugs. Plus, there’s another behaviour that happens daily that is annoying and I haven’t had the time to track down.
Mostly, these are “chicken and egg” things. The nVidia bug was allowed to happen and wasn’t fixed quickly because there aren’t enough Linux users for nVidia to bother to fully test their things on lots of different Linux configurations before releasing them, or to make it an all-hands-on-deck emergency when they break. If there were more users, the drivers would be better. But it’s hard to get people to migrate to Linux because there are frequently buggy drivers. Same with other drivers, and other commercial software. People don’t switch because it’s glitchy, it’s glitchy because there aren’t enough users for companies to properly invest in fixing things, that makes it glitchy, so people won’t switch.
Having said that, the thing that prompted me to install Bazzite was that I was getting BSODs in Windows and I wasn’t sure if it was a driver issue or a hardware issue. It turned out to be bad nVidia drivers… but they were fixed in days, not weeks. So, it’s not that things don’t break in Windows, it’s just that it’s a bigger emergency when they do break.
I’m not going back to Windows any time soon. Despite the issues I’m having, there are some parts of the system that are so much better than Windows.
Like, people complain about Linux having a bad UI, but have you ever tried to change low-level network settings in Windows? You start in a windows 10 or 11 themed settings app. If the thing you’re trying to change doesn’t show up there you have to click to open a lower-level settings app, this one styled in a Windows XP UI. And if that’s not where the setting lives, you have to open up a lower-level thing that is using the Windows NT / Windows 3.1 interface.
Or, anything involving using a commandline. Windows does actually support doing a lot of things using the “DOS prompt” but that thing feels like a Fisher Price toy compared to a real shell. Even the “power” shell is a janky mess.
Or, any time you have to touch the registry. Only an insane person would prefer to deal with making changes there vs. making changes in a filesystem where you can comment out values, leave comments explaining what you did, back up files, etc.
But, while Linux isn’t quite there for the end-user, it’s getting closer and closer. Really, all that’s needed is enough people taking the plunge to make it a higher priority for devs. It could be that Microsoft deciding that Windows 10 machines that are not capable of running Windows 11 should just be thrown out will convince enough people to try Linux instead. Linux might not yet beat Windows for the average end user, but the annoyances associated with Linux vs. a machine you just have to throw away? That’s an easy one.
I agree with you, lemmings and the Linux community as a whole has the incredible lack of ability to put themselves in the shoes of a technologically less literate “normal” person and see that Linux is not exactly ready for mainstream
That being said, tour first fuck up was not going with EndeavorOS the actual distro that’s for gamers (or anyone) that just works.
It’s based on arch btw
I get it. Working in IT and doing this stuff all the time and being surrounded by other technical people really disconnects you from the knowledge of the average user. I’ve worked in IT for over 10 years now, and I am always overestimating how much technical knowledge the average user has. Luckily I don’t have to talk to end users anymore, but even when helping friends and family with things, stuff that I think is common knowledge isn’t common among less tech-savvy people. I still struggle with this, and suspect I will for a very long time.
I’ve heard of Endeavor before as well. May give it a try, but then I feel like I would be one of the distro-hoppers I always see out there. I just crave stability.
Windows is just more familiar. It definitely has problems just like this all the time. There’s a reason most companies have to have a test environment to try out every update to make sure it doesn’t break everything.
I’ve been using Linux for over thirty years and the nice looking App Stores that have appeared those last few years have always been shit and have always been mostly broken in various ways. I don’t know why.
On the other hand, the ugly frontends to the package manager just work.
In this case it was installing them from flathub anyway. The applications were being installed, but the only way to launch them was through the CLI using flatpak run then the app ID. Every article I came across said to run that, then right click the app after it was open and pin it to the taskbar or whatever, but that option was greyed out.
Choosing Bazzite was a big mistake, you could’ve gone for NobaraOS or PopOS
I’m used to the CLI world of Linux. I wanted something for my non-technical wife that would “just work”. I’ve heard good things online about Bazzite and how it already has everything installed (Steam, Wine, Proton, graphics drivers, all that) and I didn’t want to mess with installing any of that stuff by hand. Idk, maybe it’s my fault for expecting a distro to have basic functionally out of the box.
I think blaming me for choosing a distro based on what it says it’s supposed to do is a bit silly. Sure, I could have installed any distro and worked to install and maintain everything by hand, but that’s not what I was looking for. I don’t want to play tech support every week when something breaks and spend hours trying to fix it when my wife just wants to play a game. If you enjoy that, great, more power to you. Sorry for not choosing your favorite distro, I guess.
It’s not my favorite distro, the maintainer of Proton-GE created NobaraOS
Choosing a distro based on what it says it does is not on you. Recommending it to your wife without even having tried it is. When I put Ubuntu on my wife’s computer, I know what to expect because I’ve installed on just abuse every pc I’ve ever used in the past 10 years.
I installed Bazzite on my personal gaming PC a few months ago, so I have done more than try it. My AMD drivers would crash on Windows when playing Helldivers about every 30 minutes. I lost count of the number of times I booted into safe mode and ran DDU to uninstall drivers. Haven’t had the issue a single time on Linux. The Bazzite image I’m using on her PC is different than mine since she currently has an NVIDIA GPU. She has an old 1080Ti because Microcenter was out of stock of all GPU’s on the day we went to buy the rest of the parts for her build. Eventually she will get a newer AMD GPU as well and we can be on the same image.
This is exactly what keeps me from switching. I don’t have the time or pull to do knuckle down on an important PC. Maybe when I have a backup one, I’ll do it. Who knows.
You’re not wrong. This is an argument for sticking with Windows. It will suck. But, you know exactly how much it will suck and in what ways. Switching to Linux will suck in new and expected ways.
This.
I also had a similar experience with bazzite and ubuntu.
Apps would look like they installed but they are nowhere. Tried the app store. Tried flatpak. It instilled but clicking on the icon wouldn’t launch anything. Ended up with two icons for the same app. One works one doesn’t. No easy way to uninstall non working app.Bazzite bluetooth stopped working after update. Had to run two commands found on the Bazzite forum to get it to work again. Steam wouldn’t update either. Had to run another command I found on the forum to get it to update.
This is all last week. I am still running both but I wouldn’t call it ready for the non-IT user.
The App Store has to work consistently for it to be accessible for the average person.
Yeah that’ll happen if you run Bazzite. It’s extremely hardware dependent. It “just works” if you get lucky and use the same hardware as the developers. Otherwise, it’s a shitshow
I’m running a homelab with tons of CLI Ubuntu and whatnot, but I’m fine with Windows and Mac for desktop laptop, so I’ve never tried gnome or anything… I reflect on the last time I saw gui Linux… Creepy basement of dude we called Crazy Eyes around the neighborhood, around 2006, trying to convince us of the future.
He was right, though.
I run Linux daily, Linux isn’t ready, its really not much of a debate. If the average person can’t operate it efficiently then the average person will just stick to mac or windows.
I’ll admit it is closer than it has ever been thanks to compatibility layers like proton but the average user still can’t figure it out so it still has a way to go.
The average person can’t use Mac or Windows efficiently either lol
the average user clicks on the chrome icon to open the internet and goes to gmail.com.
you can do all that in linux.
Until everything breaks because the average user hasn’t bothered updating.
With atomic distros, that updating happens in the background, you don’t have to do anything. It’s like MacOS or Android.
Honestly, Windows isn’t ready for the desktop, either, it’s just not ready in a different way that most people are familiar with.
Things like an OS update breaking the system should be rare, not so common that people are barely surprised when it happens to them. In a unified system developed as one integral product by one company there should be one config UI, not at least three (one of which is essentially undocumented). “Use third-party software to disable core features of the OS” shouldn’t be sensible advice.
Windows is horribly janky, it’s just common enough that people accept that jank as an unavoidable part of using a computer.
I disagree. I’m running Bazzite, which is based on the immutable variant of fedora, and it runs like a charm, even without much knowledge. Most drivers are prepackaged, so stuff like WiFi aren’t much of a hassle anymore and I haven’t had any issues with Flatpak. It basically eliminates all fiddling at the cost of customizing your OS as much as other distros. Honestly, SteamOS did show that immutable distros are the de facto future for new users. So far I know of Bazzite and Fedora’s immutable distros variant, but there might be more.
I’ve been playing FFXIV on Linux with dlss, reshade and 3rd party mods and it’s been a blast.
Linux is 100% ready for gaming even with the worst case scenario (nvidia) I’ve been able to overclock and play just fine.
99% of people want a drop-in replacement for Windows that will install and run every possible Windows-compatible application, game and device without them having to make any extra effort or learn anything new. Basically Windows but free (in all senses).
Any even slightly subtle difference or incompatibility and they’ll balk. Linux can never be that, and Microsoft will keep the goalposts moving anyway to be sure of it.
Sure, a lot more works and is more user friendly than 15 years ago, but most people won’t make the time to sit down and deal with something new unless it’s forced on them… which is what Microsoft are doing with Win11.
Most of the hobbyists I speak to that have failed linux desktop experiences mostly switch back to windows due to:
- Hardware compatibility issues.
- Microsoft office interoperability limitations of the web based office.
- Display scaling issues on multi-monitor setups and some linux applications.
Personally for me the list is:
- Bluetooth not being detected on my particular asus laptop. (The same bluetooth chip works in other laptops)
- Multi-monitor scaling and resolution issues when 3 external monitors are connected via thunderbolt doc.
- Lack of good alternatives to fancyzones
Honestly I think potentially a bigger factor is that there are very few manufacturers who sell machines with linux preinstalled. Very few people have ever installed an OS before or have any desire to do so.
Also there is plenty of software with no real linux alternative even today unfortunately.
You say it like it’s a bad thing but yes, I want my stuff to just work and my apps to just run after I download them… I don’t want to spend hours every other day or week during my limited free time troubleshooting why something doesn’t work. I already spend all day doing that in my work’s linux servers and my home server.
This is an issue with FOSS. If something doesn’t work then you are on your own. Yes, I can fix it, or work around it, or whatever but it will take hours that I could be spending in windows 11 just playing a game or actually learn something more relevant instead of troubleshooting random shit. On other apps as well, I’ve paid for a lot of software to be able to ask the owners to help and for them to not tell me to fuck off.
Here’s an analogy: You can do your own gardening, or you can hire one of the two landscaping services in town.
This sounds great, but these days, no matter who you hire, the people who show up 1) want to install a fountain and an advertisement billboard that will run off your water and electricity supply and 2) want the right to take what they like from your house by default, they’ll mysteriously “forget” and do it anyway even if you pay them not to.
Furthermore, with their latest package, one of the landscaping companies are basically saying that if you don’t have a yard large enough for their fountain, you have to move house, which is only marginally better than the other one who will only work on gardens for houses they sold in the first place.
(A previous version of this comment involved the word “lube”. I’m sure you can imagine the rest.)
More user friendly doesn’t mean you won’t have to spend hours troubleshooting driver issues that you will never have on Windows, that’s a real problem…
(and when you find the solution you need to input commands in terminal that you can’t tell what they do, that’s a huge security concern as it teaches users to just trust anyone who tells them to do things they don’t understand)
Man, people really overstate the barrier to entry to the terminal. Windows troubleshooting is full of command line stuff as well.
It’s not the terminal, it’s the underlying issues. Having more GUI options to set certain things is nice, but the reality of it is that if an option isn’t customizable to the point of needing quick GUI access it should just never break, not be configurable or at least not need any manual configuration at any point. The reason nobody goes “oh, but Windows command line is so annoying” is that if you are digging in there something has gone very wrong or you’re trying to do something Windows doesn’t want you to do.
The big difference is that the OS not wanting you to do things you can do is a bug for people in this type of online community while for normies it’s a feature.
As a normie (at least in these circles), I think I agree with your last point. Windows being heavily restricted in its customizability is a feature. A bad feature, but a feature nonetheless.
The linux terminal is really easy to get into & the UNIX file-system is just nicely organized
You know whats worse than doing things in windows command line or powershell? The registry
“Nooooo! I cant $sudo nano /etc/some.conf!!!”
Regedit -> HKEY_USERS/microsoft/windows/system/some_setting --> value=FUCK type=DWORD
That’s because you are sending your Fucks to the wrong key. You are missing the /feedback folder under system
Windows 11 doesn’t even support first gen Ryzen CPUs. The amount of hardware that runs Windows 11 without tinkering is a tiny fraction of the hardware that runs Fedora Workstation without tinkering.
Linux is much better with drivers and hardware support than Windows. Windows only works well if you use the very small subset of hardware it supports.
The difference is that if you’re using hardware that’s compatible it just works. My current experience on Linux is that you have 100% hardware that’s supported based on what people are saying, you install one distro and your GPU shits the bed the second there’s load on it and WiFi works when it feels like it. Install another distro and the GPU works but WiFi doesn’t. In the end you spend hours troubleshooting and you’re applying solutions by trusting that people aren’t doing anything malicious when they tell you to input such and such in terminal.
On Windows? Install the OS, everything works, so no, there’s no issues with the hardware itself.
And the “small subset” of hardware it supports is anything made after 2017 and it’s only Windows 11 that doesn’t support hardware made before that.
Try to make Linux work without any outside intervention with all the hardware that Windows 11 is just compatible with out of the box, I dare you.
Huh, odd. I never had these issues, even though I use an Nvidia card with a VRR monitor. All my peripherals (webcam, printer, bluetooth earbuds) work out of the box, too. But maybe I’m just lucky.
That “small subset” is hundreds of millions of devices made in the last 5 years alone.
The problem with Linux (not their fault), is that most of the problems appear in hardware made in the last 3 years.
Kinda crazy, because W7 didn’t support first gen Ryzen either!
Running windows 11 on older hardware is as easy as a checkbox in Rufus. Also the small subset of hardware windows supports is by far the most used hardware (probably because it’s supported by windows).
Well, my brother installed linux (mint) on more than 30 laptops that we were fixing to reuse. Im pretty sure none of them had any driver problems.
Tbh, unless you have a NVIDIA graphics card, or are using arch*, driver issues almost never happen.
*my personal thinkpads wifi board didn’t work in arch, but that may be because I had already borked that install completly.
All AMD hardware, Bazzite was killing my GPU as soon as there was load on it and WiFi that worked intermittently, Mint had non working WiFi on a USB antenna that is supposed to be 100% Linux compatible.
So yeah, I would love it if Linux fanatics stopped pretending that Linux is just as plug n play as Windows, it isn’t and solutions rely on trusting random people on the Internet.
I don’t pretend anything, I commented my personal experiences. So I guess we both shouldn’t expect our experience to be the norm…
And tbh, statistically you have the upper hand, most people do use windows after all. (76% or something like that?)
Even the Nvidia graphics card sentiment is becoming outdated. There have been sizeable improvements in their drivers over the past couple years.
Correct. I’ve been rocking their open source driver on Wayland for about a year now, pretty smooth experience.
Though sleep is still a neverending struggle.
You’ve been rocking it for what? Does it support the DLSS feature set now along with HDR and VRR? I mean, it sure did show me a desktop for the few days I spent trying to get a clean, working install of the proprietary driver, but I wasn’t under the impression that I’d have feature parity without doing that.
I’ve defaulted to enabling the X reset on mine, just because waking from sleep is such shite.
Yeah, I was having trouble with sleep, and kwin compositing (KDE), so I switched to proprietary drivers and X11, its working pretty well.
In the last twenty years, I’ve pretty much only had nVidia hardware for graphics with very few issues.
Of course that wasn’t in laptops. Having a GPU in a laptop is asking for trouble anyway in my opinion.
“Unless you have a computer in the 90% of users” is a hell of a dismissal.
In fairness, thin-and-light media and web use laptops are a different story, but for desktop use? That’s a big stretch.
My man, you think 90% of pcs have a graphics card at all? I live in a poor country, so does the majority of the worlds population, and almost no one has a graphics card here.
No, I think 90% of the ones that do have a dedicated GPU have a Nvidia one. That’s not an opinion, it’s data that’s widely available.
It’s also, incidentally, just an example of one of the more egregious issues with the current state of Linux. It doesn’t mean it’s the only one.
In any case, that’s not typically the space being discussed here. The advice generally is “get an AMD GPU”, not “we are assuming you’re on integrated graphics”.
They want ReactOS.
But they don’t want to pay it to develop it fully
They also want the developers to dedicate their entire lives, 20 hours a day, for no pay, just became they’re entitled to a FOSS Windows clone.
This is my old man nerd point every time (and by the way, we all keep having the exact same conversation here, which is infuriating).
It is NOT, in fact, more user friendly than 15 years ago.
Not Linux’s fault, necessarily, but hardware got… weird since the days of the mid 00s when Linux WAS pretty much a drop-in replacement. What it couldn’t do then is run Windows software very well at all, and that was the blocker. If we had Proton and as many web-based apps as we do now in 2004 I’d have been on Linux full time.
These days it’s a much harder thing to achieve despite a lot more work having gone into it (to your point on moving goalposts).
It is NOT, in fact, more user friendly than 15 years ago.
This is just patently false. Pick any common distro.
it definitely is more user friendly, i remember trying ubuntu 10+ years ago and the default driver was awful, the nvidia driver install ran in the terminal and asked questions that i had no answer to, so half the time i fucked it up, and then it didn’t support my monitor so i had to edit the x server conf to get the correct resolution and refresh rate. and when the new drivers came out i had to re-do everything every time
for a few years now you just install with a usb stick and everything runs greatInstalling Windows machines 10+ years ago wasn’t much more fun either… (I’m not sure it’s any more fun these days, but I haven’t done it in ages, so I’ve no idea).
Having recently spent the equivalent to five work days trying to get an Nvidia setup working on Linux I’m going to say the experience isn’t necessarily much better, depending on what you are trying to do and how.
Audio and networking were a shitshow back then, nowadays almost everything just works on those two fronts. Also, having to edit your Xorg.conf is not what I’d call user friendly…
Especially if you had a soft-modem.
And printing. Oh dear, I might have a headache if I think too much about it.
Oh, man, I had entirely blocked the concept of “soft-modems” from my memory. I’m having flashbacks.
But there was this brief moment, though. Maybe that’s my problem, that I remember it as this momentous piece of Linux history to start getting these cool distros in nice, shiny professional-looking CDs with proper installers that would set up your DE first time every time and get everything mostly there… and it turns out that it was like three years and a couple of Ubuntu iterations.
FWIW, networking mostly works, but I had a heck of a time finding a distro that would properly do 5.1 out of my integrated ASUS audio device last time I went distro hopping. I think audio got better, worse and then better again since the good old days.
I had a heck of a time finding a distro that would properly do 5.1 out of my integrated ASUS audio device
That’s not even close to a common use case though. Using that as an indicator of how user friendly Linux is is unfair.
It’s not being used as an indicator of user friendliness (that’d be the atrocious time I had setting up my Nvidia GPU and HDR monitors). It’s specifically an anecdote replying to the previous guy’s (accurate) comment regarding how finicky old implementations of audio on Linux used to be.
But also, in case you’re wondering, that setup worked first time on Windows with no additional work beyond the drivers installed by Asus itself. Do I like, or even tolerate, ASUS’s weird driver manager? Nope, frickin’ hate it, would switch to Linux to avoid it all things being equal. But one thing worked first time, the other needed five different distros before one randomly got it right for no discernible reason.
Fair enough, sorry for the misunderstanding.
I’ve had the opposite experience with Windows audio though. It’s always been weird for me, randomly switching outputs for no reason, and I stopped even trying to connect wireless headphones because it would always seem to prioritize those, even when they’re turned off. Every 5 to 6 months I’d have to dig deep in the audio settings to fiddle with the gain on my mic so I’d stop blowing out my friends’ ears on discord.
I think we all need to start differentiating the usability quirks and general jank that all OS have in different areas from the blockers.
Yes, the way Windows handles sources and prioritization sucks, while different Linux DEs have dumb problems with UI scaling or their own audio quirks or MacOS has weird multimonitor support or whathaveyou. If that was it I’d be all for prioritizing the free alternative, no questions asked.
The issue is the blocking issues. Entire features not working, or working at noticeably sub-par performance. Hardware with straight-up nonexistent support you need to replace to make the jump, or that is so finicky to set up that it may as well not work for all the average user is concerned. Those are showstoppers.
The problem is you could have a LOT fewer of the quirks, but a single dealbreaker is enough to block somebody making the jump, or reporting that they tried and failed. I’m as annoyed with how inconsistently videoconferencing picks up the right audio output as anybody. I complain about it every time I have a work call. But I still wouldn’t suggest to any of my friends to try to set up their high end Nvidia GPU on Linux as a main gaming daily driver. Those two things are on completely different tiers.
