The only few reason I know so far is software availability, like adobe software, and Microsoft suite. Is there more of major reasons that I missed?
People told me “oh yeah, gaming on Linux is a comparable or even better experience compared with gaming on windows.” Well after a whole weekend spent troubleshooting and trying different distros only to get 20fps max and no controller support for a 5 year old pc game I went back to windows and was playing within about 30 minutes including the time to install the OS.
Edit: Before you go giving me tips: yes, I tried that too. You’re missing the point if your solution to the above is “more troubleshooting, I guess.”
Usually this means you didint install the proprietary graphics driver. Which you also have to do on windows (Geforce Experience )
And on windows, you can do all of this without touching the keyboard…
You don’t have to type in the website?
On-screen keyboard
Nice try Linus 😂
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Performance and reliability when gaming is my only reason for keeping Windows installed.
Steam and everything else have already exceeded my wildest expectations in Linux, however I am somebody who wants to come home from work, fire up a game and have it work perfectly with the best settings and framerates I can manage. I don’t have the time nor patience to troubleshoot why some update just broke the game in some way after I’ve spent the last 10 hours dealing with other people’s problems.
Yeah I’m still on Windows for the same reason. I seem to be a Linux gaming bug magnet, but I just keep having issues on basically any Linux PC that I try to game on. It’s getting better, but still not reliable enough for me. I have a Steam Deck now, which is super cool. But even there I had my fair share of bugs. I tried installing some software in desktop mode which instantly crashed the store (this was on first boot after a fresh install and update). I’ve also had my fair share of full Deck crashes during games already, especially after updates. Overall it’s very cool that it all works, but I don’t want to end up in a situation where I have to debug a game for 30 minutes (or more) instead of just playing the game. And that happens just a bit too often to me.
Man I relate to this so hard.
I haven’t used it since Valve made Proton what it is today, but:
The troubleshooting was a nightmare. Heaven forbid the trouble be with graphics drivers. I love the command terminal and all but when you try 10 different solutions from Stack Exchange and Reddit and all of them give you errors or do nothing at all… At some point I just had to accept that it wasn’t worth the amount of time I had to invest in it.
I hate Windows as much as the next guy but I had to admit that troubleshooting, for whatever reason, took significantly less time when problems came up on Windows.
I gave up on linux because it made academic collaboration difficult as a grad student. I spent too long trying to make a system to bridge the gap between mac/windows and linux, and not enough time on research. Professors don’t care that you use arch btw, they just want results, and will not be forgiving if you explain that linux is what’s slowing you down.
this is actually my case lol, no way I’m writing thesis in libreoffice or onlyoffice if I didn’t have much experience of using it
If you’re committed to word-style documents instead of LaTeX, pandoc is a great way to convert between word and the style of your choice (for me, markdown). I made a bunch of additional scripts to assist in conversion between the two.
That said, LaTeX is often a better choice. I’ve settled into a combination of overleaf / git / vscode / LaTeX that keeps my collaborators (and myself) happy.
Why aren’t you using LaTeX to write your thesis though?
Collaborative?
There are few online options, also you could just sync it to a common folder so it could work that way… But rarely thesis are drafted concurrently -
The main advantage of LaTeX is the easy type setting for journal articles/thesis etc and ease of changing the style.
Because I haven’t heard that app at the time, and none of my colleagues use it
20ish years ago I installed Ubuntu on a laptop with the intention to get off Windows. I then spent 4 to 6 hours a day for the next two weeks just trying to get the WiFi to function. None of the fixes I could Google up worked, and that was frustrating. It was the people in the Linux forums that finally made me quit trying, though. The amount of gatekeeping was kind of shocking. Like, how dare I bother such mighty computer men with my plebian questions. I should feel honored that anyone condescended to respond at all, and I should gratefully accept their link to a fix I’ve already tried and fuck off.
I bought a new PC last year and I hate Windows 11 so much that it’s got me eyeing Linux again. But the thought of having to repeat that whole ordeal again makes me feel sick to my butthole.
what distro was it back then? some distros religiously dedicated to software freedom don’t ship the proprietary
linux-firmwareblobs which might, among other things, contain your WiFi drivers.I honestly don’t remember. It was a long time ago. I also tried Mint thinking it might be more intuitive, but I couldn’t get WiFi to work with either of them.
virtually any built in card works these days. with 3rd party cards… well you’re better of looking up it’s chipset and how well it is supported by linux before you buy one, for example some cheap realtek dongles had no WPA3 support and worse throughput. Iirc Broadcom has for a long time been hostile towards linux.
Linux works well if you need something to function as a tool, be it a NAS, network appliance, server, etc. You can setup it up with the small subset of things you need it to do and trust it’ll just run without further interference.
When it comes to a consumer device, it fails the “just works” criteria much harder the OSX or Windows. Software tends to be maintained by an army of unpaid volunteers passionate about their specific use case with a lot of infighting around how things get done. Such functionality is often developed by people with such a warped idea of usability that they consider VIM to be the ideal, modern, text editor. This is a piece of software that started life in the mainframe days, where input lag was measured in seconds rather the milliseconds, in order to minimize number of keystrokes, no matter how convoluted. This leads to multitudes of forks of functionality with subtly differing functionality often with terrible UI and UX catered to the developer’s specific workflow.
Whenever a lay persons asks how to get started with Linux, they get sent down a rabbit hole of dozens of distros, majority of which are just some variant of Ubuntu, with no clear indication of what’s different as they all just describe themselves as the ultimate beginner distro. With the paralysis of choice, they can pick one at random and hope it’ll work with their hardware without issue, spend hours figuring out the nitty-gritty differences and compatibility issues, or just give up and keep using what they already know.
It’s more of a hobby than a daily driver for someone that games on PC games ranging from the early 90s to modern games. Too much hassle when I just wanna install and play.
For me
protonlaunch game.exeworked for >90% of the games that didn’t provide native releases. so glad steam deck came out.Yeah steam deck is awesome I have one as well and it got me to dabble with installing Linux on my laptop but there was just too many things that had to be done to get it running how I wanted. You’re selling it massively short by saying one command rules all. For instance, my laptop has an igpu and a desktop 2070 in it and Linux wanted to constantly use the igpu by default in games and it wasn’t that easy for someone that doesn’t use Linux that often to find a fix for that. I have a kid and a fulltime job I dont feel like configuring crap when I get home to have less time to play ya know?
I’ve honestly had better luck with retro games on Linux than windows. Half the time lutris can auto install the game with minimal input, and patch the games etc - and even with abandonware titles I just pointed proton at them after installation and no issues.
If you’re on older integrated graphics however, I will admit it can be a lot more problematic.
You didn’t read what I wrote if you think I’m on older igpu. …
Bugs. Bugs, everywhere.
These often require workarounds via the terminal – if we’re lucky. The whole situation gets old after a while, despite myself using Linux for 25 years now, and being an ideological supporter of Free Software for just as long. For new users, it’s terrifying. At the end, convenience wins, and that’s why I’m typing this via an M1 Macbook Air. Despite that, I still have 5-6 older Linux machines/laptops around, and I often run Debian ARM via virtualization too on this Macbook. I won’t ever quite decouple from Linux.
But it’s important to objectively point at its faults, and for the chance that these faults will never get fixed, unless massive corporations come behind it to do the heavy lifting: proper beta testing of absolutely everything on the desktop/apps. That’s the non-glamour part of coding that volunteer programmers hate to do, or can’t do. It’s what saved the Linux kernel, systems utils and server software: the companies that came to clean it up, develop it further, and support it. The desktop doesn’t have that same support. That support died in 2002 when Red Hat announced that it will become a server-only company. Ubuntu is too tiny to help, and they’ve moved to servers too anyway.
I’ve used Linux since about 1996, when only Slackware worked for me ( Red Hat didn’t work right, & I never tried Yggdrasil ).
Ian began his Debian distro sometime around then ( Deb was his partner, hence the distro’s name )
About a year ago, I was using openSUSE, both Tumbeweed & their more-stable LEAP.
They removed the drivers for my wifi adapter, in an update.
They broke my desktop.
Again.
I’ve been told by Steam support ( in 2023, iirc ), directly through their system, that they ONLY support the Ubuntu family of Linuxen.
UbuntuStudio stuck with XFCE for YEARS, even though XFCE is rigged to prevent one from being able to grab the corner of a window, because almost-all of its different options ( themes? ) permit only a 1px thick window-grabber, and that isn’t usable.
Why??
Try installing Haskell Stack on Void Linux for ARM.
You can’t:
Haskell Stack requires GMP lib, for arbitrary precision arithmetic, and you can’t get that to work on it.
They won’t add it, to make Haskell Stack installable.
So, if the only machine you’ve got is ARM based, and you need to learn Haskell, go get a different distro.
( “Haskell Programming From First Principles” requires Stack )
I used Ubuntu Server on ARM, for awhile, and the Ruby it included was broken, with a hard-coded bit in one of its scripts that had the wrong-location for one of the basic things in Linux…
can’t remember what it was, perhaps it was /usr/bin/mv instead of /bin/mv or something … it was stupid, though, and it was in the Ubuntu version of Ruby, which was a deprecated version of Ruby … so…
the upstream Ruby maintainers wouldn’t fix it, because they only maintain the maintained versions of Ruby, AND…
Ubuntu wouldn’t fix it, because they insisted it was upstream’s problem, even-though they wouldn’t include a maintained version of Ruby.
Fuck idiocy.
On & on & on.
Fix 1 thing, & break 3 more , seems to be the “religion” of the various Linuxen.
I’m old, & tired of being beaten-on by “friends” and “allies”.
Abusers are abusers.
IF I ever succeed in fixing my health, breaking ( permanently ) my health-obstacles,
THEN I want to do a linux-distro that simply excludes all bullshit, & enforces correctness-of-function.
Funtoo seems to be part of The Right Answer ( it is the evolution of Gentoo ), in that people get the benefit of whatever hardware they’ve got, instead of a dumbed-down version which is more sluggish than need-be.
I’d want it to be based entirely on Haskell, & Julia, leaving-out pretty-much all other languages ( Haskell’s correctness & Julia’s ruthless-efficiency ).
Notice how there is a huge push to replace X.org with Wayland?
Wayland removes ability to run The Linux Terminal Server Project, so you can’t have little arm-terminals stuck on the backs of displays, and 1 single real-computer in the back, with an ocean of RAM, for all the students to use for their real apps…
This “improvement” forces all to either have a powerful-enough desktop or … not be allowed to run the modern distros/Linuxen at all.
War against inclusion of people in poorer places, where it is much more doable to afford a bunch of RasPi-terminals than it is to afford dozens & dozens of x86-64 machines, is warring for … fashion & class-status??
The X Window System works. Through it, TLSP works.
It enables people to have their Blender-renderer machine in the other room, where its fans-noise isn’t going to bother them.
Fashion-motivated or fad-motivated “strategy” consistently solves the wrong problem.
Same as breaking people’s wifi solves the wrong problem.
WTF “loyalty” for a distro can ANYone have,
… once one has been “punched-in-the-face” by them, enough times??
I’ve read OpenBSD’s statement that “lack of a manpage IS A BUG”.
That IS PROPER.
They GET it.
There are development/programming methods that hold-to the same kind of properness:
Behaviour-Driven Design, e.g.
Test-1st.
As somebody pointed-out, of all the “agile” methods, XP included engineering-processes, like test-1st whereas … the rest, like Scrum, don’t…
That difference-in-religion, XP’s objectivity MATTERS.
Any “improvement” which breaks the functionality-tests or behaviour-tests, and you don’t get the “improvement” in.
Nobody has the integrity to do that, at the distro-level?
I wouldn’t permit any desktop-environment which is hard-coded to have 1px window-grabbers to be included in a distro, hence XFCE would have to get fixed, or it would be locked-out, explicitly for that usability-defect.
I wouldn’t permit breaking of people’s network-access to be an official update’s component.
MAKE IT WORK RIGHT.
That needs to be SOME distro’s spine, that is usable-by-most, and efficient, and including the capability that people actually need to get stuff done…
I want low-vision people being able to use it.
I want blind-readers working in it.
I want deaf people having full function through it.
I want quadraplegics being able to work through it.
I want TLSP working, so a single x86-64 machine, plus a batch of displays & RasPi’s stuck on their backs, give a classroom the ability to teach calculus with Julia which is the proper way to be learning algebra or calculus ( seriously, try Julia: it’s wonderful ).
Anyways, you’re seeing a tiny sliver of the decades-of-abuse that operating-system makers have put in us, that is in me.
I won’t willingly run any MS software ever again, due to their religion of molestation-of-priivacy & abuses ( I was one of the ones stung by their stolen from STAC disk-compression tech, in DOS 6.20, and their Vista era sending all searched-terms from the desktop to Microsoft violated privacy-law for both health-care sytems & for police systems, but … they’re “too big” to make accountable?? etc. )
But the Linux world seems to have one hell of a religious-problem against stable usability.
Distro-runners need to read a book by Al Ries: “The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding”, and understand that that stability/identifiability is a REQUIREMENT for a userbase to be not-sabotaged by one’s distro.
DON’T KEEP CHANGING THE WAY EVERYTHING WORKS, and expect your userbase to love you for it.
KDE 3.5 had much right-idea, but nowadays … wtf??
Too complicated to be allowed to see where one is, within the menu-system??
That isn’t a “feature”, that is “fashionable” mental-illness.
And I despise the Apple-style contextless GNOME way.
/grouch
just an opinion, of an old, useless bastard, who’s tired of being obstructed/abused by distro-decisions.
_ /\ _
I feel like you and Linus Torvalds should be in the same room. Thank you for writing this. My Wi-Fi doesn’t work either and Bluetooth is a half assed mess that only seems to work with my mouse and nothing else. I don’t have time for that shit.
I thought Debian addresses most of your complaints. And LMDE is a good option for people that want a different flavor of it.
I’m using regular Mint, but plan of switching to LMDE in the future, when it’s no longer an experimental option. Their Cinnamon desktop is very polished, accessible and sensible. I was surprised I didn’t need to configure and hardware - wifi, Webcam, Bluetooth keyboard, mouse and headset… It was all detected and configured properly. I chose Btrfs and the installer set up a subvolume for /home and sensible backup policies.
Because to most people, a computer is like buying a car, it should just work.
A Mac is an Automatic, no configuration is needed outside of your favorite radio stations. Sure most people hate that the infotainment was replaced with a touch screen that only support carplay. But hey for the rest of the time they don’t think about it. A widows PC is the same thing, but made by Tesla/BMW where the heated seats are a subscription service.
Linux is a range from manual to a kit car. Sure it can look like the big boys or even cooler. But the amount of work that’s required is insane to the average user, and most people won’t want to touch the hood, let alone to configure the infotainment so it can connect to your iPhone since it technically supports car play. But to those that know how to use it will swear that their manual car is better in every way than an automatic.
That’s the thing about Linux though, is it really depends on the user. The average user doesn’t need any more than a web browser and maybe some Office suite. Chrome OS has shown this. Linux is actually great for these users.
It’s the semi-power user, the one that has to do a lot of work, but doesn’t know much about computers that Linux seems to trip up.
It’s like that wojack bell curve meme.
For me was when Mint suddenly broke my Bluetooth driver and I had to dig deep about how to fix that wasting my entire day on it, this was 2016 I think.
I just wanted to play some games.
I feel your pain
Last time I tried diving headfirst into Linux, I got frustrated by having a problem and all the suggested solutions are all wildly different (from an outside perspective) series of editing settings or unusual terminal commands. I already knew how Windows worked well enough to do most things I wanted, but didn’t have almost any understanding of how Linux operated so all of the opaque solutions offered without explanation of why or how it should fix the problem just added to my confusion. Couple that with having to sort through one or two dozen suggestions to find one that actually works, not knowing if even attempting any solutions would cause other issues later.
If you ever want to try again I’d suggest pulling up chatgpt to ask questions. It’s not failsafe, but it helped me a ton and I come from a predominantly windows background. (Edited to add: I ended up sticking with Pop_OS! And I LOVE it. I game a ton and have very little issues with proton on steam)
It’s “hard”.
I’m an os slut. I use whatever… daily driver is Mac, most of my work is RDP to windows servers
I’ve always got a Linux flavor or two running
We are not most people… not even close. “Most people “ love that their computer runs chrome - and that’s good enough.
It lets them facebook and do taxes.Asking even the most basic lift. Install Firefox; try an ad blocker. Care about your privacy.
Nope. Make Netflix work is about as far as it gets.
I want to get Asahi running when I have some time to spare. I’ve only don’t run it as a daily driver because what I have works. And that’s fine.
My cousin gave up Linux because he struggled to find answers to problems. He was really into trying to build a home server and followed YouTube videos. He used to video call with me for tech support, which was kinda exhausting like teaching a kid how to use a computer.
After a few months, he gave up on it and gave me his server filled with weird ass directories and software constantly giving errors because it’s not configured correctly. It was easier to wipe and restart.
Everything I know about Linux I learned troubleshooting a problem. And I still feel like I don’t know shit about the OS. After so long with Windows, Linux feels like living in a country where you don’t speak the language; everything is harder than it needs to be.
If the day comes where games are as easy on Linux as they are on Windows, I’ll give desktop Linux another shot.
This said, I’ve self-hosted on a Debian box for years.
