Linux is SUCH a breath of fresh air. No one wants it to be anything other than what you want it to be. Modern desktop Linux has a much improved out of the box experience with good support for all the hardware I've thrown at it. And Claude Code makes it very fast and trivial to personalize, adapt, automate, etc.
Lol, that's what Microsoft tried 10+ years ago and everybody gave them shit for it, especially Apple fans. Now Apple is "inventing" this again.
Windows is strangely less direct, but will regularly automatically try to save something to onedrive and force a subscription. Plus, it is just full of ads and nonsense.
On the other hand I think this makes it difficult to provide a perfect experience - you have to stay closer to the herd if you want trouble free computing. You have the choice.
Nobody would get into the Operating System business to make money I think, the going rate is $0, subsidized by something (an ad company, a hardware company, or general kindness and community spirit).
I used Claude to define some CS exam computers using NixOS; it was just GNOME, but with a few tweaks made via dconf. For example, add a maximize icon next to the X (close) in the menubar, make the dashbar behave like a dock with smart autohiding. On a Tailscale VPN so I can service them. And with a few programs preinstalled, preconfigured and pinned to the dock. System users for every student. And with mirroring the screen at a certain resolution by default.
Anything I hadn’t tried before, I just asked it to make. The dconf tweaking in particular was so much easier than when I tried to do this manually.
I wish I could agree, but the recent push for Wayland only, or GNOME deciding to deprecate middle-click paste, or further reliance on systemd, comprise a non-exhaustive list of examples of things I don't want, and which may end up pushing me off the platform again on the desktop. There are definitely opinionated agendas in Linux (and open source more broadly), and the relative instability of Linux as a target makes forking and maintaining a project + dependencies often unrealistic for a single person... which is how these big projects are able to exert so much influence.
They've already fumbled it.
> the way they did with mobile.
It's the exact same way they fumbled with mobile. They were very late to the party and decided to buy their way in. It _never_ works.
I’m curious if we’ll see another major shift with the new deign lead, or if the higher ups will want to run with Liquid Glass for a while after so much investment, and not wanting to alienate users by radically changing design direction too often. Or if Liquid Glass is here to stay as long as we have Vision Pro, because VR/AR demand that style of UI, so everything else needs to fall in line for consistency’s sake.
I think I’d be more apt to switch to Linux if it wasn’t for all the mobile integration macOS and iOS have. Giving that up is a tough sell. It also means finding new solutions for managing photos, music, notes, and a bunch of other things. I also struggle to find non-Apple hardware I find acceptable. I’ve used Linux on and off for over 20 years, and in the past few years is gotten to the point where I think I could daily drive it with little to no compromise, in a bubble. But mobile really bursts that bubble.
So when that vision is something that users are ambivalent on (3D TV, AI operating system, etc...), well tough, that's still all they're getting until it hurts the company financially or the next executive has a different "big idea". :(
It's a mess of disparate highly inconsistent systems.
The Linux user experience matches what it is - a random bunch of developers developing random software in the way they like with a very thin patina of consistency failing to hide the mess.
It's nowhere near as fabulous as you are making out - it's fanboiism to say otherwise.
Using an x86 laptop in 2025 is like using a flip phone 6 years after the iPhone came out.
Of course if you are a gamer, ignore everything I just wrote.
A great deal of gratitude is owed to all the people who volunteer their free time to create the stable desktop environment we have free access to on Linux in 2026.
Probably need to clarify since Android is Linux. Assume you're referring to community run distros. Unfortunately the issue is usually proprietary hardware that has to be reverse engineered and nobody willing to pay engineers full time to do that.
Please run Kate/Kwrite as root and then we will talk on the topic. Or pipe password to ssh
I decided to give desktop Linux another shot and I'm glad I did. I was prepared for a lot of jankiness but figured I have enough experience to fix whatever needs fixing. Surprisingly, this has not been the case at all, the PC has been not only as stable as Windows or Mac but also performs better and is much more comfortable and intuitive to use. I never really want to "work on" my personal computer, I want it to just be there for me reliably. I've always had a soft spot for free software, but I just couldn't justify the effort until now.
So I guess this is my love letter to all the devs that have made the modern Linux desktop possible. Even compared to just a few years ago, the difference is immense. Keep up the good work.
I moved my immediate and mostly non-tech family to all run Linux including an aging relative who needed a locked-down Firefox install to keep her from falling victim to predatory sites and extensions. Pretty easy to script the entirety of the OS install and lockdown so that it was documented and repeatable. Can't do that without techie roots but I love that it's possible and mostly straightforward from a scripting perspective. It's almost exclusively get the right file with the right config in the right place and restart a service.
The only major day-to-day downside IMO is battery life on Linux laptops. Can't compare to current generation of Macs but that's true for Windows too.
It's a little upsetting that Windows has gotten so terrible, because I think in a lot of ways the NT Kernel is a better piece of software than the Linux kernel. Drivers are simply easier to install and they generally don't require a reboot and they don't require messing with kernel modules, IO is non-blocking by default, and a bunch of other things that are cool and arguably better than Linux.
The problem is that, while the kernel is an important part of an operating system, it's not the only part. Even if the NT kernel were the objectively best piece of software ever to be written by humans, that still doesn't change the fact that Windows has become a pretty awful mess. They have loaded the OS with so much crap (and ads now!), the Windows Update tool routinely breaks your computer, their recovery/repair tools simply do not work, their filesystem is geriatric and has been been left behind compared to stuff like ZFS, btrfs, and APFS, and they don't really seem determined to fix any of this stuff.
Even if the Linux kernel were to be slightly worse, it's still good enough. Even if you do have to muck with kernel modules it's not that hard now with DKMS. Even if the IO is blocking by default epoll has been around for decades and works fine.
So at that point, if the kernel is good enough, and if we can get userland decent enough, then desktop Linux is better than Windows. Linux is good enough, without ads, with recovery tools that actually work, and performs comparably or better than Windows.
The fact that you now need an account for almost any piece of hardware, including computers, phones etc is a major drawback that arrived with the internet era. Linux has been able to avoid that temptation.
To note, with official Linux support on Windows, it's trivial for me to get everything I want as a developer on Windows, so that's never been a hard blocker for me.
This is because the list of network refreshes (and disappears) before I can find and click the correct Wifi:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/network-manager-applet/-/issu...
This completely breaks the Linux experience for anybody living in a reasonably populous area. The issue has 3 upvotes.
I also put a 400 $ bounty on it, if anybody wants to give it a shot. (Given that AI is supposed to replace 90% of programmers last year, making the Wifi list stay visible should be easy, right?)
This worked fine 10 years ago.
Most of my gripes are around some UI garbage behaviour like that. I have a file manager on one PC (I think it's the Ubuntu one where some "GUI in Snap" stuff breaks the GUI) breaks the file picker dialogue, so that when pasting a directory path in to navigate there, at the exact instant you press Enter, it autocompletes the first file so that that gets selected, leading you to upload a file you didn't want to upload.
That said, all of that feels like really high quality compared to when once per year I click the Wifi menu on some Windows and it take 20 seconds to appear at all.
It's great that you can customize everything and use your own window manager, compositor, etc ... but these issues are the price you pay. It is unfair to compare this to Windows, where you don't even have these customization options.
Specifically for the network manager applet, it is not fixed because it's not really used anymore. GNOME Shell has it's own network selection menu that does not use the applet. It is the default on most systems, so users don't face this issue by default.
Also for some reason DE's sometimes fail to automatically connect to an AP when it's right there and I have to click for them to do it. This issue literally never happened to me when just using wpa_supplicant, for years whenever an AP is operational then so is the connection without fail.
Really really bad WiFi connection UI all over
You should give KDE a go.
>First challenge: My mouse buttons don’t work. I can move the cursor, but can’t click on anything.
Maybe should've picked Ubuntu? I suspect this is the Linus (tech tips, not Torvalds) strategy of picking up an obscure distro for content purposes. Can't really have an article if everything just works, right
> Nah, it’s a problem with this particular mouse in X and Wayland and it’s been seen on Fedora and OpenSuse almost since the mouse came out. Not a Cachy issue, a nonstandard USB HID implementation by the vendor
Tbh, I don't even know what a distro would have to do to break this.
Mint is the best default to advise to someone switching to Linux (it's mostly Ubuntu under the hood, but without the snap nonsense and with a less imaginative UI).
I think anyone technically savvy enough to follow the article is already aware Linux is a viable primary OS, the question is can you manage it without having to become a Linux nerd? I want to be able to tell normal people they can use Linux.
If they'd just installed normal Ubuntu or Fedora, they wouldn't even know what a bootloader was, and they'd just use whatever desktop environment (probably GNOME, maybe KDE) came with it.
Nowadays every time I want to run a non-trivial command of a program, configure a file somewhere, customize using code Emacs or anything else, I always put the LLMs to do it. I do almost nothing by myself, except check if said file is indeed there, open the file and copy paste the new configuration, restart the program, copy paste code here and there and so on.
No need to be a nerd to use Linux, that's so 2021. LLMs are the ultimate nerds when it comes to digging into manuals, scour the internet and github for workarounds, or tips and tricks and so on.
I believe if my Dad is able to install, use and benefit from Linux, anyone can.
Snark aside, I really really don’t understand the aversion, even within the tech community, to learning new skills especially as it pertains to Linux.
Would having new knowledge be such a burden? Why is it something to avoid? Why is it not a good thing if normal people learn more about computing?
Do we want a population of iPad baby Linux users? Normal people can use it now, don’t gate keep.
We have people going “I don’t have to read, I could just have the AI do it for me” and pretty soon they’re not gonna be able to think. People don’t want to think or learn because we have such a cultural aversion to being a nerd. Nerd is not a bad thing.
People like buy a computer and use whatever is on it, they can't manage to install windows, the drivers needed for the hardware, I had to setup emails, or other online accounts for this kind of people so give them a preinstalled Linux and they should manage,.
How do you fix Windows when it breaks every couple of weeks and the only information you get is a bright blue screen with a couple of lines of hexadecimal on it?
I also use every OS and Windows 11 is still the most hassle free and reliable (at least if you install the IoT version using Rufus). I still have to use X because Wayland has a couple of remaining issues. Also most distros inexplicably use Gnome despite KDE being significantly better. Why?
So this isn't a usual comparison, as the vast majority of users will choose Ubuntu, Fedora, or Mint. CachyOS is also a new distro, meaning it won't last long (most distributions, like small businesses, only last a few years). It's also Arch-based, meaning the user is going to get constant updates, which leads to problems. Finally, Cachy is optimized for speed and security, not hardware.
> First challenge: My mouse buttons don’t work. I can move the cursor, but can’t click on anything. I try plugging in a mouse (without unplugging the first one), same deal. Not a major issue; I can get around fine with just the keyboard
And this is where I stop reading
The issue is that he was using an obscure gaming mouse, and the solution was to use a different mouse.
What I think could really push Linux desktop forward is if various PC gaming influencers started doing content on how to game on Linux. Given that it is not just viable now but actively sometimes better than on Windows it would make for good content AND show people an alternative. And soon as AAA games start being created for Linux first and run on Windows in some sort of compatibility or emulation mode that will really start turning the tides.
Not exactly what you are looking for, but Gamers Nexus at 2.57M subscribers is working on Linux Gaming Benchmarks with help from Wendel at Level1Techs [0]. Steve bemoans the shitshow that Windows has become all the time.
Don't get me wrong, I rejoice when I get a native Linux game. I buy nearly every native Linux game I can find that is reasonably priced and sounds remotely interesting. I have a couple dozen games in my GOG backlog that I haven't even tried to run yet, but I bought on a sale or something because they were relatively cheap and supported Linux natively. So I would love a world where it was Linux first and Windows second.
The one pain point for me is film and book scanning. AFAICT there are exactly zero Linux software packages that will play nice with my Epson V800 or my Fujitsu SV600. I keep a Windows laptop around (second-gen ThinkPad X1 since you asked) and its only job is to talk to those devices. Firewall doesn't let it get on the internet, its only network access is to move scans onto my NAS.
> First challenge: My mouse buttons don’t work. [...] Not a major issue; I can get around fine with just the keyboard.
> Then I remember that my root partition is only 100GB. I reboot back into the Cachy live image and use the Parted utility to increase it to 1TB, then make a second btrfs partition in the remaining space.
I don't think the goal was achieved here. For most people it still takes some dedication and a lot of computer knowledge to switch successfully.
But I expect things to continue to improve now that Valve has solved the single major blocker for a large chunk of people, that being running their back catalog of games. It's an amazing gift to the community that we should all be very thankful for.
After not using Windows for so long, I came to realize that Windows is just as much a mess as Linux just in different ways. You get used to the quirks so you don’t notice them after a while but they are definitely there.
Most of my games work just fine or even better on Linux. Some of my older games don’t even work on Windows that work perfectly under Wine/Proton which is truely miraculous. The Wine team and Valve have made some incredible contributions to the preservation of games on PC, it can’t be understated.
So I daily drive Linux and play those handful of games on Windows, and I’ll probably stay this way for now and try the proton situation again in a few years.
EDIT: I hunted for the link, to deliver it to you! https://astrid.tech/2022/09/22/0/nixos-gpu-vfio/
Out of curiosity, which game?
I promise I am not asking as a gotcha. Just genuinely curious.
I don't play many new games on PC (normally I play recent games on consoles). What I play on PC is older/niche games.
I have a couple of oddballs that I could not make work on Proton. Others had weird issues that got fixed over time.
Sometimes there is a fix, such as fiddling with different Proton versions, etc. Lutris makes this somewhat straightforward.
First, I tried to install fedora atomic cosmic. It kind of worked but I could not get it to work with my dock + external monitors at all. Now that I am used to that setup, I can't go back.
Not wanting to spend time figuring it out, I just installed Ubuntu instead. Thankfully, that worked out though it's not perfect. Everytime I turn on my laptop, I need to spend 10-15 minutes turning the monitors on and off until ubuntu recognises them correctly and also sends dp output (it shows the monitor in settings and I can open windows on it but the monitor doesn't actually show anything; other times, it reads the monitor as something nvidia with the lowest resolution).
I tried to install genshin anyways on ubuntu. I couldn't get it to work via wine/lutris. Virtualbox doesn't support gpu passthrough so I tried using virt-manager. The setup was too hard and it didn't work anyways. I gave up on hoyo at this point and install steam instead.
Honestly, ubuntu is rough and Linux as a whole is very rough. But on the whole, I would still pick this over dealing with windows any longer.
All this time, money, dev energy, and marketing to keep trying to find a magical bean in their stalk and they still just won’t support open hardware and open source OSes with vigor.
Apple people tend to buy Apple products generation over generation, and none of the Windows hardware manufacturers are even close to having that rep. Even in this thread people are recommending Gen 1 Thinkpads, but Lenovo’s heart really isn’t in it across the board. Dell went simple with the revived XPS but the release versions don’t offer Linux in the BYO order flow.
And no, I don’t think Framework is good enough.
Still, every computer I buy comes with Microsoft tax and their OS preinstalled. In all these years I always left a small Windows partition, in case I need it. Never booted it.
There's nuisances in popos, but I am generally thrilled.
Their upcoming CPUs are even better. Also Qualcomm might actually finally offer good support on Linux and their new X2 is amazing.
The launcher was somewhat pretty stable all along, until Microsoft enabled Google's Integrity Protection "DRM" into it. [0]
Fortunately, they have found a way to run it even with that added in after a couple of weeks later since they added that at Q3/4 last year.
> but I couldn’t get it to work.
From what I've seen, the game will crash when vibrant visuals (a built-in alternative rendering option with shaders-like experience in Minecraft Bedrock) volumetric fog is enabled. [1]
[0]: https://github.com/minecraft-linux/mcpelauncher-manifest/iss... [1]: https://github.com/minecraft-linux/mcpelauncher-manifest/iss...
Fedora: wanted to have the newest kernel and updates due to new hardware - so far i am really satisfied; the only issue i have is that the printer does not work everytime… as a workaround i print with my iphone instead.
Edit: the two configuration.nixen has since been merged in a single dotfiles repo, which also covers my Macbook via https://nix-darwin.org.
Mint does everything I need it to, so there's no need for me to hop.
I definitely find KDE the most appealing. I'm one of these people who feels like desktop UI pretty much peaked around Win98 or Win2000, and KDE more or less lets me have that experience. It's customizable and works well. It has occasional problems and annoyances, but over time I find they're comparable in magnitude to what I had with Windows.
It always seems like Ubuntu has the best compatibility with stuff overall, in the sense that anything that has a Linux version will almost always explicitly say they support Ubuntu. I looked at some other KDE-based distros but Kubuntu seemed like the safest choice. I had used Linux Mint KDE in the past and was bummed to see it go away; if that still existed I might well have chosen it.
Notably, I had attempted to switch to Linux several years before (around 2014), but wound up going back to Windows because I just encountered too many gotchas. But things were much smoother this time. The main reason I switched was because I felt Windows 10 was getting too intrusive and user-hostile, and also no longer made it easy for me to get the "Windows classic" look and feel that I wanted. I'm glad I switched when I did, because since then those trends have become even more pronounced; I'd probably be pulling my hair out if I were using Windows now. I still have a Win10 VM for situations where I need Windows, but I rarely use it.
Immutability in OS updates is also something I didn't know I needed until I experienced it on Bazzite; pretty advantageous as a gamer using Linux with nVidia hardware these days.
This is my second go around on Bazzite, YMMV but I opted for Gnome over KDE this time and have had zero issues running the games I am into (WoW, PoE2) and no funky window management issues that I seemed to run into with KDE.
I'm considering a move to a Framework machine in the very near future, and still need to settle on a distro for dev; most of that is done on an M3 Max Macbook these days.
Setting it up for modern gaming hardware required a couple of extra steps, which I found to be worthwhile. I now have a system that has proved dependable whenever I need to get work done immediately, and very capable whenever I just want to have fun. (The Backports repository makes bridging that gap easy in most cases.)
Linux Mint is what I suggest to new users. It's based on the widely supported Ubuntu distro, has a good sized community, and seems aimed at people who don't already know unix. It also makes a point of stripping out problematic Ubuntu-isms, and has a Debian-based edition waiting in the wings in case that ever becomes unmanageable.
My desktop environment is KDE Plasma, which you can install on just about any distro even if it's not the default. It has a wealth of useful features, lets me tweak or disable them as I see fit, and avoids trying to turn my desktop into a mobile phone interface. (I used Xfce in the past, but its adoption of Gtk 3 transformed it into something that I found frustrating.)
I plan on getting a new machine in the near future. Then I'll use my old Dell as a testing ground for other Distros. Was thinking of testing Tumbleweed first.
I don't really recommend this route, but I will say that the experience has been pretty great. Once setup the regular maintenance is just boring update commands. Most days, it's a less than 1 minute affair to get everything compiled and up to date.
Arch would be a pretty equivalent experience as would be using bin packages with gentoo.
I don't want to tweak hours and Ubuntu was so far always a no brainer. At some point, probably 5 years ago after they switched to GNOME Shell, I even stopped switching the desktop manager and kept using the default one.
You know what's fun? Being able to change system fonts, which you can't do on Windows.
I'm using the IBM Plex fonts and they are so good looking.
But yes Fedora - I have traditionally worked on "Enterprise" Linux where RHEL is the standard, so I track Fedora for bleeding edge development work and target EL for "production".
Don't get me wrong I'm just as comfortable on Debian systems or even building Linux-from-scratch type systems but I really don't have a day to day use case for Linux distributions outside of Fedora/Redhat, they cover all my needs.
With rpm-ostree automatic updates are so reliable it's a set and forget experience.
And I've stuck with it ever since while trying Fedora, Arch and a few others along the way.
I guess it just works for me, know my way around the tooling and can use that knowledge on my Debian servers.
It's not without its problems, though:
Snaps completely bork the system, so you need to remove snap entirely on Kubuntu (good riddance anyway - snaps are a plague).
Idle suspend is flaky. Sometimes it won't come back. Better to just disable it.
Sometimes the machine just freezes up. Either it completely freezes, or the mouse slows down to 1fps with the entire movement queued up (move the mouse and it'll go exactly where you told it to, over 2-3 minutes).
WIFI was a nightmare, but I switched to ethernet so it's not an issue for me anymore (desktop machine).
Bluetooth is iffy. I just switched to wired speakers.
On the plus side, AI works great!
Later (on repurposed low-spec Chromebooks, then on newer deployments just because I came to like it) Crunchbang++ (12, then 13) which is Debian-based.
I avoid printing like the plague, and keep a long-remaining-AUE Chromebook around almost solely for its ability to WiFi-print to our aging Brother laser printer.
Best Linux experience I've ever had. Using it for a few years now, but wish I switched sooner (been using various distros since Ubuntu 8.04). Dnf is GOAT, upgrades don't break shit, moderately up-to-date, but not bleeding-edge, vanilla Gnome, no bloat, full systemd commitment, btrfs, few idiosyncrasies, RPMs are widely available, flatpak for the rest. (Don't have a printer tho...)
However, due to e.g. the need to install the Fusion repo for non-free software, I don't think it's suitable for total non-tech beginners, who don't want to touch the terminal at all. Don't get me wrong, Fedora is extremely hands-off, default is bliss experience, but because of their software license policies you likely have to install the Fusion repo at some point and that's not the most straight-forward thing to do.
Only negative for me: The GUI updater wants to install updates during shutdown frequently, which is mighty annoying with full-disk encryption. I live dangerously and do my updates live with dnf, which by the way can be configured to fetch packages in the background, making updating super fast, no need for permanent internet connection.
If you are annoyed by Ubuntu, not old enough for Debian, but already fed up with Arch, please, do try Fedora!
The way to make Linux easy to use is basically just to pre-install it and ensure the hardware is compatible.
System 76 does this, and charges 3x as much as other OEMs.
At this point if I'm a consumer ohh Linux is 3x the price.
If you install Linux on a refurbished Thinkpad, most of the time you can get something very nice for 500$ or less.
I often dream, if I had money, of buying and refurbishing hundreds of laptops per year. Installing Linux and giving them out.
Would be better than cities handing out Chromebooks.
If you want to do basic stuff like browsing streaming learning video calls etc, get a non Linux computer with decent specs with some headroom. These operating systems are for people who just want to use that ecosystem and not need to manage anything themselves. Battery life is exceptional. Most people I know need a one or two step process to do things (like backup photos contacts documents etc) and Apple google Microsoft offer you that. It’s not perfect but it’s easy to manage. People really have gotten used to someone managing it for them and these things do fine in that regard. It’s better than people having 5 hard drives with photos and misplacing them imo. I’ve had people in 2000s connect drives to my computers and find private pictures and contacts and files etc I need not be having access to. iCloud and Google Photos offer you that peace of mind. With 2FA you’d rather lose it all than fall into the wrong hands. People have all kinds of stuff on their phones and computers that should not leave their computers and accounts. Imagine having your kids classmates find your intimate pictures on some drive they used to copy something your kid gave them. All this has reduced with cloud managed services with activation locks and 2FA and password mangers built into them. Yes they can lock you out one day, but it’s better than people having access to it.
If you are serious about your personal computer, switch to Linux before you start hating those companies. You are not the target audience anymore and you shouldn’t be disappointed about it.
I use Linux for most things, macOS for streaming and surfing the web (private relay and 4k native works great on M1) and windows when I have to deal with others having windows only accounting software sometime.
I came from windows to MacOS so despite what folks bemoan about MacOS ... I still love it and it is problem free enough that I don't feel the need to do the lifting to go to Linux.
I think that's a common thing for those of who maybe haven't ridden MacOS for so long.
Windows for me is on a whole several levels of worse when I have to dive back into it. Windows feels like an OS POINTED AT ME rather than for me.
The money's paw curls.
I used to love macOS, back in the Mojave days. You could run almost anything you wanted, and still get work done on a decently made machine. Those were the days when the grass truly felt greener to me, macOS for creative work simply annihilated any other option on the table.
Then Catalina stripped out 32-bit compatibility, ruining my Ableton Live project folder and Steam library. And Big Sur removed the sleek, professional-looking UI that I loved. Apparently Tahoe is infecting it with the glass disease, but I've long since migrated to Bitwig and Steam on Linux.
macOS taught me, ultimately, that any feature you take for granted can be removed to fulfill someone's OKR.
Out of the increasingly loud outpouring of support for desktop Linux over the past year, I went ahead and installed some distros to get back in on the action. I came to four conclusions:
1) You can play games on desktop Linux now other than Tux Racer. Cool!
2) There's less weird X11-wrangling. Thank god.
3) It's otherwise still pretty much the desktop Linux I've always known and felt mildly annoyed by.
4) The current versions of Windows and macOS have gotten to be so unbelievably annoying for no good reason that a mildly improved desktop Linux now actually seems far less annoying than the mainstream options do.
Good job, Microsoft and Apple, for giving us the year of retreating in disgust to the Linux desktop.
Which I never got to work properly on the laptop/netbook I owned until 2024.
As far as I know netflix still limits you to 720p under most browsers (although their support page shows that opera of all things supports 1080p)
libva is usually installed these days but you can install it manually. For Netflix you'll need to install widevine.
At least for Intel and AMD graphics, the Arch wiki's guide should work.
How does one have an MDM solution? Most of the solutions out there are poor on Ubuntu or need lots of work to get things right. Can anyone provide a reference architecture/solution that allows them to be SOC2 compliant? But also not have high friction for developers and more importantly not have bigger overheads on process or investment?
But after a while I switched back to Windows 2000 on my notebook, because of hardware support. So it would be interesting if they do the same after a while.
Since over 20 years I‘m now on mac, which has great hardware and a Unix underneath. Don’t let that stop you from going Linux desktop.
At first she found it really frustrating, but then reality set in: she didn’t really know Windows either. On Linux there is pretty broad capability to solve your own problem if you can get over fear of a terminal.
Her favorite game runs faster on Debian so that helps.
There's still a lot of folks who bounce of setting up this or that thing that requires editing some config file. We're really good now about making most things pretty well UI'ee up, but Linux is such a malleable platform (complementary): LLM's decondtrain what users can do from what UI has been built. That's super exciting.
Step 1 of folks being able to use Linux as a desktop is going pretty well these days. With some AI hope, I hope folks get more and more enticed into setting up some devices. Once you're up with TailScale and have a service or two deployed, it can be very addictive to keep going. LLM's can make setting up & customizing the desktop easier, & they can help operate & admin services too. Strong hopes users will have much more agency, with where we are going.
At home I consistently gave up on Linux due to hardware and game compatibility issues.
A combination of buying a steam deck plus windows 11 pushed me back to Linux.
It is oddly peaceful using mint Linux. No adverts. No "like what you see" wall paper click bait. No news site click bait. No register with an online Microsoft account that doesn't have a no button. Just my computer.
The one annoying thing is, some games just don't play nice with wine / proton (for some reason I want to play soldier of fortune, even though I know it's not great). Others are a pain to set up. But mainly it is good enough. (I'm a gog.com junkie). So I may end up installing windows 11 lts. Though I did that with windows 10 and it was lacking some DLLs that some old games needed and was pretty much unfixable.
Everytime I read such an article I'm thinking "duh, of course it works" but apparently people still think it's not the case.
I do really, really, really wonder what's going to happen once battery usage is more efficient on Linux than on Windows. For in every thread about Linux on the desktop, there seems to be an endless flow of comments saying "I can get 11 hours of battery time on Windows, but I only get 10h40 minutes on Linux".
Linux powers billions, if not tens of billions of devices by now: trust me, it can power your desktop/laptop just fine.
Figuring out the luks + page file + hibernate resume configuration is non intuitive, and is only viable for me to figure out due to my Linux based day job.
Probably could have gone bazzite and had things just work, but I need a Linux dev box locally and was not sure about dev on bazzite.
Now I can play and work on a same machine for the first time in like 15+ years since I switched to Mac so I can work.
It isn't smooth sailing, I have bluetooth speakers and headphones, switching is not easy experience. Vibe coding, audio dictation works on Thinkpad which is underpowered compared to desktop, but it isn't working there. In fact this is more troublesome issue then headphones.
But for most part I could live with those issues and hopefully they get resolved.
Macs are just annoying, updates are for things I don't care and everything is about pushing me towards some subscription or other. I don't see future there for myself
* Office and PIM apps moved to web, no longer its a requirement.
* You can game on Linux out of the box, same performance or even better.
* Installation and hardware compatibility - it has improved a lot! Even Nvidia and Broadcom chips run easily with no tweaking of config editors.
* Old hardware still runs at same performance (mostly). If I need to upgrade its because I am doing something more like watching 4K movies, running LLMs locally or running MS teams! Not because my file browser or basic text editor is suddenly slow.
There are two major hurdles I see:
* Enterprise IT still prefers Windows or Mac because of MDM (managed devices).
* Niche tools like photo/video editing, CAD software are still Windows only (with Mac ports for some).
It's really fast and lightweight (my laptop stays cold at idle while running the Windows VMs) with all the HV enlightenments for good computational efficiency.
Installing and using the virtio drivers is key for many useful features such as memory ballooning, fast networking with low computational overhead, and virtiofs which is used to mount a virtual drive in the Windows guest in a way that it's not a "network" drive.
I use a MacBook and spend a majority of my workday in Ubuntu Linux.
The absolute only reason I installed windows on the home machine is because gaming is still essentially nonexistent in the Linux sphere.
If a flavor of Linux can catch up and run everything that can be run on windows I’d happily switch. I imagine a good chunk of the windows market would as well.
Install Steam in Linux and notice you can play the vast majority of your library. There are some online multiplayer games that won't work due to anticheat[1] though that seems to be improving over time as well.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2888221/check-out-pcworlds-n...
But with the enshitification of Windows (first all the spam and ads on the Start menu, then Microsoft forcing you to have an account to be able to use the machine and the expensive license for Windows Professional if you want access to Hyper-V, which I did), I did some research, tried a few new distros (Manjaro, Bazzite and CachyOS) and settled for CachyOS (gaming support was the main driver, based on Archlinux was secondary).
I do everything I did on Windows and some more: all the terminal stuff plus browsing, CAD modeling, 3D printing / slicing, Office stuff... I miss nothing. No more double partition to boot into Windows when I want to game.
My RX 9070 XT runs smoothly with no driver issues whatsoever. I even have tested the waters running some LLMs with LM Studio and that also worked out of the box.
The only thing that has been a bit meh are Teams and Slack and I believe that has to do with the fact that I ran them in Firefox. Once I ran Slack on Chromium, noise canceling was again available.
2009 was the year of Linux on desktop for me. 17 years later, after going back and forth between macOS and Windows, it feels good to be back home.
One last note in my random ramble is that I do not have as much spare time as before, and I had heard this from other people back in the day whenever I'd say I ran Archlinux on my machines, so I am going to repeat what others have said to me: it's really nice to not have to worry about much, be able to sit down and get productive right away. To me, CachyOS and KDE have made that idea my actual experience and for that I am grateful.
That's not so much a Linux issue as an Arch issue.
If a Minecraft Java server has the special Geyser plugin ( https://geysermc.org/ ), Minecraft Bedrock clients can connect to it, so you can stick to Minecraft Java on Linux and still play together with your kids who are on Minecraft Bedrock on their iPads.
Then i replaced linux with mac os.
Cook, keep in mind that if you keep dumbing down Mac OS I can switch back to linux in 24 hours.
I picked manjaro because rolling updates + being more noob friendly than arch sounded good and gnome because i wanted something completely fresh than a windows layout i'm used to. Now i'm eyeing after hyprland as the next step but couldn't fimd guts to disrupt my workflow in order to get used to it
A year ago I was about to switch from Linux to Mac for that reason after 25 years using Linux (although I really don't like MacOS). But then Apple released their Glassy OS and so I just bought a used Lenovo for 300€ with 1 year warranty ...
Some advice for Linux newcomers - use AMD, avoid Nvidia. Use something like KDE Plasma for best experience.
If tied to MS, Office online is an option, if you must.
In think MacBook Air + Microsoft365 may be the cheapest startup IT setup that doesn’t require windows itself.
I still have to restart it from time to time, though.
Everything just works. Snappy. Professional awesome native tools (Office, Affinity series, Directory Opus, Visual Studio, AutoHotkey,...)
For paid services, there are also native Dropbox client support in MATE, Ubuntu, or Mint desktop file managers etc.
iOS sftp:
https://www.photosync-app.com/home
Android sftp:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.bukacek.fil...
Practically speaking, I often recommend dual booting from 2 ssd drives for windows and Linux. There are just some commercial software/games that can't run properly within a linux environment (programs like Wine do allow running some Windows native programs, but YMMV.)
https://www.linuxmint.com/ or https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop is a great starter OS.
If you already use a posix system like MacOS, than the workflow will seem more familiar. =3
Although I was trying to shift to Linux slowly at the time, I honestly wish I'd switched sooner.
What I find most annoying is that I have several very old iMacs. Apple disallows their OS upgrading, even though their hardware is still perfectly fine. I've been using them, which means I've been stuck working on Mac OS 10.15, and now I can't install many applications, including some basic libraries, because they're no longer compatible with 10.15. I don't want to just throw away my perfectly good computers, and considering I do most of my work in the terminal, and I'm shocked by Apple's recent UI updates on iPhones(They've got to be kidding), so after 17 years away from Ubuntu as my daily OS, I'm now considering seriously going back to it.
Uh what?? I can’t think of a more easy to use Linux one that’s most supported for everything then… Ubuntu..
Microsoft has really, really fucked up windows 11, and ultimately abandoning it is the only recourse the consumers have.
I have seen so many ”anyone can switch to Linux” articles, and none of them seem to mention ”all of your files are going to be utterly lost”
Well ...
I hope we can standardize on Linux on the desktop and FreeBSD on the server.
But please, do not push to make Linux into a Windows Clone :)
There are some valid criticisms of Microsoft, and a great many criticisms that are unfounded or are often misdirected. Or in some cases, the vast majority of folks don't use enough of their operating environments to encounter the same types of problems. After all, it's not like Linux operating systems are "perfect". Especially when you begin to push the platforms beyond the most basic functions, problems quickly become apparent.
Microsoft's largest challenge in the Wintel environment is the diversity of hardware, software, and skill levels involved in making it all work together. And quite frankly, most often people trying to cut corners in places they shouldn't or don't know they shouldn't.
On the hardware front, there's a lot of cheap nonsense out there. And lots of folks clamor for cheaper hardware. For example, my $500 Asus motherboard has a checks Device Manager Mediatek Wifi 7 card in it. Now, the reality is that Intel, widely seen as an incredible network chip manufacturer (both ethernet and wlan), doesn't have a Wifi 7 chip available for 3rd parties (i.e. AMD boards). So in order for Asus to get Wifi 7, they have to look elsewhere.
Mediatek's website appears that they focus on supporting new standards first, often before they're stable or solidified, but simultaneously does not provide a robust driver environment that supports multiple platforms.
At any rate, this is just one example. There are many thousands more. Much of this is driven by consumers either wanting features faster, platform vendors aiming for differentiation, or both clamoring for some middle ground between cost and margin. And Microsoft is stuck in the middle.
Maybe the current driver that Mediatek has released through IHVs doesn't have fixes for certain bugs. Perhaps the IHV (motherboard makers, etc.) doesn't have a robust enough team to want to package and release regular driver updates released by the vendor.
As it stands, Mediatek doesn't offer a driver for this card for Linux, either: https://github.com/openwrt/mt76/issues/927
But again, Microsoft often gets the blame for problems with this type of hardware (vendors that barely support it, etc.) whereas on Linux it's totally acceptable to say "yeah just ditch that and go buy an Intel Wifi NIC" or something and people just accept that as being a totally okay answer. And then suddenly the hardware problem just 'disappears'.
As far as things that are a bit more in Microsoft's control, for example, requiring cloud accounts to log in and use the computer. I still stand by that this is far less important than the shriekers on the internet make it out to be. But it's most often one of the most primary arguments (because there are actually very few to really make).
Google and Apple require you to login with a cloud account on any of their devices and platforms. In fact, I'd wager that the vast majority of you reading this page right now have Google Chrome signed in with a Google Account that's syncing your history, favorites, passwords, autofill, and tabs right now. You effectively can't use an iPhone without signing in with an iCloud account, and Google is just about ready to force that direction as well by disabling the ability to sideload applications in Android. They already long effectively killed rooting devices (although it is possible in specific circumstances).
In fact, every time you visit a Google property using any other browser than Chrome, Google makes sure to tell you that you really should be using Chrome. And any time you visit a Google property using Chrome, they insist you sign in using Chrome (to your Google account, no less.)
So I really don't get the abject hatred for Microsoft on this front. After all, once you light up Windows Hello on a modern system with TPM2.0 and Windows 11 24H2 or newer, you effectively get free software passkey support (pending the web application properly supports it and isn't using an ancient FIDO2 library that insists on hardware tokens).
For the aforementioned Google account: I'm using a Microsoft Account sign-in to my desktop with Windows Hello, with a TPM-protected passkey to sign into the aforementioned Google account. I get SSO to all Microsoft properties, and "soft" passkey support for all of my Google accounts as-needed, with unlimited passkey storage. No USB dongles required (although I have those, too).
About the only other end user facing problem that is well within Microsoft's control is the amount of Copilot and AI nonsense. I contend that Satya Nadella is well beyond what his tenure should be at Microsoft, but can you blame them for having FOMO? I mean after all, the mobile phone and tablet markets were hundreds of billions of dollars that they missed out on. They also missed the mark on cloud platforms where Amazon raked in hundreds of billions. If they flood the zone with their AI products, and AI happens to catch on somewhere eventually, they're well-positioned to take advantage of it.
Microsoft also lost out on being the primary development environment, when they stopped innovating in the computer browser and software development space, effectively handing the keys to the kingdom over to Google. They only partially regained that with VSCode (which was the perfect blend between their full-fledged commercial IDE and the text-driven IDEs used prior to VSCode's dominance such as Textmate).
As far as "ads" on the platform, I don't really have any. But I turn a lot of stuff like the widgets off. At least the widget bar is isolated and isn't annoyingly embedded into the software like you'll find the ample ad-based notifications being spammed at you via mobile phone notifications. And unable to disable them because you also need those same notifications to actually get time critical information (here's looking at you, Doordash).
This is ultimately a long conversation and has many layers to it. But what I've found in reality is that software of all sorts and all platforms isn't as rosy as the people pitching them as solutions tend to tell you. I think it's silly, for example, on Linux that you have to split your engineering between multiple software development stacks to accomplish typical systems administrator goals (Ansible/Python, Bash, perhaps some Go thrown in there if someone on your team wants to mess around, tons of YAML and JSON). Whereas on Windows it's pretty well unified behind PowerShell and .NET.
To be fair, I often encounter situations where available Powershell tooling doesn't exist and I need to call .NET APIs anyway, or if I really want to secure the environment I need to drop the ability to use Add-Type and end up having to create proper powershell modules anyway. But at least the paradigm and language used is mostly the same.
What is it with mice and OSes?
Windows is the only OS I can seem to configure to get low latency, high accuracy, linear movement with, and it's not for lack of effort.
I struggled for several years to do SWE work on a Mac and no 3rd party program could get it working the way it does on Windows. I tried Linear Mouse and many others. I eventually gave up, went against the prevailing (90%) culture where I work, and exchanged my mac for a windows laptop. I haven't measured it, but I feel more productive simply because I can click what I want to click marginally faster.
Is something in Mac drivers performing non-linear mapping? Why?
Based on the quote above it seems like Linux hasn't even gotten up to par with Mac for mice.
The best litmus test for an OS for me is whether I could play an RTS or FPS competitively with it, even though I haven't played either for years.
