Could be small or big.
My answer has always been that, Linux can’t handle everything I’d ask out of it that I normally can with Windows. I know the games issue has been progressing far from the days when that used to have been an archaic flaw with Linux for the longest time. Games might not be the issue except for some concerns I have for some games.
I was taking some time a few moments ago, to check if a program called Firestorm Viewer would work on Linux Mint which could’ve been my distro of choice. And the description written on the linux page described exactly the kind of concerns I’d have for compatibility and usability from going Windows to Linux.
They said that their viewer was tested and designed to function mostly with Ubuntu and while it could work with other distros, it’s not to be expected to be smooth.
That’s the kind of sentiment and concern I have always had with Linux if I were to go from Windows to it. There are programs and tools on Windows that I have that are used for specific purposes and I know they will not function on Linux. Furthermore, incase anything breaks down, any and all solutions would only be applicable to that thing that would be far easier to solve than just being SOL if I was on Linux.
It is something as a user that I just can’t simply afford to deal with on a regular basis if I made the switch.
So while I may not have too much of an issue running games, I won’t have too much of an issue using alternatives, I won’t have to deal with the Windows ecosystem .etc I will just be running into other walls that would simply make me second guess my decision and make me regret switching to the point where I would dip back into Windows in a hurry.
Every couple years I decide to switch to Linux, spend few weeks trying to get everything to work right, then give up and go back to Windows.
I feel like I’m in a “Goldilocks zone” where I’m enough of a power user that doing what I want in Linux takes quite a bit of work to get set up, but not enough of a power user that I enjoy the technical challenge.
Most recently I was trying to play a couple modded video games, and run a headless HTPC. One thing would work on one distro, another would work on another, but I couldn’t get everything to work at once.
I’m convinced it’s much less straightforward than people here say it is.
I hate Windows, but I only use my computer for OpenOffice, some liiiiight browsing, and old-school light pirating (light enough TPB fits all my needs), so meh.
My new neighbor is an old leftist techie though, and when my 9 year old laptop dies, I may ask him to convert me. Maybe.it is not, but for the simple use case you mention, it’s actually more intuitive.
you can try it out straight from the usb.
it can be straightforward, but oftentimes it is not.
everytime i ever try to use linux on anything, even VM or usb, the video/audio drivers are forked and it takes hours to fix it w/ some sort of custom settings file editing. wasted hours of my life trying to edit this files. never again
So many folks seem to be the opposite of me…
Linux just works now. Shit with my printer, device drivers, LAN things, stuff like like is like wrestling an animal on Windows for some reason, and… just works with KDE. It’s like they’ve swapped places.
Random Windows apps works better in wine than they do in actual windows, sometimes. With no fuss: I double click and they launch, that’s it.
Don’t even get me started on security.
But Linux is (mostly) not performant for gaming, at least not on Nvidia. It’s… fine, but I’m not going to take a 10%+ hit, sometimes much more severe, and poorer support for HDR, frame limiters, mod tools and such when I can just boot neutered Windows instead.
So I’m not getting away from Windows in the near future, but to frank, I don’t understand why more folks (who get past the admittedly tall hurdle of learning about partitioning and installing an OS) don’t dual boot, or seek to use certain poorly supported Linux native apps when double clicking exes mostly just works.
But my point is you don’t have to pick and choose. And there’s no commitment. You can have your cake and eat it, and send the cake back if you don’t like it.
But Linux is (mostly) not performant for gaming, at least not on Nvidia.
That’s true. If you really want to switch to Linux full-time, going with Nvidia is gonna be painful. Drivers have improved a lot over the last few years (especially on Wayland), but there are still so many small bugs and problems that add up and drive you crazy if you have to deal with them every day.
That’s why I sold my 3060. I had a 12GB model and for a period of a few months, the Nvidia drivers were just completely broken and I couldn’t even launch into a graphical interface (I guess they didn’t test that much VRAM because most models only had 8GB), so I had to go back to earlier (even buggier) builds. Even after they finally fixed that there were still constant graphical glitches and stuttering on Wayland with KDE…it worked, but it wasn’t fun.
Since I switched to an RX7800XT everything just works out of the box and I often get even better performance than on Windows. Just a few FPS here and there, but it’s still nice.
Nvidia doesn’t care. They do the bare minimum to make their cards somewhat work on Linux, but it’s not enough.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure working Nvidia on wayland is a very recent thing.
Honestly I just boot from my (AMD) IGP for linux, which is better for compute anyway.
Dual boot is a pain in the ass. I did this for a time and just ended up going to one OS.
My journey with Linux has always ended with “Oh, it’s easy, just paste this mile long command i to the terminal to do something that is a checkbox on Win or MacOS” type nonsense.
There’s just not any true benefits for me to run Linux. Windows and MacOS have their own bullshit but generally the amount of BS is easier to manage than Linux.
I guess it depends on what that ‘something’ is.
My box used to be like this (mostly Nvidia issues), but its been relatively well behaved. And now my Windows install has become a pain with UWP apps, printers, and LAN drives, specifically, that I’ve just given up trying to resolve TBH. Not to speak of some programming stuff.
Both OSes are tools that make specific things easier.
While we are nearly an “All Linux” shop at home, there is one machine that I won’t change.
It is a HP oscilloscope running a heavily modified version of Win98. Back then, it cost as much as a new car, and it still works mostly fine (and where it doesn’t, I know, and can work around). The Windows is basically an afterthought to the hardware, and I don’t think I could get any kind of drivers for the hardware - not even for a newer Windows version. So that remains.
But even my wife wants to switch to Linux now instead of going Win11.
If it works, don’t fix it.
I went back to windows for a few months on the newer desktop. I installed mint and discovered it had a lot of problems with the hardware. HDMI, Ethernet, WiFi, and various downstream things didn’t work. I fixed some of it with help from forums and such, but eventually I went back to windows.
But a couple months later, I tried Pop!_OS and that has worked perfectly out of the box. No regrets.
Only remaining windows devices in my house are my wife’s gaming rig, my gaming rig, and my work laptop.
Gaming rigs are using heavily debloated windows 11 installations, and if I ever figure it out enough they will act a lot more like game consoles than PCs eventually. The moment Linux can reliably play all the games I frequent, Windows will be purged.
Work laptop is non-negotiable sadly. My work uses Windows 10 and an absurd amount of permission controls over it. I am a web developer and every time I need admin permissions for UAC, I have to send a ticket to IT and wait for them to remote into my laptop just to enter a password. Dumbest shit I’ve seen, but this company is the masters of time wasted. But at least it isn’t Windows 11 I guess.
Other devices are mostly linux. Wife’s work laptop is MacOS.
Unfortunately I’m addicted to a game that requires kernel level anti cheat. So I dual boot Fedora and Windows, but pretty much the only thing I use the Windows partition for is the game and that rare application that just works ™️ on Windows
Caught and clocked 😅
Same here, fellow Fedora and Windows dual boot. I have a seperate hard drive for kernel level anti-cheat games: Escape From Tarkov - some PVE maps do run under Linux but PVP and parts of the map require anti-cheat.
Battlefield games from 5 onwards
Call of Duty games Coldwar onwards - do not open a call of duty game under Linux, there have been posts where it is an instant ban.
Ghosts of Tabor
I do have hope that one day the anti-cheat situation will work out where it doesn’t matter what operating system you are running but for now if I want to play some of the above games with friends for now I dual boot.
If you care… you would probably drop Tarkov and not touch Battlefield anymore… but assuming you already know and dont care so wont ruff your feathers. CoD is valid dont know anything about Ghosts of Tabor.
I’m a lazy bastard who keeps pushing it off
🤣
Pirated games
I have tried several times, with both Ubuntu and Mint, and it never ends well for me. I even use Ubuntu as a web server for years, and have similar problems there, just in a different use case. I don’t even get to a point where I’m unable to run apps that can run on Windows. It always seems to work fine during the first few hours and while doing the setup and config stage, I eventually run into a never-ending troubleshooting wormhole that leads nowhere but aggravation. I’ll spend hours upon hours scouring the internet for solutions and it always ends the same way “I have this same problem, and this fixed it.” and whatever “this” was never fixes it for me, whatever it is. I feel like Linux is just so always evolving that there’s no standards and a command that works for one user on a previous version/distro is just completely useless for me because of some obscure technical glitch or difference whatever my installation has. Dealing with repositories, updates and endless dependencies is always just impossible and it’s completely alien to someone who’s used Windows for 40 years.
My current iteration is I’m running a dual boot machine with Mint and Windows with the intention of phasing out Windows, but I’m unable to trust Linux Mint to be there when I need it. After a day or so of installing apps and configuration, it became unstable. I attempted to update the video drivers to the “recommended” version and it seems to have borked the whole Linux installation and nothing on the internet seems helpful, and the communities aren’t very friendly to n00bs.
So I always end up back on Windows, even though my hateful soul wants to ditch it badly. As much as I hate Windows and MS, Windows rarely has severe stability issues.
Are you me!? What you described is exactly my experience with Linux. I really want to completely ditch Windows, but I’m not keen on the idea of spending full days of my life every year on maintaining a Linux installation. I tried Ubuntu, Manjaro and PopOS, all of which have bugs preventing audio from being played on my laptop (I spent so many hours troubleshooting and couldn’t figure it out). Finally tried Mint and audio works most of the time, but Mint is a super mediocre experience that I’m not excited about and I don’t understand why people rave about it. My laptop is dual boot and I use Mint 95% of the time but it’s pretty lame and doesn’t feel like “my” OS.
Linux enthusiasts scratching their heads wondering why the masses aren’t switching over to Linux need to understand that it’s nowhere near ready to go mainstream. Even after decades of development it takes more troubleshooting and customization than 95% of people are willing to give it.
Maybe you should try something Arch-based like Cachy OS? Coming from Mint I don’t think I could live without the Arch wiki now. Just like you said, I was tired of the never ending obscure forums. I’m personally using EndeavourOS and everything just works™️. I’d like to think it’s due to the fact that less things are pre-configured, so my configs are the singular source of truth. I would say Ubuntu based distros are not good for extensively modifying.
Again, thank you for the recommendation of CachyOS. I whipped it up last night on my computer, and other than a small blip that the drive doesn’t appear in bootable devices on my BIOS unless I go deep digging and manually click it to boot, it’s been very smooth and reliable. I’ve been using it all night/day and it is really nice. I just have to figure out why the drive doesn’t appear in my boot order menu when it’s clearly a bootable OS.
Glad to help!
If you’re trying to use grub(im not sure which boot loader you’re using), you’ll need to add the drive ID to the boot config. You can use something like
lsblk -fI hope that’s enough information to help you keep going.
I second CachyOS. That shit just works on every machine I slap it on.
Thanks for the tips! I’ll check them out. I had not heard of those.
Not sure what to get considering I want something fully European.
audio production in Linux is awful.
Isn’t reaper the same in Linux?
the linux build of reaper is great, yes
There’s a lack of linux native VSTs, but other than that my exp has been that Linux is both easier, less demanding and more stable than Windows for audio. Don’t know how it compares to Mac.
the linux builds of bitwig and reaper are great, don’t get me wrong. but running Windows vsts with yabridge is just not going to cut it for me. I need my music tools to work
In my latest setup I’ve chosen to make due with what’s available for Linux. I’m not going to bridge Windows VSTs.
So I don’t mind the software, I’ll use whatever is available, but it was really the hardware issues with Windows that made me switch. I don’t want to spend another night trying to make Windows recognise my old controllers, when they all work without any issues in Linux. I need my tools to work too.
I’ve found a lot of success after biting the bullet and purchasing bitwig as my DAW.
yes, bitwig is fantastic on linux. I’m really impressed with what they’ve been doing
I want to be able to rely on all the things I want to do on my PC “just working” I don’t want to come home after a long day of bullshit looking forward to playing a game or working on a project and have to do a bunch of troubleshooting because something is fucked up. I’m not there yet with Linux. To be fair I’m not there yet with Win 11 either so I’m in a tight spot.
I did buy a laptop so I could try it out more aggressively but have ran into a lot of roadblocks and just have a lot of things that I haven’t had time to figure out yet.
What kind of projects are you creating?
I will say, Linux really is not all the way there for people who use Adobe products. I get the hesitation. But, I haven’t had issues with games since like 2022 - and that was because I was trying to mod anyway.
That said, I have to inquire what distribution you’re using on your laptop? Not that they’re perfect, but something a little more preconfigured for your needs like Pop!_OS or CachyOS may be the ticket to a smoother experience.
CAD for 3d printing/woodworking
Drawing
Managing my media server and putting together playlists/reading lists.
Various little coding things to help with workflows on different things.
I’ve been playing around with Bazzite which seems to be pretty good so far but I have a list of things still I need to figure out how to do on it. Also for the record I’ve been running a headless debian server for my media for years without much issue so I’m not clueless about Linux but that isn’t as involved as using it for a desktop.
Have you tried https://www.winboat.app/ ?
No, but it looks like it could be worth a try. Although I do see that it doesn’t currently support GPU passthrough.
CAD is the one thing that has no meaningful Linux alternative.
For drawing or painting, Krita or Gimp are your top options, though Gimp gives some of the worst user experience in all Linux. Inkscape if you do vector art.
Yeah, you’re a bit SOL for CAD and drawing. I mean, Krita is great, but if you use Adobe you’re fucked.
I hear so many complaints about FreeCAD… Maybe we’ll be there someday.
Yeah, I use Krita for drawing so I’m not so worried about (assuming my tablet works) I do have FreeCAD installed and have played with it a little but it was a pretty rocky start that left me not super confident that I’ll be able to rely on it.
Theres also the issue that working off just the laptop is annoying so I’m looking to see if theres a KVM switch/Dock that will let me use my periphreals with the laptop without having to unplug all my shit. Haven’t messed with hardware like that in a long time though so I’m not sure what’s what.
Edit: These are reasons I use Linux because I read the title too fast… Doh…
Because I dont think its normal to have an American tech company recording what I do at my computer. Its a bit shocking that people have given up and just let them watch everything now.
Its not only that, its also that windows always is annoying. Weather its constant sounds, notifications, ads, user interface changes or bugs, its all so annoying.
Linux is just beautiful, quiet, fast, no ads. Doesnt get slower with time. Updates are actually adding features you may want.
The entire open source idea is beautiful. Sharing solutions, working together, without profit motives.
Mac OS has always worked well enough. It’s much worse now in my opinion than it was since High Sierra but it’s still fine. Also, I fear it’d be quite difficult to get Linux working on an M2 MacBook Pro for dubious benefit to me.
If I was on a PC though, I’d definitely try Linux out, really don’t like Windows 11 and didn’t love Windows 10
