I could never go back to Windows, after having tasted the freedom of Linux.
Linux has its flaws, but so does Windows. And for me, the flaws in Windows became much more annoying than the ones in Linux. Game compatibility was the main factor that kept me backt from using it on a desktop, and that’s a non issue nowadays.
Game compatibility
Steam+Proton is pretty impressive. I can play Baldur’s Gate 3 on my Thelio. Does get a little toasty, though …
Why would you buy that? Overpriced and with that case it’s no wonder that things get toasty. There’s like fuck all for airflow. If you want a case with wood accents, there’s the North from Fractal Design, which have great airflow thanks to their open fronts.
I’m still dualbooting Windows to play games with a controller until I can get off my ass and buy a USB hub. Reason being that the Xbox Series controllers has issues with my mobo’s Bluetooth chipset, even when updating the firmware. Bluetooth support is particularly inconsistent with these.
But outside of the odd app that needs Windows (and I can just boot a VM for that), Linux has been really good on the desktop.
I invested in an Icy Box IB-AC6110 powered 10 port usb hub a while ago too, but it is more for additional controllers, specifically joysticks and the likes. Mainboards just don’t have enough USB ports for all that. Dual sticks or a hotas? Two gone. Maybe some pedals? Now it is 3. How about a camera and a head tracker? Well, 4-5 depending on your product solution. Defo gives me some peace of mind to be good on USB ports.
For me it’s the basic things that drive me crazy in Windows: the Start menu doesn’t work half of the time, and it shows web results above the program you want to run. File operations are slow and the File Explorer crashes a lot. Application windows constantly steal focus from the one I’m typing in, leading to passwords being typed into code, documents, web browsers or other unsafe places. Background indexing is constant and eats up CPU, and the file search still takes forever despite all this indexing.
These are all basic things that Microsoft has had decades to get working, and they’re all still broken. Microsoft always seem to be paying attention to anything but the quality of the user’s experience.
By contrast, Linux is just relaxing.
Man that MS indexing is so terrible. I shut it off because it was robbing my system when trying to work, and as you said it is slow anyway. Compared to GNOME desktop where the indexing is invisible to user, I hit the Suoer key type a few letters it instantly shows me results as you would expect indexing to work.
and that’s a non issue nowadays.
Again, this community is delusional lol. If you consider only about 5% of Steam games being Linux-friendly these days as “a non issue nowadays,” I’d hate to see your game library.
I game on linux regularly, primarily thanks to Valve. In the last 2 months steam lists 11 different games I’ve “Played Recently”.
- 7 worked flawlessly (Baldur’s Gate 3, Destroy All Humans!, Divinity: Original Sin 2, Besiege, Deep Rock Galactic, Shotgun King, Call of Cthulhu)
- 1 the native linux version doesn’t work, but the windows version works perfectly (Northgard)
- 1 didn’t initially work, but worked a month later after proton was updated. (Grounded)
- 1 I had to choose an older version of Proton (due to the external launcher breaking things), but with enough performance hitching during cutscenes that I chose to just play it on windows (Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order)
- 1 I couldn’t get to work, but I honestly don’t know if it’s a linux issue because the game’s discussion forums are full of people saying the game is riddled with game breaking bugs on windows (The Sinking City)
I’ve been gaming on linux for a couple of years now, over that time I’ve put many hours into WoW, Sea of Thieves, Rimworld, Golf with your Friends, Core Keeper, Outer Wilds, and dozens more without any issues at all. 90%+ of the time the game starts up and just works.
I’m just one datapoint, but yeah, Linux as a gaming platform is totally viable for me these days.
Also, protondb lists 19% Verified and 16% Playable, so your 5% number is just demonstrably wrong.
Cheers.
Again, this community is delusional lol. If you consider only about 5% of Steam games being Linux-friendly these days as “a non issue nowadays,” I’d hate to see your game library.
Speaking of delusional. You don’t seem to have a whole lot of ideas about Linux gaming if you truly believe this ignorant nonsense.
79% of my library has a Silver or higher rating on ProtonDB, 65% are Gold or Platinum rated. For the Top 100 in Steam it’s even better with 89% Silver+ and 79% Gold+. Of the Top 1000 Steam games it is 87% Silver+ and 75% Gold+. Even if we look at the entire Steam catalog we have 13% & 11% respectively, and that’s only so low because there’s literally just no reports. Only 1% of the titles are considered to be “Borked”, another 1% are Bronze rated.
You can check the data for yourself here: https://www.protondb.com/
And again, that’s just Steam and what has been tested by people. Most titles just run, others require minimal tweaking, some require a little tinkering.
I always see people say this but does no one here use professional apps like solidworks or revit? Are there good Linux alternatives? I’d switch to Linux but I need solidworks for work I do.
Windows is the defacto standard for desktop PCs for a reason. In a corporate setting it’s kind of the ideal.
Because of the sheer number of users, most software is built with Windows in mind and therefore has the most support. It’s pretty rare that you find an application that doesn’t have a Windows build available.
On top of that tools like Active Directory, and group policy makes managing thousands of machines at scale a reasonably simple affair.
Microsoft is a corporation rather than a community so you can always expect their main goals to be profit-driven and that comes with some nasty baggage, but it’s not enough that it’s easy for professionals to make the switch.
Linux has made lightspeed progress over the last decade, especially with Proton making games mostly work cross platform, but outside of specialist use cases, the vast majority of business PCs and by extension home PCs will be running Windows for the foreseeable future.
The popularity of Windows is largely due to the fact it’s pre installed on most PC’s when you buy them, people literally think Windows ‘is the computer’. Such popularity has little to do with Windows being a great OS. In many ways Windows is like McDonalds: It’s not the best, it’s not the worst, it just fills that hump in the bell curve.
Due to the fact Linux has no marketing department, it’s unlikely this will ever change.
Closest thing I use to a professional app is DaVinci Resolve Studio on a distribution that is not officially supported by Blackmagic. Not only does Resolve Studio work perfectly, I am able to use Blackmagic hardware (Intensity Pro 4k, Speed Editor) without having to mess around with settings, config files, permissions, packages, etc.
The caveat here is the initial setup: I use an AMD GPU, and it’s a bit of a pain to get the free and licensed versions of Resolve working with those under Linux. However, once that’s out of the way, it’s completely seamless.
As for CAD…yeah that’s where everything falls over. There are tons of FOSS alternatives out there but I have yet to see any of them in a professional setting. Even Fusion360 is hit or miss under Wine, I spun up a Windows VM just to use that for my 3D printer tinkering.
Windows with WSL became a lot better to what Windows used to be but with the TPM requirement Win11 became factually less compatible that modern Linux (at least without fiddling to override that requirement).
Enough with the fan wars. Let’s be perfectly honest for once. Windows, Linux, MacOS - they all suck. Sometimes in similar ways, sometimes in different ways. But they all suck.
Windows users - I get you, you use it because it sorta works 40%, of the time and sucks in the way you understand.
Linux users - I get you, you know all of the arcane incantations you need to quickly install, update, and troubleshoot your os in a terminal window. It works - once you apply your custom bash script that applies every change you need to get everything exactly how you like it. But again, it sucks in the way you understand.
MacOS users - well I don’t really get you. You know what you’ve done.
We deserve better than this, guys. We deserve an os that just works, is easy to use, easy to configure, doesn’t require an IT degree to use, and that we can recommend to our grandma without a second thought.
Windows: “We dropped support for that thing you bought brand new 5 years ago”
Linux: “We are considering dropping support for something that has existed for longer than you had”
I’ve worked exclusively with Linux servers since 2002 and exclusively Linux desktop since 2004 and I’ve come to the point where I prettyuch refuse to touch windows for fear it will infect me somehow.
I know most people don’t know any better but it’s insanity to me that anyone still pays money for windows. It’s a scam, no other words for it.
Don’t even get me started on Windows servers. It’s just sad to see how much money is spent on a company that has so litte focus on quality.
Even the online services suck. Dear God Microsoft, would it kill you to understand that people might have gasp TWO tabs open with your teams “app”?
I guess I pay for the convenience that I get when I buy a new game, simply press Install and start playing. I spend most of my free time playing games on PC, I have no other reasons to stick to Windows. I’ll happily switch to Linux on the day when every new release works with no extra problems, tinkering, waiting or searching caused by my choice of OS.
This is going to sound selfish, but I don’t have the “energy” of fighting against whatever the current meta is - I just have to appreciate the more invested people that drive Linux forward. I’ll just follow and use the OS where I get the smoothest overall experience for gaming (including thing like mouse/kb driver support). Windows is the current answer for this, one day it’ll be something else - hopefully Linux.
Shit’s been progressing really fast recently - I guess Steam Deck is doing some heavy lifting when it comes to motivating developers to keep Linux in mind. Direct support will always give the best results for everyone.
I’ll happily switch to Linux on the day when every new release works with no extra problems, tinkering, waiting or searching caused by my choice of OS.
Let me give you an honest answer that no Linux users is willing to give you (certainly because they fear to scare people off of Linux): you will never see the day where Linux will be equal if not better than Windows for gaming (which it can be sometimes, but it’s not always the case) if not a certain amount of people get out of their comfort zone and are willing to try something new. In fact, nobody can improve anything in their life if they’re not willing to get out of their comfort zone.
You’re already using a PC to play video games, I did this choice too, so trust me, you definitely have the energy to change for a better OS, something ever you recognize as having qualities outside of games. Otherwise, you would’ve played exclusively on console where you actually have a plug and play experience… unfortunately at the cost of your freedom to use the machine you bought however you want, besides all the other considerable disadvantages.
For me, Linux made as much progress as it can do, meaning now, for Linux to be viable for gaming, either companies start to move their asses and make Linux native games (which they can easily do, if they’re willing to use the right tools for their game like Vulkan) but I hardly see that coming any time soon, or new users have to come to Linux so that companies would finally care. Personally, I made my choice by making the first step.
Games don’t always run perfectly under Windows on release either.
I specifically remember one of the CoD games running just long enough to use up all my vram, whereby it would promotly crash. Took about about two weeks to sort that one out.
My tinkering under Linux consists of downloading a game under Steam, ticking a compatibility checkbox, and playing the game. For other launchers, I simply open Bottles and install the launcher of my choosing. Been playing Diablo 4 under Battle.net just fine since launch.
It blows my mind just how bad file system performance is under Windows compared to Linux. I mean, you literally have to have an SSD in order for the OS to be responsive. Granted, most have SSD’s these days, but performance on spinning rust shouldn’t be that bad.
I’ll happily switch to Linux on the day when every new release works with no extra problems, tinkering, waiting or searching caused by my choice of OS.
Yes, it’s definitely getting close now…
I’m specifically talking about the experience of installing and playing games, not installing the OS. I haven’t had any issues with installing Windows either, but apparently we have a different experience with that part - but even then, installation/configuration of OS happens like once per 5 years so I don’t really care if it takes 15 or 90 minutes. I do agree that Linux is quite easy to set up too, no issues there either.
I have no idea what you’re talking about when you say “constantly having to un-fuck Windows”. I just open my PC and open whatever program/game that I was planning to?
But: if installing a new game requires more than pressing install from the service I bought it from due to the choice of my OS, that is the issue that I’m trying to minimize. If one OS is more likely to give me a smoother purchase-to-gameplay experience, I’ll prefer that one.
Basically if 90% of games work equally well on both platforms but 10% require extra tweaking (or literally don’t work) on Linux, I’ll just stick to Windows. Proton is great, but not a perfect answer for everything - but I’m not sure what you mean by “easier than Windows” since I don’t know what could be easier than pressing install.
I guess I’ve just been lucky with my experience overall.
I obviously do use the PC for other stuff too (video editing, browser, music, the usual), but those would work equally fine on Linux - it’s just the gaming part that’s keeping me on Windows, and it’s also the main thing I do on a daily basis.
Linux people will never admit that it’s like that though. I have a few friends on Linux and when we all boot a game to play, the windows users like me sit in the lobby waiting for my friends to trouble shoot why battlefield 1 isn’t launching on Linux, then they give up and just boot into windows and magically the game starts.
I’ve used Linux since about 2004 for personal use. On my homer server(s) and desktop. 95% of them Gentoo (stable). For my relatives I’ve installed some EL workstation distro. Especially my father needs a install-and-forget system, which Windows isn’t.
But I do install and fix Windows PCs at my work. It’s because how Windows works (or rather not work) I get paid. That said, the more I use Windows the more I get frustrated with it.
One of the worst things lately was the accidental activation of BitLocker. It got activated even when the user didn’t have Microsoft account (from where he/she would retrieve the encryption key to decrypt the data if Windows decides to lock the drive). “Oh I’m sorry, but because M$ fuckup your data is gone. Do you have backups? 😇” To avoid any BitLocker issues the secure boot should be disabled. BitLocker shouldn’t then be available for activation.
Some of the frustrating sides of Windows can be avoided by using Pro version of Windows. But that’s simply not enough.
IMO the only reason to use (suffer from) Windows is if you play some games that require it.
My personal solution to that problem ist to not play those games. There’s plenty of stuff to play on Steam that runs fine on Linux.
It’s the professional software that’s lacking in Linux, and that’s the only reason I keep a Windows machine around. For music production, video production, design work, photography and so on, Windows has good commercial software that is well established in these professions.
But for most people, including gamers, Linux is a very good option right now.
I recently setup a Windows vm for my mum because she also needs photo and video editing sw and isn’t happy with the Linux alternatives. This works astonishingly well. Virtualbox even has a mode now to fully integrate the vm into the existing desktop, so basically she just gets the windows status bar in addition to the Linux one when she starts the vm. Windows programs open as if they were running natively. Might be worth a try for you.
I prettyuch refuse to touch windows for fear it will infect me somehow.
Don’t worry. It won’t. It’ll just frustrate you. Windows has gone seriously downhill since 7.
I love windows… I appreciate Linux but as a standard user, I have no need for Linux. I’m careful and I’d say an advanced user. I avoid dodgy websites and idk… I have a dual boot with fedora but I really don’t use fedora because no need?
Let’s assume you’re not a power user who would be confined to Microsoft’s “can’t do” or “too complicated” rules; why do you pay for windows?
And if you pirate, why? Then just use Linux, it’s tree and does all you need
And if iou “got it for free with your computer”, you didn’t, you paid Microsoft ab obligatory tax, like ot or not. Why?
The KDE UI looks and feels the same like windows but is superior, you don’t always have to reboot after any minor issue or change, it’s free, it doesn’t spy on you, and you don’t have the virus bullshit for a variety of reasons
If you don’t know better, I can understand, but you do. You know Linux is out there, why windows?
Thanks. I’d say I’m a power user for program use (multiple windows, programs, etc.).
I got it for free with my computer (lol) when I bought an open box product from a large computer store on discount.
I used to be a sailor but have hung up my hat. The seas seem to be calling me though.
I guess I haven’t really been confined by windows as much as I have been free to do things. Maybe the things I want to do are not extending beyond the limitations that you see. What are some things that you can do that you can’t normally do on windows?
Are there distros that you recommend over others? Do different distros do different things? Are they for different purposes? I have some experience in fedora, Ubuntu, and very little in kali2 (school teaching)
Windows requirements: sprawling list of unsupported hardware based on an arbitrary requirment for a security chip that doesn’t actually improve security at all
Linux: CPU (optional)
