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I’m running a homelab with tons of CLI Ubuntu and whatnot, but I’m fine with Windows and Mac for desktop laptop, so I’ve never tried gnome or anything… I reflect on the last time I saw gui Linux… Creepy basement of dude we called Crazy Eyes around the neighborhood, around 2006, trying to convince us of the future.
I think once Valve polishes SteamOS for desktop environments there will be actual largescale migration.
Proton covers most games that I play, only a couple exceptions involving heavy handed anti-cheat stuff like League of Legends has now. For non-gaming Windows stuff that doesn’t work in Linux I would guess that a virtual machine might work.
Based Linux wont run riot games
Is that a bad thing?
Dont get me wrong, I love the IP for League, but the I would never reccomend the game to anyone.
That’s why it is based.
league of legends used to work on linux. they removed the compatibility, explicitly.
With the most braindead reason,
There are barely any Linux users…
Riot… I quit the game because I didn’t want to bother with proton and get mad when it goes wrong. And I knew kernel anti cheat would come. And all the Linux fans who are addicted enough are running the game on windows specifically. I literally have a friend with a windows VM with graphic card passthrough to play league of legends… That guy gets counted as a windows User…
Fucking idiot create the most toxic environment for Linux users and then say they don’t attempt to support Linux because the Linux users didn’t bother to fight their shit enough in a detectable way.
well it’s good for us, I think. it wasn’t fun anymore last time I played it, and it was never a healthy habbit.
whoa gpu pss through is wild, how well does it work ?
They’re just trying to match the toxicity of their players.
can’t be done, but they’re making an admirable go of it.
Some would say that League not working with proton is a blessing.
Because it is.
Same goes for Valorant, I hear.
Playing Valorant is like opening port 22 and having “password” as your root password.
Not to mention the backdoor it opens into your soul, for the toxic commumity to pour their verbal detritus into.
It was Valorant first, because of the kernel anticheat, which they eventually brought to league too
The joke is that the games are bad, and the communities too toxic, to be a healthy hobby.
Thereby, a person being prevented from playing is being blessed, not because there is no longer a backdoor into their system. But because they will no longer have to endure the verbal abuse of temmates and opponents.
The windows user brain cannot comprehend actually enjoying to use a computer.
As a Windows & Linux user, I can, in the same way that I get that car people love working on cars.
I still really don’t ever want to work on cars but I understand.
I largely use technology of any kind for the applications of its use, not because of an intrinsic desire to knee deep in technical work.
It is funny to watch old Windows admins bring all sorts of bad habits to Linux
Like what? Genuinely asking as a Windows user with a few Linux machines.
File extensions, wanting a GUI for everything, running some random threat detection software, assuming that Linux is lightweight so therefore it will make old machines have modern performance… The list goes on
yeah this was the thing.
it’s not even about whether linux is ready. windows got sloppy drunk and rode its motorcycle into a brick wall. it’s linux or nothing now.
Obligatory (semi)relevant XKCD
Classic.
I hate to be one of the “Linux isn’t ready” people, but I have to agree. I love Linux and have been using it for the last 15 years. I work in IT and am a Windows and Linux sysadmin. My wife wanted to build a new gaming PC and I convinced her to go with Linux since she really only wanted it for single player games. Brand new build, first time installing an OS (chose Bazzite since it was supposed to be the gaming distro that “just works”). First thing I did was install a few apps from the built in App Store and none of them would launch. Clicking “Launch” from the GUI app installer did nothing, and they didn’t show up in the application launcher either. I spent several hours trying to figure out what was wrong before giving up and opening an issue on GitHub. It was an upstream issue that they fixed with an update.
When I had these issues, the first thing my wife suggested was installing Windows because she was afraid she may run into more issues later on and it “just works”. If I had never used Linux and didn’t work in IT and decided to give it a try because all the cool people on Lemmy said it was ready for prime time, and this was the first issue I ran into, I would go back to Windows and this would sour my view of Linux for years to come.
I still love Linux and will continue to recommend moving away from Windows to my friends, but basic stuff like this makes it really hard to recommend.
Alright, I have shared my unpopular opinions on Lemmy, I’m ready for my downvotes.
Windows is just more familiar. It definitely has problems just like this all the time. There’s a reason most companies have to have a test environment to try out every update to make sure it doesn’t break everything.
I’ve been using Linux for over thirty years and the nice looking App Stores that have appeared those last few years have always been shit and have always been mostly broken in various ways. I don’t know why.
On the other hand, the ugly frontends to the package manager just work.
In this case it was installing them from flathub anyway. The applications were being installed, but the only way to launch them was through the CLI using flatpak run then the app ID. Every article I came across said to run that, then right click the app after it was open and pin it to the taskbar or whatever, but that option was greyed out.
Choosing Bazzite was a big mistake, you could’ve gone for NobaraOS or PopOS
I’m used to the CLI world of Linux. I wanted something for my non-technical wife that would “just work”. I’ve heard good things online about Bazzite and how it already has everything installed (Steam, Wine, Proton, graphics drivers, all that) and I didn’t want to mess with installing any of that stuff by hand. Idk, maybe it’s my fault for expecting a distro to have basic functionally out of the box.
I think blaming me for choosing a distro based on what it says it’s supposed to do is a bit silly. Sure, I could have installed any distro and worked to install and maintain everything by hand, but that’s not what I was looking for. I don’t want to play tech support every week when something breaks and spend hours trying to fix it when my wife just wants to play a game. If you enjoy that, great, more power to you. Sorry for not choosing your favorite distro, I guess.
Choosing a distro based on what it says it does is not on you. Recommending it to your wife without even having tried it is. When I put Ubuntu on my wife’s computer, I know what to expect because I’ve installed on just abuse every pc I’ve ever used in the past 10 years.
This is exactly what keeps me from switching. I don’t have the time or pull to do knuckle down on an important PC. Maybe when I have a backup one, I’ll do it. Who knows.
You’re not wrong. This is an argument for sticking with Windows. It will suck. But, you know exactly how much it will suck and in what ways. Switching to Linux will suck in new and expected ways.
It’s not my favorite distro, the maintainer of Proton-GE created NobaraOS
I also had a similar experience with bazzite and ubuntu.
Apps would look like they installed but they are nowhere. Tried the app store. Tried flatpak. It instilled but clicking on the icon wouldn’t launch anything. Ended up with two icons for the same app. One works one doesn’t. No easy way to uninstall non working app.Bazzite bluetooth stopped working after update. Had to run two commands found on the Bazzite forum to get it to work again. Steam wouldn’t update either. Had to run another command I found on the forum to get it to update.
This is all last week. I am still running both but I wouldn’t call it ready for the non-IT user.
The App Store has to work consistently for it to be accessible for the average person.
Yeah that’ll happen if you run Bazzite. It’s extremely hardware dependent. It “just works” if you get lucky and use the same hardware as the developers. Otherwise, it’s a shitshow
I run Linux daily, Linux isn’t ready, its really not much of a debate. If the average person can’t operate it efficiently then the average person will just stick to mac or windows.
I’ll admit it is closer than it has ever been thanks to compatibility layers like proton but the average user still can’t figure it out so it still has a way to go.
the average user clicks on the chrome icon to open the internet and goes to gmail.com.
you can do all that in linux.
Until everything breaks because the average user hasn’t bothered updating.
The average person can’t use Mac or Windows efficiently either lol
Honestly, Windows isn’t ready for the desktop, either, it’s just not ready in a different way that most people are familiar with.
Things like an OS update breaking the system should be rare, not so common that people are barely surprised when it happens to them. In a unified system developed as one integral product by one company there should be one config UI, not at least three (one of which is essentially undocumented). “Use third-party software to disable core features of the OS” shouldn’t be sensible advice.
Windows is horribly janky, it’s just common enough that people accept that jank as an unavoidable part of using a computer.
I disagree. I’m running Bazzite, which is based on the immutable variant of fedora, and it runs like a charm, even without much knowledge. Most drivers are prepackaged, so stuff like WiFi aren’t much of a hassle anymore and I haven’t had any issues with Flatpak. It basically eliminates all fiddling at the cost of customizing your OS as much as other distros. Honestly, SteamOS did show that immutable distros are the de facto future for new users. So far I know of Bazzite and Fedora’s immutable distros variant, but there might be more.
I’ve been playing FFXIV on Linux with dlss, reshade and 3rd party mods and it’s been a blast.
Linux is 100% ready for gaming even with the worst case scenario (nvidia) I’ve been able to overclock and play just fine.
ah the early 2000s days of fedora.
It’s ready enough, but at the same time not ready. It could be better
I’ve been using Linux as my main OS (NixOS btw) for everything for years now. The only things that doesn’t work is anti-cheat…
That’s a feature (probably)
Mum wouldn’t even notice as long as the wallpaper is the same
My excuse for not switching to Linux for a long time was that it couldn’t play games. Now that proton is a pretty developed thing, that’s no longer an excuse. I actually tried out mint Linux for a friend to see how easy it was to use and I just kept using it because it did everything I wanted it to. As a power user I had to modify it quite a lot but my friend just wants to basically load into the OS, launch a browser or play games from steam and that’s about it, so for him it’s pretty easy and straightforward.
I actually ended up installing kubuntu on his computer and modified it to look exactly like Windows 7, which is what he’s upgrading from. It’s kind of scary how close it got.
I dual booted with Windows purely for gaming and Linux for everything else for a long time.
After upgrading to Windows 11 I switched the default boot option to Linux and moved all my games there.
Now Windows is used exclusively for printing with thay pesky Canon printer of ours.
Tobii haven’t released Linux drivers for their eye-tracker, but that’s the only gaming-related problem I’ve had this time around.
99% of people want a drop-in replacement for Windows that will install and run every possible Windows-compatible application, game and device without them having to make any extra effort or learn anything new. Basically Windows but free (in all senses).
Any even slightly subtle difference or incompatibility and they’ll balk. Linux can never be that, and Microsoft will keep the goalposts moving anyway to be sure of it.
Sure, a lot more works and is more user friendly than 15 years ago, but most people won’t make the time to sit down and deal with something new unless it’s forced on them… which is what Microsoft are doing with Win11.
Most of the hobbyists I speak to that have failed linux desktop experiences mostly switch back to windows due to:
- Hardware compatibility issues.
- Microsoft office interoperability limitations of the web based office.
- Display scaling issues on multi-monitor setups and some linux applications.
Personally for me the list is:
- Bluetooth not being detected on my particular asus laptop. (The same bluetooth chip works in other laptops)
- Multi-monitor scaling and resolution issues when 3 external monitors are connected via thunderbolt doc.
- Lack of good alternatives to fancyzones
You say it like it’s a bad thing but yes, I want my stuff to just work and my apps to just run after I download them… I don’t want to spend hours every other day or week during my limited free time troubleshooting why something doesn’t work. I already spend all day doing that in my work’s linux servers and my home server.
This is an issue with FOSS. If something doesn’t work then you are on your own. Yes, I can fix it, or work around it, or whatever but it will take hours that I could be spending in windows 11 just playing a game or actually learn something more relevant instead of troubleshooting random shit. On other apps as well, I’ve paid for a lot of software to be able to ask the owners to help and for them to not tell me to fuck off.
Here’s an analogy: You can do your own gardening, or you can hire one of the two landscaping services in town.
This sounds great, but these days, no matter who you hire, the people who show up 1) want to install a fountain and an advertisement billboard that will run off your water and electricity supply and 2) want the right to take what they like from your house by default, they’ll mysteriously “forget” and do it anyway even if you pay them not to.
Furthermore, with their latest package, one of the landscaping companies are basically saying that if you don’t have a yard large enough for their fountain, you have to move house, which is only marginally better than the other one who will only work on gardens for houses they sold in the first place.
(A previous version of this comment involved the word “lube”. I’m sure you can imagine the rest.)
More user friendly doesn’t mean you won’t have to spend hours troubleshooting driver issues that you will never have on Windows, that’s a real problem…
(and when you find the solution you need to input commands in terminal that you can’t tell what they do, that’s a huge security concern as it teaches users to just trust anyone who tells them to do things they don’t understand)
Man, people really overstate the barrier to entry to the terminal. Windows troubleshooting is full of command line stuff as well.
It’s not the terminal, it’s the underlying issues. Having more GUI options to set certain things is nice, but the reality of it is that if an option isn’t customizable to the point of needing quick GUI access it should just never break, not be configurable or at least not need any manual configuration at any point. The reason nobody goes “oh, but Windows command line is so annoying” is that if you are digging in there something has gone very wrong or you’re trying to do something Windows doesn’t want you to do.
The big difference is that the OS not wanting you to do things you can do is a bug for people in this type of online community while for normies it’s a feature.
The linux terminal is really easy to get into & the UNIX file-system is just nicely organized
You know whats worse than doing things in windows command line or powershell? The registry
“Nooooo! I cant $sudo nano /etc/some.conf!!!”
Regedit -> HKEY_USERS/microsoft/windows/system/some_setting --> value=FUCK type=DWORD
That’s because you are sending your Fucks to the wrong key. You are missing the /feedback folder under system
Windows 11 doesn’t even support first gen Ryzen CPUs. The amount of hardware that runs Windows 11 without tinkering is a tiny fraction of the hardware that runs Fedora Workstation without tinkering.
Linux is much better with drivers and hardware support than Windows. Windows only works well if you use the very small subset of hardware it supports.
The difference is that if you’re using hardware that’s compatible it just works. My current experience on Linux is that you have 100% hardware that’s supported based on what people are saying, you install one distro and your GPU shits the bed the second there’s load on it and WiFi works when it feels like it. Install another distro and the GPU works but WiFi doesn’t. In the end you spend hours troubleshooting and you’re applying solutions by trusting that people aren’t doing anything malicious when they tell you to input such and such in terminal.
On Windows? Install the OS, everything works, so no, there’s no issues with the hardware itself.
And the “small subset” of hardware it supports is anything made after 2017 and it’s only Windows 11 that doesn’t support hardware made before that.
Try to make Linux work without any outside intervention with all the hardware that Windows 11 is just compatible with out of the box, I dare you.
Huh, odd. I never had these issues, even though I use an Nvidia card with a VRR monitor. All my peripherals (webcam, printer, bluetooth earbuds) work out of the box, too. But maybe I’m just lucky.
Kinda crazy, because W7 didn’t support first gen Ryzen either!
Running windows 11 on older hardware is as easy as a checkbox in Rufus. Also the small subset of hardware windows supports is by far the most used hardware (probably because it’s supported by windows).
Well, my brother installed linux (mint) on more than 30 laptops that we were fixing to reuse. Im pretty sure none of them had any driver problems.
Tbh, unless you have a NVIDIA graphics card, or are using arch*, driver issues almost never happen.
*my personal thinkpads wifi board didn’t work in arch, but that may be because I had already borked that install completly.
All AMD hardware, Bazzite was killing my GPU as soon as there was load on it and WiFi that worked intermittently, Mint had non working WiFi on a USB antenna that is supposed to be 100% Linux compatible.
So yeah, I would love it if Linux fanatics stopped pretending that Linux is just as plug n play as Windows, it isn’t and solutions rely on trusting random people on the Internet.
“Unless you have a computer in the 90% of users” is a hell of a dismissal.
In fairness, thin-and-light media and web use laptops are a different story, but for desktop use? That’s a big stretch.
Even the Nvidia graphics card sentiment is becoming outdated. There have been sizeable improvements in their drivers over the past couple years.
In the last twenty years, I’ve pretty much only had nVidia hardware for graphics with very few issues.
Of course that wasn’t in laptops. Having a GPU in a laptop is asking for trouble anyway in my opinion.
Correct. I’ve been rocking their open source driver on Wayland for about a year now, pretty smooth experience.
Though sleep is still a neverending struggle.
You’ve been rocking it for what? Does it support the DLSS feature set now along with HDR and VRR? I mean, it sure did show me a desktop for the few days I spent trying to get a clean, working install of the proprietary driver, but I wasn’t under the impression that I’d have feature parity without doing that.
I’ve defaulted to enabling the X reset on mine, just because waking from sleep is such shite.
Yeah, I was having trouble with sleep, and kwin compositing (KDE), so I switched to proprietary drivers and X11, its working pretty well.
They want ReactOS.
But they don’t want to pay it to develop it fully
They also want the developers to dedicate their entire lives, 20 hours a day, for no pay, just became they’re entitled to a FOSS Windows clone.
This is my old man nerd point every time (and by the way, we all keep having the exact same conversation here, which is infuriating).
It is NOT, in fact, more user friendly than 15 years ago.
Not Linux’s fault, necessarily, but hardware got… weird since the days of the mid 00s when Linux WAS pretty much a drop-in replacement. What it couldn’t do then is run Windows software very well at all, and that was the blocker. If we had Proton and as many web-based apps as we do now in 2004 I’d have been on Linux full time.
These days it’s a much harder thing to achieve despite a lot more work having gone into it (to your point on moving goalposts).
It is NOT, in fact, more user friendly than 15 years ago.
This is just patently false. Pick any common distro.
it definitely is more user friendly, i remember trying ubuntu 10+ years ago and the default driver was awful, the nvidia driver install ran in the terminal and asked questions that i had no answer to, so half the time i fucked it up, and then it didn’t support my monitor so i had to edit the x server conf to get the correct resolution and refresh rate. and when the new drivers came out i had to re-do everything every time
for a few years now you just install with a usb stick and everything runs greatInstalling Windows machines 10+ years ago wasn’t much more fun either… (I’m not sure it’s any more fun these days, but I haven’t done it in ages, so I’ve no idea).
Having recently spent the equivalent to five work days trying to get an Nvidia setup working on Linux I’m going to say the experience isn’t necessarily much better, depending on what you are trying to do and how.
Audio and networking were a shitshow back then, nowadays almost everything just works on those two fronts. Also, having to edit your Xorg.conf is not what I’d call user friendly…
Especially if you had a soft-modem.
And printing. Oh dear, I might have a headache if I think too much about it.
Oh, man, I had entirely blocked the concept of “soft-modems” from my memory. I’m having flashbacks.
But there was this brief moment, though. Maybe that’s my problem, that I remember it as this momentous piece of Linux history to start getting these cool distros in nice, shiny professional-looking CDs with proper installers that would set up your DE first time every time and get everything mostly there… and it turns out that it was like three years and a couple of Ubuntu iterations.
FWIW, networking mostly works, but I had a heck of a time finding a distro that would properly do 5.1 out of my integrated ASUS audio device last time I went distro hopping. I think audio got better, worse and then better again since the good old days.
I had a heck of a time finding a distro that would properly do 5.1 out of my integrated ASUS audio device
That’s not even close to a common use case though. Using that as an indicator of how user friendly Linux is is unfair.
It’s not being used as an indicator of user friendliness (that’d be the atrocious time I had setting up my Nvidia GPU and HDR monitors). It’s specifically an anecdote replying to the previous guy’s (accurate) comment regarding how finicky old implementations of audio on Linux used to be.
But also, in case you’re wondering, that setup worked first time on Windows with no additional work beyond the drivers installed by Asus itself. Do I like, or even tolerate, ASUS’s weird driver manager? Nope, frickin’ hate it, would switch to Linux to avoid it all things being equal. But one thing worked first time, the other needed five different distros before one randomly got it right for no discernible reason.
Fair enough, sorry for the misunderstanding.
I’ve had the opposite experience with Windows audio though. It’s always been weird for me, randomly switching outputs for no reason, and I stopped even trying to connect wireless headphones because it would always seem to prioritize those, even when they’re turned off. Every 5 to 6 months I’d have to dig deep in the audio settings to fiddle with the gain on my mic so I’d stop blowing out my friends’ ears on discord.
I think we all need to start differentiating the usability quirks and general jank that all OS have in different areas from the blockers.
Yes, the way Windows handles sources and prioritization sucks, while different Linux DEs have dumb problems with UI scaling or their own audio quirks or MacOS has weird multimonitor support or whathaveyou. If that was it I’d be all for prioritizing the free alternative, no questions asked.
The issue is the blocking issues. Entire features not working, or working at noticeably sub-par performance. Hardware with straight-up nonexistent support you need to replace to make the jump, or that is so finicky to set up that it may as well not work for all the average user is concerned. Those are showstoppers.
The problem is you could have a LOT fewer of the quirks, but a single dealbreaker is enough to block somebody making the jump, or reporting that they tried and failed. I’m as annoyed with how inconsistently videoconferencing picks up the right audio output as anybody. I complain about it every time I have a work call. But I still wouldn’t suggest to any of my friends to try to set up their high end Nvidia GPU on Linux as a main gaming daily driver. Those two things are on completely different tiers.
It depends on who you are
If you have to use a command line or terminal ever then the OS is not 100% user friendly.
In Linux you still have to use a command like, the average windows user does not.
They forced him to type sudo apt update
Nothing that requires the command line in Linux can be done in a “friendly” way in Windows.
I have to disagree with you on that, sometimes even running certain apps needs some command line knowledge there might be a way to run them without but it’s a lot of hassle
not to mention people are very familiar with windows so learning a new OS feels way more complicated than it actually is
I love linux and always try to get people to use it but lying to ourselves about the current state of linux does not help at all
My wife uses Linux Mint Debian Edition and never uses the command line. She has literally never opened it because she’s intimidated by it lol.
Even if you are right that using the terminal ever is not user-friendly, that means that Windows is not user-friendly since I was forced to use it every time the OS fucked up randomly and I had to do
sfc /scannowto fix my boot drive.Not to mention the countless times a Windows forum power user posted a command for people to run that was supposed to fix everything.
Until I can run special K or RTX HDR to inject HDR into games that don’t support it I’m not going to switch to Linux on my main gaming PC. Its hooked up to my Nice OLED TV in my living room and games look too damn good with HDR to give that up for Linux. Yes I know HDR works on Linux now. But it only works with games that support HDR and the only “Auto HDR” solution I’ve found is a janky reshade plugin that only works with dx11 games and doesn’t really produce very good results. I’m really holding out hope that valve figures out a nice auto HDR solution they can build into gamescope.
