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(2025 is “The year of the Windows 11 PC refresh,” allegedly)
Wait. Since when has Microsoft’s Windows team been driking the same from the same copium jars as us Linux users have for years?
That’s hilarious.
Oh it will be the year of the Windows 11 refresh, there’s no question of that. Untold millions of business PCs will be making the change as Windows 10 goes EoL.
It’s a very different story in the home market. Frankly the only thing holding Windows Gaming in place is decades of increasing personal PC ownership but that ownership / use rate is now declining as normal people transition to using smartphones and tablets.
In just a few short years, ten at most, gaming on Windows will be about as relevant as gaming on Mac. It may still be called “PC Gaming”, you can already see media trying to redefine gaming on SteamDeck and other handhelds as “PC Gaming”, but those games won’t be built around the Windows OS.
This. Family have even ditched laptops for tablets, and businesses would definitely not risk a new eco system just because of 11
I hope to see this before the EoL date set for Windows 10 and a bunch of people throw out perfectly good machines to but something that works with Windows 11.
Personally, I won’t use Windows 11 on my home machines. But my concern is that I install a distro this year and want to switch to SteamOS later, but would have to start over with customizations, etc. in the new distro. I wish SteamOS was available now for gaming rigs!
I think it should be available just in time for Windows 10 sunset later this summer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdR-bxvQKN8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebmp2FIrTlE
my concern is that I install a distro this year and want to switch to SteamOS later, but would have to start over with customizations, etc. in the new distro.
I wouldn’t sweat that at all.
I switched distros last week, didn’t like the new one as much as I thought I would, and switched again a few days later. It’s not that big of a deal. Install some apps, reload your files from a USB stick. It’s not a major commitment.
A good way to keep this easy for yourself is to keep the files you actually care about like pictures, game saves, documents, etc all on a separate partition. It makes it very easy to make a backup for distro hopping.
You can nuke your OS as many times as you like, and everything will be exactly in the same place.
If you want to be slightly fancier, you can use a btrfs subvolume and not have to worry about sizing partitions correctly.
@cadekat @Olgratin_Magmatoe doesn’t ext4 have this feature or am I missing something?
I don’t believe it does, but I could be wrong!
lvm2 noises intensify
I’m at an uncomfortable crossroads of knowing enough to hate Microsoft, but not knowing enough to trust myself with switching to Linux. I’m like just barely tech-literate enough to wander into places like Lemmy, but beneath some surface level shit I’m probably one of the dumbest motherfuckers here when it comes to not setting my devices on fire.
So… a ‘Linux for dummies’ sounds exactly like what I need!
I feared making the plunge as well but it was so seamless tbh. Got Linux Mint and it just feels like a newer version of old Windows. Not sure hownit’s with other distros, but I findnit to be precicely Linux for dummies.
I’d say the difficulty to getting used to new environment was on a similar level to getting from Windows XP to Windows 7. If you can dual boot I recommend just trying it - the water is fine.
This is accurate really. Linux Mint is excellent for people who want to get away from Windows and learn Linux because it looks similar. Bazzite, however, especially the KDE version, honestly looks better than Windows at this point, imo.
In addition to making gaming much much easier, it also has an atomic code core, meaning that all the stuff you will eventually break on Linux Mint by playing around with different programs… and eventually lead to a new Linux user re-installing… is almost non-existent. Programs are installed in their own space with their own dependencies, meaning that they don’t encroach on any other programs using similar drivers, configurations, etc. When those programs are uninstalled, they’re just gone.
So if you can finally game on a Linux distro, not worry so much about borking a linux distro, and it looks and feels both modern and intuitive at the same time…
Why not put in on a spare laptop or something and get some hours in? Microsoft needs some serious pruning and unfortunately they seem immune to criticism that doesn’t come in the way of lost revenue.
beneath some surface level shit I’m probably one of the dumbest motherfuckers here when it comes to not setting my devices on fire.
Well… if you actually want to learn, as we ALL did, get yourself a device you can literally set on fire. By that I mean a RPi 3 (probably going for 10 EUR nowadays) or a 2nd hand laptop. If you can’t find that easily, try a virtual machine, if you don’t want to bother give a whirl (with a ad blocker…) to https://distrosea.com and come back, risk free.
It’s honestly empowering to learn and it has been relevant for decades (basically since the UNIX days) and STILL is relevant today in the time of the “cloud” where all such commands are still used.
Well, there are a lot of newb-friendly distros these days. Options:
- Linux Mint (any spin) - one of the easiest to get help with online, with minimal compromises
- Fedora - also pretty easy to get help w/ online
- Bazzite - great if you just want to play games; it’s about as close to SteamOS as you get w/o an official release
Any of those should be pretty friendly to users new to Linux, and they go roughly in order from fitness as a regular desktop (top down) to fitness for gaming (bottom up), but any of them can handle gaming and desktop stuff pretty equivalently.
Bazzite is freaking awesome. I started my Linux journey with Arch, then tried Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Mint, Zorin, Endeavour and more. Bazzite has been on my PC for a year and it’s been the best experience I had with PCs in my whole life. I freaking love it.
It does look nice. My main concern is the read-only root, which seems annoying to deal with for non-gaming stuff. I’m a dev and sometimes need to install new dependencies and whatnot. But I’m sure there’s a good workflow for that as well.
Aurora (KDE) or Bluefin (gnome) have dev editions. They are based on ublue like Bazzite, but are more dev oriented.
I’ll have to check it out.
I’ve also considered trying the openSUSE MicroOS versions as well (Kalpa for KDE and Aeon for GNOME). I use Tumbleweed on my systems right now, so that would be a natural transition.
I was the same as you about 6 months ago. I installed Bazzite and never looked back. Sure, there might be some quirks but overall my pc works much better. I can even finally use Steam Link reliably!
Some things that may help you get started:
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All of the risk in changing your computer operating system comes from the potential loss of data. Everything else is replaceable/recoverable, including your original Windows install if needed. You can avoid this risk by backing up your personal data to an external drive, which frankly everyone should be doing anyway because hard drives are consumables.
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You can try Linux with no risk by running it as a live OS. This loads the operating system files into RAM from an external device (typically a USB drive) and makes no changes to the system hard drive. This lets you test your computer’s functionality in Linux without making permanent changes (does my graphics card work? wifi? audio? etc). The mainstream Linux installers do this already for the installation process, but you can just load one up to try things out without running the installation process.
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You don’t have to completely switch off of Windows. It’s fairly easy to install Linux as a dual-boot on an existing Windows system. As long as you have some free space on your hard drive to dedicate to Linux, you can just keep your Windows install and have Linux too. You can even access your files in Windows from the Linux install.
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I think one of the biggest hurdles for switching over is knowing what software to use in Linux (how do I edit a document? watch a movie? read a pdf? etc). There are options for basically anything you might want to do, but if you don’t know what you’re looking for you might feel a bit lost. I recommend alternativeto.net for this. You can search for software like Microsoft Office and filter for Linux to get a list of compatible software options that do the same job.
You can avoid this risk by backing up your personal data to an external drive, which frankly everyone should be doing anyway because hard drives are consumables.
This is super inconvenient. Better method is to set up a server w/ Syncthing and use that to just sync your Home directory remotely.
Better method is to set up a server w/ Syncthing and use that to just sync your Home directory remotely.
Sure, just set up a server, very convenient. Dude, this advice is for people who have never installed an operating system before.
Like, yeah, if you’re talking about keeping a living backup that is up to date within 30 seconds because you’re doing accounting as a home business and you can’t afford to lose the last 5 minutes of work, then yeah self-hosted file syncing is great. It’s absolutely a better long-term solution for personal data management. But for most people this level of backup fidelity is unnecessary, and a USB drive is a thing you can just buy and start using with no setup effort.
Syncthing can be installed on anything, very easily. All you have to do to make it a “server” is to make sure its connected 24/7.
and a USB drive is a thing you can just buy and start using with no setup effort.
USB drive will be super slow and will be hanging out of whatever it’s attached to. There are many other better options.
This would imply that you have at least two machines. In that case they could just install Linux in the other machine to try it out.
Foa people dabbling in Linux for the first time, with the anxiety of losing their data, it certainly sound like they don’t have 2 machines to run syncthing. Otherwise, why wouldn’t they just copy all their important data to the other machine to avoid the data loss risk?
And sure if that is the case Syncthing is a good solution, but it doesn’t sound applicable in this situation.
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As a long time Linux enjoyer, this is honestly the easiest way to get it into the mainstream. People have already seen the success of the steam deck which only reinforces that Linux can be used for gaming better than ever before. As long as people stop using Windows I’m here for it.
Eh, I don’t really care if they stop using Windows, I care that they start using Linux. Dual boot if you need, but more market share for Linux increases the likelihood that devs will support Linux directly.
more market share for Linux increases the likelihood that devs will support Linux directly.
I’m starting to wonder if that’s true. I thought so do but now I’m wondering, especially with compatibility layers like Proton, and even Wine before that, and plenty of tools like Electron, Unity, etc helping to be cross-platform, if the lack of support is rather due to bad habits instilled by years of Microsoft partnership with manufacturers (and thus driver support) implying that drivers must be kept secret and thus Linux support is “bad for business” and that then cascades down to developers then users.
I think it’s more that devs see Linux support as a liability. Linux market share is low, and supporting Linux opens them up to Linux specific cheats, so they’ll need to spend resources on Linux specific mitigations. Why do all that for ~2% market share, most of whom seem content not playing their games?
I don’t think we need to jump to conspiracy theories. If Linux adoption gets to 10% or so and still see this issue maybe the conspiracy theory carries some weight.
For sure. I’m doing the dual boot life these days because as much as I want every game to work on Linux there are still some that don’t. And some games just work better on Windows. But at the same time that’s why more devs supporting Linux is what we wanna see.
I’m always curious tochear what games people aren’t able to run in Linux. Which ones are you unable to run?
openSUSE, Mass Effect Legendary Edition does not boot on my setup, but on ProtonDB, it says gold. Just using Proton did not work for me, so I don’t know what extra BS people did to get it running, but yeah. That’s a recent one I’ve run into.
Not super familiar with openSUSE, but you could get protonup-qt and install Proton-GE.
I tried that too, as I did have the GE option under compatibility when trying different versions. It just won’t install EA’s shitty app. I feel like on one of the Proton versions, it did “install” and booted up, but then just showed a black screen with nothing afterwards. I shut it down to try again because I know how finicky these things can be, and then the EA app was saying t wasn’t installed. I gave up after about an hour and went back to Windows. I work way too much to be able to sit there and tinker with this crap when I get off from a 10 hour shift…
I mean, use the tool that fits the job. I could probably help point you in the right direction. Is it from steam, or straight EA play app?
It’s mostly the problems with anti cheats. The one that comes to mind is Helldivers. I already hated the anti cheat for that game but it’s impossible on Linux. If I was still into Apex Legends I’m sure Easy Anti Cheat would cause some issues but I’m not sure. If Easy Anti Cheat doesn’t work then there are a lot of games to add to that list like Halo and The Finals. I can’t name a lot off the top of my head but Easy Anti Cheat is super popular with devs of online games.
Helldivers or Helldivers 2? HD2 runs very well in Linux.
Helldivers 2. It kept crashing so I figured it was because of the anti cheat. Perhaps it was just user error and I need to try again.
I’ve played Helldivers 2 for over 400 hours now, and all of that has been on linux.
Look it up on protondb, there’s some launch options you could try.
Proton has modules for EasyAntiCheat. I have played Halo on Arch. I don’t know about Helldivers, or Apex. But I absolutely know anticheat is an issue on Linux. Well if you ask me it is more so that these Kernel level anti-cheat mechanisms need to die.
(iirc) Apex worked great up until recently, when they started deliberately banning Linux players.
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As a Mac user I too want SteamOS to succeed, because it will indirectly result in more games that are compatible with macOS via game porting tools and wine.
Honestly windows is just annoying to deal with. I don’t like the ads, and I don’t like my start menu bar being reorganized. I run it in a VM and managing my install keys is a huge pain with their login system.
Linux is awesome, it’s neat watching its developer friendliness result in snowballing market share.
Well, yes and no. The main point of compatibility that games should be working towards if they want to run well on macOS is to have ARM versions that work better with Apple’s M-series chips. SteamOS/The Steam Deck are still built for x86 processors which Apple has since stopped supporting.
It’s not impossible to bundle the games in an emulation layer, but it is a bit more involved than something like Proton/WINE, which are just compatibility layers and not emulators, and it comes at the cost of performance.
Rosetta 2 seems pretty good still. It’s not free translation, but it’s viable.
I don’t expect macOS to be the best platform for games, I just want them broadly playable.
Yeah a lot of the proton work is going into
https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/
Which there’s a cool user friendly experience with
A lot of that work is going directly into
https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/
So there is certainly overlap, though as you said, architecture emulation is a different beast
That’s the thing though. I bet you Valve is already prototyping an ARM based Steam Deck. It’s the logical next step to improve performance and thermals/battery at the same time.
Not SteamDeck, but there is evidence that Valve is working on x86-ARM emulation for a stand-alone VR Headset.
compatible with macOS via game porting tools and wine
How is moltenVK going by the way, assuming you follow that? I originally thought macOS gaming was dead when they ditched OpenGL and declined to support Vulkan, but maybe with layers of shims peoples still make it work.
If a SteamOS desktop system gets established, it would be time to add productive software to the ecosystem. Like a web browser, email, libreoffice, maybe some other tools. There are good free versions of all kinds of productivity software, and having them nicely packaged for a system like that would add a lot of value to the SteamOS driven family PC.
FYI, if you switch to Desktop mode on SteamOS, all those applications you listed are available via the included app store that taps into Flathub. SteamOS also ships with Firefox out of the box. I have them all installed on my SteamDeck already.
Wonderful!
A real corporate productivity suite for Linux via SteamOS would be a wonderful thing.
This is why both Google and Microsoft dumped untold billions of dollars into developing Azure (Microsoft) and Workspace (Google). Those OS agnostic corporate productivity suites are meant to keep those companies relevant.
Just a small correction; Microsoft 365, not Azure.
Azure is their cloud computing platform, similar to AWS
M365 runs on Azure which is why is why I phrased it the way I did. Although in retrospect I should have said Azure / GCP or M365 / Workspace instead of mingling the terms.
Linux is awesome, it’s neat watching its developer friendliness result in snowballing market share.
Why not ditch MacOS? Mac’s are just as bad as Windows, just in different ways.
Apple has been progressively neutering root on a path to make a laptop as much of a walled garden as iOS. Not to mention the entirely soldered RAM and SSD and then charges ridiculous premiums to get more
Mac’s are just as bad as Windows, just in different ways.
They’re absolutely not.
Not to mention the entirely soldered RAM and SSD
Hate to tell you this but this is the direction of the entire industry. Look at the new Ryzen “AI Max” chips. Integrating CPU/GPU/RAM on the same chip just leads to crazy increases in performance and efficiency. As usual Apple paves the path to erosion of consumer choice.
Apple has been progressively neutering root on a path to make a laptop as much of a walled garden as iOS.
I agree it’s a very bad thing in general but it can also be disabled with some simple terminal commands. MS goes out of their way to constantly break any solutions consumers might find to make their systems suck less.
Integrating CPU/GPU/RAM on the same chip just leads to crazy increases in performance and efficiency. As usual Apple paves the path to erosion of consumer choice.
CUDIMM is the socket-able answer to this and it’s rolling out. What’s the excuse for soldering SSDs?
but it can also be disabled with some simple terminal commands.
For now, Apple’s not stupid, they know if they move too fast they’ll piss off too many people so they’re doing it slowly step by step.
CUDIMM is the socket-able answer to this and it’s rolling out.
Rolling out where? As far as I know it’s only ever been installed and sold in a single device. Can’t tell ya why but it is.
What’s the excuse for soldering SSDs?
I don’t have an answer for that one.
For now
If that ever changes I’ll change my argument. I don’t think Apple really cares about the small fraction of users that will bother to mess with it.
Rolling out where? As far as I know it’s only ever been installed and sold in a single device. Can’t tell ya why but it is.
We’re only about 4 months in ATM, it’s quite early
Nonetheless, it’s technically sound so even if it does flop, it will have been for primarily greed reasons rather than because soldering was superior
Why not ditch MacOS? Mac’s are just as bad as Windows, just in different ways.
Eh, I disagree. Yes, macOS isn’t great, but calling it “just as bad” is a bit disingenuous. If I had to pick between Windows and macOS, and installing Linux wasn’t an option for whatever reason, I’d take macOS in a heartbeat because it doesn’t spy on users anywhere as much as Windows, most Linux stuff works seamlessly (macports or brew, take your pick), the built-in software is actually pretty decent.
That said, I very much dislike macOS as well (I use it for work), and there’s no substitute for me for Linux.
Doesn’t MacOS phone home every time you run a new or changed executable? https://eclecticlight.co/2020/10/27/xprotect-what-do-we-know-about-it/
Edit: might be that it phones home for each executable if last it run was more than 12 hours ago, given this: https://www.howtogeek.com/701176/does-apple-track-every-mac-app-you-run-ocsp-explained/
Doesn’t Windows as well?
Regardless, Windows recording literally everything I do is worse than logging the apps I open.
No?
For me it strikes the right balance of usability and security.
I’ve been a Mac user for almost 20 years now. I’ve had periods using Linux on desktop, but not for some time now. I’m very much a macOS power user.
The things I use my computer for: desktop publishing via Affinity, photo editing, programming, some app dev, playing mostly older games, and I do a lot of data analysis. There are a few macOS apps I could not live without: Automator, Preview, and I use Apple Numbers a surprising amount (I like that it’s table based and not sheet based).
I also find the right usability and hardware quality makes a huge difference for me. What stopped me before was Linux high DPI support and trackpad quality, but that was years ago.
An example of why I like Mac: I have a script at work that spits out Google cloud buckets in gs: format and I can’t change the script. I set up a simple Automator workflow so now I can right click the url and format it as a link to the bucket viewer in my browser instantly.
I have a ton of these little workflow improvements that I’m sure you could do with Linux but already work well for me.
I think Steam Machines would be successful now.
I believe it could be killer casual home PC if they had clearly stated specs with expected power draw and output. Not everything needs to run at 240 Hz in 4k res… as steamdeck showed. It has too low res though for desktop PC, so new steam machine should be a bit beefier than just rebranded deck.
I could be horribly wrong, but with a disgruntled console market and SteamOS’s success on the Steam Deck, a plug and play device along with a controller could be very successful at capturing departing console users and it would really give a kick start to linux gaming.
I know there’s lots of people who want to try PC gaming, but are not sure how to or are scared to do so, a Steam Machine would be the perfect device for them, they could just plug it into their TV and be gaming in minutes, just like the simplicity of the Deck.
I just installed Linux and holy shit it is so much easier and more straight forward than a windows install. Really wish I would have done it sooner.
Yeah. Windows install and Linux install quietly switched which was the difficult shitty experience sometime when I wasn’t watching.
Which distro ? I’ve been rocking Bazzite for a year, and holy mother of christ, it requires less maintenance than my smartphone.
Bazzite for the win!
Ive been looking at Bazzite, but Ive tried to make the jump to linux for a while but always run into dumb issues and go back to windows.
Is it ‘it just works’ or is it actually dad gamer easy?
If you plan using Steam, gaming will be super easy. There’s also a good store to install new programs. Everything worked out of the box.
If you know how to flash an iso to a thumb drive and press F2 at the bios prompt to boot into the installer, everything else will be easier than that. It just works.
I’ve been rocking endeavourOS.
It’s really nice, but I hear great things about bazzite. I’m going to have to take bazzite & steamOS for a spinI installed EOS and I’m liking it.
If you like endeavourOS, CachyOS is really good too. It’s also Arch based and includes a really fast custom kernel. It also has lots of gaming enhancements whatever that means. I’ve been trying to spread the word, not a lot of people seem to know about it. I hear Bazzite is pretty good as well. I definitely need to try it out.
That’s actually what I went with too. I considered Mint and Pop!OS but really my PC is a gaming machine with a nvidia card. A friend recommended bazzite and its exactly what I was looking for.
It’s funny because while some of it has to do with work to make Linux desktops better, a non-trivial amount of it is how worse Microsoft has made it to deal with Windows.
Also, some (most) annoyances with installing Linux, still, is primarily due to Microsoft managing to fuck things up in subtle ways.
Because Windows is a data-mining and advertising tool these days, more than anything. So they want to make sure you have a MS account on day 1 and that you have to opt out of all of their services 34 times over before they let you use the damn thing.
Yep, and then have to opt out all over again the next week when an update decides you need to verify you really mean to opt out again…
And if you managed to not have an MS account when you installed, interrupt your login and say “you cannot proceed like you have been doing for the past year without adding an MS account now”, and then look up how to get out of that dialog without doing the MS account…
Yep 100% this kind of shit drove me away a couple years ago. It had nothing to do with Linux getting better and everything to do with Windows getting worse.
Creating an offline account to install windows is worse than installing 99% of the Linux distros out there.
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Guessing your machine uses the one-two punch of Nvidia + Broadcom / Realtek?
Haha you had me, ngl
That said I’ve never had issues with drivers on Windows, like ever.
The last time I tried Linux was probably a good 5 years ago (Mint) and it was good, but I kept having to do what you described, adding repos (had no idea what they were or how they worked) and running command line updates, and it all looked like random code executing on my system. I could definitely see why the average person would be intimidated.
Eventually I gave up when I couldn’t get the most simple thing I did in windows working on Linux, updating my keepass automatically via Gmail.
I’ll have to give Mint another shot, I’m sure it’s come along even more.
I haven’t used Windows in a bit, but I had to help two friends with display driver issues on windows recently. When they break they have to be uninstalled using a third party tool before you can perform a fresh install of them.
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I had a few times on Windows with niche discontinued products. Not really a huge issue but it didn’t work out of the box.
Here’s your issue with Linux: You’re expecting it to work identically as Windows does. They’re different systems with different issues and solutions. I use Syncthing to sync my Keepass database updated between devices. It’s very simple and easy to use.
Go into Linux unburdened with the expectation that everything should work the same and you’ll have a better time. You have to acclimate to the new environment, but you did the same with Windows. You got used to how bad Windows is to use. Linux is generally easier, in my opinion, once you’re used to it. It isn’t Windows though so you have to learn new things.
Did you get it working to sync via google drive?
No. It’s from one of my own devices to another (or multiple). It doesn’t need to use Google drive. You may be able to make it do that. I’m not sure. There’s no need for it though.
How did you get that to work? There is no master location for the vault?
Backbone for normie stream tux edition is on the horizon
Get fuxked satya the creep… Seeing Windows constantly pinging microshit is a disturbing and disgusting experience.
Never again!
I understood several of those words.
Translation: Get lost, Satya Nadella (Microsoft’s CEO). Seeing Windows contact Microsoft’s servers constantly (telemetry) is disturbing.
Gaming is only a fraction of what we need to get people to move away from Windows.
Besides office software and better
NVIDIA driverhardware support in general, what else do you think is necessary?I can’t speak for everyone, but many hardware peripherals software for configuration and control don’t work.
For gamers that could be companion software for RGB and mwcro customization on keyboards, controllers and other peripherals too.
For myself, it would be music production software (VSTs and otherwise.) I know about different compatability layer softwares out there, but it’s a band-aid.
I made the switch to Arch and these 2 things have been my struggle.
For my music hardware I have run a windoes VM with virt-manager/qemu with USB passthrough. That sort of works, but it’s an extra thing to fuss with.
I even went down the rabbithole of trying to use usbip to get wine to recognize my hardware, with no success of wine seeing the bound port.
Its not flawless but I’m getting there.
I will not go back to windows. Even if it means changing my habits and use cases.
companion software for RGB
Yeah, that’s the one thing I lost when switching to Bazzite. I’m on an Acer Predator and I’m stuck with auto fan controls (which work fine) and I can’t customize RGB. There’s options to replace the Predator Sense program to get that working on Linux but I just don’t care enough to mess with it.
For RGB try OpenRGB!
I also tried setting up a VFIO machine for lack of good VR support (oculus🙄) and I cannot see a normal user doing that (Tbf it’s Meta’s fault, not Linux. But I think it still ties into my argument)
And I heard basically everything except ardour and LMMS are broken or buggy on Linux (I’m no composer so I could be wrong)
God, I wish I could permanently use Linux (NixOS❤️) but it’s just not ready yet.
And don’t even get me started on NVIDIA 🥲
I haven’t tried VR in Linux, I did sell my oculus, and haven’t gotten a replacement.
I use Reaper, and it’d fantastic. It’s more so the plugins that are an issue since VSTs aren’t supported too well on Linux. There are peripherals that don’t play well as well, but that’s vendor specific. My Line 6 gear for example.
I am full time on Arch. Ditched Windows 6+ months ago, and i won’t turn back. It has come with issues, but I’ve treated like a learning experience.
I am using an EVGA 3090 FTW on Arch, and if I had known when building my PC that Nvidia has issues, I would have gone the AMD route. But, I have gotten my 3090 usable, quite well actually with some tweaking.
I had issues using Wayland at first, but driver updates have helped.
I have wanted to check out NixOS, but I haven’t yet.
I haven’t tried VR in Linux
Valve Index, SteamVR, install, setup, play, no tinkering.
Now… if one does want to buy hardware from Meta (… which sadly I understand, it’s so damn cheap) and Meta refuses to support Linux, well, it’s kind of a decision on the buyer. Still, if one still want to tinker, because they have the hardware now, plenty of good solutions listed on https://lvra.gitlab.io e.g. ALVR (very convenient nowadays) or WiVRn and more.
Office software is covered by LibreOffice.
Just general software and hardware support. And ease of use. So basically everything.
Ease of use (and general software too) seems to slowly getting better, but the real bottleneck, i think is hardware support.
No matter how much software there is, or how easy it is to use Linux, there’s no point if your GPU is extremely buggy and broken on Linux. which seems to be a huge problem for many NVIDIA users, including me :/
The main hiccup for hardware support is GPU support, and as a side effect of the bigger business being in messing with LLMs and that use case preferring Linux, GPUs are getting more Linux attention.
For example, nVidia drivers went years and years with a status quo of “screw open source, compile our driver and deal with the limitations”. Only after they got big in the datacenter did they finally start working towards being fully open in the kernel space (though firmware and user space still closed source, but that’s a bit more managable)
Fuck nvidia, each big update that’s supposed to "fix everything " explicit sync cough cough always brings me a boatload of new issues. I’m going for amd/Intel next time.
Yeah I mean especially for professionals, most hardware requires special software for it to function properly and they don’t bother making it available for Linux.
especially for professionals, most hardware requires special software for it to function properly and they don’t bother making it available for Linux.
That’s entirely use case specific. CUDA is actually used more on Linux than on Windows (I don’t have data, but even Azure by Microsoft runs on Linux…) so for e.g. NVIDIA hardware for professionals the support is better there.
Sadly, LibreOffice isn’t up to the task.
However, more and more this stuff is done in browser anyway.
What does libreoffice not do? And what about onlyoffice?
Basically when I open up an MSOffice file, if there’s anything vaguely complicated it will not look like the way the office user intended.
Being done in the browser means it’s being done in the cloud which I’m personally not okay with. LibreOffice works well enough for my use.
Yeah, but the O365 crowd is pretty much 99% tied to the cloud anyway they slice it (MS really wants you to work exclusively in OneDrive).
LibreOffice may be able to handle it’s own documents fine, but interoperate with an MS Office user and it frequently is unable to be consistent.
The ability to stream media from legit paid sources. (Netflix, Comcast, max, disneyplus, prime, I don’t know where the list is currently, but anything that bitches about user agent.)
TPM.
The ability to play multiplayer games that rely on anti-cheat ( seriously, make Linux a hit with the fortnite crowd and the upcoming generation will think of windows as boomerware )
The ability to use an HDMI cable at full speed. (It’s the leading A/V cable standard and the only one some people understand. )
Then there’s the stuff I’m unsure of the current status of but that I know was a problem once upon a time: Online banking, online doctor stuff, encrypted emails from mainstream providers, you know, anything that could qualify as “every day stuff” that works out of the box on windows and yet sometimes requires complicated (for grandma) setup on Linux.
The ability to stream media from legit paid sources. (Netflix, Comcast, max, disneyplus, prime, I don’t know where the list is currently, but anything that bitches about user agent.)
I thought all you needed was browser DRM to run those? Idk, I don’t use streaming services 🏴☠️
And Isn’t TPM supported on Linux? It’s been in the kernel since 3.20, no?
As for anti cheat, it’s a bitch to deal with, I agree. Same with HDMI,I think DP is superior but people should have freedom to make their one choices.
And the rest? Idk. I use a web browser for all online things, from mail, to banking; so it doesn’t matter whether I’m on Linux or not.
You raise some great points though. The average user isn’t going to use workarounds or alternatives, so we should focus on actually solving the problem instead of saying use this instead.
You raise some great points though. The average user isn’t going to use workarounds or alternatives, so we should focus on actually solving the problem instead of saying use this instead.
These kinds of things are the first things that come to mind when people start going all “Linux is ready for $blah” because while I can figure out how to deal with these issues, they’re invariably the first things I get phone calls from my non-IT-career friends about when they switch to Linux.
Windows changes insane amounts of interface whatnot on the regular, users can usually figure THAT out, finally, no matter what OS they’re using.
It’s the stuff that just works out of the box on windows or Mac but doesn’t on Linux that’s at issue, and it’s what will continue to halt widespread adoption at the casual user level, unfortunately.
The ability to stream media from legit paid sources. (Netflix, Comcast, max, disneyplus, prime, I don’t know where the list is currently, but anything that bitches about user agent.)
Agreed, that’s critical. That said, I periodically subscribe to all of those, and all of the ones I’ve tried in the last year on Firefox on Debian, have worked perfectly. If there’s any left that still don’t, I haven’t tried encountered them.
Agreed, that’s critical. That said, I periodically subscribe to all of those, and all of the ones I’ve tried in the last year on Firefox on Debian, have worked perfectly. If there’s any left that still don’t, I haven’t tried/encountered them.
That’s great news and it gives me a lot of hope.
But it’s apparently the easiest, since Valve is already working on it. You just need to shift a significant portion of technical users to Linux and the other use-cases will follow.
Is gaming even much of a problem anymore on Linux now? All my problems come from NVIDIA or oculus BS, but not from proton or wine. Sounds like there isn’t much to perfect anymore :^)
Absolutely:
- lots of games don’t work
- anti-cheat games in general still don’t work, and that’s a massive market
- some games have terrible perf through Proton
That said, most games work fine on Linux, but the ones that don’t are pretty popular.
Most anticheat isn’t a technical issue though, it’s just companies blocking Linux.
I never said it was. I said it’s a problem that limits Linux adoption.
Oh, i forgot about anticheat, i dont play MP sorry. I also can’t tell when a bug is from NVIDIA or Proton, seems i conflated the two too much.
No worries. I also don’t play MP, so the vast majority of games just work for me. However, we’re talking about broad market adoption, not you or me.
Yes, it’s only a fraction, but most of the rest is going to SaaS through web browsers or mobile apps, because companies get to control and force subscriptions that way, but has a side effect of targeting a browser as a platform rather than an OS. Gaming in browser is more in the pain point of browsers, so it’s a use case that demands OS.
I’m legitimately curious how many half-baked ad-filled second-to-the-punch products will be too many for Microsoft before they finally capitulate.
Man, if microsoft capitulated, and gave us a Windows 7 - 2, that was just windows 7 with current support, no spyware, no telemetry, and a nice coat of polish… I would definitely be tempted to switch back lol
Microsoft has already lost the console wars, and now it starts to look like they might even lose the PC wars. Is there any future for Microsoft gaming? It feels like the only thing they got going for them is Call of Duty.
Is there any future for Microsoft gaming?
Yes, in the “Netflix of Gaming” Game Pass, they’ve already been pivoting on it more and more. They know they’re losing their hardware dominance
Only a matter of time IMO before they work on getting Game Pass games on Linux. Which would be great because I got the bulk of my games from Game Pass these days lol
The only real limitation for Game Pass on Linux is market share. There’s no way Microsoft passes up that money if Linux gaming gets big enough.
True. When they start feeling threatened, they will bite as hard as they can.
Imagine gaming with no windos OS…. The future is better!
No need to imagine!
SteamOS will let you pay games from GOG, right?
Yes you just have to sideload the client. I believe Lutris makes it easy but I don’t use GOG myself.
Heroic makes it even easier
Because they’re DRM free, they’re super easy to install too! Another install method is Heroic
Steam is terrified of the Microsoft store. It’s part of why they’re moving to linux
Sure, but Valve is terrified of the Microsoft store for a subtly, but importantly, different reason than why Microsoft should be terrified of Steam OS.
Microsoft should be terrified that Steam OS will destroy their monopoly by making it so users no longer have to use their product.
Valve is terrified that Microsoft will destroy their monopoly by making it so users no longer can use their product.
Microshit already lost, most windows users just don’t know it yet. Sure microshit will get another 25 years as generations shift… Similar to opinions on israel but the trend is set
So in the end, consumers win?
As long as SteamOS doesn’t fail, yes. If SteamOS draws enough gamers for there to be a healthy amount on Windows and SteamOS there will be competition between the two OS-s, which will benefit everyone. If SteamOS does draw away the supermajority of gamers then we still benefit because the open source nature of Linux makes it much harder for Valve to have total control like Microsoft has.
We shall see, there has been a rise recently
In this case, between Valve winning and Microsoft winning, a Valve win is good for consumers.
Valve winning is less awful for consumers.
Valve is still a multi billion dollar company, who had to be forced into compliance with lawsuit and regulation to get even the most basic shit like refunds for bad/broken/scam games.
Valve does have a better history
Those are two orthogonal things, but they do both point towards Valve being the better choice between the two. But if there were a Valve vs. Microsoft duality where the choice that’s better for anyone that’s not the two of them is to side with Microsoft, I’d be disappointed with Valve, but I’d choose the Microsoft route.
I don’t think that’s likely, as Valve have repeatedly made choices that are better for the consumer even when they’re not better for Valve, but I’m not ruling out the possibility.
People use steam because it’s better than alternatives, if it dies consumers will lose
Oh I was thinking competition on the market. But yes, Valve is great
thats exactly why Valve start Fighting Against Windows, UWP And Microsoft store.
Even MS hasn’t dared to release a version of Windows you can’t switch out of “S mode” yet, but the fact that it even exists would be troubling for them.
MS would love a walled garden like Apple have made, but there’s no way in hell it would ever pan out for them, and certainly not before regulation arrives (probably from the EU) that would stamp it out, and that’s before you take into account the business implications. Windows only exists because of all the pre-existing software. Flattening the only reason to stay would be suicide.
