Additionally, what changes are necessary for you to be able to use Linux full time?
I really, really want to love Linux.
Mate introduced me to Red Hat in the very late 90s and I keep trying various distros every year or two - last time was about 2020 so my views here might be a bit out of date now…
When Ubuntu launched I truely believed this would be the start of genuine transformation. While I do see the overall progression in modern distros - installing them is easier than ever - but at its core, it just doesn’t seem to truely improve when it comes to usability and user friendliness. As others have said, small changes or issues might require hours of research or a game of copy/paste/pray with commands found on a long lost forum page.
MS make plenty of mistakes and dumb changes but windows has had significant improvements over the years both to the interface but also functions:
W2k/XP dragged us kicking and screaming out of DOS and into the modern era.
Vista made much needed changes to security/driver issues - but it was still a slow pig - particularly updating.
Win7 fixed what Vista should have been - faster, cleaner and simpler, BSoD mostly a thing of the past now driver manufacturers have caught up from Vista fixed updates a bit.
Win8.1 improved boot speeds, had a lot of good under the hood changes that improved deployment and self-repair, good tools for power users (we just don’t talk about that start menu)
Win10/11 greatly improved the updating process - still far from perfect but significantly faster and more reliable. No longer the upgrade lottery it was in XP - 7 era.
Not wanting to start a fight here, just my perspective - unfortunately, every time I install Linux, the visuals look good but it always feels like a fancy modern skin over top of something akin to Win98. Sure, it’s fast, secure as a MF and not riddled with modern bloat but genuine advancement of the platform feels absent.
Maybe it’s because I don’t live elbow deep in Linux like I have in windows desktop for the past 20+ years. I do know that it’s versatility and power is incredible - from phones and Pi’s to world class infrastructure, so maybe that’s it. It’s designed for maximum power and flexibility that it’s not really suited as a general purpose desktop for the masses like windows. It might always remain as a oddity at the desktop level, insanely powerful in the right hands and just a little too complex and less refined to appeal to those not willing to go deep into really learning it.
I can’t use Fusion 360 on Linux, so I dual boot windows. But that’s the only time I ever go back. I don’t even run a bootloader with options and you’d never know Windows is on my machine unless you interrupted the boot process and checked boot drives. Getting into Windows is a manual process on my system.
Following a long how-to to install/configure something, just to get to step 99 and have the command not work, and not being able to find the solution.
I have to have a computer science degree to install a peice of software… I just wanna double click the installer icon. I don’t want to have to write out some long String in terminal to install software. And sometimes it’s different depending on distro.
"I don’t want to have to write out some long String in terminal to install software. "
I’m no expert, but isn’t it literally just apt get (name of software) to download and install through terminal?
Am I wrong or is it easier to install software on Linux? The package manager basically figures out everything for you and you don’t need to hunt for an exe all over the Internet.
Most major distributions come with a software center of some kind. And with Flatpaks, AppImages, and gag Snaps, it pretty much is just click and install these days.
What’s wrong with snaps? I’m giving Linux another go so I’m still learning. I’m trying Ubuntu on an ancient iMac right now but I also have Pop!_OS in a vm on my windows pc to play with. I haven’t installed anything on pop but I noticed Ubuntu had snaps.
Snaps are proprietary to Canonical (Ubuntu). Historically, they were larger, slower to load, and generally slower overall to use With a good SSD and system, I’m not sure that’s the case anymore though.
Ohh. Thanks for that info. Proprietary stuff and forced ads are two of the biggest things pushing me away from windows right now so that’s good to know.
Linux desktops are horrible. I like linux servers a lot, I have several running in my homelab.
Say fucking what? When was the last time you tried KDE or Gnome? Gnome is a beautiful masterpiece that blows Windows and Mac OS desktops out of the water.
It’s my opinion. Part of the problem is ‘which desktop’. As long as I can ssh into a Linux system I’m happy. The guis are clunky, but I’ll admit to not having tried all of them or the absolute latest versions. Also, and I likely ought to have mentioned this, in my homelab almost all ‘systems’ are vms, so the desktop gui has to function well in a virtual environment and has to at least try to have a decent rdp implementation.
Many DE have received substantial improvements over the last couple of years. It sounds like you’re really looking for something lightweight, more than you are something that is fully featured. I don’t have much experience with the lightweight Linux DE, because when I need performance I just use command line like you do. I’m sure if you did some searching, you could find a really snappy DE, but it doesn’t sound very important for your use case. Definitely do check out some of the full-featured desktops though if you ever decide to use Linux as a primary PC. Several of them are really slick now.
Hate to say it but, laziness… bought a new gaming laptop with windows 11. My old laptop was running Mint for a couple of years and I really loved it. Software wise everything I needed just worked.
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I’ve tried Linux a few times each time would seem to be good apart from gaming but every single time something I Didn’t Even realise I did broke it completely. I’d say I’ve never had linux work for more than a few months.
With windows an install no matter how inconviant and annoying with forced updates has always lasted me years. Don’t get me wrong though I hate Microsoft but I need my games and I want reliability.
To me following linux guides has mostly ended in an unbootable system.
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Peripheral compatibility was my biggest issue. Most vendors just don’t make Linux versions. One that I couldn’t work around was my Razer Huntsman v2 Analog. While I was told about the open source Razer app alternatives, they were far from feature complete. My keyboard ended up defaulting to a profile where WASD emulated a controller instead, and the software didn’t have a way of changing it outside of windows.
Indie software is also a big miss. I play FF14. I use a Streamdeck with a custom plugin for hot keys. That is windows only. I use Teamcraft. Also windows only.
The problem is really one that I’m feeding into by going back to windows. There’s just not enough people on Linux to rationalize app development on smaller projects for it. I feel bad going to a one man Dev team and being like “Hey, you should stop everything and do this for just me, because no one else will use the Linux version”.
Could I work around some of these issues? Probably. Could I advocate for Linux software and put together my own alternatives? Probably. But by the time I’m done with work and just want to play a game…I don’t want to spend hours reinventing the wheel.
Ultimately windows is there, and I can make it do what I need it to do. While I’d love to use Linux, it’s just not a viable option for me.
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You have ro spend some time making things work, I don’t always have the time.
Although I’m using WSL2 with Ubuntu because of the terminal.
I suppose I can technically answer this. I do use Linux full-time now and have for several years, but prior to that I had a few false starts where I’d switch back to Windows. Usually it was because I’d encounter some technical issue I just didn’t know how to fix besides reinstalling the whole OS, or a graphics driver issue. For example, at one point when I had an NVIDIA graphics card only the newest drivers from NVIDIA’s website supported it but the drivers in Ubuntu’s repo didn’t, so I had to manually install the drivers. Except then whenever the kernel was updated by Ubuntu (basically every week) my display stopped working and I’d have to switch into a TTY and manually reinstall the drivers.
Now I know how I’d fix that (setup some rule to reinstall the drivers whenever the kernel updates, which I believe is now the default anyway), or use a PPA containing the latest NVIDIA drivers, or use AMD instead - but really any kind of problem that requires the user to both diagnose and fix the issue prevents non-technical people from adopting it.
These are my list of changes. I still don’t use it full-time but I use it outside working hours. I use Ubuntu 23.04 and I dual boot with windows 11:
Install gnome extensions and “dash to panel”
Install Chrome from google site (.deb package)
Same for Steam
Install mangohud sudo apt install mangohud Source: https://github.com/flightlessmango/MangoHud#debian-ubuntu
Disable Intel Bluetooth device so the realtek one is the only one. (Now there is a new option to also disable Intel Wifi adapter in the same word~ document).
Change default display for “Lockscreen”
Change the local time ( timedatectl set-local-rtc 1 --adjust-system-clock enabled RTC in local time.
For Ryujinx I added this “vm.max_map_count=524288” to /etc/sysctl.conf because it was saying it fixes a crash with TOTK
Disk Performance (System hanging with encryption on the SSD): Disabled the ‘no-read-workqueue" and “no-write-workqueue” sudo gedit /etc/crypttab Added “discard” “no-read-workqueue” and “no-write-workqueue” at the end of the string.Looks like this: dm_crypt-0 UUID=4170cddc-59a8-4f4e-afdb-125f70004fef none luks,discard,no-read-workqueue,no-write-workqueue sudo update-initramfs -u -k all sudo reboot
Enable OC en AMD card (Source: https://linuxgamingcentral.com/posts/increase-power-on-amd-gpus/) sudo gedit /etc/default/grub Somewhere in that file should be a GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT= line, followed by a pair of quotation marks. In my case it looks like this: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=“quiet splash” We add amdgpu.ppfeaturemask=0xffffffff at the end. Example: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=“quiet splash amdgpu.ppfeaturemask=0xffffffff” Sudo update-grub
Install codec bluetooth AAC for Pixel Buds (codec is lighter than SBC-XQ)
Be sure that bluetooth dongle MPOW is on USB2 and no USB3 which causes interferences (at least in Linux I can suffer it, but not in Windows).
Do the tutorial to make BT devices to work with “Dual Boot” between Ubuntu and W11 without needing to re-pair them everytime (for dualsense and pixelbuds).
Enable AMD ROCM (used to run apps like SDXL).
Couldn’t have dual monitors due to Nvidia drivers not working correctly. Couldn’t play Overwatch. Deep Rock Galactic ran very badly and slowly. I’ve used Linux in the past for years but it’s just not good on a gaming laptop.
Ltt made a video on this, they switched to Linux for some time and documented their experience as windows users
