Viewed through the lens of digital autonomy and citizenship, the question isn’t simply “Is Linux perfect?” but rather: Do we want our fundamental computing environment to be ultimately under our control, or controlled by private interests with their own incentives?
As a user of Linux as my main desktop OS for more than 20 years, a user of Linux far longer than that, and a promoter of FOSS before that was a term, this has always been the question. Most of the world does not care. I suspect that is more true today than ever before. There are now adults that grew up in the age of social media that have no idea how local computing works.
Not to be negative but the "obstacles" to adopting Linux were never actually obstacles most of the time. Fifteen years ago my mother started using Linux as her main OS with no training. I gave her the login information, but never had a chance to show her how to use it, and she just figured it out on her own. Everything just worked, including exchanging MS Office documents for work.
Yep. I was amazed when I was talking to a friend who's a bit younger (late 20s) and told him about a fangame you could just download from a website (Dr Robotnik's Ring Racers, for the record) and he was skeptical and concerned at the idea of just downloading and running an executable from somewhere on the internet.
I suspect most adults these days are like this; their computing experience is limited to the web browser and large official corporate-run software repositories e.g. app stores and Steam. Which ironically means they would do just fine on Linux, but there's also no incentive for them to switch off Windows/MacOS.
To them, Microsoft and Apple having control of their files and automatically backing up their home directory to Azure/iCloud is a feature, not a problem.
Ironically, being concerned and skeptical about running random executables from the internet is a good idea in general.
I agree you shouldn't run random executables, but the key word is "random". In this case, Ring Racers is a relatively established and somewhat well-known game, plus it's open-source.
It doesn't guarantee it's not harmful of course, but ultimately for someone with the mindset of "I should never run any programs that aren't preapproved by a big corporation", they may as well just stick to Windows/MacOS or mobile devices where this is built into the ecosystem.
This was probably always true. Replace youtube with Byte magazine and it was probably the same 45 years ago. I wonder if the percentage of true FOSS adherents has changed much. It would be a bit of a paradox if the percent of FOSS software has exploded and the percent of FOSS adherents has declined.
Note: I mean "adherent" to mean something different than "user".
Raspberry Pi is an interesting example because it is constantly criticized by people who complain about the closed source blobs, the non-open schematics, and other choices that don’t appease the purists.
Yet it does a great job at letting users do what they want to do with it, which is get to using it. It’s more accessible than the open counterparts, more available, has more guides, and has more accessories.
The situation has a lot of parallels to why people use Windows instead of seeking alternatives: It’s accessible, easy, and they can focus on doing what they want with the computer.
OrangePi boards are great. Zero is almost stamp sized, plus and pro has tons of options and on-board NVMe + fast-ish eMMC with great official cases, whatnot.
But, guess what? The OS is bad. I mean, unpatched, mishmashed, secured as an open door bad.
You get an OS installation which drops you to root terminal automatically on terminal output. There are many services which you don't need on board. There's an image, not an installer, and all repositories look to Chinese servers.
Armbian is not a good solution, because it's not designed to rollover like Debian and RasberryPi OS. So you can't build any long-term system from them like you can build with RaspberryPi.
On top of that, you can't boot anything mainline on most of them because either drivers are closed source, or the Kernel has weird hacks to make things work, or generally both.
So, what makes Raspberry Pi is not the hardware, but software support.
Now, the groups have drifted apart. Even if you're a programmer, unless you care or get excited about the hardware, you don't know how things work. You follow the docs, push the code to magical gate via that magical command, and that works. It's similar even for Desktop applications.
When you care about performance, and try to understand how these things work, you need to break that thick ice to start learning things, and things are much more complicated now, so people just tend to run away and pretend that it's not there.
Also, since the "network is reliable, computing cheap" gospel took hold, 90% of the programmers doesn't care about how much performance / energy they waste.
Define "our".
Because having general compute under developer/engineering control does not mean end-users want, need, or should, tinker inside appliances.
So there are two definitions of our: our end-users, and ourselves the engineers.
Worldwide, in aggregate, far more harms come to users from malware, destroying work at the office and life memories at home, than benefits from non-tech-savvy users being able to agree to a dialog box (INSTALL THIS OR YOUR VOTING REGISTRATION WILL BE SWITCHED IN 30 MINUTES!!!) and have rootkits happen.
Our (hackers) tinkering being extra-steps guardrailed by hardware that we can work within, to help us help general computing become as "don't make me think, and don't do me harm" as a nightstand radio clock, seems a good thing.
Not hard to see through the false "only two cases" premise of the quote, however un-hip to agree so.
Very few people of any age understood how local computing (or any computing) works. There's probably more now since most of the world is connected.
Profit scale has reached a point where commercial OS creators have to do stuff like shove ads into the UI. There's probably more legitimate need from non-developers to use Linux now than ever before, just to get a better base-line user experience.
> There are now adults that grew up in the age of social media that have no idea how local computing works.
They like it given a chance. My daughters for example far prefer Linux to Windows.
The two topics are orthogonal. GP talks about "local computing" vs. "black box in the cloud", the difference between running it vs. using it. You're talking about various options to run locally, the difference between running it this way or that way.
Linux or Windows users probably understand basic computing concepts like files and a file system structure, processes, basic networking. Many modern phone "app" users just know what the app and device shows them, and that's not much. Every bit of useful knowledge is hidden and abstracted away from the user. They get nothing beyond what service the provider wants them to consume.
Niche professional software may lack native Windows support or require workarounds.
Windows has a strong grip in enterprise environments where it is desirable to remove desktop control from users.
You have things like FreeIPA and Samba making weak offers beyond directory services in that direction. You have things like OpenTofu and Ansible making partial efforts in that direction. But you don't have an integrated goto standard solution for giving Linux desktop control to the enterprise. So Windows continues its grip in the enterprise. (If I'm wrong, please post a correction here. I'll be grateful for the education.)
For companies less obsessed with taking control away from users, Windows has less of a grip.
I've hardly had hardware issues since I moved to Windows 2000. Sure some, but few enough I can't recall any in particular.
> Do we want our fundamental computing environment to be ultimately under our control, or controlled by private interests with their own incentives?
But if windows is now objectively worse than linux, normal people also now have a reason to switch.
So they shrug, say "meh, computers, I just can't understand them," and go on their merry way rebooting Windows for the 10th time that day.
Now, don't get me wrong, Windows has improved a lot from a robustness standpoint. Moreover, most people only use computers that come pre-configured, either from the factory or by their IT department. They won't face the crazy shit I have to put up with when I manually reinstall mine. Half the things on my 5 yo HP Elitebook don't work out of the box and I need to install a bunch of drivers from HP with dubious names, like sp1234 which makes the touchpad work, and sp4321 which enables the webcam. After a further set of updates, I can use my external screen connected to the intel integrated gpu and finally try to get some work done. Good times.
I've already switched to Linux, but this was not at all my experience of Windows. The only reason I switched was because Windows is going towards an "AI" focused OS which I do not want, as well as the cost of the Pro version - I run many VMs and not shelling out for Pro for all of them.
Microsoft will (almost already has) loose its advantage to Apple before it loses to Linux.
(Also a ton of MS Office work is being done through the web interfaces now anyway. I find the web versions pretty terrible but people seem to put up with them.)
Why? You can edit MS Office documents fine in LibreOffice and other similar software.
I can't.
Or the same with PowerPoint.
I can't.
In a modern workspace it's not just local software running solely on just your local machine emailing around files or clobbering changes in some corporate file share.
It's not perfect on windows either. Crashes, non working sleep on almost any windows laptop... at least compared to what Apple can do.
Microsoft Office is not "niche professional software"
My personal pet peeve is the GTK/Qt divide. Theming has an extra step, as you have to pick a matching theme for the other toolkit apps you inevitably end up using.
KDE/Qt has excellent scaling support, but GTK apps (OrcaSlicer for example) end up having blurry text or messed up text labels if you run a non-integer scaling resolution.
The Wayland transition almost seems akin to the IPv6 debacle. Support is there, but it’s half-baked in half the cases. I crave RDP remote access, but this is currently not possible with KRDP as it does not work with Wayland sessions. Wine is just getting there, but only with scary messages that say that it’s an experimental feature.
> My personal pet peeve is the GTK/Qt divide. Theming has an extra step, as you have to pick a matching theme for the other toolkit apps you inevitably end up using.
Is this perhaps an issue of fractional scaling? I’ve run Openbox/Blackbox on Linux for ~15 years and never had these issues. Not 100% sure I understand the issue at least.
Things look mostly fine (to me) and even if they don’t, the apps still work as they should (no blur). AFAIK Openbox/X11 just uses the DPI the monitor reports and things scale as they should.
Sounds like an issue with Gnome/KDE to me, not with Linux?
I may be wrong, I’m not seeking a super polished look or want to tweak my UIs a lot.
> Viewed through the lens of digital autonomy and citizenship, the question isn’t simply “Is Linux perfect?” but rather: Do we want our fundamental computing environment to be ultimately under our control, or controlled by private interests with their own incentives?
We make choices, become passionate about some, and wear values we feel strongly about on our shoulder. What we witness here, I believe, is a conflation of two things:
A: Linux as a value: Representing open source software, rejecting bad corporate behavior, and as a philosophy for software ownership
B: Linux as a collection of related operating systems, as practical software.
I think trying to understand each person's perspective, and if it can be categorized as one or the other makes sense of this article, similar ones, and discussion. Someone in Category B evaluating operating systems as tools should not be viewed by someone in Category A as an affront to their identity. It may just be different use cases; different hardware; different priorities; different variants and versions of operating systems used.
But when you approach 99% of the population who, to the extent they’ve even thought about it, will only judge an OS on B, Linux is just one of 3 main choices (sorry BSD folks. Don’t yell at me). Is it the best choice purely on functionality and app ecosystem? Maybe, but also maybe not.
Since the majority of Linux does not come on hardware by default what you’re essentially asking people to do is to buy a car and swap out the motor. We have to convince them why that new motor is better and is worth the effort of doing so. If it’s marginally better or worse, it just won’t be worth the headache to most people.
To be clear Linux (and MacOS) are my preferred OS. I haven’t owned a Windows box in at least 5 years.
I want to switch but I just don't feel confident yet, and I wonder how long the "yet" will remain.
As a Linux user forced to run Windows at work, I only see issues with Windows ;)
> I want to switch but I just don't feel confident
Live distros make it very easy to dip your toes and try, without committing to anything.
IMO Linux has much better UI options because there are so many choices and freedom.
You can likely find something that looks/works EXACTLY like you’ve always dreamed of - but maybe you have to try a few options to find it.
Do you run any exotic hardware? Do you run MS Office regularly? Do you run any highly specialized software?
If the answer is no to all those then Linux is worth a shot.
> I want to switch but I just don't feel confident yet, and I wonder how long the "yet" will remain.
For people like you who think like this.
FOREVER
You'll always dream up some reason why this side of the road, is just better.
The reality is a lot more nuanced than that. Should one live in a forest, devoid of any city services and company of other individuals, so that one may be under "own control"? This is the essential value proposition with Linux and it's no wonder many prefer the comforting institution of proprietary prisons^Wsystems.
Windows is strictly quite a bit less configurable than Linux. You likely just know Windows better?
Clearly there will be challenges, minor or major.
The failure of these articles is the authors aren't going for distros that "just work". Want to undercut Microsoft's user base, grow GNU/Linux, and herald the year of Linux on desktop that's been promised for decades? Keep it simple.
Majority of people going online with their computers are browsing the web, doomscrolling, and engaging on social media. They're not pentesting with Rust, running an instance of a LLM, or setting up a webserver for giggles.
Keep it simple.
But pushing Arch and other beardy distros with these kinds of articles reeks of gatekeeping as if only "smart" people are allowed to engage online and control their experience. Everyone else should suck it up with Microsoft having Copilot phone home since they don't deserve to know better. And I don't care how much preamble they give about Debian-based and beginner distros, they're just wagging their dicks to easily-awed proles and relishing imagined egoboos from other neo-Stallmans.
For people who are trying to get their work done now, in the present, this doesn’t change anything. We all know that Linux could technically run the same productivity apps and games if every company put enough investment money toward it. However even some of the apps I use which had a Linux version have announced that they’re sunsetting Linux compatibility due to low demand.
For all of the people whose work lives inside of text editors, web browsers, and terminals switching to Linux is easy. I think these threads become biased toward people who fit that description who don’t understand why everyone can’t just switch over.
> Viewed through the lens of digital autonomy and citizenship, the question isn’t simply “Is Linux perfect?” but rather:
That feels like a strawman argument. Most people don’t choose their OS on ideological grounds. The reasons people don’t use Linux isn’t because it’s not “perfect”. People use Windows because it works, it’s familiar, and their software runs on it. All of these calls to make OS choice about ideological wars isn’t convincing or even relevant to people who haven’t already switched to Linux.
It's not -their- software is it.
Desktop and laptop market is weird because no hardware vendor wants to compete with MS. The only one who does (apple), owns both the hardware and software as well as sales channels, so they are not affected by MS’s deals.
Until the Linux community stops pretending and accepts that these are real issues and they need addressing, it will never be the year of the Linux desktop.
Are you sure? My second-hand thinkpad still won't hibernate properly. It's not a weird model, it's a ryzen-based X13 Gen1 so not even shiny new. You can imagine on a laptop one would want hibernation to just work.
The fault is surely on Lenovo's table... Yet it would work if I was to run Windows (which I don't want to do).
So yeah... Now I have a laptop from a brand which is known and appreciated for linux compatibility, and a basic thing like hibernation does not work.
Well, I think MS took care of that by removing the hibernation option from the start menu. You have to manually turn it back on from the old control panel.
I mean, there are two ways to make Linux better alternative than Windows, and currently the main effort is coming from Microsoft...
I switched to Bluefin, which is a branch of Universal Blue, which is flavour of Fedora. Sounds complicated, but in fact is the best thing to ever happen to Linux. I get all the ease of use of something like macOS but pre-built with tools for development like distrobox, and then I can just build my dev environments and get shit done in no time, without having to worry about breaking updates or nuking the whole file system because my bash sucks.
Its Linux for babies, and it makes me happy.
=====
Further ass-kissing:
Also I forgot to mention I tried gaming on it via Steam and it works like a charm... Not so sure about bleeding edge AAA games since I don't play any of that, but at least for all my oldies it works just fine.
Oh!, and the one thing I miss is Affinity Designer.
While I haven't experimented with it that much yet, Affinity (the new one, the one after the Canva acquisition) does work in Wine 10.20.
Now, I won't say it is a smooth experience, one of the workarounds that I needed to do is use Wine's virtual desktop so Affinity's tooltips are rendered correctly instead of being pure black, and the GUI does seem to not render correctly sometimes (it renders as white until something causes a redraw).
The Canva global marketing lead did say that Linux support is "being discussed seriously internally": https://techcentral.co.za/affinity-for-linux-canvas-next-big...
This makes you wonder: How hard it could be for a business that already has a 80% working application via Wine to patch the application/Wine to make it work 99+%, and then bundle the application with Wine and say that it has "native Linux support"?
> How hard it could be for a business that already has a 80% working application via Wine to patch the application/Wine to make it work 99+%, and then bundle the application with Wine and say that it has "native Linux support"?
CodeWeavers (developers of CrossOver and one of the main contributors and sponsors of Wine and related tools) actually offer something like this as a paid service for companies called PortJump:
It is the rest of the iceberg that causes problems.
- You need your support to be able to support linux which means they will need training and experience helping people in an entirely new system
- Linux comes in finite but vastly more combinations than OSX and Windows which means you are probably going to need to pick something like Ubuntu or struggle with the above
- Gotta track bugs in twice as many places
- Need CI / CD for more platforms
etc
This is easily solvable by distributing the app via a distro agnostic mechanism, like as a Flatpak or AppImage. Using Flatpak also eliminates the need for rolling their own app update mechanism.
The combination issue is a real issue though that (as far as I know) is mostly solved with Flatpaks, or in case of games, by using the Steam Runtime.
Of course, it is a "chicken and egg" problem of "we don't want to support Linux because there aren't enough users using it" but "we don't want to use Linux because there aren't enough business supporting it".
Thankfully with improvements in Wine the need of having "native" Linux support is shrinking, but at the same time there is still a looooong way to go (like the issues I said before with Affinity).
And the guide itself seems to be outdated, the guide says that you need to install some stubs/shims but doesn't say that happens if you don't do it (I think that it would crash) but at least in my experience it did "work" without them when using an up-to-date Wine version.
Sadly Photoshop also doesn't work, if you want to follow the rules and use Creative Cloud it won't work at all, if you decide to sail the seven seas and download an older Photoshop version it will work but it also has some annoying bugs (sometimes the canvas doesn't update after an edit until you try to do another edit).
Don't get me wrong I do think that Wine is an amazing project and I hope that it continues to improve, but sometimes people don't seem to actually point all the issues that it exist when running an application in Wine.
I've had cases where running an app under wine worked better than the native linux port :/
I've been using desktop linux since before ubuntu, and I have never had so much confidence in my linux rigs. They are dependable, which is refreshing after boot-breaking updates have ruined my setups before.
Sometimes I just find it wild with how much we talk about containers and sandboxes for the user space code we run that there's still regular recommendations for the random distro of the week published by who knows who.
Been 90 days with zero issues.
Switching to Linux hasn't been an issue for those users for a long time - it's usually gamers, users of professional software, or IT people with deeply established workflows who have troubles
I guess the only part that matters is updates, and atomic systems like Fedora Silverblue do allow you to enable automatic updates without the fear of breaking everything, which is great
And I agree: if it works, why replace it?
Initially he was concerned about the "new" interface after using Windows since 3.11 days, but within an hour he was happy doing his usual "basic tasks" (email, basic Excel, Word for letters, printing, etc). He was amazed both his printers (colour/scanner, b&w) worked with zero hassle after simply plugging them in.
Now he loves the ability to FaceTime anyone in the family (kids, grandkids, etc.) at the click of a button using the webcam plugged into the Mini, and really enjoys the sync of photos, emails, notes, etc.
I think he would have really struggled with Windows 11 so I was tempted by an older-person friendly Linux distro if macOS wasn't an option.
This is a strange thing for them to say when they are pretty much a clone of Fedora Silverblue, with a few minor tweaks.
If Bluefin works for you, great. But I find their marketing rather pretentious.
For more details on why I came close to switching: I use my win desktop as a host for ai services such as Comfy UI for stable diffusion generation since it is a beefy platform; for example, I generate reference stuff for Krita (digital painting software) illustrations on my drawing tablet. I remember the process to configure windows as being strange, GUI bound (NOT windows strong suit), and just annoying due to my aforementioned bias. Valve has done great work with running games on linux which is the only reason I keep that OS and I’d rather set up services on linux.
This comment serves as a reminder to myself that I should just go ahead grab my windows license keys for archival purposes and flash a better OS on that system.
Now the product decisions behind the OS giving me the icks… The terminal can’t (completely) help with that ^_^
They are likely to have more issues related to getting the drawing tablet configured correctly.
The rest is just having to start from scratch and lose the decades of windows experience and intuition which can make things painful as that type of thing cant be replaced without time.
App I recommend to download models and manage UIs: https://github.com/LykosAI/StabilityMatrix
(1) Download Krita (2) Download and install the Krita AI diffusion plugin (3) Run comfy UI using StabilityMatrix
Docs for using the Krita AI plugin: https://docs.interstice.cloud/basics/ It's a really fun plugin to use!
You should just give it a go tonight.
But do I (and all my colleagues) need Microsoft Office (Word, Excel at least) and/or Drawing software (Adobe or something) and/or god forbid Visual Studio 2026, and some other corporate software to make a living? Inevitably yes.
To be fair, that could cover a lot of people.
In my experience watching people make the switch in the real world, the failure point is either the last 10% of software that they actually need, or the first time they encounter some Linux quirk that they didn’t expect. Then it reaches a point where there isn’t really any upside for people who aren’t ideologically motivated and who don’t get triggered by Windows 11 design choices or occasional pop-ups.
I have some specific engineering software that must run on Windows, period. I’ve gotten flak from the software engineers at every company whenever it’s discovered that my second machine is Windows, but outside of software devs nobody else questions it. Using Windows for work is perfectly understood by most other disciplines
It is beginning to look a lot like war is brewing between Europe and the US over Greenland. US media working super hard to make an "acquisition" sound reasonable and "FreedomTM".
If and that is a big if, Trump were to get Greenland, there is not much that Europe can do in any case. Maybe a few politicians will go on X/twitter and complain but every country in the EU knows that they are no match for the US military and I am saying that as someone who lives in the EU.
I suppose the EU could go after big US tech companies but since most of Europe's needs are covered by the very same companies, I don't think this would be viable solution either and let's be honest the EU people are not just going to switch to Ubuntu tomorrow morning.
It's unfortunate but it's the reality.
Whether or not that's true, that doesn't mean they won't try anyway. Pride sometimes beats pragmatism. I think it's foolish to dismiss the possibility of war, been if you believe it will be one-sided.
I would advise Americans not to do anything stupid.
The EU can just kick out the US bases and forbid Mastercard and Visa working here. ASML? Good luck for Intel; I'm sure AMD would have its asses already covered and found some alternative in Asia.
Watch the Dow Jones collape in minutes.
On GAFAM, there are alternatives, and libre software it's libre for the whole world, not just the US.
Software it's easily replaceable except for die hard industrial DOS (where FreeDOS experts would cover) and some special XP/w9x era machinery. European hardware, the industrial one... there's no alternative in the US. No one.
If the US army steps on Greenland in order to seize it, it's the end of the American economy.
China and Russia? These two should watch the Bering currents and South Asian quakes first; the upcoming ones will be a nightmare due to ice meltings.
Any of the above moves (military bases, Visa/MC, ASML, etc) would make the US suffer, but it would collapse the EU. Europe has a decade or two of hard work and crippling costs to significantly disengage from the US, and no one has the vision or fortitude to make that happen.
You also wouldn't have any security. If you disengage from the US militarily (whatever's left of "NATO"), we'll all see how far Russia can project power. Not as far as they'd like, but enough to make life miserable in a half-dozen or more current-NATO countries. Which puts pressure on their neighbors of course. This would be a shooting war in the east, which would require central and western European countries to decide whether they want to spend blood and treasure to respond. "No" kicks the can down the road a few years, "Yes" is economically devastating.
China could step in! It's a long way from China to the Mediterranean and North Atlantic, and their naval power is ... thin, currently. But you don't want China to step in. They could send money, but then they'd own you worse than the US even fever dreams about owning you.
The US seizing Greenland would be a terrible thing for the world, but I think the most likely outcome is that there would be complaints from the EU countries at highest level and volume, and a handful of countries would get legislation through to make the US suffer, but it would fail at the EU level, maybe even split the EU into two factions of American-bully-reluctantly-aligned countries vs American-bully-righteously-andor-selfservingly-opposed countries. The instability would last a few years, maybe a decade, and then we'd be back to where we are now, with "Greenland (US)" replacing "Greenland (DK)" on maps, but otherwise no one would spend much time thinking about it.
And the stomach-turning irony is that all of this is completely unnecessary. The US has a compact of free operation in Greenland already, including military operations. This is just an exercise in establishing dominance (i.e. The End of Politeness). There are some administrative details like mineral rights and redrawing international exclusivity zones (watch out Canada), but those are not very important when the global economic machine is working properly.
The rhetoric here in the US is that RU and CN are waiting to pounce on Greenland already, and that if we don't, they will. I honestly don't know if there's even a shred of truth to that -- it sounds like absolute manufactured BS to me (RU isn't strong enough to hold it, and CN can't project at that distance), but I have a strong anti-trusting bias against liars who lie, and those are the people dominating the conversation on this side.
The next ten months in the US will decide the next fifty years of the world. On a personal level, that's the rest of my life, and I'm worried about it.
I wish wisdom, resilience, and peace, for all of us.
And many other places - most countries depend in US tech and increasingly so (recent NH stories about Vietnam mandating banks only use unrooted mobile phones). Just card payments not working would be an economic disaster. So would closing down all the businesses and services that rely on AWS, GCP and Azure. So would whatever the US chose to do through Apple, MS, and Google OSes.
> we'll all see how far Russia can project power. Not as far as they'd like, but enough to make life miserable in a half-dozen or more current-NATO countries. Which puts pressure on their neighbors of course. This would be a shooting war in the east, which would require central and western European countries to decide whether they want to spend blood and treasure to respond
I am more optimistic than you about this. Russia is struggling just against Ukraine. They might just invade the Baltic states but anything more would force Western Europe to commit and the Russians know this. Even in Ukraine they invaded because we had signalled we would do nothing by not responding to the previous invasion of Ukraine, to threats to invade and previous Russian invasions of other countries.
> The rhetoric here in the US is that RU and CN are waiting to pounce on Greenland already, and that if we don't, they will. I honestly don't know if there's even a shred of truth to that - RU isn't strong enough to hold it, and CN can't project at that distance
If Greenland becomes independent in a few years time would it then become more of a threat?
> RU isn't strong enough to hold it, and CN can't project at that distance
China is building its armed forces, and there are ways of getting a country within your sphere if influence short of invasion.
> I wish wisdom, resilience, and peace, for all of us.
We all do but I think we are living in a new cold war.
I agree.
It's a way to assert dominance and the EU countries are partially responsible for the state of things.
I mean, when you outsource your manufacturing capabilities to China, your tech services to the US and your security to NATO, then it frees up a lot of cash to spend on other things and that is probably why life in the EU is pretty good.
Unfortunately the other side of this coin is that it leaves you completely unprepared if/when things change quickly.
> Europe has a decade or two of hard work and crippling costs
Once again unfortunately, many EU countries are already maxing out their budgets each year and running sky high deficits so there is not much dry powder to absorb these costs.
Raising more money through taxes is politically unpalatable when a lot of the EU countries are already in the top 10 of most taxed countries on the planet.
The only notable exceptions are Poland and Germany but they won't be able to carry the rest of the EU by themselves.
> maybe even split the EU into two factions of American-bully-reluctantly-aligned countries vs American-bully-righteously-andor-selfservingly-opposed countries.
The smallest EU countries have no choice. There is no EU army and therefore if the US leaves there is no one to replace it. It's a basic case of choosing the best worst outcome. Become a vassal of Russia or become a vassal of the US.
Also, back to economics. The inner European market can be huge. We have decent armies ourservers, too, among market with the whole Mediterranean, Africa and South America (Spaniards know how to do deals, no matter which political side). Oh, and don't forget China, the Chinese will love to sell us advanced tech at bargain price.
The US tries to set right wing sided mafias in LatAm, Europe tries to get good deals. The US needs to behave like gentlemen and not like thugs.
>it's the end of the American economy.
You assume that this is not the goal of the current US "leadership". They want the country to fail, so they can rule over the ashes. They are a lot more fucked up in the head than you probably think they are. They simply don't care what happens, so long as they are the ones in power.
Trump would love nothing more than to dissolve NATO, and isolate from all of the EU. He would see that as an accomplishment. I wish I were joking.
The EU uses Mastercard and Visa. If youblock them in the EU, you just cripple the EU economy instantly.
> On GAFAM, there are alternatives, and libre software it's libre for the whole world, not just the US.
How many people do you know that would be willing to switch to an alternative OS tomorrow or give up their Iphones?
> If the US army steps on Greenland
The US army is already on Greenland. They have a military base there.
I agree with you in spirit but in reality any countermeasures would inflict a lot of pain the EU as well. I don't think anyone has a crystal ball but whatever happens won't be good for anyone.
I feel like we are close to a tipping point where governments and companies will move off US services en masse as fast as they reasonably can. I think this movement already started. E.g. our local university has forbidden use of US (well, any non-EU) LLMs for work and are trialing Mistral. Two years ago they would have gone Gemini without thinking (since they are already using Google Workspace). They are also extending support for their Linux workspace, which has primarily been maintained for CS'y groups, but they want to be ready to roll it out when needed.
A lot of organizations (especially non-profits, universities, etc.) have woken up when Microsoft relinquished Microsoft 365 access of the ICC chief prosecutor overnight.
I guess one side effect of the US going rogue is open source getting a lot more traction.
I hope that the EU (and UK) will also invest heavily in iOS and Google Android alternatives, because that will be the hardest bits to replace, but as long as AOSP still exists it will be possible to bootstrap reasonably quickly.
A few governments are trying to do something about reliance on the US, but they are also doing things that create greater reliance.
Its good your university is trying, but that sounds like a limited response. Do they use Windows? MS Teams? Google Drive?
I know of no government making serious attempts to get the private sector of US dependence. Just check how many things you use regularly run on AWS. Desktop Linux is great but is any governmentactually making consistent attempts to persuade businesses to switch to it?
Step by step. For example, most Dutch banking apps work fine on GrapheneOS. Yes, still with Google Play Services, but at least they are sandboxed. It shows that there is a path to removing dependence incrementally. There are also a bunch of European phone brands (yes, most manufactured in China), like Nothing, Fairphone, Gigaset, HMD, etc. and at least one of them already supports alternative Android versions. Yes, I know they have issues, but you need to start somewhere.
Its good your university is trying, but that sounds like a limited response. Do they use Windows? MS Teams? Google Drive?
Yes, but they also have an official Linux workplace, last time I was there, you could choose to re-image a machine to run Linux on every machine. They are also trialing ownCloud.
The migration won't happen overnight, but it's good that they are setting up the alternatives, trialing them with small user groups, etc. It's the best way to prepare yourself.
I know of no government making serious attempts to get the private sector of US dependence. Just check how many things you use regularly run on AWS. Desktop Linux is great but is any government actually making consistent attempts to persuade businesses to switch to it?
I agree, not enough persuasion is done. But being gloomy is not going to help. Best is to trust in our own strength (we can do it), accept that the solutions are going to be worse (at least initially), make people aware of the risks and alternatives.
The whole situation sucks, but big changes also give rise to big opportunities and it is an opportunity to change to a more open, more privacy-friendly, more user-oriented, etc. ecosystem.
We don't need to annihilate the US forces, just make the US bleed enough to rethink this stupid shit.
These people will probably use a tablet or phone.
Drawing, yeah, true... design as well... closest the Linux world ever was to get something decent in the design department was the Serif/Affinity products, but they never made the port.
I've not had any lock-in to Microsoft software and I don't think I've deal with a .doc file in all that time. I need a terminal to run devops stuff, and emacs to write it with, but almost nothing else.
Artists, and so on, are probably tied to Adobe, etc. But random developers and sysadmins are certainly capable of switching I think.
For the average home user I can see gaming - while hugely improved in recent years - could still be a showstopper.
But surely for the average user Libreoffice or online versions of MS Office will suffice? Surely there cannot be _that_ many average PC users that need the full power of Photoshop?
Of course I expect the average HN user to be quite different from the average user in general, but I really do think that many casual users get no advantages from Windows apart from familiarity.
Are you all expected to provide your own personal hardware?
Maybe this depends on location, but everyone I can think of has a corporate-issued laptop on which their corporate software runs.
You're making the exact same argument everyone here is making, and that's because you're attempting to argue from technical parity / superiority. Windows isn't the dominant desktop OS because of it's technical superiority to Linux, it's dominant because of deeply entrenched compliance and industry reasons.
Healthcare, finance, legal, engineering (less so today, but still very sub-discipline dependant), and government all have very specific software needs that no one in their right mind will bother writing new software, or rewriting existing software, would do for 6% desktop market share.
EMR programs (Epic, Cerner, Meditech), Practice management and billing, Tax and compliance, Legal discovery and case-management tools, Niche hardware and it's control software
This is all the realm of Windows. Most of these applications are Windows-only (Win32 / .NET / ActiveX legacy), they're only certified and validated on Windows, and they're only contractually supported on Windows.
Even if Wolters-Kluwer rewrote the entire CCH ProSystem fx suite for Linux, now there's recertification, regulatory review, vendor retraining, staff retraining, potential issues with auditors and regulators, etc.
There's currently no upside large enough to justify: Vendor finger-pointing, Compliance risk, Training costs, Downtime risk
It's negative ROI all the way down.
Windows has to become so bad that switching to Linux for desktops overcomes all of the above.
It doesn't work. Right now the main issue is Wayland vs X where Wayland is not working and will never work because the underlying ideas and goals do not align with that of a desktop. Someone described X as ALSA, Wayland as PulseAudio and we are waiting for PipeWire to arrive.
Also, hardware and software issues will always be there because the incentives are not there.
I swear Linux on the desktop adherents sound like they have some sort of Stockholm Syndrome but of course in reality just cognitive dissonance explains it.
I know people desperately want to believe that Linux is "there", but it really isn't. And will probably never be. It’s still too confusing for the average user (many distros, many desktop environments, Wayland vs X, systemd vs init, snap vs flatpak).
Users don't need to know about any of that, except for picking a distro and just using whatever is there.
Regarding DAW - I get sticking with Windows if you have thousands invested in it. Even so, there's quite a bit of professional software out there with native support (like Bitwig) or flawless Wine support.
I run Aurora, an immutable Linux distro. It auto-updates the core OS without me even noticing (just remember to reboot your laptop every couple of weeks). It has a software center to install GUI apps (all Flatpak, I think) and comes with brew to install command line apps. Things pretty much just work, and for the occasional small issue, I generally manage to just shrug.
To be fair, one thing still lingers just above my annoyance threshold: connecting/disconnecting monitors while my laptop is suspended will sometimes lead to a black screen when resuming, requiring a reboot. A gentle wink from the bad/good old days. :-)
If you go online, you will see a whole YouTube videos and articles on how to fix the issue. Let me tell you, after a considerable amount of time, I gave up.
I'm running Ubuntu 24.04 on my desktop, and I can't remember the last time I had issues applying patches.
Similar problems will have very different solutions for Linux. The knowledge of how to resolve them is much less widespread. I’ve had very good success in asking ChatGPT how to resolve Linux issues, probably better success then I would on Windows because the error messages on Linux are much more detailed.
Been there, done that... worked fine but with an unacceptable performance penalty.
For power users or users with niche use cases, sure there might be specialized software that lock you into Windows or Mac.
But for most casual home users, I think Linux would be perfectly adequate, and familiarity being the only real detractor.
Assuming someone can help install a friendly Linux distribution (and that the hardware is compatible), then what are the big blockers? Gaming maybe, for those where it is relevant.
But looking at all my not so tech savvy family members and friends, a browser, online versions of MS Office (or Libreoffice for sure), maybe Spotify or the like, would really be enough. Being able to install apps via an (actually useful) app store is a big win in itself.
Looking at those friends/family members, it is not like they are able to support their Windows machines either when something goes wrong or needs to be changed - I (or someone else technical) always need to help out anyway, fixing driver issues, installing software, changing any non-trivial settings, and so on. And I could just as well do that on Linux - and whether I need to pull up a terminal is irrelevant.
The pathway is there should you choose, one day. Linux is quite good now. That being said, I know a lot of niche plugins that some guy wrote that only works on windows because that’s all he/she has access to. Some 8-bit synth bitcrushers come to mind.
Also Steinburg made VST 3 sdk open source so you have a path to a free music production studio.
Most??? I can’t find Arturia, Korg, Reason Rack Plugin, FabFilter, Native Instruments, Softube and those are just from the top of my head.
If we just learn one thing and never change then we wind up being left behind. While FL Studio and Logic, Cubase and Ableton are what most people know. There’s ways of running ALL of them on Linux.
As I just managed to get VR working with HP Reverb G2 in my Linux environment, quite literally the only reason I have Windows still installed on my computer is because of Ableton, and not being able to run that properly on even workstation hardware.
How exactly do I get Ableton running with an external USB soundcard and everything running exactly like it runs on Linux? I'm quite literally ready to give you money if you manage to give me an answer that actually leads to me being able to run Ableton on Arch Linux, because for years I have tried, and waited for the moment it's possible. So please do tell, how do I get it running?
https://hanez.org/document/ableton-live-linux-wine/
https://github.com/wineasio/wineasio
The biggest thing with any Linux and Wine mix for DAWs is using JACK and WineASIO for low latency
And that is unfortunately the place where I spent my big bucks.
I do however use Linux for my work, and have for more than a decade. If all the plugins (plus FL Studio, I've tried Reaper but it might be not for me) worked, I'd switch my personal desktop in a heartbeat. It's honestly the only thing locking me to Win10. Maybe I'll try a Mac through work (we get to keep the machines).
And yes, I've tried running FL using Wine, and it works surprisingly well! Just not _well enough_, and some plugins do not work at all. Most do, and that's great, but not enough for me at least.
That is unbeatable value for money in the DAW market and that was before Logic Pro 11 came out and added a ton of new plugins.
I had this friend while my kid went to school with his kid, he was a musician. He absolutely was frightened of even handling me the mouse of his windows 7 setup in case I break his DAW, cherry audio tools and midi mixers just by me showing him a website. Also helped to switch some dlls (hi didn't know how to kill background task to release dll to be replaced) and edit windows registry cause he needed an upgrade for some pirated software.
I have seen many more nightmarish stuff hapenning in windows, even on holy sacred windows xp.
On the other hand my mother has been using debian xfce in her acer touch screen laptop for 15 years. No issues. Many elder people got in shock when windows 8 made all those changes.
So whenever windows users talk about linux confusion I smirk.
If you mean that there's no Linux replacement for Digital Audio Workstation, then I agree: switching is not for you. But if what worries you are the $$ you have spent, you are just another victim of the sunk cost fallacy. The earlier you realize your mistake, the earlier you are ready to evaluate the options without biases.
Surge-XT, Vitalium and/or PlugData or Cardinal can get you so far on the synthesis world that maybe not even a full dedicated lifetime can explore everything you can do with it... Ardour isn't a shinning pot for MIDI editor generational features but if you actually know music-theory, it works pretty solid for writing. the in-line editor makes very much sense, just like sheet music can hold an orchestra info. on a sigle page
And Steam Deck is there.
But I think the desktop interface is legacy for anyone under the age of 25, I get a kick out of watching them navigate a desktop.
> every case is different
Every article like this is another person for whom Linux is there.
Average users need to buy hardware with a suitable distro installed. Usually that means Ubuntu. Its a decision that should be taken for them
With regard to DEs - Gnome for touch devices, KDE for mouse and keyboard driven ones. Both set up to be Windows like by default.
The average user is never even going to know whether they are running Wayland or systemd or snap. They will never change the default.
Yes there are options. In practice you pick one distro, the one your friend recommends, or that the IT department gives you.
There are probably fields in which you cannot use Linux software, but for your average joe? It's not impossible, and it's not that confusing with a little patience.
I can't get over how they torpedoed one of the most famous brands in the world... but that's kind of on brand for them now, self-sabotage.
If the general public comes over this situation might end. Desktop linux isn’t a target right now because its niche, I’d prefer that didn’t stop.
Oh well. Maybe nothing lasts forever.
I'm a Sunday photographer and quite like Lightroom and Photoshop (I know about the drama, but to me, I get enough value from them compared to Darktable and the GIMP to not switch just yet). It's the only reason I still have a windows pc hanging around the house.
There is a big difference in what software a desktop user runs versus what runs on a server, but the great thing about Linux is that you can keep just as much variation between your install and the average desktop user.
Your best bet for security is probably running OpenBSD, but within Linux, if you avoid common optional applications and services like Gnome, KDE, pulseaudio, systemd, etc., you'll have a significantly different attack vector. Avoiding Python and Node package managers and sticking to your distribution's package manager would be great, too.
My media center experience is so so much better. The apps on roku logout randomly, the nvidia shield remote craps out, windows firefox/chrome are slow and the logitech keyboard doesn't work. But the same keyboard and browser setup works like a charm on the same machine on linux.
Manufactured waste, fight against general purpose computing and ownership is what is at stake.
[0] Bitsearch uses a distributed hash table (DHT)[1] to find all public tracker content
I probably chose the wrong distro for this but I really just want the PC to work for playing games without any issues. I don't use it for anything other than playing games so for my time I just went back to Windows 10 and will use that until apps stop working.
I'm not saying I'm reading these regularly, just that yes it's the expected way.
EndeavourOS is apparently Arch-based so I've got no useful suggestions for fixing there, sorry.
If you have a choice don't use nVidia either, but the bigger distributions do handle them well.
The last time I used arch, I ran an update and it broke my bootloader, meaning the next time I restarted it wouldn't boot at all.
Sure I could make a recovery USB and fix it, but at that point I was away from home, and just really needed to do the totally crazy thing of "using my computer to actually do work".
(To be clear, I didn't and I'm not recommending going back to Windows, just a more sane Linux)
Yet, when you go online to refresh your memory on how to update your Linux installation, too many of the guides still say STEP 1: Back everything up because you may not be able to boot after you do this!
But the usual way to install Linux nowadays is from a live boot, so you automatically have a recovery drive anyway. It's not hard to set up regular restore points with Timeshift or similar, either.
That said, I haven't had problems like what you describe in nearly 4 years.
Updates generally just work, on the balance of my experience and other available evidence. It's still unwise to schedule them at a time where a failure would be more disruptive than baseline, and it's still best practice to be prepared for a failure and not have to figure things out on the fly.
Windows isn't perfect in this respect by any means, but it sure seems like it handles updates a lot better than the distros that have been mentioned in this thread; in that Windows at least takes steps to examine your hardware first and to not apply updates where it's known something has fallen out of support.
Windows also, apparently unlike these mentioned distros, maintains a Last Known Good configuration so if an update does start causing failures, it can automatically roll itself back (or, at worst, can manually be rolled back). There are some distros that do similar, particularly immutable distros; but honestly this sort of thing should be table stakes to the point that if a distro doesn't do it, it should be laughed out of the room.
There is absolutely no acceptable excuse for any operating system to break itself in an update.
Year of the Linux desktop for sure
Most people don't make their coffee in an Aeropress either.
I've also used Linux exclusively (in my case 25 years), but I also realize that with a few niche exceptions, there are few mass marketed products that feature the traditional Linux desktop as their primary UI.
Desktop OS UI is hard. It takes investment in technology, product, and marketing all focused on a target market. Even with all of those most upstarts have failed to gain traction. Also consider that most people buy laptops for 2 reasons: 1) browsing the web and if they can afford it 2) as a fashion accessory. People will put up with a lot of BS from a product if they feel like the product gives them social status and acceptance.
No Linux laptop really hits (2). Arguably only a few Windows laptops do either.
Stupid analogy, the Linux version of that would be whatever french press you want to use. Buy your coffee ground or as beans and grind yourself, depending on preference. And for my girlfriend there's always the Starbucks equivalent (Debian stable with Gnome).
Apple would be picked by modern slaves and sold in a capsule at 100,000% markup and it only fits their machines. Windows comes with pesticides for the "benefit of the user".
I use a french press myself, and never heard of Aeropress. My machines all run Debian with DWM and I never have any problems. My non-technical girlfriend is fine on Debian and doesn't really know the difference. She did mention how fast her laptop boots though.
Ditto. I can't stand other OSs; they are constantly in my way for just the basic tasks.
> I don't understand people who use anything else, to be honest.
Anti-ditto. I would never give Linux to my parents. They're capable enough to maintain their own Windows computers, and switching them to Linux would mean that I'd have to take over all of those tasks -- because they've got other, more important things to do than to learn a new OS.
I'd agree with you if you could buy rando PC with Linux installed and working with no stupid hardware issues. People who can live in Google Docs/Office 365 web and don't have industry specific use cases will almost always be fine. But once you break out of that subset of people, tossing them a Linux machine can be kind of mean.
I don't know about your parents but most people (including my parents) just use a browser and some applications that are identical to their Windows versions or sufficiently similar. There isn't really anything new to learn.
Most people just use an OS to start applications. There is nothing they need to learn other than maybe the start button has a different logo on it.
One huge barrier is printing. I've been using Linux as my daily OS for a decade and I still have stupid problems with printers. I can't print from my laptop because the printer spits out unicode garbage if I try. My desktop works, but sometimes I have to reboot to get the print queue to clear.
Printers are their own slice of misery that seem to transcend brand, OS, platform, etc.
However, most people do not know what an OS is. They do not understand its software rather than hardware.
But during my brief period on Windows I would get issues like my colour settings changing or the behaviour of certain meta keys being switched out when I woke a sleeping laptop.
Fine but that attitude isn't going to increase Linux adoption. Arch does work in this regard today but it does require some BIOS tweaks to get it to work flawlessly. Compare this to a MacBook where closing the lid always does the right thing and seems to use basically no power at all in this state. For me, I'll accept the trade-off as I don't want to use macOS (makes no sense for development imo) but some aspects of the experience are clearly superior.
At work, I got a fancy MacBook, and as much as I admire the hardware, I despise the MacOS window management. IMHO, it is broken by design, and I wonder how anybody at Apple considers this a good system. There is still a small chance that I didn't understand a crucial concept, but until now, nobody was able to explain to me, how it is supposed to work.
I have reached the point where I believe that it must be something historical, like Steve wrote it himself, or else, and now nobody dares to reform it.
Apple's pretty imperfect, and it's sad to see that they've neglected and regressed their desktop OS, however I don't think anyone can argue that macOS is anywhere near as bad as Windows 11.
If your work area is anything other than it, perhaps the Mac isn't necessary.
How about photography and video production?
Some of your points are common, such as the touchpad being garbage, or that it runs hotter than an Apple Silicon MacBook Air. But most people consider ThinkPad keyboards to be way better than Apple's and while most (not all) ThinkPads have a plastic shell, they certainly don't feel cheap. Apple displays are typically really good, but ThinkPads have a lot of options, so it is hard to tell.
Your comment, especially regarding the keyboard makes me think you just love your MacBook. Why buy anything else?
Linux support is not great, but a lot of a significant part of what makes Apple great is in their hardware/software integration and they are not doing it open source. It means a MacBook without OSX is a lesser MacBook, but at least, it is not Windows 11.
It likes to spin up its fan doing the most insignificant things though (even plugging in a pedestrian 1x scaling external monitor can while idle can do it) and its battery life is somewhat abysmal. Standby time is also quite poor.
Some of these things are in theory improved by a newer CPU (Lunar Lake in particular looks decent) but sadly they discontinued the Nano. The Carbon isn’t that much bigger, but the size difference is noticeable in some circumstances.
Either there’s simply a hard limit on how good this hardware can be in terms of thermals and battery life or neither Lenovo’s tuning of Windows nor any Linux distro has gone far enough in properly leveraging power management and the like.
Lenovo's cheap laptops are as bad as anyone's.
Doesn't seem to me like a good deal especially price wise.
And the price looks perfectly fine.
I have a personal Thinkpad (Linux) and a company provided one (W11). The personal one basically never turns on the fan. The company one is hot all the time. Guess why.
Classic lenovo. Some models have FN as the most bottom left key, instead of ctrl. Gotta be the worst design decision ive ever seen. Everyone copy+pastes and finds, whoever thought that was a good idea really needs relieved of decision making power.
In a brief survey of laptop photos from the early 90s, IBM, Toshiba, Zenith, NEC, Packard Bell, Compaq, and Fujitsu all put Fn on the outside.
Epson, Apple, HP, Panasonic, and Sony put it as the second key.
A handful put it as the third key. Heck, one Toshiba machine had Ctrl left of A, Alt on the extreme lower-left starting out the bottom row, followed by Caps Lock and Fn and backslash and finally spacebar.
Only in the last 15-ish years have most of the Fn-Ctrl keyboards died out and the majority of the industry is now using Ctrl-Fn. Thinkpads are the last major holdout, but they didn't decide to buck the trend, the trend bucked them.
ThinkPads were one of the last major holdouts, they went to the Control-Fn layout in 2024.
The only thing my work 16" MBP does better is the speakers.
edit: Updated the battery life to 9+ hours from 7+ hours based on what the battery monitor says.. I remember binge watching a couple of long movies/tv shows without ever having to plug in the laptop that day...
So in that sense I think it does matter who is the ultimate arbiter of what it will and won't do, not only in an individual sense but a societal one. The more people switch to something they themselves control, the less power third parties have over their behavior.
Suffering can be real with a bad screen, an overheating laptop or difficult to use software.
My mental health definitely suffers if I'm forced to use software that enriches companies I dislike for good reason.
Why? Because as much as I want to get rid of my dependence on tech giants, Apple's products are just so damn good, and they Just Work^TM, especially with each other.
Having used Linux on/off for many years, I can say that it's definitely gotten better, but I am still waiting for the year of the Linux desktop. It doesn't have to be as polished as my Mac, but I'd like to at least not have to fight with Bluetooth especially, and things like the dongle for my headset not working and other issues like that.
I'm now in the process of un-Appleing my home too, and it's going pretty well, but I know I'll need to keep a single Mac somewhere in the corner of my garage in case I need to use Xcode to build an iOS app or something.
It's basically built like a Macbook in terms of case and screen quality, but it's based on an AMD Strix Halo chipset - mine is an AI Max Pro+ 395.
The chip design is somewhat similar to Apple Silicon in that it's one big chip with unified memory - you can get them with up to 128GB of unified ram - that thing is a beast for running local LLMs.
Since HP also sells them with Ubuntu preinstalled, Linux support is quite good, though it requires some bleeding edge packages for everything to be supported.
In my case, I have suspend and hibernate working perfectly, fingerprint reader, webcam, etc all work.
In Linux? Seriously? How much tweaking did that require?
Do you dare to throw the laptop into a backpack in sleep mode instead of shutting it down first?
I feel like Pacman is the real reason for instability with people who dont understand how Pacman works messing up upgrade commands and not getting all their dependencies properly updated. When I tried Manjaro like ten years ago it was a mess.
I just moved to CachyOS, (from Fedora, and earlier from Ubuntu -- I've been on Linux for a while) and I've been very, very happy. The gaming performance is legitimately better than what I was getting on Fedora, and I've just enjoyed the OS and KDE much more than Gnome Shell. I haven't had any real showstoppers with CachyOS, and it really has felt like a user-friendly version of Arch finally exists.
None of these things are truly unique to CachyOS, but nonetheless I do think I experienced a boost when I switched.
Curious as to how CachyOS does it.
As I'm typing this, on my work windows PC, the taskbar icons aren't rendering. Generally the graphics are slow, Microsoft outlook randomly freezes my entire computer, and occasionally my USB drives turn on/off if I'm plugged into a docking station. I experience exactly zero of these issues when running
It sets up a Windows machine in Docker where you can install your apps, then you'll get .desktop applications that starts the program in the VM and use RDP to only show the app window – it feels nearly native. I've even bought an Office 2024 license to improve some VBA Excel macros for a client.
> The first question often asked of Windows refugees migrating to Linux is, "Why Linux?"
The answer, realistically, is probably "What else?". Unless you're comfortable with the BSD's (which I like, and weren't mentioned), or unless you have recent Mac hardware lying around, it's the easiest and most practical alternative.
It's a bit of a duopoly, isn't it?; with a third leg that's sometimes something in the BSD camp, and sometimes in the MacOS camp.
It's impressive Microsoft has bungled Windows enough to make this go viral.
While Linux and the user space ecosystem has come a long way there are still plenty of sharp edges and anyone planning to use Linux long term must be able to figure some issues that will inevitably happen sooner or later when some update/system upgrade happens.
Even though I consider myself fairly proficient Linux user I also gave up on Linux on laptops..life is just too short to tinker to make it work. (Power saving, suspend/resume, graphics with Optimus etc. Are still pain points)
It's hard to evaluate fairly. This author, for example is fed up with specific issues on Windows and new to Linux. He is likely be more forgiving of sharp edges on Linux, recognizing that it's normal for something unfamiliar to be more challenging. On the other hand, someone content with Windows might think of its sharp edges as just how computers are and consider every way in which Linux is merely different to be pointless aggravation.
Most publications covering Windows have a bunch of articles about how to tinker with Windows 11 to keep it from spying on you, showing ads, and forcing the use of an online account. One might argue life is also too short for that.
For many users, linux is already easier to use.
This is not to discount the tens of thousands of hours of hard (often volunteer) work put into the ecosystem, but a substantial amount of work remains on things like battery life and UX (both for devs and more typical end users).
For example, why does getting virtualization under Fedora working require a whole stack of commands? Elsewhere, the most that’s needed is ticking a checkbox (if that). Worse, the mode of failure if you haven’t done the correct dance is unintelligible errors in e.g. GNOME Boxes that don’t even point the user in the right direction.
There’s all sorts of somewhat low hanging fruit like this that I suspect hasn’t gotten attention because it’s not particularly sexy or interesting.
I am also using GNU/Linux on laptops just fine, and the only issue is with battery life.
I think hardware-wise one needs to do some reading before buying, to check what is supported and what is not well supported. Other than that, I don't have issues. But then again I am also a strict on or off guy, who does not use things like hibernation or standby or whatever at all, so maybe I am dodging many bullets there.
Alas, I exclusively use laptops - as I work a great deal while travelling.
I do not wish to have to carry around a mouse with me wherever I go with my portable computer.
If any Linux distro manages to replicate even 80% of the smoothness and functionality of a Mac trackpad experience, I'll switch. I have yet to find one, however (and yes, I've tried all the Asahi variants - they don't come close).
Now, run Linux (say, Ubuntu) on that exact same hardware and try scrolling in Firefox or something. Instead of the content moving exactly as your fingers are moving, it does this weird jumpy "page up / page down" like thing as your fingers move. Even moving your fingers as slowly as you can will make the content jump to the next "page" 20 pixels down. This is not just Firefox's behavior: it carries through to every application.
Yes, there's probably some obscure GNOME configuration I need to add to fix this behavior, and if you search online you'll find forum after forum of people asking for logs and responding with "I dunno, try this." For something that should work out of the box.
I find my use of the trackpad so rare now that it’s a non factor.
I find Niri to be a great WM for trackpad use if you are amenable to a scrollable-tiling workflow. All gestures are inertial like MacOS and to my fingers they often feel snappier and more natural than their macOS equivalents. Scrolling is consistent and natural, though which apps have inertial scrolling is definitely hit-or-miss. It perfectly recognizes three and four finger gestures. PikaOS (debian-based) and CachyOS (arch-based) both offer Niri as an option if you want to give it a try.
For context, my experience is on a 4 year old thinkpad which admittedly is probably best case for driver support but is definitely not the best touchpad hardware on the market.
As an aside, the latter also teaches you the bindings for Vim which is a nice boon if you've tried in the past and couldn't make it stick.
But again, this might not fit your use case or your preparedness to invest time and effort. I'm just saying.
My gripes with the trackpad are less to do with window management and are more to do with the graphical components of my job.
Please explain to me how I'm supposed to design graphics in Inkscape using only the keyboard? Or create presentations in LibreOffice Impress using only the keyboard? I don't spend the entirety of my time in a text editor.
Consider these "amateur" tasks all you like, most organisations value them and I need to be able to undertake them without frustration. MacOS won't fight me in these contexts. Linux will.
In any case, I am proud to be a very weak Linux amateur despite having used it for two decades.
It's a bit like with cars. If you know someone who really knows about cars, they'll be able to recommend a solid, simple, super cheap, practical car that will just work and give you no problems. It'll probably be something like a 2010 Toyota Aygo, which you can pick up for next to nothing on the used car market (here in Germany) and which you would never have thought of buying yourself. This is a Linux laptop. Other people who never got this insider tip that driving can be cheap and hassle-free might instead buy a new car from a German manufacturer on credit for half a gross annual salary (or even a whole one). Two years later, the car may already be in the repair shop because the engine is losing oil or because the Nanoslide/Nikasil cylinder liner coating is damaged.
With the Aygo, you can drive from A to B just as well as with any other car, and you might even have a little more fun doing so. But if you need CarPlay and heated seats, distrust things that are cheap, and love that je ne sais quoi that comes with things you've just bought for a lot of money, then this simple 2010 Aygo is not for you.
This weekend, I wrote code for a non-trivial compiler on my old everyday laptop. I didn't even buy it; I got it for free because the previous owner considered the device obsolete and unusable. Slowly, the thing is getting too old for me too, but Linux (Ubuntu) has gotten another couple of years of use out of it. Meanwhile, a friend of mine just bought a used Macbook that still cost more than I would ever spend on a new laptop because she has to write papers for her studies and thinks she needs a “good” computer for that.
I'd always recommend upstream distributions with corporate backing for novice users: Ubuntu or Fedora. If they're coming from Windows: Linux Mint. There's also a clear upgrade path for users who enjoy Mint or Ubuntu: Debian testing.
Arch Linux is awesome, don't get me wrong. I just believe it's borderline unethical to recommend someone installing anything related to Arch on their workstation. It's just not what a beginner should choose at all. CachyOS included, it even makes you choose your bootloader at install (any user-friendly distro would simply never bother you with that and go with GRUB right away).
A user's first distro can make or break their Linux experience. Think hard before recommending new users the flavor of the month or an Arch derivative.
I switched from Windows 11 to Kubuntu a year ago, and then gave CachyOS a shot after hearing praise for it. I'm on a laptop with an AMD iGPU, and CachyOS's `znver4` optimized repos gave a significant bump on my Geekbench results:
(Note: these results are from almost a year ago though)
Lenovo Thinkpad P14s Gen4 AMD
- Windows 11: 2366 Single-Core Score, 10717 Multi-Core Score
- Kubuntu: 2496 Single-Core Score, 9878 Multi-Core Score
- CachyOS: 2569 Single-Core Score, 11563 Multi-Core Score
Repeat tests were essentially the same (Win11 23xx/107xx, Kubuntu 24xx/98xx, Cachy 25xx/115xx)
It's a lot more polished than Arch, but it's not for someone who hasn't used Linux before and wants a reliably rock solid and predictable experience 365 days a year, with no fiddling.
It's rolling release, and there are inevitably bugs when updating immediately to every minor version of every part of the OS stack. Arch/Cachy/Endeavour are for experts, and those who enjoy tinkering. (If you want to recommend something Arch-flavored, just recommend Manjaro, and don't listen to the memers who parrot some youtuber's list of ancient and silly engagement-bait grievances.)
Only problem I believe is the lack of customization options in Cinnamon compared to KDE and even Gnome with extensions. I guess that makes the user miss out on some of the cool parts of owning your software. Also, being stuck in X11 will start to become a problem in the next few years: I'm waiting to see what they come up with on that front.
Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against CachyOS (I really couldn't care less), but if this is where we collectively set the bar for what is "user friendly", we are doing it wrong.
In general I'd recommend sticking to the simple options and not going into niches unless you/the user actually wants or needs to.
For the Linux newcomer, the biggest advantage of Ubuntu (or Ubuntu derivatives like Mint) is the wealth of guides, tutorials, and Q&As online, allowing you to google most common problems. You can always switch to another distro once you become more confident with Linux.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46566465 ("I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great (theverge.com)"; 20 hours ago, 596 comments)
Funnily enough, though, you can get a very user friendly experience using Niri and Dank Linux (don't remember the exact name). It takes two 3 CLI commands to install, and the top bar incredibly cool, compared to the i3 defaults and even to what I remember of Gnome and KDE.
Next up: somebody comes up with a desktop environment called BTW.
No, people do care about battery life. That's where Macs excel. (I'm saying this as a Thinkpad user, where getting 6-8hrs of battery is doable, if you don't do anything on the laptop).
Have you considered that you're using the mouse because the touchpad doesn't work as well on any other OS?
It's not the hardware, it's the software somehow that makes the touchpad usable in Mac OS.
The author of TFA hopped from Mint -> Debian -> Bazzite -> Fedora -> Void -> Artix, so Void is an extremely obvious outlier here.
Aside from Void, every other distro he tried was either a newbie-friendly desktop distro (Mint, Debian, Fedora, Bazzite), or "Arch, but easier, with an installer" (Artix).
Bad luck with Void's package selection is fair enough, but I'm not sure what he meant by "driver compatibility was a big issue" - Void uses an upstream kernel and driver availability should be roughly the same anywhere.
He's using a Ryzen APU on desktop so graphics drivers shouldn't have been an issue there. The MacBook had problems with Broadcom Wi-Fi drivers on Artix(!), but I'd wager this would affect all distros out of the box, and Void has the Broadcom drivers[0] available as well.
It's frustrating that he doesn't explicitly mention what he couldn't find drivers for on Void. I assume it was Broadcom Wi-Fi and he didn't enable the nonfree repository. In fairness, Void's docs don't cover any Broadcom quirks so maybe this isn't as discoverable as it should be.
Sure, Void doesn't have the endless options of Arch+AUR for packages, but it had everything I needed. Even the well-maintained, latest versions of less common software, like Nim compiler.
The author might also missed that Void has a non-free repository, that you have to install for stuff like proprietary drivers, DRM and Steam.
I see Wine, YABridge and LinVST mentioned in searches, but while I've got plenty of Linux experience, I'm time-poor and would prefer to make computers make noises rather than spend my time making things work. I have Reaper which is cross-platform but again, getting the VSTs working would be great (at a bare minimum).
A Mac is not an option here. Any pointers gratefully received!
I've been using Linux for work and hobbies for more than a decade at this point, mostly Arch Linux, some CachyOS, but always had a partition of Windows available too. Why? Almost solely because Ableton does not run properly with Wine, Proton or any other tooling, and has never been able to do so, for as long as I've used Ableton (since version 8 or 9 I think).
If you spend most of your day with Ableton, then Linux is not ready for you, and then I'm not even considering plugins or what not, just the default and standard stuff is not running properly no matter what you'll try.
Then Linux is not for you at this point. I don't mean to discourage you - for me, Reaper works, Scarlett works, ffmpeg works etc. But there are quirks. Reaper has horrible scaling on 4k screen, which I believe can be resolved by forcing UI scaling, but this requires change every time I switch from laptop to external monitor, so I just live with tiny buttons. Scarlett works, but requires JACK, and I never got it working properly with Pulse/Pipewire (outputs get duplicated sometimes), also control software doesn't exist, aside from one opensource reimplementation, which works but looks horrible.
If you don't have time, just don't.
I actually had good experience with setting up yabridge, it could have worked for me I think. But the elephant in the room is that many big commercial plugins use JUCE as a framework, and the recent release of JUCE (JUCE8) just broke compatibility with wine and seem to be sabotaging wine-based usage completely, and are not considering going back at the moment.
https://forum.juce.com/t/juce8-direct2d-wine-yabridge/64298/...
https://github.com/robbert-vdh/yabridge/issues/386
There are patches based on binary diffs to JUCE7, but it is just so much pain to simply run the commonest plugins in the field :/
So I'm now kind of stuck between using windows with commercial plugins or use linux with mainly smaller scale alternatives (although there are good ones: lsp, decent sampler, cardinal, surge)
The good news is the same interface today works fine with PipeWire, without needing to tweak anything. I am using Arch this time around.
For your regular PC, you can install a gaming-focused distribution like Bazzite to get everything sorted out automatically.
That way Linux gamers can still play with other Linux gamers if they want (and cheaters).
Not an ideal situation but probably better than nothing.
Segregating into two pools: Windows-verified, or Linux-unverified, would probably not work for Linux users either. It'd be the same problem (on a smaller scale) as not including kernel anticheat in Windows. No fun for the non-cheaters.
I'm not a gamer though, so I may be missing important details.
I assert that most people who're happy running Linux on their desktop (for games or productivity or development) do not overlap much with the people who're happy to take kernel patches from UbiFuckingSoft. And this includes those people who're willing to take closed-source NVIDIA drivers.
A good rule of thumb is that single player games generally just™ work and that older games generally just™ work.
"Mainstream" is maybe too hefty, the amount of Linux users (including SteamDeck) who participate in the Steam surveys are still in the single digit if I remember correctly. Most gamers today still use Windows, even though Valve made great strides with Proton.
Age of empires will be okay.
[0]: https://www.protondb.com/explore [1]: https://areweanticheatyet.com/
I'm no Linux expert, but if a SWE has a hard time with it, can't imagine how an average person is supposed to use this. Yeah it's learnable, but nobody wants to. Come back when I can install Linux on a PC, not a "distro" but just Linux, no choices for random stuff like DEs unless you're an expert. And that's necessary, not sufficient.
The entire point of Linux is there isn't just one Linux, having centralized control of an OS is how Mac and Windows ended up so godawful.
As time goes on the UX will continue to improve (through targeted distros) for less sophisticated users, but we're realistically only now at the point where everything in the ecosystem is "good enough" for a large number of people.
At some point Ubuntu had Gnome2 and only apt for packages, that made more sense than now
Start citizen runs fine and gives excellent FPS NOW
I used to heavily configure my ubuntu distros to be keyboard exclusive with i3wm and such, but I ended up with regolith desktop, a version of ubuntu with pre installed i3wm and keyboard focus. I'm too old to keep my dotfiles updated.
Nowadays, imo you should only choose the package manager, any os using that chosen package manager (aptitude for ubuntu) definitely had a version that's close enough to your use cases.
I don’t understand how someone breaks a system but look into immutable options like Fedora Silverblue.
The things that bother me about this laptop are primarily hardware related coming from using a mac laptop (which is the laptop I would mind getting stolen). Trackpad on X1 carbon is definitely not as good, battery life not as good. And opening the lid momentarily reveals what you were on before the lock screen comes on. This last one tastes more like a software issue. I had another issue with the hdmi port being finicky, but that's hardware again.
Overall very happy with this setup, linux mint is in great shape. I do wish there were fewer distro choices for people considering making the switch. It does introduce choice paralysis. I had to set aside my ego and pipe dream aspirations of being a "hacker" and went with a distro that seemed to be simple and straightforward to setup. Mint definitely is easier to install than windows, hands down, no need to create a microsoft account and you don't have to deal with all the slop features it tries to shove down your throat.
I think Steam Machine + macOS laptop + NAS running debian headless is my personal compute plan for the next few years.
I have tried switching to Linux several times over the decades. It required many compromises on the interface and compatibilities. Why is it so difficult to slap on a clone of Windows or Mac UI on Linux? I'm not saying they are good. But it avoids the feel of moving to an alien land and learn everything afresh. People don't have time for that.
Screens dont wake up properly, sometimes only one screens wakes up, sometimes one screen wakes up with a wrong resolution. The usual linux desktop problems where nothing really works and finding a solution is very hard to many different permutations of hardware / os / kernel / drivers / window manager / etc.
I have the framework desktop with AMD 395+
My windows ssd is plugged and I can boot it directly using virt-manager, so thats kinda solves some windows specific stuff like tax software.
If you want stuff to just work you might want to try using a more up to date distro with a mainstream desktop. Stock Ubuntu or Fedora would probably work fine for you.
running the latest also is problematic, i.e. a new kernel upgrade that blows thing up.
and that's the main difference between linux and windows, windows just works, osx just works, linux is a minefield of different quirks.
While the drivers at the runtime are part of the kernel, they are not distributed as part of the kernel.
My drivers are *latest* -> 6.16.6.30200100-2255209.24.04
https://instinct.docs.amd.com/projects/amdgpu-docs/en/latest...
Debian is *stable*, but you are so far only proving my point in my original post.
If you are going to download ubuntu, the version proposed is 24.04 that has older kernel version than my debian 13.
https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop -> Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS -> Kernel 6.8
Stable in Linux language is a synonym for OLD. Don't let any stable OSes near any hardware that is newer than the release, and you'll be fine.
Linux 6.12 was released back in 2024, which is several months earlier than the hardware you have. So the reasonable expectation is that there is a high chance that fixes for it won't be in yet.
And use the builtin AMD drivers, you shouldn't have to touch those assuming other choices were done ok.
If you are installing via an outside method, again, you are going agasint the grain for no good reason and making problems for yourself.
Nobody is suggesting installing LTS on brand new hardware.
You are arguing and arguing and shifting goal posts as we go.
The facts are:
* I am running the latest amdgpu video driver.
* AI 395 wasn't released yesterday, but a year ago.
* (My original point) Many different permutations of hardware / os / kernel / drivers / window manager / etc.
I highly doubt that installing Ubuntu 25.10 will fix the issue. Can you provide that guarantee? No. Then we can stop talking.
It’s fine to be new to Linux, but please refrain from the sweeping generalizations until you are more familiar with how it works.
Still, despite all of that when it works it is better than Windows. It's just ironic that my Linux desktop is less stable than Windows 10 since I have to reboot 2-3 times a day from GPU memory leaks. Windows 10 was really stable with the same hardware and had no input delay in games. I only rebooted when the OS pushed an update since I keep my machine on 24 / 7.
The drivers are still getting maintained by NVIDIA until August 2026. They also got classified as "legacy" on paper 1 day before I installed them.
The compositor memory leak is affecting a lot of people. Since COSMIC and niri both use the same one (smithay), there's threads on GitHub with people using modern GPUs, both NVIDIA and AMD who experience it. There's a lot of replies across all of the different open issues.
The GPU allocation issue on Wayland (separate from the memory leak) also has hundreds of replies on the NVIDIA developer forums with people using new NVIDIA cards with the latest drivers.
The thing is, most people don't talk about either of them because if you have 8+ GB of GPU memory and turn your computer off every night then you won't experience this problem since all GPU memory allocations get reset on shutdown. It happens to be more of a direct problem for me because I have 2 GB of GPU memory but that doesn't mean the problem isn't common. The root cause is still there. Even if I switched to an AMD GPU the niri / smithay memory leak would be present. Instead of rebooting twice a day, if the GPU had 8 GB of memory I'd have to reboot every 2 days (x4 basically).
Since I opened that issue on GitHub NVIDIA did acknowledge it and suggested I try their experimental egl-wayland2 library. I did try that and it hasn't fixed it fully but it has made GPU memory allocations more stable. It even fixed 1 type of leak in niri. This library is decoupled from the drivers themselves as far as I know. I mean, this same library could still be used for the 590 series, it's not 580 specific which means it's not dependent on your GPU model.
But then this sounds like a bug in that particular compositor rather than the driver(s)?
fwiw, I have a modern nvidia card, and use the proprietary drivers, and Wayland (KDE/KWin), and that box has a few weeks of uptime.
The NVIDIA GPU memory allocation issue affects all NVIDIA cards, at least based on that forum post where there's a good amount of people replying with similar issues with a large combo of cards + drivers.
You probably don't notice it because you rarely ever use all of your GPU's memory at once. Try running `watch nvidia-smi` and then open multiple copies of every hardware accelerated app you have available. Once you reach nearly the max GPU memory apps will either start crashing or fail to open and if you get semi-unlucky your compositor (including KDE on Wayland) will crash if it's the app trying to allocate resources to render the window. I've had plasmashell or kwin hard lock / crash many times with just a small amount of testing.
The expectation is the driver allocates those memory resources to system memory instead of denying the memory to the app. It works correctly in X11 or if you have an AMD card, in Wayland and X11.
The leak is separate and is compositor specific, possibly related to NVIDIA driver bugs (to some degree) but this leak wouldn't be experienced unless you used this compositor. This leak is the compositor doesn't release any GPU memory after any window is closed, so simply opening and closing apps will cause the leak. Combine this with the first problem and that's how you end up rebooting every few hours with a lower end GPU. AMD and NVIDIA are affected.
The post goes into all of these details and there's reproducible tests, and even demo videos showing the first GPU memory allocation problem in Plasma Wayland but not Plasma X11. It also links to all of the related GitHub issues that I could find.
For un-bricking my phone, I had to use some proprietary windows-only software. So I took an old Laptop and installed Windows 10.
Installing it was such a pain already. So many dark patterns, so many privacy issues. I even had to create a microsoft account!
After the deed was done, I closed the Laprop, went back to my Linux system and enjoyed it even more :-)
What about "Hey! I tried Linux and it's cool! Let me show you!", instead?
- Quicken. I have 30 years of personal financial data in quicken. I'm not completely opposed to migrating to something else, but I haven't seen a good substitute. I'd probably have to learn double entry bookkeeping, and I'm unsure if other software could still download data from my bank and investment accounts. I'm sure as hell not going to start entering transactions manually (ugh).
- Ableton live. I do have a copy of bitwig, but I am unfamiliar with its workflow, and would have to figure out which of my vsts I would lose, and it seems a big pain in the ass.
- Plex server. For some reason, out of the box this was dog slow. Because of the other issues, I was unwilling to spend the time to try to figure out what was going on with this.
- The are games I would probably lose, but honestly there are so many games available I doubt I would care that much.
How many hundreds of hours am I gonna have to take to figure this all out before I have a working system again? Not my idea of a good time even if I like the outcome.
Edit: and this is from somebody who loves the idea of Linux! I first installed 0.11 or 0.12 way back in the early 90s from a stack of floppies!
Genuinely curious - outside of personal satisfaction/scratching the itch to store data, does personal financial data dating 30 years ago serve any practical purpose?
I might be willing to give all that up if I could find something that worked for new transactions, but I haven't found it yet.
I’m almost certain you’d have no trouble running Quicken or Ableton. Ableton even has a Bottles configuration available, which is a one-click GUI install:
https://usebottles.com/app/#abletonlive
Isn’t Quicken also primarily a web/cloud app now?
Of course, if Wine-based solutions really don’t work, you also have the option to run a VM or dual boot for those one-off needs.
Your comment on plex server seems odd. It seems like most people run it via Docker, I can’t imagine what kind of Linux-specific issue you had. Docker/podman on Linux is quite superior to the experience on Mac and Windows.
As far as games, I have trouble finding games that don’t work. Steam and other launchers for other stores have pretty much eliminated this issue. There are even some online games with anti-cheat software that work in Linux.
Hundreds of hours? No, not really. Not these days. I know it’s hard to believe me but I went through this same thing switching from macOS to Linux last year. I was shocked, I almost thought my experiment would fail and I’d go back. But no, it’s so solid and a bunch of stuff I expected to not work just…worked. (I chose Bazzite as my distribution on a Framework 13).
Ableton would still have the issue of: which plugins can I still somehow get to work? And which do I just lose? And then: how reliable is it? Does it really just work, or am I gonna be fighting glitches all the time?
I suspect part of the problem might be a mental block on my end. I spent 25 years as a sysadmin before I retired, and the idea of going back to that is just not acceptable. And I know it would be hundreds of hours because that's what I spent last time I tried to make the switch a few months ago.
Hundreds of hours makes me wonder what distribution you chose…I think if you choose something that’s more designed to work out of the box as a ready to go solution you might have a better experience. For example, since I like occasionally playing games, I chose Bazzite which comes with all the gaming stuff installed already and is an immutable OS that “just works.”
And for sure, I think trying to shoehorn complicated non-Linux applications into your Linux workflow might waste your time. I tried this with Autodesk Fusion and I almost got it to work. But it didn’t work. So I just use that on Windows, but it’s also nice to not be bothering with Windows for the majority of what I do.
The way I do it is that my laptop is Linux and my desktop is on Windows and I can just RDP into it over WireGuard to use Windows apps. So I guess this is cheating: ideally my desktop also leaves Windows but I haven’t made that leap.
it's remarkably stable and reliable and way less annoying than modern windows or macos. i'm looking forward to a panther lake thinkpad with robust linux support and incredible battery life.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46566465
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46483432
I bet 2027 will be the year when writing code by hand will be (re)discovered.
Hopefully.
Since 2001 I've used Red Hat, Mandrake, Slackware, Ubuntu, and Mint. I got rid of them at the first available opportunity. Elon Musk himself couldn't pay me enough to switch to Linux.
“ A few months and several headaches later…”
Additionally, the first comment I read is very positive, yet it also gives insight into the same situation.
> “ A few months and several headaches later…”
These are the words of someone that hasn't tried to install Windows on a recent machine. There's plenty of headaches there too.
WHAT? How people could tolerate a software that wipes partitions without asking? I mean, I can see that it can be handy if OS managed partitions by itself without asking a user what to do, but if it leads to removing user created partitions, it is a no go.
A long time ago I tried to install Mandrake Linux. In the installation process I started to change partition table and wiped it all, due to a fact that Mandrake Linux used its own custom made partition managed written in Perl that applied changes to a partition table as they arrive. I was used to fdisk, that accumulate changes and allows to review them before applying, the behavior of Mandrake's partition manages was completely alien for me. It was the first and the last time I touched Mandrake or its successor Mandriva or anything with "Mand" in front, even despite the fact that it was my mistake, I should've learned more about the partition manager before using it. It was hard (or maybe impossible) to do in an installer, but it is not an excuse. It was the last time I used installers to install Linux, I don't trust them anymore.
But people are tolerating windows that can wipe a partition when you even do not touch them. I can empathize the author ditching Windows.
That should of course not be necessary, but it could have saved a few hours of setup if that was the case.
Then windows and intel support decide to blame the customer, because it's never their company's fault. Sample conversation: https://community.intel.com/t5/Rapid-Storage-Technology/Inte...
This was a valid argument with... Windows 9x and XP. Today, not.
For context, this was early 1982. That 599 would cost 1,900 today — still a lot for a modem, but not quite the "gazillion" I remembered. Still, it illustrates just how far we've come.
Since then, I've written software professionally for over 40 years (with varying degrees of success). I've owned well over 200 computers — roughly 90% Wintel machines and 10% MacBooks. I've built them, repaired them, debugged them, and occasionally, after particularly frustrating days, set them back together again. I like to think I know my way around a PC.
Six months ago, I decided it was time. "This is the year of the Linux desktop on my machine," I declared, and I meant it. I installed over 20 of the most popular distributions from DistroWatch and used each one for at least two weeks. I was on a mission to rediscover the joy of computing.
For a while, it was genuinely fun. The sheer number of options was overwhelming in the best way possible. Customization everywhere I looked. All those incredible free software packages waiting in the repositories. In the beginning, I didn't even mind that I found myself doing full reinstalls every two or three days due to random instabilities. I was living the dream. Desktop effects and visual flair? Bring it on. Why does Compiz get so much criticism these days? What's more satisfying than a beautifully animated window?
Six weeks in, things changed. The Linux installations started to degrade — subtle at first, then undeniable. Random slowdowns. Browser links that wouldn't register for 10 or 15 seconds. The kind of frustration that makes you stare at the screen and wonder what's happening under the hood. It was consistent across distributions, which suggests this wasn't just a bad package here or there. Something fundamental was happening.
And yes, I'm aware of the irony. The system celebrated for its stability and reliability was the one leaving me longing for a responsive desktop environment. But that's exactly what I experienced, and I gave each distribution a fair shot.
There's also the practical reality: I'm a heavy Ableton Live user, and dual-booting has become increasingly grating. The Linux audio ecosystem has made real progress, but for my specific workflow, it's not there yet. Maybe in another year or two.
So I'm back on Windows 11. It works. It doesn't surprise me. After four decades, I'm okay with "it works" as a primary criterion.
Will I try Linux again? Maybe. The ecosystem continues to improve, and who knows what the next wave of AI-assisted tools might change. But for now, I wanted to share an honest account of what I encountered — because I genuinely wanted Linux to win.
This is something that I would expect with Windows over time (not in a few weeks though) but has never happened to me with Linux. I have run less stable rolling release distros, and I have done multiple major version upgrades on the same machine over time over many machines.
its sounds to me as though you are doing some unusual things - few people use Compiz now because DEs like KDE provide those through their default Window managers.
What hardware were you using?
What kind of troubleshooting did you perform?
>> Six weeks in, things changed. The Linux installations started to degrade — subtle at first, then undeniable. Random slowdowns. Browser links that wouldn't register for 10 or 15 seconds. The kind of frustration that makes you stare at the screen and wonder what's happening under the hood. It was consistent across distributions, which suggests this wasn't just a bad package here or there. Something fundamental was happening.
Without more details it would be difficult to determine what problems you were having.
I have never had problems like you describe with Linux. I would be interested to know more details.
Very interesting. It is something I've never hit. Or, rather, I know the symptoms, but in my case they are caused not by the age of the installation, but by the memory use and swapping. When I compile something big, it can eat a lot of memory, and even 32Gb or RAM is not enough sometimes, there are lags and sometimes very painful.
It is really interesting because the behavior was persistent for all Linux distributions you tried, so probably there was some program that ate all the memory. Pity you didn't try running top and watching CPU and memory usage. Now I'll think of possible causes to the end of my days without any hope to find a real cause.
Twenty distributions in six months, using each one for at least two weeks. Aside from the overlap, the post claims experience with debugging and repairing computers - but a lot of the blame here is placed on Linux without specifics of hardware of actual distributions used. Reads formulated like the typical narrative meant to deride Linux with surface level anecdotes.
I don't read blame in this; it's a description of his or her experience.
> Reads formulated like the typical narrative meant to deride Linux with surface level anecdotes.
I don't see this. It is possible for others to have different experiences and preferences without theirs being derision.
Check out https://asahilinux.org/
The M2 models came out in 2022. You can't buy them new anymore.
Asahi linux doesn't support any of the currently sold macbooks, so I think it's fair to say modern macbooks don't run linux.
This is also at Apple's mercy, if enough people do it there's a non-zero chance they lock things down further. They've done even more consumer-unfriendly things before.
I've been using an Asus EliteBook for the last 3 years. Despite taking a beating, the build quality has held up flawlessly and with 32 GB of RAM, 1 kg form factor, and great battery life, I have no reason to upgrade yet.
Unlike other laptops, there is always the lingering fear of a Chinese backdoor.
I always use Linux, so I don't care what software it came with. If you're suggesting there are firmware backdoors, I'd like to see your evidence.
> I'd like to see your evidence.
I think this is a really bad epistemological stance in this case.
Ugghhh.
I am sorry for you.
Looking forward to your next article: I dumped my iPhone for GrapheneOS, and you should too.
It does not really affect me that much, as I switched to Linux in 2005 or so, give or take, but some people around me, in particular elderly, depend on Windows still. So that's a dilemma. Do I want to install Win11 for them? Or Win10? And help maintain either? Replacing those computers with Linux is not so trivial. You would need virtually kind of 100% "what works on Windows must work on Linux too". Any complexity is a real total showstopper for many elderly people who have very little experience with computer systems.
I switched to Linux, Arch btw, Omarchy, sometime last year when it was announced. I installed it on my old Thinkpad and it worked wonderfully, for most part. I realized that I am more productive there in real sense and experience is more delightful.
When I would go back to Mac, I would realize I need several clicks to accomplish something I had on shortcut available. Having websites/apps on shortcuts as an app is huge help. Also working on command line is really much more focused.
Sometimes in September I plugged Thinkpad to desktop setup and in December I set my powerful computer to Omarchy as well.
It isn't seamless experience, there are issues switching from speakers to headphones and dictation can be hard to setup. Overall whole machine seems more powerful and interesting to work on.
This is first time in many years that I can both play and work on same machine which is definitely welcome and surprising.
I think this is really what more people should take away from the switch. A lot of the time I see people not wanting to make the leap because they're afraid: Afraid of learning how to use the command line, afraid of asking other people for help, afraid of really using the computer. Learning how things work is how you learn to be free, and that holds true no matter your hobby. The cyclist with their repair kit, the driver with their beater car, the cook and their kitchenware. The more we give away for the sake of immediate convenience, the less control we have.
Linux is no longer in the realm of needing to be an expert to resolve issues, just a little bit of willingness to experiment. This isn't to say all issues are easily solvable, there's plenty of workflows that still require you to stay on Windows and some edge cases where things won't work as you expect. But I always encourage people to try, because why not?
You might be interested in Darktable or the less common fork called Ansel.
These have Windows versions you can try before moving your world to Linux.
I think the Ansel developer has a YouTube series with tutorials on how to edit in Darktable using the Filmic RGB workflow. Not sure if that's where I'd get started nowadays (I've just adopted Sigmoid and it's way quicker to edit with it), but it gave me a solid base in how to use this software.
For example, you can right click empty space to "remove" or "update path to file..." in the left hand rail. There shouldn't be a right click option in empty space.
Everything lower case makes it very difficult to quickly parse, especially the settings menu.
Inkscape is also full of these sins. For that matter, so is KDE.
It also looks and feels pretty sleek.
I would not recommend Pop for server situations, as the desktop trim might be unneeded.
I've used Linux for 25+ years and my reaction is always to do my best with the options I have, but in those cases when it's not enough I just say "I'm sorry but I can't edit this document" or "sorry but some of the formatting was lost when I saved this in libreoffice".
The thing is that I'm a senior Linux specialist so people accept my excuses because they generally need my work.
What new features are Microsoft bringing out that are that critical for LibreOffice et al to catch up with?
I can’t think of much which I use that wasn’t already available in Office 95 which was released 30 years ago.
Aside from OOXML (which isn’t nearly as open as the name suggests) and the ribbon bar (which i personally hate), there hasn’t really been any big innovations.
The only features I can think of are:
- better security model for marcos. But that was only needed because MS Office was insecure to begin with so not really relevant here either
- Unicode support
- more rows in excel (though generally once you start reaching that point, the memory footprint of Excel becomes too great to make working on that spreadsheet practical)
The real issue with LibreOffice isn’t new features. It’s the subtle rending and parsing quirks when working on OOXML documents. But that’s likely Microsoft’s fault and thus OOXML working as intended.
I don’t doubt there’s been plenty of new features. But are they significant enough that users on older versions or non-MS suites are left longing for the latest version of Excel?
I just don’t think there is much innovation left. Or at least not without changing the UX and/or paradigm significantly. Neither of which have happened.
Albeit I wouldn’t say they’re significant enough that LibreOffice would struggle to keep up.
But it is nice to see that Excel is still working on basic quality of life features.
I'm not even sure this is true. Isn't there some company (or more) like Collabora behind most of the dev work right now?
A office specific winapps fork : https://github.com/eylenburg/linoffice/
Or try running via Wine.
You could also try LibreOffice or OnlyOffice and see if the documents are readable / writable.
Failing all that the web versions might work just fine.
Excel really depends - if you're using it as a glorified document with a table, then libreoffice will do fine. If you need compatibility and more advanced features, or your whole company runs on excel like a financial corp - there's no alternative. VM in that case.
I use ~~Office 365~~ the Microsoft 365 Copilot App online all the time on Debian at work.
As far as compatibility goes, OnlyOffice is fairly good at it, more geared towards MS-compatibility than LibreOffice, which is more of its own thing (and pretty good at that).
That is what we are supposed to do at work.
The functionality of the iPhone connection to Linux is not unique to the platform, that works on Windows as well. iPhones present themselves as cameras when connected via USB and as the author found out, some apps present their internal storage for manipulation.
I’m surprised the author didn’t get KDE Connect to work. It’s a clutch app, and it’s even better for Android users. It’s one of the things that has had me consider switching to Android over iPhone (but there are still a couple of things I just can’t quite get over leaving behind like FaceTime for my non-technical family, the unmatched-by-competitors utility of AirTags, Siri Shortcuts, and my general feeling that without installing GrapheneOS, that Android is a less private and secure OS).
All my littler hacking projects are faster setup and my idea is faster
However I think if you do video editing you need Mac or Windows
Wait, what? Is this true? Since when?
You can also access the file system over the local network from Dolphin using KDE connect. I know that with Android the phone just appears as a drive and I think its the same with Apple devices.
I don't see articles about people installing Windows or Mac everyday like the people installing Linux.
Is it such an achievement to do? That make you proud enough to tell the world?
It's worse than vegetarian people at that point.
And what's the point? The whole thread is filled with "yeah yeah, I installed Linux too!" just like some kind of cult.
Look at you...
1. The hardware manufacturer has never tested Linux support for drivers. 2. Some application that you need doesn't target Linux due to lack of users
This isn't everything, sure. But I think it's a majority of the headaches. Thus, Linux-users really want other people to also use Linux, so that companies actually give a shit about supporting it.
There's also the whole ideology involved. A lot of companies are increasingly pushing that you are not allowed to control the computer/phone/device you buy and Linux is at the forefront of combating this.
Update: OMG I turned ad blocker off and what a disaster of a site.
I run Fedora, if its what Linus himself runs then why should i choose anything else?
Mint was too buggy. It just felt so single-threaded. It had upsides - easiest Nvidia support for example. Cinnamon is nicely customizable and has some great ideas but it's just too rough around the edges.
Raw Debian was just too hard to get Nvidia drivers playing nice.
But for "I'm comfy editing config files but I need some hand-holding for this" KDE with Ubuntu is the best balance of performance and clean design and support.
My biggest disappointment is how little batteries-included gui I'm seeing for core Linux functionality. Where is the systemd service manager? Why are all the file managers so bad at editing permissions?
Kde used to have a systems settings module for Systemd. There are defitely GUIs for managing user services (its called Background services for me)
> Why are all the file managers so bad at editing permissions?
What does right click and then choose properties in Dolphin not do satisfactorily for you?