[inktype]

Windows and its ecosystem have already become a telemetry monster; if you're fine with everything else, you ought to be fine with this. The linked Intel support page shows the simple instructions for opting out of the telemetry.

Having said that, 2022 was already the year of the Linux desktop. Everything works. KDE gets better every week. Be the owner of your technology. Join us!

[hef19898]

Linux is great! And, thanks to Steam, a lot of games wirk as well. Not all, but most.

Ubuntu, I haven't tried anything else so far, is a charm on Lenovo hardware. Update wise, it is were Windows was a couple of years ago. Meaning there are random updates that just kill and break certain functions. Happened last week, everything was running fine, including steam, as it always did. Until an update managed to delete the GUI, reinstalling the GUI killed nVidia drivers, Steam couldn't be installed under 23.04 for some missing dataset, installing said data (some 32-bit stuff) killed WiFi...

No attack on Linux so, I rember that not too long ago I stopped all Eindows updates because for months the auto-updates had the same effect (save the WiFi bit).

So yes, my dqily, private driver is Linux. And will be, except for games, for the time being. All I uave to do now, well after vacation, is to get Steam running properly again. Feels like a throwback to the pre Win 10 days, when Windows randomly did the same thing with regards to drivers and certain games / programs.

[bee_rider]

It is unfortunate that people recommended Ubuntu as a starting distro for so long.

It does too much. It will update things for you, or give you a pop-up to tell you to update. Updates happen all at once, rather than a little at a time, so you get these big dramatic updates with combinatorial bug explosions. Maybe the repos will be gone if you don’t update in time. Maybe your favorite packages have moved from apt to snap. Good luck!

A rolling release distro like Arch would be a better first experience for most people I think.

Linux is not where Windows was years ago. Software gently rolls in at a nice steady rate. Some distros choose to take that nice steady flow, chop it up, and for some reason emulate the Windows catastrophic update experience. It is… an odd decision.

[BizarroLand]

I've not had a good experience with Ubuntu or Pop OS. They've always felt sluggish on any hardware I've put them on.

Debian may take a touch more wrenching to get running but it has been good for me, although I haven't tried 12 yet. Fedora was good but Red Hat shenanigans seems to have messed with it.

I may try Mint next time. I've heard good things about it.

I said all of that to say, isn't Linux great?

If you have a quibble with it, you can kick it to the curb and try something else in an hour and everything just works. There's so many options to choose from, and you don't have weirdo corporations tracking your every application launch or building a psychological profile off of you from how you tab through a spreadsheet or cloud mapping your speaking patterns based off of how you type.

[joshspankit]

Since you want responsive, try XFCE (xubuntu)

[footlose_3815]

>so you get these big dramatic updates with combinatorial bug explosions.

Yes. My Ubuntu installations always have bugs when I do big updates. A

And while I'm here, snapd can suck it. Me and my homies hate Snap.

[f1shy]

The worst is when they tried to call home, like Windows

[ASalazarMX]

Please use Ubuntu LTS, you can live with 2-year old versions at its worst, specially when snaps can deliver up-to-date applications.

I'm not happy with some of Canonical's decisions, but I can't deny that using LTS as a daily driver is boring because most things just work without fiddling. I don't have as much time to fiddle with the OS nowadays.

[bee_rider]

I’ve used LTS on a shared system, but I don’t love it. 2 years is shorter than you’d expect, and now if we want to update we’ll need to deal with 2 years worth of work, configuration, and cluges if we want to update.

[hef19898]

My first fall back was to downgrade from 22.04 to 20.04 again. Steam worked fine, wifi worked. I was happy. Until, that is, I tried reinstall Darktable, in version 4.x as that was the one that used for basically all my photo edits in the last year. Turned out Ubuntu 20.04 only supports darktable 3.x, and darktable 4.x edits are not backwards compatible (kind of logic, so the loss of around 100 edits is totally and absolutely on me and only me). For now, I use the Linux installation as my daily (as soon as I re-imported my passwords to Firefox, as of course I lost those as well during reinstall number 3...) and Windows as my gaming "console". Until, that is, the official Steam installer works under 22.04 again. The Steam client from Canonical sucks IMHO.

[hedora]

Ubuntu LTS breaks my stuff more often than Manjaro (~= Arch).

I don't understand why Canonical decides to backport breaking changes to LTS releases, but they do it on a regular basis, and I don't trust them for anything important. (I'm not suggesting using manjaro for stuff that needs to be stable over a long time period -- it's not meant for that, which is precisely my point!)

[boppo1]

I've been using xubuntu for about 6 years now and I barely understand how linux works. So far so good, I've had one major issue which was related to my storage getting too full.

Admittedly I'm reasonably comfortable in CLI, but I don't know a whole lot about bash, just cd, mv, cp, ls -a, etc.

Is xubuntu better than ubuntu just because it removes a lot of cruft?

[fuomag9]

Xubuntu or *buntu distros are mostly Ubuntu distros with a different default desktop environment (KDE, xfce, etc)

[red-iron-pine]

> A rolling release distro like Arch would be a better first experience for most people I think.

Nah. Most people can't grok partitions or do the command line installs by hand. "Most people" aren't very technical, and even white collar office types will struggle.

Likewise they don't grok rolling updates and snap, they just get their updates and they restart once a month, just like on their windows box. That's enough, and once they get comfortable with the rest of the Ubanto env they can start thinkin about their Gentoo build from scratch.

[bee_rider]

I think most people barely are able to administrate their Windows laptops either, usually they just use them until they break and then buy a new one, and never really configure or fix anything.

Phones, with their app stores, are sort of like rolling release with automatic updates, right?

[hef19898]

The issue described above was the only update problem I had with Ubunutu so far. The reason I picked it was the basically guaranteed compatability with my Lenovo laptop, I guessed better not take any risks. popOS was on the list as well so!

Positive side effect of above tepuble shooting, I got pretty fast installing Linux now.

[caeril]

Agreed, Arch is likely the best introductory option, especially now that archinstall comes with the iso. Dead simple to install, and the documentation is fantastic for setting up the rest of your environment.

[bee_rider]

Arch is a good into to Linux, for people that want Linux.

It might not be the best for people who want a web browser/computing appliance, but I’m not sure what is, there just might not be a good one yet.

[erwincoumans]

It would be great if Linux had some automatic checkpoints so you can revert to a working system after an update. So many times updates leave a broken system and re-install Ubuntu from scratch is quicker than fixing the problem.

[usr1106]

OpenSUSE had this 7 years ago when I last used it. I think they still have it, it's called snapper.

Not that I would really have turned any Linux significantly non-functional by updating during the last 15 years. But it's all software, so everything can happen one day...

[boomboomsubban]

Bootable snapshots are a thing, also known as boot environments. You need to use ZFS or btrfs, or possibly bcachefs or LVM offer them. And they never have seemed to have a great implementation on Linux compared FreeBSD, but they do exist.

[tredre3]

> but they do exist.

And here's the crux of it, isn't it? Unless it's accessible and enabled by default, it might as well not exist from the PoV of the end user.

Windows' restore points happen automatically before updates or driver updates. Then you're prompted automatically to restore if Windows fails to boot after an update.

As usual Linux has all the pieces but no desire to create UX to go with it. Which is a shame because ZFS with automatic snapshotting daily or before major events combined with a simple UI that can run in the preboot environment would be a game changer and make Windows look like a toy.

[dizhn]

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed has this. The installer defaults to btrfs and snapshots using snapper. Snapshots are automatic before and after every package manager operation. Save for something that breaks grub, you can always recover.

[bravetraveler]

In that spirit, if you have an EFI system, you don't need GRUB

[vladvasiliu]

> And here's the crux of it, isn't it? Unless it's accessible and enabled by default, it might as well not exist from the PoV of the end user.

For what it's worth, at one point Ubuntu supported installing on ZFS through its regular installer and installed the boot environment thingy, with a snapshot before every update. I have one such machine which is now running 23.04 and that still works. I've never had to use in practice, though.

[hef19898]

Oh, so this! Having had the option last Friday to just reboot into whatever it was before said update, and just skip the next couple of updates, man, that would have been great!

[michaelmrose]

To be pedantic It's impossible for "Linux" to have this as this exists way higher than the kernel or even the filesystem layer.

Linux mint has timeshift.

The now defunct Project Trident installer set up a zfs root with zfsbootmenu and an update script that automatically sets up a boot environment you can revert and boot from with the built in feature of zfsbootmenu.

Both let you achieve your goal. You can set up either system even if they aren't built in.

[rkagerer]

A lot of comments here say Timeshift is crap - do you find it helpful yourself and can you elaborate on what works / doesn't?

https://community.linuxmint.com/software/view/timeshift

[michaelmrose]

I have not personally used timeshift. I have used zfsbootmenu and syncoid found it useful and fit for purpose. Personally I think its more reasonable to separate boot environments from backing up as they are two separate if related concerns. EG boot environments are for when something went wrong with an update and backups are for when your drive failed. If both went wrong you just do both operations in sequence restore from backup and THEN pick the prior boot environment and make it the default.

Insofar as timeshift consider the review source, circumstances, and nature of complaints. Users who don't have difficulties rarely post anything and yet many reviews are positive. Those that aren't seem to focus on people who didn't realize they could provide a secondary drive and just kept storing data until their OS drive filled up.

Mint leans heavily towards technically incompetent users and yet many people were able to use it successfully. Meeting every users needs no matter how incapable is probably a poor benchmark to define if somethings is "crap" or not even if those users problems are are a great guideline to a path forward to helping all users better.

For instance it might be better if timeshift only supported a fs with snapshots instead of rsync and required a secondary disk and warned of space issues long before the disk fills up but it seems quite possible to competently use it right now.

[justinclift]

Some Linux distros actually do this. :)

[joshspankit]

Once NixOS is desktop-ready you’ll have a way more powerful checkpoint system

[tracker1]

I haven't had that happen for a few years now... I will say the RX 5700 XT had a really rough few months after launch on Linux. Other than that, it's been relatively smooth.

Mostly been using PopOS and Ubuntu-Budgie.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

NixOS has this by default, on any filesystem. You can also do it with ZFS or BTRFS filesystem snapshots.

[aednichols]

Check out immutable distros like Fedora Silverblue & Kinoite.

[o1y32]

> Everything just works

No it doesn't. Every Linux desktop requires me to spend hours tweaking things or finding workarounds to make it usable for myself. Window management is horrible compared to other OS. Fractional scaling mostly doesn't work. The Pomodoro timer in the "Software" store is no longer maintained and doesn't work at all on the latest Gnome. (Windows 11 has it built-in). Even so, I have to live with certain restrictions. I tried to get into Linux desktop every few years, and I never find the situation has improved much.

By comparison, setting up the environment on Windows or MacOS takes no more than a fem minutes.

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

It takes me days to make Windows usable for myself by hosing all the garbage off it. And it's still a miserable experience. On the other hand, if I just install a batteries included Linux distro I get something I'm not necessarily thrilled about, but I can go pretty much straight to work. And if I spend a few days, I can set up a system that's exactly tailored the way I want it to be, eats an order of magnitude less RAM than Windows, and doesn't regularly break itself by forcing updates on me, changing settings from under me, etc.

MacOS is somewhat better than Windows(less garbage to hose off), but it's not worth the money of buying the overpriced unrepairable and unupgradeable hardware it runs on.

[musicale]

> It takes me days to make Windows usable for myself by hosing all the garbage off it.

I guess it's what you're used to. I don't find Windows decrapification to be that much more effort than Linux configuration.

> it's not worth the money of buying the overpriced unrepairable and unupgradeable hardware

For your use case, presumably not.

The ship seems to have sailed for upgradable Apple hardware (and I expect Apple did their homework and discovered 90% of Mac Pro systems were never upgraded anyway) but I still appreciate the advantages of hardware-software integration, nice form factor and battery life, unified CPU/GPU memory, etc.

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

>I guess it's what you're used to.

Exactly. All these exchanges of experiences boil down to people rationalising their own preferences, which are really just about familiarity. I do it too. I'm really just more familiar with Linux systems because I used it since I was 10-12, and as a main OS since I was about 14(I'm 30 now).

My view is that Windows being more user friendly is really just a myth. Most non-technical people use their Windows PCs or macs for the same 4 different tasks they always have. Ask them to do something new or do some troubleshooting and they'll struggle with it and get nowhere. Whether they're staring at a terminal window with no idea what to type or a "troubleshooting wizard" that offers no useful advice and links to an MSDN article with no useful information, is really irrelevant. They'll still need help from a technical person.

And technical people like us all just prefer what we're more familiar with too.

[faeriechangling]

Sure, attempting to make Windows into Linux by “decrapifying” it is harder, but if you use Windows as intended and upload all your documents to Microsoft’s cloud it is easier for the vast vast majority of users.

Windows breaking itself with updates is less a symptom of Windows and more of a side-effect of “decrapification”. I’ve seen a pretty damn large sample size of windows users undergoing windows updates and Windows Update does really not break computers other than by annoyingly changing your defaults to Microsoft stuff “woops, by accident” but if you do stuff like use Edge as your default browser it stops breaking.

Apple forces you to use their defaults, Microsoft theirs, and Google theirs. When you accept these companies operating system is not Linux, and stop acting like they are Linux, and stop acting like you own your windows PC, they do become pretty simple to use.

If you want a PC you can own, you use Linux. Linux is great. My grandmother uses Microsoft Windows in S mode with edge as her browser. Her photos get backed up. She only uses Edge at 175% DPI scaling and maybe looks up a few family photos. It is easier for her than using Linux because she’s familiar with it and because nobody has taught her that unless she is using Windows for education without a decrapify script she is doing things all wrong.

[navjack27]

You're absolutely correct

[mrguyorama]

People are acting like Linus Sebastian and that other guy didn't JUST RECENTLY demonstrate Linux to still be a tough sell to non-linux gurus for daily driving.

[nwallin]

He deliberately shitcanned his system to generate clicks. What are people going to say if an uppity linux fanboy youtuber shows himself deleting system32 and then crying about Windows is unusable for non-Windows gurus for daily driving? They're going to say he's an idiot and move on.

When I instruct my package manager to uninstall your desktop environment, and the package manager says, "You are about to delete critical system components. Are you sure? (yes/no)" and I type in "yes" I expect my package manager to uninstall the desktop environment. That is the correct thing for it to do. Anything else is the wrong thing to do.

"A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools." -Douglas Adams

[bravetraveler]

Let's not forget, that while he did kind of shrug and agree to remove everything... that was a problem in the packaging spec.

The package (Steam, if memory serves?) should not have had the other packages referenced as they were. The dependency/requirement resolution was faulty...

Then he didn't truly take in the message and this is the result we get.

There's plenty of "probably say no if you don't know what this means" in what he ignored. Fault is all over.

    - His distribution of choice [or] the repository supporting it
    - him for not reading and acting accordingly
    - sheer chance

Had he chosen another distribution at random, there's little chance that would have happened.

If he repeated it on the same one now, it wouldn't happen. When you choose a niche distribution, you get niche problems.

My entire family manages fine on 'bleeding edge' Fedora, yet it doesn't market itself this way. Packaging is specifically in their domain of expertise

This isn't to say Linux is for everyone, but I really wish for a more fair representation.

As the reporters they should have dug in a bit more. They become part of the problem, in a sense, by not clarifying where there truly be dragons.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

> There's plenty of "probably say no if you don't know what this means" in what he ignored.

Users will pretty much always click what they think will make the goal they're trying to accomplish work. Usually "yes" or whatever the default is.

[bravetraveler]

Indeed, and a tool that does what it's told is a good tool

The packaging snafu was unfortunate, but beyond preventing him from having the ability, I don't know how it could have improved

The spec shouldn't have been so egregiously incorrect. Pretending it didn't happen... how is something both powerful and safe?

I don't know how anything could be made to take arbitrary input and sort it out to meaningful work

Edit: Fedora does well to mark things as protected, this would likely help. But still, the operator should serve as a filter

[bsder]

> By comparison, setting up the environment on Windows or MacOS takes no more than a fem minutes.

My wife is constantly taking her laptop into her IT staff.

The main difference between Windows and Linux is that corporate IT staff are willing to futz with Windows but not Linux.

The main difference between macOS and Linux is that macOS users will spend money to futz with macOS but not Linux.

[vips7L]

This is because corporate IT staff are largely responsible for Windows not working. Their endless and senseless configuration changes make Windows not work.

[NoGravitas]

To be fair, fractional scaling on Windows is kind of garbage, at least if you don't have the same scaling set on every display. If I have one screen at 100% and one at 125%, any application will look okay only on the display it was started on, and blurry on any others. I don't think the situation is any better on Linux, but I'm pretty sure that as long as you're using Wayland (only), it's not any worse.

[iraqmtpizza]

meanwhile, .bashrc, .bash_login, .bash_profile, .profile, /etc/profile, and /etc/environment all still exist, are poorly documented, and if you want a GUI for them, you have to build it yourself.

[pdntspa]

Patently incorrect.

https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html#Bash-Star...

These files are all shell scripts and largely empty before distribution-specific customizations, there isn't much to document there. They are commands that you want to run in startup.

[4ad]

> are poorly documented

There are many things you can criticize Linux for, but this is not one of them.

[bsder]

As opposed to the amazing Windows Registry? Those who throw stones ...

Nevertheless, your criticisms are fair. However, unlike on Windows, Linux is actually working on that. Distributions like NixOS and Fedora Silverblue are starting to take the whole "put everything under control" very seriously.

I see no comparable efforts on Windows.

[iraqmtpizza]

I've never had to set an environment variable in the windows registry. I'm talking about simply adding a directory to the Path or setting JAVA_HOME. Windows GUI needs tons of work but it's at least 20 years ahead of linux. It gets one year more ahead of linux every year.

[sitzkrieg]

AD, gpos and mdm csps go very far. this is windows business bread and butter

[blueflow]

.bashrc, .bash_login, .bash_profile: bash(1) manpage

.profile, /etc/profile is a mechanism from the bourne shell, so you would go sh(1) as long as its not bash again. Otherwise mksh(1) or dash(1).

/etc/environment is pam_env(8)

[iraqmtpizza]

As I said, poorly documented. In fact, there is no defensible reason why they all need to exist.

And I didn't understand anything you said after and including bourne shell. I don't know if Windows has any documentation for its environment variables program, but I have never needed documentation for it because it's not brain dead. It's a GUI. An interface which is self-documenting.

[blueflow]

> An interface which is self-documenting.

I wanna see you find the right dialogue windows in the control panel.

Would you know how to enable/disable IPv6 from your head?

[iraqmtpizza]

I have a GUI which has a checkbox for IPv4 and a checkbox for IPv6. Checkboxes are self-explanatory. And if I hover over them they say something like "Use servers reachable over IPv6 (do not enable if you don't have IPv6 connectivity)". And yes I didn't have to look up how to do that. It's staring me in the face every time I open the program.

[Bu11etmagnet]

There are plenty of GUIs for them, e.g. emacs, vim, nano, pico, joe, jed, etc.

[iraqmtpizza]

LOL. notepad.exe too. now that you mention it, the command line allows you to select text with the mouse. so technically cmd.exe is a GUI

[coconut08]

you are correct about fractional scaling being suboptimal and there are a few quirks here and there but linux has become largely usable at this point. most of the criticisms you have made about linux are due to inexperience and not being familiar with it rather than being fundamental problems with it. If instead of spending the last x years of your life daily driving windows or macos you had instead spent that time daily driving linux you would have all of the understanding infrastructure built up around linux instead and these would be non problems. I use fedora with gnome and I don't install any extensions or do any tweaking or workarounds as you say.

I know this is true because i'm a non developer, non power user (though still relatively technical) who has been using linux since 2006 and it works just fine. Not only that my dad has been happily setup using linux since around 2014 and he is as non technical as they come.

To really go in on this point I bought a macbook pro when the m1 devices came out and the experience you have with linux I have with macos. It's the worst operating system I have ever used. You complain about linux having bad window management but macos has basically no window management. you double click the top bar and depending on the software sometimes it will maximize, sometimes it will pull the window all the way down the screen and sometimes it will do nothing at all. You drag the window to the top or to the side and nothing happens at all. Window management on macos is so bad that most people say that you need to install external tools to mac it even half way usable. Even when you do its still less performant and buggier than what gnome or windows offers out of the box. You say macos needs no setup, but I spent 10's of hours desperately trying to make the workflow and ux of macos not be a horrible experience for me. Everything from no tools and trying to work within its paradigm, simple window management tools even going so far as to trying yabai and none of them felt right to me.

Now that said I would bet a person who has spent a decade daily driving macos probably has internalized the ins and outs and quirks relating to macos and wouldn't find it nearly as problematic. Most of the issues people have with linux are much less problems with linux and much more a lack of workflow understanding that they haven't built up but have built up around other operating systems instead.

The main exception being that there are some proprietary tools that are pretty explicitly not supported on linux which require windows or macos.

[gambiting]

>> Everything works.

I'm a video games developer. Neither PS5, Xbox nor Switch toolchains work under linux - not to mention that actual proper Visual Studio doesn't and that alone is worth staying on windows for.

For playing games though - sure, Linux is already great. Steam Deck proves that by playing pretty much everything flawlessly.

[qwertox]

Also good luck in convincing Native Instruments and other musical instrument developers to also compile their plug-ins for Linux.

[anthk]

Ubuntu Studio LTS has VST bridges using WineLib.

[sleepingthom]

Do VSTs not work on Linux? I'm not being obtuse, I am in a situation where I'm about to build a new PC for writing / recording music and I saw that Reaper is supported in Linux, but was not sure about VST plugin support.

[bri3d]

Conceptually the idea of a "VST" works on either platform, because VST is an API. However, VSTs are distributed as executables targeting a specific platform, and almost no VSTs are compiled natively for Linux.

If you're already content with Reaper as a DAW, use "yabridge" which runs VSTs in WINE. It's virtually perfect for most purposes. Getting Linux audio set up for low latency is another Linux rabbit hole, though.

[lyjia]

how does this work for VSTs with DRM? Or protected by iLok/etc?

[bri3d]

I think software iLok used to work if it were licensed to the yabridge environment; whatever device identity parameters it read were implemented in WINE. For hardware iLok and other stuff, yeah, you're pretty stuck, they usually use goofy hacks or custom drivers that can't be handled in WINE. Someone would have to reverse engineer the DRM and figure out how to redirect the licensing methods. Or just remove the DRM from the plugins (crack them), which is the honest answer to people probably do it in the real world.

[ceroxylon]

Check out LMMS [0], I just found it yesterday to run VSTs, I normally stay away from them and just needed a minimal VST host for one I couldn't resist, and I was blown away at what it could do for free. Between that and the synth Surge XT [1] (another free and open source project), you can make any sound you would want to, and use either the sequencer on LMMS or an external hardware sequencer (yes, USB MIDI works, even Bluetooth MIDI).

[0] https://lmms.io/ [1] https://surge-synthesizer.github.io/

[sleepingthom]

Thanks for the recommendation. Unfortunately I do mostly prog / metal stuff these days and while the occasional synth sound can be had for free, a lot of my sounds come from either Helix Native / Neural DSP for guitar / Kontakt for drums. I'll take a look at LMMS.

[qwertox]

For what it's worth, Bitwig Studio also works on Linux.

The issue with most professional VST plug-ins is mainly the UI which is not compatible with Linux.

[prmoustache]

Native Instruments is dying anyway.

[qwertox]

How does that matter if you already invested 1000+ USD?

Go to Plugin Alliance [0] and select any plugin and when you scroll down you'll see that they are Windows and Mac only. Same for Plugin Boutique [1].

[0] https://www.plugin-alliance.com/en/products/amek_eq_250.html

[1] https://www.pluginboutique.com/product/1-Instruments/4-Synth...

[musicale]

It's because of obnoxious DRM garbage. I doubt helps these companies since the unlicensed users are starving musicians and kids with no money who aren't going to magically spend more.

[parenthesis]

As a company, or in your opinion of their products?

[prmoustache]

As a company. Since they have been bought by an "investment company" they have been in a downward spiral. It will take a few years but the process started.

[gorjusborg]

There are plenty of niches that use proprietary tools that don't work across platforms.

I don't think that's a fair criticism of the platform 'working'. That's just status quo / profit maximizing on the part of the tool selectors and developers.

Linux works very well with regards to hardware.

Calling out microsoft tools like visual studio as proof linux doesn't work is sort of dumb. It's a tool that targets windows (mostly) written by the developers that sell windows.

You don't have to look very hard for a world class c/c++ tool chain on linux.

[gambiting]

>>Calling out microsoft tools like visual studio as proof linux doesn't work is sort of dumb

Oh sorry this wasn't my intention at all. I'm just countering the argument that I see a lot on HN(and tbf, maybe this isn't what OP was saying) - that Linux is so good that there is literally no reason for anyone to ever stay on Windows. Like......yeah, it's great and a lot of things work really really well - but some things still don't. That's all. It's not a criticism of Linux, or at least I don't mean it in that way.

[gorjusborg]

Yeah, it isn't all roses on the linux side, for sure. It really isn't perfect on any of the platforms though. I have had no end of USB issues with MacOS, and with no indication it will be fixed. I am told to buy 'supported' (Apple) devices. That's not very 'universal'.

It is amazing how much improvement there has been in recent years. The main thing that makes me want linux ecosystems to be used is that at least they are slowly improving, not simply positioning for a rent-seeking position in the 'market'.

[Dalewyn]

>For playing games though - sure, Linux is already great. Steam Deck proves that by playing pretty much everything flawlessly.

The caveat is that this is only true when applied to games on Steam. I play games that aren't on Steam, and I've not even bothered to see if they would run on Linux because it's just not worth my time.

(No, I do not expect something in Japanese that communicates with DMM Game Player for user authentication and DRM shenanigans to work in Linux.)

[account42]

Wine is older than Steam on Linux. And Valve's enhanced Wine aka Proton can be used independently of Steam. The deciding factor is not whether the game is on Steam but whether it uses draconian DRM or anti-cheat that requires and actual Windows kernel.

[gambiting]

>>The caveat is that this is only true when applied to games on Steam. I play games that aren't on Steam, and I've not even bothered to see if they would run on Linux because it's just not worth my time.

I play Diablo 4 on my steam deck and it's so little effort to install it - you install Lutris, install battle.net and then it just works, you can launch it directly from the Steam Deck UI.

[baal80spam]

Exactly. I refuse to use Steam, so linux is a no go for me.

I hate it so much when people equal games to steam.

[account42]

Linux gaming is not restricted to Steam.

[account42]

FWIW at least cl.exe and msbuild work just fine under Wine. I never cared for the IDE so no idea how well it runs but if you just need to build VS projects you can do that.

[matheusmoreira]

You should demand Linux software from Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo.

[cornercasechase]

The “year of the desktop” implies a solution for consumers, not professionals. That being said for almost every other kind of development Linux is by far the best platform. I cannot develop on Mac anymore due to Apple making things more difficult in every update.

[iraqmtpizza]

Package managers are useless for getting the latest maven, gradle, or ant version. This in combination with there being multiple poorly-documented ways to set environment variables and there being no GUI for any of them means that setting up for Java development is massively worse than Windows the instant you step outside of your IDE.

[nwallin]

> Package managers are useless for getting the latest maven, gradle, or ant version.

My package manager has the latest versions of maven and gradle. Ant is behind; upstream is up to 1.10.13 but my package manager only has 1.10.9.

[iraqmtpizza]

did you have to enter some magic string like ppa:chien that literally no one would ever know

[nwallin]

No. They're not in an overlay. They're in the primary, central repo.

maven 3.9.4: https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/dev-java/maven-bin

gradle 8.2.1: https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/dev-java/gradle-bin

ant 1.10.9 (upstream is 1.10.13): https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/dev-java/ant

Oddly there's no overlay that has a more up to date version of ant. So even if I did want to enter magic strings, that wouldn't have helped.

[Tmpod]

I'd say they use a rolling release distro like Arch or similar, where packages are updated very often. In fact, I believe Arch even has a tool to seamlessly manage multiple Java installations.

[cornercasechase]

I’m sure the versions in AUR are up to date.

[devsda]

Switching to linux is a good option but the ideal solution is one where coporations do not or are not allowed to collect telemetry by default.

Microsoft has normalized default optout telemetry in the OS, IDE & developer tooling and now others are also following suit even in areas where telemetry doesn't make sense.

I wish there is an easy solution to the pervasive telemetry problem for those who can't switch for any reason.

[musicale]

Microsoft has really poisoned the well with default-always-on-telemetry.

Technical solutions (firewalls, switching to Linux, etc.) aren't necessarily practical for many people.

> the ideal solution is one where corporations do not or are not allowed to collect telemetry by default

This is probably the only effective solution, but I don't see it happening without enforceable legislation.

[Aerroon]

I think TV manufacturers don't help either.

[musicale]

Needing an firewall (both incoming and outgoing) for your TV isn't something I would have predicted a few years ago.

At least "monitors" don't seem to have telemetry. Yet.

Who knew that companies would use 1984 as a product roadmap.

[joshspankit]

The fact that most of them include the content of the screen as telemetry is especially concerning

[Zambyte]

Corporations should not be allowed to collect telemetry at all. Information should always be pushed from one party to another, never pulled.

[RajT88]

Companies have not yet woken up to the idea that implementing this kind of telemetry is effectively leaking their private business data to third parties (competitors even).

Nobody's been so obviously burned by it yet that the lawsuits have started flying.

Just imagine the kind of data (say) Microsoft is leaking to Google, via all those users running Chrome. How about all those AMD users who are running Intel/NVIDIA graphics drivers in their laptops?

If I am a big tech company sitting on a pile of that telemetry data, you can bet I'll be tempted to data mine it for such leaked data about what the competition is up to. It'll probably take an email leak to reveal the practice, and cause some sort of consequences for this though.

[raxxorraxor]

Economic espionage is the largest field of espionage. Although I guess if any big tech company would get caught, there will be repercussions for their business.

[royal_ts]

KDE is great but also very, very buggy. I'm using it since 2016 and some bugs just won't go away and good luck with openeing a bug report - nobody will care. Especially multi monitor support just isn't good. Multi window support is also, by default, not as good as Windows does it. Sicne a few updates I'm getting some polciykit errors everytime I'm doing anything session related just because - I have not found a solution since then.

[loeg]

I use KDE daily, including a multi-monitor setup, and it is not buggy in my experience. Like, at all, much less "very, very." I wonder why we have had such different experiences? I'm using Fedora.

[FirmwareBurner]

Maybe he's using an older KDE release or on a not-first-class distro which doesn't ship with it out of the box, like Mint.

[royal_ts]

"very very" was a bit exaggerated but it's far from perfect. There's always something. I'm using KDE neon which should be as new as it gets. For multi monitor: it forgets that I had a second desktop, renders it black, switching between two monitors and none is also error prone.. it's not "bad" I'm used to it but as I said, some bug been here for a while now.

[heyoni]

Are you using nvidia drivers by any chance?

And correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t KDE neon supposed to be a bit less stable?

[WesolyKubeczek]

The black desktop used to happen on every brand of GPU (I have a mix of Intel and AMD), it just had to be the third or the fourth display, something like that. Or after sleeping and waking. I used to have it a lot.

I haven’t seen it in a while, though, so it just might be they have fixed it. Fedora + zawertun COPR, for what it’s worth.

[marcosdumay]

Debian (stable) user here. I'm also scratching my head trying to understand what bugs you find on KDE. Or what kind of multi-monitor or window behavior you have a problem with when compared to Windows. (Isn't the default window behavior basically equal to Windows? I have never notice a difference in anything that I didn't change myself.)

I too think you were unlucky on your combination of hardware-distro-setup in some unusual way.

[SomeRndName11]

HiDPI is not perfect neither in KDE (arguably, better situation)not in Gnome, compared to Win 11. When your enable scaling, window's context menu (left click on menu) is not scaled in debian 12 and Ubuntu, irrespective of environment variables (PLASMA_USE_QT_SCALING=1 and such). In Wayland (which solves many scaling problems) KDE renders fonts blurrier than in X11. For many it is not a big deal, but not is not acceptible for me. Gnome apps are not properly caled unless the scale is bigger than 175%, and then they are too big (overscaled).

I still use KDE though.

[v3ss0n]

Use Manjaro, KDE focused arch linuxes, they have latest KDE , I am using KDE dedicated Linuxes ( Gentoo, arch) and past 5 years is a blast for KDE. Much stable.for WM I am using QTile because it have best tiling wm that works with KDE application

[v3ss0n]

Use Manjaro, KDE focused arch linuxes, they have latest KDE , I am using KDE dedicated Linuxes ( Gentoo, arch) and past 5 years is a blast for KDE. Much stable.for WM I am using QTile because itis best tiling wm that works with KDE application

[Workaccount2]

The worst thing about linux is that it is made an maintained by people who like linux.

I would love more than anything to see a paid fork of linux whose goal was to make a power user friendly user OS that never needs to pull up a CLI.

People will come out of woodwork here to suggest whatever shitty half-assed CLI wrapper enviroment. No. No. No. They suck. I have been using them on and off for 20 years. Including right now.

I'm someone who does way more than email and youtube, but has less than zero interest in spending 6 months learning the nomenclature and structure of linux so I can become a proper user.

[screamingninja]

Please correct me if I am wrong, but is this not a straw man argument?

> spending 6 months learning the nomenclature and structure of linux

> become a proper user

Care to elaborate? My parents have been using Ubuntu successfully for over a decade now for "email and youtube". They do not even know what a CLI is. What are you trying to accomplish that does not work out of the box?

[ghastmaster]

>My parents have been using Ubuntu successfully for over a decade now

Add my 87 year old grandmother to that list. Firefox->email, youtube, kroger, banking etc. These days most users just need access to a web browser via their OS.

[Tactician_mark]

Absolutely agree. For most people, their entire OS is just now just a bootloader for their web browser. More and more I feel like downloading any program at all is treated like a "power user" task

[Workaccount2]

Troubleshoot network issues using a GUI.

That's the thing, linux is great for linux power users and absolute hands off users. Its terrible for people in the middle, and hence why it cannot get the ball rolling towards adoption for 30 year now.

There are tons of tech literate people who know what a problem is, know what the fix is, but do not want to deal with climbing through forum posts and documentation to figure out the correctly structured command to do the actions (and how to unfuck if the command wasn't right). Just make fucking buttons, toggle switches and drop down menus.

[adambatkin]

Debugging and troubleshooting a networking problem is approximately the same on Windows vs Linux (except that there are additional powerful tools available built-in to most Linux distributions). Which is to say that anything non-trivial likely needs a command line. Windows does have some graphical network troubleshooter thing, and I've let it do it's thing a few times, and it has never done anything (at least nothing noticable).

[postmodest]

There is a FreeBSD fork that does exactly that, but to use it you need to buy a $3000 hardware dongle....

That's the path a lot of Mac Users are on, though we also have a telemetry problem; the only advantage is that it stays "in house".

[okanat]

Mac has never been power user friendly.

[washadjeffmad]

> never

Oh, yes it was. The Macintosh was once a platform for independent professionals and small businesses to build their own software using native tooling. The add-in cards you could buy for the Apple II would shock you in today's anti-consumer ownership war being waged by vendors.

[joshspankit]

I’d say it’s actually been power-user friendly 3 times:

1. The Apple II

2. Late 80s/early 90s when screen savers and [I can’t remember the name. Something makes me want to say ‘shell extensions’? small apps that made deep and wondrous tweaks to the system] were allowed to experiment with almost complete freedom

3. OSX. The first version was specifically designed for power users who had existing Unix/Linux skills. Special shout-out to some of the early tools as well: Automator, Quartz Composer, Audio Unit Lab, and even Applescript.

[qwytw]

> FreeBSD fork

Isn't NeXTSTEP quite a bit older than FreeBSD?

[ign0ramus]

What's the name of the fork?

[bbatsell]

They are jokingly referring to macOS, which is descendant from a fork of BSD with the Mach kernel.

[elkhadiy]

He used a periphrasis to mean macos.

[pdntspa]

If you didn't have that attitude you could have learned that stuff in the last 6 months and then you wouldnt have to worry about it.

Also, "power user friendly" but hates CLI..... I see. You might have to hand in your power user card over that one

I am a diehard windows user but the OS's affinity for burying settings in nested, labyrinthine setting dialogs gets old super fast.

[Workaccount2]

This comment perfectly sums up why linux is perpetually stuck with close to zero adoption.

"It's not linux that's the problem, it's you!"

[pdntspa]

Yeah, forgive me for thinking that people need to meet the computer halfway. I keep forgetting that most are too stupid that they cannot be trusted to make effective use of such powerful machines.

[wwtrv]

> forgive me for thinking that people need to meet the computer halfway

Seems like a very defeatist attitude to have..

[pdntspa]

Defeatist? How? We don't just put anyone in a vehicle, they have to have a license. That's a bit much for a computer but what is wrong with having to learn?

[skeaker]

> If you didn't have that attitude you could have learned that stuff in the last 6 months and then you wouldnt have to worry about it.

The issue is that this has to scale to everyone if the goal here is mass adoption (meaning your family, maybe including your grandma, running Linux). If someone says "I don't have 6 months to learn this" or "I couldn't learn this even with 6 months to do so" and your goal is mass adoption, your action should be resolving whatever the roadblock is, not blaming the individual with the issue.

[short_throw]

"You could have learned that stuff in the last 6 months"

"You might have to hand in your power user card over that one"

And these attitudes are why most consumers almost exclusively use proprietary software. You have to let people be lazy to get mass adoption. Businesses know and exploit this, the foss world writes tools with steep learning curves and says "take it or leave it." And that's perfectly fine as long as we can be honest with ourselves: the vast majority of people will never invest the time to learn to use cmd line applications, or debug wifi drivers, or learn to use an environment that's more complicated than what they already have. Time is money so even a highly motivated person should question spending months to learn new tools.

I love Linux for being superior for servers and hackable and having so much powerful software available for free...but if I weren't a software developer and I didn't enjoy this stuff there'd be no justification for the time I spent learning it.

[pdntspa]

And when you look around you and realize that everything sucks, now you know why.

Enshittification is real. Knowledge is the antidote...

[iraqmtpizza]

linux bros think CLI is required for everything but they don't realize that it's only required for everything in linux

[pdntspa]

yeah because clicking through half a dozen nested dialogs to change my DNS settings is good fucking design

Or even better, for many things the option doesn't exist any more? Why? Because fuck you thats why!

I just LOVE watching Windows take away features because some normie asshole decided options were bad for usability and testing.

Typing this on my Windows daily driver, btw. And I have to drop into CLI on a pretty regular basis.

[iraqmtpizza]

Tree structures are terrible design, yes. They shouldn't teach trees in computer science. Everything should be flat. Just like the Earth.

I love watching Linux stay stuck on design choices from 1970 because to change the interface now would cause the operating system to implode and the resulting riot would exceed even the asspain over systemd

[pdntspa]

Some of those design choices are pretty good, they stick around for good reason. Everything is a file/chaining together tiny commands/text-based configuration files are computing zen for a large portion of users.

A lot of text config now has way more documentation -- right there above the freaking setting! -- than a Windows design analogy could ever cram into (never-used) help files. The majority of config I deal with is like 25 lines of comments for every 1 line of setting.

Systemd's not that bad either, I will take writing systemd config files over trying to make a service daemon in init.d scripts any day of the week.

[femiagbabiaka]

Power users require CLI on every OS. Not just Linux, but also Windows or OSX, to be specific.

[qwytw]

Especially macOS. Generally I feel like it's way easier to avoid the terminal on Linux since there are GUI apps for most stuff.

[femiagbabiaka]

Yep, the difference between the Ubuntu experience and the Mac experience is stark. Also when the time comes to do power user stuff, macOS has many differences from Linux that have not been translated to documentation well, basically issues there are less Googleable.

[dylan604]

>power user...that never needs to pull up a CLI.

What strange creature is this? Is it a mythical creature like a unicorn or closer to big foot?

[iraqmtpizza]

The ultimate power user is he who has CLI powers but does not need to use them

[account42]

> a power user friendly user OS that never needs to pull up a CLI

ERROR: Does not compute.

A CLI is the pinacle of power user friendlyness.

[joshspankit]

You might like the ability to use natural language on the CLI, then have AI create and run the command for you.

One example of many: https://github.com/mattvr/ShellGPT

[rdp36]

It's called a Chromebook.

[sukruh]

FWIW ChatGPT is pretty good in generating the specific Bash incantations you need to perform if you describe what you want to do in plain English and don't forget to add the specific version of the OS you're using. Unless what you're trying to do is pretty advanced and would be cumbersome in any other OS as well.

Learning specific API's are over. Mostly.

[ycombinete]

Yeah I used chatgpt to write the string for a cronjob yesterday, and then an awk script to parse the output.

[joshspankit]

Don’t know why you’re getting downvoted.

I think you’re currently right and will be even more right in a year or two.

[Grom_PE]

Yep. Jumped ship after Windows 7 due to pervasive telemetry. That was a deal breaker for me. It's funny that Windows (and its ecosystem) getting shitty is the major factor of "Linux desktop" happening.

I figured that the effort of decrapifying Windows has outgrown the effort of configuring a Linux system, and furthermore, the former becomes obsolete with every Windows update, but the latter stays with you forever.

In 2022, Linux port of Far Manager, far2l, got a fork with LuaJIT scripting support, far2m, and that was the last thing holding me on Windows.

[bacchusracine]

>KDE gets better every week.

As someone who has tried KDE off and on over the years since its version 2.0 release in SuSE Linux, and through various versions and distros since is there a fork that doesn't have twenty different configuration options in their own apps?

I was most happy with Ubuntu's Gnome 2.x desktop and am currently using Mate Desktop these days to try to hold on to what I consider the best desktop and what I always felt "home" at when using it. But it gets more and more inconsistent release after release due to intentional theme breakages. I'd love to be able to use KDE or Plasma instead and take advantage of the way that desktop leverages its shared libraries for performance if only I could get over the behavior of its shell and configuration.

Is there anything that I can run that re-organizes it into the traditional desktop that I prefer? A script? A combined theme?

I see all sorts of themes for Windows (why?) and themes for OSX (also why? especially without the skeuomorphic looks of the past?) but there seems to be very little that would take someone from Gnome 2.x\Mate to KDE. Am I just missing it? Is there any way off this burning platform?

I keep hearing how great KDE is and can perform but it makes my skin crawl when using it. Is there any way to change it that doesn't leave me lost at sea going between multiple applications with nested options?

Thanks in advance for any advice given.

[iraqmtpizza]

I have yet to use a linux desktop which has working drag-and-drop. When you drag a file or file path from the file explorer and drop into the command prompt, it's supposed to put the file path there. Also, I shouldn't have to hold down twelve modifier keys to move a file from one place to another. I should be able to drag a file to a segment of the file path in the file explorer and have it move to that directory level.

[aruggirello]

> When you drag a file or file path from the file explorer and drop into the command prompt, it's supposed to put the file path there

> Also, I shouldn't have to hold down twelve modifier keys to move a file from one place to another

> I should be able to drag a file to a segment of the file path in the file explorer and have it move to that directory level

Guess what, that's exactly what happens in Dolphin (KDE Plasma). Please don't spread falsehoods.

[iraqmtpizza]

I've used KDE plasma as recently as 2019 and it most certainly does not do that. If you're saying that it just recently got added then that's extremely sad that it took this many decades. Surely a few decades more until it's the default, though

EDIT: ha, I just looked it up. exactly as I remember, you need to use a modifier key to do any dropping. And it opens a dialog half the time instead of just doing it. I'm 99.99% sure it's not integrated with bash at all, let alone the OS, meaning you can't drag and drop a path from one program to another. Something you could probably do starting in windows 95

[Tmpod]

I'm not sure I understand what you're describing but I believe Plasma and Dolphin work like that. If you drag and drop a file into a program it will select that file (if it expects a dropped file) or paste the path. You can also drag and drop files inside Dolphin itself to move or copy stuff around. I think what's confusing you is that, by default, it doesn't assume a move and prompts you to pick between that and copy, and you can force the choice and prevent the prompt by holding a key while dragging. You can, however, change this behavior in the settings to instead mimick Windows explorer.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

[iraqmtpizza]

It may be gnome (which is even worse). But if you're correct about the setting to change the behavior, then this is a non-default (setting) of a non-default (desktop environment) in Ubuntu. A really unfortunate situation.

I am skeptical about the claim that KDE's file explorer supports dropping files onto any part of a file path e.g. three levels up in one go, but if you say so.

[WillAdams]

I would if I could, but I don't need/use desktops --- my preference has always been for tablets, preferably portable with a stylus (and touch) --- CellWriter is kind of primitive, and driver support is problematic at best.

That said, my next project is connecting my Wacom One screen to a Raspberry Pi 4 (which unfortunately means giving up touch --- I'd be very interested in graphics tablet/screen w/ support for current Wacom styluses _and_ touch). Can't quite justify a Wacom Cintiq since I don't want the complication of a different stylus technology than my other devices (it's really nice to be able to switch between drawing on my Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 to taking notes on my Kindle Scribe to checking something on my Note 10+).

I suppose I should try an Android tablet, but there's not much software there which is suited to the work I do.

[mcpackieh]

Is it confirmed that Intel's drivers on Linux aren't doing this too?

[boomboomsubban]

Intel drivers are part of the kernel, and I imagine Intel's attempt to put telemetry in them would be shut down fairly quickly by Linus Torvalds.

[cccbbbaaa]

Graphics drivers, at least on unices, come in two parts: one in the kernel, another one in the userspace. The latter provides interfaces such as Vulkan. That said, ANV (Intel's driver) is part of mesa, and not bespoke like nvidia's. But that's a moot point: this telemetry component is not a part of the actual driver, but another separate program in the package.

[anthk]

On libre drivers? No.

[Aardwolf]

I do use the full fledged nvidia drivers on linux (I don't know if with the mentioned libre drivers the steam games, LLM's and image generation I use would work?), so I would also like to know if this telemetry is also present in the linux drivers

[sockaddr]

Agreed. It is the year of the linux desktop. I installed Pop OS and everything works great right out of the box. It's now good enough that I could install it on my mom's computer.

[wood-porch]

Not in my experience. I was using a Dell work laptop recently and decided to use Linux instead of windows. Once I got things working mostly to my liking, I updated the GPU drivers and got a kernel panic. I’m lucky to be tech savvy so I can recuperate from that, but after that I asked for a MacBook and now have a solid daily driver that I can rely on, without having to spend hours looking for workarounds, crashes and kernel panics

[OO000oo]

> Everything works.

...if you're a software engineer. If you need Photoshop or Word or another industry standard software then you don't count.

[gambiting]

>>...if you're a software engineer.

I'm a software engineer and you'd have to pry Visual Studio out of my cold dead hands, it's the reason why I deal with all the nonsense of using Windows.

[throw10920]

Out of curiosity, how does Visual Studio (proper) stack up against JetBrains tools, especially CLion?

[nottorp]

But you can only use it to write Windows software?

Unless you mean VSCode which is cross platform.

[tssva]

Visual Studio supports development for linux using remote linux machines, virtual machines or WSL for execution.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/linux/download-install...

[bee_rider]

I think they must mean legacy visual studio, rather than VSCode.

VSCode is of course very portable. It also seems to be Microsoft’s (successful) attempt to get everybody to use a reasonable Linux-style workfow. If you look at it as a text editor and terminal in a tiling window manager, it suddenly makes sense that it became so popular.

[okanat]

There is nothing legacy about Visual Studio. There is simply no equivalent of its debugging and profiling capabilities in C++ and C# especially in graphics / game development. No such equivalent exist in Unix world including macOS. They set the bar.

[nottorp]

Agreed, but all those features don't help at all if you are doing software for platforms that aren't Windows or apparently the major game consoles.

[bee_rider]

Have you tried Vtune? I don’t do much profiling, so I’m not sure what exactly good is, but when I’ve played around with it, it seemed neat.

[someNameIG]

I've never tried it but does anyone know how C/C++ development is in Xcode?

[gambiting]

I'm a games developer - PS5/Xbox/Switch have excellent VS integration. And yes I mean the full fat VS.

[nottorp]

Oh I didn't know that. Those versions aren't accessible for us plebs :)

[Aaron2222]

If you're referring to Visual Studio, then Visual Studio Community[0] is free (for individuals and "non-enterprise organizations") and is equivalent to Visual Studio Professional.

[0]: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/community/

[baal80spam]

> If you need Photoshop or Word or another industry standard software then you don't count.

But you can always use GIMP, right?!

OK, this was a bad joke.

[yummypaint]

To be fair this is adobe's fault. The only reason it isn't available on linux is because adobe goes to great technical and legal lengths to ensure it can't be. A VM with seamless windowing isn't a bad solution for running that kind of forcewear, compromising the whole host OS seems excessive.

[OO000oo]

Blaming doesn't fix anything. The real point here is that it's a political issue and the open source community is too infantile for politics so they keep lying to themselves instead.

[heyoni]

I wonder if it would work under a vfio system.

[bravetraveler]

Almost surely! Outside of seeing obvious signs like VirtIO devices, one can go to great lengths to hide the virtualization

Similar tricks that work for the ESEA Anti Cheat client and Nvidia code 43 will likely suffice

VFIO takes this a step further and provides one less virtualized device

[heyoni]

I really want to try VFIO and ditch my windows install completely but I'm worried about anti cheats. Nice to hear there are steps you can take...

You have experience with this? If so, just wondering...are there linux distributions to avoid for VFIO? I'm between arch and NixOS, nothing too outside of the mainstream.

[the_lego]

> adobe goes to great technical and legal lengths to ensure it can't be

Could you elaborate? It was my impression they simply didn't care, but I never looked into it.

[cornercasechase]

You can use Krita! It’s legitimately very good.

[OO000oo]

not industry standard, useless

[cornercasechase]

How is an amazing, advanced, free design program “useless”? If you can’t dictate the tools you use at work you should find a new job.

[pdntspa]

GIMP's pretty good

[trelane]

Also, no cloud or subscription required.

[eukara]

Creative Cloud has a web version of Photoshop[1] supposedly and then there's Office 365, which has been around for a good long while now. I suppose one could use those if need be.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Creative_Cloud#Desktop,_...

[godshatter]

"don't count" as far as Adobe and Microsoft are concerned, yes. You can't blame the people that spend a lot of their free time trying to bring free software to a free platform for not coming up with something that can act as well as Photoshop or Word and fit in with their ecosystems well given the way those companies try to lock things down.

[GartzenDeHaes]

You might want to into who makes Linux. Intel wrote 23% of the changes for kernel 6.0 and AMD wrote 32%.

https://lwn.net/Articles/909625/

[darklycan51]

Proceeds to defend this by arguing that Windows already does it anyways then goes and mentions how Linux doesn't do it... but then your whole comment makes no sense, because there is a justifiable annoyance at being tracked on Linux as well even if you quit Windows through Intel drivers

[wtallis]

> there is a justifiable annoyance at being tracked on Linux as well even if you quit Windows through Intel drivers

I feel like you may be making some pretty wild assumptions. The Intel GPU drivers for Linux have little to nothing in common with the Intel GPU drivers for Windows.

[slackfan]

KDE has been getting progressively worse and less usable since 3.5.

[72deluxe]

So refreshing to see someone else who revels in the nostalgia of 3.5!

[account42]

I believe the correct word is KNostalgia.

[Aardwolf]

Fully agree, I've been using cinnamon instead for a long time already

[_ugfj]

By everything you mean an extremely narrow slice of hardware and software works -- which admittedly are widely used and can give the false sense of "everything".

But https://xkcd.com/619/ is just as true today in spirit: mainstream multimedia has serious issues. Bluetooth often just doesn't work, forget about any decent resolution from any streaming service.

Heaven forbid you wanted to dock to an eGPU, might as well reboot because you need to restart your apps anyways.

Multifunction printer/scanners are a crapshoot. Strange enterprise VPN and wifi, well, I am wishing you good fortune in the wars to come.

Nah. Life is too short to struggle with this.

O&O ShutUp10++ handles the telemetry. Way easier to deal with that once then constantly struggle with Linux.