[eek2121]

I switched a couple months ago. This is my third time trying to switch to desktop Linux, and things are very different this time.

I installed CachyOS and all of my hardware just worked, including NVIDIA/Wayland. No real bugs beyond incorrect monitor positioning, and some tinkering needed for Diablo 4/Battle.net.

The Diablo 4 issue is present on Windows as well, and ironically, there isn't a fix on Windows for those affected. On Linux, a DXVK config change solves the bug.

Not really missing anything.

[saghm]

It really is hard to overstate just how much progress there's been in the past few years. I first started using Linux in late 2012 (with Ubuntu 12.10 being the first version that actually came with my laptop's wifi firmware in the default installtion; when I first tried 12.04 I had to plug it into ethernet just to download it), and by that point, graphical stuff mostly worked without needing a ton of manual work, and it was past the era where I would have had to compile a custom kernel or something (although a few years later I did learn how to do that just for the fun of tinkering when I got a macbook with a wifi driver that wasn't released in a stable kernel for another few months), but when I started getting into gaming in the later part of the decade, I had to spend a decent bit of time learning about Wine, Crossover, Lutris, etc. Over the course of the next few years I started playing around with Proton in Steam, even for games that aren't released on Steam, and nowadays I don't even have Lutris or Crossover installed, and I can't remember the last time I tried to play a game that Proton couldn't run.

At this point, Valve has done enough to make Linux gaming viable that they might have permanently bought my goodwill. Right now I mostly play on my Steam Deck an equal mix of games that are and aren't from Steam (streamed from my desktop with Moonlight, which itself is a third-party app rather than from Steam), but even if they started trying to lock things down more, I'm not sure I'd be able to get mad at them. So much of the investment they've made into the ecosystem has been in the tooling itself that isn't exclusive to them, ostensibly for the purpose of entering the "handheld desktop" gaming market (not sure what exactly to call it, but playing the same PC games on handhelds is demonstrably different from a handheld console with a separate catalog), but they did it in a way that benefited a lot more than just that. I don't pretend they're a perfect company, because those don't exist, but as far as companies go, this might be the first time I actually identify as a fan of one.

[ErroneousBosh]

> No real bugs beyond incorrect monitor positioning

Windows really needs to catch up with this. Multiple monitors have been a thing in Linux pretty much since the beginning of X.

Why can't I plug a Windows laptop into a docking station, and expect the screens to come up in the same order they were in last time? Why is it so hard?

[andyjohnson0]

> Why can't I plug a Windows laptop into a docking station, and expect the screens to come up in the same order they were in last time? Why is it so hard?

I regularly move my work Win 11 Pro laptop between three different multi-monitor (hdmi) setups, and it works flawlessly. I don't recall any problems with Win10 over many years either.

What am I missing out on?

[chrneu]

My last 2 laptops have really struggled with win10/11 multimonitor support. Explorer would often crash, taskbars would not populate, behaviors weren't consistent, taskbars would reset themselves, settings would change randomly after reboots, not including updates resetting all my settings and having no real way to disable updates cuz windows would re-enable them.

did i mention explorer would crash pretty often? like, half the time I plugged in a docking station it would crash explorer. That then reset all the settings. lol just a mess.

Pop OS! is a simple plug and play on any setup i've tried it on, over usb3 or hdmi/dpi. Works great.

[da_chicken]

Multi-monitor mostly works fine for me in Windows 11, but I do have consistent issues when dragging windows between displays with different dpi scaling. They have the same resolution but the dpi scaling on the laptop display doesn't match that on the two 27" displays next to it.

Adobe Acrobat in particular takes multiple seconds to drag a window from the laptop screen to one of the attached displays when a PDF is open. Now, this is on a 6 year old laptop due to be replaced, but it was fairly high spec when it was purchased (64 GB, RTX 2060, NVMe SSD). It really shouldn't be making me wait on 2d rendering of a document.

[samplatt]

My non-corporate desktop has 3 screens, screen#2 is shared with a corporate laptop (via a KVM, but the issues happen without it as well).

If I switch that monitor to the other machine, Windows re-arranges ALL windows to appear on the new "primary" portrait-oriented screen#1, some maximised to fill the screen, some not. They stay there after the other screen is reconnected.

Possibly because the screen being switched is the "primary" screen? At least it's consistent behaviour between both Win10 AND Win11, which is nice.

[efreak]

Why can't I lock my computer and have Windows turn off my displayport monitor without having it turn itself on and off every few minutes until I log back in?

Why can't I turn off the power button on my monitor and then turn it back on to keep using it again without having to shut down my PC, turn off the PSU switch, press the power button to fully power it down, then bring everything back up? I just want my monitors off when I'm in bed...

[int0x29]

> Why can't I plug a Windows laptop into a docking station, and expect the screens to come up in the same order they were in last time? Why is it so hard?

I've never seen this work correctly. My work dock breaks monitor ordering on MacOS reliably and Gnome+Wayland frequently. I don't remember if it broke for Xorg. My home monitor setup breaks mouse behavior in borderless fullscreen and libreoffice scaling on KDE+Wayland.

[baobun]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45793218

Don't hold your breath... This is configurable in Linux (at least I recall Xfce and KDE having display position config built in for years).

[bigstrat2003]

I do that all the time. So it seems to be something hardware-specific, not that it makes it less annoying.

[chrneu]

Multimonitor support and bluetooth are the two biggest reasons I ditched windows a couple years ago.

I have no idea how multimon got so, so bad on windows.

Then bluetooth ...wtf? Again, how did they get so bad?

[ssl-3]

I don't do a ton of multi-monitor stuff with Windows these days, but I certainly have done a good bit of it. It worked OK on my desktop at home with three screens, and when I sometimes plug an extra monitor into my laptop at work it seems to put things back how they were last time.

But I don't recall a time when Bluetooth was "good" on Windows -- like, at all. I've spent somewhere in the realm of 20 years now dinking around with it. As far as I can tell, it has always been a miserable experience.

[JamesBrooks]

> and some tinkering needed for Diablo 4/Battle.net

Funnily this is the same thing I tried to do just last month, Installed CachyOS after not having Linux on my desktop for a very long time, tried installing Battle.net and just ran into too many issues and haven't come back yet (to be honest I didn't try too many avenues to fix it).

If you don't mind me asking what was the tinkering you had to do to make this work? Thanks!

[WD-42]

I added the battle.net installer as a non steam game in steam and it just worked. Proton is really good.

[JamesBrooks]

I was trying to do it through Lutris, I'll give a non-steam game in Steam a shot, thanks a lot!