[hybridtupel]

I guess now is the best time to switch to Linux. MacOS 26 being super sluggish and looking like a soap bubble game for children. Windows becoming a SkyNet OS. Meanwhile Steam just announced their new hardware on SteamOS, emphasizing that users still own their hardware and can install whatever they want.

[anvuong]

Unfortunately the most popular distro (Ubuntu - Canonical) is behaving more and more like Microsoft. I updated to 25.10 last week and it decided to ignore my settings, reset the snap priority and reinstall the snap firefox package, all without my consent. I was fed up when Canonical decided to hijack apt to inject their own proprietary closed-source snap packages, now after having dealt with it again and again after each major upgrade, I just switched to Fedora Gnome a few days ago and I'm not missing anything with Ubuntu.

[neilv]

Corporate ethics-wise, Canonical is vastly better than Microsoft.

But I prefer Debian Stable, for reasons both pragmatic and on-principle:

https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/iso-dvd/d...

(Or people can go to a confusing download page: https://www.debian.org/distrib/ )

[KetoManx64]

Debian isn't heading down the best path either with their their policies (keeping the child sex predator on their payroll to do conferences that often times parents bring kids to, forcing the removal of the fortune packafe because it was deemed offensive, openly stating that straight white males shouldn't apply for internship, etc)

[sekh60]

The Amazon Lens was pretty bad ethically.

[happymellon]

> Canonical is vastly better than Microsoft.

However Canonical apologised, and removed it.

Microsoft doubled down, adding more adverts.

[sharts]

Just BSD and chill

[gspencley]

I switched to Mint (Mate) around 2012 or so because of radical UI changes made by Canonical. At the time, the "mobile revolution" was the big industry trend. Windows 8 had come out which was designed for touch screens (and people hated it) ... and Canonical released a new default desktop environment (I think it was Unity? Memory is fuzzy). It was shocking to me and when I complained about it, a friend recommended Mint.

The nice thing about Linux is that you have max choice. That can pose problems for new users who might be a bit overwhelmed but we shouldn't pretend that Canonical "owns" Linux or that everyone is necessarily going to land there. I recommend Mint when people tell me they're thinking of giving Linux a try. Haven't given Ubuntu a second thought in years.

[khedoros1]

I went from Ubuntu to Mint around the same time on my laptop. I took my desktop from Ubuntu to Fedora. A later laptop followed it, because I was tired of the little differences.

Ubuntu is completely off my radar too. So many dumb things that often lasted a few releases. Like ads for their cloud services, Unity for a while, window controls on the left for a while...

My biggest problem with Mint was that upgrading the OS became a hassle if I put it off for too long (which I started doing after a not-so-smooth upgrade experience, one release).

[DemocracyFTW2]

I'm happy to report that I upgraded my Mint from the previous to the most recent version without any snags. I then discovered I was still on an older kernel version which required a little more research, but went without any difficulties. The second part is admittedly something that not-so technical people will have considerable difficulty in even realizing. But all in all I can say that Mint is a solid, stable, and usable system for experts and novices alike.

[dv35z]

Curious your experience with Mint Debian Edition. I currently use Debian Stable as my workstation & local server - I considered Mint, but since it was Ubuntu, I held off...

[stubish]

What is unfortunate? You found one alternative was not to your liking, and another right there to take its place. You didn't have to pay for anything. You were not locked in to anything. Now you are not fighting your OS. Seems to be working as it should.

[roscas]

Some people like Ubuntu but I don't because of so many reasons. If rather use Debian.

Same for Fedora that I don't like also. I prefer to use RockyLinux or AlmaLinux if you really need a RHEL compatible system.

There are other options, most of them based on Debian or Ubuntu.

My desktop choice is ArchLinux with Plasma or XFCE4. No snaps, no crap.

My servers choice is RockyLinux 8 or 10.

[wltr]

Who are you the people still praising Ubuntu? Where does it come from, this Ubuntu by default thing? Why? I genuinely interested. It was one of my first distros, but that was when they were doing this shipping CD thing. There are countless of distros that are better out of the box, e.g. Fedora. Sincerely, I don’t understand. Who uses Ubuntu these days, and why. Especially on servers, lol. Why not use Debian then?

[rurban]

Privately I'm using Fedora, because that works. But my last two companies are using Ubuntu overall. Maybe because there are so many packages available. It's still far less stable than Fedora. I have to fight stupid Ubuntu bugs every single day. On my Fedora machines it tested OK, so that is my gold standard.

[klaussilveira]

Ubuntu was always like this. Use Debian.

[anticensor]

Ubuntu was like this since 2009, use Pardus (which is based on Debian and follows roughly the same release process as Ubuntu, but no snaps).

[xeonmc]

Perhaps SteamOS will take up the mantle.

[WorldMaker]

Or distros taking cues from it like Bazzite.

[surgical_fire]

Mint is love, Mint is life.

[scuff3d]

Debian, Mint, Fedora...

[anonymousiam]

Canonical needs snap in order to distinguish them from all the other Linux distros, so they've gone overboard to make sure that you "need" it.

I think it's horrible that they've taken extreme measures to overtly circumvent their users' desire to run the Firefox distributed through Mozilla's repo.

The following link describes how to overcome the latest version of Canonical's extreme insistence on the snap version of Firefox. It's almost laughable when you see how far they've gone to try to lock you in.

https://gist.github.com/jfeilbach/78d0ef94190fb07dee9ebfc340...

[turtletontine]

I’ve been using Linux distros daily for >10years now, and I only get more confident that I made the right choice.

Pretty much the only things I miss out on are Microsoft Office and Photoshop. Gaming works astonishingly well on Linux these days with Steam+Proton.

[foobarian]

> Gaming works astonishingly well on Linux these days with Steam+Proton.

This alone is the last frontier IMO. It's the only reason I still run Win11 on a gaming PC with a big Nvidia. Take that away and their marketshare will tank.

[nartho]

I wouldn't call it the last frontier. Gaming works well enough for me to not have to worry about.

I am, however, obligated to keep a Windows partition around because I do music production. If there are good DAWs that run natively on Linux, almost all plugins won't run on Linux. Everything plugin that runs as standalone or anything similar is guaranteed to not work on Linux.

I am thinking about getting a Mac mini for music production only, seems it's probably the lesser of 2 evils

[klaussilveira]

Which VSTs you had problems with? Have you tried LinVst?

[thewebguyd]

Last frontier for gamers.

I'm still on macOS for the foreseeable future as long as there's no Lightroom (Classic) or Photoshop on Linux. I'd even settle for CaptureOne or Exposure. DarkTable still isn't there, nor is the UI as easy to work with.

Not to mention other business uses and different fields whose apps are exclusively Windows, not even mac and Windows.

Windows has a captive audience. Yeah, Linux can and will take some, but it'll still be a small piece of the pie, unfortunately. Everyone else has no choice but to put up with the abuse.

[fletchowns]

> Gaming works astonishingly well on Linux these days

They have certainly made a lot of progress, but there are many of us that will be stuck unless all the new AAA titles are supported. Battlefield 6 is a notable recent example of a wildly popular game that you can't play on a Steam Deck.

Seems like it's really just the anti-cheat that is holding things up. I wish every game studio out there didn't have to come up with their own anti-cheat system. Is this something Valve could solve once and for all with their OS & platform? That seems like something that would make the 30% tax a lot more appealing to game studios.

[netsharc]

I wonder if the solution would be multi-booting. Keep the OS open, but games with anti-cheat would boot out of its own partition, with a secured bootloader, and secured lightweight OS, just enough to load the game..

[TremendousJudge]

Is there any video production software that runs on Linux well nowadays?

[dfxm12]

I've used Shotcut, it's simple and easy: https://github.com/mltframework/shotcut

I've tried Kdenlive, but honestly, shotcut met my needs, so I didn't explore it too much: https://invent.kde.org/multimedia/kdenlive

DaVinci Resolve is also available for linux. I've never used it though.

[JeanMii]

All the Davinci software runs well and I consider it class leading in its category of software.

Design, sound production and cad are all lacking strong alternatives on Linux.

[sprkwd]

https://reaper.fm has a Linux build.

[phibz]

Kdenlive isnt bad

[pjmlp]

Until normies start getting fully working GNU/Linux laptops on PC stores, it will be the same migration story since Windows XP days, that gets repeated every single time Microsoft does something folks don't agree with.

[WolfeReader]

They also need tech support. Desktop Linux is in great shape, but most current Desktop Linux users are capable and willing to troubleshoot their own problems.

[thewebguyd]

Yep. And they will ultimately return them or be disappointed when [insert xyz app] doesn't work.

Gamers are only one case that's currently being solved. Devs are already solved (except for iOS). Creatives are a different story entirely.

If anything, Microsoft's decisions are more likely to boost mac sales than they are to create any kind of meaningful normie migration to Linux. Especially if Apple goes through with the rumored low-cost macbook. That thing will sell like hotcakes, and macOS share is already growing as is.

We are many times more likely to see the "Year of the macOS desktop" than we are the "Year of the Linux desktop"

[pjmlp]

Not every Dev is a UNIX developer, for some reason this misunderstanding keeps being repeated.

Proton is a betting on the wrong horse, until Microsoft decides to put an end to it, in whatever way they feel like it. They own Windows, and are one of the biggest publishers in the industry, when grouping all studios they own.

Apple margins are too much for economies not on the same level as USA.

I do agree with devices being returned, this happened quite often with netbooks.

[NoGravitas]

Chromebooks seem to be fairly successful, despite [insert xyz app] not working on them.

[LennyHenrysNuts]

We don't want a bunch of entitled ex-windows users shitting up our forums thank you very much.

Lets hope they all buy a Mac.

[pjmlp]

Unfortunately not everyone can afford Apple margins outside a few selected tier 1 economies.

[workfromspace]

I apologize but weren't we all one of those normies when we first started using Linux or any other computer?

[LennyHenrysNuts]

Not me. My first computer was a Dragon 64. I was an outsider from day one!

[naIak]

"MacOS 26 being super sluggish" is the kind of thing I only read here on this website. For me and everybody I know who upgraded to it it's running fine.

[Gigachad]

Yeah on my M1 it’s running as fast as it ever did. I have experienced a bug on both my personal and work Mac on 26 where the internal screen fails to turn on sometimes when using an external display. Hoping that gets fixed but otherwise I have no issues.

[rsynnott]

It was painfully slow if you were using Electron crap for a few weeks, due to an Electron bug. This may have coloured peoples' impressions.

[johaugum]

Can confirm, has been flawless for me. I waited until 2 weeks after release to upgrade, possible I avoided some initial friction that way.

The only device I’ve found more sluggish after this recent OS upgrade is my Apple Watch Ultra (gen 1).

Animations when navigating the OS are noticeably sluggish where the previous version was smooth as butter. This degradation has persisted through multiple minor version updates since, so it seems to be permanent.

Disappointing for what is marketed as the most powerful watch in their lineup.

[deafpolygon]

m4 and m4 pro here, runs like butter

[grishka]

Linux (with the "traditional" userspace) is a mess on the inside, has always been, and will always be. It blows my mind that there still isn't a universal, easy way to compile binaries that would run on any distro, of any version — something that all other mainstream OSes have solved from day one.

Yes, I know that AppImage and Flatpak are a thing. No, they are not the answer, because they, too, all come with their own issues.

[thewebguyd]

There's a reason that Win32 is currently the stable ABI for Linux (via Wine/Proton).

And you know what? Tbh, I don't see a problem with that. If it keeps improving and eventually expands beyond gaming and can start running some of the stuff that can't currently (modern office, adobe stuff, etc.) then why not? There's decades of windows-only apps that there's just not enough time or talent in the world to re-create for Linux, so might as well put effort into Windows compatibility and just start running Windows apps.

[grishka]

I don't disagree with that, but I feel like ReactOS is more promising in this regard, as it reimplements not only win32 API/ABI, but also the NT kernel with its stable API/ABI, so it would allow using Windows drivers as well. I mean, no translation layer is better than even the best translation layer :)

[BeFlatXIII]

IIRC, MacOS 26 sluggishness is a problem with Electron, not a mistake on Apple’s part.

[marak830]

I switched 3 weeks ago. (First Ubuntu now the badly named POP!_OS), and couldn't be happier.

Fast, a slight learning curve(took me a weekend), and I'm back gaming and coding regularly.

[NexRebular]

And as linux is becoming more and more a corpo controlled monoculture, the time has never been better to switch to *BSD and illumos where true freedom awaits.

[sekh60]

You mean the *NIXes that via their license hold dev freedom (and corporate freedom without the forced source publication) over user freedom (the purpose of the GPL)?

[sunaookami]

Surely 2026 will be the year of the Linux desktop!