I have a Linux laptop and an eGPU. I dual boot Windows when I need to use it. I didn't even try to get it to work on Linux because that's a good way to lose a week and gain nothing. Switching between dedicated GPUs and integrated ones is still barely functional after heavy tweaking, and laptops have been doing that for I don't even know how long.

That xkcd is extra painful because there are still, 11 years later, zero Linux browsers that support hardware-accelerated (i.e. smooth) video playback.

On my desktop with a GTX 1060, Chrome can play 4K60 YouTube videos without issues.

But yeah on my laptop with Intel integrated graphics (I thought Intel was supposed to be better supported vs Nvidia under Linux?) I can barely play a 1080p video without frames being dropped. It even struggles displaying a 4K desktop so I have to run at 1440p, while Windows handles it fine.

Two notes:

1) Chrome does not use hardware video acceleration under Linux. Some distributions' Chromium build does (the code is there, and is enabled under ChromeOS). Why Google didn't enable it for desktop Linux is a question for Google.

2) Intel GPUs do not have problem with 4K desktop under Linux, they are capable enough to run two 4K display at once, at least since Broadwell. It's 8K capabilities that are currently under development.

If you don't believe, choose 2160p60 on this video and see the CPU utilization under Linux:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXb3EKWsInQ

>Linux is a great server operating system with a desktop badly cobbled on top.

Especially the most popular flavor, Ubuntu.

Between releases which require reinstallations to get new features, hardware support, and bugfixes (bugfixes are supposed to be backported, but fresher DE versions have worked much better than old ones for me, so I'm skeptical) and the awkwardness of PPAs, it's sad it's the go-to assumed distro which everyone writes articles for and tests hardware/software against when rolling release is such a better model (that Windows now ostensibly uses with 10).

Manjaro seems to be gaining popularity as a user-friendly, nerfed rolling distro which offers safety and fast features+hardware support+bugfixes and can use the AUR, where everything in the Universe is and can be browsed with a GUI package manager -- no PPA terminal imports needed. But so is MX Linux, a Debian-based, Xfce distro whose selling point seems to be "no systemd", which speaks to a misalignment of priorities between many Linux users and the average PC user... if "average PC user" means "vaguely technical person who games and wants fast drivers + new hardware support", which is already wrong.

But FWIW, >>Windows is a painful experience these days, but Linux Desktop manages to still be worse.

Disagree. Can't speak to exotic use cases though; I don't even know what an eGPU is. For me, there seems to be a magical effect of using Linux for a long time and then returning to Windows. Windows doesn't seem to work as well as it used to. There's permission problems with the new 10 Settings interface when trying to access the core system apps like Device Manager. It can't connect to the Internet when I turn off my VPN, when Linux works fine on the same VPN. So many little things.

Suddenly, Windows seems like the janky, ersatz OS I force myself to go to sometimes while Linux feels like the more intuitive "home" system. But I've been on it for like 2 years now, so I'm probably brainwashed. And in 10 years Linux will get worse so I'll boomerang back to Windows like you? Or maybe something better will take over, like Fuchsia.

Funny how things go! I had been using Arch Linux for about 4 years and recently I switched to PopOS.

I never had problems with updates, but had a lot of problems with non-standard locations. For example, getting Vim to work inside of Tmux with eslint and auto complete just wouldn't work perfectly no matter what I tried.

It's a different world with Gnome and PopOS, and I really miss the AUR and Pacman but other than that I feel like I'm spending more time on my system than before.

>Between releases which require reinstallations

You got your facts wrong, Ubuntu supports updating in place no need to reinstall, maybe you confuse Ubuntu/Debian with other distros that require a reinstallation.

Ubuntu has a LTS version and it officially backports video and other drivers to allow support for recent hardware.

> Disagree. Can't speak to exotic use cases though;

Windows desktop usage is somewhere north of 80%. Consider that Linux can't even do many common use cases right, it's just that it can do your use cases.