I am NEVER going back to Windows unless I get a modern version:
* Targeted for professionals / gamers (why call it pro if its just Home without dumb restrictions?) * Offline-first accounts only * Zero ads for Microsoft products (I'll literally pay $50 a year to stop them, and stop the update nagware). * Stop pestering me to update * And this is more important, decouple your OS so you can update while I use it, requiring a restart only under kernel tier changes.
Edit:
I did not know about Kinoite. I am definitely checking it out, sounds similar to what made me interested in Vanilla OS 2
I’ve started recommending it to others, while personally I’m happier with Arch’s more transparent and simplified architecture and development, plus rolling release to avoid mass breakage on full upgrades.
but rolling-release distros does mean one day you might update and reboot and something is broken. it's more maintenance than fedora.
1. with Fedora Atomic you get an operating system with the reliability and resistance to entropy and ability to power wash of Chrome OS, but also the ability to be changed via building your own custom image (its easy, check out BlueBuild) or with easily reversable overlays, plus an update cadence that offers an excellent middle ground between rolling release and point release — you get all non major version updates to your image's software basically immediately, but major versions wait for every 6 months so they can be integration tested and stuff.
2. And then with Distrobox you get the ability to trivially create a containerized environment with your Linux distribution of choice inside (can be different from the host), that nevertheless integrates almost seamlessly with the host (including having access to all of your hardware devices and your home directory and being able to trivially export applications, as well as easily open a shell inside the container with a simple terminal command), so you can have your cake and eat it too: a fully bleeding edge rolling release distro like Fedora Rawhide or Arch Linux inside your distro box to get the most up to date developer tools, but a more stable system as your host. And if something goes wrong in the container you can easily just blow it away and regenerate it since Distrobox has a declarative container spec (distrobox assemble). For GUI management of Distroboxes check out Pytaxis and BoxBuddy-rs.
There are some things you should know if you go this route though that will save you a lot of pain and frustration:
1. Fedora Atomic is really barebones by default, and since layering is kind of painful it can be really annoying to do the system administration necessary to get it set up; especially if you have an Nvidia card and you have to do all the typical annoying shit you have to do on Linux to set that up. So instead of using vanilla Fedora Atomic, I highly recommend checking out Universal Blue[0], which offers pre-built Fedora Atomic images with all of that annoying setup and system administration done for you already. Their headline images (Bazzite and Bluefin) are really opinionated, but don't worry about that, their base images[1] are perfectly usable too! That's what I use :)
2. Layering packages via rpm-ostree should not be used for just random system utilities or applications. That's not how it is intended to be used, and that way lies only pain. The whole point is that the applications you use as a user, including terminal ones, should be separate from the core system, and not dependent on it, so they can be updated separately and not break each other. Layers, since they are updated by the system package manager, must be versioned in lockstep with the rest of the system, and the system image will fail to build if it can't update the layers you have, so really only use it for things you consider part of your essential OS. People who forget this tend to come away really hating Atomic distros. For your development environment or any build environments you need, create distroboxes and install applications inside them; for GUI applications, just use Flatpak, or install the application inside a distrobox and use distrobox-export to integrate the app into the host. If distrobox feels too heavyweight, or you just want various sundry utilities installed on your host system, then I recommend using something like Homebrew or Nix or Guix or Pkgsrc, that is, any package manager that installs things to your home directory in a way that is cleanly separated from your host system and independently updated. Universal Blue images come with a script to get Homebrew all set up for you. Wouldn't have been my first choice, but its very convenient.
For more on the benefits of this, see this pastebin article I made: https://rentry.co/mm2qcwzh
If you're wondering what the advantage of this is over Nix, the most important to advantages for me are that:
1. Nix's directory structure is basically completely unreadable and unusable for human beings in a way that is far worse than the default posix directory structure
2. Nix requires absolutely every program and package that runs on it to be custom patched to deal with its alternate directory structure, and while sure yes it's package repository is gigantic so a lot of that work is done for you, it can still cause weird problems and make things much more unreliable and good luck if there's a package that isn't there or hasn't been updated for a while. I'm on an emacs Discord and apparently installing it on Nix is very difficult. It's just another layer of possible incompatibility and failure and annoyance on top of the stack of those layers that compose linux.
Meanwhile, you got most of the same benefits on an atomic distro, except:
1. it's all completely human readable
2. uses standardized technology so it's already compatible with everything without having to do any work
3. you can get fully different distros inside distro boxes, unlike with and Nix's equivalent.
The other thing is that with nix, you configure your entire system at a layer of abstraction above what's actually happening on the system — it's not like that declarative config is actually directly deciding how the system operates, no, it's just layered on top of all of the existing crap Linux has going on, and you're just hoping that it can automatically, imperatively perform the actions necessary to keep your system in line with the config.
That, and to get the same level of resistance to entropy and reversibility and ability to power wash and rebase and cherry-pick changes and stuff that you get with an atomic distro on nix, you would have to Version Control your Nix config and then also be very very careful with manually committing with informative commit names at regular intervals every time you make a change and stuff, instead of it being handled automatically for you and not requiring an extra version control tool slapped on top.
Plus, Nix doesn't benefit from the minor, but still meaningful in my opinion, security benefits of an immutable image-based distro.
[0]: https://universal-blue.org/ [1]: https://github.com/orgs/ublue-os/packages [2]: https://distrobox.it/
Also drawbacks for me when using nix:
- I needed to greatly increase boot partiton, because nix stores there linux kernels. Whith dual-booting Windows, I created 2GB partiton at the end of disk. Thankfulluly Windows reused it.
- vscode was having strange laggines on nix.
- nix language is quite strange but also imo taught poorly. This was my attempt to demistify it https://github.com/rofrol/nix-for-javascript-developers.
btw. nice remark about nix beeing declarative but beneath is Linux not-declarative. It is like functional programming, but you still have some internal state of components that can clash with your functional top-down approach.
Yeah. That's what always made me loathe to try it out. I'm glad there's someone else that feels that way.
Why does NixOS work for me?
I got attracted to Nix because of the possibility of being on the bleeding edge. According to repology Nix related package repositories are far up and to the right, their own cluster. In fact, only Arch is getting close by, but not being as good in terms of freshness, as can be seen from the position of AUR below [2].
1: https://mihai.page/nixos-and-me/
2: https://repology.org/graph/map_repo_size_fresh.svg - even nixpkgs 24.05 stable is so far ahead of every other repo it's not funny.
1. How friendly is the installer? I can get a second hand machine in which I can afford to nuke the disk and let Nix take it all but what if I need to install it side-by-side with my existing Windows install on my main laptop where I have a custom partitioning scheme? Ubuntu's installer provides sufficient flexibility to able to re-use partitions without overwriting them, allocate whatever mount point I want, resize things etc. I have been using Linux for close to 20 years but fdisk still spooks me.
2. How easy is multi-monitor setup and switching between setups? I have a main monitor that I usually use but occasionally I also use the laptop screen as a second display and sometimes I just use the laptop screen.
3. The 1st link alludes to be able to rollback changes from grub? How? What are my recovery options if I mess up the system?
2. I'm using a laptop with AMD/NVIDIA on Wayland with KDE, this is no problem. This question is in the domain of your display server and compositor, not the base distro.
I choose the previous build from grub, and then rollback my config files from git and rebuild. Every build creates an entry on the boot menu so I can go back to any previous iteration of my setup (I do have it set to only keep the last 15 builds)
1. The installer is Calamares. It's fantastic and fully user-friendly, no need to worry about it.
2. I'll speak for KDE6 which I personally find superior to GNOME. You can have either with NixOS. I don't think there's anything specific to NixOS on multi-monitor functionality. There's a menu accessed either through a keyboard shortcut or system tray that allows any of the 5 permutations laptop/monitor. And it pops up as an OSD menu whenever you connect a monitor. I'd say the functionality is 'done'.
3. I suggest you read up on how Nix works, once you understand it you can understand NixOS better. To summarize, all programs in your system are stored in /nix/store and accessed through symlinks. You don't access /bin/bash, you access the bash executable stored in /nix/store through its symlink in your PATH. And all the symlinks are stored in a single directory. This directory is called a profile. There are multiple profiles. With NixOS, not only just executables but the system configuration data (users, passwords, mounted disks, desktop environment settings, traditionally in /etc) is also stored in profiles. This way you can have multiple 'whole system configuration's all containing different system configurations, arbitrary versions of arbitrary programs, and they don't conflict. During the boot, you can choose between different profiles. It's not limited to grub, systemd-boot also works.
Other than Warzone and Tarkov (for which I keep a separate drive with Win10), the only things I haven’t quite managed to get sorted yet are (i) a convenient system-wide replacement for the frame limiter in RTSS, and (ii) relatedly, proper frame-pacing when streaming using Sunshine.
Also, Steam seems to have a weird and widespread bug where if you use Big Screen, exit to the desktop mode, then launch BS again, you get like 5fps in the BS front-end itself (after launching a game, it’s fine). The workaround is to just kill the client when you exit Big Screen (usually when your gaming is done anyway).
Really happy I made the switch and fully expect those niggles to get sorted (or my aptitude to improve) in due course. Windows has been shit for a while but recently it’s really crossed over into unbelievably shit.
My budget gaming PC is still on Windows and RTSS is a lifesaver: I couldn't stream or record some games with my Intel Arc A580 otherwise, since titles that use DX11 or older rendering technologies typically have worse performance than the more recent ones, ergo I have to stream/record at 30 and cap the framerate anywhere between 30-60 depending on the title, otherwise things get unstable.
Of course, it's not ideal, but is at least workable. A bit odd that the card struggles with games like Ghost Recon Wildlands (DX11, 2017), but not Ghost Recon Breakpoint (Vulkan, 2019) or ones that use DX12 etc. Either that, or when there's a title that's badly coded and doesn't lock framerate properly to the screen refresh rate.
Aside from that, around 90% of the 500ish Steam games I have would actually run on Linux (various indie titles, mostly), at least according to ProtonDB: https://www.protondb.com which is pretty nice to see, except for the fact that last I checked something like GOG doesn't run on Linux natively, though thankfully something like Lutris exists.
GOG absolutely does offer native Linux games.
That’s why people seem to recommend Lutris or some other alternatives to access the actual library.
I’ve had a really mixed experience with GoG on Lutris and Heroic - both on Pop and the Steam Deck. I often struggle to get things running. It requires just that little bit more knowledge of what’s happening under the hood than Steam/Proton does, and I often just give up. My library is mostly in Steam anyway. Honestly, EmuDeck has been easier for me to get uo and running than either Heroic or Lutris.
And both Nvidia and AMD have native control software (GeForce Experience and Adrenalin) that bundles a bunch of nice stuff like underclocking, recording, noise suppression, per-game profiles, frame limiter, etc;
On Linux you have GreenWithEnvy and CoreCTRL, but neither are as nice or have even half the features.
Every time I’ve tried it, it has just seemed slow, even on reasonably powerful PCs.
Disclaimer I am not very familiar with Linux for Desktop - but to me this is an indication that we are not yet in the "just works" state for desktop linux.
Or it does just mean that while the Windows recurrent problems (how to create local accounts, disable telemetry, install 3rd party programs, etc.) are just seen as life as normal while Linux problems are seen as such.
I think I’m also a bit spoiled by the Steam Deck, where it’s so easy to set and change custom limits. I kind of just want that, for Pop, ha.
As for the frame pacing, try with the beta NVidia drivers (v555) and Wayland, though I don't use Sunshine so I'm not sure if it'll help.
Check out if these updates are all available on Pop, if they are give them a try!
This is what I have in my MangoHud.conf:
fps_limit_method=late
toggle_fps_limit=Shift_R+slash
show_fps_limit
fps_limit=0,45,60,90,120,240
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/niggle
""" Etymology
First attested in 1599. Origin uncertain, but likely borrowed from dialectal Norwegian nigla (“to be stingy, to busy oneself with trifles”), ultimately from Old Norse hnøggr (“stingy; miserly”), related to Old English hnēaw (“stingy; niggardly”). More at niggard. """
Niggard is unrelated to the racial slur we're thinking of but in fairness I can understand how it would raise eyebrows.
Would it be fair to say that a history of raising eyebrows establishes some relationship between otherwise previously unrelated words?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word_n...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1557349
History certainly loves to rhyme.
When the news began circulating on social media, many couldn’t believe it was true––that the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California would remove a longtime professor from a class because a Mandarin word he used correctly in a lesson sounded sort of like a racial slur.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/fight-agai...
The USC story is quite different from the current thread. The historical use of the word “niggard” has been intentionally used in a racist way (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word...), and if you read the WP article, it has quotes speculating that subtle “sophomoric” usage of the word might increase for racial reasons.
So I don’t buy the slippery slope argument, and it seems like the USC story is actually demonstrating that people can be reasonable about where the line is. It might have caused a stir once, but now there is precedent for settling cases of Mandarin confusion more quickly.
It's hyperbole to call this a slippery slope when the exact same thinking that finds niggardly offensive leads to the absurd outcome at USC. Instead of pruning the language of any words that a racist might use as a dog whistle, maybe expect, if not everyone, at least college students to have some notion of context.
> it’s not a compelling example of reasonableness
Why not? The outcome was positive, Patton suffered no serious consequences, and the ability to say foreign words without worrying was affirmed publicly. It could have been much worse, but it wasn’t. There was a temporary misunderstanding followed by some conversation that got it sorted out, no need to worry about that further. Again, the precedent that was set is that using Mandarin is not insensitive or racist. Precedent refers to the outcome, not the temporary misunderstanding. The outcome at USC was not absurd, the outcome was reasonable. The accusation might have been out of line, or just a mistake, but that was the cause, not the outcome.
> are there any other languages about which we should be concerned?
Why would there be? (…especially given the outcome of the USC story) If you read the USC response, you’ll even find it addresses that question directly. It affirms that incidental phonetic similarities across all different languages are pure coincidence and should not result in claims of wrongdoing. It even says the same thing you did, and takes responsibility too, it says college students should have some notion of global context, and it’s college’s job to give them that context.
The case that started this thread is not a cross-language mistake, and didn’t come with evidence of historically racist usage, so it’s different by definition. It’s not the exact same thinking, and I posted some evidence of that. There’s no reason to believe the Mandarin incident will lead to more accusations, and due to being publicized and decided in Patton’s favor, there is reason to believe it won’t happen again.
I think it is easier, in hindsight, for you to say that Patton didn't suffer serious consequences. If I were in his shoes, being prohibited from teaching his class, disciplined for an absurd accusation and investigated, I would be pretty upset and wondering what the outcome would be.
If these were second graders learning a foreign language, maybe it is understandable that they might titter about a word in that language that is similar to one in English. I think it takes quite a bit of mental contortion to believe that students in a college foreign language class would think that a Mandarin word was insulting to black people because it sounds like an English word.
The reason this story is publicized is not because it's the valuable precedent you assert. It's that it is symptomatic of the ridicule deserved by the reasoning that people should be offended by words with similar sounds and different meanings.
Maybe it would be clearer if you read the whole thing: https://web.archive.org/web/20200922014834/https://www.theat...
I did read the whole article (btw please re-read HN guidelines), which was designed to stir and highlight drama, as newspapers are wont to do. You’re right, the Atlantic story you’re linking to is downplaying the precedent and focusing on the controversy. Even though there’s not that much controversy.
I also read some followup too, obviously, since I wrote some details above about the story that your source doesn’t mention, for example that Patton was not disciplined and was cleared and apologized to, and that the dean who “excoriated” Patten also had to publicly apologize for his hasty & presumptuous email, and admitted he reacted too quickly.
You seem to be insisting on incredulity and outrage, when feelings got out of hand but nothing serious actually happened. That’s kinda the same mistake Patton’s students made.
The school is required to take accusations seriously and investigate. That’s not a bad thing, it’s a good thing. The dean handled it poorly at first, but people sometimes make mistakes. And it’s also good thing prof Patton was cleared. Almost everything worked like it should have. It doesn’t matter what you or anyone thinks about the validity of the student’s accusation, and the fact that the accusation happened is not somehow going to make anything worse.
Hey, it’s a free country, say whatever words you want, as far as I’m concerned, the consequences are yours to enjoy. You’re right that this shouldn’t have happened, and you’re right that the words we’re discussing did not originate from a racial epithet. But then history happened, replete with a lot of actual racism and words, and in reality new negative associations were formed between unrelated words. Bummer. But complaining about not being able to use one totally anachronistic word now that clearly sounds like a racial slur, and has been used as a racial slur, might seem a bit tone deaf. Arguing that choosing not to say one particular word is going to lead to many more and cause problems is an imagined and absurd end result.
OK. "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
Which is not what you're doing when you reduce the question to saying one particular word is the issue rather than only an example of blindly ignoring context. (Which is not even the case here since we're now offended by niggle, niggardly, niggard and 那个 and who knows what else). The issue is making the language less expressive at the instigation of 1) people who can't understand context and 2) sophomoric racists who take advantage of the people who can't understand context. Neither group should be rewarded by ceding the use of completely harmless and expressive words.
There’s that slippery slope again. English isn’t getting less expressive, that will never happen. That right there is the “imagined, absurd end result”. The number of English words that have become politically incorrect over our lifetimes is completely dwarfed by 1) the better, more expressive synonyms and alternatives available and 2) the number of new words introduced into English over the same period.
I hear you, and I agree that it’s stupid that a couple of previously unrelated words have become tainted, and they shouldn’t have been. But it’s too late, it happened… in this case, over a hundred years ago.
Nobody is being rewarded. Racist word usage doesn’t seek to remove words from our lexicon. The words don’t actually go away, the choice to use or not use certain words is yours to make. Whether we offer other cultures any respect by choosing to avoid any innocuous words that happen to have a higher probability of being taken the wrong way is purely a personal decision. Which is why arguing about it might not be the best look, even if you’re right, right?
Anyway, there is value in trying to get people to understand that people who innocently use a sound-alike don't intend to offend them. Which is pretty much what John McWhorter has written about many times. The failure to understand context seems to be a big part of many issues of the day.
I totally agree there’s value in sharing context, and helping people not be offended. USC agrees as well now. Good!
I am right now using the Xbox Wireless Dongle with a custom driver (xone), that driver says that it supports audio through audio jack. No audio though. Probally because I am not very experienced in Linux on Desktop.
That sounds like a feature, I’ve got plenty enough games to play that I don’t need to have my machine rootkitted. I swore off of all EA-published games on those grounds 15 years ago so having the information upfront would be a strict improvement.
They were already getting to be too much but this is getting crazy.
https://blog.system76.com/post/may-flowers-spring-cosmic-sho...
I can't speak for everyone here, but not all of us use stock ROMs and Google Play Services. I personally use GrapheneOS, which let's you significantly neuter Google's spyware capabilities.
[1] https://digitalcontentnext.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/DC...
We must be browsing different HNs!
I would not go so far as GP as to say that this dark pattern is better or worse than what Microsoft is doing, but I think it is a fair point that a Google/Microsoft account is needed on the biggest mobile/desktop platforms respectively and their attitude to privacy and user agency is somewhere between laissez-faire and contemptuous.
With Android there does at least feel like with F-Droid, different OEMs, alternative apps, the web and even Other android spins that these aren't quite the lockdown that Windows is, although it's fair to say that in either case you shouldn't really be constantly on your guard for the next way that your operating system is going to try to trick you into giving away more of your stuff to them.
It's actually the developers of the app doing that. I make sure to minimize such dependencies.
Having WiFi turned on will drain your battery faster by virtue of connecting to WiFi. Even worse, if it's on but not connected, it will periodically look for networks to connect to. The same is true for cellular service.
It's just an incredibly user hostile operating system that only a broken bureaucracy like Microsoft's feudal dynasties can build.
In contrast, I love Android, even more than any desktop Linux, macos, ios, etc. It just works and the notifications are super customizable and Pixel blocks 90% of my spam and texts and the adblock is system wide (via VPN) and it auto updates overnight and just never gets in my way. For every Windows annoyance I've had, there are entire months or years where Android just keeps on working, even across new phones and new major versions.
Google may be the spiest of them all, but at least they can deliver a great user experience and operating system. It's not perfect (I still miss my old style notification shade system controls), but it's a lot less noisy than Windows. A good operating system should stay out of the way, not make itself the center of attention at every possible opportunity.
Google is also an ad company, the bar for their behavior is lower. MS used to be an OS company. Many of the users here remember the time when there was a supplier/customer relationship with MS.
It is probably hard to imagine if you are, like, under 25, but MS actually used to be this kind of interesting company that enabled people doing new, fun things on their computers. Of course they are just another garbage factory now, but it’s hard to update your priors sometimes.
Still trying to delay the upgrade to 11 as long as I can though.
The EU is not a single threaded application. They can, and should, be focusing on multiple areas where there is wrongdoing. Both are being egregious and abusive, and need attention. And the EU has shown that it can!
> (which is monopoly inside their ecosystem, but not a provider of "default" software used in offices etc.)
A good phrase to use here would be 'platform abuse'. Focusing on the 'default' is an attempt to justify what they are doing, and I notice it gets used to defend Apple rather than call them out. In the sense that "Oh well, it's their platform, they can do what they want"
Things have changed a lot here. I now regularly buy windows laptops, toss windows and they just work. When there is a hardware problem, it usually takes a few minutes to resolve.
The hard part is realizing that you have to do the EFEI setup and not just try to boot in insecure mode.
Dual booting would rather defeat the point / message of leaving windows behind for Microsoft’s shenanigans.
But 2 weeks ago I installed Linux on my home setup to run 24/7.
There's some seriously dumb issues with it: Ubuntu snaps are terrible with no local fonts in FF and other snap-based software has surprising bugs and crashes you don't realise are the fault of snaps until you waste hours researching it, everybody pushes AppImages but you can't get launcher shortcuts without doing it all manually in a friggin .desktop file* (you could do this 30 years ago in Win3.1 without having to search around for an icon!!!), you can't consistently pin stuff to a taskbar, etc.
But I think I'll be sticking with it all the same. Microsoft could ban my Microsoft account and then what, I can't use my PC anymore?!
* Yes I know there's some software you can download to do it but seriously it's not been updated for ages and this should be core OS GUI functionality. I switched to Debian and KDE which at least has more flexibility.
It's so upsetting that Ubuntu went so hard in on Snaps. I just end up with issues caused by their sandboxing with hardware and config access and you end up having to fight to find a normal .deb install for FF instead of that damn default Snap.
I hope the journey isn't too rough for you though - best of luck!
If you want to easily distribute commercial applications, use flatpak. You could even have your own flatpak repo for your own products, if you wanted (it is really just static http).
I agree that the flatpak/appimage/snap options for apps, and in particular commercial apps is a decent idea. I think integration and permissions should probably move to something similar to the UX for phone apps though... it feels weird having to try to configure permissions that should be in the box.
There's your problem ;)
Mint has been much more user friendly for a long time. I've been on Manjaro for some time now, and I'm quite happy with it.
Basically nothing you’ll want to do is googleable.
I’d recommend arch to a newbie before nix.
Once you get a handle on things, nix is pretty nice.
Debian/Mint/etc. are all good distros, but if you're willing to step up the learning curve just a bit, I'd definitely suggest Gentoo. I've been using it as my daily driver for several years now and it's made me feel like I'm actually in control of my machine (compiling all your code with debug flags so you can attach gdb when it's behaving weird so you can write a patch?! And then submit it to get sucked into upstream!? Yes please!). There's definitely a little work up front, but it's without a doubt the best experience I've had with Linux and I'd recommend it if you're up for it.
IMO Debian is a pretty good choice if you have hardware that's about 2 to 4 years old or more and don't really care about getting the latest driver updates or advances in the Linux ecosystem, so you should have a better experience there, but if it starts to frustrate you that it takes years for huge fixes and advancements to make their way to you, I really enjoy Fedora. :-)
Also, you mentioned two of the major alternative application packaging formats, snap and appimage, but have you heard of our Lord and savior Flatpak? :p It has all of the benefits of snaps (namely sandboxing, consistent environments and packaging dependencies along with applications, updates directly from upstream, distribution agnostic packaging, and automatic integration with your desktop environment) but none of the downsides (namely far better desktop environment integration thanks to portals and much much faster startup times and no perf impact during runtime unlike snaps). A lot of people talk down about them but I think that's mostly FUD.
(Also, having ancient single-purpose laptops is fantastic. I have one for recreational programming, and that's all I use it for. I have another for curating my music collection, and one for games. They don't need to be fast, or up to date, or power efficient, because I don't use them all the time. But when I do use them, it's nice to have them set up just so for the thing I want to use them for.)
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/lin...
Been great.
And in general, desktop Linux is just as buggy and maybe even more half-baked than it was when I started using it in 2007.
But, I own my machines. I don't need to ask permission from a company to be able to log in to my machine. I can install or uninstall whatever the hell I want.
It's not your computer anymore, it's this computer.
Be careful. This is how distros start.
I started with Linux Mint, then Ubuntu. I don't remember which Ubuntu it was, but it had Gnome 2 and then later had fun with the Unity Desktop versions. When they started being the bully, I started distro hopping and then finally settled with Debian (because of my personal values as well). I can't trust a for-profit company to care about its users. Today I try to use as many FOSS alternatives and projects supported by community.
Ubuntu is no better than Windows 11 at this point. It's just lesser evil of two. Try something else, Pop_OS!, Linux Mint, Manjaro Linux, Fedora, etc. Plenty of good options out there. Debian too, if you don't want a solid stable long term OS.
And nowadays that's the same thing you need to do in order to de-bloat Windows.
Don't want to create Microsoft account? Google how to do it, read about pressing a random keyboard shortcut during install, and running a random command in the terminal. This is literally the Linux experience. It's the same thing, now on Windows!
Your tablet doesn't work on Linux? Install OpenTabletDriver from who knows who to fix it! Your Windows doesn't work? Install power tools from who knows who to fix it! Want to bring back the old context menu? Install this. Want to bring back "my" computer? Install that. Want to get rid of OneDrive? Run this .bat file!
If things continue like this one day Microsoft will get rid of backwards compatibility altogether and people will migrate to Linux to run old Windows programs in WINE.
I was uneasy about Ubuntu PPA, that's binaries from unknown source. I prefer AUR, it provides packaging instructions but source trusted by user.
Linux issues possible to investigate, search brings grounded instructions. Windows is closed source, "solutions" is guesswork.
Linux distributions build experiences, maybe there is already group of people like you, issues solved.
Now I do my gaming on GeForce Now as much as possible (soooo much nicer than fighting Windows updates, UAC, game bar, drivers, etc. all the time). And Crossover/Whisky sometimes, Parallels almost never. I wish Proton worked on macos :(
Together this means I can only play maybe 50% of the games I used to be able to (specifically anti cheat can be a problem, if the game doesn't support GFN). But otherwise the small performance penalties are totally worth not having to deal with Windows anymore.
I have separate machines for separate purposes.
I do all my gaming using linux. I haven't used Microsoft's shit since windows 7
I’ve done this around 4 year ago and I’ve literally never felt compelled to move back.
I also think about that quite often recently. Сleaner, more controlled...
My mind went here too. I know a lot of people questioned the first iteration of "Steam Machine" PCs. Created by independent hardware vendors, with a Steam-flavored Linux distro, a lot of people asked what was the point.
But increasingly, every month that goes by Windows seems to add a new task bar thing you need to disable, something new on the login screen, and now, apparently, changes to something as fundamental as user management. It seems inconceivable that Valve would want to willingly tie their fate to the unpredictable twists and turns that Windows may have in store.
I think I get it - there are plenty of people using Windows as their primary OS and they want bells and whistles while not caring about telemetry. But just.. let people disable things.
IMO fact, that Microsoft is pushing spyware on their users and make it harder and harder to disable it is much more important topic than EU focusing on Apple (which is monopoly inside their ecosystem, but not a provider of "default" software used in offices etc.)