Welcome, newcomer! Better late than never.
Well said, and in the tech community that's predominantly Apple. We need to change this.
(I'm typing this on my Linux desktop right now... but also have a separate Windows PC for running the games I want to run that don't work on Linux yet. When they work, I'll be thrilled to put Linux on that machine or its successor.)
Also, everyone seems to blame developers for anticheat shenanigans, but is invasive anticheat evem possible on linux without trivially being able to circumvent it? I don't think this is a brand issue here
That isn't weird. It's by design. MacOS is only designed to run on Apple hardware, and a VM, even if the host is Apple hardware isn't really Apple hardware.
Many games refuse to run in VM, even if that VM is windows one. I bet there is a trick to bypass, but then you are at risk of being banned or can't receive support when needed.
For many people, this is called "barely working at all." And as I get older I am becoming one of those people so quickly.
For a server there is no better choice than Linux, but for my desktop/laptop, I find other alternatives better. Perhaps I haven’t found «the right distro», if so let me know, but until Linux is as low maintenance as windows or macos, it will be for those with an interest in doing that maintenance.
I realize I have a love-hate relationship with Linux. It is perfect, but flawed.
I tried running various Linux distros on my desktop some years ago and definitely agree on the crap-out experience and having to reinstall. Eventually settled on macOS and it's been okay.
The game changer for me has been Nix. It works on macOS. I have had coworkers use it on Ubuntu. I am soon planning to switch to NixOS.
People complain about the syntax but honestly AI gets you around that. You will still do janitorial work, but you mostly only need to do it once.
{
nix.gc = {
automatic = true;
dates = "weekly";
options = "--delete-older-than 30d";
};
}Pin all their apps in favorites and they will persist through updates. Updates don't overwrite desktop shortcuts either (although like other os, a couple might be added that need to be removed). This might be more difficult in gnome, I wouldn't know since I am firmly in the kde camp.
To stay as up to date as possible, use the mozilla apt repo:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/install-firefox-linux#w...
From my experience, some examples: for gentoo you are much more than a janitor - you must be everything all the time; for redhat based - you can get a major headache with some version upgrades; for arch (currently using, same install from 7 years) - update monthly and I had very few and minor issues
Many seem to be interested in knowing my distro. I’m not interested in throwing shade on a distro in particular, but it is one of the bigger and well known ones.
Compared to Windows-land where nuking and reinstalling the entire OS is a routine maintenance task, checking arch news to see if there's any manual intervention and running `pacman -Syu` is all I really ever think about.
Yet I've never had to reinstall windows on any of my devices ever. I've never had things behave in unusual or unpredictable ways.
Meanwhile, a highly suggested utility (on reddit, SE/SO, and even a few distro forums) for touchpad gestures borked my gnome setup. (Uninstalling it, as you might have guessed from my story and tone, did diddly squat.)
Just today I manually flushed my dnf packages (or clear them? Not sure of the terminology.) In the past, I had to debug manually because apparently the default timeout for Fedora was causing timeout issues with a few 100ms internet latency. That was a fun rabit hole "why can't I install an app that's only available via dnf install" "Oh, because Fedora assumes you have good internet. But don't worry if you have Ubuntu, because that doesn't have these issues!".
...I've never even been made aware what download timeouts windows has. As it should be for a user.
I could go on and on. My windows partition goes nearly months without sleep, typically only rebooting if I run out of battery or want to install an update. Linux... doesn't have hibernate yet. Fortunately it doesn't matter! ...Because some odd memory leak (and gpu driver stuff perhaps?) forces me to shut down ever so often. Oh well.
Also the other issues you're describing do sound frustrating but I think it's a byproduct of an entirely different culture. Exposing user-configurable timeouts and you being made aware of it during troubleshooting is something that enables you to deeply understand your system and how it's configured. In Windows, even if there is defaults for things like that it likely is not exposed to the user or configurable at all. If the default settings are bad you're just stuck with it and you aren't expected or intended to modify anything to better suit your needs.
My experience with Arch is mostly due to having been a fairly proficient Linux user prior to switching over and being very comfortable reading the wiki or bbs and tinkering to find solutions to things. A lot of the prior experiences I had with Debian or other "friendly" distros kind of put me through the ringer too and I've found that having the rolling release with Arch fits my preferred workflow much better than something like Ubuntu or Debian or Fedora or the other "batteries included" distros.
Perfect analogy. I'm using Debian for a few months now on my main laptop, and everything is flawed. Seriously, everything.
- Hybrid graphics simply doesn't work. The exception is when it works. Don't even try Wayland with it.
- Graphics card handling is still full with race conditions. It's random when everything works as intended without manual intervention.
- Switching monitors is pain. Sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. Waking up my laptop with a new monitor plugged in is a gamble.
- Energy efficiency was bad with hybrid graphics, but since I had to turn it off, I don't even try to optimize it since.
- It was a pain to make my laptop speakers work. A lot of searching, and applying random fixes until one worked (in reality two fixes together).
- My main bluetooth headset has a feature to mute itself, or stop the music when it's not on my head. Guess which is the only device which I have that have a problem with this? The funny thing is, that it's a random even again. The sound comes back about 10% of the time fully. In another 10% of the time, the sound from some apps comes back, in others doesn't. In the other 80%, I had to reconnect it.
- Don't even talk about printers. It's a gamble, again. Some printers worked at some point in time, some simply don't work, and never will, because nobody cares about them anymore enough.
- Game performance is simply worse than on Windows. First of all, it wasn't trivial to force some games to use my GPU when I had hybrid graphics. The internet is full with outdated information. But even after that, my FPS is consistently worse. I heard some others who have the opposite experience. But this tells me again, that the whole thing is a gamble. Probably it's also a gamble on the game.
- When I press the power off button to put it to sleep, or initiate a normal shutdown, I need to force shutdown the whole laptop. Sometimes I get a notification that text editor is preventing shutdown, and whether I want to force quit it, but it doesn't matter which I clicked, and the "it will be force quit in 60 seconds if I don't select something" is a lie, the whole X framework is killed after a few seconds, and the laptop remains powered on, with the lie "the computer will be shutdown now" in terminal. This happens even when I don't get notification about that something would prevent power off. The shutdown initiation from the OS menu is working, and closing the lid put it to sleep.
And this is my current laptop. I simply couldn't use my previous one with Linux, because some stupid problem with the video card, which I couldn't solve in months. Even installation was a challenge.
I've used Linux in the past 25 years from time to time. It's getting better, but still a long way. You need some janitorial work also with Windows, especially nowadays, but it's still way better experience to click on "leave me alone" once a month, than this constant tinkering, and daily annoyance. I want to build things, not fix things which should just work.
That said I am running Debian Trixie using wayland / kde / cups / nvidia / etc and do not have any of your problems my graphics work, my printers work, my bluetooth works, sleep works. They all required a lot more configuration than the last several versions of Ubuntu had required (which shouldn't be the case if there is better example just right next door), but none are persistent.
What grinds my gears on Linux even more than that is that is is fundamentally unsafe [1], and you can only approach mitigating it. And nobody really cares. I use it because it's the least bad of the major 3 OSes, and I do want a community that can help. But I don't pretend to love it unreservedly. Perhaps I should move to a BSD, but the ecosystem keeps me here.
And I understand if you are certain there are bugs that will be ignored based on your past experiences, I too would be poorly motivated. I am not trying to convince you that you don't know what you know you know. But you can understand that my first take when reading a comment on the internet, even on HN, is that there is always more annoying-and-almost-impossible-to-discover config work to do.
[1] See https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/linux.html and https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/guides/linux-harden...
I had to run Ubuntu 22.04 on a laptop for a while and encountered similar monitor switching and bluetooth issues. Eventually I figured out I could get the latest version of most desktop packages from the KDE Neon repos since they were also based on 22.04 at the time.
Running the latest KDE Plasma desktop with the latest mesa and pipewire made a huge difference. Monitor switching now works every time, all the bluetooth features worked, battery life improved, and Firefox stopped crashing when using webgl.
I'm not saying it'll fix all your problems, but most of these problems are being actively worked on and I think its worth trying a distro that actually keeps up with the pace of that work.
Generally I'd avoid Linux on laptops altogether. Even hardware explicitly designed for Linux support has tons of other tradeoffs and most manufacturers don't even try. I'd say Linux on the desktop is night and day from Linux on laptops.
I've been using Linux at work and at home every day for 15 years and I think in that whole time I've only ever had to reinstall the OS due to system issues once.
(I ran an Ubuntu system update on my laptop while on low battery, and it died. The APT database was irrevocably fucked afterwards. I'm not even sure it's fair to blame the OS for this, it was a dumb thing for me to do. I would also not be at all surprised if it's possible to fuck up a Windows installation in a similar manner).
Nowadays I run NixOS and yes that requires quite regular attention. But I've also used Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian extensively and all of them are just completely stable all the time.
(Only exception I can think of: Ubuntu used to have issues with /boot getting full which was a PITA).
I think it was Jorge Castro, the creator of Universal Blue, who called it the sysadmin culture. Most Linux distros are made by sysadmins for sysadmins, and you're expected to change and configure your system. I was a sysadmin myself for a long time. I used Slackware; switched from the 2.4 kernel to 2.6; tweaked CFLAGS on Gentoo; replaced SysV init with systemd; used PipeWire from the earliest versions - you name it, I did it.
Nowadays I use https://aeondesktop.github.io/ - an immutable system with Btrfs snapshots. Everything is installed from Flathub. The major roadblock is that much of the Linux world expects you to modify the system one way or another, so your mileage may vary. I replaced my printer because I did not wanted to install binary blobs from HP/Samsung.
> Perhaps I haven’t found «the right distro»
I’d look at immutable or image-based offerings, which aims at low or no maintenance: Aeon Desktop, Universal Blue, Endless OS. There are reviews on sites like LWN.net
What does that even mean though? Under what circumstances? In what way?
> working professionally on Linux for many years.
Not enough to say which distribution... or do you mean you do kernel development work?
Fully open source drivers using AMD video cards. It just works (minus the early x11/wayland debacle, I had to switch back to x11 for a while).
My read is they don't really give a shit about it anymore because the revenue comes from mobile/tablets. Same reason Microsoft is comfortable trashing windows... the revenue is coming from O365 & Azure now. The OS is a loss leader to sell those, and it definitely feels like it these days.
Once a company eats from the fruit of the "ads" tree... they tend to degrade into "awful" from the user side, because the user stops being the primary customer - the conflict of interest there is unavoidable.
Apple is tucking in... https://ads.apple.com/
I don't know what distribution you're using, but something sounds very broken if you need to do this.
Linux would be the desktop of choice years ago if anything from Adobe or Office actually worked on it, the two things that make the world go round. Valve has done their part to develop Proton, but there is no equal push for things people can't do work without.
That said, tech folk routinely underestimate how much they rely on their own technical skill. Try using Linux for a week without ever opening a terminal. Terminal is a "f this I'm going back to Windows" button for most people.
I think a lot of people would prefer to deal with the different inconveniences of Linux.
Plus I never been that FOSS religious, any system with some POSIX compatibility is good enough for me.
The amount of hate spewed at FOSS is astounding really. People are literally giving you shit for free. Chill out.
as pointed out by others and throughout the thread, anti-cheat is very restrictive inside a vm. even cloud streaming fails to support some popular titles from EA and R* due to this.
meanwhile, WSL exists, and now provides good gpu passthrough and has a higher success rate with the said permutation.
(cue superiority complex) I've been using Linux Desktop for over 10 years. It's great for literally everything. Gaming admittedly is like 8/10 for compatibility, but I just use a VM with PCIe passthrough to pass in a gpu and to load up a game for windows or use CAD, etc. Seriously, ez.
Never had issues with NVIDIA GFX with any of the desktop cards. Laptops... sure they glitch out.
Originally Wine, then Proton, now Bazzite make it super easy to game natively. The only issues I ever had with games were from the Kernel level anti-cheats bundled. The anti-cheats just weren't available for Linux, so the games didn't start. Anyone familiar with those knows its not a linux thing, it's a publisher/anti-cheat mechanism thing. Just lazy devs really.
(cue opinionated anti-corporate ideology) I like to keep microsoft chained up in a VM where it belongs so can't do it's shady crap. Also with a VM you can do shared folders and clipboard. Super handy actually.
Weirdly enough, MacOS in a VM is a huge pita, and doesn't work well.