I said this in another thread but I set up a windows vm for someone because they needed it to run literally one scam tax software, otherwise they had no reason to switch back from Linux.
Even stuff like icue that uses windows drivers for peripherals will run in a VM with USB pass through.
And even then there’s a nice open source alternative for icue; you only need it if you want to edit hardware profiles.
US? Here in scandi tax seems to work well automatically, as in, we just log into the government website and click OK most years. Corrections are easy enough too, if you need it, but it’s usually not required.
Let me give you 2 big reasons:
- Linux does not work with the particular hardware or software you want or need to use.
- It’s a PITA to just do basic stuff.
Linux Mint is very simple to use these days.
That depends entirely on what you’re trying to do.
Most things work without hiccups.
Once again, that’s fine so long as you don’t need the things that don’t work.
But… I wanna play Fortnite.
I know it’s not a solution for everyone, but this is why I dusted off my Xbox. Fortnite on Xbox supports keyboard and mouse too
My reason is that VR gaming is not feasible on Linux, so I need to keep a Windows VM to play VR games.
why not?
Most VR headsets don’t work at all on Linux, and for those that do, most games don’t work anyway. For those that do work, they are unstable, and SteamVR itself is unstable and prone to crashes. Even when things work for a while, the frame rate is lower than on Windows, which is much more important for VR games.
So as much as flat games work perfectly on Linux nowadays, it’s just not there for VR.
I ask because it works fine for me
i never saw one to begin with
My daughter wants to play Sims 3 and use her Zune. I’m sure it’s possible to do both with enough work and time spent tracking down old utilities but how much time do I want to spend on that when I could just crank out a VM.
Did I just go back in time?
It’s funny to me that I couldn’t* even tell which post of mine this was a response to 😅
Yes, we are quite anachronistic in my house.
I’m surprised that Zunes even work anymore. I thought that Microsoft had that locked down so tight that it wouldn’t work without the Zune software on your PC (which likely hasn’t been updated since 2012).
I have multiple 120GB Zunes, one being my original and the others I bought for cheap when everyone was dumping them for their phones. They all work fine. You do have to track down the software; I keep the executable on my local file share. I just found my old brown 30GB Zune in storage. It has a bunch of local bands from the area I grew up in that are irreplaceable. Unfortunately the software can’t read it because the firmware is out of date, and it can’t be updated without wiping the music off it, which defeats the purpose. There’s a utility called zalternator that allows you to mount the zune as a disk but I haven’t been able to find a copy anywhere. I was going to make a Windows XP VM and install the 1.1 version of the Zune software and see if that works. I digress, they do work still, but it’s a bit of work. MS could have brought it all back after GotG3 and cashed in, but nope!
After the 3rd (iirc) Guardians of the Galaxy movie referenced Zune, they have had a small resurgence
Why is this thread getting flooded with people saying how they can’t use Linux? Isn’t that a little odd coming from a Linux community?
I don’t see why. You can be interested in Linux and like some aspects of it but still get annoyed at the blinkered zealots claiming that there’s no reason to use Windows.
There is no reason for some people to use Windows
I never had a reason to use Windows outside of job requirements. If I bothered I could find a job without such requierements.
Because on lemmy a post getting 100 up votes is enough to end up somewhere high on all, so your seeing people from outside of the Linux community in here.
That’s why I’m here, front page.
I would say “people don’t see the community a post is in before commenting?” But of course they don’t. :'(
People outside of the community are allowed to have a different experience than those within it.
Of course, but sometimes communities have a specific context that is important to be aware of. Just to give an extreme examples: Communities like unpopular opinion, that you should upvote if you do not agree with that opinion. Or circle jerks communities that the point is to be tongue and cheek about the particular subject. Or the nosleep community that, if am not mistaken the name, everyone has to interact with the post in character as if it was real.
The title of this post is “I Don’t See a Reason to Switch to Windows from Linux Anymore in 2025”, surely that invites discussion?
I read the combo before my original reply as “there is a bunch of people with no interest in Linux or that just hates Linux coming to a Linux community just to say that Linux sucks”. I feel like that if it was a more general technology sub it is fair, but in a Linux community is more weird, like people interested in Linux will discuss its shortcomings in a more positive way not just being dismissive. But I may be interpreting things wrong.
Hiya, intending to switch from Windows to Linux (it looks like I’ll finally be pulling the proverbial trigger this holiday season!) but I got here via Local sorted by Active on programming.dev. I am not subbed to Linux.
In other words, people outside the target audience are getting exposed to this post.
“Anymore”? I haven’t ever owned a Windows machine, and I haven’t used a Windows machine since 2015. I do have to fix a random issue on my wife’s work laptop about once a month.
I get that there are some things some people can’t do without and which keeps them in Windows: games, and requirements of their business (Word, Excel, PPT), but nothing about Linux has gotten significantly better in recent years. Incrementally, over there past decade, sure, but no big, recent change that might justify the title.
Except in the same way I’ve never needed Windows: in a very specific, individual way.
Coming from someone who just migrated myself and my family within the last year. Flatpaks were a big deal. I get people have their criticisms of it but wow, installing and updating apps is so much easier now compared to when I tried linux last and flatpak is probably the main reason why we are still on Linux today.
As a person who was all in on the AppImage distribution system (vs Flatpaks), I’m both sad and excited to see how well Flatpaks seem to be working out.
I guess they won that little competition in the end - which seems good, as there’s now a healthy standard we can focus on.
It’s genuinely great to now have widely accepted distribution independent packaging standards.
I’m glad Flatpack appears to be winning over the utterly horrible Snap, but I still don’t like it. I fear a day when it becomes difficult to get software that isn’t packaged in Flatpack, and I have good reason to: Ruby Gems. Long ago, I was big into Ruby, and was a major contributor (I authored one of the core standard libraries). Gems came along, and I hated them; eventually, for unrelated reasons, I stopped using Ruby altogether, and now when I encounter it, it’s impossible to use anything that doesn’t have Gem woven into it. Consequently, AFAIK, my current system has nothing Ruby installed on it - unless my OS package manager is doing it under the hood.
IMHO, Flatpacks are a really poor work-around for people supporting and using programming languages that don’t build software correctly. Rust and Go do it right: they build stand-alone executables. Flatpack adds literally no value to software built with these. They’re not the only languages that do this, but they’re the ones having their moment; any language that builds stand-alone, statically linked binaries would do.
I’m with you about AppImage; it would have been a better solution. Any packaging solution requiring extra software to be installed and a service to use is a bad design. I’d be objecting less if AppImage were emerging as the winner.
Incidentally, this is why Podman is superior to Docker: yes, you still need extra software to be installed, but there’s no system service with crazy, root-level permissions required to run containers with podman.
Okay, look, I don’t want to be a hater, I promise. I have a setup with a Linux dual boot in my computer right now. But man, the crazy echo chamber around this issue is not just delusional, it’s counterproductive. Being in denial about the shortcomings isn’t particularly helpful in expanding reach, if that’s what you all say you want.
So, in the spirit of balance, my mostly unbiased take on the listicle:
1 - Web tools get the job done: This is true when it’s true. I work with Google’s office suite, so yeah, many tools are indistinguishable. But not all tools are web tools. A big fallacy in this article is that just because a subset of items have embraced a solution doesn’t mean that the solution is universal. If you need to work with Adobe software you’re still SOL. MS Office still lacks some features on the web app. Some of the tools I use don’t work, so I do still need to run those in a native Windows app. Since I’m not going to switch OSs every time I need to push a particular button, I’m going to default to Windows for work.
2 - Plenty of distros to suit your preference: This one is an active downside, and it pisses me off when it gets parroted. When I last decided to dual boot Linux I had to try five different distros to find one that sort of did everything I needed at once, which was a massive waste of time. I’m talking multiple days. Yes, there are a ton of distros. I only need to use one, though. But I need that one to work all the time. If one of the distros can get my HDR monitor to work but not my 5.1 audio and another can get my 5.1 audio setup to work, but not my monitors, then both distros are broken and neither is useful to me. This actually happened, incidentally.
3 - Steam has a decent collection of Linux games, plus Steam OS: Yes. Gaming on Linux is possible and works alright, but it’s far from perfect. Features my Nvidia card runs reliably on Windows are hit-and-miss under Linux. Not all games are compatible in the first place, either. And while Heroic does a great job of running my GOG and Epic libraries, which are themselves just as big as my Steam one, it is a much bigger hassle to set up to run under the SteamOS game mode UI. Don’t get me wrong, this has made huge strides but again, I’m not going to change OSs every time I hit a compatibility snag. This is the least fallacious of these points, though.
4 - Proprietary choices on Linux: Yes, there are some. Like the web app thing, the problem isn’t what is there, it’s what’s missing. Also, as a side note, I find it extremely obnoxious when you have to enable these manually as an option in your package manager. As a user I don’t care if a package is open source or not, I just want to install it.
5 - Electron makes app availability easier. Cool. Will take your word for it. Acknowledging the ideological debate behind it goes to the same argument I made in the previous point. And as above, it’s not about what’s there, it’s about what’s missing.
6 - No ads in your OS. I mean… nice? I still get ads for my selected distro on first boot, as well as on web apps and notifications for installed apps. Beyond a few direct links to first party apps in the one page of Win 11’s settings app I don’t find anything in Windows particularly intrusive, either. Which is not to say I don’t dislike some of the overly commercial choices in Windows, they’re just not a dealbreaker… yet.
7 - Docker, Homelab and self-hosting: This is… off topic, honestly. I do self host some things. Even used Docker once or twice… in my NAS, where the self-hosting happens. You don’t need to switch your home desktop to Linux for that, and nobody is questioning that Linux is the OS of choice for a whole host of device ranges, from servers to the Raspberry Pi. Linux is great as a customizable underlying framework to build fast support for a niche device with a range of specific applications. We should be honest about how that breaks down if you try to use it as a widely accessible home computer alternative where the priorities are wide compatibility and ease of use.
Well, that became a huge thing, but… yeah, I guess I was annoyed enough by the delusion to rant. Look, I’d love to step away from Windows, and it’s a thing you can do if you’re tech savvy and willing to pretzel around the limitations in your hardware choices and your willingness to tinker… but it’s not a serious mainstream alternative by a wide margin. I wish it was. Self-congratulatory praise within the tiny bubble of pre-existing fans (and why are there fans of operating systems in the first place?) is not going to help improve or widen its reach.
Well, that’s your opinion. For others it works fine. I’ve been using Linux since 1995 and exclusively for both home and work for well over a decade now. And there are rarely issues these days. Teams is a piece of shit, but my coworkers on Windows agree on that. Apart from that everything works for me.
The only point I can really agree with you on here is Adobe products (and some other niche proprietary stuff like AutoDesk – I don’t consider MS Office an industry standard and if your job does I’m very sorry). And that’s just corporate lock-in, if you’re already paying hundreds of dollars a year to use those programs then yeah you’re gonna stay on the corporate OS.
Other than that, everything you brought up just isn’t quite accurate, or evaporates as you get more comfortable with the Linux ecosystem. The distro point, for example: every distro is just a starting point. Outside of some niche exceptions like Gentoo and NixOS that will radically redefine how you configure the system, any distro can largely be made to work similarly to any other. The major differences are just a) initial package set, b) the package manager, and c) the set of available packages. There is no one-size-fits-all answer to “what software should be on a computer”, which is why there are so many distros and spins out there.
I would say gaming is actually pretty close to perfect, provided you don’t play any of the games that have decided they just will never work on Linux – almost exclusively games that use invasive kernel-level anti-cheat software which I wouldn’t want to install on Windows either. There are a handful like Fortnite and Apex Legends which use EAC, which works great on Linux now, but the devs explicitly decided to disable it. Just like the corporate lock-in point, if you’re committed to those games stay on Windows. Heroic and Lutris take a few more clicks to set up than Steam’s one-click magic, but it’s generally pretty straightforward for any game with any popularity.
The point about ads is where I start to think you’re deliberately being obtuse. You think that, what, a splash screen telling you how to use your computer when you first boot it, and notifications from apps you installed, are advertising? And you find them similarly annoying as the actual sponsored content that shows up in your start menu, on the lock screen, in Edge, when you use Cortana… Not to mention the constant pressure from the OS to use those things? The only way I can interpret this without you just trolling is that you’ve spent too long in the Windows ecosystem and you’ve just adjusted to not notice how often it’s shoving something in your face.
Have used Linux for decades. Switched over full time a few months ago and have generally been happy but all your points are extremely valid.
Plasma will occasionally freeze the taskbar/desktop when it wakes up or I switch back to my desktop from work laptop using a KVM, effectively connecting a monitor.
For me that’s fine, manually open a terminal and kill the process so it’ll restart. For all but a handful of my extended friends and family that means the computer is broken until you log off or restart. It’s not a smooth experience.
why are there fans of operating systems in the first place
Operating systems are huge endeavours of engineering and design by entire teams of people over decades, which are used literally daily. Is that not enough of a reason for people to be fans of them?
Hah. Of the concept of operating systems, maybe. I can see one appreciating technical solutions and UX choices just as a matter of skill and execution. Actively fanboying for them? Getting into playground-style arguments where you root for your favorite? Nah. Seems super immature to me.
There aren’t even that many of the things anymore. It’s not like the old days, where every computer brand had their own. Where are the TOS fanboys these days? All them kids and their obnoxious modern software interfaces. That’s not a OS, it’s just graphics.
That is true for any fandom. Why is being a fan if flavour x software bad but being a fan of flavour x car or flavour x sports team is OK?
You are making a ton of assumptions about my opinions of car brand fans and sports fans that I am not ready to verify, friend.
Regarding Office, fear not! Microsoft is working hard to remove functionality from the Windows and Mac desktop apps, so soon we’ll have feature parity! See: “New Outlook”.
They’ve been pushing this shit for years already, nobody wants it, and they’re forcing it next year despite still not fixing shared calendars (among other things). New Outlook is basically just the web app in a wrapper.
I must be nobody, because I like the new Mac outlook. Granted it’s because I like the option to pin emails in top and I don’t recall any missing feature. Why the hate?
Granted I am used to the web version from the time I used Linux at work. The windows version seemed much worse in comparison
Personally I’m a fairly basic user, so for me it’s “fine”. But I also work in IT so I’m aware of some the problems preventing wide adoption across the org.
Shared calendars and delegation still don’t work correctly. It’s a dealbreaker for a lot of the admin assistants, who are generally the most advanced users.
On the Windows side, PST support is basically gone. Microsoft will claim they support PSTs, but their idea of “support” is to use old Outlook to manually copy your PSTs into server-side folders. That would be bad enough even if it were reliable, and in practice it would take eternity for some users to migrate all their stuff. We have nearly unlimited storage in O365 but it’s still a pain.
The only things I actually like about new Outlook are a couple UX changes that would have easily been applied to old Outlook if MS still gave a shit. Instead, old Outlook has been nearly frozen in time since…2016? Maybe 2019?
I mean, cool. Works for me. As soon as there is feature parity between their web app and their native app I no longer have a problem working with Office out of Windows. Not that I want to use Office in the first place, it’s just not my choice.
But right now I need to push a button that doesn’t exist on Linux, so I have to do it on Windows and that determines what I boot, which is the same situation from anybody who hates Adobe but has to use their software suite as well.
The only reason I have a windows laptop at home is because my employer forces me to. It’s true that Adobe and MS stuff doesn’t run or runs bad, same with some specific live service games. Personally I hate all of those and am more than happy to avoid em like the plague outside of work hours. They’re horrible inadequate tools and horrible predatory games. Everything I actually wanted personally, has so far run just fine for years.
Edit: Remembered one specific thing that does really suck on Linux, and that’s music production. That area is absolutely cluttered with proprietary shit. Even switching between windows and macos is a pain as many of the tools are just not compatible.
It works for me and has done so for almost 10 years.
Sure it won’t work for everyone but to say it isn’t viable isn’t true either. It depends on the person.
It’s not viable for the mainstream. “It depends on the person” suggests it’s luck of the draw, but the Linux desktop penetration is something like 1-4%, at best, and that’s inlcuding SteamOS and PiOS in the mix.
That’s not, “depends on the person”, that’s “doesn’t work for the vast majority of people”. There is a reason for that.
I agree with some of your points but in this one and other comments you are referencing “data” multiple times to provide validity for your opinions, yet you either fail to understand what the data is able to measure or you are using it dishonestly to further your argument.
A usage percentage does not provide reliable data about the usability (“viability for the mainstream”). There are too many factors at play distorting it to make a reliable connection between these two.
“It depends on the person” suggests it’s luck of the draw, but the Linux desktop penetration is something like 1-4%, at best, and that’s inlcuding SteamOS and PiOS in the mix […] that’s “doesn’t work for the vast majority of people”
The only way in which the percentage would be useful is, if you are implying that the other 96-99% chose to not use linux, because it doesn’t work for them, which is obviously not the case. Otherwise it is completely meaningless, as users were never exposed to linux, thus didn‘t have to make a decision, and thus didn’t deem another operating system superior.
There are a few objections along these lines in this thread, where the implication is that Linux is underused because it lacks awareness. Maybe it’s a generational thing? Linux has been around for a long time now, people are aware of it. There are multiple popular device lines out there that use it, several companies even put some marketing behind it.
I don’t know if you were there when Ubuntu first hit, but it was pretty widely reported. And that was twenty years ago. And of course Valve and Raspberry and Android and ChromeOs all were reported to carry flavours of Linux to the masses.
I mean, I’m sure a bigger, more coordinated marketing campaign would help, but it’s not a secret tucked away on nerdy cycles. I remember being in a college classroom in what? 2006? And when a professor didn’t know what Linux was the entire classroom laughed at them for reacting in disbelief at the notion that Linux was free (“so if something breaks who provides support?” I remember them asking, it was hilarious).
Look, it’s been a long time since you can just pull installation media of Linux from the Internet and just give it a try. Awareness is a factor, but it’s not THE reason Linux isn’t more widespread.
I disagree that the implication is only about lack of awareness. Further my point wasn’t that Linux is underused because of a lack of awareness. My point is that user popularity is not a valid measurement for usability.
Awareness definitely plays a role in user numbers but there are other more important factors. For example awareness of Linux doesn’t beat what comes preinstalled, this is a much bigger factor if we are talking about all desktop users in my opinion. Linux could have the best usability out of all desktop OS, most would still not change preinstalled OS for different reasons e.g. not knowledgeable enough, indifference etc… You might argue that if it was the OS it would come preinstalled, but then you would be ignoring the economic reasons that guide that. I still maintain that popularity of an OS is not a metric that can be used to infer usability. As long as there are different hurdles to getting to the actual using part, actual usability can‘t be determined by popularity.
On a side note about awareness:
Maybe it’s a generational thing?
It could very well be, or it could potentially be something geographical. Anecdotally in my friends group of university students(20-26year olds) in a non-technical-field, not a single Person (beside me) knew what Linux was, and most had never heard the term before I mentioned it in a conversation. Neither would my parents. So maybe not a generational thing. I think you might be viewing the extent of awareness from the eyes of someone broadly in the tech field?
“it’s not ready for the mainstream because it’s not mainstream” truly fantastic logic
That is not true though. The vast majority of people are people that don’t do much on their systems at all. Maybe look at Facebook or a few sites, write the occasional document or email and maybe play a few simple games. The type of people that have never heard of Linux or even know what an OS is let alone able to switch to another one. Those types of people will be perfectly happy on Linux if it came pre installed.
The people switching ATM and having issues are the highly technical people that have far more complex requirements and for those it does depend on the person and what they need to do.
The low percentage of users is not a sign of of it not being ready, just the sheer marketing and effort Microsoft has put into making windows the default option.
Again, same as the response above: that use case is covered in phones and tablets. Nobody who is just browsing the web is changing their entire OS. Especially if their main device is currently running Android or iPadOS/iOS. I am sure my parents could use Linux the same way they use their current device, but their current device is an Android tablet they know how to use and works just like their phone. I’m not switching them over for nerd bragging rights.
I mean, sure, they mostly would use a Linux device as a ChromeOS device (ChromeOS also at residual usage levels, incidentally), but it’s disingenuous to pretend articles like the one linked here are targeting those users, and it’s definitely not the focus for Linux desktop usage and development, either.
You just proved nous@programming.dev point. Android OS is a Linux kernel variant. Since it comes pre-installed, most users have no issue with it.
Man, I would love for desktop Linux to get to the level of Android when it comes to dedicated support. Are you kidding me? Hell, I was telling raging fanboy down there that I actually find desktop Android is a more reliable experience for light usage at this point. At least you have some expectation of universal app support across the ecosystem and the hardware comes pre-configured out of the box.
The problem is that a desktop OS is a much, much harder challenge. You’re not shipping a custom image dedicated to the specific piece of hardware and just ensuring all software runs in it, you have to provide a modular install that will not just adjust to whatever weird combo of hardware the user has at the time, but also support radical changes in that hardware going forward. It’s kinda nuts that computers ended up working that way.
But they do. And Windows handles it by way of being the default use case for all that hardware, so it gets all the third party support. And Apple doesn’t handle it because they ship their OS like phones ship their OSs, so they don’t have to.
But I’m telling you right now, the day the desktop Linux experience matches Android I will default to it, no questions asked, just like I did on my phone and on my tablet.
Well that’s unlikely to happen since Android is locked down spyware.
I’m not really seeing your point. You don’t have to use Linux and you are perfectly free to use whatever you want. The strange part is how you keep insisting that it is somehow behind. Linux for me is the only thing that works for me. Windows simply lacks a lot of the Linux feature set and apps. Plus I can’t stand ads, AI and other user hostile stuff. I straight up could not use Windows as it would slow me down.
Yeah I’m not going to lie that’s kind of a weird take.
By that logic captain crunch cereal isn’t ready for mainstream because it doesn’t have enough market share.
We may not be reading the word “mainstream” the same way here, because when you have a small oligopoly with one player at 75%, one at 15% and one at 4%… well, yeah, one of those is mainstream and one of those is not. That’s kind of how being mainstream works. Hell, that’s borderline monopolistic.
That’s not the same as a commodity where dozens or hundreds of options are available and compete on relatively equal footing. The comparison isn’t Captain Crunch versus Corn Flakes, it’s Coca-Cola versus Green Cola. I can find Green Cola in my supermarket… but it sure as hell isn’t the mainstream choice.
That’s different to “being ready for the mainstream”, though. Linux is not mainstream because it has big blockers that prevent it. The lack of readiness is a cause of the lack of mainstream appeal, not the other way around. For the same reason that Green Cola’s stevia-forward absolutely wild aftertaste is a cause of its lack of mainstream appeal.
I do realize not everybody will get this comparison, but if you know you know.
There are more people who only browse and use cross platform apps that don’t realise they could switch easily, than there are people for whom a switch would be problematic.
Windows has more supported software, but many people use a small range of common software. Gamers are just one niche. Just like you think Linux users are an echo chamber here, you are not considering the echo chamber of gamers you’re in that dont represent most windows users.
Honestly I’m waiting for a small company to license a Linux desktop to companies with support. It would need to be desktop focused and designed to be indestructible.
And those people have phones and iPads.
My concern isn’t gaming. If you do read what I wrote above, I actually say explicitly that gaming improvement is one of the more solid improvements on Linux recently.
The real problem isn’t PC gamers, who are typically tech savvy (although the issues with anticheat and display hardware compatibility are relevant for a big chunk of many millions of casual gamers). The problem is with people who use their PCs for work using unsupported software in Windows or Mac. Those people have no time for troubleshooting. One key piece of software doesn’t work or isn’t available? That’s a dealbreaker. One area of the setup has a problem that needs tinkering for troubleshooting? That’s a dealbreaker. I am using my computer to make money, I don’t have time for posturing. Either all the stuff I need works or it doesn’t.
Gaming is a problem, but it actually has a lot of people working to support it because at least one major company is betting on that to make money. Software and hardware compatibility doesn’t have the same corporate backing and it makes Linux impractical.
Spot on. And like ants to sugar you have 20 or so ACKTUALLYs responding to you.
I’m not reading all that- anyway
I switched to full-time Linux this year. One of my programmer friends, whom I never expected to embrace Linux, switched to full-time Linux and is not going back. Our libraries have switched to Linux on all user-facing computers. 2 of my e-friends have approached me about Linux. Another friend is, despite not being a computer nerd, going to switch because Windows is forcing him to- and that’s my point. It’s not that Linux doesn’t have deep flaws inherent to its development model, it’s that those flaws are now less significant than those of Windows. Nobody likes Windows 11 and it’s pushing people off.
Nobody even thinks about Windows 11, they just use it if it comes preinstalled. And from the data we have, the people that don’t like Windows 11 are more likely to be on Windows 10 (or Mac OS).
There is no mass exodus to Linux. No data point we have shows that. The biggest Linux uptick we’ve seen recently is related to Steam Deck, which is as much Linux as Android or ChromeOS are.
Desktop Linux is better than it was, and it will be closer to its competitors if people ever agree that one consolidated system to support features that have been standard for years is the way to go… but it’s not a mainstream option. Yes, even against Windows 11.
I didn’t imply a mass exodus, I’m just telling you that ‘linux has issues’ isn’t a good argument when both W10 and W11 also have issues of the same grade and that it is, in some nerd circles, pushing people into Linux because they’d rather deal with Linux problems than Windows problems.
But I want a mass exodus.
I want to be on the OS with all the support and the software and the compatibility and the patches and the drivers. I don’t want to be in the nerd corner manually troubleshooting every piece of hardware I want to use. More to the point, I have things to do and can’t afford that anyway.
And I would love if that OS happened to be free, open source and not trying to sell me crap.
Hey, if you’re happy with the nerd corner, then that’s great for you, but man, does it not line up with the headline of “I don’t see a reason to switch to Windows anymore”, which is what we’re discussing here.
Steam OS is just a Linux desktop with the Steam client in fullscreen. With two clicks you are on an ordinary KDE desktop. It’s not at all like Android or ChromeOS. If it were, Android would be a much bigger market for Steam to want to put their games. Everyone outside the US having their Steam library in their pocket would far outweigh however many thousand Decks they’ve sold.
Your ignorance on this tracks with the less obvious clues that you don’t know what you’re talking about, like your talk of “Linux games on Steam”. Linux games on Steam vs playing Steam games on Linux are two different things.
Thankfully Valve has done a ton of work to minimize that divide, although even the two checkboxes you have to tick on most desktop Linux installs to automatically fire off Windows games under Proton instead to filtering out only native Linux games are completely unnecessary and kind of annoying.
As for SteamOS, people need to get their story straight. Either it’s just Big Picture running by default over Linux, and then it’s just like having Steam Big Picture autolaunch on boot on a Windows handheld, or it’s a fantastic consolized UI that is the killer app that makes the Deck so much better than any other handheld.
Honestly, I lean towards the latter. SteamOS is great, compatibility aside. But if you do want to use it as a full Linux install then you have the same limitations you have on any Windows handheld, which kind of defeats the point.
🙄 but my Linux works so well on this embedded device, totally the same thing as a desktop!
Again, it’s just a computer. You can open it and replace parts. You can plug in a USB hub and a monitor and do spreadsheets with keyboard and mouse.
My favourite bit of weirdness from it being just a computer is that the screen is actually a vertical screen by default, so when you boot to the desktop, for half a second the cursor is rotated the wrong way.
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Like most articles on itsfoss, this one is only a notch over clickbait — a kernel of an idea not fully developed, written with the last minute energy of a student who pushed off the assignment until right before deadline — but I’ll be damned if that title isn’t beautifully turned.
I haven’t had to have Windows installed for more than a decade, but on recent occasion I’ve borrowed Windows and Mac computers for work. Those revisits didn’t give me reason to switch back, only to long for my lean Arch install.
As the next major version of Windows approaches like a Santa down the chimney with all sorts of “AI”-infested gadgets in his sack, I do hope more will make the more often mentioned switch to a Linux distro from the
advertising platformOS that came with their computer.But this headline deliciously reminds us that there is already a good chunk of users who made the jump, or are sitting on the dual booting fence, one boot (sorry!) on either side. This article is for them, yes, but also a gentle nudge for those still gathering courage.
At this stage, it is time to seriously change the perspective of that switch. The single reason for switching from Windows to Linux is … the utter state of Windows. Only the most blinkered of tech journos can continue to pretend that all is well on Windows, and not at all a sophisticated malware infection.
So bravo itsfoss for the clever barb, less so for the depth of the article itself.
I like the writing style of It’s Foss. They don’t make there articles dry and the tone is always positive and honest.
I think the Linux switch will heavily depend on your work flow and whether you like to tinker at all. I think It’s Foss is right to say that for some Windows is not an option. People like me use a lot of Linux tools and apps.
I agree that the tone of their articles helps push the quality above some other tech blogs. At the very least they’re sincere!
Windows is no longer an option for me either — I had made a conscious effort to use FLOSS apps even before switching, so there wasn’t much holding me back. And, as you say, once I’d started modifying system settings to disable Microsoft telemetry, I was already at Linux tinkerer levels…
Me neither, if anything it’s the other way around.
I wish. NVIDIA is still a buggy mess for me, and it seems that I am the only person with these issues, I see people praising NVIDIA on Wayland all the time now.
And VR is still bad on Linux.
I still love Linux, but I can’t use it for now. God i miss NixOS );
Last round of nvidia drivers made a mess, nix has a wiki on the issues on how to fix them until they are resolved.
I use X11 with Nvidia without issue. While I like the idea of Wayland, and it being pushed a lot now, it really remains beta software. While I think it’s good Wayland is being focused on and promoted by the distros and DEs, I think it’s a bit of a distraction from Linux as a whole.
I’ve had to switch back to X11 on both Nvidia and AMD devices due to bugs or compatibility issues in Wayland.
I agree about VR - I keep dual boot windows on my PC and VR is about the only thing I use it for now. But the result is I just use VR less.
I dual boot Windows for VR and Fusion360. Do alternatives exist? Yes, but it’s just not something I want to spend hours tinkering with for what I perceive to be a worse experience.
I tried ALVR but it kept disconnecting if it connected at all. VD on Windows works flawlessly every time.
I heard of an ALVR alternative made by Collabora, you could try it. Dunno if it’s good or not.
Thanks for the heads up. It looks like it’s called ElectricMaple. I’ll definitely give it a go, although having no updates on the main branch in 6 months doesn’t fill me with confidence.
I suspect your issues stem not from hardware incompatibility but outdated kernel/applications. If i had to guess you run one of the ‘stable’ distros. Which translates to dealing with bugs for longer.
How out of touch are you? Thry are using the most up to date repo.
Nix has the largest and most updated repo of all of them by a large factor according to live stats.
Tbh running AMD isn’t easier. For my workload I needed OpenCL and when it wasn’t installed by default, and wasn’t apart of apt package manager. I had to follow a script which involves amdgpu and only having OpenCL install if I wanted my machine stable.
Not the best experience.
For Nvidia some distros have installers built in to handle it. Like Mint where it’s one click and a restart and I have everything.
My problem isn’t installing, it’s after installing. Vsync has extra bad latency, frames are reversed, and more. And this is on 565, the latest version.
Games are unplayable.
The best way to use AMD GPU compute is to use containers. Keep in mind AMD only really has good performance on newer cards.
I never had any major issues with nvidia and VR is improving aswell
That just makes it even weirder, how does seemingly nobody have any problems on NVIDIA, except a small minority?
What driver version are you using?
I’m semi convinced the downloads don’t work right if you use the GUI distros like Mint provide for Nvidia drivers
My 2080ti had multiple issues until I installed a different version (same issues) and then RE-installrd the original drivers manually
When I updated later: same exact series of events went down except I was able to get it to install on the third try from GUI properly because I wanted to see how many tries it might take for the lulz
I think it’s older cards and some sort of glitch in the proprietary driver manager shit most people use by default
It can’t be that, I use NixOS. But yeah, GUI installers are buggy as shit for me too. And i don’t use an old card.
Nvidia is just universally shit :(
It’s mostly people on older cards with those problems I guess
Me for example on my GTX 1080 can’t use G-Sync (monitor blacks out in specific fps ranges). Nvidia “fixed” this like 5 times already. Newer cards work correctly I guess?
I also get graphical bugs in Wayland after Nvidias final Wayland “fix”. Other people somehow do not experience this so I guess newer cards work correctly (again)
Imo Nvidia just didn’t bother fixing this on their old cards so there is a minority left with those problems which can be ghosted safely by Nvidia because “those bugs got fixed”
It’s not uncommon for Nvidia to ignore their normal users since the most money comes from other companies purchasing their GPUs anyway
I have an rtx 3060, i don’t think that counts as old. I feel you, should have gone with AMD
I have an rtx 3060, i don’t think that counts as old
Huh, that just makes everything weirder
I feel you, should have gone with AMD
Yeah, this is definitely my last Nvidia card
I am using the latest proprietary driver on a gtx 1650 gpu and my distro cachyos preinstalls it
- Web-based tools get the work done: agreed,especially when half of these web tools are Electron like number 5
- Plenty of distributions to suit your preference: my personal favorite thing about Linux
- Steam has a decent collection of Linux Games (& you may get a console): True,And outside of steam will work nicely aswell (like touhou 6 for example like Proton/soda does a great job of running touhou 6 patched with THCRAP)
- Proprietary choices on Linux (Better late than never): True and maybe even custom versions of wine (like elemental warriors fork and vanilla wine but vanilla wine cannot run complex apps tho)
- Technologies like Electron make it easier for app availability: Controversial opinion but True
Technologies like Electron make it easier for app availability: Controversial opinion but True
I do agree, but currently Electron is great for apps the way Flash was considered great for the web. It solves one problem, but creates a bunch more.
In itself, Electron is pretty bloated*, but I don’t dare check how many versions I have installed because different apps have stuck with older ones. I’d really like to see a less resource consuming, backward compatible alternative to Electron.
* From my thrifty perspective of keeping older hardware alive with Linux, that is. On your high grade, best-of-class gaming rig, mileage will definitely vary.
It’s quite a storage hog having multiple 500+ MB electron blobs. Unfortunately that’s a platform agnostic issue now.
That is true, definitely not an OS exclusive problem!
yeah true its spinning a instance of the Chromium browser which is where the bloat is at.
@Sunshine Agree! Left Windows decades ago. Except for some ocassional office compability snafus and still poor gaming, it does everything I need and well.
Gaming is catching up. Valve has done a tremendous job getting games supported with Proton on SteamOS
There will always be a game that is not supported.
@naonintendois @craigcorbin catching up? From what I heard, Linux surpassed winlol in gaming for certain titles, but yes, if you take the average, there’s still a gap, and it’s becoming smaller and smaller
@bargo @naonintendois Awesome 👌
@naonintendois Cool. I’ll have to check that out. Thanks.
Still poor gaming? I have all of my games working with zero effort on Steam. The only exception are my sim racing peripherals.
@AstralPath Good news. I tried a few games in October but the graphics were off. I’ll have to give them another try. My machine is pretty old, too, so I may need to upgrade. Thanks
Definitely give it a go! My machine isn’t crazy modern by any means but it’s decent.
I can’t afford a broken system anytime and that’s why i can’t use linux. It breaks when you least expect.
I think it’s really funny when people say this because this is exactly what made me stop using Windows.
Funnily enough I could say the same about Windows
That thing has broken itself more times than I can count but my 2 linux machines (I still have 1 Windows machine) have been rock solid for 2 years now
The most only reason I have the last Windows machine is because I’ve been lazy about switching it lol
It really depends on your needs for sure. My linux systems have been rock solid. Been windows free for years. But i absolutely know people who have workloads that break seemingly weekly on linux. Like say example android emulation. Easy on windows, bluestacks. On linux? Lots of options from waydroid to blissOS on qemu but they break fucking constantly
While I can’t speak for others I use Waydroid and it is pretty solid.
When it works, it works great. But almost every update for me and my friend completely breaks waydroid and it will just refuse to boot stuck at the linage booting animation for eternity. Been trying to get him on stable android it’s the only thing he misses from windows but it’s been a chore
I I believe Linux appeals to a specific group of users. Personally, I rely heavily on Microsoft Office. Unfortunately, LibreOffice and OpenOffice don’t meet my needs because they often alter document formats when I share files across different platforms.
I rely heavily on Microsoft Office
Oh, boy. Get a better job.
You could use PDF
Yeah my Windows system has my Lightroom install and my Fusion 360 install, part of my laziness is that I hear that you can get both to work but I haven’t bothered to shift over and make the attempt at getting them to work.
The open source alternatives for those 2 just aren’t there for me.
You can get Fusion 365 working but it is a pain and I wouldn’t recommend it.
What you could do is setup Windows in a KVM VM with some sort of graphics acceleration. With guest addons it will be like native.
In my experience Windows takes way more troubleshooting and time debugging and fixing things than linux does. Theres a reason people use linux for critical servers, it tends to be extremely reliable once everything is set up.
Not to mention is is very easy to automate. You can deploy thousands of servers with a button and delete them all if you want.
Try Silverblue or Kinoite. They’re designed such that if you find an update breaks something, you can literally revert to the version before that update with a reboot. Application distribution through flatpaks offers pre-configured environments so it’s not a pain to get stuff running. Toolbox lets you dick around in isolation from the system. You’d really have to go out of your way to break something. Great stuff.
You also can revert transitional packages
