Comment by AnIdiotOnTheNet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AnIdiotOnTheNet | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

AnIdiotOnTheNet

> Non-evangelist here. I've been running Ubuntu as my daily driver for years, and mostly it just works. Not saying it's going to take over the business world, just saying it's not worse than Windows for me in any way.

Ok. But it is worse for me, and basically everyone else who uses Windows and says that Linux Desktop won't suit their needs.

I don't have a problem with people who use the Linux Desktop. Hell, if I bother to count all the desktops in my house then I use it on 4/5 PCs myself. What I have a problem with are evangelists who believe that anyone not using a Linux Desktop is doing so for stupid reasons. I can't even count the number of times over the past 2 decades I've had to listen to some Linux Desktop evangelist proclaim that there was literally no reason to use anything else, and then proceed to argue the case with no knowledge whatsoever of the needs of the person they're arguing against. It's these people who are being referred to when people talk about how the Linux Desktop community itself is the worst part of using the Linux Desktop.

It is a mindset I really can't stand about tech people: assuming that because something works for them that it therefore is the right choice for everyone else. That they are so superior to the rest of humanity that they can instantly understand everyone's use cases, and anyone who claims otherwise is just being a stubborn fool.

As a dev, but not really an OS power user: I've tried switching to Linux (ubuntu and mint) full time before and I really don't see any major shortcomings vs windows for regular desktop use - I know anecdotal evidence is pretty useless but it's all you really can get about this on here.

The only reason I'm not on Linux full time is video game compatibility.

I suspect no retail PCs coming with Linux preinstalled, and general lack of knowledge that it even exists or what it is is just as big (if not more) of a contributor to it's lack of users for non techies as UX is.

Proton is nearly there and integrating in to wine in to Steam.

However if the game in question makes use of the Windows Video decoding APIs results are currently very disappointing; the last time I tested it (which was earlier this month) I still couldn't actually play Obduction (the Myst like game) due to none of the puzzle explanations / video data that make up the story of the game running.

Yep, Proton is really good for lots of things.

Unfortunately, it's not a 100% complete solution. For example, no-one seems to have gotten Crysis (the original - and best ;) - version) to work, due to some kind of DRM thing in Crysis itself. :(

Proton is improving but a lot of games still don't work or have random issues.

And for linux, forget any game that uses BattleEye for anti-cheat detection.

Things have really, really come a long way. I've got Centos 8 running Steam, and huge swaths of my library just work. I was not expecting that.

I recently started to change over to linux for gaming and I was pleasantly surprised by how many games work through lutris.

It really depends on your dev workflow. If you're a Visual Studio user, you might find it quite jarring, but if you are, there are probably plenty of other reasons not to switch (it's switching away from your target environment).

For non-devs, it depends on how much MS infrastructure and solutions they've already adopted and have resources invested in. For a lot of companies, all that really matters is that they have hundreds or thousands of excel documents being passed around, and they can get better support and licensing through Windows.

Online versions of a lot of these reduce this to some degree, but most people would probably prefer to run Word and Excel natively than through an online app, even if they sync to shared storage and occasionally use those to view/edit something.

Add to that the fact that MS offers an end-to-end environment where you can buy something for whatever you find your needs are and find directions on how to integrate it, and there's really not much to compare.

For gaming, as long as you're not playing a Microsoft-exclusive game, Lutris seems to work pretty well for most stuff.

Anecdote: I recently purchased a laptop which came preinstalled with Windows 10. After trying 6 different Linux distributions -- Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, Manjaro, Suse, MX Linux -- and none of them working (issues ranging from the installer not working to being totally unable to boot after the install to frequent freezing), I gave up and have gone back to Windows. I think I could've made Gentoo work with enough effort, but I don't have the patience for Gentoo that I used to.

I mean, maybe my experience would've been different with a different laptop, or maybe I could've put more effort in, but this is what stops Linux from being a daily driver for me. I don't want to spend all of that time just trying to find a distribution that works, followed by even more time trying to keep it working.

I disagree with Windows' direction more and more. I very much want to like Linux and use it as a daily driver -- I tried 6 popular distributions trying to get just one to work! -- but the reality of it stops me. If this is what someone who wants to use Linux experiences, how will it ever be able to catch on for regular desktop use?

(The best experience was with MX Linux. The hardware compatibility wasn't ideal; installing proprietary nvidia drivers broke the boot; power usage was kinda poor relative to Windows; but overall, I was able to at least use it.)

New laptops (or hardware in general) need a while to get going in Linux, I've noticed.

My mom got herself a new laptop while she was here to visit me, I installed Ubuntu on it, Wi-Fi kept crashing. It wasn't really stable.

Due to an unfortunate chain of events, her laptop spent another half a year with me, before she came back over to pick it up. I wiped it clean, reinstalled Ubuntu again, and now everything was working fine.

This was maybe a year or two ago.

> The only reason I'm not on Linux full time is video game compatibility.

Have you tried Steam within the past 6-9 months with Proton?

Steam is bundling a version of wine that Just Works(tm) in the Linux Steam client. Valve is claiming responsibility for all the goofy workaround configuration that accompanies setting up wine for any given game.

Native Linux games are listed alongside emulated Windows only games. This includes dx11 support. In the past 3 months they apparently added DX12 support, but I haven't tried it.

dx9 games have better framerates in Linux than windows on open source drivers. (not Nvidia) dx10/11 games have comparable framerates. Can't comment on 12. Obviously opengl or vulkan games have no issues.

It does not help with multiplayer games that include draconian anticheat mechanisms. Nor does it help you with Ubisoft's or EA's stores, but fuck them.

> It does not help with multiplayer games that include draconian anticheat mechanisms. Nor does it help you with Ubisoft's or EA's stores, but fuck them.

Easy to say when the OS is more important to you than the games. But when games are more important than the OS it's a different matter. Most gamers just want to click on the game and have it run, they don't want to mess with WINE or proton or Lutris or playonlinux

> The only reason I'm not on Linux full time is video game compatibility.

Let me see if I can leverage this to help you understand why other people don't use Linux: WINE and Proton do a pretty incredible job of allowing Windows games to run on Linux, why isn't that good enough?

Now take whatever your response was, and replace "gaming" with "engineering", "audio production", "accounting", "video production", or whatever. You're viewing these things from a perspective of casual understanding and saying that Linux seems "good enough", but when you've got a deeper level of knowledge in something (gaming) you readily see the problems.

> Ok. But it is worse for me, and basically everyone else who uses Windows and says that Linux Desktop won't suit their needs.

I tried Linux a few times at home for 6m to a year, in this regard I missed nothing of Windows. However twice my instance was killed by Nvidia driver updates. People claim AMD has better drivers on Linux so I recently bought a Ryzen 7 3700x and 5700XT.

But after being burned and /never/ having anything similar happen on Windows, I can't bring myself to put Linux on my computer in fear of the same shit happening again...

The other elephant in the room is hardware acceleration in browsers. Fire up a Google Meet (or YouTube for that matter) on your distro of choice using Chrome/Chromium/Firefox and watch those cores shoot through the roof, the fans ramp up, and battery life nose dive. Now, try the same thing on Windows or macOS ... night and day.

The entire problem with Nvidia's drivers is that they aren't in the kernel, and the kernel driver API/ABI isn't stable, so potentially any kernel update could break the drivers.

That's not true for AMD on Linux. The drivers are in the kernel itself so any changes made to the kernel interfaces will include changes to the drivers that use them.

It's not the case for either vendor on Windows because Windows has stable driver APIs.

Basically, if you're on Linux and your hardware has mainlined kernel support you are not likely to ever have that kind of problem.

Thanks for the info! Appreciate it. Will definitely try out linux again.

There is one thing to know about though.

On Windows, since the vendors control the drivers, they can ship out new hardware support immediately.

On Linux, if the driver is mainlined, it's tied to your kernel. So if you have a really new graphics card you might need a new kernel also. If your preferred distro isn't Arch or Fedora (which have very up-to-date kernels), that might also be an issue. Debian Stable for instance might not have support for a new graphics card.

I use a linux desktop personally, but when you open up a powerpoint presentation or submit a proposal you need to be reaaly sure it looks as is intended. That means real powerpoint or word inside a real windows OS. It's unfortunate, but it's just required. I wish VMware hadn't killed the mode where applications looked like they were on the real desktop.

>It's these people who are being referred to when people talk about how the Linux Desktop community itself is the worst part of using the Linux Desktop.

Those people are trying to be helpful by educating people about alternatives since in their assessment it is a suitable replacement. Imagine if everyone whined about windows and also recommended windows. What would that achieve ? It's not like Nadella is lining up to listen to your whining either.

The license cost of Windows is less than 1hr of most people's time who post here. Focus on making Linux desktop a positive opportunity cost vs calling people whiners.

Also, Windows users tend to pay for software, Linux users less so. Guess which user base is going to be more valuable to 3rd party devs.

I have no dog in the game. Each person should use (or develop for) whatever they want. But coming to a thread that is critical of windows and still somehow bashing linux is beyond pointless. Either do something productive, or let others do their bit.

> Those people are trying to be helpful by educating people about alternatives since in their assessment it is a suitable replacement.

And that's an extremely arrogant mindset. They think because they know some tech shit that they understand all of that person's needs. I mean, they've converted an image from BMP to PNG in GIMP once, so clearly that's a suitable Photoshop replacement right?

> Ok. But it is worse for me, and basically everyone else who uses Windows and says that Linux Desktop won't suit their needs.

The irony is delicious.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com