I'm not sure if Linux will ever be pressure to MS for desktop Windows, though. Valve seems to be the most likely party to make it happen, but much like previous cases they're really carving out a new space for Linux to potentially hold a strong position in, not really competing on MS's home turf of desktop and laptop computers. Though, it is promising that Valve has built their commercial products on a fairly standard desktop stack, as it does seem to be leading to ecosystem-wide improvements that will still improve the situation for people who are willing to make concessions to use alternative operating systems.
Intel CPU, RTX 2070, 1440p@160Hz screen (with HDR, which doesnt work). ArchLinux.
What works:
- every game I want to play, from multiplayer shooters, over single player games, super old games, racing games, simulator games, etc. works. Some required going to protondb and reading there, applying the fixes.
- programming/work obviously is possible when it wasnt on windows (much better dev experience)
- I have a live boot arch iso USB because every few months, an update bricks my install. No idea why, but it does. I do read the update mails. The fix is usually to boot into the USB, mount my drives, chroot, mkinitcpio, and reboot. I suspect it's an issue with some driver or firmware.
- I use Xorg KDE Plasma, works very well. No visual issues. You dont have to switch to wayland ;)
Also, what distro to recommend? Honestly, I find Arch to be one of the best mixes of stable and reliable, which is odd. Somehow I find Pop!_OS and Ubuntu installs with fucked up dpkg issues that I can't even figure out, and sometimes I wind up just manually grabbing packages with apt download and forcing things into a correct state. I'd expect Arch with an inexperienced user to be worse, but multiple datapoints strongly disagree so far; the biggest issue with Arch has just been installs. If Arch were friendlier to install and had smoother updates, it would be hands-down the way to go for noobs. Archinstall is certainly a step forward from browsing the wiki on lynx, so there is that.
Feels, though, like there should be some immutable "just works" distro, that gives users a good mix of things. Like... give users an immutable base with image based deployment. Flatpak apps. Maybe ChromeOS crostini-style chroots to use a "traditional" distro? SteamOS is somewhere close here.
I like Linux, and I use only Linux on my own hardware aside from VMs (and practically only NixOS at that) but is it in a position to seriously eat at Windows? I think not in the desktop and laptop market. Hopefully some day, though.
I have had other distros break in more ways and more destructively than arch, for sure
I'm really curious about why this is. I have a desktop I update daily, a laptop I update very irregularly (once even went without an update for over a year), and a toy server that I update once a year or so (I know, terrible security practice). All running arch. And I think I've had two situations where something broke significantly after an update, and even those didn't require a live boot USB.
What desktop environment/window manager/compositor do you use? I'd guess one of those is the culprit if anything