There Has Never Been a Better Time to Switch to Linux
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When my 70+ mom needed a new computer, I put Ubuntu on it and turned on unattended upgrades. I do SSH into it every 6 months and update her Zoom .deb manually (I guess there's a ppa for that?). She uses it every day and has had no problem.
I'm really impressed with the Linux experience. Thanks to all who have contributed!
- The best developer experience with the most hackable toolkit
- A great gaming experience that plays the vast majority of titles on Steam
- A "dumb by default" non-cloud enabled workstation
- IMHO the most well-design, does most things "vanilla" desktop environment with GNOME.
The tradeoff is
- You will need to learn to update your system and learn some new things. Things will seem difficult till you learn how they work.
- There are gaps in third-party applications (primary, video editing is sub par). The smaller apps you pay for now, you'll end up making scripts or small pieces of software to replace. Eventually this will be freeing, but it's a learning curve and you'll initially miss some things (Alfred, Screenshot tools...etc).
- Customization comes with a larger maintenance cost.
- Your phone is not really connected to your PC, and syncing systems is all manual. If it's not web-based, that app you like doesn't probably doesn't work.
I switched 3 or so years ago and it's been a revelation. Although I'd been using computers since the 80s I never really understood how an OS works. While you could argue I never needed to, I find myself much more digitally literate now. After a hump year, I mostly tailor the OS to what I need it to do, and it feels like an extension of me.
I wrote a blog post about this more generally here. https://www.davesnider.com/posts/im-a-linux
Not exactly sure what you mean, but KDE Connect is amazing for connecting my phone (and any device that has the app, including other PCs) to my PC.
Does your setup:
1. Back phone things up to the PC wirelessly? Not just photos but app data, documents, drawings, etc. Note: must all be in original quality/format
2. Allow your PC to update an app itself (in a way that can be scripted)?
3. Allow copy/paste between the desktop and the phone? (Though with LocalSend being decent this is less and less relevant)
4. Transfer edit history for photos, videos, and audio?
5. Allow you to install and debug your own apps wirelessly? (ok, this one is a gimmie bc linux to android does this natively through adb)
6. Allow your phone to mount drives from your PC so that you can access and transfer files wirelessly?
2. Not sure, but you can setup scripts and run them. I only tried running scripts on my PC via my phone.
3. You can send the clipboard to another device.
4. Not sure what this means.
5. Not sure.
6. Yes.
Depends on what you want to achieve, in general and day to day. In a lot of cases, either of these are dealbreakers on the long term. You can say 1001 bad things about Windows, but you can safely update, and run most your apps from 20+ year ago just fine, including "customizations" (shell scripts, registry entries etc). And handle all the hardware you throw at it. On a Linux Desktop you will have 100% control, but at many orders of magnitude harder learning curve and maintenance.
However bad the path is it goes down currently, Windows is still the best middle way between macos and Linux.
Even things like logging into google with an already logged in account (click on your face) is not intuitive they press instead the "log in with account" button and retype the credentials.
All of this to say, there might be challenges with Linux. But then the opposite it's also true, windows restarts the computer in your face without caring
> [Hardware on Linux] have mostly become just plug-and-play. That favorite software [and game] of yours probably either works natively on Linux nowadays or there are alternatives/workarounds to make it work.
> But this is not an article about Linux and its current features so far. In fact, what should be pushing you towards Linux should not only be the features it has to offer nowadays. Instead, it should be the grim future with Windows that you should try to escape from.
> Microsoft just announced [...] “Recall” has been added to Windows which takes screenshots of your screen every few seconds so that you can ask the AI model about your previous activities anytime you want.
> This is not to add on some other spyware-like “features” in Windows 11, such as ads being displayed right in your start menu or File Explorer according to your user metrics.
I have more faith in Microsoft to stop breaking Windows than on the Linux community to fix any of their desktop distros and environments.
At least if some Linux distro includes something that users consider bad for their privacy, you can choose among several alternatives, including direct forks. That is an actual strength of that approach.
I think Microsoft will change their minds faster than Linux will fix its other problems.
All of the power I need, fanless, insane battery life, unix shell.
I know I can put Asahi on it, but I also know there are still issues around webcam/graphics drivers (I spend a lot of time on video calls)
If there was something with the form factor of a MacBook Air I could put Linux on, and it would run as well, I wouldn't look back.
The closest is the Framework laptop, amazing bit of kit, but still a fan, and worse battery life.
Second-best is a mobile-first portable computer, that you don’t have to worry about having it plugged in except for an hour or so every ~day of usage.
These things don’t really show up in any kind of stats but I can say that they change the definition of computing for humans (vs. data centre servers, etc)
Not what I'm looking for personally in computing so no idea if either are what you are looking for.
Yes LTSC is not "legal" to use as an ordinary end user but MS doesn't care about piracy at all.
Honestly MS doesn't care about piracy at all. They rather have you pirate Windows than lose you as a user to another OS.
My point is roughly there isn't even a remotely comparable bit of software to the stuff built into macOS on Windows or Linux (calendar, contacts, notes, reminders, mail, maps).
I've run my entire life, business and academic study with this software for over a decade. Works across my computer, ipad and phone. Works offline for days at a time. Never goes wrong.
(I have Apple ADP turned on, so all my keys are on-device only. I also have period of up to 2 weeks where I am completely disconnected from the Internet)
Geary seems to be almost exactly what I need UI-wise, but they do not support 2FA.
Funnily enough Microsoft says it will replace Mail with bloated Outlook, so bad decisions are everywhere.
If you read to this point and wanted to say "but on Mac" - that one killed itself for me by disallowing iCloud login in Virtualization Framework-based VMs and by extension any dev tools that require it. It also disrespected me as a user by not bothering to say that outright and wasting a couple hours of my time chasing "Something went wrong" around.
What is the smallest unit of time?
Does it even make sense when you get there?
Now I've got a headache.
Mostly it's been a good experience. I can still open all my old documents, and you can't even tell the difference when browsing. There are some Windows only apps that I relied on, including a couple I helped develop - I haven't figured out how to deal with the loss of those yet.
Multi monitor support with two different resolutions just doesn't work in too many scenarios.
I have a long bullet list of issues but that one was at the top.
What WM or DM were you using?
Here's your problem. Going for something slightly more offbeat and less supported is going to produce problems. Last time I looked it was still running on X, so it's never going to be a great experience.
However, it is a crap shoot that an application will 1. choose the correct monitor / remember the chosen monitor after reboot 2. render text in the correct resolution for the monitor 3. correctly render in the new resolution when dragged across monitors 4. correctly respect the "primary" monitor setting instead of using the "first device in the list"
My most recent experience is using Linux Mint Cinnamon
The same hardware on Linux works most of the time right out of the box from the live distro, the problem I have seen is when you adjust the layout and resolution using the GUI, it can help if you close the settings GUI after each little change to allow the displays to adjust before opeing the GUI again for the next tweak.
Either way, rebooting can be the major factor if you're trying to switch cabling. Even though you can generally plug & unplug VGA or HDMI cables safely while in use, if there is more than one display output on the back of the PC, the ones which have nothing (recognizable) plugged in when you power up can be very likely to be non-functional until you reboot.
I also had to constantly reset my screen layout whenever I would turn on/off my tv.
I’m back on Arch and building my DE from scratch in Hyprland. At least I can tell it in text exactly how to lay monitors out, identify them by name or port, and know that it’s going to follow that layout even if one is disconnected/reconnected
For years the audio IC's have been very flexible, with the analog I/O pins re-routable by software (expected to be drivers) to any of the 3.5mm jacks that may be scattered on the outside of the PC, along with any aux connections that may be merely an unused internal motherboard socket.
Otherwise you wouldn't be able to use a single socket for either speakers or a microphone, and have the system figure out which one it is when plugged in. And things like that. When they first color-coded the 3.5mm analog I/O's it was the 20th century and it was still a hard-wired approach.
With a modern motherboard the same exact board can be connected to a cabinet having 2 or 3 of the 3.5mm, or 5 or 6 and configuration could be selected (sometimes in advance) by specific factory drivers, accessible settings in a GUI, or both.
Windows isn't perfect any more by any means. Windows 7 or XP still works ideally with the original Dell drivers, but with W10 nothing ever comes out of the green 3.5mm, you have to plug speakers into the black 3.5mm. At least you get stereo then, but could select mono from Windows if you wanted to.
Using the newer Mint, you only get output from the green 3.5mm as expected, but usually only the left speaker gets any signal. Although sometimes you can set it for 5.1 surround and the whole pair of speakers will respond as the center channel. Depending on what you were doing with Windows before you rebooted to Linux, and whether or not you cold-power-up. But there is no provision to set Mint for mono at all which would be the perfect workaround.
That would get us by until the flaws in the audio get corrected. It would be good to have user access to the pin-to-jack hardware configuration too, but the inconsistency could be a sign of deeper defects.
Didn't used to be this bad.
But the offer of long battery, silent and powerful computing device is still in their hands.
Anyway, the reason in the near future will be the AI intrusive implementation on both leading desktop platforms, so Linux will continue to be the choice of privacy conscious.:)
It was Slackware. I've used all sorts since: redhat, Gentoo, yellow dog, Debian, arch. Never looked back.
A job I had once required windows, and I tried WSL, but it felt ... so limited.
So, I went round and they had a front room full of a whole crazy mix of stuff. Some Next machines, Macs, AUX, Sun, BeOS, everything, on all sorts of crazy hardware.
We got chatting, he handed me a Yellow Dog CD and told me to install it and see what it's like. That led to SuSE 6.4 then 7, some BeOS, Gentoo, Ubuntu, etc. Had to purchase the SuSE CDs early on because on 56k couldn't download the ISO and didn't own a CD burner anyway.
I would love to use Linux + Framework Laptop (awesome hardware). What I need is some suggestions for a distribution that just works. My workload is development plus lots of web browsing (100+ tabs).
The best Linux experience remains classical desktops.
But then I never multi-monitor. But everything these laptops had, was working without a hitch.
Toshiba, Dell, IBM, Lenovo, Asus, HP.
If you don't need cutting edge software packages and run older hardware, I've been very happy running Debian for a long time.
This is purely my impression, I have not run an apples to apples test. I just see sleep and hibernation and so forth as things people still tend to struggle with, especially if they are trying to get good battery life. As with anything on Linux, you can often make some real gains with sufficient research and time.
Basically it seems like Linux will always be several years behind on something and so it’s most likely to gain popularity when Apple and Microsoft stop figuring out how to make new laptops interesting.
typo I guess, it was in 2020. (Last Windows I really liked was Windows 2000 btw. =)
In fact since Windows keeps changing things, I usually configure Linux to be more like (old) Windows than Windows is.
This is a conceptual idea however - no, I can't name any specific free software. Perhaps it is yet to be written.
The inability to even utter that phrase is the primary ddemonstration of the modern corporatized linux environment...
p.s. been using a linux, fluxbox desktop for ~25 years
Lucky we are on linux, so i was able to put it in docker and render the window back to the host (amazing!)
- way too much people developing on Docker and co, thinking it's a good idea wasting storage and running binaries made by someone you do not know on internet instead of pushing declarative systems like NixOS or Guix System;
- an immense repo of unfinished apps/webapps designed in Silicon Valley berserk mode without any real idea why;
- more and more commercial parasites in major distros.
So well... As a decades old GNU/Linux user, started from 2.2 in early '00 and back then tried to switch back to FreeBSD, than switched to OpenSolaris, IllumOS and hopeless again with GNU/Linux I think today is a very bad time to switch to GNU/Linux but if the user came from any other OS GNU/Linux is the sole usable option left...
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