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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I think Linux, at least if you have an AMD graphics card, has gotten a lot better as a desktop OS in the last decade or so.

For a long time you'd have issues with graphics drivers and wifi drivers and X crashing and PulseAudio just deciding to not work, but nowadays that really hasn't been an issue for me. AMD drivers are built into the kernel, Wayland is generally stable, Pipewire with Pulse works ok, and most Wifi seems to work out of the box for me. Hell, I have a network card in a desktop computer from the infamous Broadcom, and even that worked out of the box in Linux now.

I'm sure it's more difficult if you're a FOSS purist, but I'm not. I allow the unfree stuff in NixOS, and things have generally been pretty good, at least in my current laptop (ThinkPad P16s Gen 2 AMD).

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I was really cynical about this for the longest time as I had used Linux on and off since 2001/2002 and was used to just debugging shit to get it to work. I found it fun but I could never recommend it to anyone.

I built a PC last May thinking "fuck it I'll install Linux and see how long I can ride this out until I can't stand it anymore" and I'm totally sold. It supports my weird 5120x1440 monitor at 240hz with HDR. Most of my games work just fine without tweaking (namely CS2, Baldur's Gate 3, Hunt Showdown). The non-gaming stuff is all in a browser or works better on Linux anyway.

If you're annoyed by Windows it's honestly worth poking at Linux again.

(I'm running Bazzite with KDE.)

Yeah, it's hard to overstate how good Valve Proton has gotten. I almost never bother checking compatibility anymore, most Windows games, that I try to play just work right out of the box...sometimes even better than their native Linux versions.

Granted, I don't generally play the new AAA games, so I might not be the best litmus test for this, but between Wine and Proton, I haven't had a ton of problems with compatibility. I also don't do professional video editing, or photo editing, or music editing, so it's possible I'd have different opinions if I did.

I've been running NixOS for awhile, and I'm at the "I'm annoyed this isn't the default for everything" stage for it now. I have no plans on going back if I have any choice in the matter.

Haven't personally had issues with WiFi drivers since 2010 on any of my many Linux computers, graphics cards as long as you avoid NVIDIA work flawlessly, even with NVIDIA as long as you don't need their closed source driver. Pulse Audio though an abomination I hate with the burning heat of a thousands suns.

Since I started using Pipewire, audio has mostly been "just fine" for me.

I actually have gotten Nvidia cards working with the closed driver on NixOS, but it took an entire weekend of whack-a-mole. It works mostly fine now, but man it was a huge pain in the ass. I should have bought an AMD card, but when I bought the Nvidia card it was specifically for Stable Diffusion and most of the documentation I could find at the time for that wanted CUDA.

Not trying to self-promote too much, but I wrote a blog post explaining how to get it working if anyone needs help: https://blog.tombert.com/posts/2025-03-09-egpu/ (There are no ads or anything, I don't make any money from this, FWIW).

Last time I had NVIDIA on my daily driver the proprietary driver would work fine until the next kernel update then would boot blackscreen. The only way to fix it was to boot into single user mode purge the driver all of its configuration file, and the NVIDIA configuration utility install the open source driver reboot then reinstall the proprietary driver then it would work fine until the next time either the driver or the kernel updated at which point I would have to do it all over again.

Yeah I've been using an HP laptop with AMD chip and integrated graphics loaded with Pop!OS for an internet machine + some really minimal steam gaming (older 2D titles) and it's been effortless. The only shortcoming I've run into is DRM-equipped sites like prime video refusing to play nice.

Yeah, the DRM stuff has been irritating for me as well. I've spent more time than I should trying to get a SteamOS box to replace an Nvidia Shield TV, but no matter how many variables I tweaked I couldn't get any of the big streaming services to do better than 720p, and a crappy version of 720p at that.

But if you can forgive that, I think desktop Linux has come a long way. I'm admittedly a software person, so it might be a bit easier for me than average, but if someone could convince Microsoft to port over MS Office to Linux (which I don't think is likely), I think I could even convince my parents to use something like Ubuntu or OpenSUSE.

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