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Comment by akgoel | Hacker News Reader

I’ve tried to switch to Linux and Mac several times over the past 30 years. And once I get it in front of me, I’m struck with a feeling of “now what?”. All that effort and no upside.

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Aye, I must have tried it ten, fifteen times over the years before it stuck.

All I'd say is it's pretty easy and more or less "just works" these days. I remember fighting over basic stuff like second monitors, but for the most part, all the issues relating to Linux itself are solved. A DE like Gnome is simple, clean and easy to use. Gaming totally works thanks to Steam.

The only hurdle is if you absolutely need a full Office or Adobe install. For most of us, that comes with our work machines. For me, Linux is perfect for my personal rig.

Wouldn't dream of going back.

Obviously your experience is your experience, but I just cannot understand this. Been using Linux comfortably for 5 years now. The only time I touch Windows for personal use anymore is inside a GPU-passthrough VM for gaming, though lately I've been considering switching to playing the games through Linux because it's gotten so good recently. Actually, many titles get better performance in Linux than Windows now, ironically.

I think the fact that you are able to even setup a VM with GPU-passthrough probably means your knowledge of using Linux is far greater than most coming from Windows and Mac. I'm someone that uses Visual Studio for work often, but the fact that you can do GPU-passthrough gives me some hope that I could switch to Linux full-time, and make it work. Even though your comment was about games, I appreciate that you posted and gave me some hope. Most of the software I write now in .NET is able to run on Linux, but the specific CMS I use is still tied to MS SQL Server for production. I can use SQLite for development, but moving from SQLite to MS SQL Server is quite a big extra step. If I can use Visual Studio and MS SQL Server (Express) in a VM, I can do most of my daily tasks directly in Linux.

If you don't plan to do anything graphically-intensive, you don't even need to pass a GPU through. But GPU passthrough is the smoothest experience by far. The downside is that you have to switch display inputs back and forth between passed-through GPU's output, and host output, if you're using the same monitor. And then the easiest way to share a keyboard and mouse between the two is a cheap KVM.

The biggest things are that you probably want a newer kernel, and your motherboard needs proper IOMMU layout to isolate the GPU. This is "the" tutorial if you're interested:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF#Wi...

That may remain true, but at some point the downside of Windows will become large enough that what was once a lateral move will become a step up.

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