Those of you who don't use Linux as a daily driver: why?
What do you need in Windows that is not possible in Linux? Its slowness to justify your 40-hour work week?
What do you need in Windows that is not possible in Linux? Its slowness to justify your 40-hour work week?
But in the past 20 years I tried using Linux on the desktop a couple of times.
It always ends the same way - out of the blue it refuses to boot. Of course there's usually a solution, but I just really don't like that my PC can just suddenly decide that I'll be troubleshooting for the rest of the day, usually in front of some very minimal "maintenance" CLI. And that's if I got the time - I may have to use my laptop for the rest of the week, now dreading the weekend instead of welcoming it.
Right now I'd have to do a bunch of research first. Would I still be able to play all the games I play with my friends once a week? I have 3 monitors, one of them has a different DPI than the others, did they fix that by now? I got a stream deck, will that be essentially useless? Is my webcam / mic supported? Do I need to learn about various audio architectures before I can ever use a mic again? Which ones of the dozens of apps I use every day can be made to run under Linux?
It'll probably take a 40-hour work week to get to like 90% of where I was on Windows, and then I'd consider myself lucky that I got that much to work at all. And then I'd start waiting for the first "troubleshooting day".
With all that negativity I have to also say that I adore Linux on the server. When all you need in terms of hardware is basically a CPU and any number of storage devices and all you get in terms of UI is SSH, Linux is far superior to anything else.
Distros like Arch, NixOS (my current laptop driver) or even Debian require a bunch of tinkering to get some things to behave properly.
Also, I get tired of all the tech "reboots", eg the 3 or 4 different ways of setting up network or DNS, pipewire vs pulseaudio vs whatever, Wayland vs X11, etc.
> the 3 or 4 different ways of setting up network or DNS, pipewire vs pulseaudio vs whatever, Wayland vs X11, etc
Sounds like a problem with your distribution. I've been on openSUSE Tumbleweed for years and I've never had to tinker with any of those.
In my case it stems from having to deal with multiple distros (and multiple generations of distros, eg 3 LTS Ubuntus) professionally.
In other cases, distros give a choice on which tools to use, usually because the new one is better (but also happens to come with its own new bugs).
Unrelated, I love that any "why aren't you using Linux?" question is actually almost always just a thinly veiled "let me tell you why you're wrong" plant.
That's actually the opposite of what I said. All those issues seem to come from the fact that the user didn't choose a distribution where it's "one-click install".
If you came to me and said "I tried Arch Linux and my installation broke after every update", I think it's fair to say that it's something you should've expected before you installed the distribution. It's unfair to make the comparison for stability between Windows and Linux if your only example is Arch Linux.
So yes, I maintain that the distribution choice is important and that if you constantly run into issues, it's probably a problem with your distribution (or your use thereof).
If there's one thing I'll admit to "doing it wrong" it's that I've been on a distro-hopping binge the past few years because I've (fortunately) not actually needed my laptop as a daily driver, so I've experienced a bunch of them and, so far, none of them have given me a compelling reason to stay.
Many have been interesting (particularly NixOS and Bluefin), some have been easy until you decide you want to get away from defaults (Mint comes to mind). All of them have had some quirks/issues.
I haven't tried a SUSE in probably 25 years so maybe that'll be my next hop.
Mind you, I've had Linux devices for 30 years and I was also a FreeBSD-as-my-main-desktop user for about a decade, so it's not like I'm not into this kind of tech.
I've tried about 4 or 5 distros before settling on openSUSE Tumbleweed (now on my 4th or so year). Linux Mint, Fedora, Kubuntu, Solus, Manjaro...
Ironically, I find Tumbleweed (a rolling distro) more reliable than all the others I've tried. I can't say it's stable per se, but if something breaks you can rollback very easily. Doesn't break often, though.
Easier to work on than Windows but my Linux pisses me off every day.
Problems with docks, forgetting all monitor setups except for the last dock (I use three, two at the office, one at home), Zoom ALWAYS having problems with screensharing, Network Manager issues since forever (can't VPN like a human being, have to use vpnc like an animal), etc, etc.
For example i think the first issue any new user will face is with many codecs not being available in the official repository distros, making various sites (and video plays) unusable. The solution to that one is simple, add packman, which is a community repository that contains all codecs - but IIRC packman is not mentioned anywhere during the install, it is something you need to search for (it is in the wiki). However, packman very often conflicts with the official repos when it comes to updates, making all GUI-based ones (that do not seem to handle cross-repo conflicts like zypper) pretty much unusable as they always give up in the presence of a conflict. And unfortunately some comments i've seen (mainly on Reddit) from people working on the distro seem to indicate at least a minor hostility towards using packman, so i do not see this being solved any time soon.
For an experienced Linux user this is a trivial issue, something that i doubt most (long time) openSUSE Tumbleweed users would even think about, but for someone new to Linux it can be a larger issue they wont find in distros like Debian (though they may find other issues :-P).
There have been other issues i had with openSUSE Tumbleweed, like -e.g- at some point after an update every 3D game had some significant input lag regardless of vsync state. I never solved that one, i just rolled back updates (snapper is great for that, but again an advanced Linux user feature) until at some point -months later- the problem stopped happening. Though now i have another issue where the X server randomly starts not updating the screen for random numbers of milliseconds - essentially it feels as if the entire thing is stuttering - but weirdly enough there are no CPU or GPU usage spikes and it doesn't seem to be relevant to CPU/GPU usage at all. If anything, it does not happen at all if there is some OpenGL or Vulkan program running in a window (so it doesn't affect games at all, just regular desktop use) and sometimes i just end up running vkcube in another virtual desktop (it doesn't matter if the output is visible or not) to avoid it. My guess is that there is some sort of scheduling bug in the modesetting driver as i never had that issue with the amdgpu driver (my guess is the modesetting driver doesn't get as much testing as the amdgpu driver on AMD GPUs), but the amdgpu driver causes the X server to hang after i suspend and resume my desktop since i got a RX 7900 XTX (it did not happen with my RX 5700 XT, which was rock solid), so it is choice between the lesser evil.
I get that's a car-aazy answer, but here I am.
> I so badly want to jump ship entirely, but there's several things holding me back. I do music production as a hobby and Ableton Live doesn't play nice with Linux. In fact it seems anything that is resource intensive without native linux support has some issues. I'm also an MS stack developer, so things like Visual Studio Pro aren't available (although I've been using Cursor IDE more and more these days). Lastly I have some games acquired through "the high seas" in which a work-around doesn't exist for compatibility.
The responses I got were to switch to different software. No, no, and no. I paid a lot of money for Ableton Suite and poured many many hours into learning how to use it; it's the DAW I prefer to use, I don't want to switch.
Having said this, I did try to dual boot recently with Linux Mint, and once again ran into headaches getting my Logitech mouse buttons to work.
This should generally work for games of various origins as well.
Extra mouse buttons should generally map correctly. For me, my Logitech MX Master 3 works under Arch. You may need to add udev rules if your mouse generally works but additional buttons don't seem bindable.
Try an Arch linux based distro, Omarchy or Manjaro. Most of these tweaky things will generally work better since you will be on the latest versions of software.
Objectively if you want to run desktop performance intensive software, Linux is not the primary place unless it’s AI/HPC or crypto related. Linux is a bad choice for gaming and people like you who try to pretend like it’s not are wrong and they should feel bad for spreading lies on the internet.
This depends on the game too obviously.
Though having a computer that actually.. just works can't be overstated.
I don't know what your requirements are because I can say the exact same for Windows.
> especially on laptops
I agree with this but only if you have Nvidia drivers.
But whenever I run into an issue after an update, I just rollback and wait for a few more days because it usually gets fixed. More often than not, it's not even an issue that deserves to rollback, let alone spend a whole evening troubleshooting.
Next time you try a Linux distribution, may I suggest openSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE Plasma?
I know this is a special case: hardware with specific Microsoft firmware. But I imagine that other people have other specific cases.
Also Lightroom and Fusion 360 don't run on Linux, fusion kind of works through wine but barely, and lightroom does not work at all.
Half the time I woke it from sleep the lockscreen would be broken and unresponsive too, requiring a reboot.
Overall its just too much time to figure out these problems, windows just works with very little involvement on my part.
Linux just has no upside over Windows in a dual boot context.
If you do dual-boot and don't care about the privacy of the data you put into Windows, I guess so.
I also personally keep no data on my devices, but if I did, having data that I need to reboot to get to would be friction I don't want.
Now I get your point. But still I would prefer to access my "personal" accounts from a device I trust.
Do you use a cloud service for your files?
Some stuff goes in GitHub, none of which I actually truly care about though.
I'm sure you'll groan. :)
But hey, if it's good enough for Cloudflare and Datadog (two past employers), it's good enough for me.
I also may be weird because I don't own any media and I'm perfectly happy with the streaming model. I enjoy not having the mental load of thinking about self-hosting and backing up terabytes of stuff.
I feel "lightweight" and I like it.
I have a Nextcloud instance for family to store files, though.
I have them on the separate nvmes and I disable Linux nvme before I boot into windows.
Last time I accidentally inserted encrypted pendrive I use in Linux when my windows was booted, it immediately offered razing the partition to the ground, creating a new one and quick formatting it. Very helpfully "OK" was preselected. If I was a bit more tired I'd be a bit sad.
Windows is intentionally hostile to anything non-windows. Enjoy your dual booting while it lasts :)