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Linux is good now

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Re: Linux is good now

#12
post #5

Linux desktops have felt flaky for me for a few years now. I’m trying to figure out how much of that is bad choices vs real problems. Ubuntu’s default desktop felt unstable in a macOS VM. Dual-booting on a couple of HP laptops slowed to a crawl after installing a few desktop apps, apparently because they pulled in background services. What surprised me was how quickly the system became unpleasant to use without any o…

> Does this line up with others’ experience? Not really, no. What did you install that slowed things down? > If yes, what actually works long-term? Plain ordinary Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, running on an ancient Thinkpad T430 with a whopping 8GB of RAM and an SSD (which is failing, but that's not Linux's fault, it's been on its way out for about a year and I should probably stop compiling Haiku nightlies on it). Can you give…

Edited: My bad, I misread, started ranting about Gimp, how terrible this software was

Re: Linux is good now

#13
Linux is a viable alternative to Windows/MacOS if you stand back and squint.

Not up close due to the vast number of inconsistencies.

This could only be fixed by a user experience built from the ground up by a single company.

Re: Linux is good now

#14
post #5

Linux desktops have felt flaky for me for a few years now. I’m trying to figure out how much of that is bad choices vs real problems. Ubuntu’s default desktop felt unstable in a macOS VM. Dual-booting on a couple of HP laptops slowed to a crawl after installing a few desktop apps, apparently because they pulled in background services. What surprised me was how quickly the system became unpleasant to use without any o…

With debian and KDE (both personal preference), but no snap or flatpak, it works wonderfully. Power/sleep-management has become better than a default windows install. All hardware, including the fingerprint sensor, just works.

Re: Linux is good now

#15

I made the move about a month ago to bazzite on my desktop with an nvidia graphics card. I still have my windows drive for when I need it but that's pretty rare. Bazzite isn't perfect but we've reached the point where the rough edges are less painful than the self sabotage microsoft has been inflicting on their users in recent versions of windows.

This is the key. It’s not that 2026 is the year of the Linux desktop, but rather 2026 is very much not the year of the Windows desktop.

Bazzite is rough in the way that all distributions are, but I imagine Windows 11 is rougher.

Re: Linux is good now

#16
post #5

Linux desktops have felt flaky for me for a few years now. I’m trying to figure out how much of that is bad choices vs real problems. Ubuntu’s default desktop felt unstable in a macOS VM. Dual-booting on a couple of HP laptops slowed to a crawl after installing a few desktop apps, apparently because they pulled in background services. What surprised me was how quickly the system became unpleasant to use without any o…

The only real obnoxious slow-down daemons I'm familiar with are the "system indexing" things (GNOME Tracker, KDE Baloo) -- highly recommend disabling them.

Re: Linux is good now

#17
It's good until you boot your system and end up with an unrecoverable black screen that meeses your day of work for no good reason. Linux is free if you don't value your time.

Re: Linux is good now

#18

It is good, and for 99+% of use cases for 90+% of users (who mostly use nothing but the browser), they will hardly even notice a difference, besides the lack of obnoxious, instrusive MS behavior. However, despite really, really wanting to switch (and having it installed on my laptop), I keep finding things that don't quite work right that are preventing me from switching some of my machines. My living room PC, which…

There are plenty. I run only Linux at home but CAD software for hobbies (Fusion 360), most games that want kernel level anti cheat, some embedded DRM-enabled media, all sort of just fail. Other things, like GPU tuning or messing with your displays/drivers are harder than they should be. My Bluetooth earbuds just don't work with my Linux machines.

Re: Linux is good now

#19
post #15

I made the move about a month ago to bazzite on my desktop with an nvidia graphics card. I still have my windows drive for when I need it but that's pretty rare. Bazzite isn't perfect but we've reached the point where the rough edges are less painful than the self sabotage microsoft has been inflicting on their users in recent versions of windows.

This is the key. It’s not that 2026 is the year of the Linux desktop, but rather 2026 is very much not the year of the Windows desktop. Bazzite is rough in the way that all distributions are, but I imagine Windows 11 is rougher.

I tried bazzite but ended up on cachyos. The whole layered / immutable thing got a bit annoying. I'd rather just run snapshots and manage my packages more traditionally

Re: Linux is good now

#20
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does this line up with others’ experience? Not really, no. What did you install that slowed things down? > If yes, what actually works long-term? Plain ordinary Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, running on an ancient Thinkpad T430 with a whopping 8GB of RAM and an SSD (which is failing, but that's not Linux's fault, it's been on its way out for about a year and I should probably stop compiling Haiku nightlies on it). Can you give…

Edited: My bad, I misread, started ranting about Gimp, how terrible this software was

GIMP is definitely not a daemon; I don't think it even has a run in the background mode. Maybe something with snaps?
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