I switched in 2020. I run Fedora and Arch. I don’t miss MacOS at all. The last Windows I used was 8, so my opinion is out of date, but yeah… I don’t miss Windows, either.
Linux is good now
141–150 of 1001 posts
Re: Linux is good now
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Proton for games had changed things dramatically. Gamers can legit switch to Linux with barely a second thought, without being technical. Linux/x86 still is poor for battery life compared to Apple.
Most people don’t care about gaming, so they shouldn’t care about proton. What changed recently for those who don’t care about gaming?
I’d argue the majority of casual online PC discourse is driven by gaming. By the numbers LTT is the largest PC/IT/consumer computer YouTube channel and the majority of their content is focused on gaming.
That’s my impression anyway.
Re: Linux is good now
#143Linux 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.
Spoken like a true Windows UX aficionado. Who doesn't love multiple system settings apps, a mix of minimal new context menus and overcrowded legacy context menus just one more click away.
Re: Linux is good now
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
nvidia
Right, it IS nvidia's fault at this point, but its still like what? 90% of the consumer GPU market.
They're also selling $3000 nVidia AI workstations that exclusively uses Linux. But what if you want to watch an HDR video on it? No. What if you want to use Google Meet on Chrome/Wayland? It's broken.
Re: Linux is good now
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
But what about laptops? I don’t use desktop machines anymore (last time was in 2012). Apple laptops are top notch. I use ubuntu as vm (headless) for software development tho
Works well if the laptop has hardware designed to support Linux. Framework stuff is great, for instance.
I have the HP Zbook Ultra G1a. AMD 395+, 129GB RAM, 4TB 2280 SSD. Works great with Ubuntu 24.04 and the OEM kernel. Plays Steam games, runs OpenCL AI models. Only nit is it is very picky on what USB PD chargers it will actually charge on at all. UGreen has a 140W that works.
Updated Mesa to the latest and the kernel too.
Re: Linux is good now
#146I think its interesting that mainstream PC gaming press is now talking about Linux. We have the benchmark Youtube channels doing some benchmarks of it as well and plenty of reports of "it just works", which is pretty promising at least for the games that aren't intentionally excluded by DRM. For me its still controllers and equipment incompatibility due to my VR headset and sim wheel/pedals setup, I use Linux everywh…
The last remaining roadblock is kernel level anti-cheat frameworks. Pretty horrible technology, and unfortunately a good majority of the gaming industry by revenue relies on it.
Another unresolved roadblock is Nvidia cards seriously underperforming in DX12 games under Proton compared to Windows. Implementing DX12 semantics on top of Vulkan runs into some nasty performance cliffs on their hardware, so Khronos is working on amending the Vulkan spec to smooth that over.
Re: Linux is good now
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Linux kernel has eBPF now so if they wanted to start spying on everything you do they can just do it.
> The Linux kernel has eBPF now so if they wanted to start spying on everything you do they can just do it. Sure, except that anyone can just compile a Linux kernel that doesn't allow that. Anti-cheat systems on Windows work because Windows is hard(er) to tamper with.
The interesting solution here is secure boot, only allow users to play from a set of trusted kernels.
Re: Linux is good now
#148What makes Linux a viable desktop for so many people now is the fact that they don’t need to run very much software anymore. It runs Chrome so you’re good.
Re: Linux is good now
#149What is really blocking the move for me is zScaler, Zoom (they may exist on Linux, not sure about how integrated they are) but especially Outlook (the client). The OWA version is subpar and without it I cannot function in a work environment.
Re: Linux is good now
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think this is true. I can go into my display settings in kde plasma and enable HDR and configure the brightness. I have a nvidia blackwell card.
You can enable, yes. But (assuming you're on an LCD display and not an OLED), you're likely still on XRGB8888 - i.e. 8-bit per channel. Check `drm_info`. Also, go to YouTube and play this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onVhbeY7nLM Do it once on "HDR" on Linux, and then on Windows. The "HDR" in nVidia/Linux is fake. The brightness you see on Plasma or Mutter is indeed related to the HDR support in the driver.…
It's not obvious how to interpret the output. I pasted it into chatgpt and it thinks I am using "Format: ABGR2101010" for both monitors (only 1 has HDR on) so I don't trust it.
EDIT: See my sibling comment.