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Linux is good now

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Re: Linux is good now

#211

Post by mixmastamyk »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #178
babl-yc wrote: post #33

I switched my desktop from macOS (10+ years) to Ubuntu 25 last year and I'm not going back. The latest release includes a Gnome update which fixed some remaining annoyances with high res monitors. I'd say it pretty much "just works" except less popular apps are a bit more work to install. On occasion you have to compile apps from source, but it's usually relatively straightforward and on the upside you get the latest…

> The latest release includes a Gnome update which fixed some remaining annoyances with high res monitors. Amazing that high dpi still doesn’t work. I tried to run linux on 4k in around 2016-2017 and the experience was so bad I gave up.

Again, I've had two 4k monitors on Linux for about ten years, and it has worked well the whole time. Back then I used "gnome tweak" to increase the size of widgets etc. Nowadays its built into mate, cinnamon, etc.

Re: Linux is good now

#212

Post by drnick1 »

savolai wrote: 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? If yes, what actually works long-term? Minimal bases, immutable distros, avoiding certain package systems, strict service hygiene, specific hardware?

No, not really. A Linux desktop with a DE will always be slower and more brittle than an headless machine due to the sheer number of packages/components, but something like Arch + Plasma Shell (without the whole KDE ecosystem) should be very stable and snappy. The headaches caused by immutable distros and flatpaks are not worth it IMO, but YMMV.

Re: Linux is good now

#213

Post by hparadiz »

hackyhacky wrote: post #134
hparadiz wrote: post #127

Earlier 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.

Well yeah but then eBPF would not work and then the anti cheat could just show that it's not working and lock you out.

This isn't complicated.

Even the Crowdstrike falcon agent has switched to bpf because it lowers the risk that a kernel driver will brick downstream like what happened with windows that one time. I recently configured a corporate single sign on to simply not work if the bpf component was disabled.

Re: Linux is good now

#214

Post by amlib »

eleventen wrote: post #124
tigerlily wrote: post #100

This is really shaping up to be the Century of Linux on the Desktop.

Adoption has really picked up since 1900.

Previous millennium adoption also really pales in comparison to current millennium. Let's hope it keeps going strong in the next millennium

Re: Linux is good now

#215

Post by epistasis »

saghm wrote: post #162
epistasis wrote: post #157

Honestly I loved it a lot more pre-2022, when Ubuntu added a super aggressive OOM killer that only operates on the level of an entire systemd run unit. Meaning that if you are running computation in, say, a shell and one for your subprocesses running computation takes too much memory, it takes out the entire shell and terminal window, leaving no trace of what happened, including all the terminal logs. And if you are…

I have to wonder if Ubuntu's prescriptive stance on things like this is becoming increasingly outdated in an age where there's actually a decent experience out of the box for a lot more stuff on Linux. I've long since moved on from using it personally for my devices, but I'm fairly certain my tolerance for spending effort tinkering to get things working like I want is a lot higher than even most Linux users, so it's…

It's not just Ubuntu, Arch is just as bad. The primary problem is systemd, which provided an adequate OOMd for daemons, but then all the distributions seem to be using it for interactively launched processes

If anybody can help me out with a better solution with a modern distribution, that's about 75% of the reason I'm posting. But it's been a major pain and all the GitHub issues I have encountered on it show a big resistance to having better behavior like is the default for MacOS, Windows, or older Linux.

Re: Linux is good now

#216

Post by coffeebeqn »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #178
babl-yc wrote: post #33

I switched my desktop from macOS (10+ years) to Ubuntu 25 last year and I'm not going back. The latest release includes a Gnome update which fixed some remaining annoyances with high res monitors. I'd say it pretty much "just works" except less popular apps are a bit more work to install. On occasion you have to compile apps from source, but it's usually relatively straightforward and on the upside you get the latest…

> The latest release includes a Gnome update which fixed some remaining annoyances with high res monitors. Amazing that high dpi still doesn’t work. I tried to run linux on 4k in around 2016-2017 and the experience was so bad I gave up.

What issues? I’m running Mint on a 4k monitor and haven’t had any issues in years

Re: Linux is good now

#217

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

howdyhowdy123 wrote: post #60
jbstack wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't really make blanket statements like this about "Linux" in general because it depends on what distro you use. For example, in NixOS to fix this type of problem all you have to do is rollback to a previous configuration that is known to work. I've not used it, but I believe Arch has something similar. Even with imperatively configured distros like Ubuntu, it's generally much easier to recover from a "screen o…

"Screen of death" in Windows? I haven't heard of one of those in over a decade.

I spent years (maybe a decade) without seeing them in the Windows 7 and early 10 era, but in the last few years I have them sometimes. Many seem Nvidia-related, but I also remember some due to a bad update that broke things in some laptops.

Re: Linux is good now

#218

Post by tnel77 »

dfxm12 wrote: post #166
fooker wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You don't have to play these specific games though. I mean, what's your privacy, what's not being bombarded by ads in your OS worth to you? Have you taken an honest thought about this?

Yes, but sometimes it is nice to socialize with other people and they might play these types of games. I don’t enjoy Call of Duty, but I’ll play it from time to time so I can chat with my brother (this is the only way to get him on the phone/microphone for some reason). I value the time I am spending with him more than a bit of privacy (in that context).

I am very pro-Linux and pro-privacy, and hope that the situation improves so I don’t have to continue to compromise.

Re: Linux is good now

#219

Post by BLKNSLVR »

Shacklz wrote: post #184
sowbug wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious: do enterprises using Windows suffer through all the system-level ads and nagware? Or do they get a version that lets their employees actually focus on work instead of learning the many reasons they should consider switching back to Edge?

No nagware but, at least on the machines of my colleagues, an even worse enemy: Microsoft Defender with all the checkboxes ticked. Grinds the machine to an absolute halt for any development work - sometimes the responsible security department has mercy and gives exceptions for certain folders/processes, sometimes not.

My work machine is grossly slow due to all the various security software.

Loading Teams can take minutes. I'm often late to meetings waiting for the damn thing to load.

Feels like early 90s computing and that Moore's Law was an excuse for bad coding practices and pushing newer hardware so that "shit you don't care about but is 'part of the system'" can do more monitoring and have more control of 'your' computer.

Re: Linux is good now

#220

Post by hparadiz »

ffsm8 wrote: post #192
hackyhacky wrote: post #134

Earlier 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. 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.

Uh, you'd have to compile a Kernel that doesn't allow it while claiming it does ... And behaves as if it does - otherwise you'd just fail the check, no? I feel like this is way overstated, it's not that easy to do, and could conceptually be done on windows too via hardware simulation/virtual machines. Both would require significant investments in development to pull of

All it takes is going to cd usr src linux and running make menuconfig. Turning off a few build flags. Hitting save. And then running make to recompile. But that's like saying "well if I remove a fat32 support I can't use fat32". Yea it will lock you out showing you have it disabled. No big deal.
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