Linux is good now • Hacker News Board

Re: Linux is good now

#531

Post by HankWozHere » Fri, Jan 02, 2026, 5:38 AM UTC

SomeHacker44 wrote: post #158

Paracompact wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just switched to Linux. It's a great gig, and I'm actively encouraging everyone I know still infected with the malware known as Windows 11 to switch. But some of the drawbacks really aren't edge cases. Apparently there is still no way for me to have access to most creative apps (e.g. Adobe, Affinity) with GPU acceleration. It's irritating that so few Linux install processes are turnkey the way they are for Windows/…

I use OneDrive and Google Drive heavily and there just are not good clients for Linux for those that I have found. Especially with the ability to not sync files but still "look" like they are there in the filesystem. That is my main stopper now.

Whilst initially reluctant to - I have made a once off payment to Insync ( https://www.insynchq.com ) many years ago for my Google Drive account - and has worked flawlessly.

Re: Linux is good now

#532

Post by mkozlows » Fri, Jan 02, 2026, 5:45 AM UTC

scaramanga wrote: post #290

Switched in, ooh i dunno, '98 or '99. Quality is about where it was then relatively speaking. Sure things have improved, mainly just systemd, and we got ACPI and later power management stuff for laptops. Prior to that windows was better on laptops due to having the proprietary drivers or working ACPI. But it was pretty poor quality in terms of reliability, and the main problem of the included software being incredibl…

I'm sorry, but no. I ran Slackware 96, Red Hat 4.2, Mandrake 5.0, a bunch of Ubuntus from 12.04 onward, and Fedora now. It is absolutely, qualitatively different now than it was at the turn of the century.

In the Red Hat 4.2 days, it was something that I was able to use because I was a giant nerd, but I'd never ever ever have recommended it to a normal person. By Ubuntu 12.04, 15 years later, it was good enough that I'd recommend it to someone who didn't do any gaming and didn't need to use any of the desktop apps that were still then semi-common. In 2026, it's fine for just about anyone unless you are playing particular (albeit very popular) games.

Re: Linux is good now

#533

Post by mkozlows » Fri, Jan 02, 2026, 5:46 AM UTC

sudo_and_pray wrote: post #198

mkozlows wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 8 era had the same vibe.

This time there 2 big factors that were not there in '12. 1. 'office' cloud services - now you just need a browser for majority of docs/sheet/slides tasks 2. gaming - while it was possible back, but it was really hit or miss with a game. Nowadays vast majority of games work on Linux out of the box.

Yeah, fair! Same sentiment about Microsoft now as then, but fewer real blockers on the Linux side.

Re: Linux is good now

#534

Post by speff » Fri, Jan 02, 2026, 6:11 AM UTC

Klonoar wrote: post #444

speff wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's funny - my work MBP won't go to sleep properly, lol. Often come back to work after the weekend to find a dead laptop.

Then you have a significant outlier experience for that platform. It’s more than fine for people to dislike Apple products but this is simply not an area where other platforms have them beat.

Not sure why you're insinuating that I dislike apple products. My personal mb air doesn't have this issue and most of my household is on apple.

I'm also seeing results for "macbook pro doesn't go to sleep when lid closed", so other people see this problem too. You can't really claim that other platforms have them beat here if there isn't data to support the claim.

Re: Linux is good now

#535

Post by dismalaf » Fri, Jan 02, 2026, 6:12 AM UTC

Linux has been good for years. The only thing that's changed is that Valve put a bunch of effort into Proton so now Linux has enough game titles for that to no longer be an excuse to not switch.

I've been using Linux full-time (no other OSes at all) for nearly 20 years. Went through all my university education using only Linux. It's problem free if you use it like a grandma would (don't mess with the base system) and even if you mess with it, most things are easily reversible.

That being said, I have noticed that the newfound interest in Linux seems to be a result of big tech being SO abusive towards its customers that even normies are suddenly into computing "freedom".

Re: Linux is good now

#536

Post by lawn » Fri, Jan 02, 2026, 6:26 AM UTC

Biganon wrote: post #228

I'm tired of people saying Steam on Linux just works. It doesn't. Tried running Worms: instant crash, no error message. Tried running Among Us: instant crash, had to add cryptic arguments to the command line to get it to run. Tried running Parkitect: crashes after 5 minutes. These three games are extremely simple, graphically speaking. They don't use any complicated anti-cheat measure. This shouldn't be complicated,…

> Worms, Among Us, Parkitect

All three games works perfectly well on both Steam OS and on my kid's PC running CachyOS without any intervention.

Re: Linux is good now

#537

Post by kentonv » Fri, Jan 02, 2026, 6:29 AM UTC

snvzz wrote: post #507

MangoToupe wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Installing the nvidia first-party drivers (downloaded from the nvidia web site) will fix a lot of things. Crazy—it used to be that nvidia drivers were by far the least stable parts of an install, and nouveau was a giant leap forward. Good to know their software reputation has improved somewhat

NVIDIA on Linux is a pain, either path. Whereas, AMD just works and is thus standard recommendation.

Everyone says this but it is not my experience at all. Every time I try AMD cards I run into weird problems. The Nvidia drivers are a pain to install and tend to break randomly on kernel updates, but once built properly they always just work for me...

Re: Linux is good now

#538

Post by lll-o-lll » Fri, Jan 02, 2026, 6:30 AM UTC

School-Cotton wrote: post #467

lll-o-lll wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No hd scroll wheel? I don’t exactly understand this setup. What’s the vm tech?

What I mean is: on a normal laptop, when you scroll with two fingers on the scroll wheel, the distance you scroll is nearly a continuous function of how much you move your fingers; that is, if you only move your fingers a tiny bit, you will only scroll a few pixels or just one. Most VM software (at least all of it that I've tried) doesn't properly emulate this. Instead, after you've moved your fingers some distance,…

Yeah OK. Googling and LLMing around, it sounds like you’d need to use the proprietary Parallels to get hd scroll on a mac from the touchpad.

Re: Linux is good now

#539

Post by kentonv » Fri, Jan 02, 2026, 6:32 AM UTC

MangoToupe wrote: post #379

kentonv wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These games are all rated gold or platinum on protondb, indicating that they work perfectly for most people. Hard to say what might be going wrong for you without more details. I would guess there's something wrong with your video driver. Maybe you have an nvidia card and the OS has installed the nouveau drivers by default? Installing the nvidia first-party drivers (downloaded from the nvidia web site) will fix a lot…

> Installing the nvidia first-party drivers (downloaded from the nvidia web site) will fix a lot of things. Crazy—it used to be that nvidia drivers were by far the least stable parts of an install, and nouveau was a giant leap forward. Good to know their software reputation has improved somewhat

Nouveau has never been good for gaming. Not their fault (they had to reverse engineer everything), but it was only really ever viable for mostly 2D desktops in my experience.

Re: Linux is good now

#540

Post by yndoendo » Fri, Jan 02, 2026, 6:39 AM UTC

bigyabai wrote: post #322

chuckadams wrote: post #66

Just recently started using the desktop machine (under my desk, as opposed to my laptop which sits on my desktop) and put NixOS on it, and found myself pleasantly surprised. There's certainly still some parts of NixOS that require some expertise and getting your head around its package model, but overall I was surprised at how idiotproof it was to install and use. I mostly play games on it with Steam, which also Just…

NixOS is really a profound experience, once you embrace it. I used Arch for ~3 years and ended up reinstalling it maybe 15 times on my desktop alone. Switched to NixOS and I've used the same installation for 3 years, synced with my laptop and server, switching from x11 to Wayland to KDE to GNOME then back again with no problem. It doesn't feel real sometimes. My dotfiles are modularized, backed up in Github and versi…

I also have the same Arch install from 2014 on my main hardware. Each replacement computer is nothing more then taking the old drive out, placing it into an USB enclosure, booting a USB live, setting up the partitions on the new drive, and _rsync_ the content from the old to the new, finalizing with registering the UEFI boot loader.

One just need to make sure that you use the proper _rsync_ command options to preserve hard links or files will be duplicated.