Live data from Hacker News

Linux is good now

pcgamer.com

761–770 of 1001 posts

Re: Linux is good now

#761
This may be an unpopular opinion but I feel Bazzite (and immutable distros in general) is the future for the normal users. Yes I know, they take the freedom of messing with the system core but for most people this is fine. All they need is a device that works without any problems.

First time I switched to asus kernel from the generic one was magic - I know asus-linux exists and following the instructions probably would have ended up in a working system, but with bazzite I wrote only one command and everything worked. It still feels weird not to monkey around with package installations (and this was a dangerous path, usually ended up with more work for me) but this is a tradeoff I can live with. The software I used - luckily - already moved to Flatpak so everything was a breeze. Also the fact that I can switch to a working state with one keypress is a stress reliever.

I agree. Linux is good now - for the common user. I still can't see immutable distros can be used for all scenarios but for gaming/home use, this is a methodology I can easily recommend for my friends and family who only want a computer that works without messing with console.

Re: Linux is good now

#762

If only. Ubuntu seems to be slowly getting worse. - Firefox seems to be able to freeze both itself and, sometimes, the whole system. Usually while typing text into a large text box. - Recently, printing didn't work for two days. Some pushed update installed a version of the CUPS daemon which reported a syntax error on the cupsd.conf file. A few days later, the problem went away, after much discussion on forums about…

What are you talking about? Firefox hasn't been single process since more than 10 years ago. At most, it uses 7% for the main process and I have thousands of tabs open. I can't talk about the other two, but I've had processes use 60% of the system memory without problem (everything else is slow due swapping, but that's expected).

They were talking about instability. I had an old Radeon workstation card in my desktop at home for at least a decade, but with the most recent AMD drivers, Firefox (with hardware acceleration turned on) would crash Gnome and the system when watching videos on YouTube. So I wasted money on one of those new Intel graphics cards to get the stability back (in addition to the time wasted diagnosing the problem).

Re: Linux is good now

#763

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The start menu seems to respond instantly for me. That's on a 7950X3D with 64 GB RAM and a Samsung 990 Pro SSD. Maybe it performs worse on slower hardware. I have 14 TB of SSDs connected, so it's not like there is no content on my PC. Notably I don't have any HDDs connected, maybe that plays a role here.

The few win11 I've touched were all on NVMe drives, but I'm pretty sure they're fast enough for a start menu. I mean, your gear should not be needed to get a responsive start menu. I'm curious, did you clean up what's by default in the start menu? Stuff like "recommended", "candy crush", and the likes? On the win11 I tested, those parts loaded slower than the rest, I wonder if the start menu has a timeout of "load th…

After checking the responsiveness of the start menu earlier, I uninstalled or unpinned the useless stuff in Pinned.

I don't think it made a difference, it was already lag free before.

It's annoying they put Office Copilot and Instagram there, but it uninstalled with just two clicks per item, taking a minute or so to get rid of everything.

Re: Linux is good now

#764
post #572

(cue arrogance) People on HackerNews complaining about Linux Desktop is pretty disappointing. You guys are supposed to be the real enthusiasts... you can make it work. (cue superiority complex) I've been using Linux Desktop for over 10 years. It's great for literally everything. Gaming admittedly is like 8/10 for compatibility, but I just use a VM with PCIe passthrough to pass in a gpu and to load up a game for windo…

I have been working professionally on Linux for many years. But about once a year I have to reinstall the os because it craps out for various reasons. The same story goes for most of my team, but for some reason they seem ok with this. My issue with Linux is this: I don’t feel like a consumer, but a janitor. I don’t want this. Yes you can do whatever you want, but I don’t want to do those things. I want to write code…

> it craps out for various reasons.

What does that even mean though? Under what circumstances? In what way?

> working professionally on Linux for many years.

Not enough to say which distribution... or do you mean you do kernel development work?

Re: Linux is good now

#765
post #572

(cue arrogance) People on HackerNews complaining about Linux Desktop is pretty disappointing. You guys are supposed to be the real enthusiasts... you can make it work. (cue superiority complex) I've been using Linux Desktop for over 10 years. It's great for literally everything. Gaming admittedly is like 8/10 for compatibility, but I just use a VM with PCIe passthrough to pass in a gpu and to load up a game for windo…

I have been working professionally on Linux for many years. But about once a year I have to reinstall the os because it craps out for various reasons. The same story goes for most of my team, but for some reason they seem ok with this. My issue with Linux is this: I don’t feel like a consumer, but a janitor. I don’t want this. Yes you can do whatever you want, but I don’t want to do those things. I want to write code…

What? I have been using Linux daily for almost 20 years. I have typically only installed the OS fresh once each time. I've been using Fedora as my daily driver for well over a decade. I can't remember having to re-install a distro unless I was switching distros. My current system was installed in 2019, Fedora 30. Over a dozen painless upgrades, the last several of which have had Steam flatpak installed with no breakages.

Fully open source drivers using AMD video cards. It just works (minus the early x11/wayland debacle, I had to switch back to x11 for a while).

Re: Linux is good now

#766
post #572

(cue arrogance) People on HackerNews complaining about Linux Desktop is pretty disappointing. You guys are supposed to be the real enthusiasts... you can make it work. (cue superiority complex) I've been using Linux Desktop for over 10 years. It's great for literally everything. Gaming admittedly is like 8/10 for compatibility, but I just use a VM with PCIe passthrough to pass in a gpu and to load up a game for windo…

I have been working professionally on Linux for many years. But about once a year I have to reinstall the os because it craps out for various reasons. The same story goes for most of my team, but for some reason they seem ok with this. My issue with Linux is this: I don’t feel like a consumer, but a janitor. I don’t want this. Yes you can do whatever you want, but I don’t want to do those things. I want to write code…

When I use Windows, I feel like a product, not a consumer. There's always macOS.

Re: Linux is good now

#767
My company had an onsite where presenters were plugging their computers into a projector via HDMI. I watched seven individuals go up with their MacBook Pros, plug the cable in, then get confused why nothing was showing on the screen. Seven times in a row, someone had to run onto the stage and accept the permissions dialog on the Mac allowing the user to share their screen via HDMI. When the eighth presenter took the stage, he plugged the HDMI cable into his laptop running Linux, and the screen immediately output an image. Linux just works.

I switched full time to Linux in 2022 when Elden Ring launched and had better performance in its first week on Linux than on Windows. I personally switched over to KDE Plasma powered by Arch. The first thing I noticed was how perfectly it was immediately. So I'd push the title of the article on step further: Linux has been good for a while.

In the four years since switching over from a dual Windows (for gaming) and Mac (for programming, web browsing, and everything else), I have almost entirely had a better experience in every single area. I still use macOS daily for work, and it is constantly driving me mad. For every task I have thrown at it (from gaming to programming to game dev to photo editing), Linux just works.

On Mac it's more like, "there's an app for that". I have third party package managers on Mac. I use a third party app to display if my internet connection is using Ethernet. It yells at me to delete the CSV file that I created and requires an instruction manual with instructions for the Settings app that have changed three times in three years for how to open the file, add Bluetooth to the menu bar, etc. It even had a permanent red icon on the Settings about not being signed into an Apple ID. And once I signed in, the Settings app has a permanent red icon about paying for Apple Care. My parents have made comments about how they're worried as they get older that they won't be able to keep up with the constant updates and changes to macOS and iOS.

I don't have much to say about Windows besides good riddance. It was far less confusing to use than macOS but was filled with too much bloat and pop up notifications.

The final thing I'll mention is that the first time my girlfriend used my computer, she sat down, opened the browser, and completed her task. She thought that she was using Windows and was able to navigate the new interface without having to spend any time learning anything. For her regular use case of using the PC for an internet browser, Linux just worked. She even asked me afterwards to install it on her laptop to replace Windows! I can't believe we're in a world where that's asked by someone non-technical who just wants a computer to get out of their way so that they can perform their tasks.

Re: Linux is good now

#768
post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Did you use the proprietary AMD drivers? You need to use the open source drivers. As far as I know these should be the default on all distros, so just click through the OS installer, install Steam, and start gaming. Don't touch the drivers.

In my most recent attempt to use AMD, my problems were:

1. I needed to install a bleeding-edge kernel version in order to get support for the very new AMD card I had purchased, which was a bit of a pain on Debian. (With NVidia, the latest drivers will support the latest hardware on older kernels just fine.)

2. AMD can't support HDMI 2.1 in their open source drivers. Not their fault -- it's a shitty decision by the HDMI forum to ban open source implementations. But I was trying to drive an 8k monitor and for other reasons I had to use HDMI, so this was a deal-breaker for me. (This is actually now solvable using a DP->HDMI dongle, but I didn't discover that solution at the time.)

But every time I've tried to use AMD the problems have been different. This is just the most recent example.

Obviously I'm using the open source drivers, since the entire point of everyone's argument for AMD on Linux is the open source part.

The root problem may just be that I'm deeply familiar with the nvidia linux experience after 25 years of using it whereas the AMD experience is unfamiliar whenever I try it, so I'm more likely to get stuck on basic issues.

Re: Linux is good now

#769
No, it really isn't. I use Ubuntu daily and not a month passes without a serious issue that no normal user would be able to solve. Last week my desktop completely froze again (as it often does) and Linux broke a mounted NTFS partition when I shut off the power.

Re: Linux is good now

#770

I switched all the machines at https://lanparty.house over to Linux a couple months ago. So far, we've experienced noticeably fewer problems on Linux compared to Windows. Stability and performance are better. I can't think of one game we tried that didn't work. And wow is it nice not to have all the ads and crapware in our faces anymore. (I'm aware that Battlefield series and League of Legends won't work due to draco…

That is literally the coolest house humanity has built this side of the Industrial Revolution, if not ever. Congrats on envisioning and executing such an amazing project!
Post reply on HN