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I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too

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Re: I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too

#181

Post by iinnPP »

pelagicAustral wrote: post #179

I have... I switched to Bluefin, which is a branch of Universal Blue, which is flavour of Fedora. Sounds complicated, but in fact is the best thing to ever happen to Linux. I get all the ease of use of something like macOS but pre-built with tools for development like distrobox, and then I can just build my dev environments and get shit done in no time, without having to worry about breaking updates or nuking the who…

As another anecdote in favor of Universal Blue's approach. My mother (who can't use a computer but to check email or regular websites) has been swapped to Aurora and has nothing but positive feedback.

Been 90 days with zero issues.

Re: I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too

#182

Post by g947o »

manuelabeledo wrote: post #160
adontz wrote: post #86

These articles... I'm not sure who are the target audience, because I am definitely not and I don't know anyone who is. Specific OS is not the important, anything with modern KDE is good enough to replace Windows 10/11. But do I (and all my colleagues) need Microsoft Office (Word, Excel at least) and/or Drawing software (Adobe or something) and/or god forbid Visual Studio 2026, and some other corporate software to ma…

Don’t all of these run in the browser nowadays?

I don't think you'll ever see a web version of Visual Studio.

Re: I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too

#183

Post by oamaok »

reactordev wrote: post #170
mnls wrote: post #164

Every now and then a new article "Why you should go Linux". I get it, I like Linux too but every case is different. I want to use Linux but I have to use Digital Audio Workstation. So in my case, I shouldn't dump Windows (and thousand of $$ I've spent on audio software). I know people desperately want to believe that Linux is "there", but it really isn't. And will probably never be. It’s still too confusing for the a…

Reaper is just as good as FL Studio or Logic Pro. VSTs are really your biggest hurdle. Depending on how they are compiled, they may rely on platform specific code. Most big plugin makers have VSTs for all platforms though and your license works on all. The pathway is there should you choose, one day. Linux is quite good now. That being said, I know a lot of niche plugins that some guy wrote that only works on windows…

> VSTs are really your biggest hurdle.

And that is unfortunately the place where I spent my big bucks.

I do however use Linux for my work, and have for more than a decade. If all the plugins (plus FL Studio, I've tried Reaper but it might be not for me) worked, I'd switch my personal desktop in a heartbeat. It's honestly the only thing locking me to Win10. Maybe I'll try a Mac through work (we get to keep the machines).

And yes, I've tried running FL using Wine, and it works surprisingly well! Just not _well enough_, and some plugins do not work at all. Most do, and that's great, but not enough for me at least.

Re: I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too

#184

Post by pelagicAustral »

iinnPP wrote: post #181
pelagicAustral wrote: post #179

I have... I switched to Bluefin, which is a branch of Universal Blue, which is flavour of Fedora. Sounds complicated, but in fact is the best thing to ever happen to Linux. I get all the ease of use of something like macOS but pre-built with tools for development like distrobox, and then I can just build my dev environments and get shit done in no time, without having to worry about breaking updates or nuking the who…

As another anecdote in favor of Universal Blue's approach. My mother (who can't use a computer but to check email or regular websites) has been swapped to Aurora and has nothing but positive feedback. Been 90 days with zero issues.

I thought about mentioning my mom, since she's been my number 1 tech support client since ever... And I was going to say that, I am so certain of how solid this distro is, that I would even install it on my mom's laptop without any hesitation.

Re: I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too

#185

Post by g947o »

stainablesteel wrote: post #148
keyshapegeo99 wrote: post #134

For both ideological and practical reasons, I'd love to switch. If I were a desktop computing person, I'd already have done so years ago. Alas, I exclusively use laptops - as I work a great deal while travelling. I do not wish to have to carry around a mouse with me wherever I go with my portable computer. If any Linux distro manages to replicate even 80% of the smoothness and functionality of a Mac trackpad experien…

[flagged]

I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not.

In any case, I am proud to be a very weak Linux amateur despite having used it for two decades.

Re: I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too

#186

Post by rasur »

hejira wrote: post #178
rasur wrote: post #111

Gaming is all well and good, but I'd be interested to hear of experiences with moving and using Audio apps (Ableton Live, Cubase and other Steinberg apps, plus many VSTs) from Windows to Linux. I see Wine, YABridge and LinVST mentioned in searches, but while I've got plenty of Linux experience, I'm time-poor and would prefer to make computers make noises rather than spend my time making things work. I have Reaper whi…

I use Reaper for Linux and love it. Getting Windows VSTs to work is okay with lin-vst and wine. Bascially install wine with your package manager, maybe run winecfg, then get lin-vst and make a copy of its single so-file, named the same as each vst binary in the same directory, then add that dir as a vst location in Reaper. As far as I remember.

thanks!

Re: I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too

#187

Post by pelagicAustral »

adontz wrote: post #86

These articles... I'm not sure who are the target audience, because I am definitely not and I don't know anyone who is. Specific OS is not the important, anything with modern KDE is good enough to replace Windows 10/11. But do I (and all my colleagues) need Microsoft Office (Word, Excel at least) and/or Drawing software (Adobe or something) and/or god forbid Visual Studio 2026, and some other corporate software to ma…

Yeah, but I guess part of the point is that MS themselves have been moving their desktop stack to the cloud making it even better for Linux users to maintain some degree of interoperability between the two OSs. I never particularly liked the Libre alternatives to Office, but now with 365 I can keep up with my colleges stack without having to switch to a VM or some other artifact just to collaborate on a document.

Drawing, yeah, true... design as well... closest the Linux world ever was to get something decent in the design department was the Serif/Affinity products, but they never made the port.

Re: I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too

#188

Post by shevy-java »

It is indeed a huge problem. The whole operating system now behaves and feels like the US government spying on everyone. Now, Microsoft has done that before, but with Win11 it really now seems almost shameless AND desperate in abusing users, while also alienating many of them via "features" they don't want, in particular all the AI garbage slop.

It does not really affect me that much, as I switched to Linux in 2005 or so, give or take, but some people around me, in particular elderly, depend on Windows still. So that's a dilemma. Do I want to install Win11 for them? Or Win10? And help maintain either? Replacing those computers with Linux is not so trivial. You would need virtually kind of 100% "what works on Windows must work on Linux too". Any complexity is a real total showstopper for many elderly people who have very little experience with computer systems.

Re: I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too

#189

Post by samiv »

As a long time Linux user I started with Red Hat 7.2. Then moved on to Slackware from there to Ububtu and finally to ArchLinux.

While Linux and the user space ecosystem has come a long way there are still plenty of sharp edges and anyone planning to use Linux long term must be able to figure some issues that will inevitably happen sooner or later when some update/system upgrade happens.

Even though I consider myself fairly proficient Linux user I also gave up on Linux on laptops..life is just too short to tinker to make it work. (Power saving, suspend/resume, graphics with Optimus etc. Are still pain points)

Re: I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too

#190

Post by lenova »

doodlesdev wrote: post #51
sumalamana wrote: post #5

Try CachyOS, it's based on Arch but with additional optimizations, better defaults, and is user friendly. The problems the author of the article had would not have happened if he spent some time using an user friendly distro before trying a hard distro.

Do CachyOS optimizations actually make any difference whatsoever? I know they enable certain optimization flags whenever building software, but that doesn't directly equate to performance improvements unless you're actually benchmarking and testing it. I've seen some benchmarks in games and it seems there is literally zero performance difference (sometimes it loses to Fedora, even). I'd always recommend upstream dist…

> Do CachyOS optimizations actually make any difference whatsoever? I know they enable certain optimization flags whenever building software, but that doesn't directly equate to performance improvements unless you're actually benchmarking and testing it.

I switched from Windows 11 to Kubuntu a year ago, and then gave CachyOS a shot after hearing praise for it. I'm on a laptop with an AMD iGPU, and CachyOS's `znver4` optimized repos gave a significant bump on my Geekbench results:

(Note: these results are from almost a year ago though)

Lenovo Thinkpad P14s Gen4 AMD

- Windows 11: 2366 Single-Core Score, 10717 Multi-Core Score

- Kubuntu: 2496 Single-Core Score, 9878 Multi-Core Score

- CachyOS: 2569 Single-Core Score, 11563 Multi-Core Score

Repeat tests were essentially the same (Win11 23xx/107xx, Kubuntu 24xx/98xx, Cachy 25xx/115xx)

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