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Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

himthe.dev

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Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#211

Post by stdbrouw »

One of the things I like most about CachyOS is that the configuration is all just in text files, one of the things I like least is that I am never quite sure whether to modify the systemd unit settings that are usually in /usr/lib somewhere, the app settings in /etc or the personal configs in ~/.config. For packages that I am unfamiliar with, I usually end up trying all three locations until I notice that my changes seem to stick.

The installer also completely broke the Windows partition that came with the workstation even though I was planning on dual booting, but oh well, no great loss there.

Other than that, there are some small conveniences and apps that I miss from MacOS (the mac calendar and mail apps are just so nice!) but the Niri window manager is just so amazing that at this point I don't think there's anything that could make me switch back.

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#213

Post by tremarley »

the_arun wrote: post #87
giancarlostoro wrote: post #68

This was me in 2022 or 2023. I have posted on HN about my shift a few times. I gave up with Windows 10 because you needed Windows Pro in order to make an "offline" account, I spent $2000+ for a gaming rig, and I couldn't add new users, one program told me to use the other program which brought me back to the original program... I had to go out of my way, buy a license just to make it work. I just went and installed L…

I would love to switch from Mac. But Mac hardware is so resilient & haven't seen that in PC world.

You can run Linux on Apple Silicon with Asahi Linux

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#214

Post by Toutouxc »

gortok wrote: post #151

I want to switch to Linux for my EOL Windows 10 originally-built-for-gaming rig. It was “new” in 2016, so I hold out hope that there will be few compatibility issues. My biggest concerns are being able to play my library of steam games on it. Overall the problems I have are that last time I tried to put Linux on that machine I tried a dual boot system, and at the time UEFI did not play well with dual booting. I don’t…

My desktop is a gaming-only machine, it’s still on Windows 10 and it will probably stay on Windows 10 until Steam stops working.

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#215

Post by bhewes »

bobsterlobster wrote: post #132
bhewes wrote: post #86

Ah 3d is fine with Maya and all the real VFX running on Linux. And we haven't had problems with game dev for years on Linux. Agree otherwise good to see another join.

Awesome, good to know that, and glad to be here

Houdini,3dcoat,Nuke are the three things we pay for, will use Maya when we work with Maya artists, but dcc is mostly 3dcoat-blender-houndini workflow.

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#216

Post by delta_p_delta_x »

jsheard wrote: post #163
marginalia_nu wrote: post #33

As a long-time Linux user who fairly recently dropped the Windows partition entirely, I do think the remaining chafing points are these: * UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous mess. And now you don't just have different versions of GTK vs QT to keep track off, but also X vs Wayland, and their various compatibility layers. * Support for non-standard DPI monitors sucks, mostly because of th…

> Wayland has fractional scaling as a sort-of workaround if you can tolerate the entire screen being blurry. Every other major OS can deal with this. I think Windows is the only other one which really does this properly, macOS also does the hack where they simulate fractional scales by rendering with an integer scale at a non-native resolution then scaling it down.

> I think Windows is the only other one which really does this properly

Windows is the only one that does this properly.

Windows handles high pixel density on a per-application, per-display basis. This is the most fine-grained. It's pretty easy to opt in on reasonably modern frameworks, too; just add in the necessary key in the resource manifest; done. [1]

Linux + Xorg has a global pixel density scale factor. KDE/Qt handles this OK; GNOME/GTK break when the scaling factor is not an integer multiple of 96 and cause raster scaling.

Linux + Wayland has per-display scaling factors, but Chromium, GNOME, and GTK break the same way as the Xorg setup. KDE/Qt are a bit better, but I'm quite certain the taskbar icons are sharper on Xorg than they are on Wayland. I think this boils down to subpixel rendering not being enabled.

And of course, every application on Linux in theory can handle high pixel density, but there is a zoo of environment variables and command-line arguments that need to be passed for the ideal result.

On macOS, if the pixel density of the target display is at least some Apple-blessed number that they consider 'Retina', then the 'Retina' resolutions are enabled. At resolutions that are not integer multiples of the physical resolution, the framebuffer is four times the resolution of the displayed values (twice in each dimension), and then the final result is raster-scaled with some sinc/Lanczos algorithm back down to the physical resolution. This shows up as ringing artifacts, which are very obvious with high-contrast, thin regions like text.

On non-retina resolutions, there is zero concept of 'scaling factor' whatsoever; you can choose another resolution, but it will be raster-scaled (usually up) with some bi/trilinear filtering, and the entire screen is blurry. The last time Windows had such brute-force rendering was in Windows XP, 25 years ago.

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/win32/hidpi/settin...

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#217

Post by barrkel »

rafaelmn wrote: post #64
reconnecting wrote: post #5

Apple forced me to switch to Linux! Linux should consider paying Microsoft and Apple for new customers. Perhaps the customer acquisition funnel is quite long, at least it took 20 years of using Apple in my case before switching to Debian ( Xfce ), but it was worth it!

As much as I love the idea of moving to Linux - Mac hardware is like two years ahead of PC currently in pretty much any regard aside from gaming. I keep looking for an iteration where it makes sense to switch but currently the intel core 3 stuff is at best comparable to M5 base. Strix Halo is much more power hungry and also not that impressive other than having a bunch of cores. Nothing comes close to the pro/max chi…

I think this mostly only holds if you use local compute in a portable form factor.

Most of my personal development these days is done on my home server - 9995wx, 768GB, rtx 6000 pro blackwell GPU in headless mode. My work development happens in a cloud workstation with 64 cores and 128GB of ram but builds are distributed and I can dial up the box size on demand for heavier development.

I use laptops practically entirely as network client devices. Browser, terminal window, perhaps a VS Code based IDE with a remote connection to my code. Tailscale on my personal laptop to work anywhere.

I'm not limited by local compute, my devices are lightweight, cheap(ish) and replaceable, not an investment.

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#218

Post by tliltocatl »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #160
tliltocatl wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous me I'd take balkanization over the "we force-migrate everyone to the hot new thing where nothing works". > It'll probably work fine out of the box, but if it doesn't. Drivers are a pain point and will probably stay so until the market share is too large for the hardware vendors to ignore. Which probably aren't happening any time soon, sadly.

This is not a driver issue I'm talking about. It's a "best way to adjust the white balance is with this GTK+-2.0 app that hasn't seen maintenance since the Bush administration" issue.

Yes, this one is quite a problem as well.

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#219

Post by fguerraz »

They lost me at Vista lol

In all honesty, it was easy for me to switch to Linux because I was always more interested in the computer itself rather than what useful things I could do with it, so I actually never missed a particular application. I also was more interested in making a game run in Wine with maximum effort rather than actually playing it (I did play countless hours of World of Warcraft though...)

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#220

Post by nashashmi »

pier25 wrote: post #116

> You had unsaved work? Too bad, it's gone, get bent. This has happened to me a couple of times. I put the PC to sleep and the next morning I discover it has decided to close everything to install an update. Not using Windows ever again to do any work. Say what you will about Apple but at least they don't do crap like this.

Happens to me way too often. And it is frustrating if backup auto save is not included in the system. I have disabled auto update because of this.
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