Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too

notebookcheck.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 832 posts

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

#321

Post by AlecSchueler »

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…

Not that there aren't trust issues with bigger projects but don't folks worry that the further down the "branch of a flavour of of a branch of a flavour" chain they go the higher and higher the risk of someone sneaking nefarious code through becomes? I guess there's a natural barrier in that the lesser known code bases become less of a target.

Sometimes I just find it wild with how much we talk about containers and sandboxes for the user space code we run that there's still regular recommendations for the random distro of the week published by who knows who.

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

#322

Post by ryandrake »

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…

Here's a perfect example of this: Using a Mac trackpad on macOS, you can two-finger scroll as fast or slow as you want. If you go slow enough (you might have to "roll" your fingers instead of moving them down), you can scroll your browser pixel-by-pixel. This behavior carries through every app on the system. Scrolling basically does exactly what your fingers do.

Now, run Linux (say, Ubuntu) on that exact same hardware and try scrolling in Firefox or something. Instead of the content moving exactly as your fingers are moving, it does this weird jumpy "page up / page down" like thing as your fingers move. Even moving your fingers as slowly as you can will make the content jump to the next "page" 20 pixels down. This is not just Firefox's behavior: it carries through to every application.

Yes, there's probably some obscure GNOME configuration I need to add to fix this behavior, and if you search online you'll find forum after forum of people asking for logs and responding with "I dunno, try this." For something that should work out of the box.

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

#323

Post by fragmede »

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…

I'm currently working on converting an ARM Chromebook to run a different userland from ChromeOS and have been wondering which distro to use. I've starting getting Nix on it, but I think I'll switch over to Bluefin based on your recommendation.

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

#324

Post by jcelerier »

MrPowerGamerBR wrote: post #211
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…

> Oh!, and the one thing I miss is Affinity Designer. While I haven't experimented with it that much yet, Affinity (the new one, the one after the Canva acquisition) does work in Wine 10.20. Now, I won't say it is a smooth experience, one of the workarounds that I needed to do is use Wine's virtual desktop so Affinity's tooltips are rendered correctly instead of being pure black, and the GUI does seem to not render c…

> This makes you wonder: How hard it could be for a business that already has a 80% working application via Wine to patch the application/Wine to make it work 99+%, and then bundle the application with Wine and say that it has "native Linux support"?

I've had cases where running an app under wine worked better than the native linux port :/

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

#325

Post by GlacierFox »

volkercraig wrote: post #307
voxleone wrote: post #299

It’s worth acknowledging the real challenges raised in this thread: desktop Linux still has rough edges for some use cases, hardware support isn’t always perfect, and niche professional software may lack native support or require workarounds. But these obstacles are not intrinsic technical limitations so much as ecosystem and investment gaps, areas where community projects, standards efforts, and wider adoption could…

I think you are thinking about it way too hard. Windows 11 is a dog. Constant hardware problems, slow, and frustrating UX. Is any desktop linux perfect? No, but its better than w11 right now.

I take it you just read the first sentence and darted to the reply button...

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

#326

Post by raffael_de »

crocowhile wrote: post #278

I have been using Linux exclusively for twenty years now. I don't understand people who use anything else, to be honest.

Same here. Using Linux Mint for about 15 years now. Same for various computer illiterate family members. As far as I am concerned it is significantly more pleasant to use than Windows and MacOS.

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

#327

Post by AlecSchueler »

osigurdson wrote: post #318
crocowhile wrote: post #278

I have been using Linux exclusively for twenty years now. I don't understand people who use anything else, to be honest.

Do you use a laptop? It seems that doing the right then when opening / closing the lid only happened in the past 5 years or so.

This is something I see repeated everywhere but I've been using Linux daily on all sorts of laptops for a little over 15 years and never struggled with this issue.

But during my brief period on Windows I would get issues like my colour settings changing or the behaviour of certain meta keys being switched out when I woke a sleeping laptop.

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

#328

Post by GlacierFox »

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…

Keep an eye on the Graphite vecor app that's in development. It's Linux native I think.

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

#329

Post by WD-42 »

free652 wrote: post #309
WD-42 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amd drivers might not there, and they will continue to not be there on the version of the kernel you are using and choosing to be stuck on by using Debian. Drivers are part of the kernel in Linux, it’s not how windows works. Ubuntu and Fedora are not unstable, you are just choosing pain for yourself.

>Drivers are part of the kernel in Linux While the drivers at the runtime are part of the kernel, they are not distributed as part of the kernel. My drivers are *latest* -> 6.16.6.30200100-2255209.24.04 https://instinct.docs.amd.com/projects/amdgpu-docs/en/latest... Debian is *stable*, but you are so far only proving my point in my original post. If you are going to download ubuntu, the version proposed is 24.04 that…

This is just false. Amdgpu is an in tree kernel module and has been forever. https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/gpu/amdgpu/index.html

If you are installing via an outside method, again, you are going agasint the grain for no good reason and making problems for yourself.

Nobody is suggesting installing LTS on brand new hardware.

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

#330

Post by asveikau »

buzzardbait wrote: post #293
crocowhile wrote: post #278

I have been using Linux exclusively for twenty years now. I don't understand people who use anything else, to be honest.

I'm sure most people feel the opposite way. I've been using Windows and Macs for 20 years and I don't ever see myself ever using Linux as a desktop OS.

Among the subculture that would be the type to visit Hacker News (or Slashdot back in the day), this attitude emerged around 25 years ago. In the late 90s, there was widespread enthusiasm for the Linux desktop. I remember those days fondly. It was glorious. Then macOS (or OS X as we called it) swept away a lot of people. A lot of them would get hostile or angry or mock people when they would mention they didn't join the Mac bandwagon.
Post reply on HN