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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

#381

Post by free652 »

WD-42 wrote: post #329
free652 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

>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

You are arguing and arguing and shifting goal posts as we go.

The facts are:

* I am running the latest amdgpu video driver.

* AI 395 wasn't released yesterday, but a year ago.

* (My original point) Many different permutations of hardware / os / kernel / drivers / window manager / etc.

I highly doubt that installing Ubuntu 25.10 will fix the issue. Can you provide that guarantee? No. Then we can stop talking.

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

#382

Post by ryukoposting »

NegativeK wrote: post #315
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 have been using Linux exclusively for twenty years now. Ditto. I can't stand other OSs; they are constantly in my way for just the basic tasks. > I don't understand people who use anything else, to be honest. Anti-ditto. I would never give Linux to my parents. They're capable enough to maintain their own Windows computers, and switching them to Linux would mean that I'd have to take over all of those tasks -- bec…

System76!

One huge barrier is printing. I've been using Linux as my daily OS for a decade and I still have stupid problems with printers. I can't print from my laptop because the printer spits out unicode garbage if I try. My desktop works, but sometimes I have to reboot to get the print queue to clear.

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

#383

Post by nickjj »

formerly_proven wrote: post #334
nickjj wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would be fair to mention that this is happening for you with a decade old GPU using an EOL driver, which sucks, but is unlikely to be a common experience. The drivers are still getting maintained by NVIDIA until August 2026. They also got classified as "legacy" on paper 1 day before I installed them. The compositor memory leak is affecting a lot of people. Since COSMIC and niri both use the same one (smithay), t…

> The compositor memory leak is affecting a lot of people. Since COSMIC and niri both use the same one (smithay), there's threads on GitHub with people using modern GPUs, both NVIDIA and AMD who experience it. There's a lot of replies across all of the different open issues. But then this sounds like a bug in that particular compositor rather than the driver(s)? fwiw, I have a modern nvidia card, and use the propriet…

> But then this sounds like a bug in that particular compositor rather than the driver(s)?

The NVIDIA GPU memory allocation issue affects all NVIDIA cards, at least based on that forum post where there's a good amount of people replying with similar issues with a large combo of cards + drivers.

You probably don't notice it because you rarely ever use all of your GPU's memory at once. Try running `watch nvidia-smi` and then open multiple copies of every hardware accelerated app you have available. Once you reach nearly the max GPU memory apps will either start crashing or fail to open and if you get semi-unlucky your compositor (including KDE on Wayland) will crash if it's the app trying to allocate resources to render the window. I've had plasmashell or kwin hard lock / crash many times with just a small amount of testing.

The expectation is the driver allocates those memory resources to system memory instead of denying the memory to the app. It works correctly in X11 or if you have an AMD card, in Wayland and X11.

The leak is separate and is compositor specific, possibly related to NVIDIA driver bugs (to some degree) but this leak wouldn't be experienced unless you used this compositor. This leak is the compositor doesn't release any GPU memory after any window is closed, so simply opening and closing apps will cause the leak. Combine this with the first problem and that's how you end up rebooting every few hours with a lower end GPU. AMD and NVIDIA are affected.

The post goes into all of these details and there's reproducible tests, and even demo videos showing the first GPU memory allocation problem in Plasma Wayland but not Plasma X11. It also links to all of the related GitHub issues that I could find.

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

#384

Post by DetectDefect »

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…

> Do we want our fundamental computing environment to be ultimately under our control, or controlled by private interests with their own incentives?

The reality is a lot more nuanced than that. Should one live in a forest, devoid of any city services and company of other individuals, so that one may be under "own control"? This is the essential value proposition with Linux and it's no wonder many prefer the comforting institution of proprietary prisons^Wsystems.

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

#385

Post by scoopdewoop »

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…

Bluefin, Aurora, and Bazzite are taking over my home.

I've been using desktop linux since before ubuntu, and I have never had so much confidence in my linux rigs. They are dependable, which is refreshing after boot-breaking updates have ruined my setups before.

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

#386

Post by lukan »

tempest_ wrote: post #365
MrPowerGamerBR wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Getting it running in linux is the easiest part dev wise. It is the rest of the iceberg that causes problems. - You need your support to be able to support linux which means they will need training and experience helping people in an entirely new system - Linux comes in finite but vastly more combinations than OSX and Windows which means you are probably going to need to pick something like Ubuntu or struggle with th…

And then people wonder, why electron became a thing.

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

#387

Post by ivankra »

grigio wrote: post #8

I hope one day to upgrade my laptop to a Honor/Huawei AMD Ryzen AI computer to run Linux. Modern Macbooks unfortunatly do not run Linux and the other laptop manifacturers basically produce expensive trash laptops

Nonsense. I've been running Linux just fine as my daily driver on Macbook M4 for a year. Besides battery life (VM is kinda heavy on it) and some minor issues (fewer than you'd think, especially with Vulkan landing in UTM today) it's the best Linux laptop I've owned ever so far. I like macOS as much as the next Linux user here, but it's fairly decent as a hypervisor. If anything, at least it comes with UI unlike Intel ME.

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

#388

Post by bachmeier »

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…

> Viewed through the lens of digital autonomy and citizenship, the question isn’t simply “Is Linux perfect?” but rather: Do we want our fundamental computing environment to be ultimately under our control, or controlled by private interests with their own incentives?

As a user of Linux as my main desktop OS for more than 20 years, a user of Linux far longer than that, and a promoter of FOSS before that was a term, this has always been the question. Most of the world does not care. I suspect that is more true today than ever before. There are now adults that grew up in the age of social media that have no idea how local computing works.

Not to be negative but the "obstacles" to adopting Linux were never actually obstacles most of the time. Fifteen years ago my mother started using Linux as her main OS with no training. I gave her the login information, but never had a chance to show her how to use it, and she just figured it out on her own. Everything just worked, including exchanging MS Office documents for work.

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

#389

Post by thom »

I installed Bazzite on a slightly esoteric machine, a 16" dual-screen Asus laptop. It's not really my cup of tea as a distribution, either philosophically or practically, but it has some specific patches for Asus hardware and as a result it seems to work better in every way than Windows. Every couple of months I'm annoyed for a moment by all the immutability stuff and the package system, but for both work and play it's running perfectly.

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

#390

Post by bhewes »

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…

I have Windows only audio and 3d software. I ended up with a windows VM with GPU passthrough on Linux. It sits on its own m2 drive for the rare occasion I need to dual boot. So Windows has been become legacy software for me. (IClone and CC).

And Steam Deck is there.

But I think the desktop interface is legacy for anyone under the age of 25, I get a kick out of watching them navigate a desktop.

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