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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

#471

Not saying I'm not considering it given the current political climate, but I'm spoiled by my Macbook Air. The Thinkpad I've been issued for work costs about the same, runs hot like crazy, always has fans running, is cheap-feeling plastic, thicker, heavier, garbage touchpad, weird keyboard layout (printscreen right next to the arrow keys, what were they thinking?), mushy keys, barely serviceable display ... what do I…

If you want something a bit more like a Macbook Pro, consider the HP Zbook G1A. It's basically built like a Macbook in terms of case and screen quality, but it's based on an AMD Strix Halo chipset - mine is an AI Max Pro+ 395. The chip design is somewhat similar to Apple Silicon in that it's one big chip with unified memory - you can get them with up to 128GB of unified ram - that thing is a beast for running local L…

> I have suspend and hibernate working perfectly

In Linux? Seriously? How much tweaking did that require?

Do you dare to throw the laptop into a backpack in sleep mode instead of shutting it down first?

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

#472
post #104
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such is the cost of freedom, unfortunately. There is no free lunch. Historically, people abandoned comfort and made sacrifices for a greater social good.

I think I get what you’re hinting at. But is there a more expensive option that’s free (as in freedom) and provides an experience that the GP referred to?

And there will never be such option if we all collectively choose to perpetuate Apple's monopoly. It is us, of all people, who need to take a stance, because we have the necessary skill.

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

#473

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…

> … desktop Linux still has rough edges …

My personal pet peeve is the GTK/Qt divide. Theming has an extra step, as you have to pick a matching theme for the other toolkit apps you inevitably end up using.

KDE/Qt has excellent scaling support, but GTK apps (OrcaSlicer for example) end up having blurry text or messed up text labels if you run a non-integer scaling resolution.

The Wayland transition almost seems akin to the IPv6 debacle. Support is there, but it’s half-baked in half the cases. I crave RDP remote access, but this is currently not possible with KRDP as it does not work with Wayland sessions. Wine is just getting there, but only with scary messages that say that it’s an experimental feature.

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

#474

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…

This. OMG Affinity is the ONE piece of software I actively miss. I tried the wine setup for it and it just doesn't work to a usable extent.

Yeah, I thought that Affinity would work pretty well in Wine because I've seen a lot of people pointing to the "just follow the guide (AffinityOnLinux repo) and it will work!" but in my experience it didn't work that well as people were saying.

And the guide itself seems to be outdated, the guide says that you need to install some stubs/shims but doesn't say that happens if you don't do it (I think that it would crash) but at least in my experience it did "work" without them when using an up-to-date Wine version.

Sadly Photoshop also doesn't work, if you want to follow the rules and use Creative Cloud it won't work at all, if you decide to sail the seven seas and download an older Photoshop version it will work but it also has some annoying bugs (sometimes the canvas doesn't update after an edit until you try to do another edit).

Don't get me wrong I do think that Wine is an amazing project and I hope that it continues to improve, but sometimes people don't seem to actually point all the issues that it exist when running an application in Wine.

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

#475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The EU can just kick out the US bases and forbid Mastercard and Visa working here. ASML? Good luck for Intel; I'm sure AMD would have its asses already covered and found some alternative in Asia. The EU uses Mastercard and Visa. If youblock them in the EU, you just cripple the EU economy instantly. > On GAFAM, there are alternatives, and libre software it's libre for the whole world, not just the US. How many peopl…

Yeah, I think it is naive of the grandparent to believe that iPhones, Android phones with Google Play Services, a lot of cloud services can be replaced overnight. That said, it might not happen overnight, but it will surely happen. I feel like we are close to a tipping point where governments and companies will move off US services en masse as fast as they reasonably can. I think this movement already started. E.g. o…

Its going to be a very long time before it changes enough to do without US tech. How many European governments are encouraging the use of apps that only run on iOS and Android? How many critically important businesses like banks require customers run unrooted Android or IOS? HSBC's app will not even work if you install apps from F-Droid!

A few governments are trying to do something about reliance on the US, but they are also doing things that create greater reliance.

Its good your university is trying, but that sounds like a limited response. Do they use Windows? MS Teams? Google Drive?

I know of no government making serious attempts to get the private sector of US dependence. Just check how many things you use regularly run on AWS. Desktop Linux is great but is any governmentactually making consistent attempts to persuade businesses to switch to it?

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

#476
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…

I have a Mac laptop, a Linux workstation, and a Windows workstation for different purposes and I use them all. I agree. Every time someone says they switched OSes and they don’t miss anything, it’s revealed that 90-100% of their work was in generic outlets like the web browser, terminal, e-mail, and Slack. To be fair, that could cover a lot of people. In my experience watching people make the switch in the real world…

Windows pop-ups can all be turned off. I have them all turned off on my machines and nothing pops up anymore. Windows is extremely customizable and modifiable and it runs 100% of Windows software which is most of the software being produced in the world today.

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

#478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but readers may be reading and think that Linux isn’t capable. It is. There’s plenty of DAWs available. You can also use WINE with proton to run FL Studio on Linux. My suggestion is just that, a suggestion to explore the possible. If we just learn one thing and never change then we wind up being left behind. While FL Studio and Logic, Cubase and Ableton are what most people know. There’s ways of running ALL of th…

> While FL Studio and Logic, Cubase and Ableton are what most people know. There’s ways of running ALL of them on Linux. As I just managed to get VR working with HP Reverb G2 in my Linux environment, quite literally the only reason I have Windows still installed on my computer is because of Ableton, and not being able to run that properly on even workstation hardware. How exactly do I get Ableton running with an exte…

https://github.com/BEEFY-JOE/AbletonLiveOnLinux

https://hanez.org/document/ableton-live-linux-wine/

https://github.com/wineasio/wineasio

The biggest thing with any Linux and Wine mix for DAWs is using JACK and WineASIO for low latency

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

#479

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…

But most of those issues are because Linux doesn't have enough market share. No one brushes off Windows because they need to support Windows and they need to add CI/CD for Windows.

The combination issue is a real issue though that (as far as I know) is mostly solved with Flatpaks, or in case of games, by using the Steam Runtime.

Of course, it is a "chicken and egg" problem of "we don't want to support Linux because there aren't enough users using it" but "we don't want to use Linux because there aren't enough business supporting it".

Thankfully with improvements in Wine the need of having "native" Linux support is shrinking, but at the same time there is still a looooong way to go (like the issues I said before with Affinity).

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

#480
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…

> t’s still too confusing for the average user (many distros, many desktop environments, Wayland vs X, systemd vs init, snap vs flatpak).

Average users need to buy hardware with a suitable distro installed. Usually that means Ubuntu. Its a decision that should be taken for them

With regard to DEs - Gnome for touch devices, KDE for mouse and keyboard driven ones. Both set up to be Windows like by default.

The average user is never even going to know whether they are running Wayland or systemd or snap. They will never change the default.

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