Live data from Hacker News

Linux is good now

pcgamer.com

511–520 of 1001 posts

Re: Linux is good now

#511

It's good until you boot your system and end up with an unrecoverable black screen that meeses your day of work for no good reason. Linux is free if you don't value your time.

Never had that happen to me in 25 years of Linux use.

Re: Linux is good now

#512
post #300

I'm not against Wayland, but I think Wayland is currently not good for the Linux ecosystem. I've had lots of friends try Linux, and they've had issues with Discord global keyboard shortcuts not working, and window positions not restoring at application start, and lots of other small issues, which add up in the end. But once they switched to X11, they've all been very happy.

I think Wayland is good for more technical users. Going from i3 to sway or bspwm to river feels like essentially nothing has changed. On the other hand, Gnome X11 to Wayland might be a bigger shock. Unfortunately, Wayland inherently can't be like Pipewire, which instantly solved basically 90% of audio issues on Linux through its compatibility with Pulseaudio, while having (in my experience) zero drawbacks. If someone…

It can absolutely be like that. Global keyboard shortcuts not working is a deliberate design choice in Wayland (as is non-foreground apps not having access to the clipboard).

Re: Linux is good now

#514

Recently switched to Linux Mint from Windows and it has not only been good. It has been cathartic. I enjoy computers again! I am self-hosting some services, what an absolute joy.

Same! I made a comment earlier that it's now very easy to navigate bash with guidance from ChatGPT.

Re: Linux is good now

#515
post #435

I switched all the machines at https://lanparty.house over to Linux a couple months ago. So far, we've experienced noticeably fewer problems on Linux compared to Windows. Stability and performance are better. I can't think of one game we tried that didn't work. And wow is it nice not to have all the ads and crapware in our faces anymore. (I'm aware that Battlefield series and League of Legends won't work due to draco…

I used multi seat in Linux with SystemD, i just threw in some old grapchics cards and sound cards in my gaming PC so that the children could play on separate monitors while I worked. Multi seat is very cool. When upgrading to a new gaming PC it was much cheaper to build 4 separate machines because cpu's and motherboards with enough pcie lanes are very expensive. GPU's still run at decent performance with half the pci…

This is awesome!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiseat_configuration

I am super curious about your setup. I played with MS years ago, but I lost the need. It is a super cool tech that I'd love to see its efficiencies embraced in some way.

Re: Linux is good now

#516

I switched all the machines at https://lanparty.house over to Linux a couple months ago. So far, we've experienced noticeably fewer problems on Linux compared to Windows. Stability and performance are better. I can't think of one game we tried that didn't work. And wow is it nice not to have all the ads and crapware in our faces anymore. (I'm aware that Battlefield series and League of Legends won't work due to draco…

I see not being able to install invasive kernel level anti-cheat as a positive. I uninstalled all Riot games before they rolled it out. I would’ve been pretty miffed if I had accidentally gotten their kernel modules simply because I wasn’t reading tech news before the auto update.

Re: Linux is good now

#517
Long time Linux on the desktop user here. I don't feel Linux has become significantly better recently. It's more that Windows reached a new low that is just below the threshold for many. Also, Apple, what are you doing?

Re: Linux is good now

#518

I have been switching between linux-windows for a while now, and i think 2026 is not the year of linux for now. Linux still suffer from the same fragmentation issue: Oh you want to play game, you should use distro X, oh you want an average web-browsing, working, you should use distro Y, or for programming, use Z. Of course all of them can do what other can do, but the community decided that the way it is. Yesterday i…

I just got a laptop for Christmas (first thing I've bought for myself in a good while) with 64GB of DDR5 RAM, a video card inside of it, AMD Ryzen 7 CPU, AMD Radeon 6550M. 144hz screen.

Not the best, but works for me.

I put CachyOS on it, using Steam just run the game's installer adding it as a game to your library -- you just select which proton you want (cachyos-proton) as a dropdown in the Properties in the Steam library. that's it.

it's lightweight, arch (I ditched manjaro), runs KDE and games perfectly, cursor IDE runs great, VMS run great.

first thing I did when I got it from fedex was remove Windows and put Linux on it. I thought 'maybe I'll just bite the bullet and sign up a Microsoft cloud account to be able to access ..my desktop' and 1/4 through its install I held the power button and popped a flash drive in. just say no to windows and you'll all be happy, trust me.

the only effort it required was for me to say f this on using Lutris and just use Steam as the wrapper.

2026 is definitely the year for linux. every year is. valve heavily invested in Arch, proton, and is using Linux on their devices and honestly: Windows is spyware, and after their vibe coded jank 25H2 update that broke a ton of things and Windows 10 being EOL, I hope more people get to enjoy throwing Ventoy on a USB stick with a bunch of linux isos copied over to it and boot and play with what they love.

so I disagree, 2026 is the year for Linux, and Linux is love.

Re: Linux is good now

#519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say there are two remaining roadblocks. First and biggest is kernel level anti-cheat frameworks as you point out. But there's also no open source HDMI 2.1 implementation allowed by the HDMI cartel so people like me with an AMD card max out at 4K60 even for open source games like Visual Pinball (unless you count an adapter with hacked firmware between the card and the display). NVidia and Intel get away with it be…

Is HDMI really a roadblock to gaming when DisplayPort exists?

The Chinese tech manufacturers are so sick of the HDMI licencing mafia that they've developed their own replacement for it:

https://www.techpowerup.com/335152/china-develops-hdmi-alter...

Re: Linux is good now

#520

I'm tired of people saying Steam on Linux just works. It doesn't. Tried running Worms: instant crash, no error message. Tried running Among Us: instant crash, had to add cryptic arguments to the command line to get it to run. Tried running Parkitect: crashes after 5 minutes. These three games are extremely simple, graphically speaking. They don't use any complicated anti-cheat measure. This shouldn't be complicated,…

> And of course, as always, those for which it works will tell you you're doing-it-wrong™ .

This sounds like you are rejecting help because you have made up your mind in frustration already.

Because you are doing it wrong. If you want an OS that just works, you should use Ubuntu or Fedora. Why is SteamOS based on Arch then? Because Valve wants to tweak things in it and tinker with it themselves to get it how they like.

You don't.

So use an OS that requires less from you and that tries to just work out of the box, not one that is notorious for being something you break and tinker with constantly (Arch).

Post reply on HN