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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

#641
post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Windows VM with USB passthrough. I haven't had any issues with USB devices this way.

> Windows VM

That's not wine, and I'd rather keep dual booting that running Windows VMs that barely can keep up. Have you tried doing music production inside a Windows VM before?

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

#642

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 am curious.

Does the flatpak Firefox allows access to all folders?

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

#643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love you guys, and I wish you were right, but I don't think you are. Any of the above moves (military bases, Visa/MC, ASML, etc) would make the US suffer, but it would collapse the EU. Europe has a decade or two of hard work and crippling costs to significantly disengage from the US, and no one has the vision or fortitude to make that happen. You also wouldn't have any security. If you disengage from the US militar…

> Any of the above moves (military bases, Visa/MC, ASML, etc) would make the US suffer, but it would collapse the EU And many other places - most countries depend in US tech and increasingly so (recent NH stories about Vietnam mandating banks only use unrooted mobile phones). Just card payments not working would be an economic disaster. So would closing down all the businesses and services that rely on AWS, GCP and A…

> Vietnam mandating banks only use unrooted mobile phones

Other way around. They are used to using money. Even India tried to make everything electronic. A bit successful but not totally.

Yes Playstore is important. But unless US mandates Qualcomm and mediatek, apple to brick all non US.phones this won't happen.

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

#644
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…

> It’s still too confusing for the average user (many distros, many desktop environments, Wayland vs X, systemd vs init, snap vs flatpak). Users don't need to know about any of that, except for picking a distro and just using whatever is there. Regarding DAW - I get sticking with Windows if you have thousands invested in it. Even so, there's quite a bit of professional software out there with native support (like Bit…

Even if they pick a distro and decide to install it, more often than not the install process is still overly convoluted even in just making installation media.

Going to a distro website and trying to find where to get it (ubuntu has a habit of leading with literally anything else other than regular desktop distro on their front page). Finding a download page, and having it just spit out an iso file, with no explanation on what to do with it, or 'how to install' link in sight (debian, it's very nice that there's a big download button, but like...then what. where's the explanation link. it's buried under other downloads, but that's not very intuitive). Getting to a 'how to install' page and having it be intimidatingly long, perhaps even needlessly. Sites, pages and explainers being laid out in confounding ways, and install process sometimes laid out in a bit of an overcomplicated way. (debian has an installation guide that's presented perhaps in the most intimidating way possible to a new unwitting user, and also buried under click on a click on a click. somehow writing the iso is not even among the first dozen of pages there. ubuntu mate gives you links to iso downloads, and yet the installation process is buried under 'faq' (again, not very intuitive or straightforward), that faq only has a bunch of oddly laid out 'making installation media' pages, and the rest of actual installation process is just somewhere else.)

That's before someone even gets to the actual install process. Somehow all of that stuff hasn't gotten more streamlined or user friendly. If you try to see how one would go about getting and installing any distro, you'd quickly see that it's very confusing and convoluted, way more than it has to be, or needs to be to appeal and be simple for new users.

There's glimmers of hope, like fedora which has its media writer, which is gonna hold your hand through the whole thing. Even that links out to github for a download, despite clicking on a seemingly specific 'windows/mac or linux' button. It's a little buried too, below iso downloads, when it really should be brought up more forward, and explain a little bit better on how it's gonna guide you thru the whole thing.

It really should be an app that's gonna guide you thru it, or a dead simple 1-2-3 step tutorial that's gonna guide you thru writing an image (download writer, download iso, write an image - laying it out more than that is just overcomplicating it really, at least in the initial quick install guide), with a clear, visible link to it - and yet somehow even this is too high of a bar for many distros to clear.

What has done a number on the ease of installing linux is how compact discs have just went away, because having a compact disc, burning it, or having it be just sent to users was making that step of the process simpler. Sure, writing to a USB is easy, but the expectation that everyone's just gonna have a spare usb is naive (and you're never gonna hear that you actually need to buy a usb stick in any of those guides lol), and there's just a little more opportunity to fuck up there (overwriting other disks, unless the writer app is laid out nicely and fail-proof). Distros might as well start selling usb sticks with installers on them. If someone's gonna be brand new to the whole thing and they're gonna have to buy a usb stick anyway, they might as well buy it from the distro with the distro on it already.

Some distros may want to get real about how a new user would even navigate their websites in order to get the thing. Like just trying to go thru that process themselves and see what's that experience like.

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

#645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will these issues with Linux ever be overcome? I want to switch but I just don't feel confident yet, and I wonder how long the "yet" will remain.

>Will these issues with Linux ever be overcome? I'd ask you the inverse question: If Linux never got any better than it is currently, what would it take to push you away from Windows? I don't mean this as a challenge, I'm genuinely curious.

Not OP but I have a couple of red lines that if crossed, I would move to Linux: things stop “just working”, and ads/nags/notifications/behaviors that I don’t want cannot be disabled.

Things are very occasionally annoying right now when a new update enables some new idiotic thing but 99.9% of the time things just work.

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

#646

Everyone is talking about moving to Linux lately, it’s a bit of a trend. I wish they’d stop, for one simple reason: I’ve been using Linux exclusively (when I’m not forced to use macOS by work) for several years now, and I rather enjoy the lack of malware, spyware and other bullshit on the platform. If the general public comes over this situation might end. Desktop linux isn’t a target right now because its niche, I’d…

Folks on reddit and hackernews aren't normal people. Outside of this bubble few people have heard of linux. Hell so few people I know use firefox which makes me mad. You are safe from that fear.

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

#648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>- 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 the above This is easily solvable by distributing the app via a distro agnostic mechanism, like as a Flatpak or AppImage. Using Flatpak also eliminates the need for rolling their own app update mechanism.

AppImage relies on the old, unmaintained and suid root fuse2. Not a wise choice in 2025.

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

#649
My home nvidia desktop is running CachyOS and it's been an overall good experience. 99% of the apps I need just run without issue, and I've only needed to apply a few minor tweaks to get my other laptop set up (switched to deep sleep). As a long time Fedora fan, I was not sure about switching to CachyOS but the performance has been marginally better under heavy use-cases. However, Fedora is fine and can be tweaked to get most of the same benefits though.

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

#650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Windows userland compatibility is outstanding. I can run most 30 year old Windows applications on Windows 11 without a problem. This makes it easy for a commercial vendor to support their applications on Windows.

The same is not at all true on Linux.

Right now at work, I’ve got a bunch of commercial apps built for RHEL9 for which I’m chasing vendors for new builds that work on RHEL10, for a variety of reasons. Dependencies like libXScrnSaver have simply been removed, and so apps linked against that library no longer work.

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