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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

#661

Post by embedding-shape »

reactordev wrote: post #478
embedding-shape wrote: post #346

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…

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

Thanks, I've seen that repository before, but when I last saw it it boiled down to basically "create a prefix with these winecfg values" and not much more, but it seems a lot more fleshed out now, will give it another go.

Would be great if we'd eventually get some PipeWireASIO thing, sounds like a missing piece of the puzzle still, although not strictly required I suppose.

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

#662

Post by pixelpoet »

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.

> Windows 11 is a dog.

So, man's best friend?

Anyway, while I agree about the slowness (now that I've experienced Linux snappiness and done the benchmarks), it's the constant nagging / dark patterns that seals the deal for me. Microsoft would still have me as a happy customer and MSVC user if they hadn't bricked their OS after Win 7 and shoved AI, MS account, ads etc down everyone's throats.

On that note, even more hilarious/tragic is their turning MS Office into Microsoft Copilot 365 App lol, probably the tech biggest marketing blunder of all time, and entirely unforced (unlike for example Intel mostly abandoning the Pentium brand after the P4).

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

#663

Post by kazinator »

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…

> desktop Linux still has rough edges for some use cases

Windows is shit from the total management viewpoint: what it means to own and operate Windows over the long haul.

windows is okay when there is some program on it that works well and that you like, and you're interacting with that while avoiding Windows.

If Windows were the dominant platform and Windows were trying to eke out share, it wouldn't stand a chance.

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

#664

Post by pixelpoet »

ipjrms wrote: post #522
WheatMillington wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>niche professional software may lack native support Microsoft Office is not "niche professional software"

What is Microsoft Office? Do you mean Microsoft 365 Copilot?

You forgot the "App" :) I'm still astonished at how dumb that rebrand is...

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

#665

Post by user34283 »

Aurornis wrote: post #238
adontz wrote: 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 11 isn't running half as bad for me as most here seem to say.

I experience no delays with the start menu, and it's perfectly smooth on my 240 Hz monitor.

I also never encountered crashes like described as OP's reason for the switch.

So what do I have to gain from using Linux? A bit better compatibility for my software work, but much worse game compatibility. Fewer annoying popups, but they aren't that frequent on Windows either. Probably a worse update experience, and more time spent configuring.

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

#666

Post by johnny22 »

tapoxi wrote: post #265
odie5533 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laptop battery life suffers greatly on Linux. When their Google Chrome bootloader is out of battery all day, it matters which OS they installed.

This doesn't make much sense, ChromeOS is itself Linux, and those are prime "computers for parents" machines.

not the same thing at all. Different userspace that may or may not be that efficient at power, as well as well tested power management in the kernel for specific devices.

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

#667

Post by tombert »

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 have been running desktop Linux for a very long time, but I actually agree. There's a lot of rough edges. I do think a lot of these problems do go away if you are a bit proactive in choosing compatible hardware. I bought my mother in law a laptop for Christmas, and I put Linux Mint on there [1]. There were no issues getting it working on Mint with Cinnamon, but that's in no small part because I double checked all the common hardware (wi-fi, GPU, trackpad, etc) to make sure it worked fine in Linux and it did.

If you don't do your homework, it's definitely a crapshoot with hardware compatibility, and of course that sucks if you're telling people that they should "switch to Linux" on their existing hardware, since they might have a bad experience.

That said, it is weird that people seem to have total amnesia for the rough edges of Windows, and I'm not convinced that Windows has fewer rough edges than Linux. I've grown a pretty strong hatred for Windows Update, and the System Restore and Automatic Repair tools that never work. Oh, and I really think that NTFS is showing its age now and wish that Microsoft would either restart effort on ReFS or port over ZFS to run on root.

[1] Before you give me shit for this, if anything breaks I agreed to be the one to fix it, and I find that generally I can solve these kinds of problems by just using tmate and logging into their command line which AFAIK doesn't have a direct easy analog in Windows.

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

#668

Post by foresto »

Jackknife9 wrote: post #42

I tried to leave Windows 11 for Linux - it just didn't work for me. I installed EndeavourOS onto my main gaming desktop. It worked great for a while and ran all the games I played with my friends. However, one night when I went on to play a game I ran a system update and it seemed to completely break my nvidea drivers - I tried reinstalling them and also using the open source driver. This meant I just couldn't play a…

> I probably chose the wrong distro for this

Indeed. Arch-based distros ought to be managed by intermediate-advanced users. Linux Mint is better suited to beginners.

> but I really just want the PC to work for playing games without any issues.

If you decide to give it another go, and you have the means, I suggest using an AMD graphics card. Nvidia's drivers are notorious for being troublesome on Linux, and although they can usually be made to work (either by the user or by a distro developer), the drivers for AMD GPUs are much better integrated with the OS.

I switched to AMD a few years ago and have been very pleased with the results, both in games and in non-gaming tasks. (I don't use my GPU for LLM development, though, so I can't speak to the current state of things in that area.)

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

#669

Post by mjr00 »

Nextgrid wrote: post #618
mjr00 wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ironically, being concerned and skeptical about running random executables from the internet is a good idea in general. I agree you shouldn't run random executables, but the key word is "random". In this case, Ring Racers is a relatively established and somewhat well-known game, plus it's open-source. It doesn't guarantee it's not harmful of course, but ultimately for someone with the mindset of "I should never run…

> plus it's open-source Open-source only matters if you have the time/skill/willingness to download said source (and any dependencies') and compile it. Otherwise you're still running a random binary and there's no telling whether the source is malicious or whether the binary was even built with the published source.

Of course this is true. But you can keep going down the rabbit hole. How do you know there isn't a backdoor hidden in the source code? How do you know there isn't a compromised dependency, maybe intentionally?

Ultimately there needs to be trust at some point because nobody is realistically going to do a detailed security analysis of the source code of everything they install. We do this all the time as software developers; why do I trust that `pip install SQLAlchemy==2.0.45` isn't going to install a cryptominer on my system? It's certainly not because I've inspected the source code, it's because there's a web of trust in the ecosystem (well-known package, lots of downloads, if there were malware someone would have likely noticed before me).

> still running a random binary

Again "random" here is untrue, there's nothing random about it. You're running a binary which is published by the maintainers of some software. You're deciding how much you trust those maintainers (and their binary publishing processes, and whoever is hosting their binary).

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

#670

Post by AuthAuth »

My non technical friend she choose to try installing linux and picked mint. I laughed and I was sure she would brick it at least once but its been over 6 month and the system is still running fine. She did end up dual booting windows because there are a few games which were to hard for her to get setup and some that will never work. I think dual booting is fine its a good pressure release valve as long as you're spending most of the time booting into linux.
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