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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

#681
post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've got history backwards. IBM Thinkpads did it that way 30+ years ago, when there was no consensus in the industry. Do you switch it now, and anger every lifetime Thinkpad loyalist, or keep it and annoy just the folks who switch back and forth between different vendors' laptops? In a brief survey of laptop photos from the early 90s, IBM, Toshiba, Zenith, NEC, Packard Bell, Compaq, and Fujitsu all put Fn on the ou…

> Thinkpads are the last major holdout ThinkPads were one of the last major holdouts, they went to the Control-Fn layout in 2024.

Whoah.

Is that the end of it, then?

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

#682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> They just completely turn off their laptops anytime they want to move somewhere Fine but that attitude isn't going to increase Linux adoption. Arch does work in this regard today but it does require some BIOS tweaks to get it to work flawlessly. Compare this to a MacBook where closing the lid always does the right thing and seems to use basically no power at all in this state. For me, I'll accept the trade-off as…

My development machine is a macbook air, which is fantastic for me because I can work anywhere without a power outlet for long hours. Production target is usually debian servers, they just work reliably. And my game/music machine is windows (all the games, all the vsts). I don't like trade-offs.

Battery life is great on a mac, but then I would have to use my macbook / macOS. For me that is a tradeoff as I would prefer to use Arch / Hyprland, kernel support for cgroups, etc.

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

#684
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone will build as nice hardware as Apple anytime soon, so I think if that's your primary requirement then any other choice will be a compromise. I don't really like Apple, but it must must acknowledged that even a few basic things (the monitor turning on immediately as I open the screen, the touchpad quality, etc.) seem totally elusive to other manufacturers. Apple's pretty imperfect, and it's sad to…

I'm pretty sure Apple is unavoidable if you work as a mobile app developer. I mean, no iOS SDK for Windows/Linux. If your work area is anything other than it, perhaps the Mac isn't necessary.

Don't they offer downloads of Xcode outside of the App Store if you pay their developer program fee? That includes their SDKs. Theoretically there is only an expenditure of time and effort to build an iOS app on Linux. I forget if it is against their terms or not, but I don't think the SDK available is a barrier.

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

#685
post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of cachy performance is placebo, because Steam games use the container runtime's Debian 11 libraries, it doesn't use the native CachyOS ones at all.

I'm CPU-bound on one of the games I play, and cachy's scheduler may have made a difference for me. I was also fully on the closed-source NVIDIA drivers in Fedora, and had been totally out of the loop that that the kernel driver had been open sourced. And, cachy had me on a more recent version of the driver. None of these things are truly unique to CachyOS, but nonetheless I do think I experienced a boost when I switc…

To expand a little bit, I think it might clearer to say that CachyOS does out of the box what many other distros could also do with manual configuration. So, in that sense (default) CachyOS probably is faster than (default) [mainstream distro].

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

#686
I installed CachyOS on a spare ssd with the idea that if it became a headache I would go back to windows. All my games work, even weird open source ones. All my sounds, monitor, kvm switch, volume rockers, Bluetooth game controllers, headsets, everything works with zero issue. Cuda works, I can run ML models, and it all works much better and faster than Windows. There's been no reason so far to switch back. Next, I'll wipe my NVME drive and be done with windows for good.

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

#688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or GP knows that anyone who finds the following appealing has already been using linux for years: > Do we want our fundamental computing environment to be ultimately under our control, or controlled by private interests with their own incentives? But if windows is now objectively worse than linux, normal people also now have a reason to switch.

The problem I see with most people is that it just doesn't occur to them that there are alternatives. They're so used to a shitty experience with Windows and MS apps, and to them there's no such thing as os" and "hardware", in their minds they're lumped together. So they shrug, say "meh, computers, I just can't understand them," and go on their merry way rebooting Windows for the 10th time that day. Now, don't get me…

> I need to install a bunch of drivers from HP with dubious names, like sp1234

This is just how HP names their software deployment packages. Lenovo will have something like "u6chp70us17" or "83wo12ww". You go on your product's page, download the driver, install it. I understand complaining about a device that doesn't work out of the box, but about the name of the driver installer?

To be honest I've never seen an EliteBook that needed any drivers for the common components (I also own quite a few Elites, oldest from 2012), and in general any laptop that needed a touchpad driver to work in well over a decade. And I've played with a lot of different laptops, business models in particular. Not saying it doesn't happen, just that I don't think it's common.

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

#689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always agreed with this take until I went all in on keyboard driven tiling window managers. First with i3 and now with Omarchy/hyprland. I find my use of the trackpad so rare now that it’s a non factor.

what do you use to get web browsing to work without a mouse? I tried Vimium and Vimperator, but that was a really long time ago.

I still use the mouse in a browser, but I find myself tabbing around a lot more often than I used to.

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

#690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking of doing that, but since that would require me to switch the monitor and whatnot, it would be just like using two PCs. And since I only use my desktop for LR and not much else, jumping through the hoops with emulation doesn't make much sense.

How so? Winapps lets you run windows applications as if they were native to Linux, you interact with them the same way you would anything installed by apt/pacman/dnf etc. Unless I'm very much misunderstanding things (which I don't believe I am)

In the general case, I think you're right. WinApps seems to use RemoteApp functionality on windows to export just the window you're interested in from the virtualized guest vm to the host, which should behave mostly as a "native" app.

But you were talking about sr-iov, which is a whole different matter. Presumably, the goal is to have LR use that GPU for some of its functions. But LR doesn't support multiple GPUs: it does its computation on the same GPU that handles the output. For that, you need to connect the display to the passed-through GPU. Now, aside from intel, I don't think any mainstream GPU actually supports sr-iov, so you need to pass through the entire gpu to the guest VM (the host wouldn't see it anymore at all). This isn't how RemoteApp works, and I doubt WinApps handles this case.

I remember a project (Looking Glass?) that tried to somehow "bring back" the output to the host machine, but it didn't seem too robust at the time. I haven't followed it, so I have no idea if it's any better now, if it's still alive. If it does, this could possibly work if you had two GPUs (which I happen to have, since my CPU has an integrated GPU). But you'd still get the whole Windows desktop of the VM, not an RDP connection.

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