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Unfortunately, no. I use Linux on a daily basis on my desktop, and while it's great for development (if you develop for Linux), it sucks for everything else (co

Unfortunately, no. I use Linux on a daily basis on my desktop, and while it's great for development (if you develop for Linux), it sucks for everything else (compared to Windows, for example). > Linux is now a viable gaming platform, thanks in large part to the efforts of Valve and GOG.com. Six of the top ten games on Steam right now support Linux. No. Look at the most recent SteamOS/PC review from Ars: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/11/ars-benchmarks-show-significant-performance-hit-for-steamos-gaming/ http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/11/ars-benchmarks-show-si... -- even the purpose-built PCs deliver significantly lower performance with Linux than Windows. > Hardware support is no longer a major issue. You can generally expect all your devices to work out of the box. Even your WiFi. Not really. AMD GPUs are badly supported -- even the proprietary driver is _very_ slow compared to the Windows version and it has very crude power management (meaning that most of the time, your GPU runs loud and hot). The NVidia side is much better, but still tends to crash more than on Windows or OSX (things like WebGL are not 100% stable). Hybrid graphics is not supported properly, so laptops like my ZBook 15 G2 can't run Linux well (there is no solution that provides on-demand GPU switching AND proper external monitor support at the same time). In general, my biggest issue with Linux on the desktop is stability of things related to graphics/display. My quite standard desktop (Xeons, NVidia GPU, SATA SSDs) cannot boot with the most recent Ubuntu image. Fedora 23 installs well, then the first software update breaks graphics (it turned out that GDM cannot communicate with X due some SELinux misconfiguration). I could install CentOS7 which is officially supported by the manufacturer but that has crappy font rendering and obsolete packages. And sadly, the situation in 2015 does not seem better than ~10 years ago, when I was trying to install Linux on my X40. Everything worked well except the graphics. Same in 2015. Look at what Windows is doing with WDDM and DX12. It's really-really cutting edge. Yes, Vulkan is coming sometime, but MS has actually delivered. But still, as a Linux dev, that's not an alternative.

acveilleux 11y ago
I agree with you so much. The last time I had an experience where I thought my computer ran *nix really well, it was a Celeron 500 Thinkpad X21 with OpenBSD. I have not had sound work as well before or since (next best? IRIX with an Octane2.) My work dev box is a CentOS 6 PoS and while it's serviceable and works OK for dev, I have a windows VM for a reason and my personal macbook comes out often.
- yitchelle 11y ago
  Also in agreement here. Actually, the last time I had a really well *nix system is when I had a MacMini :-) This sounds like a cynical remark, but it is a true.
dktbs 11y ago
You address every issue I have with desktop linux at the moment. The lack of hybrid graphics support is especially annoying. The bumblebee project was working on solving this, but there hasn't been an update on that project since 2013.
bananaoomarang 11y ago
Ditto this. I have used desktop Linux for about eight years now and graphics have consistently been the largest problem. If you can get them to work at all expect abysmal performance (excepting nVidia's proprietary drivers). Also if you buy a new machine you can't expect it to work straight away, in fact you should expect that Network and sound cards, touchpads and hardware related hotkeys will be broken. I think it is still better than Windows on the development front though (Cygwin is a pain and, virtuously, Linux desktop shells are stuck in the noughties)
_yy 11y ago
> it sucks for everything else What else does it suck at? "Desktop" does not mean "gaming". > there is no solution that provides on-demand GPU switching AND proper external monitor support at the same time Not true - this is highly hardware dependent. On recent Thinkpads, bumblebee works perfectly fine with externals monitors and has acceptable performance for most tasks (I use it with Blender and have no issues with it). There's still a performance hit since there's no DMA yet, but I hope that Nvidia will fix this one day. > No. Look at the most recent SteamOS/PC review It's still a viable gaming platform, even if performance for some recent high-end games is worse than on Windows. It's fine for hundreds of others. But I agree with you - while it works well for me now, I've spent a huge amount of time debugging Linux graphics in the past and there is still lots of work to be done (and is being done - Wayland will significantly improve things). Right now, the Windows stack is superior.
FatalBaboon 11y ago
The last few times I installed Linux on a machine went fine for 95%+ of what I expected. First, the worst: a high-end gaming laptop from MSI. Everything worked except the wifi that was not recognized, and the GPU that was too recent to have built-in nvidia drivers (but "nouveau" was working). I had to use a realtek driver from github and a classic ppa to get the most recent nvidia drivers easily. Then: my main computer, and my gf's. Both worked without any change. Install is fast and easy to customize (emplacement of / /home etc). Also, Linux runs much faster on my gf's computer than Windows7 (Firefox & document editing). And I game everyday on my computer (dota2, some coop games) through steam. Then of course: RaspberryPis & servers (I'm a Devops). Nothing to say there, works like a charm. But we expect that much anyway. So, has it fully matured? No, but it's a hell of a lot better than it used to be, and going on the right direction, on fast rails (Steam). The problems I encoutered seem to come from the simple fact that since it is not the most common OS, it gets the drivers/games after the others. And even that window is closing.
cdubzzz 11y ago
> it sucks for everything else (compared to Windows, for example) This is very, very broad. I moved from Windows 8 about a year ago and I find it to be comparable and better for most of the stuff I do. > even the purpose-built PCs deliver significantly lower performance with Linux than Windows. I agree that those numbers are significant, but frankly everything there looks acceptable to me. I have a custom build for gaming but am also a "patient gamer" so I've been doing just fine in Linux. I have been playing through Bioshock Infinite with no problem and enjoying the hell out of the recent Linux release of my current favorite FPS, Insurgency. In fact, I had a long standing stuttering issue in Insurgency under Windows 8 that ultimately led me to just give up on the game, sadly. Under Linux, no issue at all and equal performance. Anecdotal, of course, but just trying to illustrate that the recent increase of gaming availability is very nice for casual gamers like myself. > The NVidia side is much better, but still tends to crash more than on Windows or OSX Any source on this? I have a 780 and can't recall even a single issue with crashing because of the graphics driver. > My quite standard desktop (Xeons, NVidia GPU, SATA SSDs) Are Xeons really "standard" for desktop? This is is a legitimate question, I couldn't find anything quickly. Just thinking about market share vs Core and how well this may be tested in Linux distros currently.
- rbanffy 11y ago
  > Are Xeons really "standard" for desktop? I use one (it's actually a server, running multiple VMs, but it seems to have a decent GPU and has 1 VGA and two DisplayPort connectors on its back). I like it a lot.
  - cdubzzz 11y ago
    Hah, I bet you do love it! That is the use case I suspect is more common for Xeon - a server doing something like running multiple VMs.
    - rbanffy 11y ago
      I suspect the caches, larger than desktop processors, have a lot to do with the perceived performance. One benchmark I've been using is the set of unit tests on MAAS (dominantly CPython code). My laptop takes 20+ minutes to run them. An i5 with SSD takes 17 minutes. A VM on this Xeon box with a spinning hard disk takes 9 minutes to run them.
zamalek 11y ago
Linux has all the reasons to be the fastest gaming platform: something slow in the kernel slowing your game down? Submit a patch. Yet it isn't. It's absurd. The OSS framework has worked so well for almost every other facet, it's crazy that it hasn't worked for the kernel for games. Especially game developers: those are the guys you want when performance really matters. Gaming (and very slightly Visual Studio) is the reason I use Windows at home, if Linux became more competent at that I'd switch to it in a heartbeat.
- bwindels 11y ago
  Unlike other hardware, graphic cards don't have open specifications, so the only way third parties can write drivers is through reverse engineering, that's a big handicap.
  - dogma1138 11y ago
    The ISA's are more or less open AMD's are available for download, to get the ISA from NVIDIA you need to register and get a rubber stamped NDA. But still there isn't any one capable of writing a modern GPU kernel driver and a shader compiler for GPU's. The driver is doing a billion and a half optimizations, and fixes tons of errors that were left in the code during development at this point most AAA developers say "fuck it" let NVIDIA/AMD handle the performance and that's the best case, there have been cases where AAA titles were shipped with code that can't even initialize the display driver properly and it had to be fixed in the driver. Both AMD and NVIDIA pretty much keep their compiler and driver locked tight as a trade secret because it sort of is, the driver is what gives them to competitive edge and not in a million years would an FOSS team would be able to keep up with the release cycle for new games and new hardware. And for people that say well Vulcan will fix it, i highly doubt so, while Vulcan gives you very low level access to the GPU it's not the first API that did so, and it's very likely that developers will still continue to make the same mistakes as they did with DirectX which has by far more internal sanity checks and strict requirements than OpenGL. Valve might want to see Linux gaming and while they will be most likely able to compete with consoles they have very little chance of being able to compete with Windows based PC's unless there will be a cross platform unified driver architecture or NVIDIA and AMD will decide put as much development resources into their Linux driver as they invest in the Windows one.
dogma1138 11y ago
I have to agree my XPS15 from Dell isn't viable for native Linux installs (NVIDIA Optimus not supported on Linux, cannot connect external displays, can't really use the discrete GPU). The mouse pad works kinda funky, touch display bugs out, scaling doesn't work well in Gnome/KDE (works sorta well in Unity) since it doesn't have 1:1 pixel doubling due to the resolution Dell chose. Battery life is considerably poorer on Linux, i might need to play with Intel's AMT but I really don't feel that for a desktop distro I should be recompiling my own kernel with various modules and flags, the fan control is pretty awful and has 2 modes silent and jet engine and nothing in between. On the software side well 3 major pieces of software missing Office which can be mitigated with Office 365 (sorry folks OpenOffie/LibreOffice isn't there yet for actual work), Exchange client and non-browser / SSL extender based clients for enterprise grade VPN's (Checkpoint, CISCO, Juniper etc.). For me this presents a huge problem when I actually need to use my computer for work, this pretty much gives me 2 options either do all the technical aspects of my work on a VM or do or the non-technical aspects (office, communication, reporting etc.) in a VM. Considering that VM Workstation works better for me on Windows (better performance, no compatibility issues) than Linux and some software that actually needs things like 3D acceleration like Office 2013 onwards runs very poorly in my Windows Guest on a Linux Host (due to lack of support for the OPTIMUS "chip") it's a no brainier for me. Other things that make me stir clear of Linux as the primary OS are the simple little things that while might be trivial are very important things like connecting to a projector or using what ever magic wand HID the client might have during a presentation I just don't want to have to be in a position saying gosh sorry the display port to VGA adapter isn't working or i can't use that mouse because it just looks horribly unprofessional and yes I know I could solve these issues but in many cases there isn't an easy way to solve them universally and wasting 10-15 min on finding some config file to edit and then restarting the xserver to make it work will just make one look bad. That said if you want to utterly stick to Linux as a desktop today it's very possible if you A) don't need to use most commercial enterprise software B) have complete control over your hardware selection and C) don't need to waste much time doing non-technical stuff on your machine. Sadly I haven't found many places that would enable at least me to do so so Windows/OSX is the only way to go for me.
spikej 11y ago
I keep checking out Linux Mint as an alternative at every update as an alternative to Windows for family members, but it's still nowhere near where it needs to be. Aside from that, applications like Skype have terrible support/interface for linux.

acveilleux 11y ago

I agree with you so much. The last time I had an experience where I thought my computer ran *nix really well, it was a Celeron 500 Thinkpad X21 with OpenBSD. I have not had sound work as well before or since (next best? IRIX with an Octane2.) My work dev box is a CentOS 6 PoS and while it's serviceable and works OK for dev, I have a windows VM for a reason and my personal macbook comes out often.

yitchelle 11y ago
Also in agreement here. Actually, the last time I had a really well *nix system is when I had a MacMini :-) This sounds like a cynical remark, but it is a true.

dktbs 11y ago

You address every issue I have with desktop linux at the moment. The lack of hybrid graphics support is especially annoying. The bumblebee project was working on solving this, but there hasn't been an update on that project since 2013.

bananaoomarang 11y ago

Ditto this. I have used desktop Linux for about eight years now and graphics have consistently been the largest problem. If you can get them to work at all expect abysmal performance (excepting nVidia's proprietary drivers). Also if you buy a new machine you can't expect it to work straight away, in fact you should expect that Network and sound cards, touchpads and hardware related hotkeys will be broken. I think it is still better than Windows on the development front though (Cygwin is a pain and, virtuously, Linux desktop shells are stuck in the noughties)

_yy 11y ago

> it sucks for everything else What else does it suck at? "Desktop" does not mean "gaming". > there is no solution that provides on-demand GPU switching AND proper external monitor support at the same time Not true - this is highly hardware dependent. On recent Thinkpads, bumblebee works perfectly fine with externals monitors and has acceptable performance for most tasks (I use it with Blender and have no issues with it). There's still a performance hit since there's no DMA yet, but I hope that Nvidia will fix this one day. > No. Look at the most recent SteamOS/PC review It's still a viable gaming platform, even if performance for some recent high-end games is worse than on Windows. It's fine for hundreds of others. But I agree with you - while it works well for me now, I've spent a huge amount of time debugging Linux graphics in the past and there is still lots of work to be done (and is being done - Wayland will significantly improve things). Right now, the Windows stack is superior.

FatalBaboon 11y ago

The last few times I installed Linux on a machine went fine for 95%+ of what I expected. First, the worst: a high-end gaming laptop from MSI. Everything worked except the wifi that was not recognized, and the GPU that was too recent to have built-in nvidia drivers (but "nouveau" was working). I had to use a realtek driver from github and a classic ppa to get the most recent nvidia drivers easily. Then: my main computer, and my gf's. Both worked without any change. Install is fast and easy to customize (emplacement of / /home etc). Also, Linux runs much faster on my gf's computer than Windows7 (Firefox & document editing). And I game everyday on my computer (dota2, some coop games) through steam. Then of course: RaspberryPis & servers (I'm a Devops). Nothing to say there, works like a charm. But we expect that much anyway. So, has it fully matured? No, but it's a hell of a lot better than it used to be, and going on the right direction, on fast rails (Steam). The problems I encoutered seem to come from the simple fact that since it is not the most common OS, it gets the drivers/games after the others. And even that window is closing.

cdubzzz 11y ago

> it sucks for everything else (compared to Windows, for example) This is very, very broad. I moved from Windows 8 about a year ago and I find it to be comparable and better for most of the stuff I do. > even the purpose-built PCs deliver significantly lower performance with Linux than Windows. I agree that those numbers are significant, but frankly everything there looks acceptable to me. I have a custom build for gaming but am also a "patient gamer" so I've been doing just fine in Linux. I have been playing through Bioshock Infinite with no problem and enjoying the hell out of the recent Linux release of my current favorite FPS, Insurgency. In fact, I had a long standing stuttering issue in Insurgency under Windows 8 that ultimately led me to just give up on the game, sadly. Under Linux, no issue at all and equal performance. Anecdotal, of course, but just trying to illustrate that the recent increase of gaming availability is very nice for casual gamers like myself. > The NVidia side is much better, but still tends to crash more than on Windows or OSX Any source on this? I have a 780 and can't recall even a single issue with crashing because of the graphics driver. > My quite standard desktop (Xeons, NVidia GPU, SATA SSDs) Are Xeons really "standard" for desktop? This is is a legitimate question, I couldn't find anything quickly. Just thinking about market share vs Core and how well this may be tested in Linux distros currently.

rbanffy 11y ago
> Are Xeons really "standard" for desktop? I use one (it's actually a server, running multiple VMs, but it seems to have a decent GPU and has 1 VGA and two DisplayPort connectors on its back). I like it a lot.
- cdubzzz 11y ago
  Hah, I bet you do love it! That is the use case I suspect is more common for Xeon - a server doing something like running multiple VMs.
  - rbanffy 11y ago
    I suspect the caches, larger than desktop processors, have a lot to do with the perceived performance. One benchmark I've been using is the set of unit tests on MAAS (dominantly CPython code). My laptop takes 20+ minutes to run them. An i5 with SSD takes 17 minutes. A VM on this Xeon box with a spinning hard disk takes 9 minutes to run them.

zamalek 11y ago

Linux has all the reasons to be the fastest gaming platform: something slow in the kernel slowing your game down? Submit a patch. Yet it isn't. It's absurd. The OSS framework has worked so well for almost every other facet, it's crazy that it hasn't worked for the kernel for games. Especially game developers: those are the guys you want when performance really matters. Gaming (and very slightly Visual Studio) is the reason I use Windows at home, if Linux became more competent at that I'd switch to it in a heartbeat.

bwindels 11y ago
Unlike other hardware, graphic cards don't have open specifications, so the only way third parties can write drivers is through reverse engineering, that's a big handicap.
- dogma1138 11y ago
  The ISA's are more or less open AMD's are available for download, to get the ISA from NVIDIA you need to register and get a rubber stamped NDA. But still there isn't any one capable of writing a modern GPU kernel driver and a shader compiler for GPU's. The driver is doing a billion and a half optimizations, and fixes tons of errors that were left in the code during development at this point most AAA developers say "fuck it" let NVIDIA/AMD handle the performance and that's the best case, there have been cases where AAA titles were shipped with code that can't even initialize the display driver properly and it had to be fixed in the driver. Both AMD and NVIDIA pretty much keep their compiler and driver locked tight as a trade secret because it sort of is, the driver is what gives them to competitive edge and not in a million years would an FOSS team would be able to keep up with the release cycle for new games and new hardware. And for people that say well Vulcan will fix it, i highly doubt so, while Vulcan gives you very low level access to the GPU it's not the first API that did so, and it's very likely that developers will still continue to make the same mistakes as they did with DirectX which has by far more internal sanity checks and strict requirements than OpenGL. Valve might want to see Linux gaming and while they will be most likely able to compete with consoles they have very little chance of being able to compete with Windows based PC's unless there will be a cross platform unified driver architecture or NVIDIA and AMD will decide put as much development resources into their Linux driver as they invest in the Windows one.

dogma1138 11y ago

I have to agree my XPS15 from Dell isn't viable for native Linux installs (NVIDIA Optimus not supported on Linux, cannot connect external displays, can't really use the discrete GPU). The mouse pad works kinda funky, touch display bugs out, scaling doesn't work well in Gnome/KDE (works sorta well in Unity) since it doesn't have 1:1 pixel doubling due to the resolution Dell chose. Battery life is considerably poorer on Linux, i might need to play with Intel's AMT but I really don't feel that for a desktop distro I should be recompiling my own kernel with various modules and flags, the fan control is pretty awful and has 2 modes silent and jet engine and nothing in between. On the software side well 3 major pieces of software missing Office which can be mitigated with Office 365 (sorry folks OpenOffie/LibreOffice isn't there yet for actual work), Exchange client and non-browser / SSL extender based clients for enterprise grade VPN's (Checkpoint, CISCO, Juniper etc.). For me this presents a huge problem when I actually need to use my computer for work, this pretty much gives me 2 options either do all the technical aspects of my work on a VM or do or the non-technical aspects (office, communication, reporting etc.) in a VM. Considering that VM Workstation works better for me on Windows (better performance, no compatibility issues) than Linux and some software that actually needs things like 3D acceleration like Office 2013 onwards runs very poorly in my Windows Guest on a Linux Host (due to lack of support for the OPTIMUS "chip") it's a no brainier for me. Other things that make me stir clear of Linux as the primary OS are the simple little things that while might be trivial are very important things like connecting to a projector or using what ever magic wand HID the client might have during a presentation I just don't want to have to be in a position saying gosh sorry the display port to VGA adapter isn't working or i can't use that mouse because it just looks horribly unprofessional and yes I know I could solve these issues but in many cases there isn't an easy way to solve them universally and wasting 10-15 min on finding some config file to edit and then restarting the xserver to make it work will just make one look bad. That said if you want to utterly stick to Linux as a desktop today it's very possible if you A) don't need to use most commercial enterprise software B) have complete control over your hardware selection and C) don't need to waste much time doing non-technical stuff on your machine. Sadly I haven't found many places that would enable at least me to do so so Windows/OSX is the only way to go for me.

spikej 11y ago

I keep checking out Linux Mint as an alternative at every update as an alternative to Windows for family members, but it's still nowhere near where it needs to be. Aside from that, applications like Skype have terrible support/interface for linux.