Linux desktop is in its best shape since its inception, and yet a thousand light years away from Windows.
That depends on your needs and values. As far as freedom is concerned, Windows is a far cry from what Linux offers. Windows restricts you to NTFS as root filesystem, for example. Windows offers no open-source disk encryption. Linux distros come out of the box with great integrated tools and workflow, something Microsoft only wishes to emulates with its Linux subsystem. But Windows aims to restrict your workflow to singular proprietary applications like VS. Windows as a whole is a packaged product that makes choices for you, and restricts the user in the process. That may be OK with you, but in no way does that make it "light years" ahead of Linux, only the opposite. This isn't even mentioning privacy.
> and yet a thousand light years away from Windows
Yep, in the front.
Stuff works. You don't need 32GB of memory to run anything. The system doesn't get locked down all the time while the OS uses the entire IO capacity. The computer does not misbehave all the time and instead does what you order. You get software for almost everything right from the package manager, and it works for you, instead of shoving ads or licensing constraints into your face.
Such rants would actually be believable when instead of cherry-picking the ultimate worst experiences and generalizing them you'd stick to more average statements, more reflective of the truth. I'm not saying this to defend Windows, denying it has problems would be insane, but just to let you know it's prerfectly possible to rant on Windows without going into extremes which sound ridiculous to people who actually know and use Windows on a variety of devices. E.g. I can rant the same way about Linux or OSX based on the worst experiences I had with it, and you'd recognize it would be far away from your experience. Also I can counter each of your examples just based on a Windows 10 install I happened to do a week ago so clearly something is off with your statements: after boot uses about 2.5GB of memory. Personally didn't experience lock downs, though I heard it from others as well, but not 'all the time'.. Driver issues? As far as I'm concerned it does what I tell it to, 'all the time'. I installed a terminal, text editor and IDE using a package manager. They all work for me and don't show adds nor licensing constraints.
Windows not running on 8GB of memory isn't non-usual. (Yes, 32 was an exaggeration.)
I see Windows using the entire IO capacity of my work computer every working day, 1/3 to 1/2 the time.
Windows update destroying your configuration isn't even news anymore. It restarting when people don't want is a widely known fact, and more than 1/4 of the times I have a half-hour meeting at work the computer stays there updating for 1 hour or more.
Windows software installation is a worst in class experience on nearly any dimension. It's not something that happens once in a while.
I don't know what you call "cherry-picking". Those "ultimate worst experiences" happen every day.
Not if the point is to get work done. I see a new version of Windows and my reaction is usually " oh that's nice, to bad it's MS and at some point it will be pathetic ". Because I know it's coming, it always does and it's always worse than the last thing that pissed me off. Linux Desktop is light years ahead if the point is to get stuff done and not hate your machine.
For me? Because I'm trying to work through the several hundred steam games I've accrued from humble bundles over the years (and for one or two works apps hopefully going away soon).
I used Linux on the desktop for over a decade, usually with a highly customized FVWM2 config. I found windows 8 to be okay, and windows 10 to be a pretty good minimal desktop.
All my dev work is done remote on PuTTY anyways, so beyond a browser and terminal, other features are really the deciding factor.
I have all 3 systems: Mac, Windows and Linux.
Most engineering softwares are only and exclusively available on Windows. I’m a Mechanical Engineer.
Linux, I use for writing code with open source tools (gcc, clang).
Mac, I use for general purpose computing and media consumption.
Use an Enterprise ISO that comes with Local Group Policy Editor.
From there you can turn off or on any feature or function.
I specifically use it to disable all windows defender applications and firewalls (which also automatically kills windows store and updates unless turned back on)
With something called execTI. It lets you modify the registry as a TrustedInstaller so you can turn off any services running aka the 5 or 6 different windows anti malware, defender, firewall, and security services.
If you want more instructions I will help because it is extremely annoying and every update does turn everything back on for the most part. So I do this cat and mouse game about every 2 or 3 months.
My laptop usage on 16GB of ram goes from 25% idle to just under 10% idle. which is my entire point of doing it so I can save battery life that I don't really have.
>Most engineering softwares are only and exclusively available on Windows. I’m a Mechanical Engineer.
Out of curiosity, does it run under Wine or it has some DRM that prevents it?
I wish blizzard would release overwatch for linux, so I can forget about running windows.
If Blizzard released their games on Linux I'd be incredibly happy. Most of the time I boot Windows 10 it's to play Heroes of the Storm.
Have you had any luck running it with Wine?
I'm not parent, but Overwatch runs very well on my computer with Wine + DXVK (Wine plugin(?) which translates DirectX to Vulkan). Performance is not noticeably worse than Windows.
Edit: I realize you may have been talking about HotS, not OW, but according to Google that should also work if you configure esync: https://github.com/lutris/lutris/wiki/How-to:-Esync https://github.com/lutris/lutris/wiki/How-to:-Esync
If you have a laptop with switchable graphics, you will need to use nvidia-xrun to enable Vulkan passthrough to the dGPU, but aside from that I just followed these instructions: https://github.com/lutris/lutris/wiki/Game:-Overwatch https://github.com/lutris/lutris/wiki/Game:-Overwatch
Note that the Blizzard app will fail to launch with DXVK enabled, so you have to disable DXVK, launch Battle.net, enable DXVK, and then click the 'Play' button to start Overwatch. I made a few scripts for this, so I just do `./disableDxvk ... ./startBlizzard ... ./enableDxvk ... click play` to run the game.
WINEPREFIX=~/.overwatch_wine/ setup_dxvk64 # enable DXVK
WINEPREFIX=~/.overwatch_wine/ winecfg # disable DXVK: delete the overrides from Libraries tab
exo-open Battle.net.desktop # launch the Blizzard app, the .desktop should be generated on install
Isn't there a build of Wine made specifically for playing Overwatch? I tried it a while ago and it worked really well.
It looks like there is now a report on appdb with a gold status, every time I checked it before it was borderline unplayable. Even now the gold report says it has constant flickering and fps drops. I'll probably try it, but knowing blizzard's tendency to completely break wine compat with some updates I really wish the support was first-party.
I may do that at one point out of frustration, but don’t underestimate the enormous amount of stuff that one has to relearn for a reasonably advanced windows user. Not the least if you live in visual studio. And my job doesn’t involve managing linux servers. All I know about linux, I learned it toying with my synology...
> visual studio
Yeah, that's a big one. There is no other C/C++ IDE out there that can measure up to Visual Studio. Either you use vim or emacs with a hundred cobbled together plugins to sort-of approximate a productive development environment (and you still don't have a usable debugger); or install one of KDevelop or Code::Blocks, which are fine for toying around with toy/academic projects of less than 100kloc; or you shell out lots of money for one of Qt Creator or JetBrains' CLion and get a product that is almost as good as Visual Studio 5. I'd say if you want to actually write software, just install Windows in a VM and do a full restore every so often. It's a bit of a pain, but you get the absolute best C/C++ IDE ever created and can enjoy unrivaled productivity and unmatched performance.
There are two sides of this coin. I have abandoned my attempt of running Linux on my laptop after 17 years. (My Linux server usage goes back to 1993.)
There are always problems. Bluetooth breaks often, the MFC device on upgrades, enterprise wifi is iffy (and now it's only enterprise wifi but up until very recently, it was 5GHz wifi) ...
I am now on Windows 10 w/ Linux subsystem for Windows. The big upgrades are put off with Group Policy, the small updates run overnight because I leave the laptop docked and powered when I am sleeping. But reboots are rare. The big upgrades I wait 4-5 months with installing. This is a solved problem. O&O Shutup10 deals with the privacy issues, I think (also I think this is overblown, the privacy fight is lost already).
So why suffer needlessly with the Linux kernel?
I actually went the other way around from you.
Linux used to be terrible on laptops, but I recently bought a laptop, installed Linux (Fedora with KDE) on it, and everything just worked out of the box.
You're probabaly waiting for the "except..." - but there is no "except". Everything works the same or better. I get hours more battery life than windows after installing powerTOP, and about the same before doing that.
I ran Arch before I tried Fedora, and from that experience I found that the only way to get Enterprise WiFi is by using network-manager and nm-applet (both of which come with KDE on Fedora so I had no issues when I switched).
It's magical.
Out of box Linux support for most laptops is surprisingly good now, leaving the overall quality of the laptop as the real issue. Tons of crummy machines out there with poor displays, hinges designed to fail, a million screws yet the screw mounts love to shear off at the slightest force...
Mint is a dangerous distribution and should not be recommended to new users. Just install debian or use the ubuntu netinstall (mini.iso) or some minimalist distro like alpine (although alpine probably isn't great for new users.)