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Over a decade of Ubuntu use, could not be happier! I remember in 2000s, I had to edit /etc/ text files to set up internet etc. Nowadays everything works out of

• a_bonobo 5y ago
  >Am I missing anything ignoring closed source Windows and MacOS? I went back to Windows with WSL. My employer relies heavily on Outlook and especially the Outlook calendar. The equivalent in Thunderbird does not work well at all with missed invites/missed reminders/missed meetings. WSL with Ubuntu is amazing for dev work!
• underscore_ku 5y ago
  nope
• astrea 5y ago
  video games :(
  • midasuni 5y ago
    I wish I had time to play, but transport fever, civ 6 and KSP all seem to work just fine every few months when I get a few hours.
  • _xy8h 5y ago
    Proton. Play on Linux. Lutris.
    • beefjerkins 5y ago
      Yeah, gaming on Linux has seriously come a long way thanks to the efforts of Valve and the wider community. My main issue with gaming on linux is cloud saves; while it generally will work with Steam, other platforms like GoG have no such capacity, and it's a real drag compared to Windows.
      • mmcdermott 5y ago
        I recently set up Game Backup Monitor (http://mikemaximus.github.io/gbm-web/linux.html http://mikemaximus.github.io/gbm-web/linux.html) for GOG games. The backup location is in OneDrive. I do have to import the backup manually, but the combination eases the pain.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • mmcdermott 5y ago
    Open source game development remains light, but Wine works better now than at any time in the past. I installed a game that had a Linux release that blew up on ALSA libraries. The ultimate fix was to install the Windows version over Wine.
    • gigglesupstairs 5y ago
      Does Steam work in Wine?
      • sjustinas 5y ago
        The Steam client works natively on Linux. It ships its own version of Wine, called Proton and many games work well. They are doing lots of work to get the remaining games working in preparation for the launch of Steam Deck. https://www.protondb.com/ https://www.protondb.com/
        • KptMarchewa 5y ago
          Is it still 32bit?
          • TingPing 5y ago
            Yes, same as on Windows.
      • Mikeb85 5y ago
        Steam Proton is the way to do it now.
      • techrat 5y ago
        From my experience: Linux > Steam > Proton > Windows Game works better than Linux > Wine > Steam > Windows Game There's really no reason to be running Steam in Wine when Steam runs natively within Linux and Proton does the work for you for each individual game.
        • 5y ago
• mercurialmaven 5y ago
  In my experience, Ubuntu, or Linux in general, works great on desktops but very poorly on laptops due to lack of hardware and driver support. Not a hardware engineer myself, I think this is because desktop hardware is more standardized while laptop hardware is more proprietary, advanced, and custom-made to different makes and models. My previous job was the first job I had wear a company-supported Linux laptop was even an option. I absolutely loved it, but fully admit it was incredibly difficult to set up and maintain. Most devs continued to use Macbooks. One specific Linux issue I ran into repeatedly is that Chrome and Chromium by default refuse to trust Linux graphics drivers and instead do software rendering. It turns out, software rendering makes your browser really slow and makes it burn tons of battery when not plugged in. I eventually figured out how to enable most acceleration for Chrome. However, there were several electron apps like Zoom that didn't expose any option to enable hardware acceleration. The zoom desktop app was completely unusable for me on Linux. Instead, I used the browser app exclusively. Slack was similarly unusable without hardware acceleration but to its credit exposed an option to enable it.
  • techrat 5y ago
    > One specific Linux issue I ran into repeatedly is that Chrome and Chromium by default refuse to trust Linux graphics drivers and instead do software rendering. https://i.imgur.com/u1sKBiu.png https://i.imgur.com/u1sKBiu.png
    • mercurialmaven 5y ago
      I don't remember the details, but I remember it wasn't nearly as simple as toggling a switch. I remember it involving a mixture of: * Setting custom startup flags to chrome * accessing a hidden dev-specific page and turning on acceleration features that were deemed unsupported or experimental. This page looks related though I don't remember if these exact instructions worked for me or not: https://www.linuxuprising.com/2021/01/how-to-enable-hardware-accelerated.html https://www.linuxuprising.com/2021/01/how-to-enable-hardware.... I had to do a bunch of research before I arrived at a working solution. After I enabled these features, my desktop started encountering a problem where I would have to kill and restart the display manager once, and thereafter the display manager would occasionally hang and I'd have to restart it. It was manageable with a few days research and technical skill, but it's not the kind of thing you would expect most people to put up with. Another thing to note, Chrome's software renderer didn't seem to play well with my skylake? integrated graphics. Not only was it slow, but buggy with screen tearing and other visual artifacts. So I had to get acceleration working so my browser would both render properly and be reasonably responsive and performant.
• _xy8h 5y ago
  Anecdotal but no less amusing: I upgraded my desktop and used the extra parts to rebuild my Windows 10 system, the nearly cutting edge hardware on the newly rebuilt main desktop all worked when I reinstalled xUbuntu 20.04 on the new SSD. The hand me down parts, while not ancient, were still old enough that I had expected Windows 10 to be able to support it when I installed it on the SSD for that machine. Wifi and Webcam both did not work after Windows finished installing and detecting hardware/updating. Windows 10 later decided to reboot my system, unprompted, when I still had a project file open in Premiere. How far Linux has come is honestly refreshing. How long Windows has continued to have absolute dealbreaker issues is astounding.
  • rbanffy 5y ago
    The immense majority of Windows installs are on computers that come with it. Because of that, OEMs make sure all bits and pieces they sell at the same time work with it. Also, that’s why even printers need to come with a CD of Windows drivers (probably for the imaginary CD drive that no longer comes with the computer)
• beefjerkins 5y ago
  Out of interest, have you tried other distributions? Perhaps Debian based like Linux Mint / Pop OS, or others like Manjaro? What keeps you using Ubuntu after all these years?
  • Mikeb85 5y ago
    I've personally tried some of those. Ubuntu simply works. I hate most of their defaults, most add bugs, Ubuntu is what most cloud providers use if you're a dev, every software provider targets Ubuntu if they target Linux, and so on. You can install Ubuntu and it'll work. Easy. No other distro I've tried (Fedora, Suse, Manjaro, Mint, Mageia) is as easy.
    • in_mice 5y ago
      I've had driver issues with things like arch and debian. I maybe enjoyed digging into that a decade ago. I don't anymore.
    • washadjeffmad 5y ago
      I know we're just sharing anecdotes, but I dropped Ubuntu during the "Megalomaniacal Shuttleworth" days, and I still don't accept his vision for Ubuntu. If you remember the earliest builds, they included a video of Nelson Mandela explaining ubuntu and implied it as a light, legally unencumbered OS for the world. I was helping build labs in East Africa at the time, and it was a fantastic choice for running scientific operations because of its relative UI cohesion and simplicity over Debian while allowing access to its vast repositories and package groups. I kind of lost all faith when the power trips started happening across the GNOME Foundation and elsewhere and moved to less divisively ambitious distros that were more responsive to their users. I've never had issues installing or using Linux on hardware I picked, but I understand the struggles of working around non-spec and proprietary chipsets without drivers. I don't use non-free drivers in most cases, so having hardware that doesn't struggle with them is paramount.
  • PetahNZ 5y ago
    For me, because Ubuntu just works for everything I need it to. So I have not found the need to try a different distro.
• vladev 5y ago
  You'll be surprised, but it's RedHat that made most of that happen. A lot of the important Linux projects are developed mostly by them - Gnome, Wayland, NetworkManager, Pipewire, flatpak, etc. Ubuntu, on the other hand, seem to like to do many things their way. Like aggressive patching. I recall fontconfig being heavily patched from upstream. Then we have Mir (now almost abandoned), Unity (abandoned), snap (flatpak, done differently, not yet abandoned :).
  • nullspace 5y ago
    I get annoyed when I see posts like this with revisionist history. I can't comment on everything but: > Unity (abandoned) You probably don't recall how bad Gnome 3 was initially, and how much better Unity was over Gnome 2. Sure it also had its issues in the beginning, but it took a really long time for Gnome 3 to catch up. > snap (flatpak, done differently, not yet abandoned :). I am pretty sure flatpak didn't exist when snap was announced. Or it was around the same time. Given the above two, I'd place very little credence on the rest of your points. I agree with the Mir situation to some extent, but look at how long wayland has taken to ship.
    • michaelmrose 5y ago
      You are absolutely correct that Gnome 3.0 was bad. Even more importantly there isn't anything whatsoever inherently with going your own way. Doing so is ultimately how we end up with a useful marketplace of tools to pick from. If you stop worrying about the victimless crime of fragmentation neither gnome sucking or the specific sequence of development matters. For what its worth I think they date from around the same time. https://launchpad.net/snapcraft/+milestones https://launchpad.net/snapcraft/+milestones September 2015 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatpak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatpak September 2015 The larger issue would seem to be that canonical has a habit of betting on losers it ultimately abandons. Snap looks like the next roadkill to me. Far from being universal it will probably never see substantial use outside Ubuntu. It suggests perhaps that they should exercise better judgement.
      • rbanffy 5y ago
• midasuni 5y ago
  I moved from Debian teating to Ubuntu on the desktop in 206 as I felt the repos were more uptodate. The last couple of Ubuntu releases have announced me significantly though, netplan and subiquity especially
• imron 5y ago
  > Nowadays everything works out of box. Except for decent power management on laptops, and certain Bluetooth headsets.
  • zarkov99 5y ago
    PopOS has decent power management.
    • tssva 5y ago
      PopOS does slightly better than most distros out of the box on my Thinkpad. Installing tlp greatly improves battery life across all distros I have tried and basically eliminates the advantage PopOS has. Unfortunately compared to this level of improvement I still get about a 30% improvement in battery life using Windows without any tweaking at all.
      • ArclightMat 5y ago
        Have you checked out Fedora? Out of the box I had as good as (or close enough to) Windows' battery life on my ThinkPads and normal consumer hardware due to certain optimizations [1] they've made, to the point where I don't even run tlp anymore. Furthermore they've introduced power-profiles-daemon in Fedora 35 [2] by default, which allow granular-ish control similar to Windows' "Power Mode" option and PopOS' system76-power. [1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/ImprovedLaptopBatteryLife https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/ImprovedLaptopBattery... [2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Power_Profiles_Daemon https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Power_Profiles_Daemon
        • tssva 5y ago
          I have tried Fedora and battery life was still awful in comparison. Looking at the details of the changes referenced in your 1st link they are for Intel chips or chipsets. My Thinkpad is Ryzen based. I even tried the beta of Fedora 35 which still had awful power management for me. After a couple of days I installed the latest to tlp to see if it had improved the situation since my last try. Still no where near Windows and requires disabling the new power profiles daemon. Maybe things would be better for me at this point if I had an Intel based laptop but my previous one was and the situation then was the same.
• poisonborz 5y ago
  - About 90% of the (GUI) software ever developed? I'm happy to hear that there are quality Linux alternatives nowadays, but there's just many order of magnitudes more choice on Windows (and far less, but still more on Mac). For a lot of categories, this might change in the next decade (Electron and other cross-platform frameworks, tech like Proton) but for things like media editing or even image viewers, or until there is some tech to seamlessly emulate, this won't be a fight. - Trivial app portability - I absolutely love the concept of portable Windows software. Have a single folder with configuration and binaries, that can run for sure anywhere (give or take a .Net/VisualC install) - and you can achieve this for 90%+ of all available apps. With a some sync tool it's simple to have the same (as in reproducible/copiable) work environment on many machines (in the context of ad-hoc gui user applications). I know this concept isn't really transferable to Linux (separated locations per app, "just build from source") and there are attempts (Snap) but due to the fractured scene and #1 it's not that practical for end-users. - Hardware compatibility - cool that you didn't have device issues, but this could be because you just don't use non-mainstream hardware. Even when I did, a lot of special functionality was bound to (Mac/Win) drivers. Sure, not Ubuntu's fault, but still. I think Ubuntu/Linux success stories are infinitely subjective - what you need as an end-user, how much time or patience you have, or how much you value privacy/lack of telemetry/security.
  • silisili 5y ago
    Re 2: It's actually gotten a lot better. There exists Flatpak, AppImage, Snapd, and of course Docker on the 'container' front. A growing number of apps, probably due to Go, are just as you described - a binary you can run anywhere. I will say, I've been solely a Linux user for almost 20 years now, and still prefer the Windows structure as you described. I like the idea of applications in their own folder, with the binaries and configs and everything just there. In Linux, of course they are divided - confs go here, binaries go here, libraries here. The problem is that -here- isn't well defined. Directions for one distro don't necessarily translate directly to another wrt to locations.
  • mdp2021 5y ago
    > Trivial app portability The "registry" is not an issue anymore?
• beebmam 5y ago
  For my work PC, I use Ubuntu, period. Too many third party apps just don't work very well outside of the Ubuntu ecosystem, apps which I need in order to function in my workplace. I'd probably use something like Arch or rolling my own for work if these apps weren't necessary!
  • vlod 5y ago
    fyi: There are distros which are fundamentally Ubuntu, like PopOS. I'm curious if the apps you're talking about are not mainstream.
  • bluepoint 5y ago
    Could you elaborate? Which apps run in Ubuntu and not in Arch?
    • dagw 5y ago
      In theory you can probably get most apps working on Arch, but if you want support and an easier life it's generally best to stick with the official packages from the developer which are almost always packaged for Ubuntu and RHEL only.
    • Delk 5y ago
      I would also be interested to hear. I'm using Fedora on my personal hardware where I don't remember encountering much (Linux-supported) software that wouldn't work. I had to tweak something to get e.g. the native Spotify client working, and it would probably have been easier on Ubuntu for which it's packaged, but problems are relatively few and far between. On the other hand, in the workplace I've only had Windows in recent years, so it'd be nice to know if there are blind spots in work-oriented software that I've missed.
• tlrobinson 5y ago
  So you’re saying 2021 is the year of Linux desktop?
• u4346 5y ago
  Kernel panic is also free. I'm using Ubuntu for 7 years and I have to admit that more unstable system I can't find. No dist upgrade was successful for me, I don't have a week without something crashed, and right now I had to make downgrade of kernel in Ubuntu 21.10 just to boot the computer. But I still can't shutdown or restart is safely because it crashes during the process of turning off. I don't know why I'm here, in Linux land. All this is so pathetic I can't even describe it. Servers on linux are cool, but desktop is a pain. Change my mind!