7 ms·

Thankfully we have options. I'm planning on moving my main desktop to Arch over my Christmas break from work. It's been a while since I ran Linux as my main des

Thankfully we have options. I'm planning on moving my main desktop to Arch over my Christmas break from work. It's been a while since I ran Linux as my main desktop, my only complaints have been around gaming performance. I have a friend who plays the same games as I do and he's got everything working on his Arch install. That's really the only thing that holds me on Windows and if it's as smooth of a transition as I believe it currently is then I just have no reason to not give it another fair shake.

BrandoElFollito 5y ago
I try to move to Linux desktop one or twice a year for the last, what, 20 years. I have Linux on all my servers, was an early (very minor) dev on pre-1 kernel and generally love it. The desktop is a walking nightmare. Something continuously does not work: multiple screens, waking up from sleep etc. I really would like to move (we use Outlook but I am even ready to go for OWA) but Windows is considerably better on laptops. Again, I love Linux and have managed literally thousands of them since 1994.
- viraptor 5y ago
  > Something continuously does not work: multiple screens, waking up from sleep etc. That's my experience with Windows as well though. On Dell xps on windows my external monitor goes blank sometimes and sleep randomly causes overheating and fast battery drain. On the other hand Linux handles it just fine. Win is not consistently better anymore.
  - rapind 5y ago
    I’ll add that m1 macs have been a shit show for external monitor support (ymmv but google it and you’ll find thousand page long support issues). It’s either rocket science to get monitors to work flawlessly or it’s the B team working on it. Probably the former given that it’s also a problem on Linux and windoze.
- aquir 5y ago
  The same, I always try but go back to Windows because on desktop it's unusable due to silly issues like what you've mentioned
- anthk 5y ago
  Odd, I run Slackware-current, with Fluxbox. To suspend, I just run "xlock & loginctl suspend" from a script being called from a Fluxbox submenu. Dumb easy.
  - mattkevan 5y ago
    Good satire!
    - opan 5y ago
      To clarify the parent's comment, he clicks a button in a menu to suspend, he just also said what the button is doing. It's probably less complicated than you're thinking.
    - anthk 5y ago
      xlock = locks your desktop with a screensaver (or not). & = puts xlock in the background so the shell can continue parsing commands without waiting for xlock to finish. loginctl = sends the command on the right to the login manager. suspend = self-explanatory. Thus, upon waking up from suspend, your machine is still locked up by xlock. Simple.
- matkoniecz 5y ago
  Well, it is not like Windows is free from annoyances. That at least for me were worse than inability to hibernate.
- tombert 5y ago
  Haven't you heard? It's the year of the Linux desktop :) In all seriousness, until about a year ago when I got a discount on a Macbook and changed to that, I had been running Linux for about a decade across different laptops, and feel that since ~2017 the desktop experience has improved substantially. I bought a new laptop in 2017, installed Ubuntu on it...and that was it. I spent exactly zero minutes installing drivers or mucking with configurations, multiple monitors with HDMI audio worked out of the box, and "going to sleep upon the lid closing" just worked. Granted, I'm a bit of a Linux veteran at this so maybe there were a lot of things I was tweaking that I just don't remember since I do them so often, but I do not think that was the case, since I got my wife (who is not a software engineer) using Ubuntu as well for awhile. I think part of what made it better was using AMD hardware for everything. The drivers are just included with the kernel, and they work great out of the box, at least for me. I realize that telling everyone to shop for a computer based on the drivers that will be available isn't exactly a great sales pitch for Linux for the average consumer, but I suspect if you frequent HN you probably have a reasonable ability to differentiate video cards and whatnot.
  - tentacleuno 5y ago
    > and "going to sleep upon the lid closing" just worked. And "not going to sleep upon the lid closing" just works, too! I tried this when I hooked my laptop up to the TV. Closing the lid did nothing. It only went to sleep when you closed it and unplugged the HDMI. I really really liked that, despite it being a tiny detail.
    - tombert 5y ago
      Oh yeah! I had forgotten to mention that. I can't really blame people for thinking that the Linux desktop experience sucks, to be fair. As someone who used it in 2012 and went through the pain of getting an Optimus graphics card working correctly, and dealt with the weird rendering issues of Gnome 3, and had to write a bootup script to disable "tap to click" on my mousepad, it's a reasonable complaint to say that the Linux desktop is unfriendly. I think a lot of people would genuinely like the 2021 Linux desktop experience if they tried it, but I fear that it will be quite difficult to shake the (well earned) stigma.
- tentacleuno 5y ago
  > but Windows is considerably better on laptops. I'll concede that if you're talking about the trackpad, Linux is disappointingly bad compared to Windows. It's really really shaky, scrolls up and down with a shockingly massive jitter. You start to wonder if the trackpad itself is malfunctioning. Sadly, the same trackpad works so much better on Windows. This is mainly about the pointer / trackpad drivers to be fair, but it's still a freestanding issue that has the potential to really bug someone using Linux on a laptop. It gets so bad I have to carry around a mouse.
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    Yeah some drivers are still garbage. My asus laptop works great with trackpad but my dell not so much (it's an older laptop)
    - tentacleuno 5y ago
      No shit! My laptop is a nearly 9 year old Dell Latitude. Haven't tried the ASUS trackpads, but IIRC it was quite smooth on an old Windows 8 netbook I had. Really miss that thing.
- scruple 5y ago
  I've been running Arch on my 8th (or maybe 7th?) Generation ThinkPad X1C since I bought it in 2018. I've had no issues with multiple monitors, hibernate, etc. I never got the fingerprint reader working but I don't care to use it regardless, so... Otherwise, though, it's been completely solid the entire time I've had it and it's my daily driver for personal project work.
- outsomnia 5y ago
  Yes the ride you get on a laptop completely depends on the laptop. I have a Dell XPS and everything is working great under Linux with that, except sleep that Intel seem to have screwed with to keep the cpu awake. Other HP laptops have been either a similar ride for higher-end one or quite difficult to get working well for a cheap one. Part of it is the laptops are developed for windows ACPI interpreter, for windows wifi drivers, for windows system level hack drivers etc. It takes time for Linux to figure out individual workarounds. At least for XPS Dell seem to be developing also for it to work on Linux.
westpfelia 5y ago
Check out https://www.protondb.com https://www.protondb.com The only games that I really ever struggle with are ones that have anticheat. And EasyAntiCheat is going linux friendly so something like 95 of the top 100 games on steam will either work natively or via proton. And with Valve pushing the SteamDeck is see that number going to 100 soon.
- mediocregopher 5y ago
  Steam on linux will automatically pull in protondb profiles for your games, so you probably don't even need to explicitly "check out" protondb at this point. Most games will "just work", with the exception of big AAA games with picky anti-cheat engines.
  - r00fus 5y ago
    Yeah you may need to use Glorious Eggroll [1] for some games. [1] https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom/releases https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom/releases
- Bluecobra 5y ago
  This is great! Games are what is holding me back the most... I am hoping that the Steam Deck really takes off and more and more games are supported.
- scruple 5y ago
  Thanks for that!
- johnny22 5y ago
  the proton side supports various anticheats, but the game dev folks still have to enable support on their side.

BrandoElFollito 5y ago

I try to move to Linux desktop one or twice a year for the last, what, 20 years. I have Linux on all my servers, was an early (very minor) dev on pre-1 kernel and generally love it. The desktop is a walking nightmare. Something continuously does not work: multiple screens, waking up from sleep etc. I really would like to move (we use Outlook but I am even ready to go for OWA) but Windows is considerably better on laptops. Again, I love Linux and have managed literally thousands of them since 1994.

viraptor 5y ago
> Something continuously does not work: multiple screens, waking up from sleep etc. That's my experience with Windows as well though. On Dell xps on windows my external monitor goes blank sometimes and sleep randomly causes overheating and fast battery drain. On the other hand Linux handles it just fine. Win is not consistently better anymore.
- rapind 5y ago
  I’ll add that m1 macs have been a shit show for external monitor support (ymmv but google it and you’ll find thousand page long support issues). It’s either rocket science to get monitors to work flawlessly or it’s the B team working on it. Probably the former given that it’s also a problem on Linux and windoze.
aquir 5y ago
The same, I always try but go back to Windows because on desktop it's unusable due to silly issues like what you've mentioned
anthk 5y ago
Odd, I run Slackware-current, with Fluxbox. To suspend, I just run "xlock & loginctl suspend" from a script being called from a Fluxbox submenu. Dumb easy.
- mattkevan 5y ago
  Good satire!
  - opan 5y ago
    To clarify the parent's comment, he clicks a button in a menu to suspend, he just also said what the button is doing. It's probably less complicated than you're thinking.
  - anthk 5y ago
    xlock = locks your desktop with a screensaver (or not). & = puts xlock in the background so the shell can continue parsing commands without waiting for xlock to finish. loginctl = sends the command on the right to the login manager. suspend = self-explanatory. Thus, upon waking up from suspend, your machine is still locked up by xlock. Simple.
matkoniecz 5y ago
Well, it is not like Windows is free from annoyances. That at least for me were worse than inability to hibernate.
tombert 5y ago
Haven't you heard? It's the year of the Linux desktop :) In all seriousness, until about a year ago when I got a discount on a Macbook and changed to that, I had been running Linux for about a decade across different laptops, and feel that since ~2017 the desktop experience has improved substantially. I bought a new laptop in 2017, installed Ubuntu on it...and that was it. I spent exactly zero minutes installing drivers or mucking with configurations, multiple monitors with HDMI audio worked out of the box, and "going to sleep upon the lid closing" just worked. Granted, I'm a bit of a Linux veteran at this so maybe there were a lot of things I was tweaking that I just don't remember since I do them so often, but I do not think that was the case, since I got my wife (who is not a software engineer) using Ubuntu as well for awhile. I think part of what made it better was using AMD hardware for everything. The drivers are just included with the kernel, and they work great out of the box, at least for me. I realize that telling everyone to shop for a computer based on the drivers that will be available isn't exactly a great sales pitch for Linux for the average consumer, but I suspect if you frequent HN you probably have a reasonable ability to differentiate video cards and whatnot.
- tentacleuno 5y ago
  > and "going to sleep upon the lid closing" just worked. And "not going to sleep upon the lid closing" just works, too! I tried this when I hooked my laptop up to the TV. Closing the lid did nothing. It only went to sleep when you closed it and unplugged the HDMI. I really really liked that, despite it being a tiny detail.
  - tombert 5y ago
    Oh yeah! I had forgotten to mention that. I can't really blame people for thinking that the Linux desktop experience sucks, to be fair. As someone who used it in 2012 and went through the pain of getting an Optimus graphics card working correctly, and dealt with the weird rendering issues of Gnome 3, and had to write a bootup script to disable "tap to click" on my mousepad, it's a reasonable complaint to say that the Linux desktop is unfriendly. I think a lot of people would genuinely like the 2021 Linux desktop experience if they tried it, but I fear that it will be quite difficult to shake the (well earned) stigma.
tentacleuno 5y ago
> but Windows is considerably better on laptops. I'll concede that if you're talking about the trackpad, Linux is disappointingly bad compared to Windows. It's really really shaky, scrolls up and down with a shockingly massive jitter. You start to wonder if the trackpad itself is malfunctioning. Sadly, the same trackpad works so much better on Windows. This is mainly about the pointer / trackpad drivers to be fair, but it's still a freestanding issue that has the potential to really bug someone using Linux on a laptop. It gets so bad I have to carry around a mouse.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Yeah some drivers are still garbage. My asus laptop works great with trackpad but my dell not so much (it's an older laptop)
  - tentacleuno 5y ago
    No shit! My laptop is a nearly 9 year old Dell Latitude. Haven't tried the ASUS trackpads, but IIRC it was quite smooth on an old Windows 8 netbook I had. Really miss that thing.
scruple 5y ago
I've been running Arch on my 8th (or maybe 7th?) Generation ThinkPad X1C since I bought it in 2018. I've had no issues with multiple monitors, hibernate, etc. I never got the fingerprint reader working but I don't care to use it regardless, so... Otherwise, though, it's been completely solid the entire time I've had it and it's my daily driver for personal project work.
outsomnia 5y ago
Yes the ride you get on a laptop completely depends on the laptop. I have a Dell XPS and everything is working great under Linux with that, except sleep that Intel seem to have screwed with to keep the cpu awake. Other HP laptops have been either a similar ride for higher-end one or quite difficult to get working well for a cheap one. Part of it is the laptops are developed for windows ACPI interpreter, for windows wifi drivers, for windows system level hack drivers etc. It takes time for Linux to figure out individual workarounds. At least for XPS Dell seem to be developing also for it to work on Linux.

westpfelia 5y ago

Check out https://www.protondb.com https://www.protondb.com The only games that I really ever struggle with are ones that have anticheat. And EasyAntiCheat is going linux friendly so something like 95 of the top 100 games on steam will either work natively or via proton. And with Valve pushing the SteamDeck is see that number going to 100 soon.

mediocregopher 5y ago
Steam on linux will automatically pull in protondb profiles for your games, so you probably don't even need to explicitly "check out" protondb at this point. Most games will "just work", with the exception of big AAA games with picky anti-cheat engines.
- r00fus 5y ago
  Yeah you may need to use Glorious Eggroll [1] for some games. [1] https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom/releases https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom/releases
Bluecobra 5y ago
This is great! Games are what is holding me back the most... I am hoping that the Steam Deck really takes off and more and more games are supported.
scruple 5y ago
Thanks for that!
johnny22 5y ago
the proton side supports various anticheats, but the game dev folks still have to enable support on their side.