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I've tried to switch to Linux every year for the last decade, but I never manage to complete the switch. I tried again in January and this time I couldn't get F

by gman83 5y ago

I've tried to switch to Linux every year for the last decade, but I never manage to complete the switch. I tried again in January and this time I couldn't get Firefox to use GPU acceleration at all, making all web videos extremely choppy. "Yeah you shoudn't use an AMD GPU". The suggestion I got was to just use MPlayer to watch YouTube videos. Ohh well I guess I'll try again next year.

thaumaturgy 5y ago
Yeah, GPU issues are absolutely an area that frustrates a lot of would-be Linux users. FWIW that was a consideration when I bought my last two laptops; I filtered out any candidates that didn't have known good Linux drivers for most of the important hardware. And, that took a lot more time reading blogs and forums and the like than I like spending.
fartcannon 5y ago
bcrescimanno 5y ago
In my opinion (disclaimer, I'm currently test driving Arch again in a VMWare installation) this phenomenon is one that is routinely glossed over in discussions about challenges of the Linux desktop. The fact that the most active people hanging out in supposed "community support" channels are the type of technophiles for whom the statement, "You should really just use mplayer to watch YouTube videos" is a completely acceptable solution. They love their home-rolled digital duct tape built system and you should too! That's just not at all acceptable to the majority of people who want to know they can click a link in Firefox (or Chromium or whatever) and watch the damn video. Perhaps more important: it's a prime example of sidestepping the question that is so frequent in these communities where you don't get answers to your questions, you get told random things sort of related to your question that others have done. I started this recent test drive after installing Arch on a secondary system intended to be a home server and, within an hour, I had Steam installed, a DualShock 4 controller connected via bluetooth, and I was playing a windows game (Final Fantasy 12 - The Zodiac Age) at 60FPS stable. I honestly couldn't believe how much "just worked."

by gman83 5y ago

thaumaturgy 5y ago

Yeah, GPU issues are absolutely an area that frustrates a lot of would-be Linux users. FWIW that was a consideration when I bought my last two laptops; I filtered out any candidates that didn't have known good Linux drivers for most of the important hardware. And, that took a lot more time reading blogs and forums and the like than I like spending.

fartcannon 5y ago

bcrescimanno 5y ago

In my opinion (disclaimer, I'm currently test driving Arch again in a VMWare installation) this phenomenon is one that is routinely glossed over in discussions about challenges of the Linux desktop. The fact that the most active people hanging out in supposed "community support" channels are the type of technophiles for whom the statement, "You should really just use mplayer to watch YouTube videos" is a completely acceptable solution. They love their home-rolled digital duct tape built system and you should too! That's just not at all acceptable to the majority of people who want to know they can click a link in Firefox (or Chromium or whatever) and watch the damn video. Perhaps more important: it's a prime example of sidestepping the question that is so frequent in these communities where you don't get answers to your questions, you get told random things sort of related to your question that others have done. I started this recent test drive after installing Arch on a secondary system intended to be a home server and, within an hour, I had Steam installed, a DualShock 4 controller connected via bluetooth, and I was playing a windows game (Final Fantasy 12 - The Zodiac Age) at 60FPS stable. I honestly couldn't believe how much "just worked."