8 ms·

I use PopOS as a daily driver. Linux gaming has picked up quite a bit, to the degree that the Steam Deck runs on it. Linux now comes as part of Windows. QEMU is

by kodah 4y ago

I use PopOS as a daily driver. Linux gaming has picked up quite a bit, to the degree that the Steam Deck runs on it. Linux now comes as part of Windows. QEMU is now running on any developers Mac who uses containers. Anecdotally, my girlfriend (who is not a technologist) is now a Linux power user, to the extent of fully customizing her Gnome environment. If that isn't Linux on the desktop, then yeah, it may never come. Personally, I would say that Linux lacks two things: 1. Cross platform integrations. The way MacOS can intelligently switch AirPods over or share with your tablet is nice. Linux doesn't really have that. 2. DirectX that's compatible with Windows DirectX. That would slay Windows gaming. For now, there's Proton.

pjmlp 4y ago
That is still Windows gaming as far as game studios are concerned.
- notwokeno 4y ago
  "Wine is the Linux ABI."
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    OS/2 says hello.
  - tigeroil 4y ago
    Indeed. I hate to say it because I love Linux but Wine has genuinely been by far the most stable ABI on Linux.
    - notwokeno 4y ago
      I don't hate it. The GNU user space is built around a paradigm of source sharing and using the shared source to build a very coherent and pleasant OS. Having some kind of clear separation between that and closed software makes things more pleasant IMO.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
        "Coherent" is not a word often used to describe the Linux Desktop experience. How many different ways do I have to copy and paste again? Which ones are valid in which contexts?
        notwokeno 4y ago
        The OS is coherent (arguably more so than most) even if the GUIs aren't necisarily. A big part of that is because most of the useful apps are shell/VTE apps. Even still it's not like other OS vendors are much better at building good UIs: How many frameworks has MS gone through just to say "screw it, write web apps?" Even Apple can't get everyone onboard with Cocoa.
        artificial 4y ago
        Wouldn't this be more applicable to BSDs more so than Linux? One is a kernel and userland made by the same team and packaged together and the other is a kernel with a bunch of different philosophies packaged around it.
        notwokeno 4y ago
        I don't want to be pedantic and write "GNU/Linux distributions" every time. People know what you mean when you write "Linux." And the result of the distribution model is something similar to the BSDs (when you pull the projects apart I'd argue they're really not so different socially.)
MayeulC 4y ago
> 1. Cross platform integrations. The way MacOS can intelligently switch AirPods over or share with your tablet is nice. Linux doesn't really have that. KDEConnect (and its compatible Gnome counterpart) is pretty good, though I understand it's not exactly what you asked > 2. DirectX that's compatible with Windows DirectX. That would slay Windows gaming. For now, there's Proton. Well... I'm not sure why you'd want that specifically, or what you mean by that. There's DXVK which is a compatible implementation, and which you can use natively. There's also gallium-nine, and the wine implementation of DX (including VK3D for DX12). All are pretty feature-complete, can be used for native apps, and there are a few more alternatives (like ToGL, which Valve developed a while back).
- kodah 4y ago
  I'll have to give those a shot and see if they work on games not running in Proton. My criticism is a bit dated to the last time I did this assessment for the purposes of discussion. Thanks for the callout!
  - vondur 4y ago
    If you wanted to try out out, Nobarra, a Fedora based distro which has been tweaked for gaming. It’s done by the person who does the glorious egg roll Proton version.
  - MayeulC 4y ago
    If you want to try DXVK natively, DXVK-native has been upstreamed in the latest release, though I guess the fork still contains the instructions: https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/releases/tag/v2.0 https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/releases/tag/v2.0 gallium-nine can't really be targetted however. While most distribution with AMD or Intel graphics will have it enabled as part of Mesa, it can't be used for nvidia (unless... well, you could theoretically use zink to run that on top of vulkan as well). It's DX9 in any case. Winelib has been a thing for a veeery long time, I think it was always possible to build a native executable and link against Wine's DX->OGL translation layer.
- happymellon 4y ago
reissbaker 4y ago
Isn't Bluetooth multipoint what you're looking for re: intelligently switching Airpods? There are a decent number of non-Apple Bluetooth headphones that can do that with any manufacturer's Bluetooth capabilities (it even works switching between an iPhone and a non-Apple laptop!). For example, the extremely well reviewed Sony WH-1000XM4 can do it — those are over-ear headphones, not the earbuds, but Sony announced that they're updating the earbuds (the WF-1000XM4, to use the nearly-inscrutable Sony product name) to support Bluetooth multipoint too — as well as earbuds and headphones from Anker, Panasonic, etc.
- lillecarl 4y ago
  I own the Sony headphones, and the multipoint stuff isn't great. If I as much as get a notification on my computer it'll mute my phone playing music, I can't be in "high quality audio mode" while talking (Bluetooth ext that doesn't seem implemented). It works, but in my day2day I Bluetooth with my phone, join meetings on both Android and Linux at the same time.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
jorvi 4y ago
- Dropbox on Linux hard-locks when trying to sync some files that happily get synced on Windows and macOS - Google Drive doesn’t even have a good client and you must resort to 3rd-party tools like OverGrive - Spotify has had broken shortcuts for more than a year now - Many of Linux it’s file managers still don’t support file thumbnails - system sleep is still unreliable (one could say broken?) - power management on laptops is atrocious without deep manual tweaking - sound on laptop speakers is atrocious without a Pulse EQ profile - it often still feels like a hodge-podge of different projects slapped together, which it is. Distros that try to tackle this (Elementary) receive nothing but scorn I like running Linux, but pretending it’s even halfway as user friendly as macOS or even Windows is just deceitful, either to yourself or, even worse, to others. Hopefully Valve’s hard push into Linux might get 3rd-party developers to improve their Linux clients, because Steam Deck users will be too big a usergroup to ignore.
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  The only two issues you mention that are real have nothing to do with Linux itself but third-party support. As you even acknowledge there a multiple functional third party cloud drive clients. The other complaints like not all file managers have thumbnails is like complaining not all windows apps have tabs. There are great file managers in Linux with thumbnails and they are the defaults in not the major window managers. Spotify shortcut works fine but maybe you were using a broken package? I never had an issue with Pulse but Pipewire is the new king on the block and works so smooth.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
    Third party support has a lot to do with how Linux works though. There's a reason Valve basically abandoned the idea of native Linux games and invested in Proton instead, for instance. It's because everything above the kernel in Linux is kind of a garbage fire when it comes to consistency and compatibility. You usually can't even run a binary compiled for Ubuntu 20.04 on 22.04 despite them theoretically being the same OS two years apart. Driver support is hindered by the lack of stable driver ABI, basically forcing drivers to be FOSS and mainlined. Granted, this also has some advantages.
zamalek 4y ago
> Anecdotally, my girlfriend (who is not a technologist) is now a Linux power user I got my 80+ grandmother-in-law onto a System76 and she has been having a hoot "learning things." For reference, her tech aptitude has involved phone calls where I remind her to plug things in. And, as a bonus, it makes her completely immune to tech support scams.
- kodah 4y ago
  This warms my heart. Thanks for sharing!
criddell 4y ago
> Cross platform integrations Even just on Linux, there are multiple platforms. The big ones are KDE and Gnome. If you want to write the best possible native Linux application, you have to pick one of these and right off the bat you are losing about half of the potential Linux desktops. I wish KDE and Gnome would merge. I don't really care which one would dominate because (IMHO) they are both excellent. Both give me icons I can double click on to launch an application and that's most of what I need from my desktop environment.
- tmtvl 4y ago
  Both Firefox and Chrome use GTK under GNU/Linux, the KDE team has invested a lot of effort in keeping GTK as well supported as you could hope for. Using GTK is fine, though of course Qt allows you to ship a single application to not only Windows, GNU/Linux, and Mac, but with some tweaking Android as well.
33955985 4y ago
3. “It just works” laptop hardware
- pmarreck 4y ago
  Feeling this as someone who just installed NixOS on his "gaming" laptop and I can't for the life of me get the Intel AX200 wifi card to be recognized. But at least, once I do, I'll be able to roll back to any known-good configuration thanks to NixOS if it ever breaks again!
- Rebelgecko 4y ago
  Yeah, I have a framework laptop which is supposed to be fairly good for Linux compatability and I'm considering installing Windows. Horrible standby battery life, random lockups when I'm in the settings app, brightness keys that don't work unless you disable other features, deficiencies in non-integer scaling, etc. Proton is actually really great for gaming, I just can't figure out how to get full screen games to render at native resolution without turning off DPI scaling across the entire system
bioemerl 4y ago
Number zero, Linux lacks usability. I've got Ubuntu on my home machine and it is an absolute buggy mess. I tried to right click and format on a flash drive yesterday, the button did nothing. No errors. No pop-up messages. No little spinning wheel. It did literally nothing. Did not respond, tried to click it multiple times, continued to do nothing. I have to open up the partition manager and reform at it through there. I've tried before to drag files from my archives into the window manager, and it doesn't work. The program's not talk to each other so you can't drag and drop between them. I've tried to use network paths as a folder on tons of different programs, and they rarely handle it well. Best can be a problem on Windows too, but it's so much more common on Linux. The user experience on Linux is just so incredibly buggy, you have to dig down into the command line at times to fix things, and so much stuff just doesn't work so often, or doesn't work with each other. Linux on the desktop needs a team of like five people to actually use it every day like a normal user would, but no understanding of the command line, and then constantly complain to the developers so that all of these issues get fixed. Until that happens Linux on the desktop will not be able to compete with Windows, no matter how many features it has. Because at the end of the day I want my operating system to just work.
- dvdkon 4y ago
  I'm not going to say your complaints are invalid, but you're setting a very high bar, one that no mainstream OS clears today. I've had similar and much worse problems on all the big three platforms.
  - bioemerl 4y ago
    I've never had any problems on Windows similar to the ones I've had on Linux. On Windows I have never had a button just do nothing. Not for something as simple and common as formatting a flash drive. I've never had problems dragging and dropping between a popular windows program and the windows operating system. Maybe it's inherent because Linux is open source and stuff just won't work together because of that, but if that's the case then Linux is doomed to never be able to compete with Windows.
    - 4y ago

by kodah 4y ago

pjmlp 4y ago

That is still Windows gaming as far as game studios are concerned.

notwokeno 4y ago
"Wine is the Linux ABI."
- pjmlp 4y ago
  OS/2 says hello.
- tigeroil 4y ago
  Indeed. I hate to say it because I love Linux but Wine has genuinely been by far the most stable ABI on Linux.
  - notwokeno 4y ago
    I don't hate it. The GNU user space is built around a paradigm of source sharing and using the shared source to build a very coherent and pleasant OS. Having some kind of clear separation between that and closed software makes things more pleasant IMO.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
      "Coherent" is not a word often used to describe the Linux Desktop experience. How many different ways do I have to copy and paste again? Which ones are valid in which contexts?
      - notwokeno 4y ago
        The OS is coherent (arguably more so than most) even if the GUIs aren't necisarily. A big part of that is because most of the useful apps are shell/VTE apps. Even still it's not like other OS vendors are much better at building good UIs: How many frameworks has MS gone through just to say "screw it, write web apps?" Even Apple can't get everyone onboard with Cocoa.
        artificial 4y ago
        Wouldn't this be more applicable to BSDs more so than Linux? One is a kernel and userland made by the same team and packaged together and the other is a kernel with a bunch of different philosophies packaged around it.
        notwokeno 4y ago
        I don't want to be pedantic and write "GNU/Linux distributions" every time. People know what you mean when you write "Linux." And the result of the distribution model is something similar to the BSDs (when you pull the projects apart I'd argue they're really not so different socially.)

MayeulC 4y ago

> 1. Cross platform integrations. The way MacOS can intelligently switch AirPods over or share with your tablet is nice. Linux doesn't really have that. KDEConnect (and its compatible Gnome counterpart) is pretty good, though I understand it's not exactly what you asked > 2. DirectX that's compatible with Windows DirectX. That would slay Windows gaming. For now, there's Proton. Well... I'm not sure why you'd want that specifically, or what you mean by that. There's DXVK which is a compatible implementation, and which you can use natively. There's also gallium-nine, and the wine implementation of DX (including VK3D for DX12). All are pretty feature-complete, can be used for native apps, and there are a few more alternatives (like ToGL, which Valve developed a while back).

kodah 4y ago
I'll have to give those a shot and see if they work on games not running in Proton. My criticism is a bit dated to the last time I did this assessment for the purposes of discussion. Thanks for the callout!
- vondur 4y ago
  If you wanted to try out out, Nobarra, a Fedora based distro which has been tweaked for gaming. It’s done by the person who does the glorious egg roll Proton version.
- MayeulC 4y ago
  If you want to try DXVK natively, DXVK-native has been upstreamed in the latest release, though I guess the fork still contains the instructions: https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/releases/tag/v2.0 https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/releases/tag/v2.0 gallium-nine can't really be targetted however. While most distribution with AMD or Intel graphics will have it enabled as part of Mesa, it can't be used for nvidia (unless... well, you could theoretically use zink to run that on top of vulkan as well). It's DX9 in any case. Winelib has been a thing for a veeery long time, I think it was always possible to build a native executable and link against Wine's DX->OGL translation layer.
happymellon 4y ago

reissbaker 4y ago

Isn't Bluetooth multipoint what you're looking for re: intelligently switching Airpods? There are a decent number of non-Apple Bluetooth headphones that can do that with any manufacturer's Bluetooth capabilities (it even works switching between an iPhone and a non-Apple laptop!). For example, the extremely well reviewed Sony WH-1000XM4 can do it — those are over-ear headphones, not the earbuds, but Sony announced that they're updating the earbuds (the WF-1000XM4, to use the nearly-inscrutable Sony product name) to support Bluetooth multipoint too — as well as earbuds and headphones from Anker, Panasonic, etc.

lillecarl 4y ago
I own the Sony headphones, and the multipoint stuff isn't great. If I as much as get a notification on my computer it'll mute my phone playing music, I can't be in "high quality audio mode" while talking (Bluetooth ext that doesn't seem implemented). It works, but in my day2day I Bluetooth with my phone, join meetings on both Android and Linux at the same time.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

jorvi 4y ago

- Dropbox on Linux hard-locks when trying to sync some files that happily get synced on Windows and macOS - Google Drive doesn’t even have a good client and you must resort to 3rd-party tools like OverGrive - Spotify has had broken shortcuts for more than a year now - Many of Linux it’s file managers still don’t support file thumbnails - system sleep is still unreliable (one could say broken?) - power management on laptops is atrocious without deep manual tweaking - sound on laptop speakers is atrocious without a Pulse EQ profile - it often still feels like a hodge-podge of different projects slapped together, which it is. Distros that try to tackle this (Elementary) receive nothing but scorn I like running Linux, but pretending it’s even halfway as user friendly as macOS or even Windows is just deceitful, either to yourself or, even worse, to others. Hopefully Valve’s hard push into Linux might get 3rd-party developers to improve their Linux clients, because Steam Deck users will be too big a usergroup to ignore.

encryptluks2 4y ago
The only two issues you mention that are real have nothing to do with Linux itself but third-party support. As you even acknowledge there a multiple functional third party cloud drive clients. The other complaints like not all file managers have thumbnails is like complaining not all windows apps have tabs. There are great file managers in Linux with thumbnails and they are the defaults in not the major window managers. Spotify shortcut works fine but maybe you were using a broken package? I never had an issue with Pulse but Pipewire is the new king on the block and works so smooth.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  Third party support has a lot to do with how Linux works though. There's a reason Valve basically abandoned the idea of native Linux games and invested in Proton instead, for instance. It's because everything above the kernel in Linux is kind of a garbage fire when it comes to consistency and compatibility. You usually can't even run a binary compiled for Ubuntu 20.04 on 22.04 despite them theoretically being the same OS two years apart. Driver support is hindered by the lack of stable driver ABI, basically forcing drivers to be FOSS and mainlined. Granted, this also has some advantages.

zamalek 4y ago

> Anecdotally, my girlfriend (who is not a technologist) is now a Linux power user I got my 80+ grandmother-in-law onto a System76 and she has been having a hoot "learning things." For reference, her tech aptitude has involved phone calls where I remind her to plug things in. And, as a bonus, it makes her completely immune to tech support scams.

kodah 4y ago
This warms my heart. Thanks for sharing!

criddell 4y ago

> Cross platform integrations Even just on Linux, there are multiple platforms. The big ones are KDE and Gnome. If you want to write the best possible native Linux application, you have to pick one of these and right off the bat you are losing about half of the potential Linux desktops. I wish KDE and Gnome would merge. I don't really care which one would dominate because (IMHO) they are both excellent. Both give me icons I can double click on to launch an application and that's most of what I need from my desktop environment.

tmtvl 4y ago
Both Firefox and Chrome use GTK under GNU/Linux, the KDE team has invested a lot of effort in keeping GTK as well supported as you could hope for. Using GTK is fine, though of course Qt allows you to ship a single application to not only Windows, GNU/Linux, and Mac, but with some tweaking Android as well.

33955985 4y ago

3. “It just works” laptop hardware

pmarreck 4y ago
Feeling this as someone who just installed NixOS on his "gaming" laptop and I can't for the life of me get the Intel AX200 wifi card to be recognized. But at least, once I do, I'll be able to roll back to any known-good configuration thanks to NixOS if it ever breaks again!
Rebelgecko 4y ago
Yeah, I have a framework laptop which is supposed to be fairly good for Linux compatability and I'm considering installing Windows. Horrible standby battery life, random lockups when I'm in the settings app, brightness keys that don't work unless you disable other features, deficiencies in non-integer scaling, etc. Proton is actually really great for gaming, I just can't figure out how to get full screen games to render at native resolution without turning off DPI scaling across the entire system

bioemerl 4y ago

Number zero, Linux lacks usability. I've got Ubuntu on my home machine and it is an absolute buggy mess. I tried to right click and format on a flash drive yesterday, the button did nothing. No errors. No pop-up messages. No little spinning wheel. It did literally nothing. Did not respond, tried to click it multiple times, continued to do nothing. I have to open up the partition manager and reform at it through there. I've tried before to drag files from my archives into the window manager, and it doesn't work. The program's not talk to each other so you can't drag and drop between them. I've tried to use network paths as a folder on tons of different programs, and they rarely handle it well. Best can be a problem on Windows too, but it's so much more common on Linux. The user experience on Linux is just so incredibly buggy, you have to dig down into the command line at times to fix things, and so much stuff just doesn't work so often, or doesn't work with each other. Linux on the desktop needs a team of like five people to actually use it every day like a normal user would, but no understanding of the command line, and then constantly complain to the developers so that all of these issues get fixed. Until that happens Linux on the desktop will not be able to compete with Windows, no matter how many features it has. Because at the end of the day I want my operating system to just work.

dvdkon 4y ago
I'm not going to say your complaints are invalid, but you're setting a very high bar, one that no mainstream OS clears today. I've had similar and much worse problems on all the big three platforms.
- bioemerl 4y ago
  I've never had any problems on Windows similar to the ones I've had on Linux. On Windows I have never had a button just do nothing. Not for something as simple and common as formatting a flash drive. I've never had problems dragging and dropping between a popular windows program and the windows operating system. Maybe it's inherent because Linux is open source and stuff just won't work together because of that, but if that's the case then Linux is doomed to never be able to compete with Windows.
  - 4y ago