6 ms·

Those of you who don't use Linux as a daily driver: why? What do you need in Windows that is not possible in Linux? Its slowness to justify your 40-hour work w

by Pooge 11mo ago

Those of you who don't use Linux as a daily driver: why? What do you need in Windows that is not possible in Linux? Its slowness to justify your 40-hour work week?

reddozen 11mo ago
the games I play don't support Linux
- Pooge 11mo ago
  Isn't dual-booting convenient for you? I've never done it myself.
  - rkomorn 11mo ago
    I like Linux, it's my laptop daily driver, but there's nothing I would do on Linux on my gaming PC that I can't do on Windows. Linux just has no upside over Windows in a dual boot context.
    - Pooge 11mo ago
      > Linux just has no upside over Windows in a dual boot context If you do dual-boot and don't care about the privacy of the data you put into Windows, I guess so.
      - rkomorn 11mo ago
        If I dual-boot, I have to maintain both OSes no matter what. I also personally keep no data on my devices, but if I did, having data that I need to reboot to get to would be friction I don't want.
        Pooge 11mo ago
        > I also personally keep no data on my devices Now I get your point. But still I would prefer to access my "personal" accounts from a device I trust. Do you use a cloud service for your files?
        rkomorn 11mo ago
        Yep. I've been a paying Google Workspace user for almost 20 years now (in the various iterations of the product name). Some stuff goes in GitHub, none of which I actually truly care about though. I'm sure you'll groan. :) But hey, if it's good enough for Cloudflare and Datadog (two past employers), it's good enough for me. I also may be weird because I don't own any media and I'm perfectly happy with the streaming model. I enjoy not having the mental load of thinking about self-hosting and backing up terabytes of stuff. I feel "lightweight" and I like it.
        Pooge 11mo ago
        Yeah it makes it very easy to be OS-independant. I have backups of my whole home directory so if anything goes awry I can just reinstall software as I go and restore my config files from the most recent backup. I have a Nextcloud instance for family to store files, though.
        themaninthedark 11mo ago
        If you dual booted but wanted access to your data from either OS, you could easily set up a data drive/ partition that both OSes can access.
        rkomorn 11mo ago
        Yeah, but presumably that's not acceptable to the person who talks about "(not) caring about the privacy of data you put in windows" in the ancestor comment, which is why I mentioned rebooting.
  - subscribed 11mo ago
    Dual booting with windows running on the same box? Sooner or later windows WILL destroy the other system.
    - rkomorn 11mo ago
      That or you'll get into an argument with UEFI/Windows/Bitlocker.
    - jimangel2001 11mo ago
      I've been dual booting windows/arch for almost 1 years now. Except the rare case that windows fucks my grub and I have to mkconfig again it'd been smooth sailing.
      - subscribed 11mo ago
        Good luck. And I'm not sarcastic. I have them on the separate nvmes and I disable Linux nvme before I boot into windows. Last time I accidentally inserted encrypted pendrive I use in Linux when my windows was booted, it immediately offered razing the partition to the ground, creating a new one and quick formatting it. Very helpfully "OK" was preselected. If I was a bit more tired I'd be a bit sad. Windows is intentionally hostile to anything non-windows. Enjoy your dual booting while it lasts :)
  - Fabricio20 11mo ago
    Dual booting is the worst possible combination, given that any windows update will kill the linux bootloader (major update to be fair, but it will happen and then you have to recovery iso to fix the bootloader every time). Plus having to disable all boot optimizations on the windows side because of tainted filesystem that linux can't figure out without risk of data destruction. I'd rather just use a VM - but the same games that don't run on linux also dont want you playing in a VM.
    - righthand 11mo ago
      This is no longer true, and has been for close to a decade now. If you sandbox the Windows bootloader in a directory it will not be able to mess up your custom boot loading config, especially booting to the kernel from UEFI.
- Ylpertnodi 11mo ago
  The Daws of my choice do not run on Linux.
1970-01-01 11mo ago
Because the ads are the devil I know and can be defeated. Linux for desktop has been the bottom contender YoY because it is still not reliable enough for daily use, especially on laptops.
- Pooge 11mo ago
  > it is still not reliable enough for daily use I don't know what your requirements are because I can say the exact same for Windows. > especially on laptops I agree with this but only if you have Nvidia drivers.
  - 1970-01-01 11mo ago
    My requirement is not to have a random Linux evening. Whenever I try Linux, it eventually involves one or two of these Linux evenings to get something working or something fixed. I'm just done with those. Windows on laptop will sleep and wake consistently without bluescreen. Once the ads are removed, its great. I much prefer battling ad injection to battling critical functional issues. Ads can be ignored until I do something about them; Kernel panicking and locked up screen cannot be ignored.
    - Pooge 11mo ago
      Granted, I don't use the sleep feature because I'm on a desktop and seeding Linux ISOs. But whenever I run into an issue after an update, I just rollback and wait for a few more days because it usually gets fixed. More often than not, it's not even an issue that deserves to rollback, let alone spend a whole evening troubleshooting. Next time you try a Linux distribution, may I suggest openSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE Plasma?
      - 1970-01-01 11mo ago
        I exclusively use Linux on servers now. I'm not really trying anything for desktop anymore.
rkomorn 11mo ago
Distros like Mint, Ubuntu, Bluefin, etc all annoy me to the same extent as Windows. Distros like Arch, NixOS (my current laptop driver) or even Debian require a bunch of tinkering to get some things to behave properly. Also, I get tired of all the tech "reboots", eg the 3 or 4 different ways of setting up network or DNS, pipewire vs pulseaudio vs whatever, Wayland vs X11, etc.
- Pooge 11mo ago
  > require a bunch of tinkering to get some things to behave properly > the 3 or 4 different ways of setting up network or DNS, pipewire vs pulseaudio vs whatever, Wayland vs X11, etc Sounds like a problem with your distribution. I've been on openSUSE Tumbleweed for years and I've never had to tinker with any of those.
  - rkomorn 11mo ago
    Ah yes. The Linux user is always holding it wrong. In my case it stems from having to deal with multiple distros (and multiple generations of distros, eg 3 LTS Ubuntus) professionally. In other cases, distros give a choice on which tools to use, usually because the new one is better (but also happens to come with its own new bugs). Unrelated, I love that any "why aren't you using Linux?" question is actually almost always just a thinly veiled "let me tell you why you're wrong" plant.
    - Pooge 11mo ago
      > The Linux user is always holding it wrong That's actually the opposite of what I said. All those issues seem to come from the fact that the user didn't choose a distribution where it's "one-click install". If you came to me and said "I tried Arch Linux and my installation broke after every update", I think it's fair to say that it's something you should've expected before you installed the distribution. It's unfair to make the comparison for stability between Windows and Linux if your only example is Arch Linux. So yes, I maintain that the distribution choice is important and that if you constantly run into issues, it's probably a problem with your distribution (or your use thereof).
Netcob 11mo ago
If Windows keeps going in this direction, I will try again. But in the past 20 years I tried using Linux on the desktop a couple of times. It always ends the same way - out of the blue it refuses to boot. Of course there's usually a solution, but I just really don't like that my PC can just suddenly decide that I'll be troubleshooting for the rest of the day, usually in front of some very minimal "maintenance" CLI. And that's if I got the time - I may have to use my laptop for the rest of the week, now dreading the weekend instead of welcoming it. Right now I'd have to do a bunch of research first. Would I still be able to play all the games I play with my friends once a week? I have 3 monitors, one of them has a different DPI than the others, did they fix that by now? I got a stream deck, will that be essentially useless? Is my webcam / mic supported? Do I need to learn about various audio architectures before I can ever use a mic again? Which ones of the dozens of apps I use every day can be made to run under Linux? It'll probably take a 40-hour work week to get to like 90% of where I was on Windows, and then I'd consider myself lucky that I got that much to work at all. And then I'd start waiting for the first "troubleshooting day". With all that negativity I have to also say that I adore Linux on the server. When all you need in terms of hardware is basically a CPU and any number of storage devices and all you get in terms of UI is SSH, Linux is far superior to anything else.
- righthand 11mo ago
  If you want to avoid boot issues, stay away from Arch-based platforms. Their goofy pacman installer has borked my boot numerous times. I prefer Debian-based or specifically for recent-enough-packages-and-stable desktop, Debian Testing.
  - puika 11mo ago
    Wouldn't all boot issues caused by pacman shenanigans be solved by setting up snapper or equivalent? Luckily haven't experienced one so far
    - righthand 11mo ago
      Yes I do that. Half the time it just deletes the grub generated image for some reason. So the solution is to often mount the drive and grub update. Ridiculous that it even happens though.
Saris 11mo ago
My time involved in making Linux work right mainly, there's always minor issues that take a lot of effort to solve. Like my audio interface has CH 1&2 working fine, but CH 3&4 are at half volume no matter what I do, and after waking from sleep it stops working entirely. And this is an interface with no special drivers needed. Also Lightroom and Fusion 360 don't run on Linux, fusion kind of works through wine but barely, and lightroom does not work at all. Half the time I woke it from sleep the lockscreen would be broken and unresponsive too, requiring a reboot. Overall its just too much time to figure out these problems, windows just works with very little involvement on my part.
detritus 11mo ago
Software that's unavailable on Linux? That I use literally all day, every day? I get that's a car-aazy answer, but here I am.
Jaxan 11mo ago
Because it doesn’t work reliably on the surface pro 4. Yes, I have tried surface-linux, and no it doesn’t work well enough. When shutting down, the machine actually doesn’t shut down and my battery was dead the next morning. The boot process sometimes hangs. The OS doesn’t properly differentiate between finger and stylus. It doesn’t seem to do palm recognition. Etc… I know this is a special case: hardware with specific Microsoft firmware. But I imagine that other people have other specific cases.
y-c-o-m-b 11mo ago
This is what I posted last time: > I so badly want to jump ship entirely, but there's several things holding me back. I do music production as a hobby and Ableton Live doesn't play nice with Linux. In fact it seems anything that is resource intensive without native linux support has some issues. I'm also an MS stack developer, so things like Visual Studio Pro aren't available (although I've been using Cursor IDE more and more these days). Lastly I have some games acquired through "the high seas" in which a work-around doesn't exist for compatibility. The responses I got were to switch to different software. No, no, and no. I paid a lot of money for Ableton Suite and poured many many hours into learning how to use it; it's the DAW I prefer to use, I don't want to switch. Having said this, I did try to dual boot recently with Linux Mint, and once again ran into headaches getting my Logitech mouse buttons to work.
- vorpalhex 11mo ago
  Ableton seems to run under Proton (a compatability layer intended for games) with reasonable-but-slightly-higher-latency of 16-20ms per user reports. This should generally work for games of various origins as well. Extra mouse buttons should generally map correctly. For me, my Logitech MX Master 3 works under Arch. You may need to add udev rules if your mouse generally works but additional buttons don't seem bindable. Try an Arch linux based distro, Omarchy or Manjaro. Most of these tweaky things will generally work better since you will be on the latest versions of software.
  - Der_Einzige 11mo ago
    If Linux was so good shit would run faster not slower. Objectively if you want to run desktop performance intensive software, Linux is not the primary place unless it’s AI/HPC or crypto related. Linux is a bad choice for gaming and people like you who try to pretend like it’s not are wrong and they should feel bad for spreading lies on the internet.
    - vorpalhex 11mo ago
      I switched my gaming pc to Linux both for reliability and because of about 7-9% improvement in raw frame rates. This depends on the game too obviously. Though having a computer that actually.. just works can't be overstated.

by Pooge 11mo ago

Those of you who don't use Linux as a daily driver: why? What do you need in Windows that is not possible in Linux? Its slowness to justify your 40-hour work week?

reddozen 11mo ago

the games I play don't support Linux

Pooge 11mo ago
Isn't dual-booting convenient for you? I've never done it myself.
- rkomorn 11mo ago
  I like Linux, it's my laptop daily driver, but there's nothing I would do on Linux on my gaming PC that I can't do on Windows. Linux just has no upside over Windows in a dual boot context.
  - Pooge 11mo ago
    > Linux just has no upside over Windows in a dual boot context If you do dual-boot and don't care about the privacy of the data you put into Windows, I guess so.
    - rkomorn 11mo ago
      If I dual-boot, I have to maintain both OSes no matter what. I also personally keep no data on my devices, but if I did, having data that I need to reboot to get to would be friction I don't want.
      - Pooge 11mo ago
        > I also personally keep no data on my devices Now I get your point. But still I would prefer to access my "personal" accounts from a device I trust. Do you use a cloud service for your files?
        rkomorn 11mo ago
        Yep. I've been a paying Google Workspace user for almost 20 years now (in the various iterations of the product name). Some stuff goes in GitHub, none of which I actually truly care about though. I'm sure you'll groan. :) But hey, if it's good enough for Cloudflare and Datadog (two past employers), it's good enough for me. I also may be weird because I don't own any media and I'm perfectly happy with the streaming model. I enjoy not having the mental load of thinking about self-hosting and backing up terabytes of stuff. I feel "lightweight" and I like it.
        Pooge 11mo ago
        Yeah it makes it very easy to be OS-independant. I have backups of my whole home directory so if anything goes awry I can just reinstall software as I go and restore my config files from the most recent backup. I have a Nextcloud instance for family to store files, though.
      - themaninthedark 11mo ago
        If you dual booted but wanted access to your data from either OS, you could easily set up a data drive/ partition that both OSes can access.
        rkomorn 11mo ago
        Yeah, but presumably that's not acceptable to the person who talks about "(not) caring about the privacy of data you put in windows" in the ancestor comment, which is why I mentioned rebooting.
- subscribed 11mo ago
  Dual booting with windows running on the same box? Sooner or later windows WILL destroy the other system.
  - rkomorn 11mo ago
    That or you'll get into an argument with UEFI/Windows/Bitlocker.
  - jimangel2001 11mo ago
    I've been dual booting windows/arch for almost 1 years now. Except the rare case that windows fucks my grub and I have to mkconfig again it'd been smooth sailing.
    - subscribed 11mo ago
      Good luck. And I'm not sarcastic. I have them on the separate nvmes and I disable Linux nvme before I boot into windows. Last time I accidentally inserted encrypted pendrive I use in Linux when my windows was booted, it immediately offered razing the partition to the ground, creating a new one and quick formatting it. Very helpfully "OK" was preselected. If I was a bit more tired I'd be a bit sad. Windows is intentionally hostile to anything non-windows. Enjoy your dual booting while it lasts :)
- Fabricio20 11mo ago
  Dual booting is the worst possible combination, given that any windows update will kill the linux bootloader (major update to be fair, but it will happen and then you have to recovery iso to fix the bootloader every time). Plus having to disable all boot optimizations on the windows side because of tainted filesystem that linux can't figure out without risk of data destruction. I'd rather just use a VM - but the same games that don't run on linux also dont want you playing in a VM.
  - righthand 11mo ago
    This is no longer true, and has been for close to a decade now. If you sandbox the Windows bootloader in a directory it will not be able to mess up your custom boot loading config, especially booting to the kernel from UEFI.
Ylpertnodi 11mo ago
The Daws of my choice do not run on Linux.

1970-01-01 11mo ago

Because the ads are the devil I know and can be defeated. Linux for desktop has been the bottom contender YoY because it is still not reliable enough for daily use, especially on laptops.

Pooge 11mo ago
> it is still not reliable enough for daily use I don't know what your requirements are because I can say the exact same for Windows. > especially on laptops I agree with this but only if you have Nvidia drivers.
- 1970-01-01 11mo ago
  My requirement is not to have a random Linux evening. Whenever I try Linux, it eventually involves one or two of these Linux evenings to get something working or something fixed. I'm just done with those. Windows on laptop will sleep and wake consistently without bluescreen. Once the ads are removed, its great. I much prefer battling ad injection to battling critical functional issues. Ads can be ignored until I do something about them; Kernel panicking and locked up screen cannot be ignored.
  - Pooge 11mo ago
    Granted, I don't use the sleep feature because I'm on a desktop and seeding Linux ISOs. But whenever I run into an issue after an update, I just rollback and wait for a few more days because it usually gets fixed. More often than not, it's not even an issue that deserves to rollback, let alone spend a whole evening troubleshooting. Next time you try a Linux distribution, may I suggest openSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE Plasma?
    - 1970-01-01 11mo ago
      I exclusively use Linux on servers now. I'm not really trying anything for desktop anymore.

rkomorn 11mo ago

Distros like Mint, Ubuntu, Bluefin, etc all annoy me to the same extent as Windows. Distros like Arch, NixOS (my current laptop driver) or even Debian require a bunch of tinkering to get some things to behave properly. Also, I get tired of all the tech "reboots", eg the 3 or 4 different ways of setting up network or DNS, pipewire vs pulseaudio vs whatever, Wayland vs X11, etc.

Pooge 11mo ago
> require a bunch of tinkering to get some things to behave properly > the 3 or 4 different ways of setting up network or DNS, pipewire vs pulseaudio vs whatever, Wayland vs X11, etc Sounds like a problem with your distribution. I've been on openSUSE Tumbleweed for years and I've never had to tinker with any of those.
- rkomorn 11mo ago
  Ah yes. The Linux user is always holding it wrong. In my case it stems from having to deal with multiple distros (and multiple generations of distros, eg 3 LTS Ubuntus) professionally. In other cases, distros give a choice on which tools to use, usually because the new one is better (but also happens to come with its own new bugs). Unrelated, I love that any "why aren't you using Linux?" question is actually almost always just a thinly veiled "let me tell you why you're wrong" plant.
  - Pooge 11mo ago
    > The Linux user is always holding it wrong That's actually the opposite of what I said. All those issues seem to come from the fact that the user didn't choose a distribution where it's "one-click install". If you came to me and said "I tried Arch Linux and my installation broke after every update", I think it's fair to say that it's something you should've expected before you installed the distribution. It's unfair to make the comparison for stability between Windows and Linux if your only example is Arch Linux. So yes, I maintain that the distribution choice is important and that if you constantly run into issues, it's probably a problem with your distribution (or your use thereof).

Netcob 11mo ago

If Windows keeps going in this direction, I will try again. But in the past 20 years I tried using Linux on the desktop a couple of times. It always ends the same way - out of the blue it refuses to boot. Of course there's usually a solution, but I just really don't like that my PC can just suddenly decide that I'll be troubleshooting for the rest of the day, usually in front of some very minimal "maintenance" CLI. And that's if I got the time - I may have to use my laptop for the rest of the week, now dreading the weekend instead of welcoming it. Right now I'd have to do a bunch of research first. Would I still be able to play all the games I play with my friends once a week? I have 3 monitors, one of them has a different DPI than the others, did they fix that by now? I got a stream deck, will that be essentially useless? Is my webcam / mic supported? Do I need to learn about various audio architectures before I can ever use a mic again? Which ones of the dozens of apps I use every day can be made to run under Linux? It'll probably take a 40-hour work week to get to like 90% of where I was on Windows, and then I'd consider myself lucky that I got that much to work at all. And then I'd start waiting for the first "troubleshooting day". With all that negativity I have to also say that I adore Linux on the server. When all you need in terms of hardware is basically a CPU and any number of storage devices and all you get in terms of UI is SSH, Linux is far superior to anything else.

righthand 11mo ago
If you want to avoid boot issues, stay away from Arch-based platforms. Their goofy pacman installer has borked my boot numerous times. I prefer Debian-based or specifically for recent-enough-packages-and-stable desktop, Debian Testing.
- puika 11mo ago
  Wouldn't all boot issues caused by pacman shenanigans be solved by setting up snapper or equivalent? Luckily haven't experienced one so far
  - righthand 11mo ago
    Yes I do that. Half the time it just deletes the grub generated image for some reason. So the solution is to often mount the drive and grub update. Ridiculous that it even happens though.

Saris 11mo ago

My time involved in making Linux work right mainly, there's always minor issues that take a lot of effort to solve. Like my audio interface has CH 1&2 working fine, but CH 3&4 are at half volume no matter what I do, and after waking from sleep it stops working entirely. And this is an interface with no special drivers needed. Also Lightroom and Fusion 360 don't run on Linux, fusion kind of works through wine but barely, and lightroom does not work at all. Half the time I woke it from sleep the lockscreen would be broken and unresponsive too, requiring a reboot. Overall its just too much time to figure out these problems, windows just works with very little involvement on my part.

detritus 11mo ago

Software that's unavailable on Linux? That I use literally all day, every day? I get that's a car-aazy answer, but here I am.

Jaxan 11mo ago

Because it doesn’t work reliably on the surface pro 4. Yes, I have tried surface-linux, and no it doesn’t work well enough. When shutting down, the machine actually doesn’t shut down and my battery was dead the next morning. The boot process sometimes hangs. The OS doesn’t properly differentiate between finger and stylus. It doesn’t seem to do palm recognition. Etc… I know this is a special case: hardware with specific Microsoft firmware. But I imagine that other people have other specific cases.

y-c-o-m-b 11mo ago

This is what I posted last time: > I so badly want to jump ship entirely, but there's several things holding me back. I do music production as a hobby and Ableton Live doesn't play nice with Linux. In fact it seems anything that is resource intensive without native linux support has some issues. I'm also an MS stack developer, so things like Visual Studio Pro aren't available (although I've been using Cursor IDE more and more these days). Lastly I have some games acquired through "the high seas" in which a work-around doesn't exist for compatibility. The responses I got were to switch to different software. No, no, and no. I paid a lot of money for Ableton Suite and poured many many hours into learning how to use it; it's the DAW I prefer to use, I don't want to switch. Having said this, I did try to dual boot recently with Linux Mint, and once again ran into headaches getting my Logitech mouse buttons to work.

vorpalhex 11mo ago
Ableton seems to run under Proton (a compatability layer intended for games) with reasonable-but-slightly-higher-latency of 16-20ms per user reports. This should generally work for games of various origins as well. Extra mouse buttons should generally map correctly. For me, my Logitech MX Master 3 works under Arch. You may need to add udev rules if your mouse generally works but additional buttons don't seem bindable. Try an Arch linux based distro, Omarchy or Manjaro. Most of these tweaky things will generally work better since you will be on the latest versions of software.
- Der_Einzige 11mo ago
  If Linux was so good shit would run faster not slower. Objectively if you want to run desktop performance intensive software, Linux is not the primary place unless it’s AI/HPC or crypto related. Linux is a bad choice for gaming and people like you who try to pretend like it’s not are wrong and they should feel bad for spreading lies on the internet.
  - vorpalhex 11mo ago
    I switched my gaming pc to Linux both for reliability and because of about 7-9% improvement in raw frame rates. This depends on the game too obviously. Though having a computer that actually.. just works can't be overstated.