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This is a good time for trying Linux. If you are coming from Mac, then a distro with GNOME interface (Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu...) will feel like at home after a

by nout 10mo ago

This is a good time for trying Linux. If you are coming from Mac, then a distro with GNOME interface (Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu...) will feel like at home after a couple tweaks. I recommend "Dash to Dock" to get the MacOS dock experience and "Search Light" to get the spotlight search.

LoganDark 10mo ago
I love GNOME Wayland; it has some of the best support for trackpad gestures of any Linux desktop experience I've ever tried. On the other paw though, client-side decorations are not the way to go on Linux, and I'm still incredibly frustrated that they insist on not even supporting server-side decorations at all. Client-side decorations are for apps that are designed specifically for a certain desktop experience; server-side decorations are for compatibility with the many millions of apps that already exist!! (And for anything cross-platform / cross-DE.) Apple gets away with it because macOS is largely monolithic, and doesn't really have swappable desktop experiences. GNOME does not get away with it because they're just one competitor in a large landscape of Linux and they should want to be compatible with Linux applications in general, not only GNOME applications.
- hagbard_c 10mo ago
  My biggest beef with client-side decorations is that they're not optional. For those of us using tiling window managers those decorations are totally superfluous and only take up space, especially since the Gnome folks seem to have decided that every UI element needs to have lebensraum by adding huge areas of white space around them. I want my windows densely populated and I want lots of them on my screen because I'm using a COMPUTER - not a PHONE - with a LARGE SCREEN and a pointing device. I do not need to be able to fat-finger those buttons, I have an accurate pointing device with which I control a pointy cursor with which I can accurately hit single pixels if needed. Now I need to LD_PRELOAD some library to get rid of those stupid unneeded decorations, I need to find the current iteration of the compact Adwaita theme (for as long as that is still possible...) and I otherwise need to FIGHT the software as if I were running some proprietary blob of malware from the Fruit Factory or from Redmond. Blegh, so much wasted time and effort.
lawn 10mo ago
I installed CachyOS recently for my 8 year old kid. Fantastic experience all around. KDE Plasma is an excellent window manager and everything just worked out of the box (gaming, wifi, etc).
jama211 10mo ago
I just did my yearly attempt at this again, and unfortunately I ran into multiple issues - aside from issues I had during dual boot setup which is still WAY too user unfriendly, the driver recommended for my video card breaks the standard resolution on my main monitor, downgrading the version fixed it but it took me an hour of hacking with console commands to work this out, and reading forum posts where I watched people be insulted by the community just because they ran into an issue. Sleep is still half broken, the login appears on the wrong monitor and only console commands I had to modify to copy some obscure config file would fix it. And cyberpunk crashes for me randomly every 10-30 minutes and runs 30% slower. And I can’t install it on my macbook… but I don’t blame linux for that last one. Linux isn’t ready in 2025. I wish it was, I try it every year, but it just isn’t. And it won’t be until the community recognises it has a problem, but all I see is denial. SteamOS seems promising though and we may have a saviour there.
- bigyabai 10mo ago
  > And it won’t be until the community recognises it has a problem, but all I see is denial. Well, that's not fair to the community or yourself. You didn't outline your yearly install process whatsoever, for all we know you're installing Hannah Montana Linux and throwing in the towel. You can get a SteamOS-style environment on whatever Linux device you want, you just need to copy Valve's steps. Additionally, you have to accept that you're just outlining perspective here. Linux was "ready" for my desktop in 2019. I played 4 hours of Cyberpunk last week with my GPU undervolted by 33%, no crash whatsoever. Your experience certainly doesn't reflect what most people say, so a lot of people will pass this by and say PEBCAK.
  - jama211 9mo ago
    You saying pebcak only reinforces my point.
    - wltr 9mo ago
      Pebcak it is then.

by nout 10mo ago

LoganDark 10mo ago

I love GNOME Wayland; it has some of the best support for trackpad gestures of any Linux desktop experience I've ever tried. On the other paw though, client-side decorations are not the way to go on Linux, and I'm still incredibly frustrated that they insist on not even supporting server-side decorations at all. Client-side decorations are for apps that are designed specifically for a certain desktop experience; server-side decorations are for compatibility with the many millions of apps that already exist!! (And for anything cross-platform / cross-DE.) Apple gets away with it because macOS is largely monolithic, and doesn't really have swappable desktop experiences. GNOME does not get away with it because they're just one competitor in a large landscape of Linux and they should want to be compatible with Linux applications in general, not only GNOME applications.

hagbard_c 10mo ago
My biggest beef with client-side decorations is that they're not optional. For those of us using tiling window managers those decorations are totally superfluous and only take up space, especially since the Gnome folks seem to have decided that every UI element needs to have lebensraum by adding huge areas of white space around them. I want my windows densely populated and I want lots of them on my screen because I'm using a COMPUTER - not a PHONE - with a LARGE SCREEN and a pointing device. I do not need to be able to fat-finger those buttons, I have an accurate pointing device with which I control a pointy cursor with which I can accurately hit single pixels if needed. Now I need to LD_PRELOAD some library to get rid of those stupid unneeded decorations, I need to find the current iteration of the compact Adwaita theme (for as long as that is still possible...) and I otherwise need to FIGHT the software as if I were running some proprietary blob of malware from the Fruit Factory or from Redmond. Blegh, so much wasted time and effort.

lawn 10mo ago

I installed CachyOS recently for my 8 year old kid. Fantastic experience all around. KDE Plasma is an excellent window manager and everything just worked out of the box (gaming, wifi, etc).

jama211 10mo ago

I just did my yearly attempt at this again, and unfortunately I ran into multiple issues - aside from issues I had during dual boot setup which is still WAY too user unfriendly, the driver recommended for my video card breaks the standard resolution on my main monitor, downgrading the version fixed it but it took me an hour of hacking with console commands to work this out, and reading forum posts where I watched people be insulted by the community just because they ran into an issue. Sleep is still half broken, the login appears on the wrong monitor and only console commands I had to modify to copy some obscure config file would fix it. And cyberpunk crashes for me randomly every 10-30 minutes and runs 30% slower. And I can’t install it on my macbook… but I don’t blame linux for that last one. Linux isn’t ready in 2025. I wish it was, I try it every year, but it just isn’t. And it won’t be until the community recognises it has a problem, but all I see is denial. SteamOS seems promising though and we may have a saviour there.

bigyabai 10mo ago
> And it won’t be until the community recognises it has a problem, but all I see is denial. Well, that's not fair to the community or yourself. You didn't outline your yearly install process whatsoever, for all we know you're installing Hannah Montana Linux and throwing in the towel. You can get a SteamOS-style environment on whatever Linux device you want, you just need to copy Valve's steps. Additionally, you have to accept that you're just outlining perspective here. Linux was "ready" for my desktop in 2019. I played 4 hours of Cyberpunk last week with my GPU undervolted by 33%, no crash whatsoever. Your experience certainly doesn't reflect what most people say, so a lot of people will pass this by and say PEBCAK.
- jama211 9mo ago
  You saying pebcak only reinforces my point.
  - wltr 9mo ago
    Pebcak it is then.