20 ms·

Linux is good now

• shmerl 10mo ago
  Yes, it's good. Also agreed that AMD would be best GPU experience.
• sieep 10mo ago
  +1 for CachyOS. I also recommend Mint and Pop!_OS if you prefer Debian based distros.
• lorenzohess 10mo ago
  2026 YOTLD?
  • Scaevolus 10mo ago
    2026 YOLOTD!
  • deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  • ofalkaed 10mo ago
    The personal desktop has fallen in relevance enough for that to be possible. The goalposts moved, now linux needs to have phone, tablet, and laptop with smooth effortless integration between them all. I recently switched to using a thumb drive to transfer files to and from my phone/tablet, I became demoralized when faced with getting it all setup.
    • omnicognate 10mo ago
      > smooth effortless integration between them all No, thank you! The "smooth, effortless [, compulsory, mandated, enforced] integration" between my Apple devices is the very worst thing about them.
    • sporkxrocket 10mo ago
      Android is Linux, so it does have a phone, tablet and many other form factors like television.
    • regularfry 10mo ago
      KDE has phone and laptop integrated well enough for me. It's worth giving it a try but the more devices you want integrated the more of a risk it is in case it doesn't quite work right. But I've got enough other devices in the house which I can't put KDE on (work laptop, Windows machine I need for some specific software) that I can recommend https://github.com/9001/copyparty https://github.com/9001/copyparty over thumb drives.
      • ofalkaed 10mo ago
        I actually intended to set everything up but did not have time and needed to copy some files, so dusted off a thumb drive. I am liking it quite a bit and I think I prefer it to the alternatives.
    • jaapz 10mo ago
      What integration between phone and desktop would you like to see?
      • ofalkaed 10mo ago
        YOTLD has nothing to do with my needs and wants and I am perfectly happy with my thumb drive and the weird little ways linux imposes itself on my life.
  • zamalek 10mo ago
    Its going to be a decade, the slow erosion of Window's market share, and we might already be in it.
• PaulKeeble 10mo ago
  I think its interesting that mainstream PC gaming press is now talking about Linux. We have the benchmark Youtube channels doing some benchmarks of it as well and plenty of reports of "it just works", which is pretty promising at least for the games that aren't intentionally excluded by DRM. For me its still controllers and equipment incompatibility due to my VR headset and sim wheel/pedals setup, I use Linux everywhere else in my router and home servers. I just hope that Nvidia notices that there does appear to be a swing happening and improves their driver situation.
  • ErroneousBosh 10mo ago
    Gaming now works better on Linux than it does on Windows. This must be upsetting for Microsoft, but it was their game to lose.
    • voidfunc 10mo ago
      I dont get the feeling they care. Microsoft is so lost under Satya at this point. Totally blinded by Azure and AI and stock price growth. At some point they're going to realize all the ground they've lost and it's going to be a real problem. They're repeating a lot of the same mistakes that cost them the browser and mobile market.
      • gerdesj 10mo ago
        "Totally blinded by Azure and AI and stock price growth." Stock price growth is their core business because that is how large firms operate. MS used to embrace games etc because the whole point was all PCs should run Windows. Now the plan is to get you onto a subscription to their cloud. The PC bit is largely immaterial in that model. Enterprises get the rather horrible Intune bollocks to play with but the goal is to lock everyone into subs.
        • tombert 10mo ago
          It's pretty much every American business now isn't it? Do any big corporations actually make money anymore? I thought all of them more or less have operated under Ponzinomics ever since Jack Welch showed that that worked in the short term.
• savolai 10mo ago
  Linux desktops have felt flaky for me for a few years now. I’m trying to figure out how much of that is bad choices vs real problems. Ubuntu’s default desktop felt unstable in a macOS VM. Dual-booting on a couple of HP laptops slowed to a crawl after installing a few desktop apps, apparently because they pulled in background services. What surprised me was how quickly the system became unpleasant to use without any obvious “you just broke X” moment. My current guess: not Linux in general, but heavy defaults (GNOME, Snap, systemd timers), desktop apps dragging in daemons, and OEM firmware / power-management quirks that don’t play well with Linux. Server Linux holds up because everything stays explicit. Desktop distros hide complexity and don’t give much visibility when things start to rot. Does this line up with others’ experience? If yes, what actually works long-term? Minimal bases, immutable distros, avoiding certain package systems, strict service hygiene, specific hardware?
  • ErroneousBosh 10mo ago
    > Does this line up with others’ experience? Not really, no. What did you install that slowed things down? > If yes, what actually works long-term? Plain ordinary Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, running on an ancient Thinkpad T430 with a whopping 8GB of RAM and an SSD (which is failing, but that's not Linux's fault, it's been on its way out for about a year and I should probably stop compiling Haiku nightlies on it). Can you give an example of which desktop apps are "dragging in daemons"?
    • rvnx 10mo ago
      Edited: My bad, I misread, started ranting about Gimp, how terrible this software was
      • stryan 10mo ago
        GIMP is definitely not a daemon; I don't think it even has a run in the background mode. Maybe something with snaps?
        • rvnx 10mo ago
• mac-attack 10mo ago
  Between this and the dual boot diaries podcast it's great to see mainstream PC outlets covering Linux more broadly.
• wewewedxfgdf 10mo ago
  Linux is a viable alternative to Windows/MacOS if you stand back and squint. Not up close due to the vast number of inconsistencies. This could only be fixed by a user experience built from the ground up by a single company.
  • regularfry 10mo ago
    Only true if those inconsistencies actually matter to your workflow. Not going to deny that they exist, obviously, but their impact is largely overplayed (and gratuitously downplayed on Windows, in my experience).
    • wewewedxfgdf 10mo ago
      Yes Windows also sadly has become very inconsistent. MacOS is highly consistent compared to Windows. Perhaps Linux operating systems like Steam or ChromeOS might finally create a beautiful and consistent UI.
      • lawn 10mo ago
        KDE is vastly better than Windows already.
  • yunnpp 10mo ago
    To be clear, are you suggesting Windows is the standard of consistency? Even modern macs fall short of the UX Apple has traditionally been known for...
  • WolfeReader 10mo ago
    Please give an example of an "inconsistency" which makes Linux not a "viable alternative to Windows/MacOS"
  • 9763468975325 10mo ago
    Spoken like a true Windows UX aficionado. Who doesn't love multiple system settings apps, a mix of minimal new context menus and overcrowded legacy context menus just one more click away.
• adamkittelson 10mo ago
  I made the move about a month ago to bazzite on my desktop with an nvidia graphics card. I still have my windows drive for when I need it but that's pretty rare. Bazzite isn't perfect but we've reached the point where the rough edges are less painful than the self sabotage microsoft has been inflicting on their users in recent versions of windows.
  • gcr 10mo ago
    This is the key. It’s not that 2026 is the year of the Linux desktop, but rather 2026 is very much not the year of the Windows desktop. Bazzite is rough in the way that all distributions are, but I imagine Windows 11 is rougher.
    • fylo 10mo ago
      I tried bazzite but ended up on cachyos. The whole layered / immutable thing got a bit annoying. I'd rather just run snapshots and manage my packages more traditionally
      • plagiarist 10mo ago
        I love the layered thing except for the rough edges. Unfortunately the rough edges for me are that Linux containerization and permissions are completely idiotic. In Fedora Atomic it should be foolishly easy to set up a system account, with access to specific USB devices via group, and attach a volume that can easily be written to by a non-root user inside of the container.
      • pamcake 10mo ago
        [dead]
  • CivBase 10mo ago
    I think we've reached a point where Windows is about as rough as Linux. But the problem is still that people are familiar with Windows and have learned how to deal with the roughness; not so on Linux. And so long as Windows owns the business and education sectors, it will always have the benefit of that familiarity.
• MostlyStable 10mo ago
  It is good, and for 99+% of use cases for 90+% of users (who mostly use nothing but the browser), they will hardly even notice a difference, besides the lack of obnoxious, instrusive MS behavior. However, despite really, really wanting to switch (and having it installed on my laptop), I keep finding things that don't quite work right that are preventing me from switching some of my machines. My living room PC, which is what my TV is connected to, the DVR software that runs my TV tuner card doesn't quite work right (despite having a native linux installer), and I couldn't get channels to come through as clearly and as easily. I spent a couple of hours of troubleshooting and gave up. My work PC needs to have the Dropbox app (which has a linux installer), but it also needs the "online-only" functionality so that I can see and browse the entire (very large) dropbox directory without needing to have it all stored locally. This has been a feature that has been being requested on the linux version of the app for years, and dropbox appears unlikely to add it anytime soon. Both of these are pretty niche issues that I don't expect to affect the vast majority of users (and the dropbox one in particular shouldn't be an issue at all if my org didn't insist on using dropbox in a way that it is very much not intended to be used, and for which better solutions exist, but I have given up on that fight a long time ago), and like I said, I've had linux on my laptop for a couple of years so far without any issue, and I love it. I am curious how many "edge cases" like mine exist out there though. Maybe there exists some such edge case for a lot of people even while almost no one has the same edge case issue.
  • WaxProlix 10mo ago
    There are plenty. I run only Linux at home but CAD software for hobbies (Fusion 360), most games that want kernel level anti cheat, some embedded DRM-enabled media, all sort of just fail. Other things, like GPU tuning or messing with your displays/drivers are harder than they should be. My Bluetooth earbuds just don't work with my Linux machines.
    • 3eb7988a1663 10mo ago
      Bluetooth is such a crapshoot for me, I feel like everyone else must be using the single blessed chip and forgot to share the memo.
• Zealotux 10mo ago
  It's good until you boot your system and end up with an unrecoverable black screen that meeses your day of work for no good reason. Linux is free if you don't value your time.
  • jbstack 10mo ago
    You can't really make blanket statements like this about "Linux" in general because it depends on what distro you use. For example, in NixOS to fix this type of problem all you have to do is rollback to a previous configuration that is known to work. I've not used it, but I believe Arch has something similar. Even with imperatively configured distros like Ubuntu, it's generally much easier to recover from a "screen of death" than in Windows because the former is less of a black box than the latter. This means its easier to work out what the problem is and find a fix for it. With LLMs that's now easier than ever. And, in the worst case that you have to resort to reinstalling your system, it's far less unpleasant to do that in a Linux distro than in Windows. The modern Windows installer is painful to get through, and then you face hours or days of manually reinstalling and reconfiguring software which you can do with a small handful of commands in Linux to get back to a state that is reasonably similar to what you had before.
    • howdyhowdy123 10mo ago
      "Screen of death" in Windows? I haven't heard of one of those in over a decade.
      • WolfeReader 10mo ago
        I've had one, although it was due to a vendor releasing inconsistent driver updates. Incidentally, I can now honestly say I've had more driver issues with Windows than Linux.
      • Al-Khwarizmi 10mo ago
        I spent years (maybe a decade) without seeing them in the Windows 7 and early 10 era, but in the last few years I have them sometimes. Many seem Nvidia-related, but I also remember some due to a bad update that broke things in some laptops.
• seawsurf 10mo ago
  And still, look at all the comments on the article bashing Linux because of compatibility, driver and hardware issues.
  • jakeydus 10mo ago
    [flagged]
    • tomhow 10mo ago
      Please avoid sneering and internet tropes on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • CuriouslyC 10mo ago
    Still less than the number of people bashing windows.
• pygar 10mo ago
  Every year at around this time there is a lot of linux related content in tech media. It's a slow moving evergreen topic perfect for a scheduled release while the author is on holiday. This is just filler content that could have been written at any point in the last 10 years with minor changes.
  • veegee 10mo ago
    [dead]
  • sho_hn 10mo ago
    I've been working on the Linux desktop for 20 years, and I've been using it on the desktop since 1999, so I lived through the infamous "Year of the Linux Desktop" era. I've not seen anything like the current level of momentum, ever, nor this level of mainstream exposure. Gaming has changed the equation, and 2026 will be wild.
    • mkozlows 10mo ago
      Windows 8 era had the same vibe.
      • sudo_and_pray 10mo ago
        This time there 2 big factors that were not there in '12. 1. 'office' cloud services - now you just need a browser for majority of docs/sheet/slides tasks 2. gaming - while it was possible back, but it was really hit or miss with a game. Nowadays vast majority of games work on Linux out of the box.
        • mkozlows 10mo ago
          Yeah, fair! Same sentiment about Microsoft now as then, but fewer real blockers on the Linux side.
    • BuyMyBitcoins 10mo ago
      Gaming, and Microsoft enshittifying Windows 11 to an absurd degree. The bloat is astounding. This is especially egregious now that RAM costs a fortune.
• LennyHenrysNuts 10mo ago
  It's been good for twenty years, the only difference is that OP finally gave it a fair go.
  • unethical_ban 10mo ago
    Proton for games had changed things dramatically. Gamers can legit switch to Linux with barely a second thought, without being technical. Linux/x86 still is poor for battery life compared to Apple.
    • ako 10mo ago
      Most people don’t care about gaming, so they shouldn’t care about proton. What changed recently for those who don’t care about gaming?
      • jakeydus 10mo ago
        I’d argue the majority of casual online PC discourse is driven by gaming. By the numbers LTT is the largest PC/IT/consumer computer YouTube channel and the majority of their content is focused on gaming. That’s my impression anyway.
      • Sharlin 10mo ago
        The hint here is in the domain name of the article URL.
      • unethical_ban 10mo ago
        We don't agree on the premise.
      • Zhyl 10mo ago
        A pretty bold statement for the largest entertainment medium in the world.
  • deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  • 10mo ago
• babl-yc 10mo ago
  I switched my desktop from macOS (10+ years) to Ubuntu 25 last year and I'm not going back. The latest release includes a Gnome update which fixed some remaining annoyances with high res monitors. I'd say it pretty much "just works" except less popular apps are a bit more work to install. On occasion you have to compile apps from source, but it's usually relatively straightforward and on the upside you get the latest version :) For anyone who is a developer professionally I'd say the pros outweigh the cons at this point for your work machine.
  • tkiolp4 10mo ago
    But what about laptops? I don’t use desktop machines anymore (last time was in 2012). Apple laptops are top notch. I use ubuntu as vm (headless) for software development tho
    • babl-yc 10mo ago
      I don't have an x86 laptop at the moment so sticking with Macbook for now. My assumption is Mac laptops still are far superior given M-series chips and OS that are tuned for battery efficiency. Would love to find out this is no longer the case.
    • mkozlows 10mo ago
      Works well if the laptop has hardware designed to support Linux. Framework stuff is great, for instance.
      • SomeHacker44 10mo ago
        I have the HP Zbook Ultra G1a. AMD 395+, 129GB RAM, 4TB 2280 SSD. Works great with Ubuntu 24.04 and the OEM kernel. Plays Steam games, runs OpenCL AI models. Only nit is it is very picky on what USB PD chargers it will actually charge on at all. UGreen has a 140W that works. Updated Mesa to the latest and the kernel too.
        • Tsiklon 10mo ago
• baby 10mo ago
  What pc would someone recommend as someone who just wants to toy around and dont necessarily need the power?
  • WillAdams 10mo ago
    Grab one of the old Windows 10 machines which are showing up from corporations upgrading to Windows 11.
  • layer8 10mo ago
    Some N100 based mini PC.
  • antod 10mo ago
    An ex lease Thinkpad T Series with Intel graphics is a good choice for value and compatibility. eg a T490 or T14 era machine. Using hardware at least 6-12 months old is a good way to get better compatibility. Generally Linux drivers only start development after the hardware is available and in the hands of devs, while Windows drivers usually get a head start before release. Brand new hardware on a LTS (long term support) distro with an older kernel is usually the worst compatibility combo.
  • TiredOfLife 10mo ago
    Steam Deck. It has been my main computing device for 2 years.
• teekert 10mo ago
  There is a strange, but pleasant feeling when you hear someone claiming “they’re early to Linux” and think it’s going to be something big. (Happened recently.)
• desireco42 10mo ago
  I get people are tired of Year of Linux on Desktop, but I feel like last year it actually started happening for real. Mostly due to Arch which is not what I ever expected. On one hand we have Steam that will make 1000s of games become available on easy to use platform based on Arch. For developers, we have Omarchy, which makes experience much more streamlined and very pleasant and productive. I moved both my desktop and laptop to Omarchy and have one Mac laptop, this is really good experience, not everything is perfect, but when I switch to Mac after Omarchy, I often discover how not easy is to use Mac, how many clicks it takes to do something simple. I think both Microsoft and Apple need some serious competition and again, came from Arch who turned out to be more stable and serious then Ubuntu.
  • desireco42 10mo ago
    My main joy of Linux is to have tilling manager and to have same machine on which I can both play games and work. Which since Windows I couldn't make happen.
• GnarfGnarf 10mo ago
  I'm a Windows/macOS developer, but I strongly feel that all national governments need to convert to Linux, for strategic sovereignty. (My customer demographic is seniors & casual users).
  • sowbug 10mo ago
    Curious: do enterprises using Windows suffer through all the system-level ads and nagware? Or do they get a version that lets their employees actually focus on work instead of learning the many reasons they should consider switching back to Edge?
    • sirjaz 10mo ago
      Enterprise and ltsc have none of the nagware or tracking. Ai is still there though
    • jackvalentine 10mo ago
      You _can_ curate the Enterprise edition a lot more with group policy/intune and remove all that stuff but my experience has been most corporate IT departments don’t care/don’t know how to do it, and MS will just randomly enable new things without asking the same as home editions and you have to keep an eye on it and go to disable them. It’s super annoying!
    • Shacklz 10mo ago
      No nagware but, at least on the machines of my colleagues, an even worse enemy: Microsoft Defender with all the checkboxes ticked. Grinds the machine to an absolute halt for any development work - sometimes the responsible security department has mercy and gives exceptions for certain folders/processes, sometimes not.
      • BLKNSLVR 10mo ago
        My work machine is grossly slow due to all the various security software. Loading Teams can take minutes. I'm often late to meetings waiting for the damn thing to load. Feels like early 90s computing and that Moore's Law was an excuse for bad coding practices and pushing newer hardware so that "shit you don't care about but is 'part of the system'" can do more monitoring and have more control of 'your' computer.
• system2 10mo ago
  Linux is not suitable for the average user. I use Xubuntu on all my old computers, but I am 100% sure a normie would not tolerate the tedium of it. People want shiny icons with animations and a bunch of garbage on their computers to make them feel they are doing something. Linux is too static for that. If I have an issue with an application or if I want an application, I must use the terminal. I can't imagine a Mac user bothering to learn it. Linux is for people who want to maximize the use of their computer without being spied on and without weird background processes. Linux won't die, but it won't catch Windows or Mac in the next 5 decades. People are too lazy for it. Forget about learning. I bet you $100, 99% of the people in the street didn't even see Linux in their lives, nor even heard of it. It is not because of marketing, it is because people who tried it returned to Windows or Mac after deciding it is too hard to learn for them to install a driver or an application.
  • deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  • mixmastamyk 10mo ago
    Outdated view. Regular people ask for help at the genius bar or IT poindexter all the time. And pretty icons are plentiful.
    • system2 10mo ago
      I bet you $100 you can't find a single person on the street using Linux. It is that rare.
      • mixmastamyk 10mo ago
        Android and chrome books are everywhere. (Though this is not what you first asserted.) I’d like that hundred as amzn gift card.
        • system2 10mo ago
          Using an Android tablet vs a linux pc is a completely separate thing. Not even close. I am talking about a user who knows Linux, uses it at home for personal PC purposes. It is non-existent.
• aborsy 10mo ago
  Linux desktop is amazing. Coming from Debian, I installed Windows and had to quickly purge it from my hardware! Super bloated, slow, constantly phoned some CC center, automatically connected to OneDrive, … Debian is a breath of fresh air in comparison. Totally quiet and snappy.
  • drnick1 10mo ago
    Debian (stable) is great but I wouldn't use it for a gaming PC on modern hardware. The drivers included are just too old. Bazzite or Arch (DIY option) seem better options.
    • foresto 10mo ago
      Debian Stable gamer here, with modern hardware, having a great time. > The drivers included are just too old. This can usually be fixed by enabling Debian Backports. In some cases, it doesn't even need fixing, because userland drivers like Mesa can be included in the runtimes provided by Steam, Flatpak, etc. Once set up, Debian is a very low-maintenance system that respects my time, and I love it for that.
    • raegis 10mo ago
      I don't game, but all my computers run Debian Stable, and my oldest child wastes considerable time gaming on Steam. I had to tweak one or two things for him early on, but it all seems to work fine. People who don't use Debian misunderstand Stable. It's released every two years, and a subset of the software is kept up to date in Backports. For anything not included in Backports, its trivial to run Debian Testing or Unstable in a chroot on your Stable machine. I moved to Debian Stable ~20 years ago because constant updates in other distros always screwed up CUPS printing (among other things). Curiously, I was using Ubuntu earlier this year and the same thing happened. Never going back.
• nodesocket 10mo ago
  I have a Windows 11 PC strictly for gaming. Nearly every-time I interact with Windows it infuriates me with garbage code, Microsoft business BS and anti-privacy. I’d love to switch but has Linux gaming solved the anti-cheat requirement issue? Do Epic and EA games work on Linux? I also play a decent amount of Flight Simulator 2024 and losing that is almost a non-starter for switching.
  • rolph 10mo ago
    anticheat is not a linux issue, its a developers issue. it seems facially easy to solve. pair players with the type of game they want. turn on anticheat if you want to join no cheat sessions. if you want a cheat game turn off anticheat and you join sessions with other cheat players. the whole dilemma comes out of malignant users that enjoy destruction of other users ability to enjoy the game. go nuclear on clients that manage to join anticheat sessions with cheats turned on.
• pjb88 10mo ago
  Any recommendations for a distro? I've used Mint in the past, loved it until I spent a day trying to get scanner drivers to work. Don't know if that's changed now, was 4 years ago
  • desireco42 10mo ago
    Omarchy is pretty streamlined for developers and you can play games as well as they work well.
    • phren0logy 10mo ago
      I tried a number of distros and settled on Omarchy because it has a coherent design and nice aesthetics, but it has some weird quirks about messing with my dotfiles on updates. It's so new I suspect this will be ironed out soon.
  • lawn 10mo ago
    Today I'd recommend CachyOS. While I haven't connected a scanner, everything else I've tried just seems to work.
  • 2OEH8eoCRo0 10mo ago
    You're going to get everyone's opinion here. Try a bunch of the major ones and see what works best. I did this and landed on Fedora but ymmv
  • riffic 10mo ago
    the Universal Blue project has got a great suite of distributions: https://universal-blue.org/ https://universal-blue.org/
  • delaminator 10mo ago
    Simple, Debian with i3-wm
  • mixmastamyk 10mo ago
    Yes, Mint for most people. I am using Fedora on machines with new hardware and liking it as well. It has small pluses/minuses vs Mint.
• sylens 10mo ago
  I've been really enjoying my experience using CachyOS on my (formerly Windows) gaming PC. I chose to use Limine and btrfs so now if it gets borked by a bad package install/uninstall I can roll back pretty easily. My next step is to replace my Nvidia GPU with an AMD one so I can stop worrying about that aspect in the future.
• nosrepa 10mo ago
  echo "$((( $(date +%Y) + 1 ))) will be the year of the linux desktop"
  • JohnLocke4 10mo ago
    Yes. The reason the year of the Linux desktop has yet to arrive is because most people don't understand this joke. Linux is powerful because it is made for power users (although certain distros are changing this)
• chuckadams 10mo ago
  Just recently started using the desktop machine (under my desk, as opposed to my laptop which sits on my desktop) and put NixOS on it, and found myself pleasantly surprised. There's certainly still some parts of NixOS that require some expertise and getting your head around its package model, but overall I was surprised at how idiotproof it was to install and use. I mostly play games on it with Steam, which also Just Works.
  • bigyabai 10mo ago
    NixOS is really a profound experience, once you embrace it. I used Arch for ~3 years and ended up reinstalling it maybe 15 times on my desktop alone. Switched to NixOS and I've used the same installation for 3 years, synced with my laptop and server, switching from x11 to Wayland to KDE to GNOME then back again with no problem. It doesn't feel real sometimes. My dotfiles are modularized, backed up in Github and versioned with UEFI rollback when I update. I might be using this for the rest of my life, now.
    • sroerick 10mo ago
      I've heard of people doing this and I'm really interested in this. Can you recommend a write up on this or further reading?
      • bigyabai 10mo ago
        I personally remember being inspired by Erase your Darlings and Paranoid NixOS Setup back in the day, less for the hardening measures and more because of how great the Nix syntax looked. Huge, monumental ass-pain setups could be scripted away in one or two lines like it was nothing. You could create wildly optimized configurations for your specific use-case, and then divide them into modules so they're portable. It's not advisable to switch to one of these paranoid configurations outright, but they're a great introduction to the flexibility provided by the NixOS configuration system. I'd also recommend Xe's documentation of Nix Flakes, which can be used on any UNIX-like system including macOS: https://xeiaso.net/blog/nix-flakes-1-2022-02-21/ https://xeiaso.net/blog/nix-flakes-1-2022-02-21/ https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings/ https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings/ https://xeiaso.net/blog/paranoid-nixos-2021-07-18/ https://xeiaso.net/blog/paranoid-nixos-2021-07-18/
• dashim 10mo ago
  I use a Linux PC every day but I wouldn't recommend it to normal people. They're not going to feel any renewed sense of ownership from it, just annoyance at having to think about technical gibberish when they just want to get on with using the computer.
  • timbit42 10mo ago
    Yeah, because getting ads and pushed to use more Microsoft products all day long isn't an annoyance when they just want to get on with using the computer.
    • dwaite 10mo ago
      However, they don't need to learn YAML or read configuration manuals to dismiss an ad.
      • timbit42 10mo ago
        Speaking of technical jibberish...
  • oreally 10mo ago
    Thanks for the counterbalancing post. Linux isn't quite there yet.
  • itomato 10mo ago
    They remain consumers at their peril.
  • mixmastamyk 10mo ago
    Right, because Windows has no technical gibberish: \\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ C$\WinSxS>ps1 DWORD etc. Outdated view—most people don’t do these things, and just use the app store and menu.
• howdyhowdy123 10mo ago
  Can I run Solidworks on Linux yet? Excel? Labview? Vivado? Adobe products? Altium Designer? (Matlab is mostly yes) Not everybody is just writing Javascript and PHP. Can I get a laptop to sleep after closing the lid yet? Not that long ago the answer to these questions was mostly no (or sort of yes... but very painfully) On Windows all of this just works.
  • cevn 10mo ago
    Adobe works
  • voidfunc 10mo ago
    These are all pretty niche products at this point. For the true professionals that need these tools they're stuck but most people can find reasonable alternatives for their hobby or side hustle.
    • howdyhowdy123 10mo ago
      Or... they can use Windows and not have to bend over backwards. I know this because I keep trying and giving up believe me.
  • maccard 10mo ago
    > Can I get a laptop to sleep after closing the lid yet? > on windows all of this just works Disagree on the sleep one - my work laptop doesn’t go to sleep properly. The only laptop I’ve ever used that behaves as expected with sleep is a macbook.
    • speff 10mo ago
      That's funny - my work MBP won't go to sleep properly, lol. Often come back to work after the weekend to find a dead laptop.
      • Klonoar 10mo ago
        Then you have a significant outlier experience for that platform. It’s more than fine for people to dislike Apple products but this is simply not an area where other platforms have them beat.
• Pxtl 10mo ago
  I've been giving Linux a go as a daily driver for a few months. I tried Cinnamon and while it was pleasantly customizable, the sigle-threadedness of the UI killed it for me. It was too easy to do the wrong thing and lock the UI thread, including several desktop or tray Spices from the official repo. I'm switching to KDE. Seems peppier. Biggest hardware challenge I've faced is my Logitech mouse, which is a huge jump from the old days of fighting with Wi-Fi and sound support. Sound is a bit messy with giving a plethora of audio devices that would be hidden under windows (like digital and analog options for each device) and occasionally compatibility for digital vs analog will be flaky from a game or something, but I'll take it. Biggest hassle imho is still installing non-repo software. So many packages offer a flatpak and a snap and and build-from-source instructions where you have to figure out the local package names for each dependency and they offer one .Deb for each different version of Debian and its derivatives and it's just so tedious to figure which is the right one.
  • foresto 10mo ago
    > Biggest hardware challenge I've faced is my Logitech mouse In case it helps: https://github.com/libratbag/piper https://github.com/libratbag/piper
    • Pxtl 10mo ago
      Sadly the project feels semi-abandoned. No new releases so I had to build it from source. Also the PR board seems to be ignored (one or two of those are mine - I tried to fix the misleading button labels).
      • deleted 10mo ago
        [deleted]
• franczesko 10mo ago
  I wouldn't mind and wouldn't be surprised by Valve phone at some point
• the_af 10mo ago
  What amazes me is that on Steam they no longer make the distinction (in the standard library view) between Windows and Linux: every game is assumed to launch in Linux, using Proton behind the scenes it needed. There's still a "Linux games" toggle but now every game appears ungrayed by default. And it mostly works! At least for my games library. The only game I wasn't able to get to work so far is Space Marine 2, but on ProtonDB people report they got it to work. As for the rest: I've been an exclusive Linux user on the desktop for ~20 years now, no regrets.
• solumunus 10mo ago
  Tried to switch to Linux plenty of times over the past few decades, this year it finally stuck. I can confidently say I’ll never install Windows again. Everything pretty much just works and any issues I’ve had have been quickly resolved with the help of LLM’s.
• bitanarch 10mo ago
  HDR still doesn't really work on Linux w/ nVidia GPUs. 1. 10bpp color depth is not supported on RGB monitors, which are the majority of LCD displays on the market. Concretely, ARGB2101010 and XRGB2101010 modes are not supported by current nVidia Linux drivers - the drivers only offer ABGR2101010 and XBGR2101010 (See: https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/blob/main/kernel-open/nvidia-drm/nvidia-drm-format.c https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/blob/main/...). 2. Common browsers like Chrome and Firefox has no real support for HDR video playback on nVidia Linux drivers. The "HDR" option appears on YouTube, but no HDR color can be displayed with an nVidia GPU. Also, video backgrounds in Google Meet on Chrome are broken with nVidia GPUs and Wayland. Ironically it works on Firefox. This has been broken for a few years and no fix is in sight. The "HDR" toggle you get on Plasma or Mutter is hiding a ton of problems behind the scenes. If you only have 8bpp, even if you can find an app that somehow displays HDR colors on nVidia/Wayland - you'll see artifacts on color gradients.
  • fruitworks 10mo ago
    nvidia
    • jetbalsa 10mo ago
      Right, it IS nvidia's fault at this point, but its still like what? 90% of the consumer GPU market.
      • bitanarch 10mo ago
        They're also selling $3000 nVidia AI workstations that exclusively uses Linux. But what if you want to watch an HDR video on it? No. What if you want to use Google Meet on Chrome/Wayland? It's broken.
      • HansHamster 10mo ago
        Funny how it went from "just get an Nvidia card for Linux" and "oh my god, what did I do to deserve fglrx?" to "just get an AMD card" and "it's Nvidia, what did you expect?"
• tigerlily 10mo ago
  This is really shaping up to be the Century of Linux on the Desktop.
  • eleventen 10mo ago
    Adoption has really picked up since 1900.
    • amlib 10mo ago
      Previous millennium adoption also really pales in comparison to current millennium. Let's hope it keeps going strong in the next millennium
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• johnea 10mo ago
  > actually own your PC It's funny they would choose this phasing. This is exactly the way I described my decision to abandon windoze, and switch to linux, over 20 years ago...
• mat_epice 10mo ago
  After a few months of testing the waters, I just moved my gaming PC over to full-time Linux this weekend. Proton has really been revolutionary, as I haven't yet encountered something in my Steam library that won't work.
• cedws 10mo ago
  I've been sceptical of the 'Linux desktop' for a long time, but I recently started using Bazzite on my gaming PC and I'm super impressed. In just a few years since I last daily drove a Linux distro it's come such a long way. KDE Plasma is fast and beautiful. So far all the games I want to play run really well, with no noticable performance difference. If anything, they feel faster, but it could be placebo because the DE is more responsive.
• knallfrosch 10mo ago
  If people put half the amount of their time into fixing Windows as they do installing software on Linux, it'd be way better. Instead of distro upgrades, spend 3 minutes disabling the newest AI feature using regedit. But, as the author rightly notes: It's more about a "feeling." Well then, good luck.
• BrandoElFollito 10mo ago
  What is really blocking the move for me is zScaler, Zoom (they may exist on Linux, not sure about how integrated they are) but especially Outlook (the client). The OWA version is subpar and without it I cannot function in a work environment.
  • BLKNSLVR 10mo ago
    > without it I cannot function in a work environment. This is more about what you choose as your operating environment, not what your work imposes as your working environment. Most places of work, mine included, run Microsoft services that lock them into the ecosystem incredibly tightly. As per the article title, "if you want to feel like you actually own your PC", this is about your PC, not the one provided to you by your workplace (since it's likely owned by them). One thing I'm worried about in my work environment is Microsoft enforcing the web versions of Office and deprecating the stand alone desktop applications. The web versions are a massive step down in terms of functionality and ease of use. Your mention of OWA makes me feel as if that is what Outlook will be sacrificed for at some point in the future anyway.
    • BrandoElFollito 10mo ago
      I could use whatever in my job, I just need access to these key tools. I have the same concern regarding the Outlook desktop client. I briefly used the web based one and it is way less convenient in a work setting.
  • byte_0 10mo ago
    I had a similar issue, but I ended up installing Debian and running Windows 10 as a virtual machine with VirtualBox. The webcam can be accessed as if were installed on the guest OS and haven't had a problem with Zoom or Teams. Just sharing in case it helps.
    • BrandoElFollito 10mo ago
      I considered that but is is such a waste of resources in my case: I deliberately use a lighter laptop that just covers my dev needs. But yes, this is a possibility, or accessing the windows via rdp. The loss would be with the "always-handy" kind of setup, where Outlook is a click away and pops up its calendar reminder
• christophilus 10mo ago
  I switched in 2020. I run Fedora and Arch. I don’t miss MacOS at all. The last Windows I used was 8, so my opinion is out of date, but yeah… I don’t miss Windows, either.
• nsxwolf 10mo ago
  What makes Linux a viable desktop for so many people now is the fact that they don’t need to run very much software anymore. It runs Chrome so you’re good.
• mlacks 10mo ago
  I moved to linux this month for good once i realized I no longer needed microsft services (Excel for example "runs on Mac" but is missing important features). I chose redhat because its what I've been using for over a decade at work and feels like home. Only thing I miss is Capcut as that workflow was pretty ironed out. Getting the hang of KDENlive
• epistasis 10mo ago
  Honestly I loved it a lot more pre-2022, when Ubuntu added a super aggressive OOM killer that only operates on the level of an entire systemd run unit. Meaning that if you are running computation in, say, a shell and one for your subprocesses running computation takes too much memory, it takes out the entire shell and terminal window, leaving no trace of what happened, including all the terminal logs. And if you are running Chrome, and something starts taking a lot of memory, say goodbye to the entire app without any niceties. (Yes, this is a mere pet peeve but it has been causing me so much pain over the past year, and it's such an inferior way to deal with memory limits tha what came before it, I don't know why anybody would have taken OOM logic from systemd services and applied it to use launched processes.)
  • mort96 10mo ago
    It sounds like your primary issue is that you have a severe RAM deficiency for what you're trying to use your machine for. Any OOM killer, be it the kernel's per-process one or systemd-oomd's per-service one, only exists to try to recover from an out-of-memory scenario where the alternative is to kernel panic (in the case of the kernel's oom killer) or for the system to completely lock up (in the case of systemd-oomd). Try doing less at once, or getting more memory.
    • epistasis 10mo ago
      My primary issue is that a system that did an OK job at dealing with low memory situations has been replaced with a completely inadequate system. If your solution is "don't ever run out of memory" my solution is "I won't ever use your OS unless forced to." Every other OS handles this better, and my work literally requires pushing the bounds of memory on the box, whether it's 64GB or 1TB of RAM. Killing an entire cgroup is never an acceptable solution, except for the long-running servers that systemd is meant to run.
      • orbital-decay 10mo ago
        As far as I know, Windows just grinds to a halt entirely, system processes start crashing, or you get a BSOD, and mobile OSes kill the app without any trace. I never had an OOM situation on Macs so I don't know about macOS. Windows is unstable even if you have more than enough memory but your swap is disabled, due to how its virtual memory works. It generally behaves much worse than others under heavy load and when various system resources are nearly exhausted. There are several advanced and very flexible OOM killers available for Linux, you can use them if it really bothers you (honestly you're the first I've seen complaining about it). Some gaming/realtime distros are using them by default.
• QuadrupleA 10mo ago
  Been so happy with my switch to Linux about 8 months ago. The nvidia gremlins that stopped me in prior years are all smoothed out. One big plus with Linux, it's more amenable to AI assistance - just copy & paste shell commands, rather than follow GUI step-by-steps. And Linux has been in the world long enough to be deeply in the LLM training corpuses.
• duttish 10mo ago
  I've been on Linux desktop for ages, but it's not quite stable enough that I can recommend it to anyone. Space Marine 2 was the first game in quite a while than didn't just work out of the box, but... E.g three weeks ago nvidia pushed bad drivers which broke my desktop after a reboot and I had to swap display (ctrl-alt-f3 etc), I never got into gnome at all, and roll back to an earlier version. Automatic rollback of bad drivers would have saved this. Are Radeon drivers less shit?
  • diabllicseagull 10mo ago
    I've been using a full amd build with arch on it for years now. never had graphics related issues after an update. my biggest gripe is with the hdmi organization and how we can't have proper support with open source drivers.
  • mrkeen 10mo ago
    I've had mixed experiences with AMD. Back in the day - a bit after Linus told Nvidia to fuck off - I tried to get my Radeon 5850HD (i think?) working on Ubuntu. It was one of those things I spent the whole weekend (OS reinstalls really add up) trying to make work, to no avail. Relative to that nonsense, the equivalent proprietary Nvidia driver just worked after being installed. A couple of months ago I bought a second hand RX 7800 XT, and prepared myself for a painful experience, but I think it just worked. Like I got frustrated trying to find out how to download and install the driver, when I think it just came with Linux Mint already.
  • keyringlight 10mo ago
    It might depend on the distro, but were you running a 10 series or earlier? They dropped Pascal and earlier CPUs with the v590 driver, I know Arch migrated what the nvidia package installed in such a way that could leave someone without an appropriate driver unless they manually moved to a different source. Then again Arch is one of those distros that has the attitude that you need to be a little engaged/responsible for ongoing maintenance of your system, which is why I'm against blind "just use (distro)" recommendations unless it's very basic and low assumptions about the user. [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1prm8rl/archannounce_nvidia_590_driver_drops_pascal/ https://old.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1prm8rl/archanno...
• MerrimanInd 10mo ago
  I love this. I spent my holidays hearing non-technical family members complain about their ever deteriorating Windows experiences, issues that make me righteously angry at Microsoft. IMO the next important unblocker for Linux adoption is the Adobe suite. In a post-mobile world one can use a tablet or phone for almost any media consumption. But production is still in the realm of the desktop UX and photo/video/creative work is the most common form of output. An Adobe CC Linux option would enable that set of "power users". And regardless of their actual percentage of desktop users, just about ever YouTuber or streamer talking about technology is by definition a content creator so opening Linux up to them would have a big effect on adoption. And yes I've tried most of the Linux alternatives, like GIMP, Inkscape, DaVinci, RawTherapee, etc. They're mostly /fine/ but it's one of the weaker software categories in FOSS-alternatives IMO. It also adds an unnecessary learning curve. Gamers would laugh if they were told that Linux gaming was great, they just have to learn and play an entirely different set of games.
  • orbital-decay 10mo ago
    Photoshop (for example) largely works in Wine, although it's not stable enough for production usage. The problem is the CC itself and the installer, which is unimaginably bloated and glued to the Internet Exp... I mean Edge Web View and many other Windows-only things.
  • Klonoar 10mo ago
    Your entire comment could be written 20 years ago and it would just about fit perfectly.
• synergy20 10mo ago
  Linux is my main and sole desktop since around-2006. I needed windows for TurboTax a few hours a year in the past but that's it, I did not do PC games though, just regular desktop stuff including developing code.
  • Aldipower 10mo ago
    Same here, since 1997 though, running the tax software in a virtual machine with Linux as host.
• hecifato 10mo ago
  I’ve been around the block with Linux distributions since 2020. I personally think that Bazzite is the way to go for most people coming from Windows, or people experienced with Linux that want something as close to “set and forget” as you can. One thing that can be annoying is how quickly things have moved in the Linux gaming space over the past 5 years. I have been a part of conversations with coworkers who talk about how Linux gaming was in 2019 or 2020. I feel like anyone familiar with Linux will know the feeling of how quickly things can improve while documentation and public information cannot keep up.
• running101 10mo ago
  Year of the Linux desktop!
• WolfeReader 10mo ago
  The article's title - and the original title of the submission - was specific, bold, and contained a call to action. The new title is bland and unspecific (Linux has been "good" for servers for decades now). Please revert this submission to use the correct title.
• Biganon 10mo ago
  I'm tired of people saying Steam on Linux just works. It doesn't. Tried running Worms: instant crash, no error message. Tried running Among Us: instant crash, had to add cryptic arguments to the command line to get it to run. Tried running Parkitect: crashes after 5 minutes. These three games are extremely simple, graphically speaking. They don't use any complicated anti-cheat measure. This shouldn't be complicated, yet it is. Oh and I'm using Arch (BTW), the exact distro SteamOS is based on. And of course, as always, those for which it works will tell you you're doing-it-wrong™ .
  • zouhair 10mo ago
    I use EndeavourOS, I just installed Worms and Among Us and they are playing right out of the box for me.
  • HKH2 10mo ago
    Ironically, quite a few Linux-compatible games only work for me in compatibility mode.
  • deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  • tombert 10mo ago
    I don't have your other games, but I do have a few Worms games and they worked out of the box for me with GE Proton on NixOS. I'm not saying "you're doing it wrong", because obviously if you're having trouble then that is, if nothing else, bad UX design, but I actually am kind of curious as to what you're doing different than me. I have an extremely vanilla NixOS setup that boots into GameScope + Tenfoot and I drive everything with a gamepad and it works about as easily as a console does for me.
    • keyringlight 10mo ago
      If anything this is the challenge with PC as a platform being so varied, any random software/hardware/config variation could bring a whole load of quirks. That probably includes anything that isn't a PC in a time-capsule from when the game originally released, so any OS/driver changes since then, and I don't think we've reached the point where we can emulate specific hardware models to plug into a VM. One of the reasons the geforce/radeon drivers (eg, the geforce "game ready" branding) are so big is that they carry a whole catalogue of quirk workarounds for when the game renderer is coded badly or to make it a better fit to hardware and lets them advertise +15% performance in a new version. Part of the work for wine/proton/dxvk is going to be replicating that instead of a blunt translation strictly to the standards.
• sirjaz 10mo ago
  If Microsoft could get their heads out of their rears, they could potentially get back to a better OS for gaming. The hybrid kernel Dave Cutler designed is in many ways still better than the Linux kernel. It's the userland that is the issue with Windows 11. Look just by enabling true nvme support you close the gap between Linux and Windows performance wise.
• kentonv 10mo ago
  I switched all the machines at https://lanparty.house https://lanparty.house over to Linux a couple months ago. So far, we've experienced noticeably fewer problems on Linux compared to Windows. Stability and performance are better. I can't think of one game we tried that didn't work. And wow is it nice not to have all the ads and crapware in our faces anymore. (I'm aware that Battlefield series and League of Legends won't work due to draconian anti-cheat -- but nobody in my group cares to play those I guess.)
  • varun_ch 10mo ago
    As an aside.. I went down a mini-rabbit hole learning about the LAN Party House, read your website and about Sandstorm[0] and how that ended up with you at Cloudflare leading Workers. That’s a really cool and honestly inspirational path. Would love to learn more if you’ve written elsewhere…! [0] https://sandstorm.io/news/ https://sandstorm.io/news/
    • ChrisMarshallNY 10mo ago
      I was also impressed by his wife's Chez JJ work. I suspect that she has done much more impressive stuff, but that kind of thing is a dime a dozen, in SV. The hacker housing stuff speaks to her humanity, and I like humans.
    • crabmusket 10mo ago
      I've been down this rabbit hole too. I quite enjoyed Kenton's two episodes on SE Daily: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2017/12/18/protocol-buffers-with-kenton-varda/ https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2017/12/18/protocol-buf... https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2018/02/06/serverless-at-the-edge-with-kenton-varda/ https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2018/02/06/serverless-a...
  • abrookewood 10mo ago
    Yep, I've been gaming exclusively on Ubuntu (mainly because I want my desktop to match my servers) for several years. If you aren't playing the latest AAA FPS, then everything pretty much works.
• api 10mo ago
  All Linux desktop has to do is stay still and it will catch up with Windows, which is progressively getting worse.
• IAmGraydon 10mo ago
  I would be 100% off Windows if it weren’t for Adobe Suite and Ableton Live not being ported to Linux. I’m guessing both of these companies are avoiding it not for technical reasons but because Linux is a support nightmare given all of the distros and variations of the platform.
• SonnyTark 10mo ago
  A long time ago when I was in University, I was a volunteer in the Ubuntu group. In addition to evangelizing Linux/OSS, We were trying to convince our University to switch to opensource software for at least some engineering education with only a little bit of success. After a particularly busy OSS event a non-programmer friend of mine asked me, why is it that the Linux people seem to be so needy for everyone to make the same choices they make? trying to answer that question changed my perspective on the entire community. And here we are, after all these years the same question seems to still apply. Why are we so needy for ALL users and use-cases to be Linux-based and Linux-centric once we make that choice ourselves? What is it about Linux? the BSD people seem to not suffer from this and I've never heard anyone advocate for migration to OSX in spite of it being superior for specific usecases (like music production). IMO if you're a creator, operating systems are tools; use the tool that fits the task.
  • I_am_tiberius 10mo ago
    Because we want the best for other people.
  • jact 10mo ago
    It’s bad for society for the desktop OS market to be a proprietary monopoly. It basically allows Microsoft to extract rent from the public defender. I do understand the evangelism being obnoxious. I don’t advocate for people to switch if they have key use cases that ONLY windows or OS X can meet. Certainly not good to be pushy. But otherwise, people are really getting a better experience by switching to Linux.
  • devnullbrain 10mo ago
    When you (try to) use libre software, the problems you run into tend not to be related to insufficient engineering, but more societal and economic, where they would be less likely to appear if there were more people in your cohort. Examples: - An important document is sent to me in a proprietary format - A streaming service uses a DRM service owned by a tech giant that refuses to let it work with open source projects - A video game developer thinks making games work on Linux isn't worth getting rid of rootkit anticheat The downside is Windows users would have to live in a world without subscription-based office suites, locked down media, and letting the CCP into your ring 0.
• jimmar 10mo ago
  I'm slowly de-Microsofting my computing. I've traded OneDrive for Syncthing. I ditched one PC for a Mac. I have the technical skills to run Linux effectively, but the biggest obstacle for my Linux adoption is distro fatigue. Run Ubuntu? Debian? Fedora? PopOS? Kubuntu? Arch? The article introduced yet another one to consider--Bazzite. The Linux world is amazing for its experimentation and collaboration. But the fragmentation makes it hard for even technical people like me who just want to get work done to embrace it for the desktop. Ubuntu LTS is probably the right choice. But it's just one more thing I have to go research.
  • ndom91 10mo ago
    As a beginner, just pick Ubuntu and get on with your life imo. Switching distros isn't that big of a lift later on and pretty much everything you learn carries over from one to the other. It's much more worthwhile to just pick _something_ and learn some basics and become comfortable with the OS imo.
  • delecti 10mo ago
    I think fragmentation is the wrong way to look at it; they're all basically compatible at the end of the day. It's more like an endless list of people who want to min-max. Any reasonably popular distro will have enough other users that you can find resources for fixing hitches. The deciding factor that made me go with EndeavourOS was that their website had cool pictures of space on it. If you don't already care then the criteria don't need to be any deeper than that. Once you use it enough to develop opinions, the huge list of options will thin itself out.
  • foresto 10mo ago
    Pick a popular distro, and during installation, put your /home directory on its own partition. This way, you won't have much to reconfigure if you ever have a reason to switch distros. (You might not ever have a reason; they're all pretty capable.) If using Ubuntu LTS for gaming, you might want to add a newer kernel: https://ubuntu.com/kernel/lifecycle https://ubuntu.com/kernel/lifecycle Linux Mint would also be a reasonable pick.
  • timbit42 10mo ago
• apt-apt-apt-apt 10mo ago
  Anybody that plays games (e.g. ages 1 to 30) will be hard-pressed to use linux. It's just not an option, and dual-booting has high friction.
  • ndom91 10mo ago
    This is just not true anymore. The only things that don't work anymore are a few AAA titles that use particular types of anti-cheat systems that rely on Windows kernel drivers (League of Legends is one that comes to mind). If I remember correctly, after the Crowdstrike BSOD-all-windows-instances update last year Microsoft wanted to make some changes to their kernel driver program and these anti-cheat measures on Windows might need to find a new mechanism soon anyway. That's a long way of saying, it's plausible that even that last barrier might come down sooner rather than later.
    • not_a9 10mo ago
      Anticheat has very different requirements to antimalware. Some interesting reads on what modern anticheats do: https://github.com/0avx/0avx.github.io/blob/main/article-3.md https://github.com/0avx/0avx.github.io/blob/main/article-3.m... https://github.com/0avx/0avx.github.io/blob/main/article-5.md https://github.com/0avx/0avx.github.io/blob/main/article-5.m... https://reversing.info/posts/guardedregions/ https://reversing.info/posts/guardedregions/ https://game-research.github.io/ https://game-research.github.io/ (less in detail and less IDA pseudo)
  • mixmastamyk 10mo ago
    Someone didn’t read the article.
• shadowdev1 10mo ago
  (cue arrogance) People on HackerNews complaining about Linux Desktop is pretty disappointing. You guys are supposed to be the real enthusiasts... you can make it work. (cue superiority complex) I've been using Linux Desktop for over 10 years. It's great for literally everything. Gaming admittedly is like 8/10 for compatibility, but I just use a VM with PCIe passthrough to pass in a gpu and to load up a game for windows or use CAD, etc. Seriously, ez. Never had issues with NVIDIA GFX with any of the desktop cards. Laptops... sure they glitch out. Originally Wine, then Proton, now Bazzite make it super easy to game natively. The only issues I ever had with games were from the Kernel level anti-cheats bundled. The anti-cheats just weren't available for Linux, so the games didn't start. Anyone familiar with those knows its not a linux thing, it's a publisher/anti-cheat mechanism thing. Just lazy devs really. (cue opinionated anti-corporate ideology) I like to keep microsoft chained up in a VM where it belongs so can't do it's shady crap. Also with a VM you can do shared folders and clipboard. Super handy actually. Weirdly enough, MacOS in a VM is a huge pita, and doesn't work well.
  • thayne 10mo ago
    > Weirdly enough, MacOS in a VM is a huge pit That isn't weird. It's by design. MacOS is only designed to run on Apple hardware, and a VM, even if the host is Apple hardware isn't really Apple hardware.
  • scaramanga 10mo ago
    I've observed that most "enthusiasts" are really just brand ambassadors. They've been captured by some proprietary software that doesn't run on Linux, and that's the problem of Linux. The day their set of products runs perfectly on Linux is the day Linux will be ready for them.
    • weaksauce 10mo ago
      I think that if affinity chooses to make it work well on linux that would be a game changer for a lot of people. daVinci resolve works on linux for video so having a proper photo editor/illustrator tool that is not gimp would open up the option for most people to daily drive it. that's really the missing piece.
• scaramanga 10mo ago
  Switched in, ooh i dunno, '98 or '99. Quality is about where it was then relatively speaking. Sure things have improved, mainly just systemd, and we got ACPI and later power management stuff for laptops. Prior to that windows was better on laptops due to having the proprietary drivers or working ACPI. But it was pretty poor quality in terms of reliability, and the main problem of the included software being incredibly bare bones, combined with the experience of finding and installing software was so awful (especially if you've not got an unlimited credit card to pay for "big professional solutions"). Every time the year of the Linux desktop arrives, I'm baffled, since not much has changed on this end.
  • mcny 10mo ago
    I tried to use Linux back in high school. I had a Pentium 4 computer which was pretty fast for its time. However, I had a dialip windows soft modem. You remember the driver situation. I had to boot to Windows to check my email. Also, I was basically a child and had no idea what I was doing (I still don't but that's besides the point). Things have definitely gotten better.
  • 3form 10mo ago
    This is a strange statement for me, because I'd say that since '99 almost everything has changed. Maybe your definition of quality is a bit different than mine.
  • mkozlows 10mo ago
    I'm sorry, but no. I ran Slackware 96, Red Hat 4.2, Mandrake 5.0, a bunch of Ubuntus from 12.04 onward, and Fedora now. It is absolutely, qualitatively different now than it was at the turn of the century. In the Red Hat 4.2 days, it was something that I was able to use because I was a giant nerd, but I'd never ever ever have recommended it to a normal person. By Ubuntu 12.04, 15 years later, it was good enough that I'd recommend it to someone who didn't do any gaming and didn't need to use any of the desktop apps that were still then semi-common. In 2026, it's fine for just about anyone unless you are playing particular (albeit very popular) games.
  • pessimizer 10mo ago
• steve-atx-7600 10mo ago
  Hahaha. Try sharing a couple old printers and scanners connected to a Linux box on your home network. At best, when it’s working you get lowest common denominator functionality. Want to run some vms ? Works great until you update your distro and the vm hosts kernel modules aren’t compatible anymore. Oh, want to use a later version of some package like docker? Did I use apt or snap or flatpack??? Yes, you can get this stuff working, but if you enjoy doing other things in life, have a job and don’t life alone, it is SSSOOOOO much easier to get a Mac mini. Or even windows 11 if that’s your thing.
  • bigyabai 10mo ago
    Sounds ultra-specific to your experience. VMs, package management and networking are all things that macOS and Windows stumble with for regular usage. I've used all three OSes professionally, and Linux requires the least configuration to get work done.
• Daunk 10mo ago
  I'm not against Wayland, but I think Wayland is currently not good for the Linux ecosystem. I've had lots of friends try Linux, and they've had issues with Discord global keyboard shortcuts not working, and window positions not restoring at application start, and lots of other small issues, which add up in the end. But once they switched to X11, they've all been very happy.
  • 3form 10mo ago
    Which desktop environment do your friends use?
    • Daunk 10mo ago
      They started with Hyprland, GNOME or KDE Plasma. Most of them have ended up using Cinnamon, and the rest use XFCE.
      • willis936 10mo ago
        hyprland is a fun spectacle, but takes insane effort to make remotely livable. Also any apparent shortcut (dotfiles) will do nasty damage to your install. Anyone hypr-curious should sandbox in an install they don't mind wiping.
        • philajan 10mo ago
          I’m really curious about your experience, what distro you used hyprland on, what dotfiles did damage to your install etc. I just installed hyprland yesterday and outside of having to switch back to i3 once to install what they had set for a terminal in their default config(kitty), I haven’t had to leave again.
          • throw2312321 10mo ago
            What does hyprland offer over i3?
• PacificSpecific 10mo ago
  We've made the switch and it's been great. On top of my that my partner who is not a computer person picked up Linux Mint to the level she can use Windows in a couple weeks.
• pregnenolone 10mo ago
  Unfortunately, TPM based Passkeys still are not a thing on Linux.
  • digiown 10mo ago
    What would that be useful for? A properly implemented software passkey like Keepassxc would be secure against anything short of a local root exploit. A TPM would not really help against that either.
    • pregnenolone 10mo ago
      Passkeys were designed to be bound to a device. Also I don't like using browser extensions as password managers or connecting them to a browser via an extension. It's been proven not to be safe many times.
• mmmpetrichor 10mo ago
  I have always wanted to use linux as my main OS. I tried with Ubuntu twice the past and always ran into really painful hurdles or missing features. This year I tried again with Mint and it absolutely stuck the landing. I have completely switched my desktop and laptop (and plex server) to mint. I have never even booted back into windows. I have not had any big issues and have been able to make it better than my windows desktop ever was.
• edferda 10mo ago
  Recently switched to Linux Mint from Windows and it has not only been good. It has been cathartic. I enjoy computers again! I am self-hosting some services, what an absolute joy.
  • scottmcdot 10mo ago
    Same! I made a comment earlier that it's now very easy to navigate bash with guidance from ChatGPT.
• jimbo808 10mo ago
  I quit gaming a year ago and no longer have a consumer OS installed on any machine. I can't imagine ever willingly going back after getting used to being able to set my machine up any way I want, and know it will work exactly as I've specified, and won't ever spy on me or monetize my data, and actually has an ecosystem for extending it in basically any way I can imagine, with no bloatware, an app ecosystem with no bundled spyware or adware, etc.
• brainzap 10mo ago
  When I got a steamdeck I open excel and started playtesting a few games, to many bugs, so I sold it
• MangoToupe 10mo ago
  Only compared to windows. Sadly, we're still stuck with a PC clone for the near future.
  • bigyabai 10mo ago
    Sounds like Darwin is finally meeting it's nominal fate.
    • MangoToupe 10mo ago
      Hey macos obviously still sucks ass, but it sucks ass less than all the other options. The userland situations for linux and windows are both horrifyingly, incomprehensibly bad. Just look at their reliance on a single fucking key "control" for all operations when that was always an inexplicably bad choice. You have so many fucking keys, why douboe dip when it defacto cripples both cli and gui contexts?
      • bigyabai 10mo ago
        Nope, sorry. macOS sucks more than every other option. It's why it has a smaller PC install-base than Windows, and it's why macOS is treated like a second-class citizen for server software. Apple's approach is dying because it cannot compete on equal footing, it's critically dependent on third-party support that simply isn't materializing. In the same fashion as Minix and BSD before it, XNU is being smothered by it's sole beneficiary. Also FYI, "userland" does not mean "desktop software" exclusively. It extends to the user's runtime, the stability and redundancy of their dependencies and the completeness of it's drivers and SDKs. macOS is not a stable runtime, static-links almost every dependency and has woefully incomplete driver support for third-party hardware. It is the worst of both worlds from Linux and Windows with a few innovative roadblocks that only Apple could universally enforce.
        • MangoToupe 10mo ago
          Eh macos still has usable apps and an actual design language. Windows/bsd\linux/minix/whatever need to sort their values out to compete
• sroerick 10mo ago
  It is interesting and fascinating to see the growth of Linux. As many have pointed out, The biggest factor is obviously the enshittification of Microsoft. Valve has crept up in gaming. And I think understated is how incredibly nice the tiling WMs are. They really do offer an experience which is impossible to replicate on Mac or Windows, both aesthetically and functionally. Linux, I think, rewards the power user. Microsoft and Apple couldn't give a crap about their power users. Apple has seemed to devolve into "Name That Product Line" fanboy fantasy land and has lost all but the most diehard fans. Microsoft is just outright hostile. I'm interested to see what direction app development goes in. I think TUIs will continue to rise in popularity. They are snappier and overall a much better experience. In addition, they work over SSH. There is now an entire overclass of power users who are very comfortable moving around in different servers in shell. I don't think people are going to want to settle for AI SaaS Cloudslop after they get a taste of local first, and when they realize that running a homelab is basically just Linux, I think all bets are off as far as which direction "personal computing" goes. Also standing firmly in the way of total SSH app freedom are IPhone and Android, which keep pushing that almost tangible utopia of amazing software frustratingly far out of reach. It doesn't seem like there is a clear winner for the noob-friendly distro category. It seems like theyre all pretty good. The gaming distros seem really effective. I finally installed Omarchy, having thought "I didn't need it, I can rice my own arch", etc, and I must say the experience has been wonderful. I'm pretty comfortable at the "cutting edge" (read, with all my stuff being broken), so my own tastes in OS have moved from Arch to the systemd free Artix or OpenBSD. I don't really see the more traditional "advanced" Linuxes like Slackware or Gentoo pulling much weight. I've heard interesting things about users building declarative Nix environments and I think that's an interesting path. Personally, I hope we see some new, non-Unix operating systems that are more data and database oriented than file oriented. For now, OpenBSD feels very comfortable, it feels like I have a prayer of understanding what's on my system and that I learn things by using it, the latter of which is a feature of Arch. The emphasis on clean and concise code is really quite good, and serves as a good reminder that for all the "memory safe" features of these new languages, it's tough to beat truly great C developers for code quality. If you're going to stick with Unix, you might as well go for the best. More and more I find myself wanting to integrate "personal computing" into my workflow, whether that's apps made for me and me alone, Emacs lisp, custom vim plugins, or homelab stuff. I look with envy at the smalltalks of the world, like Marvelous Toolkit, the Forths, or the Clojure based Easel. I really crave fluency - the ability for code to just pour out - none of the hesitation or system knowledge gaps which come from Stack Overflow or LLM use. I want mastery. I've also become much more tactical on which code I want to maintain. I really have tried to curb "not invented here" syndrome because eventually you realize you aren't going to be able to maintain it all. Really I just want a fun programming environment where I can read Don Knuth and make wireframe graphics demos!
• trinsic2 10mo ago
  Windows is so bad that I think there end game is that they are trying to push everyone to cloud apps. At that point it doesn't matter what OS you use.
• trinsic2 10mo ago
  Im really glad Linux is getting more attention now. Thanks Microsoft.
• Animats 10mo ago
  If only. Ubuntu seems to be slowly getting worse. - Firefox seems to be able to freeze both itself and, sometimes, the whole system. Usually while typing text into a large text box. - Recently, printing didn't work for two days. Some pushed update installed a version of the CUPS daemon which reported a syntax error on the cupsd.conf file. A few days later, the problem went away, after much discussion on forums about workarounds. - Can't use more than half of memory before the OOM killer kicks in. The default rule of the OOM killer daemon is that if a process has more than half of memory for a minute, kill it. Rust builds get killed. Firefox gets killed. This is a huge pain on the 8GB machine. Yes, I could edit some config file and stop this, but that tends to interfere with config file updates from Ubuntu and from the GUI tools. None of these problems existed a year ago.
  • semilin 10mo ago
    These seem annoying, but I'd argue that these problems are in some ways less significant on Linux than on Windows. If some function of Windows is broken or unsatisfactory, there is not necessarily a way to fix it. But you can adjust your own system. It'd be unhelpful of me to suggest to an unhappy Windows user that they should switch to another operating system, as that demands a drastic change of environment. On the other hand, you're already familiar with Linux, so the switching cost to a different Linux distribution is significantly lower. Thus I can fairly say that "Ubuntu getting worse" is less of a problem than "Windows getting worse." You have many convenient options. A Windows user has fewer.
    • Animats 10mo ago
      > But you can adjust your own system. User desktops should not require a sysadmin. It has to Just Work unless you're doing something exotic.
  • braiamp 10mo ago
    What are you talking about? Firefox hasn't been single process since more than 10 years ago. At most, it uses 7% for the main process and I have thousands of tabs open. I can't talk about the other two, but I've had processes use 60% of the system memory without problem (everything else is slow due swapping, but that's expected).
• Joel_Mckay 10mo ago
  Unless one has a rack of older GPU hardware that uses an abandoned EOL NVIDIA kernel driver difficult to install past kernel 6.12.x Then one faces the harsh reality of Windows users rightfully laughing at a perpetually Beta Linux OS, as Win11 still boots with the older drivers. while the dkms build randomly implodes at some point. People dual boot SSD OS for very good reasons, as kernel permutation is not necessarily progress in FOSS. Linux is usable by regular users these days, but "Good" is relative to your use case. YMMV =3
• 1970-01-01 10mo ago
  >3.2% of overall Steam users. The success measurements are quite strange. How am I supposed to think Linux is finally good when 96.8% of users do not care to adopt it. I can't think of anything else with that high of a rejection rate. The vast majority do not consider it good enough to use over Windows.
  • oreally 10mo ago
    From what I've heard most of that 3% is steam decks, so the growth isn't exactly people switching their daily OS driver.
    • snvzz 10mo ago
      The phoronix story re: steam stats has actual data on that. It's just a fifth.
• mantra2 10mo ago
  Adobe keeps me on macOS, otherwise I’d love to use something like Ubuntu as a daily driver.
• fb03 10mo ago
  The only thing that still makes me maintain a Windows installation is playing League of Legends. Everything else (I mean, real work) is done on Linux
• adamddev1 10mo ago
  All I want for Christmas is a M4 MacBook Air with Linux that works with perfectly with all the hardware.
• dmix 10mo ago
  Windows is just that bad.
• grajmanu 10mo ago
  I am using Linux in different flavours for the past 10 years. It has become more reliable for the the time. The last 5 years had noticeable few issues across the distros.
• mrheosuper 10mo ago
  I have been switching between linux-windows for a while now, and i think 2026 is not the year of linux for now. Linux still suffer from the same fragmentation issue: Oh you want to play game, you should use distro X, oh you want an average web-browsing, working, you should use distro Y, or for programming, use Z. Of course all of them can do what other can do, but the community decided that the way it is. Yesterday i read a reddit thread about an user sharing his issue with pop-os, and most(if not all) comments saying he is using the wrong distro. He is using latest release (not the nightly build), which is a reasonably thing to do as new user. Not sure if Linux Mint has changed this, but i remember having to add "non-free" repo to use official Nvidia driver. Not a big deal to people who know what they are doing, but still, that is unnecessary firction.
  • vpShane 10mo ago
    I just got a laptop for Christmas (first thing I've bought for myself in a good while) with 64GB of DDR5 RAM, a video card inside of it, AMD Ryzen 7 CPU, AMD Radeon 6550M. 144hz screen. Not the best, but works for me. I put CachyOS on it, using Steam just run the game's installer adding it as a game to your library -- you just select which proton you want (cachyos-proton) as a dropdown in the Properties in the Steam library. that's it. it's lightweight, arch (I ditched manjaro), runs KDE and games perfectly, cursor IDE runs great, VMS run great. first thing I did when I got it from fedex was remove Windows and put Linux on it. I thought 'maybe I'll just bite the bullet and sign up a Microsoft cloud account to be able to access ..my desktop' and 1/4 through its install I held the power button and popped a flash drive in. just say no to windows and you'll all be happy, trust me. the only effort it required was for me to say f this on using Lutris and just use Steam as the wrapper. 2026 is definitely the year for linux. every year is. valve heavily invested in Arch, proton, and is using Linux on their devices and honestly: Windows is spyware, and after their vibe coded jank 25H2 update that broke a ton of things and Windows 10 being EOL, I hope more people get to enjoy throwing Ventoy on a USB stick with a bunch of linux isos copied over to it and boot and play with what they love. so I disagree, 2026 is the year for Linux, and Linux is love.
    • applied_heat 10mo ago
• scottmcdot 10mo ago
  With LLMs it's now much easier to navigate Linux and bash. Definitely happy with Linux Mint as a Windows alternative.
• weinzierl 10mo ago
  Long time Linux on the desktop user here. I don't feel Linux has become significantly better recently. It's more that Windows reached a new low that is just below the threshold for many. Also, Apple, what are you doing?
  • tracker1 10mo ago
    I'd say it's both... In particular 6.16 seems to be a defining point in terms of stability and performance at least for me. My RX 9070XT is finally running with no issues since 6.16 that I've noticed in any of the admittedly few games I play. Mesa, the kernel drivers and Proton have all seen a lot of growth this past year combined with a bunch of garbage decisions MS has doubled down on... not to mention, enough Linux users in tech combined with Valve/Steam's efforts have made it visible enough that even normies are considering giving Linux a try.
  • starky 10mo ago
    A large part of it is that for most people, the vast majority of their computer use is in a web browser. Even "standalone" programs are often just an Electron app so they don't even have to use their computer differently than they are used to. Yes Windows has gotten bad, and Linux no longer has some of the major issues people would frequently run into (e.g. hardware compability is largely a non-issue, audio just works, etc.), but I think it is mostly that things are just way more platform agnostic today.
• dismalaf 10mo ago
  Linux has been good for years. The only thing that's changed is that Valve put a bunch of effort into Proton so now Linux has enough game titles for that to no longer be an excuse to not switch. I've been using Linux full-time (no other OSes at all) for nearly 20 years. Went through all my university education using only Linux. It's problem free if you use it like a grandma would (don't mess with the base system) and even if you mess with it, most things are easily reversible. That being said, I have noticed that the newfound interest in Linux seems to be a result of big tech being SO abusive towards its customers that even normies are suddenly into computing "freedom".
• SilentM68 10mo ago
  Linux is the best. Been using it since Slackware, RedHat first came out, now use Ubuntu or any distro which makes it easy to interact with its Desktop, e.g. GNOME :)
• kqr 10mo ago
  One thing I'm curious about: how is the laptop dual-GPU situation these days? I opted to install Linux in a VM under Hyper-V on Windows to avoid hassles with the dual GPUs in my ThinkPad P52, but this comes with several other hassles I'd like to avoid. (Like no GPU access in Linux at all...)
  • TiredOfLife 10mo ago
    It's not like Windows comes with built in support for running linux with gpu support. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/tutorials/gui-apps https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/tutorials/gui-...
• kderbe 10mo ago
  Steve Burke from GamersNexus tested eight games from their benchmark suite on Linux last month. Although his conclusion was generally positive, there were problems with nearly every game: - F1 2024 didn't load due to anti-cheat - Dragon's Dogma 2 and Resident Evil 4 had non-functional raytracing - Cyberpunk 2077 with raytracing on consistently crashes when reloading a save game - Dying Light 2 occasionally freezes for a whole minute - Starfield takes 25 minutes to compile shaders on first run, and framerates for Nvidia are halved compared to Windows - Black Myth: Wukong judders badly on Nvidia cards - Baldur's Gate 3 Linux build is a slideshow on Nvidia cards, and the Windows build fails for some AMD cards If you research these games in discussion forums, you can find some configuration tweaks which might fix the issues. ProtonDB's rating is not a perfect indicator (BM:W is rated "platinum"). And while Steve says measurements from Linux and Windows are not directly comparable, I did so anyway and saw that Linux suffers a 10-30% drop in average FPS across the board when compared to Windows, depending on the game and video card.
  • utopiah 10mo ago
    > Baldur's Gate 3 Linux build is a slideshow on Nvidia cards Not at all my experience which makes me question the rest. Also https://www.protondb.com/app/1086940 https://www.protondb.com/app/1086940 most people seem quite happy with it so it's not a "me" problem. Finally the "10-30% drop in average FPS across the board" might be correct, then so what? I understand a LOT of gamers want to have "the best" performance for what they paid good money for but pretty much NO game becomes less fun with even a 30% FPS drop, you just adjust the settings and go play. I think a lot of gamers do get confused and consider maximizing performances itself as a game. It might be fun, and that's 100% OK, but it's also NOT what playing an actual game is about.
    • ThatPlayer 10mo ago
      Those are mostly reports for the Windows build of Baldur's Gate 3, running through Proton/Wine. He's talking about the newer Linux native build of the game from 3 months ago. There's a few reports there for the native version of the game: https://www.protondb.com/app/1086940#9GT638Fuyx https://www.protondb.com/app/1086940#9GT638Fuyx , with similar Nvidia GPU issues and a fix.
• aquir 10mo ago
  Once a company releases a MacBook quality Linux laptop, I’m in!
• WhereIsTheTruth 10mo ago
  "Bazzite" You know this is a psyop when they can't resist mentioning Microsoft's product
  • hollerith 10mo ago
    Microsoft was and is not involved in the creation or maintenance of Bazzite.
• gigatexal 10mo ago
  Still can’t play big titles with anti cheat like call of duty. Only reason I’m stuck on windows on the gaming PC is I’m somewhat addicted to BO7 zombies.
• utopiah 10mo ago
  Been working and playing on Linux for years, from 2D indie e.g. Baba is You to AAA e.g. Elden Ring, BG3, Expedition 33 to AAA VR e.g. Half-life: Alyx to VR indie e.g. Cubism and my experience has just been great. It's MY system and I do whatever the heck I want, from play boring stuff to weird prototyping. I get no, like literally 0, anti-feature. I'm not "scared" that an update will limit my agency. I'm just zen and that is priceless. Also, quite importantly, it works wonderfully with all my other devices and peripherals. I go from Bluetooh headsets easily, I switch monitors, video projectors, XR devices, CV camera inputs, I share files with KDE Connect, I receive SMS notification from my (deGoogled) Android phone, I reply from my desktop, I get notification when my SteamDeck is soon out of battery, etc. ALL my devices play nicely with each other. So yes, Linux is good now. It's been for a while but it's been even better for the last few years.
• internet_points 10mo ago
  now if only Thinkpads were good again :-/
• freakynit 10mo ago
  Insights from discussion threads (updated just now): https://hn-discussions.top/linux-desktop-2026/ https://hn-discussions.top/linux-desktop-2026/
• gste 10mo ago
  Now that Microsoft are removing support for Windows 10, which is still running on many not-that-old devices that don't support Windows 11, I think the correct, mainstream advice HAS to be to install Linux on those machines. Those are still perfectly usable machines that can be used for productivity or enjoy a massive catalog of games. We've reached a point where Microsoft greed and carelessness is degrading Windows from all angles. With the constant forced Copilot, forced sign-ups, annoying pop-ups and ads, it is figuratively unusable; in the case of machines stuck on Windows 10 it is literally unusable. They are now banking entirely on a captive market of Enterprise customers who have invested too much to quit. The enshittification is feature complete.
• theodric 10mo ago
  The second Eternal September has truly kicked off
• lunar_rover 10mo ago
  For single player gaming, probably. Actual desktops still suffer from significant technical and design issues. Wayland spent a decade to be mostly usable with rough edges, Flatpak sandbox is really rough and most things are designed by amateurs. Still Windows destroying itself made the gap closer than ever, right now is a great chance to gain market share and funding and professionals.
• 0xbadcafebee 10mo ago
  Linux can't be a good desktop, almost by definition. 1. Look at commercial desktop OSes (Windows, MacOS). They spend hundreds of millions to develop and maintain the OS, do updates, quality assurance testing, working with hundreds of thousands of hardware vendors and enterprises, etc, just to try to not break things constantly. This is with "an ecosystem" that is one stack developed by one company. And even they can't get it right. Several Linux-Desktop companies have tried to mimic the commercial companies by not only custom-tailoring their own stack and doing QA, but sometimes even partnering on certified hardware. They're spending serious cash to try to do it right. But still there's plenty of bugs (go look at their issue trackers, community forums, package updates, etc) and no significant benefit over the competition. 2. There is no incentive for Linux to have consistency, quality, or a good UX. The incentive is to create free software that a developer wants. The entire ethos of the OSS community is, and has always been, I want the software, I make the software, you're welcome to use it too. And that's fine, for developers! But that's not how you make something regular people can use reliably and enjoyably. It's a hodge-podge of different solutions glued together. Which works up to a point, but then... 3. Eventually Linux desktop reaches a point where it doesn't work. The new mouse you bought's extra buttons don't work. Or the expensive webcam you bought can't be controlled because it requires a custom app only shipped on Windows/Mac. Or your graphics card's vendor uses proprietary firmware blobs causing bugs on only Linux for unknown reasons. Or your speakers sound like crap because they need a custom firmware blob loaded by the commercial OSes. Or your touchscreen can't be enabled/disabled because Wayland doesn't support the X extensions that used to allow that to work with xrandr. Or your need to look up obscure bootloader flags, edit the bootloader, and restart, to enable/disable some obscure fix for your hardware (lcd low power settings, acpi, disk controller, or any of a thousand other issues). Or, quite simply, the software you try to install just doesn't work; random errors are popping up, things are not working, and you don't know why. In any of these cases, your only hope is... to go on Reddit and ask for help from strangers. There's no customer support line. Your ISP ain't gonna help you. The Geek Squad just shrugs. You are on your own. And this is the most frustrating part... the extremely nerdy core fan-group, like those on HN or Reddit, who are lucky enough not to be experiencing the problems unique to Linux, gaslight you and tell you all your problems are imagined or your fault.
  • 10mo ago
• globular-toast 10mo ago
  I probably sound like a hipster or something, but it really feels like many people are finally catching up to the way I've been working for the past 15 years. I fully switched to GNU/Linux back then and have never looked back. Initially I was quite evangelical but got tired of it and gave up probably around 10 years ago thinking "oh well, their loss". But slowly more and more of the world has switched over, first servers, then developer workstations and now finally just "normal" users. Similarly, I've always been hugely invested into my tools and have a strong distaste for manual labour. I often watch how others work and can't believe how slow and inefficient it is. Typing up repetitive syntax every time, copy/pasting huge blocks of code, performing repetitive actions when booting their PC etc. I simply haven't been doing this for my whole career, I've been writing scripts, using clever editors, using programming languages to their fullest etc. I think this is why LLMs don't seem like such the huge breakthrough to me as they do to others. I wasn't doing this stuff manually before, that's ridiculous. I don't need to generate globs of code because I already know how to get the computer to do it for me, and I know how to do that in a sustainable and maintainable way too. It's sad that LLMs are giving people their first real sense of control, when it's actually been available for a very long by now, and in a way that you can actually own it, rather than paying for a service that might be taken away at any moment.
• stinkbeetle 10mo ago
  Linux _is_ good now. It was good before but it's good now too.
• geoffbp 10mo ago
  It’s year of the Linux desktop!
• mixxit 10mo ago
  Deluding ourselves here it's nice to think the day has finally arrived but it hasn't We need to address the problems rather than pretending it's already great Shutting down your laptop and having to wait five minutes for systemd to shutdown because of some timeout when you need to get your flight is just one of those reasons you end up going back to windows
  • A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 10mo ago
    << Deluding ourselves here it's nice to think the day has finally arrived but it hasn't Apart from systemd, tell me what isn't great. The whole benefit of the ecosystem is that you can pick and choose your system components and if you don't like any of then, build your own. I am not trying to be dismissive, if I use a windows these days, it is for work and some errant vm to run windows specific app ( hr block comes to mind -- I am just not willing to spend time to run it any other way ).
    • eldaisfish 10mo ago
      i don't want to pick and choose or build my own. I want something that works.
      • A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 10mo ago
        Then, you might not be the right audience for that OS. And that is ok.
  • episode404 10mo ago
    It seems HN has decided to bury their heads in the sand and pretend it’s already great.
    • bigyabai 10mo ago
      I think you have decided to bury your head in the sand, if you think systemd is a dealbreaker for desktop use. Truth is, Linux has been fine for many people for a while now. I've used it for six years without needing to install Windows for anything. Steam Deck owners are putting in millions of hours playing the hot new Windows releases, do you think they are complaining about systemd on Reddit?
• sylware 10mo ago
  Well, until it is a native elf/linux game, because the shabby compatibility, not reliable in time, zero official technical support (which is legally required for paid games), proton(wine), ewwwww... The only sane ways: either a 'correct' set of native elf/linux binaries, or proton = 0 bucks (namely only free-to-play, with 0 cent in any micro-transactions).
• devinprater 10mo ago
  Linux is even getting more accessible. I'm thinking of Elementary OS which not only posted about their accessibility work, but linked to the articles which really fired things up. I'm a Fedora guy, mainly because I want the latest Orca, AT-SPI2 and such, so I don't feel like an Ubuntu dirivitive would work as well. So I installed Fedora on my work machine and find that I can still get all of my work done. Well except the parts that require testing accessibility on Windows screen readers or helping with Windows-related issues. The only thing I miss now are the many addons made for NVDA, especially the ones for image descriptions. But if I can get something to work with Wayland, I could probably vibe code some of them. Thank goodness for Claude Code.
• notorandit 10mo ago
  Let me put gaming aside for a minute. Linux is not good. Some hardware support is still reverse-engineering-based, or based on a few individuals best effort activity. Linux needs manufacturers' first hand commitment to quality opensource to be truly good. Linux is not good. Some software is not on feature-parity among operating systems. With Linux being the software kingdom poor Cinderella. Linux needs software feature parity to be truly good. Linux is not good. Because too much mainstream new PCs comes with some other operating system pre-installed (and paid for) even if you won't need it. Linux needs freedom of choice sing first PC power on, like a stub to download whatever OS you want (to pay for) or to boot from removable media for Linux to become truly good. Linux is not good. Because there is still "stuff" that require some specific non-linux software running under some specific non-linux operating system to be made useful things. We need manufacturers to ditch this for linux to become truly good. I am a happy user of Linux on my primary PC since 20+ years now. But I still have to fight for my freedom every now and again because of one or more of the above points. Now let's jump back to gaming. Linux is not good because game industry thinks proprietary platforms and operating systems are better for their business. There is only 1 platform fully supporting Linux and too few titles. Gaming Linux hardly hits 5% of the market share, basically the same as Desktop Linux. While Server Linux is beyond 75%. I think reasons could be two-fold. On one hand, Linux is not perceived by industry as attractive as other proprietary platforms. Maybe industry can squeeze much more money from the latter. On the other hand, it could be that most of the development resources are NOT ORIENTED towards gaming and desktop, so these markets simply lag behind. Of course, I could be totally wrong: these are my humble opinions with some facts backing them. Live Long, Linux!
  • heresie-dabord 10mo ago
    > I am a happy user of Linux on my primary PC since 20+ years now. But I still have to fight for my freedom every now and again And this is a problem with Linux ?
    • notorandit 10mo ago
      Yes it is. Linux is one of my main means to fight or my freedom. Anytime I need to cope with those things, I feel less free.
• Alconicon 10mo ago
  Gaming should be a no brainer. Windows dual boot and license is cheap enough. Windows for gaming, Ubuntu as desktop default, Arch Linux on Laptop, MacOS on the other Laptop. Games are not the problem, but that one game i want to play on a saturday evening when i have time, is the problem. That one i haven't tried out yet.
• phkahler 10mo ago
  Couple of nit picks with all these articles about trying Linux. They should explain words like "distro" before throwing them around. This one also uses "Debian" without explanation. If the audience really is Windows users these are going to be rather cryptic.
• dizlexic 10mo ago
  It’s been good for quite awhile now.
• vertnerd 10mo ago
  I'm solo developing a spaceflight simulator on Linux (using the Godot engine), exporting binaries in both Linux and Windows. It turns out that I really didn't need to bother with the Linux export anyway because Steam runs the Windows version on Linux without any problems. The ONLY thing I'm still having trouble with under Linux is Steam VR on the HTC Vive. It works. Barely.
  • dueyfinster 10mo ago
    Interesting, do you think game devs in future will just target windows/proton and not bother with native Linux ports?
    • greyw 10mo ago
      Ironically, win32 is the only stable API and ABI on gnu/linux
    • vertnerd 10mo ago
      Yes, most likely. Steam is dominant, and it's not hard to make a Windows release that works under Proton. Though in my case, I currently offer demo/beta releases for both Windows and Linux directly from Github. If I ultimately elect to release my game under a GPL license, then supporting both Linux and Windows directly would make sense.
• chaostheory 10mo ago
  It’s good on desktops. Laptops are another story
• fluffet 10mo ago
  I've been using Linux on all PC's for a long time. Experience is slowly getting better. There is nothing I haven't been able to get to work, but with tricks or adjustments. I think the "best bonus" is using LLM's in deep research mode to wade through all the blog post, reddit posts etc to get something to work by discovering forementioned tricks. Before, you had to do that by yourself and it sucked. Now I get 3 good ideas from Claude in "ranking order" of how likely it is to make it work => 99% of games I get to run in 5 minutes with a shell command or two. Lutris is also pretty good. Omarchy on my laptop has finally made computers fun for me again, it's so great and nostalgic. Happy to be back after my brief work-mandated adventure into MacOS.
• ath3nd 10mo ago
  [dead]
• shevy-java 10mo ago
  I have been using Linux since almost 23 years now. I don't praise it as flawless in any way, but compared to Microsoft it is a much more efficient operating system. Top 500 supercomputers also running Linux kind of hint that Linux is very good. Despite this, Linux as ecosystem has numerous problems. The "wayland is the future" annoys me a lot. The wayland protocol was released in 2008. Now it is almost 20 years. I don't feel wayland is ever going to win a "linux desktop of the year" award. Things that work on xorg-server still do not work on wayland - and probably never will. I am not saying wayland is useless, I ran it for a while on KDE (though I actually don't use KDE, I use icewm typically), but it is just annoying how important things like GUI on Linux simply suck. In many ways Linux is kind of a server computer system, not really a desktop computer system. I use it as one, but the design philosophy is much more catering to the server or compute-work station objective. Also, GTK ... this thing keeps on getting worse and worse with every new release. I have no idea what they are doing, but I have an old GTK2-based editor and this one consistently works better than the GTK3 or GTK4 ported version. It was a huge mistake to downgrade and nerf GTK to a gnomey-toolkit only. Don't even get me started on GNOME ...
• rvz 10mo ago
  Just use macOS or Windows.
• BitsAndObjects 10mo ago
  Irony: https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/pc-gaming/windows-11-surges-among-pc-gamers-on-steam-as-linux-stalls https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/pc-gaming/windows-11-s...
• SirMaster 10mo ago
  For me like for many others anti-cheat support is what is still keeping me away. The vast majority of the games I play are incompatible because of this. I think it will probably change at some point, but until then I just can't use it.
• f4stjack 10mo ago
  This may be an unpopular opinion but I feel Bazzite (and immutable distros in general) is the future for the normal users. Yes I know, they take the freedom of messing with the system core but for most people this is fine. All they need is a device that works without any problems. First time I switched to asus kernel from the generic one was magic - I know asus-linux exists and following the instructions probably would have ended up in a working system, but with bazzite I wrote only one command and everything worked. It still feels weird not to monkey around with package installations (and this was a dangerous path, usually ended up with more work for me) but this is a tradeoff I can live with. The software I used - luckily - already moved to Flatpak so everything was a breeze. Also the fact that I can switch to a working state with one keypress is a stress reliever. I agree. Linux is good now - for the common user. I still can't see immutable distros can be used for all scenarios but for gaming/home use, this is a methodology I can easily recommend for my friends and family who only want a computer that works without messing with console.
• sotix 10mo ago
  My company had an onsite where presenters were plugging their computers into a projector via HDMI. I watched seven individuals go up with their MacBook Pros, plug the cable in, then get confused why nothing was showing on the screen. Seven times in a row, someone had to run onto the stage and accept the permissions dialog on the Mac allowing the user to share their screen via HDMI. When the eighth presenter took the stage, he plugged the HDMI cable into his laptop running Linux, and the screen immediately output an image. Linux just works. I switched full time to Linux in 2022 when Elden Ring launched and had better performance in its first week on Linux than on Windows. I personally switched over to KDE Plasma powered by Arch. The first thing I noticed was how perfectly it was immediately. So I'd push the title of the article on step further: Linux has been good for a while. In the four years since switching over from a dual Windows (for gaming) and Mac (for programming, web browsing, and everything else), I have almost entirely had a better experience in every single area. I still use macOS daily for work, and it is constantly driving me mad. For every task I have thrown at it (from gaming to programming to game dev to photo editing), Linux just works. On Mac it's more like, "there's an app for that". I have third party package managers on Mac. I use a third party app to display if my internet connection is using Ethernet. It yells at me to delete the CSV file that I created and requires an instruction manual with instructions for the Settings app that have changed three times in three years for how to open the file, add Bluetooth to the menu bar, etc. It even had a permanent red icon on the Settings about not being signed into an Apple ID. And once I signed in, the Settings app has a permanent red icon about paying for Apple Care. My parents have made comments about how they're worried as they get older that they won't be able to keep up with the constant updates and changes to macOS and iOS. I don't have much to say about Windows besides good riddance. It was far less confusing to use than macOS but was filled with too much bloat and pop up notifications. The final thing I'll mention is that the first time my girlfriend used my computer, she sat down, opened the browser, and completed her task. She thought that she was using Windows and was able to navigate the new interface without having to spend any time learning anything. For her regular use case of using the PC for an internet browser, Linux just worked. She even asked me afterwards to install it on her laptop to replace Windows! I can't believe we're in a world where that's asked by someone non-technical who just wants a computer to get out of their way so that they can perform their tasks.
• tsss 10mo ago
  No, it really isn't. I use Ubuntu daily and not a month passes without a serious issue that no normal user would be able to solve. Last week my desktop completely froze again (as it often does) and Linux broke a mounted NTFS partition when I shut off the power.
  • episode404 10mo ago
    Thank you for being honest. This is exactly my experience as well.
• itomato 10mo ago
  When do we ever say Nintendo is good now because it plays Sony titles? Why are you holding computing to the same standard? I'm curious as a non-gamer. The article seems to be entirely about Windows gaming.
  • justonceokay 10mo ago
    This is not an argument in good faith. Nintendo is a company that primarily makes hardware to sell its own games. The Wii is not a general computing device and we never expected it to do that. Linux claims to be a general computing operating system, but had historically not prioritized gaming (or UI…). This has changed and the article notes as much. Windows OS is used for a benchmark because it is still the gold standard, and the OS that most games are intended to be executed with.
  • kgwxd 10mo ago
    > When do we ever say Nintendo is good now because it plays Sony titles? If it did, we would. > Why are you holding computing to the same standard? What? > The article seems to be entirely about Windows gaming. It is. It'd be weird if it wasn't.
  • bigyabai 10mo ago
    > as a non-gamer. As a non-gamer, you might not fully grasp how entrenched Windows is for game development, distribution, content creation and modding. This is significant and reporting on it is good stuff, even if it's outside of your niche.
• stormed 10mo ago
  Minus work, I've exclusively been using Arch Linux, Ubuntu Server & macOS on my machines and haven't looked back for the last couple years. The biggest annoyance I have is the lack of (modern) Adobe applications on Linux. I'll be real though, I mostly just like Photoshop out of familiarity, I could probably get used to the alternatives but I'm lazy. Photoshop CS6 I hear works fine in WINE which is good enough for me since my workflow hasn't changed much since CS5. Oh, and also anti-cheat games forcing me to use Windows. Makes me sick to my stomach booting into Windows 11 every couple of months and having to watch my PC performance tank while it's downloading updates, Windows Defender scans, etc. for 30 minutes
  • ryannevius 10mo ago
    Unless you're a power user, you should check out Photopea[1]. It runs well as a PWA. [1] https://www.photopea.com/ https://www.photopea.com/
• beeboop0 10mo ago
  Windows is not only getting shittified, it's rotting from within. I guess in the last decade, the managers have sacrificed production capacity for production. Getting those quarterly profits up while failing to maintain the machine behind it (the people, the code) People are gonna be forced to leave it more and more unless they make a drastic turn about
• fleroviumna 10mo ago
  [dead]
• InfiniteQwert 10mo ago
  I want to switch to Linux for gaming. But I’m also stressed about leaving Lightroom for Darktable, which seems like it is much more complicated and with a worse UI (even if people say it’s more powerful under the hood)
• TulliusCicero 10mo ago
  The thing that gets me about Windows is: when's the last time Microsoft added a major new feature to Windows I actually gave a shit about? A feature that actually felt useful to me as a consumer? Windows 7 was nice, but since then, I struggle to think of anything. Since 7, it feels like it's just been upsell after upsell, features that are about Microsoft selling me on something or annoying the crap out of me rather than providing actual utility.
  • neogodless 10mo ago
    For me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux Note that it's coming up on 10 years. I think I am hard-pressed to think of a more recent example...
    • anonymousab 10mo ago
      They deprecated the more interesting version of WSL after a short while, unfortunately. WSL2 ended up just being a bog-standard VM setup.
  • noisem4ker 10mo ago
    WSL. Android app support (for the little while it lasted). Recall.
• ggregoire 10mo ago
  Still running windows 10 here, since my hardware isn't compatible with windows 11. I wouldn't mind replacing it with Linux. What Linux distros are recommended for gaming? All my games are on Steam. Dual monitor setup with game on main screen and browser on the second one.
  • mixmastamyk 10mo ago
    Article mentioned Bazzite. For normal computing Mint or Fedora.
    • FireInsight 10mo ago
      Bazzite works really well for general computing too, if you don't assume that it works the same way as normal distros. Learn how to use https://distrobox.it/ https://distrobox.it/, https://mise.jdx.dev/ https://mise.jdx.dev/, and Flatpaks to get started with installing shell and GUI software without access to system-level `dnf` or `apt`.
• Kye 10mo ago
  Hopefully all this news Linux is getting for games translates to pressure on makers of all the tools that don't run reliably/at all in Wine and co. to start working on ports. Or at least on making changes to make API translation work better. I can't move until the software I've invested in moves too. There are no Linux alternatives.
  • mixmastamyk 10mo ago
    VMs, second machine with firewall etc. I recommend moving everything you can to trustworthy tech. Doesn’t have to be all at once but a gradual process.
    • Kye 10mo ago
      I'm familiar with the standard suite of proposed solutions, but maybe this will help someone who can use it. Thanks for sharing.
• lmc 10mo ago
  "the real problem is a feeling that my computer isn't mine, that I am somehow renting this thing I put together with my own two hands from an AI corporation in Redmond." I've installed Windows on all the PCs I've built for home and work over the last 20 years or so, until my latest in October. It was the ads in the lock screen that pushed me over the edge. Why should I pay for a license for that? Double-dipping fools. Am happily running Bazzite now.
• jimsimmons 10mo ago
  just bricked my display out after a nvidia driver upgrade attempt. the swapped ctrl and alt (to mimic mac) setting has been reversed. horrendus ux
• Gareth321 10mo ago
  I’m really glad Linux has improved so much but it’s still just not ready for prime time. A major issue is the lack of an enforced installation method. Competing distributions and installation methods means supporting Linux isn’t “supporting Linux.” It’s supporting 24 different distros and install methods. This is confusing for people who just want to download a file and double click it. I feel quite strongly that Linux won’t enter the mainstream consumer space until people can reliable double click files to install. Further, because of Linux’s security model, kernel level anti-cheats are basically impossible. For those of us who hate cheating, I don’t play online games anymore without kernel level anti-cheats. They’re not perfect, but they’re much better than anything available on Linux. Further, I use a Fanatec racing wheel. Most peripherals just aren’t supported on Linux. It’s chicken and egg, and hardware manufacturers aren’t going to bother until we teach critical mass. This is decades away still.
• tsoukase 10mo ago
  I don't play games, so you can imagine the enjoyment of having Linux since 2005 and the same installation of Arch Linux since a decade(?). Free, stable, light, secure, private etc. The hardest troubleshoot is a few commands in bash (eg media PC, phone hacking, server stuff)
• anacrolix 10mo ago
  I'm not even going to read the article and just respond to the headline. Linux is not good now. Windows and macOS are worse than they've ever been.
• archon810 10mo ago
  The screenshot in the article https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/MxF6RyJFq3wPtTeAEQAcHS-1024-80.png.webp https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/MxF6RyJFq3wPtTeAEQAcHS-102... confirms to an average reader that Linux desktop still looks really unpleasant and dated. Is there really no better screenshot they could have used?