I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too
(notebookcheck.net)730 points by smurda 14 hours ago
730 points by smurda 14 hours ago
I don't think anyone will build as nice hardware as Apple anytime soon, so I think if that's your primary requirement then any other choice will be a compromise. I don't really like Apple, but it must must acknowledged that even a few basic things (the monitor turning on immediately as I open the screen, the touchpad quality, etc.) seem totally elusive to other manufacturers.
Apple's pretty imperfect, and it's sad to see that they've neglected and regressed their desktop OS, however I don't think anyone can argue that macOS is anywhere near as bad as Windows 11.
Apple's only just started getting good hardware. For so long their hardware was so below standard and in a lot of areas it still is. Apple users will sit there with a straight face telling me about how much they care about a good cpu when I know they paid 3k for a low tier intel cpu and 8gb of ram not to long ago.
Also when they talk about how their laptop can handle all this stuff without fans spinning up its only because the laptops come with next to no cooling and spend most of the time thermal throttling.
While not strictly required, for me macOS has been less cantankerous for running Android Studio on compared to Windows/Linux too.
Don't they offer downloads of Xcode outside of the App Store if you pay their developer program fee? That includes their SDKs. Theoretically there is only an expenditure of time and effort to build an iOS app on Linux. I forget if it is against their terms or not, but I don't think the SDK available is a barrier.
To each his own. I liked may company issued ThinkPad so much I ended up buying one myself and I have been pushing back getting a replacement (HP Elitebook).
Some of your points are common, such as the touchpad being garbage, or that it runs hotter than an Apple Silicon MacBook Air. But most people consider ThinkPad keyboards to be way better than Apple's and while most (not all) ThinkPads have a plastic shell, they certainly don't feel cheap. Apple displays are typically really good, but ThinkPads have a lot of options, so it is hard to tell.
Your comment, especially regarding the keyboard makes me think you just love your MacBook. Why buy anything else?
Linux support is not great, but a lot of a significant part of what makes Apple great is in their hardware/software integration and they are not doing it open source. It means a MacBook without OSX is a lesser MacBook, but at least, it is not Windows 11.
ThinkPads run the gamut. Their flagship line is nice. In most regards, I enjoy my first gen X1 Nano — good keyboard, screen (even if it annoyingly requires fractional UI scaling), body feels solid despite being lightweight, soft touch plastic makes it feel nice to hold. Trackpad is just ok but the trackpoint makes for that.
It likes to spin up its fan doing the most insignificant things though (even plugging in a pedestrian 1x scaling external monitor can while idle can do it) and its battery life is somewhat abysmal. Standby time is also quite poor.
Some of these things are in theory improved by a newer CPU (Lunar Lake in particular looks decent) but sadly they discontinued the Nano. The Carbon isn’t that much bigger, but the size difference is noticeable in some circumstances.
It dual boots Windows 11 and Fedora, and I’ve played with other distros in the past. They have minor edges over each other in various ways but none offer a major concrete advantage over the others in any category (except harassment/junkware, which any distro has a major upper hand over Windows 11 in, but Windows 10 accomplishes that almost as well).
Either there’s simply a hard limit on how good this hardware can be in terms of thermals and battery life or neither Lenovo’s tuning of Windows nor any Linux distro has gone far enough in properly leveraging power management and the like.
So the weird answer is... a better model Lenovo. They vary from plastic disaster to metal or carbon fiber dream machine.
Nothing is quite as slick as Apple, but companies are popping up doing pretty sleek Linux-first laptops, I have a Starlabs notebook [1] and am waiting for their new Starfighter [2]...
Batter life claims are very bold. Also the starfighter launches with a 3 year old CPU .
Doesn't seem to me like a good deal especially price wise.
As well as beautiful hardware that is a pleasure to use, Apple machines can be capable of running local models like gpt-oss-20B or Qwen Coder portably and without sweating. My 24GB M4 Mini was very cheap considering the local models it can run.
> weird keyboard layout
Classic lenovo. Some models have FN as the most bottom left key, instead of ctrl. Gotta be the worst design decision ive ever seen. Everyone copy+pastes and finds, whoever thought that was a good idea really needs relieved of decision making power.
You've got history backwards. IBM Thinkpads did it that way 30+ years ago, when there was no consensus in the industry. Do you switch it now, and anger every lifetime Thinkpad loyalist, or keep it and annoy just the folks who switch back and forth between different vendors' laptops?
In a brief survey of laptop photos from the early 90s, IBM, Toshiba, Zenith, NEC, Packard Bell, Compaq, and Fujitsu all put Fn on the outside.
Epson, Apple, HP, Panasonic, and Sony put it as the second key.
A handful put it as the third key. Heck, one Toshiba machine had Ctrl left of A, Alt on the extreme lower-left starting out the bottom row, followed by Caps Lock and Fn and backslash and finally spacebar.
Only in the last 15-ish years have most of the Fn-Ctrl keyboards died out and the majority of the industry is now using Ctrl-Fn. Thinkpads are the last major holdout, but they didn't decide to buck the trend, the trend bucked them.
I really like my HP Omnibook 14 with the Ryzen AI HX 370 chip.. it's sleek, well built (so far, at least).. insane battery life.. the standby time on Linux is in weeks and the battery life when light browsing/YouTube viewing is easily 9+ hours. Even the finger print sensor finally just works. The touchpad gestures with kwin input actions are as smooth as, if not better than os x.
The only thing my work 16" MBP does better is the speakers.
edit: Updated the battery life to 9+ hours from 7+ hours based on what the battery monitor says.. I remember binge watching a couple of long movies/tv shows without ever having to plug in the laptop that day...
Nice for experimentation, but if you want a daily driver that lasts for years: Dell Latitude (now Dell Pro), HP EliteBook or Lenovo ThinkPad. Literally laptops built to last. Will last a decade with ease. Higher segments ofcourse better than lower segments, but in general very very good if you stay away from lowest tier
It’s a computer. Stop acting like a martyr. Your “suffering” is meaningless.
A computer (or a smartphone, basically whichever type of Turing complete Von Neumann machine you use) is your interface to the modern world, from interacting with your government to the stores you frequent and talking to the people you love to the media you consume.
So in that sense I think it does matter who is the ultimate arbiter of what it will and won't do, not only in an individual sense but a societal one. The more people switch to something they themselves control, the less power third parties have over their behavior.
My computer is my work environment and often an entertainment device. As such it affects my quality of life. It affects my mental health as well as my eye health.
Suffering can be real with a bad screen, an overheating laptop or difficult to use software.
My mental health definitely suffers if I'm forced to use software that enriches companies I dislike for good reason.
Mac hardware is overrated. Asus ExpertBooks, Thinkpads and Dell XPS models are all very nice, and have lasted for just as long as Macbooks do.
Maybe! But the fact that Apple also makes the operating system means the hardware/software integration can’t be beat. I’ve never used a non-Apple laptop where the trackpad worked a tenth as good as any MacBook.
> The Thinkpad I've been issued for work costs about the same, runs hot like crazy
I have a personal Thinkpad (Linux) and a company provided one (W11). The personal one basically never turns on the fan. The company one is hot all the time. Guess why.
It's such a shame that Lenovo discontinued the X1 Nano series. It's my everyday casual driver. I would buy a newer model instantly if necessary.
Snapdragon Elite X Gen 2 laptops are coming out as we speak. Assuming you're not doing GPU heavy work (or gaming), that's what you should be looking at. They are equal to M4 performance. Personally I'd look at the new Asus machines from CES.
That sounds like just what I want, that ought to have great battery life as well. Very promising, if someone were to build a nice light laptop around it...
This is also my problem. I am currently using my docked Macbook instead of my much more powerful desktop running Linux, even though I also want to use Linux more.
Why? Because as much as I want to get rid of my dependence on tech giants, Apple's products are just so damn good, and they Just Work^TM, especially with each other.
Having used Linux on/off for many years, I can say that it's definitely gotten better, but I am still waiting for the year of the Linux desktop. It doesn't have to be as polished as my Mac, but I'd like to at least not have to fight with Bluetooth especially, and things like the dongle for my headset not working and other issues like that.
I think we're always going to have that: there will always be That One Software that doesn't work on Linux, and you need to keep another OS around just to run it. I was able to get rid of Windows everywhere in my home except for one gaming PC, where I keep it around just for Fortnite, because of Epic's insistence on using their nasty kernel-level anti-cheat. So I keep that one machine around isolated from the rest of my network, for the sole purpose of playing one game.
I'm now in the process of un-Appleing my home too, and it's going pretty well, but I know I'll need to keep a single Mac somewhere in the corner of my garage in case I need to use Xcode to build an iOS app or something.
If you want something a bit more like a Macbook Pro, consider the HP Zbook G1A.
It's basically built like a Macbook in terms of case and screen quality, but it's based on an AMD Strix Halo chipset - mine is an AI Max Pro+ 395.
The chip design is somewhat similar to Apple Silicon in that it's one big chip with unified memory - you can get them with up to 128GB of unified ram - that thing is a beast for running local LLMs.
Since HP also sells them with Ubuntu preinstalled, Linux support is quite good, though it requires some bleeding edge packages for everything to be supported.
In my case, I have suspend and hibernate working perfectly, fingerprint reader, webcam, etc all work.
I mean, it's certainly not as seamless as an open x86 machine, but if you have an Air already you can always try Linux on it? The Fedora Asahi spin [1] supports pretty much everything on M1/M2 devices.
Everyone is talking about moving to Linux lately, it’s a bit of a trend. I wish they’d stop, for one simple reason: I’ve been using Linux exclusively (when I’m not forced to use macOS by work) for several years now, and I rather enjoy the lack of malware, spyware and other bullshit on the platform.
If the general public comes over this situation might end. Desktop linux isn’t a target right now because its niche, I’d prefer that didn’t stop.
Oh well. Maybe nothing lasts forever.
While I sympathize with this angle, there's another side to this coin: if more people do the switch, maybe some applications will finally get linux versions.
I'm a Sunday photographer and quite like Lightroom and Photoshop (I know about the drama, but to me, I get enough value from them compared to Darktable and the GIMP to not switch just yet). It's the only reason I still have a windows pc hanging around the house.
I am in a similar boat; my media editing machine ruined windows 10 so that I can use Lightroom. But I would dearly love to ditch windows so I'm currently looking to try out running Lightroom under Winapps to see if it is usable. There's no way of passing the GPU through without something like SR-IOV so I'll have to see how it goes.
I was thinking of doing that, but since that would require me to switch the monitor and whatnot, it would be just like using two PCs. And since I only use my desktop for LR and not much else, jumping through the hoops with emulation doesn't make much sense.
There's a lot of servers running Linux that are regularly targeted by malware.
There is a big difference in what software a desktop user runs versus what runs on a server, but the great thing about Linux is that you can keep just as much variation between your install and the average desktop user.
Your best bet for security is probably running OpenBSD, but within Linux, if you avoid common optional applications and services like Gnome, KDE, pulseaudio, systemd, etc., you'll have a significantly different attack vector. Avoiding Python and Node package managers and sticking to your distribution's package manager would be great, too.
Thanks, and that probably is a good security posture, but having to stop using everything good and switch to OpenBSD is exactly what I want to avoid!
> Closed source is made to push malware secretly.
That is factually incorrect flamebait. Closed source is made primarily due to a desire to retain control. While one can use control for malicious reasons, the predominant use is to make money.
Folks on reddit and hackernews aren't normal people. Outside of this bubble few people have heard of linux. Hell so few people I know use firefox which makes me mad. You are safe from that fear.
Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, and Mint remain great recommendations; good stability, community support, etc. (even for Ubuntu, a regular user might not actually care that much about snaps so long as everything works)
I just moved to CachyOS, (from Fedora, and earlier from Ubuntu -- I've been on Linux for a while) and I've been very, very happy. The gaming performance is legitimately better than what I was getting on Fedora, and I've just enjoyed the OS and KDE much more than Gnome Shell. I haven't had any real showstoppers with CachyOS, and it really has felt like a user-friendly version of Arch finally exists.
I'm CPU-bound on one of the games I play, and cachy's scheduler may have made a difference for me. I was also fully on the closed-source NVIDIA drivers in Fedora, and had been totally out of the loop that that the kernel driver had been open sourced. And, cachy had me on a more recent version of the driver.
None of these things are truly unique to CachyOS, but nonetheless I do think I experienced a boost when I switched.
Yup, I have Nvidia :)
Interestingly enough, I didn't have the same issue with Omarchy/Hyprland. Hyprland doesn't have even the most rudimentary ability to restore windows but it was almost rock solid when it came to coming out of sleep.
Still searching for that one true Linux distribution :) Will stay on Cachy for now because gaming is so much better.
I have been using Linux exclusively for twenty years now. I don't understand people who use anything else, to be honest.
> I don't understand people who use anything else, to be honest.
Most people don't make their coffee in an Aeropress either.
I've also used Linux exclusively (in my case 25 years), but I also realize that with a few niche exceptions, there are few mass marketed products that feature the traditional Linux desktop as their primary UI.
Desktop OS UI is hard. It takes investment in technology, product, and marketing all focused on a target market. Even with all of those most upstarts have failed to gain traction. Also consider that most people buy laptops for 2 reasons: 1) browsing the web and if they can afford it 2) as a fashion accessory. People will put up with a lot of BS from a product if they feel like the product gives them social status and acceptance.
No Linux laptop really hits (2). Arguably only a few Windows laptops do either.
> Most people don't make their coffee in an Aeropress either.
Stupid analogy, the Linux version of that would be whatever french press you want to use. Buy your coffee ground or as beans and grind yourself, depending on preference. And for my girlfriend there's always the Starbucks equivalent (Debian stable with Gnome).
Apple would be picked by modern slaves and sold in a capsule at 100,000% markup and it only fits their machines. Windows comes with pesticides for the "benefit of the user".
Aeropress is a brand, one I've never heard of. It fits in the Linux ecosystem (maybe as one of the Red Hat flavors?) but as an analogy it is simplified. Linux is so much bigger than that and there's everything from LFS (grow, grind and brew with tools you've sourced and put together yourself), to Android (plain old drip machine). Reducing everything that's the Linux ecosystem to a niche brand of a specific type of coffee maker is dishonest.
I use a french press myself, and never heard of Aeropress. My machines all run Debian with DWM and I never have any problems. My non-technical girlfriend is fine on Debian and doesn't really know the difference. She did mention how fast her laptop boots though.
> I have been using Linux exclusively for twenty years now.
Ditto. I can't stand other OSs; they are constantly in my way for just the basic tasks.
> I don't understand people who use anything else, to be honest.
Anti-ditto. I would never give Linux to my parents. They're capable enough to maintain their own Windows computers, and switching them to Linux would mean that I'd have to take over all of those tasks -- because they've got other, more important things to do than to learn a new OS.
I'd agree with you if you could buy rando PC with Linux installed and working with no stupid hardware issues. People who can live in Google Docs/Office 365 web and don't have industry specific use cases will almost always be fine. But once you break out of that subset of people, tossing them a Linux machine can be kind of mean.
> Anti-ditto. I would never give Linux to my parents.
I don't know about your parents but most people (including my parents) just use a browser and some applications that are identical to their Windows versions or sufficiently similar. There isn't really anything new to learn.
System76!
One huge barrier is printing. I've been using Linux as my daily OS for a decade and I still have stupid problems with printers. I can't print from my laptop because the printer spits out unicode garbage if I try. My desktop works, but sometimes I have to reboot to get the print queue to clear.
Printing has always been the most brittle experience of all IT at least since when I started printing in the 80s.
To add an anecdote I let a friend print on my HP LaserJet from his Windows laptop today. It detected the printer over Wi-Fi but it could not print anything because it was missing the driver. After a 100 MB download from HP's site the installer wanted an USB connection to the printer. That friend of mine is young so he never saw a USB cable with the small squarish plug that connects to a printer (or scanner, or USB2 disk) but that's another story. The installer run for minutes and failed with an error. I told him not to trust the error and attempt to print anyway. It did print. However after a few pages a pop-up complained about a non original toner (probably true) and it stopped printing. However he managed to find the printer from his Android phone and print from there. Then he was able to print from Windows too.
All of that took about an hour. I installed Debian 13 on my laptop last week and I could detect the printer instantly and print without any problem. No driver to download. I know that I can apt install hplip to get more specific drivers but it was not necessary.
I'm sure most people feel the opposite way. I've been using Windows and Macs for 20 years and I don't ever see myself ever using Linux as a desktop OS.
Among the subculture that would be the type to visit Hacker News (or Slashdot back in the day), this attitude emerged around 25 years ago. In the late 90s, there was widespread enthusiasm for the Linux desktop. I remember those days fondly. It was glorious. Then macOS (or OS X as we called it) swept away a lot of people. A lot of them would get hostile or angry or mock people when they would mention they didn't join the Mac bandwagon.
Same here. Using Linux Mint for about 15 years now. Same for various computer illiterate family members. As far as I am concerned it is significantly more pleasant to use than Windows and MacOS.
Do you use a laptop? It seems that doing the right then when opening / closing the lid only happened in the past 5 years or so.
This is something I see repeated everywhere but I've been using Linux daily on all sorts of laptops for a little over 15 years and never struggled with this issue.
But during my brief period on Windows I would get issues like my colour settings changing or the behaviour of certain meta keys being switched out when I woke a sleeping laptop.
My colleagues run linux laptops and they don't struggle with this issue either. They just completely turn off their laptops anytime they want to move somewhere. That's how they trust their OS.
Certain versions of Ubuntu have this issue on Thinkpads, which requires updating a specific setting in Grub.
Some people are not allowed to use Linux.
At work, I got a fancy MacBook, and as much as I admire the hardware, I despise the MacOS window management. IMHO, it is broken by design, and I wonder how anybody at Apple considers this a good system. There is still a small chance that I didn't understand a crucial concept, but until now, nobody was able to explain to me, how it is supposed to work.
I have reached the point where I believe that it must be something historical, like Steve wrote it himself, or else, and now nobody dares to reform it.
I did the same for my media centers! Netflix and iQIYI refuse to work. I am cancelling Netflix. Been a member since 2010. I don't need 4k either. The 4k tax is losing ownership over your media. HDMI is closed source compared to display port.
My media center experience is so so much better. The apps on roku logout randomly, the nvidia shield remote craps out, windows firefox/chrome are slow and the logitech keyboard doesn't work. But the same keyboard and browser setup works like a charm on the same machine on linux.
Manufactured waste, fight against general purpose computing and ownership is what is at stake.
You're all too generous. The first time Netflix didn't display past 720p in Firefox, I immediately cancelled my subscription (which was paying for the whole family) and redirected everyone to Bitsearch[0] to pirate everything instead. I don't agree the moral or ethical arguments against it either.
[0] Bitsearch uses a distributed hash table (DHT)[1] to find all public tracker content
Since 2008 I've been on linux as my daily driver. You'll find two laptops in my backpack: a macbook air and whatever linux machine I'm using for development. I'm almost to the point with the mac, I use it maybe once a month. So much works better on linux. The Mac (and occasions where I've tried Windows) is not nearly as easy to deal with as it was. Far too many decisions for the user to make, and far too many situation where you just aren't allowed. For example, I once fired up my macbook, only to be jarred by Apple News notifications about a gristly mass murder. While I sympathize with the victims, I do not want my routine broken by news out of my control. So I tried to get rid of Apple news only to be told by Apple support that was not possible.
My computer is mine. I do not want the manufacturer or author of the OS controlling it. Ever. Full stop.
For both ideological and practical reasons, I'd love to switch. If I were a desktop computing person, I'd already have done so years ago.
Alas, I exclusively use laptops - as I work a great deal while travelling.
I do not wish to have to carry around a mouse with me wherever I go with my portable computer.
If any Linux distro manages to replicate even 80% of the smoothness and functionality of a Mac trackpad experience, I'll switch. I have yet to find one, however (and yes, I've tried all the Asahi variants - they don't come close).
I always agreed with this take until I went all in on keyboard driven tiling window managers. First with i3 and now with Omarchy/hyprland.
I find my use of the trackpad so rare now that it’s a non factor.
I still use the mouse in a browser, but I find myself tabbing around a lot more often than I used to.
Here's a perfect example of this: Using a Mac trackpad on macOS, you can two-finger scroll as fast or slow as you want. If you go slow enough (you might have to "roll" your fingers instead of moving them down), you can scroll your browser pixel-by-pixel. This behavior carries through every app on the system. Scrolling basically does exactly what your fingers do.
Now, run Linux (say, Ubuntu) on that exact same hardware and try scrolling in Firefox or something. Instead of the content moving exactly as your fingers are moving, it does this weird jumpy "page up / page down" like thing as your fingers move. Even moving your fingers as slowly as you can will make the content jump to the next "page" 20 pixels down. This is not just Firefox's behavior: it carries through to every application.
Yes, there's probably some obscure GNOME configuration I need to add to fix this behavior, and if you search online you'll find forum after forum of people asking for logs and responding with "I dunno, try this." For something that should work out of the box.
idk, the two finger "rolling" pixel-by-pixel scroll seems to work for me - Firefox (also foot terminal, Slack (xwayland), and Signal) on Scroll (a Sway fork) on Debian (testing) on a ~year old Thinkpad X11. I don't think I've done anything to configure or customize it either.
I got a Thinkpad (after a few years on a Macbook) largely because in the past the track point was a lot better than trackpads. But in those years, it seems hardware and/or software have improved enough that I barely use it.
Agreed. Trackpads on Windows are very good (approaching Mac quality) but on Linux it's hit and (mostly) miss. Gnome gestures are borderline unusable. Sometimes Gnome forgets how many fingers I'm using and every single finger mouse movement is suddenly a gesture, have to retry gestures to switch workspaces because the first two times it fails, etc. It becomes worse with more windows open. No back swipe gesture in Chrome, etc. Basic stuff that is annoying in every day use. Flawless mouse/touchpad support is not too much to ask.
> If any Linux distro manages to replicate even 80% of the smoothness and functionality of a Mac trackpad experience, I'll switch
I find Niri to be a great WM for trackpad use if you are amenable to a scrollable-tiling workflow. All gestures are inertial like MacOS and to my fingers they often feel snappier and more natural than their macOS equivalents. Scrolling is consistent and natural, though which apps have inertial scrolling is definitely hit-or-miss. It perfectly recognizes three and four finger gestures. PikaOS (debian-based) and CachyOS (arch-based) both offer Niri as an option if you want to give it a try.
For context, my experience is on a 4 year old thinkpad which admittedly is probably best case for driver support but is definitely not the best touchpad hardware on the market.
Thanks for the recommendation! I've been playing around with Niri for the past hour and I have to say there's a lot here that I like. I'm still going to need to figure out how to adjust the trackpad gesture sensitivity a bit (which doesn't seem especially straightforward to do) - but this is considerably more buttery than anything I've experienced before on Linux
Take this with a grain of salt, it's impossible for me to tell what you are and aren't comfortable with, but there is an alternative to using trackpads or mice at all and that's tiling window managers. You drive the OS with your keyboard. Combining this with plugins like Vimium for Chromium based browsers (or Tridactyl for Firefox) you can drive your entire OS and browser with keybindings.
As an aside, the latter also teaches you the bindings for Vim which is a nice boon if you've tried in the past and couldn't make it stick.
But again, this might not fit your use case or your preparedness to invest time and effort. I'm just saying.
People can have different preferred input devices to others. It doesn't make them amateurs.
My gripes with the trackpad are less to do with window management and are more to do with the graphical components of my job.
Please explain to me how I'm supposed to design graphics in Inkscape using only the keyboard? Or create presentations in LibreOffice Impress using only the keyboard? I don't spend the entirety of my time in a text editor.
Consider these "amateur" tasks all you like, most organisations value them and I need to be able to undertake them without frustration. MacOS won't fight me in these contexts. Linux will.
As a long time Linux user I started with Red Hat 7.2. Then moved on to Slackware from there to Ububtu and finally to ArchLinux.
While Linux and the user space ecosystem has come a long way there are still plenty of sharp edges and anyone planning to use Linux long term must be able to figure some issues that will inevitably happen sooner or later when some update/system upgrade happens.
Even though I consider myself fairly proficient Linux user I also gave up on Linux on laptops..life is just too short to tinker to make it work. (Power saving, suspend/resume, graphics with Optimus etc. Are still pain points)
Windows has its own sharp edges, such as the crashes the author of this article experienced.
It's hard to evaluate fairly. This author, for example is fed up with specific issues on Windows and new to Linux. He is likely be more forgiving of sharp edges on Linux, recognizing that it's normal for something unfamiliar to be more challenging. On the other hand, someone content with Windows might think of its sharp edges as just how computers are and consider every way in which Linux is merely different to be pointless aggravation.
Most publications covering Windows have a bunch of articles about how to tinker with Windows 11 to keep it from spying on you, showing ads, and forcing the use of an online account. One might argue life is also too short for that.
I’ll echo this. I keep at least one secondary machine booting Linux and periodically try moving a main one over, but the experience definitely is not yet without significant pains, depending on one’s needs.
This is not to discount the tens of thousands of hours of hard (often volunteer) work put into the ecosystem, but a substantial amount of work remains on things like battery life and UX (both for devs and more typical end users).
For example, why does getting virtualization under Fedora working require a whole stack of commands? Elsewhere, the most that’s needed is ticking a checkbox (if that). Worse, the mode of failure if you haven’t done the correct dance is unintelligible errors in e.g. GNOME Boxes that don’t even point the user in the right direction.
There’s all sorts of somewhat low hanging fruit like this that I suspect hasn’t gotten attention because it’s not particularly sexy or interesting.
I don't think I have ever had a system upgrade break my system on any Debian derived or Fedora I used. Also upgrades are not forced upon you like they are in Windows, with its dark patterns nudging you to upgrade.
I am also using GNU/Linux on laptops just fine, and the only issue is with battery life.
I think hardware-wise one needs to do some reading before buying, to check what is supported and what is not well supported. Other than that, I don't have issues. But then again I am also a strict on or off guy, who does not use things like hibernation or standby or whatever at all, so maybe I am dodging many bullets there.
Try CachyOS, it's based on Arch but with additional optimizations, better defaults, and is user friendly. The problems the author of the article had would not have happened if he spent some time using an user friendly distro before trying a hard distro.
Do CachyOS optimizations actually make any difference whatsoever? I know they enable certain optimization flags whenever building software, but that doesn't directly equate to performance improvements unless you're actually benchmarking and testing it. I've seen some benchmarks in games and it seems there is literally zero performance difference (sometimes it loses to Fedora, even).
I'd always recommend upstream distributions with corporate backing for novice users: Ubuntu or Fedora. If they're coming from Windows: Linux Mint. There's also a clear upgrade path for users who enjoy Mint or Ubuntu: Debian testing.
Arch Linux is awesome, don't get me wrong. I just believe it's borderline unethical to recommend someone installing anything related to Arch on their workstation. It's just not what a beginner should choose at all. CachyOS included, it even makes you choose your bootloader at install (any user-friendly distro would simply never bother you with that and go with GRUB right away).
A user's first distro can make or break their Linux experience. Think hard before recommending new users the flavor of the month or an Arch derivative.
> Do CachyOS optimizations actually make any difference whatsoever? I know they enable certain optimization flags whenever building software, but that doesn't directly equate to performance improvements unless you're actually benchmarking and testing it.
I switched from Windows 11 to Kubuntu a year ago, and then gave CachyOS a shot after hearing praise for it. I'm on a laptop with an AMD iGPU, and CachyOS's `znver4` optimized repos gave a significant bump on my Geekbench results:
(Note: these results are from almost a year ago though)
Lenovo Thinkpad P14s Gen4 AMD
- Windows 11: 2366 Single-Core Score, 10717 Multi-Core Score
- Kubuntu: 2496 Single-Core Score, 9878 Multi-Core Score
- CachyOS: 2569 Single-Core Score, 11563 Multi-Core Score
Repeat tests were essentially the same (Win11 23xx/107xx, Kubuntu 24xx/98xx, Cachy 25xx/115xx)
I love Cachy, but please don't recommend it as a reasonable first step into Linux.
It's a lot more polished than Arch, but it's not for someone who hasn't used Linux before and wants a reliably rock solid and predictable experience 365 days a year, with no fiddling.
It's rolling release, and there are inevitably bugs when updating immediately to every minor version of every part of the OS stack. Arch/Cachy/Endeavour are for experts, and those who enjoy tinkering. (If you want to recommend something Arch-flavored, just recommend Manjaro, and don't listen to the memers who parrot some youtuber's list of ancient and silly engagement-bait grievances.)
A user friendly distribution would be something like Fedora or Ubuntu, not "Arch but with some optimizations that probably won't matter much"
Mint is one of the greatest distributions to get started with for users coming from Windows. I've been using Fedora full-time for more than four years now, but before that I used Linux Mint for about a year. It's a great, seamless experience.
Only problem I believe is the lack of customization options in Cinnamon compared to KDE and even Gnome with extensions. I guess that makes the user miss out on some of the cool parts of owning your software. Also, being stuck in X11 will start to become a problem in the next few years: I'm waiting to see what they come up with on that front.
CachyOS? That distro asking you to pick one out of 5 bootloaders and one out of 13 desktop environments? That is rolling and so comes with the implicit contract that you would have your eyeballs liking every package's release notes for any one of them that you ever update?
Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against CachyOS (I really couldn't care less), but if this is where we collectively set the bar for what is "user friendly", we are doing it wrong.
This is hilarious. Recommendations like this are exactly why nobody takes desktop Linux seriously (aside from gamers who yearn to dick-measure about something). A rolling release distro? Let alone Arch? You may as well recommend Gentoo.
Yeah, it can quickly lead to analysis paralysis. I've set up three laptops with a Linux on them for non-tech friends and family members and deliberately went with distros that "just work" (Debian and Fedora specifically).
In general I'd recommend sticking to the simple options and not going into niches unless you/the user actually wants or needs to.
I find this comment funny given it reminded me of a very similar recent thread.
That's what I first thought of too. The author picks CatchyOS as their first Linux distro, only to find it's more complicated to set up, and then the mouse buttons don't work.
For the Linux newcomer, the biggest advantage of Ubuntu (or Ubuntu derivatives like Mint) is the wealth of guides, tutorials, and Q&As online, allowing you to google most common problems. You can always switch to another distro once you become more confident with Linux.
I won't comment on the merits. Each person can do what they want. But, the line that caught my attention was:
> The first question often asked of Windows refugees migrating to Linux is, "Why Linux?"
The answer, realistically, is probably "What else?". Unless you're comfortable with the BSD's (which I like, and weren't mentioned), or unless you have recent Mac hardware lying around, it's the easiest and most practical alternative.
It's a bit of a duopoly, isn't it?; with a third leg that's sometimes something in the BSD camp, and sometimes in the MacOS camp.
This was, still is and for the foreseeable future it'll be bad advice. Stay on Windows 10 as long as you can. With LTSC IoT that's 2032. We will figure out something then.
It doesn't work. Right now the main issue is Wayland vs X where Wayland is not working and will never work because the underlying ideas and goals do not align with that of a desktop. Someone described X as ALSA, Wayland as PulseAudio and we are waiting for PipeWire to arrive. Maybe Phoenix will sweep in to save the day, maybe something else will.
Also, hardware and software issues will always be there because the incentives are not there.
I swear Linux on the desktop adherents sound like they have some sort of Stockholm Syndrome but of course in reality just cognitive dissonance explains it.
> Wayland is not working and will never work because the underlying ideas and goals do not align with that of a desktop.
Can you elaborate on this?
I don't use Wayland because it lacks something I need (unprivileged Scroll Lock LED control) but I'm curious about what else keeps people from using it.
This HN thread is ongoing,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46566465 ("I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great (theverge.com)"; 20 hours ago, 596 comments)
If you must, Windows 11 Enterprise IoT LTSC is where the goodness is at. Less bloat, no ads, a frozen feature set (so they won't move your cheese every 6 months), 10 years of official support and security updates... it's like it's 1997 again! And you can install tools like Classic Shell (with its superior Start menu) to make it even better.
The real issue is the lack of support. Real users buy those support packages from vendors. They bring their PC in to be fixed at their local shop. They might Google a problem and find a solution occasionally of they are feeling spicy but how often do you get screenshots to get something to work in a Linux GUI? Web browser only laptops are great until your uncle gets a "killer deal" on some random printer on Facebook marketplace and they can't get it to work. Or a webcam. Or a Bluetooth headset. Or a game controller. Scanner. etc etc.
On top of all of this, they will just give up and buy a new machine and return it if that doesn't fix their issue.
Linux provides virtually nothing on any of those fronts unless you get a private level 8 tech support contact provided by your grandson. Who wants to be 24/7 on call for their extended family?
I bought a laptop in 2008 and in 2017 was forced to install W10. Well, the `08 hardware wasn't having it and I didn't have the cash to pony up for a new laptop so I installed Linux. Great decision.
There's definitely specific niche software that is restricted to MS and if you must use that, then by all means stay aboard. Otherwise, today's a great day to scroll distrowatch and pick your poison.
The article mentions that the author had a negative experience with Void Linux, that it was missing programs in its repository. If you considered it, give it a try anyway. Void is fast and ridiculously stable, even more so given it's a rolling release distro (so often has very new program versions). And in contrast to the author, I was impressed with the broad range of the package system - he might have had a bit of bad luck with the selection.
I've found a very comfortable home on Void Linux for nearly a decade at this point, and wouldn't consider any other distro for desktop use. I find Void to be rock-solid stable and relentlessly simple.
The author of TFA hopped from Mint -> Debian -> Bazzite -> Fedora -> Void -> Artix, so Void is an extremely obvious outlier here.
Aside from Void, every other distro he tried was either a newbie-friendly desktop distro (Mint, Debian, Fedora, Bazzite), or "Arch, but easier, with an installer" (Artix).
Bad luck with Void's package selection is fair enough, but I'm not sure what he meant by "driver compatibility was a big issue" - Void uses an upstream kernel and driver availability should be roughly the same anywhere.
He's using a Ryzen APU on desktop so graphics drivers shouldn't have been an issue there. The MacBook had problems with Broadcom Wi-Fi drivers on Artix(!), but I'd wager this would affect all distros out of the box, and Void has the Broadcom drivers[0] available as well.
It's frustrating that he doesn't explicitly mention what he couldn't find drivers for on Void. I assume it was Broadcom Wi-Fi and he didn't enable the nonfree repository. In fairness, Void's docs don't cover any Broadcom quirks so maybe this isn't as discoverable as it should be.
Seconding this. I was impressed by Void linux stability and speed: xbps (with xtools) might be the fastest and most powerful package manager I've *ever* used.
Sure, Void doesn't have the endless options of Arch+AUR for packages, but it had everything I needed. Even the well-maintained, latest versions of less common software, like Nim compiler.
The author might also missed that Void has a non-free repository, that you have to install for stuff like proprietary drivers, DRM and Steam.
Linux doesn't have all the features that Windows has, features that I use daily. It also doesn't work with all of my games and software so it's a non starter for me still. Tried it several times but it always falls short of what I need. I do have it sandboxed in Windows but it's rare that it is needed for how I use a computer.
For me, one of them would be an actually working way of putting laptop to sleep. Screw you, modern standby.
That’s the exact same 'missing features' script people used to dismiss Apple during the height of the PC era.
Gaming is all well and good, but I'd be interested to hear of experiences with moving and using Audio apps (Ableton Live, Cubase and other Steinberg apps, plus many VSTs) from Windows to Linux.
I see Wine, YABridge and LinVST mentioned in searches, but while I've got plenty of Linux experience, I'm time-poor and would prefer to make computers make noises rather than spend my time making things work. I have Reaper which is cross-platform but again, getting the VSTs working would be great (at a bare minimum).
A Mac is not an option here. Any pointers gratefully received!
> but I'd be interested to hear of experiences with moving and using Audio apps (Ableton Live
I've been using Linux for work and hobbies for more than a decade at this point, mostly Arch Linux, some CachyOS, but always had a partition of Windows available too. Why? Almost solely because Ableton does not run properly with Wine, Proton or any other tooling, and has never been able to do so, for as long as I've used Ableton (since version 8 or 9 I think).
If you spend most of your day with Ableton, then Linux is not ready for you, and then I'm not even considering plugins or what not, just the default and standard stuff is not running properly no matter what you'll try.
I'd be willing to shell out for a new license if they need that for making a Linux version... I guess next step is to fund some FOSS developer to actually add support for it to Wine, by force if must be :P Wonder if there is some way for developers to raise money for adding support for specific software to Wine? Might not be such a a bad idea.
> I'm time-poor and would prefer to make computers make noises
Then Linux is not for you at this point. I don't mean to discourage you - for me, Reaper works, Scarlett works, ffmpeg works etc. But there are quirks. Reaper has horrible scaling on 4k screen, which I believe can be resolved by forcing UI scaling, but this requires change every time I switch from laptop to external monitor, so I just live with tiny buttons. Scarlett works, but requires JACK, and I never got it working properly with Pulse/Pipewire (outputs get duplicated sometimes), also control software doesn't exist, aside from one opensource reimplementation, which works but looks horrible.
If you don't have time, just don't.
I love how windows-linux discussion is populated by DAW/VST incompatibility. I'm still new to the industry, and therefore also open minded about daw/plugins.
I actually had good experience with setting up yabridge, it could have worked for me I think. But the elephant in the room is that many big commercial plugins use JUCE as a framework, and the recent release of JUCE (JUCE8) just broke compatibility with wine and seem to be sabotaging wine-based usage completely, and are not considering going back at the moment.
https://forum.juce.com/t/juce8-direct2d-wine-yabridge/64298/...
https://github.com/robbert-vdh/yabridge/issues/386
There are patches based on binary diffs to JUCE7, but it is just so much pain to simply run the commonest plugins in the field :/
So I'm now kind of stuck between using windows with commercial plugins or use linux with mainly smaller scale alternatives (although there are good ones: lsp, decent sampler, cardinal, surge)
Thanks! I wasn't aware of the JUCE newer version issue.. I'll have to (sometime) dig into that a bit deeper. Me I don't mind the idea of the smaller-scale alternatives, but having to occasionally work withothers that aren't linux based could be.. problematic.
I can't speak for DAWs but in 2019 when I tried switching to native Linux my Scarlett 2i2 3rd gen USB audio interface did not play nicely with Debian at the time. I'd get an endless amount of crackles and pops during recordings / playback and I spent days going over tons of audio configs / tools (Jack, Alsa, PulseAudio, etc.). They weren't xruns, at least Jack wasn't reporting them as that. Buffer sizes were normal too.
The good news is the same interface today works fine with PipeWire, without needing to tweak anything. I am using Arch this time around.
I use Reaper for Linux and love it. Getting Windows VSTs to work is okay with lin-vst and wine. Bascially install wine with your package manager, maybe run winecfg, then get lin-vst and make a copy of its single so-file, named the same as each vst binary in the same directory, then add that dir as a vst location in Reaper. As far as I remember.
I don't know about the "you should too" part. I use Arch, it works fine for me but I am patient and want to use it. Realistically, I would expect the largest migration should be devs switching from mac to Linux. I don't see any reason at all to use a mac for development anymore.
Omarchy is a nice experience for devs.
Funnily enough, though, you can get a very user friendly experience using Niri and Dank Linux (don't remember the exact name). It takes two 3 CLI commands to install, and the top bar incredibly cool, compared to the i3 defaults and even to what I remember of Gnome and KDE.
Next up: somebody comes up with a desktop environment called BTW.
Unfortunately Mac hardware is a huge leap ahead of anything else.
Most of those advantages are practically irrelevant for the majority of users or a matter of having gotten used to things being a certain way.
Has apple severely degraded the developer experience on MacOS recently or something?
You may not need it but no kernel support for containers / cgroups is a deal breaker for me. Windows at least makes an attempt with WSL. But, at the end of the day, most things are just about rationalizing what you want to use. I personally identify with Linux tribe, not Mac tribe therefore that is what I want to use.
At some point it is not that Linux is better, it's about rejecting the decisions made by a company blinded by profits.
Yeah this is what switched me. I was forever complaining about wall gardens and yet was too 'comfortable' with my macbook-pro as it was the best laptop period.
I switched to a thinkpad x1-carbon and popos and never looked back. Sure I would love 10 hour battery life, but it's not THAT big of deal (for me) to carry a charger.
new intel cpus might change that as long as standby is fixed :)
What about computer games such as age of empires ? Can we play regular computer games ?
Yes. Valve (Steam) spent more than a decade building and refining a translation layer called Proton. Nearly 80% of the vast Steam library is now compatible with Linux to the point they are releasing actual Linux consoles (Steam Deck and Steam Machine).
For your regular PC, you can install a gaming-focused distribution like Bazzite to get everything sorted out automatically.
That 20% is mostly covered by competitive online multiplayer games that use kernel-level anti-cheat systems which will only work on Windows. There's not a whole lot Valve can do about that, other than continuing to push Linux for gaming and hope that it gets popular enough to create an incentive for anti-cheat providers to start targeting Linux as well.
I think it's largely to do with the whether the games are PvP multiplayer or not. I.e. many such games have anti-cheat systems that embed in the Windows kernel (or something like that - my Windows internals knowledge is... slim).
I assert that most people who're happy running Linux on their desktop (for games or productivity or development) do not overlap much with the people who're happy to take kernel patches from UbiFuckingSoft. And this includes those people who're willing to take closed-source NVIDIA drivers.
Games with kernel-mode anti-cheat consistently don't work and probably never will (barring them having it removed or made optional). Titles released more recently are more likely to not work simply due to not having had fixes applied to them, although a rather large amount of newer games work fine out of the box if they aren't doing weird stuff. Other than that it's a toss-up, since while it's usually the same few things that prevent games from working properly on Linux, it's not something you as Jonothan S. Gamer will know about unless you go and do research and check ProtonDB and whatnot.
A good rule of thumb is that single player games generally just™ work and that older games generally just™ work.
In a word, yes. While Wine has been an option for decades, Valve and Proton have made gaming on Linux mainstream. You can check compatibility reports from https://www.protondb.com/ for whichever games you're interested in.
> Valve and Proton have made gaming on Linux mainstream.
"Mainstream" is maybe too hefty, the amount of Linux users (including SteamDeck) who participate in the Steam surveys are still in the single digit if I remember correctly. Most gamers today still use Windows, even though Valve made great strides with Proton.
I haven't had any issues installing AoE Gold under Wine. Furthermore, stuff on Steam is usually trivial to get running (just click and play). With Heroic same goes for stuff on GOG (and presumably Epic as well, IDK). PlayOnLinux and Lutris have good support for games you install from CD (I probably could have used either of them to install AoE Gold, but I've been using wine directly for so long I find it more convenient to do it myself).
Many are playable with Steam on Linux, each game in the store states whether that's supported or not. Even non-supported games allow an override. I've tried that for a few with varying success. Steam has so far refunded purchases that didn't run on Linux. Then there's Lutris which runs many old games fine.
There is a community maintained website for checking game compatibility: https://www.protondb.com/
There was an article on the front page a few months ago that showed most games performed better on the Steam Deck with Linux than Windows.
You can play almost all solo games and most multi-player games depending on anti-cheat
Age of empires will be okay.
For reference, you can always check out these websites:
[0]: https://www.protondb.com/explore [1]: https://areweanticheatyet.com/
recently had need to run a legacy win32 game on linux. the game works fine but the updater is in some windows specific java that i just could not get to work, which is kind of ironic since its the "run anywhere" java that wouldnt work but the C++ game would. anyway -- i run the updater in a windows vm that has shared access to the game files, close the vm then run the game through wine. works.
Yep, once I read microsoft was going to integrate that abomination co-pilot into the taskbar and desktop in general, I wiped my windows partition for good. I didn't even back anything up. I have fedora servers at work, but I just need a stable and performant OS at home to do some remote work, hobby coding, and connect to some telescope equipment. So I just run Ubuntu LTS - why? because I don't need to spend my time nerding out on ricing a linux distro, I have better things to do with my time. The same goes for Windows, I have better things to do than try to get an operating system to work - and there lies the big rub. Linux is easy enough now for anyone who is decent at windows to learn and use, and it's free, upgradable, tons of support available, and WORKS BETTER.
As I'm typing this, on my work windows PC, the taskbar icons aren't rendering. Generally the graphics are slow, Microsoft outlook randomly freezes my entire computer, and occasionally my USB drives turn on/off if I'm plugged into a docking station. I experience exactly zero of these issues when running
My non technical friend she choose to try installing linux and picked mint. I laughed and I was sure she would brick it at least once but its been over 6 month and the system is still running fine. She did end up dual booting windows because there are a few games which were to hard for her to get setup and some that will never work. I think dual booting is fine its a good pressure release valve as long as you're spending most of the time booting into linux.
My last Windows was Windows 95 (or 98?). I've been exclusively using Linux for ~25 years. I use Ubuntu because I've been using it for ~20 years and have better things to do than try out different distros. My mother, my grandmother, and many of my non-computer-savvy friends also use Ubuntu. I know a Germanist who uses Debian.
It's a bit like with cars. If you know someone who really knows about cars, they'll be able to recommend a solid, simple, super cheap, practical car that will just work and give you no problems. It'll probably be something like a 2010 Toyota Aygo, which you can pick up for next to nothing on the used car market (here in Germany) and which you would never have thought of buying yourself. This is a Linux laptop. Other people who never got this insider tip that driving can be cheap and hassle-free might instead buy a new car from a German manufacturer on credit for half a gross annual salary (or even a whole one). Two years later, the car may already be in the repair shop because the engine is losing oil or because the Nanoslide/Nikasil cylinder liner coating is damaged.
With the Aygo, you can drive from A to B just as well as with any other car, and you might even have a little more fun doing so. But if you need CarPlay and heated seats, distrust things that are cheap, and love that je ne sais quoi that comes with things you've just bought for a lot of money, then this simple 2010 Aygo is not for you.
This weekend, I wrote code for a non-trivial compiler on my old everyday laptop. I didn't even buy it; I got it for free because the previous owner considered the device obsolete and unusable. Slowly, the thing is getting too old for me too, but Linux (Ubuntu) has gotten another couple of years of use out of it. Meanwhile, a friend of mine just bought a used Macbook that still cost more than I would ever spend on a new laptop because she has to write papers for her studies and thinks she needs a “good” computer for that.
My home nvidia desktop is running CachyOS and it's been an overall good experience. 99% of the apps I need just run without issue, and I've only needed to apply a few minor tweaks to get my other laptop set up (switched to deep sleep). As a long time Fedora fan, I was not sure about switching to CachyOS but the performance has been marginally better under heavy use-cases. However, Fedora is fine and can be tweaked to get most of the same benefits though.
I am on Linux for 26 years. Last 5 years I run PopOs! on my desktop. User friendly and stable, Ubuntu based.
Linux user for 25-ish years here, and exclusively so.
I used to heavily configure my ubuntu distros to be keyboard exclusive with i3wm and such, but I ended up with regolith desktop, a version of ubuntu with pre installed i3wm and keyboard focus. I'm too old to keep my dotfiles updated.
Nowadays, imo you should only choose the package manager, any os using that chosen package manager (aptitude for ubuntu) definitely had a version that's close enough to your use cases.
Similarly, I picked up Linux in 1997 and have used it as my primary since 1999. I've distro hopped through probably a dozen or so distros, but ultimately landed on PopOS for most of my machines, similarly to you. These threads are always somewhat disheartening, hearing everybody say they tried to switch but couldn't because of one issue or another. I guess I've just learned to work through it.
I've linked it multiple times on HN already but winapps (https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps) can be a game-changer for people relying on some Windows-only software.
It sets up a Windows machine in Docker where you can install your apps, then you'll get .desktop applications that starts the program in the VM and use RDP to only show the app window – it feels nearly native. I've even bought an Office 2024 license to improve some VBA Excel macros for a client.
I did this sometime in 2022. First I was using POP OS but I wanted to have something more up to date so I gave an Arch based distro a shot, EndeavourOS has been my go to for a full year without any feel of missing out on another distro or features. Yay is the best thing to happen to Arch Linux and its derivatives.
I feel like Pacman is the real reason for instability with people who dont understand how Pacman works messing up upgrade commands and not getting all their dependencies properly updated. When I tried Manjaro like ten years ago it was a mess.
Easy karma on HN. We have these posts every couple of days.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46566465
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46483432
Ah, so karma is a thing on HN as well. That would explain it.
Since 2001 I've used Red Hat, Mandrake, Slackware, Ubuntu, and Mint. I got rid of them at the first available opportunity. Elon Musk himself couldn't pay me enough to switch to Linux.
For some reason, there's a huge amount of Hacker News readers who are still full-time Windows users. With the forced migration to Windows 11, I guess a lot of them are now not only trying out Linux for the first time (as a desktop system), but also for some reason going for Arch derivatives, which is always fun to see a beginner mess with LOL
Desktop Linux is still very niche, even in technical communities like HN.
I am pretty sure that my previous attempts at a Linux desktop have failed because I would tweak my setup by installing packages and updates until I broke it and needed to reinstall. But I want my machine to be indestructible and "just work". Waiting day(s) to diagnose and fix an issue just isn't worth it. I have been contemplating a switch to Linux again. This time, I will embrace a LTS distribution and virtualization so that my tinkering doesn't break things. I always want a safe level to fall back to. Also, I would enthusiastically pay for a support subscription. I know they are out there. Which companies/organizations have the most positive impact in the open source community?
It has been a few years, but for example breaking the display, bluetooth, power states/sleep, or wifi. Or subtly messing up dependencies of various other packages that I was trying. I just don't want the overhead of system administration. These days I mostly use VMs or WSL. But I am thinking that I want my host OS to be Linux.
I moved from Windows about 10 years ago and it took 6 months to click. It was an enlightening experience, like the curtains had been drawn back. The only comparable experience was finally clicking with NixOS, about 18 months ago. Will never go back to any other Linux distro.
I also switched to Linux last month. It hasn't been a smooth experience with my GPU as I'm encountering memory leaks in popular compositors. I also get 150-200ms keyboard input delay in all games using some compositors but not all. I documented as much as I could here https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/gpu-memory-allocation-bugs-wi....
Still, despite all of that when it works it is better than Windows. It's just ironic that my Linux desktop is less stable than Windows 10 since I have to reboot 2-3 times a day from GPU memory leaks. Windows 10 was really stable with the same hardware and had no input delay in games. I only rebooted when the OS pushed an update since I keep my machine on 24 / 7.
It would be fair to mention that this is happening for you with a decade old GPU using an EOL driver, which sucks, but is unlikely to be a common experience.
> It would be fair to mention that this is happening for you with a decade old GPU using an EOL driver, which sucks, but is unlikely to be a common experience.
The drivers are still getting maintained by NVIDIA until August 2026. They also got classified as "legacy" on paper 1 day before I installed them.
The compositor memory leak is affecting a lot of people. Since COSMIC and niri both use the same one (smithay), there's threads on GitHub with people using modern GPUs, both NVIDIA and AMD who experience it. There's a lot of replies across all of the different open issues.
The GPU allocation issue on Wayland (separate from the memory leak) also has hundreds of replies on the NVIDIA developer forums with people using new NVIDIA cards with the latest drivers.
The thing is, most people don't talk about either of them because if you have 8+ GB of GPU memory and turn your computer off every night then you won't experience this problem since all GPU memory allocations get reset on shutdown. It happens to be more of a direct problem for me because I have 2 GB of GPU memory but that doesn't mean the problem isn't common. The root cause is still there. Even if I switched to an AMD GPU the niri / smithay memory leak would be present. Instead of rebooting twice a day, if the GPU had 8 GB of memory I'd have to reboot every 2 days (x4 basically).
Since I opened that issue on GitHub NVIDIA did acknowledge it and suggested I try their experimental egl-wayland2 library. I did try that and it hasn't fixed it fully but it has made GPU memory allocations more stable. It even fixed 1 type of leak in niri. This library is decoupled from the drivers themselves as far as I know. I mean, this same library could still be used for the 590 series, it's not 580 specific which means it's not dependent on your GPU model.
> The compositor memory leak is affecting a lot of people. Since COSMIC and niri both use the same one (smithay), there's threads on GitHub with people using modern GPUs, both NVIDIA and AMD who experience it. There's a lot of replies across all of the different open issues.
But then this sounds like a bug in that particular compositor rather than the driver(s)?
fwiw, I have a modern nvidia card, and use the proprietary drivers, and Wayland (KDE/KWin), and that box has a few weeks of uptime.
> But then this sounds like a bug in that particular compositor rather than the driver(s)?
The NVIDIA GPU memory allocation issue affects all NVIDIA cards, at least based on that forum post where there's a good amount of people replying with similar issues with a large combo of cards + drivers.
You probably don't notice it because you rarely ever use all of your GPU's memory at once. Try running `watch nvidia-smi` and then open multiple copies of every hardware accelerated app you have available. Once you reach nearly the max GPU memory apps will either start crashing or fail to open and if you get semi-unlucky your compositor (including KDE on Wayland) will crash if it's the app trying to allocate resources to render the window. I've had plasmashell or kwin hard lock / crash many times with just a small amount of testing.
The expectation is the driver allocates those memory resources to system memory instead of denying the memory to the app. It works correctly in X11 or if you have an AMD card, in Wayland and X11.
The leak is separate and is compositor specific, possibly related to NVIDIA driver bugs (to some degree) but this leak wouldn't be experienced unless you used this compositor. This leak is the compositor doesn't release any GPU memory after any window is closed, so simply opening and closing apps will cause the leak. Combine this with the first problem and that's how you end up rebooting every few hours with a lower end GPU. AMD and NVIDIA are affected.
The post goes into all of these details and there's reproducible tests, and even demo videos showing the first GPU memory allocation problem in Plasma Wayland but not Plasma X11. It also links to all of the related GitHub issues that I could find.
I can recommend the other way round:
For un-bricking my phone, I had to use some proprietary windows-only software. So I took an old Laptop and installed Windows 10.
Installing it was such a pain already. So many dark patterns, so many privacy issues. I even had to create a microsoft account!
After the deed was done, I closed the Laprop, went back to my Linux system and enjoyed it even more :-)
I installed Bazzite on a slightly esoteric machine, a 16" dual-screen Asus laptop. It's not really my cup of tea as a distribution, either philosophically or practically, but it has some specific patches for Asus hardware and as a result it seems to work better in every way than Windows. Every couple of months I'm annoyed for a moment by all the immutability stuff and the package system, but for both work and play it's running perfectly.
I never understood the Linux guys. All that matters to a common user is the user interface and whether their apps and games run or not. They don't care about telemetry, architecture etc. The damn thing should just work and it should allow familiar interactions.
I have tried switching to Linux several times over the decades. It required many compromises on the interface and compatibilities. Why is it so difficult to slap on a clone of Windows or Mac UI on Linux? I'm not saying they are good. But it avoids the feel of moving to an alien land and learn everything afresh. People don't have time for that.
This is why I recommend macOS to everyone. It's the only OS that is truly polished and where you don't have to worry about viruses and everything just works. mac could be better, but it's still leading the pack. People don't want the OS to become their hobby.
MacOS has its warts and 'unpolish' as well, as it also gets viruses despite what Apple may want you to believe.
I dislike what Microsoft is doing to Windows as much as the next guy but if you get Windows Pro and disable all the icky stuff it is a rock solid OS that just works. Sure, once a year an update might add some new icky stuff but then you just spend 10 minutes to find out how to disable that and go about your business. It. Just. Works.
Windows is prone to getting malware and ransomware. When you buy a new Macbook, you can use the Migration Assistant to move all your apps and files to the new Mac. With Windows there's no easy way. On Mac, apps are almost always safe and not going to crap up your computer. With Windows you have to be wary. Windows usually comes with bloatware, Mac doesn't. Windows you have to manage and install drivers and always update them and sometimes they break. With Mac, drivers and updates are seamless.
I daily drive Windows since Win 95 but there are rough edges that less technical people get cut on.
I switched to Debian/Cinnamon few weeks ago. I am fairly good with the server sides of things, but the desktop a little painful.
Screens dont wake up properly, sometimes only one screens wakes up, sometimes one screen wakes up with a wrong resolution. The usual linux desktop problems where nothing really works and finding a solution is very hard to many different permutations of hardware / os / kernel / drivers / window manager / etc.
I have the framework desktop with AMD 395+
My windows ssd is plugged and I can boot it directly using virt-manager, so thats kinda solves some windows specific stuff like tax software.
You are using a distro that is generally very behind on software versions and doesn’t bundle non free software (Debian) on a laptop with brand new hardware. Additionally, you are running a DE (cinnamon) which is really designed for a specific distro (Mint) which you are not using.
If you want stuff to just work you might want to try using a more up to date distro with a mainstream desktop. Stock Ubuntu or Fedora would probably work fine for you.
debian 13 is using kernel 6.12 vs ubuntu 24 6.14. I don't think it's a kernel issue, and more that amd drivers aren't there yet for the new hardware.
running the latest also is problematic, i.e. a new kernel upgrade that blows thing up.
and that's the main difference between linux and windows, windows just works, osx just works, linux is a minefield of different quirks.
The amd drivers might not there, and they will continue to not be there on the version of the kernel you are using and choosing to be stuck on by using Debian. Drivers are part of the kernel in Linux, it’s not how windows works. Ubuntu and Fedora are not unstable, you are just choosing pain for yourself.
This has been my issue as well - screens waking or not waking up. On latest Linux Mint and everything is great except when switching back and forth inputs between my personal and work laptop (running Windows), I have to do it twice going to my personal laptop or else the external monitor won't show.
I tried Linux again recently. Microsoft needs to be deleted, but this plan is still delusional. Linux is way too confusing for preventable reasons, not even talking about compatibility with Windows stuff.
I'm no Linux expert, but if a SWE has a hard time with it, can't imagine how an average person is supposed to use this. Yeah it's learnable, but nobody wants to. Come back when I can install Linux on a PC, not a "distro" but just Linux, no choices for random stuff like DEs unless you're an expert. And that's necessary, not sufficient.
You are learning an entirely different operating system. You're going to have to make some choices and do some research/learn new things. There will be challenges because it's something completely different from what you know.
The entire point of Linux is there isn't just one Linux, having centralized control of an OS is how Mac and Windows ended up so godawful.
As time goes on the UX will continue to improve (through targeted distros) for less sophisticated users, but we're realistically only now at the point where everything in the ecosystem is "good enough" for a large number of people.
I've been using Linux on and off for a decade+, and it's a moving target. There is one Linux kernel, they can make one Linux OS. (and ofc people can fork but it should remain niche)
Meanwhile I can go on Windows after years and still know how to use it. Last version I daily used was 98, but 11 is still intuitive (despite being annoying).
Which distro and shell you've tried? I believe this makes a lot of difference, and there are distros that are catering for average users, but I have no ideia if it works.
Ubuntu, Mint, Debian lately. Tons of others before. bash shell
At some point Ubuntu had Gnome2 and only apt for packages, that made more sense than now
I am very interested in the Steam Machine, because it will be an out-of-the-box Linux experience with (hopefully) no tweaking required. Hardware designed for Linux gaming from the beginning. I'm willing to put up with worse performance per dollar to not have to spend time tweaking the thing myself, similar to a game console.
I think Steam Machine + macOS laptop + NAS running debian headless is my personal compute plan for the next few years.
I'm not interested in the Steam Machine, but I DO am interested in switching my gaming PC to Steam OS! I hope the Steam Machine will put more pressure on getting Steam OS to the masses.
Frankly I'd love to switch from Windows to Linux. But it's the applications. My last attempt to switch got hung up on a few things (in order if importance, probably):
- Quicken. I have 30 years of personal financial data in quicken. I'm not completely opposed to migrating to something else, but I haven't seen a good substitute. I'd probably have to learn double entry bookkeeping, and I'm unsure if other software could still download data from my bank and investment accounts. I'm sure as hell not going to start entering transactions manually (ugh).
- Ableton live. I do have a copy of bitwig, but I am unfamiliar with its workflow, and would have to figure out which of my vsts I would lose, and it seems a big pain in the ass.
- Plex server. For some reason, out of the box this was dog slow. Because of the other issues, I was unwilling to spend the time to try to figure out what was going on with this.
- The are games I would probably lose, but honestly there are so many games available I doubt I would care that much.
How many hundreds of hours am I gonna have to take to figure this all out before I have a working system again? Not my idea of a good time even if I like the outcome.
Edit: and this is from somebody who loves the idea of Linux! I first installed 0.11 or 0.12 way back in the early 90s from a stack of floppies!
> - Quicken. I have 30 years of personal financial data in quicken. I'm not completely opposed to migrating to something else,
Genuinely curious - outside of personal satisfaction/scratching the itch to store data, does personal financial data dating 30 years ago serve any practical purpose?
Occasionally I want to see what I paid for something, or when it happened, or who the vendor was. So if I can't migrate the data somehow, I'd still have to keep a copy of quicken around to access that old data even if I was using some other software for current data.
I might be willing to give all that up if I could find something that worked for new transactions, but I haven't found it yet.
Based on your assessment you’d have almost no issue at all.
I’m almost certain you’d have no trouble running Quicken or Ableton. Ableton even has a Bottles configuration available, which is a one-click GUI install:
https://usebottles.com/app/#abletonlive
Isn’t Quicken also primarily a web/cloud app now?
Of course, if Wine-based solutions really don’t work, you also have the option to run a VM or dual boot for those one-off needs.
Your comment on plex server seems odd. It seems like most people run it via Docker, I can’t imagine what kind of Linux-specific issue you had. Docker/podman on Linux is quite superior to the experience on Mac and Windows.
As far as games, I have trouble finding games that don’t work. Steam and other launchers for other stores have pretty much eliminated this issue. There are even some online games with anti-cheat software that work in Linux.
Hundreds of hours? No, not really. Not these days. I know it’s hard to believe me but I went through this same thing switching from macOS to Linux last year. I was shocked, I almost thought my experiment would fail and I’d go back. But no, it’s so solid and a bunch of stuff I expected to not work just…worked. (I chose Bazzite as my distribution on a Framework 13).
Current quicken doesn't run on Linux, and the web version doesn't connect to any online investment accounts as far as I know, only bank accounts.
Ableton would still have the issue of: which plugins can I still somehow get to work? And which do I just lose? And then: how reliable is it? Does it really just work, or am I gonna be fighting glitches all the time?
I suspect part of the problem might be a mental block on my end. I spent 25 years as a sysadmin before I retired, and the idea of going back to that is just not acceptable. And I know it would be hundreds of hours because that's what I spent last time I tried to make the switch a few months ago.
I know it’s not the same application but Quicken Simplifi definitely connects to investment accounts.
Hundreds of hours makes me wonder what distribution you chose…I think if you choose something that’s more designed to work out of the box as a ready to go solution you might have a better experience. For example, since I like occasionally playing games, I chose Bazzite which comes with all the gaming stuff installed already and is an immutable OS that “just works.”
And for sure, I think trying to shoehorn complicated non-Linux applications into your Linux workflow might waste your time. I tried this with Autodesk Fusion and I almost got it to work. But it didn’t work. So I just use that on Windows, but it’s also nice to not be bothering with Windows for the majority of what I do.
The way I do it is that my laptop is Linux and my desktop is on Windows and I can just RDP into it over WireGuard to use Windows apps. So I guess this is cheating: ideally my desktop also leaves Windows but I haven’t made that leap.
I tried it (PopOS) on my old gaming laptop. It worked when it worked but when it didn't, it REALLY didn't. Linux unfortunately does not support my preferred (which I use semi-professionally) photo software, either (Capture One). Linux desktop feels like nuclear power to me - I've tried switching many many times over the last 20 years and it's just never quite there. I even use a lot of the open source solutions for office software etc. already, just on Windows.
I have an old Lenovo IdeaPad with fairly modest hardware, and I have both Fedora and Windows installed. About 90% of the time I use Fedora, and it works fine overall. The only thing that bothers me is that Firefox on Fedora feels noticeably more sluggish compared to Edge or Firefox on Windows. Maybe it’s just a perception issue, but I’d love to know what others are using as their web browser on Linux.
Edge is based on Chromium. I'd test any Chromium based browsers (Chrome, Brave, Vivaldi, etc) to see if performance is better.
it's really good these days. nvidia finally fixed their drivers (i suppose all it took was becoming the richest company on earth), kde is really nicely polished and all the friction from the x11 to wayland transition is over (at least from my perspective of an end user of linux desktops).
it's remarkably stable and reliable and way less annoying than modern windows or macos. i'm looking forward to a panther lake thinkpad with robust linux support and incredible battery life.
> The opening paragraph gives the reason why Linux is still not at the same level as windows:
> “ A few months and several headaches later…”
These are the words of someone that hasn't tried to install Windows on a recent machine. There's plenty of headaches there too.
> After a Windows update (that I didn't choose to do) wiped that partition and, consequently, the Linux installation
WHAT? How people could tolerate a software that wipes partitions without asking? I mean, I can see that it can be handy if OS managed partitions by itself without asking a user what to do, but if it leads to removing user created partitions, it is a no go.
A long time ago I tried to install Mandrake Linux. In the installation process I started to change partition table and wiped it all, due to a fact that Mandrake Linux used its own custom made partition managed written in Perl that applied changes to a partition table as they arrive. I was used to fdisk, that accumulate changes and allows to review them before applying, the behavior of Mandrake's partition manages was completely alien for me. It was the first and the last time I touched Mandrake or its successor Mandriva or anything with "Mand" in front, even despite the fact that it was my mistake, I should've learned more about the partition manager before using it. It was hard (or maybe impossible) to do in an installer, but it is not an excuse. It was the last time I used installers to install Linux, I don't trust them anymore.
But people are tolerating windows that can wipe a partition when you even do not touch them. I can empathize the author ditching Windows.
It is a known and fairly common dual booting people gets hit with in that windows update rewrite the dual booting setup, it is possible that the author misunderstood what had happened and that it could have been fixed by just fixing the boot setup.
That should of course not be necessary, but it could have saved a few hours of setup if that was the case.
Even though the author trivialized the problems he had getting his laptop up and running, there were enough obstacles to keep 90% of non-techies from actually getting it working. How many normies have a USB ethernet laying around and understand enough to uninstall drivers that are interfering with the UI?
It's next to impossible to get windows up and running if you dare not get a computer with it preinstalled, AHCI drivers are almost never included in the installation disc. And windows support gives you links to self installing exe files which you can't run, because you presumably run a linux live cd to be able to access the internet and ask for help, and exe files don't run on it, and can't be accessed by the windows installer either.
Then windows and intel support decide to blame the customer, because it's never their company's fault. Sample conversation: https://community.intel.com/t5/Rapid-Storage-Technology/Inte...
Getting Windows up and running isn't necessarily easier. There was a recent review of a handheld Windows device that needed unauthorized hidden driver updates to get performance to match Steam OS. The only way to avoid this type of stuff is to get a Laptop with Ubuntu or Windows preinstalled.
Windows is not exactly free of this sort of nonsense either. Just recently I built a new PC for a friend, and we wanted to keep using his old SSD and Windows installation. After messing about with Bitlocker recovery keys which was already cumbersome enough, we ran into a catch-22 issue where we needed internet access to be able to log in and verify his Microsoft account, but we needed to install a driver for the new motherboard's networking chipset first, for which you need to be able to log in to an account first. Eventually we found that you can use USB tethering from a phone to gain internet access, for which no special driver is needed, which got around the issue but it was not exactly an obvious solution.
With recent ntsync changes in Linux and wine.
Start citizen runs fine and gives excellent FPS NOW
I bought a thinkpad X1 carbon refurbished for about ~$300. I wanted to travel abroad with a laptop I wouldn't mind getting stolen if it happened. During the installation of Win11 it asked me to create a microsoft account, fuck that. I installed linux mint. Very nice experience overall, so nice to not get assaulted by ads in the start menu. Pleased to see the nightlight functionality (I googled f.lux for linux and that's how I discovered it) is built-in, and with flatpack I installed vlc, qbittorrent and obsidian. Firefox setup was straightforward. And that was it. This is a laptop for youtube and movies, I used the pre-installed libre office calc for small budget things and list making. It just worked for me.
The things that bother me about this laptop are primarily hardware related coming from using a mac laptop (which is the laptop I would mind getting stolen). Trackpad on X1 carbon is definitely not as good, battery life not as good. And opening the lid momentarily reveals what you were on before the lock screen comes on. This last one tastes more like a software issue. I had another issue with the hdmi port being finicky, but that's hardware again.
Overall very happy with this setup, linux mint is in great shape. I do wish there were fewer distro choices for people considering making the switch. It does introduce choice paralysis. I had to set aside my ego and pipe dream aspirations of being a "hacker" and went with a distro that seemed to be simple and straightforward to setup. Mint definitely is easier to install than windows, hands down, no need to create a microsoft account and you don't have to deal with all the slop features it tries to shove down your throat.
I just turned 60. My first computer was a 4.77MHz IBM PC with an 8088 processor, two floppy drives, and that magnificent mechanical keyboard IBM shipped in those days. My father, clearly receiving excellent financial advice at the time, picked up a 300bps Hayes modem for the princely sum of $599. CompuServe, here I come!
For context, this was early 1982. That 599 would cost 1,900 today — still a lot for a modem, but not quite the "gazillion" I remembered. Still, it illustrates just how far we've come.
Since then, I've written software professionally for over 40 years (with varying degrees of success). I've owned well over 200 computers — roughly 90% Wintel machines and 10% MacBooks. I've built them, repaired them, debugged them, and occasionally, after particularly frustrating days, set them back together again. I like to think I know my way around a PC.
Six months ago, I decided it was time. "This is the year of the Linux desktop on my machine," I declared, and I meant it. I installed over 20 of the most popular distributions from DistroWatch and used each one for at least two weeks. I was on a mission to rediscover the joy of computing.
For a while, it was genuinely fun. The sheer number of options was overwhelming in the best way possible. Customization everywhere I looked. All those incredible free software packages waiting in the repositories. In the beginning, I didn't even mind that I found myself doing full reinstalls every two or three days due to random instabilities. I was living the dream. Desktop effects and visual flair? Bring it on. Why does Compiz get so much criticism these days? What's more satisfying than a beautifully animated window?
Six weeks in, things changed. The Linux installations started to degrade — subtle at first, then undeniable. Random slowdowns. Browser links that wouldn't register for 10 or 15 seconds. The kind of frustration that makes you stare at the screen and wonder what's happening under the hood. It was consistent across distributions, which suggests this wasn't just a bad package here or there. Something fundamental was happening.
And yes, I'm aware of the irony. The system celebrated for its stability and reliability was the one leaving me longing for a responsive desktop environment. But that's exactly what I experienced, and I gave each distribution a fair shot.
There's also the practical reality: I'm a heavy Ableton Live user, and dual-booting has become increasingly grating. The Linux audio ecosystem has made real progress, but for my specific workflow, it's not there yet. Maybe in another year or two.
So I'm back on Windows 11. It works. It doesn't surprise me. After four decades, I'm okay with "it works" as a primary criterion.
Will I try Linux again? Maybe. The ecosystem continues to improve, and who knows what the next wave of AI-assisted tools might change. But for now, I wanted to share an honest account of what I encountered — because I genuinely wanted Linux to win.
What Linux distributions did you try?
What hardware were you using?
What kind of troubleshooting did you perform?
>> Six weeks in, things changed. The Linux installations started to degrade — subtle at first, then undeniable. Random slowdowns. Browser links that wouldn't register for 10 or 15 seconds. The kind of frustration that makes you stare at the screen and wonder what's happening under the hood. It was consistent across distributions, which suggests this wasn't just a bad package here or there. Something fundamental was happening.
Without more details it would be difficult to determine what problems you were having.
I have never had problems like you describe with Linux. I would be interested to know more details.
> Six weeks in, things changed. The Linux installations started to degrade — subtle at first, then undeniable. Random slowdowns. Browser links that wouldn't register for 10 or 15 seconds.
This is something that I would expect with Windows over time (not in a few weeks though) but has never happened to me with Linux. I have run less stable rolling release distros, and I have done multiple major version upgrades on the same machine over time over many machines.
its sounds to me as though you are doing some unusual things - few people use Compiz now because DEs like KDE provide those through their default Window managers.
> The Linux installations started to degrade — subtle at first, then undeniable. Random slowdowns. Browser links that wouldn't register for 10 or 15 seconds.
Very interesting. It is something I've never hit. Or, rather, I know the symptoms, but in my case they are caused not by the age of the installation, but by the memory use and swapping. When I compile something big, it can eat a lot of memory, and even 32Gb or RAM is not enough sometimes, there are lags and sometimes very painful.
It is really interesting because the behavior was persistent for all Linux distributions you tried, so probably there was some program that ate all the memory. Pity you didn't try running top and watching CPU and memory usage. Now I'll think of possible causes to the end of my days without any hope to find a real cause.
> Six months ago, I decided it was time. "This is the year of the Linux desktop on my machine," I declared, and I meant it. I installed over 20 of the most popular distributions from DistroWatch and used each one for at least two weeks. I was on a mission to rediscover the joy of computing.
Twenty distributions in six months, using each one for at least two weeks. Aside from the overlap, the post claims experience with debugging and repairing computers - but a lot of the blame here is placed on Linux without specifics of hardware of actual distributions used. Reads formulated like the typical narrative meant to deride Linux with surface level anecdotes.
> but a lot of the blame here is placed on Linux without specifics of hardware of actual distributions used.
I don't read blame in this; it's a description of his or her experience.
> Reads formulated like the typical narrative meant to deride Linux with surface level anecdotes.
I don't see this. It is possible for others to have different experiences and preferences without theirs being derision.
I hope one day to upgrade my laptop to a Honor/Huawei AMD Ryzen AI computer to run Linux. Modern Macbooks unfortunatly do not run Linux and the other laptop manifacturers basically produce expensive trash laptops
Modern MacBooks DO run Linux
Check out https://asahilinux.org/
> Supported processors - M1 and M2, not M3 or M4
The M2 models came out in 2022. You can't buy them new anymore.
Asahi linux doesn't support any of the currently sold macbooks, so I think it's fair to say modern macbooks don't run linux.
This is also at Apple's mercy, if enough people do it there's a non-zero chance they lock things down further. They've done even more consumer-unfriendly things before.
Looking at the support page, that comes with a lot of asterisks still.
What's so great about Huawei laptops?
I've been using an Asus EliteBook for the last 3 years. Despite taking a beating, the build quality has held up flawlessly and with 32 GB of RAM, 1 kg form factor, and great battery life, I have no reason to upgrade yet.
I'd rather be concerned about friendly fire from our own. As an US American, i'd rather be concerned about big tech and government backdoors than anything else. Especially in the current atmosphere of doom inside the US.
Nonsense. I've been running Linux just fine as my daily driver on Macbook M4 for a year. Besides battery life (VM is kinda heavy on it) and some minor issues (fewer than you'd think, especially with Vulkan landing in UTM today) it's the best Linux laptop I've owned ever so far. I like macOS as much as the next Linux user here, but it's fairly decent as a hypervisor. If anything, at least it comes with UI unlike Intel ME.
In case you hadn't heard of Framework, they're making modular laptops with the intention of reducing e-waste.
Repairable laptops don't reduce e-waste. You replace the mainboard and then what? You have a spare mainboard that sits there collecting dust. The best way to prevent e-waste is to build durable laptops that last a lifetime. Like Dell, HP and Lenovo have been doing for years (while also being very repairable at the same time).
We have open source documentation and CAD around the Mainboards to enable people to reuse them as single board computers or mini PCs after upgrading them out of their laptops. Even if the original owner of the Mainboard has no use for that, the functionality means it has resale value for others to use, reducing waste.
That is incorrect. All of our laptops have modular, upgradable memory. Our Framework Desktop is a mini PC that does not because AMD’s Ryzen AI Max platform doesn’t support it. Regardless, we maximized modularity and reuseability on that product too by following PC standards. It uses a MiniITX form factor, standard 120mm fan, and FlexATX power supply.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. They're expensive because they don't have the volume that other manufacturers have. If you dig in my comment history, you'll see me complain about the soldered in ram as well, and some of their other decisions. However their modular configuration is still better than the rest of them.
The line of defenses are different. All my Linux applications are either installed via Flatpak (which runs in a sandbox) or via the official package registry (which requires programs to be open source, and has a strong track record)
I installed CachyOS on a spare ssd with the idea that if it became a headache I would go back to windows. All my games work, even weird open source ones. All my sounds, monitor, kvm switch, volume rockers, Bluetooth game controllers, headsets, everything works with zero issue. Cuda works, I can run ML models, and it all works much better and faster than Windows. There's been no reason so far to switch back. Next, I'll wipe my NVME drive and be done with windows for good.
It is indeed a huge problem. The whole operating system now behaves and feels like the US government spying on everyone. Now, Microsoft has done that before, but with Win11 it really now seems almost shameless AND desperate in abusing users, while also alienating many of them via "features" they don't want, in particular all the AI garbage slop.
It does not really affect me that much, as I switched to Linux in 2005 or so, give or take, but some people around me, in particular elderly, depend on Windows still. So that's a dilemma. Do I want to install Win11 for them? Or Win10? And help maintain either? Replacing those computers with Linux is not so trivial. You would need virtually kind of 100% "what works on Windows must work on Linux too". Any complexity is a real total showstopper for many elderly people who have very little experience with computer systems.
> So why did I switch to Linux, and why am I writing this article about the experience? In a word: joy.
I think this is really what more people should take away from the switch. A lot of the time I see people not wanting to make the leap because they're afraid: Afraid of learning how to use the command line, afraid of asking other people for help, afraid of really using the computer. Learning how things work is how you learn to be free, and that holds true no matter your hobby. The cyclist with their repair kit, the driver with their beater car, the cook and their kitchenware. The more we give away for the sake of immediate convenience, the less control we have.
Linux is no longer in the realm of needing to be an expert to resolve issues, just a little bit of willingness to experiment. This isn't to say all issues are easily solvable, there's plenty of workflows that still require you to stay on Windows and some edge cases where things won't work as you expect. But I always encourage people to try, because why not?
>> Only thing holding me back is Adobe Lightroom.
You might be interested in Darktable or the less common fork called Ansel.
These have Windows versions you can try before moving your world to Linux.
Darktable is the best photography editing and classifying software I've ever used. New users should be warned it's quite power-user centric though. Adopting isn't like opening up Lightroom and messing around. You may have to read a bit of documentation regarding the modules and different workflows (i.e. Sigmoid vs FilmicRGB).
I think the Ansel developer has a YouTube series with tutorials on how to edit in Darktable using the Filmic RGB workflow. Not sure if that's where I'd get started nowadays (I've just adopted Sigmoid and it's way quicker to edit with it), but it gave me a solid base in how to use this software.
Darktable is another piece of software that really shows warts in UX.
For example, you can right click empty space to "remove" or "update path to file..." in the left hand rail. There shouldn't be a right click option in empty space.
Everything lower case makes it very difficult to quickly parse, especially the settings menu.
Inkscape is also full of these sins. For that matter, so is KDE.
I tested literally all alternatives to Lightroom, including even other commercial Windows only software, just because I want to get off the subscription. I tested two specific functions I use and need, and zero of all other programs do them well. It's frustrating.
let me know when you can run visual studio, the best IDE in the world, on Linux, and I wont flinch
Can recommend https://system76.com and Pop!_OS https://youtu.be/IOp7g7BNzRE?si=IKm6SLIdedgHr-u3 even if the name "Pop OS" isn't my favorite.
I like it because it's based on Ubuntu, so there's almost always a working guide/solution targeting it. It also ships with Nvidia drivers which saves a lot of headaches for some users. To me the game-changer is the fact that it supports tiling window management with minimal configuration.
It also looks and feels pretty sleek.
Not saying I'm not considering it given the current political climate, but I'm spoiled by my Macbook Air. The Thinkpad I've been issued for work costs about the same, runs hot like crazy, always has fans running, is cheap-feeling plastic, thicker, heavier, garbage touchpad, weird keyboard layout (printscreen right next to the arrow keys, what were they thinking?), mushy keys, barely serviceable display ... what do I buy if I want something as sleek and well-built and polished as Apple?