Additionally, what changes are necessary for you to be able to use Linux full time?
PUBG, waited for years and then caved.
Was using arch +5 years and eventually I just wanted to play some PUBG. win10 has been bearable as it doesn’t change much anymore. Wallpaperengine is nice plus. Yes there are ways to achieve the same on Linux, but haven’t seen anything as good with built-in library for Linux.
Back on win10 for something like 6 months, during which I switched to NVIDIA. NVIDIA + Wayland is not really something I wan’t to tackle anytime soon.
Being able to focus on gaming, fixing other parts of my home lab and automating updating other system has been breath of fresh air. Gaming and upkeep of the system was always some amount of work, when comparing to windows. I have felt the windows hasn’t gotten in my way almost at all, ( apart from getting ansible automation working. Windows being the target of palybooks. But that was just my inexperience with windows and such stuff)
For now if my win10 installation stays solid, I don’t see myself going back anytime soon on my gaming machines. Even on my lan pc getting full control of fans has been a hassle on Linux, yes there probably is kernel module on aur for the chipset or the support will be in future kernel but the simplicity of https://github.com/Rem0o/FanControl.Releases is just golden, I don’t know will I bother when everything works without hassle on windows. This is all on ASRock B650E PG-ITX WiFi.
After troubleshooting/automating Linux systems for 8 hours a day I guess I just want to be able to play games and relax after work. For now the os of choice for that is windows for me.
Couldn’t agree more. It’s the niche, or hardware-specific, or “what do I need to do this?” apps. Does this game work on Linux? No idea, I know it works on Windows though.
Fan Control is simply one of the best apps in the last couple years. I can’t live without EqualizerAPO. I recall installing Logitech G-Hub, turning off the RGB on my mouse, then uninstalling it. MSI products require and app, also.
It’s just easier on Windows, the apps exist and work reasonably well.
HDR support didn’t work when I tried it for madvr or games. Not sure if that area has changed.
No, it’s being worked on but it’s not there yet.
Admittedly, it’s been a long time since I did anything with linux, but I have done some. I’m not a developer, I don’t know how to write any code. I know some DOS scripting and now some powershell. If I need to do anything slightly different with linux, it would require me to learn a whole new scripting language, and all of the documentation I’ve seen for anything linux seems to be written for an audience of people who already really know what they’re doing in linux and just need a specific reference material.
I’ve had mainly Windows machines all my life, I have been forced by necessity to figure out how to do what I need on those. I imagine if I’d had linux machines since … 1995? I would feel as comfortable with linux now. But the barrier to entry to even having a linux machine, let alone making it do what I needed it to do, back in the late 90s, early 2000s, was way higher than it was for Windows. It arguably still is.
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So I didn’t quite try it to switch, rather installed linux to dualboot specifically because one game had lag issues on windows, and ultimately there are just 2 things keeping me from making linux the main and windows the backup.
One is game compatibility, while linux has come a long way it’s simply more convenient to be on windows which can effectively run everything (even if there are a few more performance issues at times).
The other is that I couldn’t find a DE of which I liked the look that could handle high refresh rate monitors properly. LXDE works for my purpose and I think it looks ok, but by design it just doesn’t feel as nice to use as windows.
Hated gnomes UX, liked KDE but it couldn’t handle my monitor. Wouldn’t wanna bother with trying many more options unless I actually know it will work with my hardware.
I rode in waves. Last time I switched back to Windows was just to play one game. As far as my life goes normally I’d do everything else in Linux so I dual boot. But I have 2 windows laptops for work and there’s no getting around that.
Two things: the Adobe Creative Cloud (which I hate but am totally dependent on) and better support for FreeSync with more than one display. Even with a 7900XT, which gets open-source drivers, graphics stuff is just easier on Windows.
There’s Krita, Gimp, Blender, Stable Diffusion and more
Could you please elaborate on the freesync issues you were having? I might buy an AMD GPU next, so I’m curious.
My work uses Azure Virtual Desktop and there is no Linux client for it, only the web client which seems vastly inferior. Even running in a browser on Windows the colours are terrible.
I used Linux desktop as my work rig for a year and a half. I absolutely hated it, had constant problems and lost time almost every day to stupid workarounds. When I tried to search or ask for help the answer I was usually met with was “your hardware is wrong” or “why do you want to do that” or more often than no “you’re using the wrong distro, you should use [different one every time]”. I also found the UI to be quite ugly and often obtuse, you can tell that there’s very few open source UI/UX designers. I switched back to windows and I’ve had better performance and less bugs.
Do you feel like you ever got over the initial setup period? A lot of what you are describing is what I encounter after a fresh install but I don’t typically have any issues after a little bit of tweaking.
Maybe because it was a work laptop I didn’t spend as much time on setup as I would for a personal computer. There’s were a lot of issues that I solved with tweaking at the start, but many of the lingering issues either had no solution or were so intermittent or complex that I couldn’t figure out how to word it in a way that would lead me to the solution.
Hate to say it but, laziness… bought a new gaming laptop with windows 11. My old laptop was running Mint for a couple of years and I really loved it. Software wise everything I needed just worked.
My primary desktop is Windows 11, but literally no other computer I personally own runs Windows. Part of it is games, part of it is proprietary software (music production, dj, etc). I could probably game on Linux full time, but until the commercial software situation is improved I will always have an additional Windows or Mac computer.
Gaming and HFR support.
Broken bootloader.
I’ve used Ubuntu as at least a dual booted daily driver since 2016 and have also discussed with friends and family about what they liked and hated about it when they have used it, how they use their computer and whether they would swap. Here are some observations from that:
Hardware Issues and stability: For the most part, I’ve not really had to deal with hardware issues outside of trying to get NVidia graphics cards to play nice with everything else. However, I often have weird system stability issues or just plain quality of life. E.g. 2-in-1 decides randomly when put into sleep mode to flip the screen to a random orientation which I then have to go into settings to revert back. I’m used to buggy and annoying software, but for a lot of people this is a complete killer. Similarly, while I love the diverse options within Linux, having so much diversity means that troubleshooting and testing is so much more complex and you will usually have to go over multiple answers in order to solve your problem making it much harder to get into and use reliably
MS Office: This one tends to be the largest reason in my experience for people not going over to Linux. For a lot of people this is their main use for a computer and the fact that it is not available on Linux is a deal breaker. I’ve tried the online version and it is just not a viable alternative (nor is any cloud option). Similarly LibreOffice is a lot better than nothing, but the UI feel like it came out of the 90s, Latex is faster and easier to use than the math input, I never have been able to get referencing to work, drawing tools are lacking if they even exist at all. Opening office documents breaks all the formatting and looks awful, etc etc.
Games and other windows software: While I think value has done wonderful work in encouraging developers of games to support Linux and Proton does work quite well, you never quite know how a game will perform on Linux and if it will even work, whereas on Windows you can guarantee it has been tested and will work well. Similarly for other software: Will this work on Wine or Crossover? Maybe or maybe not but it’s a bit hard to swap if you are paying large amounts for software just to find out it cannot run on Linux.
A reason to move: I think Linux will always remain fairly niche as for most people there just isn’t a good enough reason to move over from Windows or Mac. These platforms already offer them everything they want in a computer in an easy to use and polished way. For most people, they really don’t care that windows is constantly spying and with ads everywhere already, what is a few more ads or that the cost of a Mac and is absolutely extortionate. Moving across would require a whole bunch of troubleshooting and learning how to do just about everything all over again and that would require a really good reason to do which Linux doesn’t (and possibly can’t ) provide and MS and Apple haven’t done anything stupid enough to offer.
That I was not able to play all my games on linux. I heard that it is now possible tough - with something called Proton.
Not all of them. Some of them don’t work due to outright refusal from developers to support anti cheat on Linux.
What does anti-cheat mean in this context? Game developers don’t want to code measures to prevent cheating on Linux so they don’t support it at all?
Stuff like East Anti Cheat needs to have support for Linux essentially turned on. Otherwise the game won’t run even if WINE/Proton can run the game fine. I think a lot of devs don’t bother because they don’t know Linux in case OS specific support might be required, and the market was fairly small up until the Steam Deck came out.
For an example. A few weeks after the Steam Deck came out, suddenly Apex Legends and a few other games could be run on Linux without anti-cheat issues. The developers just turned on a switch and made a new build essentially.
For the longest of time is Linux users were mostly just told that people use Linux to cheat in games and that’s not really the case.
Overall though there is no real reason why anti-cheat software shouldn’t be able to work on Linux.
Yeah proton works very well, in some rare cases running the games in question better than windows. Right now the main issue is games with super invasive kernel level anticheat, eg. Valorant, Siege, Fortnite, etc. So really mostly shooters.
I play mostly indie titles with retro graphic, so that fits me well :)
Yeah those should work great.
Valve has contributed a lot into Proton for the Steam Deck which makes it great for Linux users.
