Enough with the fan wars. Let’s be perfectly honest for once. Windows, Linux, MacOS - they all suck. Sometimes in similar ways, sometimes in different ways. But they all suck.
Windows users - I get you, you use it because it sorta works 40%, of the time and sucks in the way you understand.
Linux users - I get you, you know all of the arcane incantations you need to quickly install, update, and troubleshoot your os in a terminal window. It works - once you apply your custom bash script that applies every change you need to get everything exactly how you like it. But again, it sucks in the way you understand.
MacOS users - well I don’t really get you. You know what you’ve done.
We deserve better than this, guys. We deserve an os that just works, is easy to use, easy to configure, doesn’t require an IT degree to use, and that we can recommend to our grandma without a second thought.
Probably an unpopular opinion on here, but the OS I recommend for grandparents and parents is ChromeOS. It’s so locked down that it’s almost indestructible, and they almost never need any specialized software that you’d use Windows/MacOS for. If you’re savvy enough you can also use Linux on it in a container, which is how I prefer to use it for day to day stuff (in my case, data related workflows).
Yep. I’m in IT, so every time my parents’ computer “does something weird,” I get a call. Bought them Chromebooks a few Christmases ago and the calls have all but stopped.
No that’s fair. It just assumes that everything you’ll ever need is on a browser, which in the case of grandparents, is probably true.
I would just um…never tell them about the Android app store because that can get real messy real quick.
Macbooks just make really nice ssh terminals for accessing your Linux dev environment. Though these days there are decent options for Linux terminals with a similar form factor, they just don’t tend to be much cheaper.
I know you made a joke about MacOS, but I am genuinely interested with what issue you have of it.
It sucks in the way you understand and know because nothing else even exists. No one is interested in having to cater to their walled garden unless there’s money to be made. Meanwhile both Linux and Windows have many open source projects and hobbyists working on things. So you might get a mac driver for something you buy but most of the time macos is an afterthought at best in many hobby projects. Also lol mac gaming is a joke. Even Linux is getting better support now than macos in that regard since the Steamdeck.
Yeah it was just a joke because I love to piss off the MacOS guys. But its like a brotherly teasing. Like, I love you guys, but I gotta rib you, you know.
I think Apple’s biggest sin is that everything works as long as all of your hardware, software, and co-workers have an apple emblazoned on their back. But the moment you have to work with anything or anyone that doesnt use Apple, you have problems. And Apple seems to encourage this because it gets their users to dread working with Windows or Linux users.
The sad thing is that I like a lot of their software. But using their OS is like having Steve Jobs standing over your shoulder and smacking you on the head when you try to shift outside of their intended workflow. I keep running into situations where Windows and Linux would let me go left or right (after finding a hidden and misnamed switch or running a well researched and crafted bash command), and MacOS just put a roadblock on the left because fuck you we said no.
I know that my ideal of a perfect OS is unrealistic. MacOS is more stable because it’s more rigid. Windows and Linux prove that the more flexible you are, the harder it is to use. But settling for one option and looking down at everyone who chose different isn’t going to help. We should all keep criticising our chosen option and root for others that are criticising their own. Because it seems like Apple, Microsoft, and the Open Source community are all in a rut, safely ignoring basic fucking usage issues because of an implicit assumption that their user base isn’t going anywhere.
I live in a mixed OS household. My wife and I both use windows and Apple machines for various purposes (my wife’s work requires both, my mac is just for dabbling) and I have some linux boxes for streaming or storage or whatever. And while that gives me the benefits of all three, I also have to deal with the problems of all three. And its a lot, guys. Not to mention they all refuse to work together.
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When I worked as a IT Tech at a University years ago we had a lot of MacOS users who believed they could just pick it up and use it like their iPhone. It was absurd how well their marketing worked because those users either forced themselves to learn it or dropped it and went back to Windows.
I know a lot of iOS users who have iPads and iPhones but still have windows PCs because they don’t have to worry about compatibility issues.
I’m one of those guys, IOS phone with windows PC. There really isn’t much out there that is as convenient as IOS, but theres no way I would use a Mac, as compatibility issues and more expensive hardware will ultimately hurt functionality.
But do they have a varying degrees of suck?
The OS I direct the technologically-illiterate to when I don’t plan on supporting it myself is invariably iOS. Boomers don’t need anything more anyway.
This is a pointless argument even saying that everyone sucks, linux runs worse on the desktop because it doesn’t get even 1/10th the investment from consumer hardware manufacturers compared to windows or mac to make it compatible. nevertheless linux is undoubtedly less difficult and more efficient to integrate than windows, for example the steam deck is done very well but it could be done better since KDE, wayland and arch do not have the same number of employees as microsoft.
It kinda felt like you were gonna break into song about the Year of the BSD Desktop for a second there!
macOS is BSD-based—so technically that’s been true for about 22 years
Havent had issues with my Windows PC in years. I dont have time to deal with linux stuff at this ppint in my life but used to play with it as a teen.
I guarantee you’ve had “problems” but you’re so used to Windows now that you have the muscle memory to deal with it without thinking much about it.
Using all three in my household kinda highlighted for me how much I was just ignoring or working around the ugliness of Windows every single day.
Sure thing buddy. I’ll say it again: no issues at all in ages.
ReactOS is promising.
It depends. It could also be a better idea to introduce a sort of “IT driver’s license” for everyone to have basic understanding/skills to use their devices. Sure, modern software stacks are ridiculously complex and no one understands every detail down to each machine code/assembly instruction, so there’s always a big amount of abstraction or simplification needed, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to request that someone with literal zero knowledge whatsoever should be able to perfectly use an OS or device. That’s also not even possible. I see it with my mother, she started from zero knowledge but she had to learn some basics to be able to do the few things she needs to do. Of course she uses Linux. No prior Windows knowledge means a much easier start with Linux of course. She wouldn’t have been able to use Windows either with zero knowledge. So this is a point that some forget: even Windows users need knowledge to be able to use Windows, and they probably already earned that knowledge in much earlier years. This Windows knowledge also works against you building up Linux (or even OS X) knowledge because Windows works quite differently from a Unix-like OS. This is not irrelevant: a Windows user who spent like 30 years in Windows has a much harder time learning Linux, than someone who didn’t have that. But, again, not really the fault of Linux that you indoctrinated yourself with Windows-only MS product specific knowledge over the last decades. This is probably the biggest problem there is, because almost everyone on the planet has already acquired some amount of Windows knowledge in the past. This works against you when trying to switch. Windows knowledge is mostly Windows-specific. When learning about IT, you should make sure that you learn things in a preferably OS agnostic way. Which is also the reason why schools etc. should never teach “using MS products”. They should always teach fundamentals, irrelevant of what you use afterwards. And those fundamentals should of course not be taught using commercial products, but rather open source software.
Then there are some fantasies which MS and Apple could establish in the broader population which aren’t true, for example that CLI/terminal usage is archaic and has no place on modern desktops anymore. CLI usage will always remain as a fast alternative to a lot of tasks which are hard or even impossible to do via GUI. Even MS has realized this and introduced Powershell, a new terminal, and winget, for example. As well as WSL (which was originally and still mostly is being used to have access to powerful Linux-based CLI utilities). Yet still a lot of people seem to think that CLI is obsolete or that it’s “hard”. Sure, if you do some scripting or complex one-liners, it can be too hard for someone without strong IT knowledge. But most commands are really basic and easy to understand. Even my mother is able to use basic commandline utilities, and she even prefers it sometimes over clicking around in the GUI. To claim that this is impossible or too hard to learn for a Windows user is, I don’t know. At least untrue. Probably even an insult to your own intelligence. And the main reason why most Linux users suggest doing things via commandline is that this is an almost distro- and desktop-independent way of doing things.
Also, not a big fan of the “fan” label here. Regardless of whether or not you like Linux (I like Linux as an OS more than Windows, because I think the Unix-way is better, but it’s also about so much more), I see a neutral, free/libre open source (FLOSS) operating system as the base for our digital lives as a necessity, and so I see Windows or OS X as intrinsically worse. I don’t see it as a kind of war between different products on equal footing. One product denies you any rights and control (and in more recent times, also extracts even more value and data from you than just the price you paid for the license to use it), and one that gives you full rights and control (and pretty much never extracts any more from you). It’s not OK that we use our devices for so many things in life nowadays, that all aspects of your life are being done via digital means nowadays, and yet the most popular operating systems are still 100% proprietary black boxes fully controlled by big US companies. This needs to change, and it should have happened a long time ago already. And Linux is simply the most mature and most well supported FLOSS operating system out of all of them. I actually wouldn’t care if it would be FreeBSD or OpenBSD or whatever instead, but I see Linux as being the most mature, well-supported and mainstream-viable option here. I only care that it’s not a damn black box I don’t have any real control over.
We need (almost) everyone on such open technologies like Linux, because the future (or even present) for Windows users looks like this: no control, no privacy (plus AI being trained on your work/data as well), big vulnerability when (not if) MS gets hacked (and they’re a huge, juicy target, and we already saw them being compromised twice in the last couple of years), pricey subscription to MS’ services which continues to get pricier once you’re successfully vendor-locked-in (once all your servers, desktops and data is in MS’ cloud, you won’t be able to easily leave their services anymore, so they are free to increase prices until it hurts you). Even if you happen to like the offering MS gives you, does that really seem like “the future” of computing to you? To me, that’s backwards. Or mainframe history repeating itself. Moving into proprietary clouds with vendor-lock-in only really benefits the cloud provider, which is why they want all users to join the “party”.
I’m not a big fan of Stallman in general, but his fundamental propositions e.g. that FLOSS software is intrinsically better than proprietary black boxes, is true. I wonder how long we still need as a society, to arrive at that realization. I assumed that the Snowden revelations as well as the desaster that Windows 10 was for privacy, would have already started a change in thinking about such things. But that probably wasn’t enough (strangely). I’m not sure what else would need to happen, but I guess something like first MS shoving all their users into their cloud, and then MS being hacked (again) but this time with malicious auto-updates being pushed to all MS software users as well, impacting tons of businesses. Then, maybe, people will start thinking whether this was such a great idea to begin with to play along with what MS envisioned as the “grand future”. Unfortunately I see parallels with the human behavior concerning climate change here as well. It’s like we have to first destroy our climate and suffer the consequences, before we realize it’s a bad idea and we should do it differently RIGHT NOW. We are just incredibly short-sighted and we only learn AFTER disasters, which were even announced long before. It’s tragic.
And for those people who know or think they could start using Linux but still use Windows because it’s more “aesthetically pleasing” or whatever else irrelevant aspect they make up to “justify” still staying on that sinking MS ship in 2023, please reconsider your priorities.
@eochaid @OsrsNeedsF2P yeah… I’m sorry but that’s like saying all screwdrivers suck. If you don’t take the time to learn how to use a tool you will always have a negative experience using said tool. You are never going to find an advanced technology that’s been dumbed down to the point where you can’t break it.
Except that there’s a ton of actual competition in the screwdriver market that has forced innovation and improved screwdriver functionality that it is essentially “solved”.
Even cheap screwdrivers are easy to use and will do the job, they just might break after a few years. Expensive screwdrivers add extra features and are built to a higher quality. You can absolutely look up reviews and find “the best” screwdriver.
You also don’t need to learn to use a screwdriver. They’re all built to be self explanatory. If they have advanced features that need explaining, they’ll include a manual that explains each feature at a high school reading level because that’s their target market.
Also, there is no locked in loyalty to screwdriver brands. If a brand releases a shit driver, they’ll get roasted. If a new contender puts out a screwdriver that’s better than the rest, tradespeople will flock to it.
I would love it for OSes to be treated like screwdrivers are.
Lol Linux is easier than Windows, you don’t need to know any troubleshooting secrets or bash. Even the installation is easier
How many people do you know with Android phones that know bash?
Terminal isn’t any more necessary on Linux than Windows but the commands are simpler
The downside of Linux is that it’s free, that means they can’t afford to pay manufacturers to include their OS at the same scale as Microsoft. Thus Windows will have more users and be a more profitable ecosystem to target software for
Been using Ubuntu on my desktop for a couple of years, following a couple years use of WSL (so I’m very comfortable using the terminal etc)
Off the top of my head, some of the stuff I ran into almost immediately:
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the package manager has been essentially unusable - the home page will work okay, but trying to view or install any applications through it, it just hangs forever. So I just go and use apt-get, but that’s not what I’d call ‘easier’ or ‘just works’
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Firefox windows regularly break - the contents of the page still work fine but I can’t resize or move the window, have to close it and open a new one. This happens multiple times a day
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only way I could get the discord app installed was with a .deb (since the package manager didn’t work), so as soon as it’s out of date I just get a message saying “you need to update”. So I have to use it in the browser
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speaking of discord - I like to use push to talk. Guess what, push to talk is impossible with Wayland. Supposedly this is a feature, not a bug
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also couldn’t get vnc working to remote home while travelling, due to Wayland. Maybe if I persisted with troubleshooting I could have got it to work, but it took me 30s on windows.
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installed zoom - it won’t launch from the gui, I have to launch it from the terminal. Also, ‘join this meeting’ web links don’t work, I have to copy paste them into the app
There’s plenty more quirks I run into all the time but thats just shit I run into with a clean install and very typical hardware.
I love interacting with Linux through the terminal - I hate interacting with it through a gui. That’s not my definition of easier lol
Not my Kubuntu experience, and sounds like something broke.
Which can happen with Windows too.
Have you tried just downloading the app image off of websites and running it that way? Most windows users don’t use the windows repos
I’ve had no issues with Firefox or discord but I don’t use wayland
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Windows requirements: sprawling list of unsupported hardware based on an arbitrary requirment for a security chip that doesn’t actually improve security at all
Linux: CPU (optional)
As a person who has used linux i can confirm that my daughter runs linux
I’ve worked exclusively with Linux servers since 2002 and exclusively Linux desktop since 2004 and I’ve come to the point where I prettyuch refuse to touch windows for fear it will infect me somehow.
I know most people don’t know any better but it’s insanity to me that anyone still pays money for windows. It’s a scam, no other words for it.
Don’t even get me started on Windows servers. It’s just sad to see how much money is spent on a company that has so litte focus on quality.
Even the online services suck. Dear God Microsoft, would it kill you to understand that people might have gasp TWO tabs open with your teams “app”?
Even azure runs Linux
I guess I pay for the convenience that I get when I buy a new game, simply press Install and start playing. I spend most of my free time playing games on PC, I have no other reasons to stick to Windows. I’ll happily switch to Linux on the day when every new release works with no extra problems, tinkering, waiting or searching caused by my choice of OS.
This is going to sound selfish, but I don’t have the “energy” of fighting against whatever the current meta is - I just have to appreciate the more invested people that drive Linux forward. I’ll just follow and use the OS where I get the smoothest overall experience for gaming (including thing like mouse/kb driver support). Windows is the current answer for this, one day it’ll be something else - hopefully Linux.
Shit’s been progressing really fast recently - I guess Steam Deck is doing some heavy lifting when it comes to motivating developers to keep Linux in mind. Direct support will always give the best results for everyone.
Games don’t always run perfectly under Windows on release either.
I specifically remember one of the CoD games running just long enough to use up all my vram, whereby it would promotly crash. Took about about two weeks to sort that one out.
My tinkering under Linux consists of downloading a game under Steam, ticking a compatibility checkbox, and playing the game. For other launchers, I simply open Bottles and install the launcher of my choosing. Been playing Diablo 4 under Battle.net just fine since launch.
It blows my mind just how bad file system performance is under Windows compared to Linux. I mean, you literally have to have an SSD in order for the OS to be responsive. Granted, most have SSD’s these days, but performance on spinning rust shouldn’t be that bad.
I’ll happily switch to Linux on the day when every new release works with no extra problems, tinkering, waiting or searching caused by my choice of OS.
Yes, it’s definitely getting close now…
2003 wants is comment back :p.
Linux people will never admit that it’s like that though. I have a few friends on Linux and when we all boot a game to play, the windows users like me sit in the lobby waiting for my friends to trouble shoot why battlefield 1 isn’t launching on Linux, then they give up and just boot into windows and magically the game starts.
I stopped gaming a long time ago but what I’m reading is that gaming in Linux has improved immensely and these days is in the same level as Microsoft Windows. I’d give that a try
I’ll happily switch to Linux on the day when every new release works with no extra problems, tinkering, waiting or searching caused by my choice of OS.
Let me give you an honest answer that no Linux users is willing to give you (certainly because they fear to scare people off of Linux): you will never see the day where Linux will be equal if not better than Windows for gaming (which it can be sometimes, but it’s not always the case) if not a certain amount of people get out of their comfort zone and are willing to try something new. In fact, nobody can improve anything in their life if they’re not willing to get out of their comfort zone.
You’re already using a PC to play video games, I did this choice too, so trust me, you definitely have the energy to change for a better OS, something ever you recognize as having qualities outside of games. Otherwise, you would’ve played exclusively on console where you actually have a plug and play experience… unfortunately at the cost of your freedom to use the machine you bought however you want, besides all the other considerable disadvantages.
For me, Linux made as much progress as it can do, meaning now, for Linux to be viable for gaming, either companies start to move their asses and make Linux native games (which they can easily do, if they’re willing to use the right tools for their game like Vulkan) but I hardly see that coming any time soon, or new users have to come to Linux so that companies would finally care. Personally, I made my choice by making the first step.
It’s the professional software that’s lacking in Linux, and that’s the only reason I keep a Windows machine around. For music production, video production, design work, photography and so on, Windows has good commercial software that is well established in these professions.
But for most people, including gamers, Linux is a very good option right now.
I prettyuch refuse to touch windows for fear it will infect me somehow.
Don’t worry. It won’t. It’ll just frustrate you. Windows has gone seriously downhill since 7.
It was alret horrible at 95. I used windows for about a good 2 years in my life. I’ve been on Amiga is before, Unix osses for a while and over 21 years now on Linux. Windows, any version, compared to any of those is a joke
I love windows… I appreciate Linux but as a standard user, I have no need for Linux. I’m careful and I’d say an advanced user. I avoid dodgy websites and idk… I have a dual boot with fedora but I really don’t use fedora because no need?
Let’s assume you’re not a power user who would be confined to Microsoft’s “can’t do” or “too complicated” rules; why do you pay for windows?
And if you pirate, why? Then just use Linux, it’s tree and does all you need
And if iou “got it for free with your computer”, you didn’t, you paid Microsoft ab obligatory tax, like ot or not. Why?
The KDE UI looks and feels the same like windows but is superior, you don’t always have to reboot after any minor issue or change, it’s free, it doesn’t spy on you, and you don’t have the virus bullshit for a variety of reasons
If you don’t know better, I can understand, but you do. You know Linux is out there, why windows?
Thanks. I’d say I’m a power user for program use (multiple windows, programs, etc.).
I got it for free with my computer (lol) when I bought an open box product from a large computer store on discount.
I used to be a sailor but have hung up my hat. The seas seem to be calling me though.
I guess I haven’t really been confined by windows as much as I have been free to do things. Maybe the things I want to do are not extending beyond the limitations that you see. What are some things that you can do that you can’t normally do on windows?
Are there distros that you recommend over others? Do different distros do different things? Are they for different purposes? I have some experience in fedora, Ubuntu, and very little in kali2 (school teaching)
I’d recommend Kubuntu. Been using it for ages. I’ve been on Linux desktop for 20 years now and kubuntu is by far my favorite. It had the KDE desktop (on Linux you have different desktop brands) and KDE is by far the most powerful, prettiest, and most windows like. See it as windows desktop on steroids.
Ubuntu (on which kubuntu is based) also has a nice way of how it manages the files though that is more a oeiet user thing.
Can’t recommend Kubuntu enough
I like Linux a lot, but saying you can’t understand why someone would run Windows on a server just shows a lack of knowledge. Linux is great in a lot of server applications in the application realm. However, it doesn’t get close to the power of Active Directory and Group Policy for Windows device management. Besides that, a lot of people are more comfortable with a UI for managing DHCP, DNA, etc in a SMB environment. Even if they prefer a command line for those tools PowerShell allows those people to coexist with those that prefer a GUI. Under certain circumstances, (mainly ones where a business is forgoing AD for AAD), Linux can be the right choice. Pretending that there’s no place for Windows Server, though, is asinine.
The main problem are companies forcing windows servers and technologies when they are not the good ones for the task.
If one needs to set up desktops for accounting, windows is fine. But I saw companies setting shared NFS drives used by Linux severs on windows machines! Not joking!
I know companies that even deploy kubernetes clusters on windows servers!
Just because finding cheap windows engineers is easy, everyone has had an experience on windows to put on a cv. Than some of that cheap labor go up the hierarchy as head of a random infrastructure team because all good sys engineers moved to manage linux servers after some time, he recruits people like-minded, and in few years you ends up with a team refusing to do the right thing because “we know windows and windows can do the same as Linux and Microsoft is good for governance and Linux bad”. Execs don’t understand the difference and force architecture to go along because they don’t believe it’s worthy to rebuild a team, we are anyway using windows for accounting and execs laptops, it can’t be that bad! Even accenture and mckinsey consultants us it! And they told us that wls2 is the holy grail
Corporate IT is the peak of suboptimal tools for the job because politics and money
We use both. Its not my department but i know the server guys are using windows for some servers and linux for others and the decision is normally made based on which is going to be best for the specific needs of the function of that server.
Pretending one is outright better than the other is childish. Just use whats best at the time.
You know, I’ve been using Linux on desktops and laptops for like 20 years now. I can count on one hand then number of times I’ve had hardware support issues. Outside of a fingerprint scanner, I’ve been able to solve all of those issues.
Meanwhile, my adventures across the years dealing with Windows drivers led me to finally say “fuck it” earlier this year and nuke the Windows install on my gaming rig in favor of Nobara.
I’ll take Linux hardware support over Microsoft any day of the week.
This! I literally give Windows a chance every version. I even kind of liked Windows 11 this go around.
But something always breaks and no matter how much I trouble shoot the fix is to reinstall windows. To which I say screw that and start distro hoping.
11 with 2022 gaming laptop just stopped updating. The only non native app I had on the thing was STEAM! I have been using Linux for 18 years because it’s the only way I know how to fix Windows.
I switched to arch using qtile wm a few months ago. Couldn’t be happier. If a game doesn’t run on my rig either though stream or lutris well I just don’t play it, there’s way more games to discover and play.
I’d rather stick my head in the rotating blades of a combine harvester than deal with HP printer drivers…
Well, you’ve got me on that one.
Fuck Goodix
Sorry, I feel like I’m going to regret asking but… what?
Goodix is the manufacturer of some popular FP readers (at least it’s the one I have on my 2021 XPS).
And it’s known to not support Linux at all.
So for me it’s just a useless button sitting there doing nothing.
I remember having some issues with Ubuntu 10 because I had a janky pentium 4 built out of scrap. I think it was an pci ide card I had issues with.
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They have a point. I’m in the market for a new laptop and I have, so far, returned two of them.
First, I tried a Huawei Matebook 16. I was foolish, but I thought it was “easy”. No NVidia, no dGPU at all - just part that looked very standard. It was based on the info I had gathered from a few years of Linux usage: “Basically avoid NVidia and you’re good”. It was anything but. Broken suspend, WiFi was horrible, random deadlocks, extreme slowness at times (as if the RYZEN 7 wasn’t Ryzen 7-ing) to become less smooth than my 5 year old Intel laptop, and broken audio codec (Senary Audio) that didn’t work at all on the live, and worked erratically on the installed system using generic hd-audio drivers.
I had a ~€1500 budget, but I raised it to buy a €1700 ThinkPad P16s AMD. No dGPU to speak of, sold with pre loaded Linux, boasting Canonical and Red Hat hardware certifications.
I had:
- Broken standby on Linux
- GPU bugs and screen flickering on Linux
- Various hangs and crashed
- Malfunctioning wifi and non working 6e mode. I dug, and apparently the soldered Wi-Fi adapter does not have any kind of Linux support at all, but the kernel uses a quirk to load the firmware of an older Qualcomm card that’s kinda similar on it and get it to work in Wi-Fi 6 compatibility mode.
Boggles my mind that the 2 biggest enterprise Linux vendors took this laptop, ran a “thorough hardware certification process” on it and let it pass. Is this a pass? How long have they tried it? Have they even tried suspending?
Of course, that was a return. But when I think about new laptops and Windows 11, basically anything works. You don’t have to pay attention to anything: suspend will work, WiFi will work, audio and speakers as well, if you need fractional scaling you aren’t in for a world of pain, and if you want an NVidia dGPU, it does work.
Furthermore, the Windows 11 compatible CPU list is completely
unofficialarbitrary, since you can still sideload Windows 11 on “unsupported” hardware and it will run with a far higher success rate than Linux on a random laptop you buy in store now. Like, it has been confirmed to run well on ancient Intel CPUs with screens below the minimum resolution. It’s basically a skin over 10 and there are no significant kernel modifications.To be clear: I don’t like Windows, but I hate this post as a consumer of bleeding edge hardware because it hides the problem under the rug - most new hardware is Windows-centric, and Linux supported options are few and far between. Nowdays not even the manufacturer declaring Linux support is enough. This friend of mine got a Dell XPS 13 Plus Developer Edition, and if he uses ANY ISO except the default Dell-customized Ubuntu 20.04 audio doesn’t work at all! And my other friend with a Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition has various GPU artifacts on the screen on anything except the relative Dell-customized Ubuntu 20.04 image. It’s such a minefield.
I have effectively added €500 to my budget, to now reach an outrageous €2000 for a premium Linux laptop with no significant trade-offs (mostly, I want a good screen and good performance). I am considering taking a shot in the dark and pre ordering the Framework 16, effectively swaying from traditional laptop makers entirely and hoping a fully customized laptop by a company that has been long committed to Linux support will be different.
I’ve thrown Linux on every laptop I’ve ever owned, and a couple of family members laptops as well and the past 15 years and haven’t encountered 1/10th of the issues they you have.
Complaining about broken suspend is funny because Microsoft basically killed S3 sleep in favour of the battery sucking S0. If anything it works better in Linux because you won’t open up your laptop to find that Windows Update fucking ran in the background while it was sitting closed in your backpack and rebooted.
I think your issue might be more of an AMD issue. They have a long history of buggy mobile hardware even on Windows.
I mean hell I threw Fedora on to my Intel MacBook Pro and the only real annoyance I had was not being able to reliably disable the SPDIF light in the 3.5mm jack.
I’m currently using the non-linux version of the XPS 13 2-in-1 and my OS experience is actually the opposite of your friends. I can install any Linux ISO without issue, but the standard Win 11 ISO refuses to work because it can’t detect any storage drives.
As far as daily driving Linux on it, the only things that don’t work are the fingerprint reader and webcam. It’s a bit of a piss off given that non-touchscreen version uses similar spec hardware that does support it but it doesn’t really affect daily use.
Buy a framework. Only Linux issue is screen tearing on X11 with fractional scaling. Wayland is fine.
Why would you throw away so much money for new and shitty hardware, if Linux runs perfectly on old robust devices, which can be bought for a fraction of what you invested?
More important IMO is the fact that Linux re-detects hardware on every boot! Try moving a Windows hard drive to completely new hardware and getting it to boot. Not a chance…
I’ve done that multiple times without issue.
The windows boot drive? Dont think thats possible anymore. If its completely new hardware.
Im not sure what the trigger is but if enough hardware has changed it wont boot.
I had to install windows fresh on a new hard drive when i bought a new pc last year.
If the partitioning is fine (GPT with EFI System Partition), it should boot up even if you move the disk to a completely new machine. You will need to re-activate Windows though after booting.
You may have had the ESP on a different drive than the one you moved to the new machine, perhaps?
Linux does support more CPU architecture (x86 Arm PowerPC RISC) while Windows only support x86 and some Arm CPU so technically Linux support more CPU but Windows does support more GPU and Plug and Play devices (controller, external sound card…)
I would probably rephrase it as “external plug ‘n’ play devices supporting Windows”. You can be fairly certain Microsoft wasn’t the one doing the work.
I think game controllers, external sound card or external Ethernet they all use the same generic driver that Microsoft provide to them, and those devices can add their own functionality on top, but Linux can’t have that driver because it’s MS property
You’d be surprised how many external sound cards will not function without their official driver, despite being class compliant on mac/linux.
Even with x86 only, Linux supports more CPUs. For example, the Ryzen 5 1500x in my old PC isn’t supported by Windows 11.
Wha? Even a bleeping potato can run Linux nowadays, with zero issues at day 1.
t. Got a Orange pi zero 3, and the lil’ bastard is rocking solid – even with (near zero) support.
Imagine not having all your drivers baked in into your kernel
Imagine not knowing about kernel modules 🤣
shit like this comment thread is why regular people use windows. who the fuck wants to learn about this kind of stuff when you can just point and click? especially when the people who should be helping you post brain-dead self-congratulatory gate-keeping shit like this.
if y’all want people to use linux maybe make it palatable instead of maintaining its difficulty so you can get a chubby about how smart you are
I could never go back to Windows, after having tasted the freedom of Linux.
Linux has its flaws, but so does Windows. And for me, the flaws in Windows became much more annoying than the ones in Linux. Game compatibility was the main factor that kept me backt from using it on a desktop, and that’s a non issue nowadays.
Flaws I didn’t pay for piss me off a lot less.
Raise your hand if you ever paid for that hot chunk
I consider myself forced to pay for it every time I buy a laptop whose price has to include Microsoft’s cut off the action.
You are not forced, plenty of manufacturers offer FreeDOS variants for so many years, just support them instead.
While that’s certainly also part of it, I would still stand by my opinion even if Windows was completely free.
For me it’s the basic things that drive me crazy in Windows: the Start menu doesn’t work half of the time, and it shows web results above the program you want to run. File operations are slow and the File Explorer crashes a lot. Application windows constantly steal focus from the one I’m typing in, leading to passwords being typed into code, documents, web browsers or other unsafe places. Background indexing is constant and eats up CPU, and the file search still takes forever despite all this indexing.
These are all basic things that Microsoft has had decades to get working, and they’re all still broken. Microsoft always seem to be paying attention to anything but the quality of the user’s experience.
By contrast, Linux is just relaxing.
Man that MS indexing is so terrible. I shut it off because it was robbing my system when trying to work, and as you said it is slow anyway. Compared to GNOME desktop where the indexing is invisible to user, I hit the Suoer key type a few letters it instantly shows me results as you would expect indexing to work.
I don’t understand how Microsoft manage to make it so bad. What kind of index is it building that it can be so slow?
Asking the real questions
Game compatibility
Steam+Proton is pretty impressive. I can play Baldur’s Gate 3 on my Thelio. Does get a little toasty, though …
I always see people say this but does no one here use professional apps like solidworks or revit? Are there good Linux alternatives? I’d switch to Linux but I need solidworks for work I do.
Windows is the defacto standard for desktop PCs for a reason. In a corporate setting it’s kind of the ideal.
Because of the sheer number of users, most software is built with Windows in mind and therefore has the most support. It’s pretty rare that you find an application that doesn’t have a Windows build available.
On top of that tools like Active Directory, and group policy makes managing thousands of machines at scale a reasonably simple affair.
Microsoft is a corporation rather than a community so you can always expect their main goals to be profit-driven and that comes with some nasty baggage, but it’s not enough that it’s easy for professionals to make the switch.
Linux has made lightspeed progress over the last decade, especially with Proton making games mostly work cross platform, but outside of specialist use cases, the vast majority of business PCs and by extension home PCs will be running Windows for the foreseeable future.
I work in software and I haven’t touched windows in a very long time. Even back whenever I worked on FPGA development all of that software ram on Linux, so I think you’ll find that this is very field dependent.
The only real hardware problems I come across these days with Linux is WiFi cards being shit. As far as I’m concerned, carefully selecting hardware is a problem for the *BSDs at this point. Am I missing something?
Am I missing something?
No. I think you are correct and mostly even wifi hardware works fine, at least compared to *BSDs. I use Linux across a wide-range of machines, both desktops and laptops, with mostly very recent components. The only other unsupported hardware I have personally come across is some gaming hardware (e.g. Thrustmaster racing wheels) and an add-on sound card (Soundblaster AE9). And of course, some things like DLSS3 with Nvidia do not work.
I bought a new PC recently and put Linux on it. It didn’t work with the on-board Bluetooth until I did some research and digging through the logs and compiled and installed a kernel driver and edited some config files as root.
Also the fps on my Nvidia graphics card is really bad in games.
So it does still have driver issues, I’d say.
Also the fps on my Nvidia graphics card is really bad in games.
Are you sure you have the official Nvidia driver installed? Most Linux distros, if not explicitly configured otherwise*, use the open source “nouveau” driver by default. Since that driver doesn’t support some vital aspects - such as frequency scaling - of the hardware, the performance is bad.
*Some distros, like Pop! OS and EndeavourOS, offer a “Nvidia install”, meaning that the official driver will be installed and configured upon OS installation.
I would place the blame for poor driver support directly on the chip/device manufacturer and not on Linux (whoever that is).
I know hardware compatibility has massively improved, but back when I was messing with Linux in high school compatibility was a huge issue. I managed to end up with two laptops and some desktop hardware that were truly difficult to get running. It’s like I somehow found a list of incompatible hardware and chose the worst options.
The most frustrating were an evil Broadcom (I think) wireless card and an AMD switchable card (they did actually make a few). That graphics card wasn’t supported for very long and was a bother even in Windows.
Edit to add: I was just saying that to point out why some people might have that opinion, even if it isn’t valid anymore. I’m actually thinking of jumping back on the Linux bandwagon.
Linux OSes have always been the ones to run on everything lol, it took Microsoft like a decade to make Windows run on ARM
Which is weird because WinNT 4.0 had several CPU architecture ports. Then MSFT dropped them all for only x86.
Linux has better support for the long tail of hardware. Windows has better support for bleeding-edge hardware. The main reason for this is money.
Except for my AMD 1800x that was 4 years old when W11 launched and not supported.
I hate to break it to you but 4 years old is nowhere close to “bleeding edge” when it comes to PC hardware.
It’s also not obsolete.
That’s kind of my point. Linux supports it, but Windows doesn’t anymore. Why? Money - OEMs aren’t selling them anymore, so why spend time to support new features on them? On the flip side, the heterogeneous chiplet structure of the 7950X3D was supported on Windows from day 1, while on Linux the scheduler is still unaware of the different perf characteristics to this day. Why? Same answer - money. AMD doesn’t make money selling 7950X3D on Linux, so they’re not going to spend time writing a kernel driver to optimize perf on it.
the 7950X3D was supported on Windows from day 1, while on Linux the scheduler is still unaware of the different perf characteristics to this day.
That may be true, but with the ridiculous increase in performance for this CPU due to the massive amount of L3 cache (X3D), I don’t care. I just replaced a Linux compute node with an Intel Xeon Silver compute node with a custom built Linux node that features the 7950X3D, and I’m benchmarking now at over twice the speed (CFD-type work)! Not bad for a $650 consumer CPU. The difference between 128MB and 12MB of L3 cache is apparently pretty huge, from what I’m seeing. I think it’s important to note that L3 cache can be shared across CPU cores.
The problem is that only half of the chiplets have access to the large cache. If the scheduler isn’t aware of that and a lot of data is shared across cores (as in the case for many games), you’ll miss out on most of that performance. AMD wrote a driver for Windows to help optimally schedule threads with high cache intensity to the expanded cache chiplets, but they didn’t do it for Linux. If your workload is not very chatty between cores, and threads don’t need to synchronize at 60Hz, it won’t matter as much. But for game workloads, it makes a big difference, and can actually result in worse performance than the homogenous chiplet design of the mid-tier 7800X3D if you get it wrong.
