I'm curious as to what everyone's reasons are! The Linux desktop has came quite a far ways in the last few years and is improving every day. I'd say for most people, Linux could easily replace Windows as their daily driver nowadays.
Ive been using linux as my sole OS for the last 20+ years. Nothing windows based, anymore. That said, i find questions like this a bit disingenuous. There are a LOT of reasons why it aint the year of the linux desktop, and if youve been using Linux for any amount of time, you likely know this too. That one or two cruicial apps, games, compatibilty between office suites, ease of use for those who aren’t technologically inclined, forward momentum, hardware incompatibility (broadcom, realtek come to mind specifically, im sure theres others)
I've got Linux installed around the house. I also have a Mac and a couple of Windows machines.
My most recent journey into dual booting my daily driver was a mess. Theoretically everything on the laptop was well supported. But I had to fix a dozen problems and by the end I just couldn't care anymore.
I have had a job in IT or a related field for nearly two decades and have been an enthusiast since before that. But it's not my life and I don't want to spend all my time futzing with config files. I want to play games, make things out of wood, play music, ride motorcycles, hang out with people I like, and generally just live my life. Trying to get an OS running is so far down the list that I can't be bothered to care.
I still use it for a lot of programming and automation tasks as well as steam remote play devices I have set up like consoles. I use my Mac for music production because I already own the software there and I like my workflow. Windows is my "daily driver", but most of what I use it for is Internet and Office (which would be Linux if I hadn't had to fuck with it so much). Honestly, I use my phone more often than anything else so I guess vanilla Android is my daily driver because I haven't booted a computer in two days.
I understand the many issues currently standing and that they are probably a long way from solving, I was genuinely just curious as to what people's reasons are and that I could maybe answer some questions people had, not trying to be disingenuous or anything. Although, I do believe for many people (the people who simply use their computer as a boot loader for Google Chrome to watch Netflix and check their e-mail) that Linux could replace Windows for them, but hey, if Windows works for you, or you have some piece of software that only works on Windows, use Windows!
It really do be video games. It's not often I run something that absolutely wouldn't work in Linux but it happens enough that I can't be bothered to set up dual-booting.
You should give something like Bottles a try, it manages all that stuff for you so you don't have to deal with it. Makes life a ton easier.
I have decisional anxiety and every time I go to try and pick a version to install I get recommend like 5 different builds, get intimidated, and fall back to my safe space
decisional anxiety
Use Linux Mint, if you can't get Mint to work then don't bother with other distributions and try again next year.
Just wanted to let you know that I'm sending this to you from Linux Mint :)
Really appreciate the push and recommendation!
Vidia gaems
And I'm scared of learning a new operating system.
I'd say a large majority of games run on Linux either natively (quite a lot of games have been ported because of the Steam Deck, which runs Linux!) or under Proton just fine, at least in my experience. The only troubles you will have are games with DRM (things like Denuvo) or anti-cheats (things like BattlEye or Easy Anti-Cheat, which both have Linux support, but the developers have to opt-in to it and not many do). There's actually a website called ProtonDB that has an extensive catalogue of games and the status of their Linux support, maybe all the games you play already run!
these days, if a game doesn't run on linux, I don't bother buying it lol
There’s definitely a case to try gaming on Linux if you already have a reason to use it but when high end gaming is your top priority it’s come a long way but it’s still worse than windows. HDR and directstorage support are just now becoming a thing for example. And then there’s all the drivers for various peripherals that may or may not have an inferior third party solution. It’s very cool that it’s come as far as it has, and a lot of that is thanks to valve but unless you already want to use linux it’s still second best.
Hopefully HDR & color management are coming sooner than later thanks to the new Steam Deck OLED release, they've been working on it for a while and it seems to be coming along nicely from what I've seen so far.
Yeah watching the progress valve has made has been unreal both directly and through creating linux market share which makes other developers give a shit.
I too am a videa gaem enjoyer and I have been running Linux as my main driver for more than a year with a dual boot setup specifically for games. The only times I have to boot into Windows are:
- Multiplayer games with anti-cheat that do not support Linux. Note that not all games with anti-cheat are Linux averse. For example I am able to run BattleBit Remastered just fine on Linux.
- Wabbajack modlists
For anything else, I just install the game on Steam, press play and let Proton do its thing. Sometimes I have to go to ProtonDB, check the comments for that particular game and copy-paste some launch settings, but that's about it. As someone who kept delaying making Linux my daily driver due to games, I have been really pleasantly surprised by the current state of Proton.
I do not mean to evangelize. While modern distros make the OS much more approachable than in the past, once in a while, things will break and need tinkering and this is something everyone who is interested in running a Linux machine should be aware of. Personally, I mind spending the occasional hour debugging myself out of some issue much less than I abhor Windows' intrusive features and lack of control over the OS. I have delayed switching for quite a while solely due to worrying about running my games, and I am sharing my experience for those who find themselves in the same boat.
Please keep evangelising! Microsoft and Apple suck so I do need to get off my lazy ass and consider Linux sometime. I wonder how it handles pirated PC games?
Hell, maybe I will look into Linux for my next laptop after all.
Of course avian comrade, death to Microsoft and Apple. I always advocate for Linux but I want people to be aware of what they are getting into and that a certain level of it just works will have to be sacrificed. Sadly, I don't have any personal experience with pirated games so I cannot help you on that one.
I use Linux on my laptop, but also have a Windows machine that I only use for gaming and those few random applications that don't want to perform well in wine.
I use Linux at work regularly, and often prefer Linux and suggest Linux for work projects. It's an extremely capable OS for infrastructure and embedded applications. It's a pain as a desktop though. It's just clunkier and harder to do things. Intermediate level configuration tasks which you can do with one dialog in Windows require editing shell scripts and decoding APIs designed by mathematicians in the 70's on Linux. It's just too much when I want to relax after work.
Also I like gaming, and gaming through a compatibility layer like Wine is always annoying. I don't want launching a new game to be a project in itself.
Intermediate level configuration tasks which you can do with one dialog in Windows require editing shell scripts and decoding APIs designed by mathematicians in the 70's on Linux.
Full disclosure, I've used linux since high school, to the point where I am lost as shit on windows. What I'm trying to get at is that the question I'm about to ask is not supposed to be judgemental or disbelieving or anything, I'm just genuinely curious: can you please give me an example of an intermediate config task that's significantly easier on windows than linux? I have a hard time believing such a thing exists, but that's likely because I haven't used windows since like the vista days
OK, one I encountered recently is mounting a network share on user login.
On Windows this required going into My Computer and clicking "Map network drive" then following the prompts.
On Linux this required; adding an entry to fstab then, because the mount needs to occur after network stack initialization but before the user attempts to access the drive, I needed to noauto the fstab entry and create a systemd service using After=network-online.target which actually performs the mount.
Gotcha. Yeah, that does sound like it's a bit easier in windows, fair enough. Still, I'll take a plaintext config file over searching through gui menus any day of the week. But that's just preference and what I'm used to.
can you please give me an example of an intermediate config task that's significantly easier on windows than linux?
I feel like it's the kind of thing that use to be true. I think it's easier to edit a a text file in linux and run the restart service command in terminal than it is to wander through window's new maximum white-space electron GUIs and hope what you're looking for isn't removed in windows 10 or doesn't get reset back to default on next update.
I absolutely agree. I've been very happy with linux for years. I love a well-documented plaintext config file!
steam has wine built in, for most games you don't even need to futz with the settings
Even in the best case scenario that's a straight downgrade though. Right now, I never have to worry about Wine compatibility or settings. All the games I play are tested and optimized on Windows.
It's not always true that steam proton is a downgrade. There are quite a few games, especially old ones, that actually run better with proton than natively on windows. Which is wild, but true.
That is surprising, I might give it a go next time I have an older game that doesn’t run so good under modern Windows.
Proton/Wine is a compatibility layer to translate Windows API calls to POSIX calls. In theory it should actually yield near native performance or better since Vulkan is far more optimized than DirectX.
But yeah, I use Proton and waiting for your vulkan shaders to compile is a little bit of a pain (especially for some games).
While I'll admit I don't have a lot of experience with Proton, I actually spent about 4 years working on a OpenGL based 3D graphics engine for augmented reality research. I've also written engine code in both DirectX and Vulcan but not as much. All this to say I've done some in depth research on Vulkan in the past, and I don't think it's really true to say that it's more optimized. DirectX is probably more optimized, but it is over-optimized for graphics techniques that have been superseded by more modern ones. Vulkan allows more optimized code to be written by giving the application programmer more direct control over graphics card resources. This only works when the program is written to take advantage of this though, if you access a Vulkan driver via a DirectX compatibility layer you are going to get very similar performance to native DirectX because you'll simply recreate all the bottlenecks that Vulkan was designed to avoid.
This gets to the underlying issue with Wine/Proton as a general solution to Linux gaming. So long as the application code was tested, debugged, profiled and optimized on Windows with DirectX it will almost always run better under Windows. The design will take advantage of efficiencies in the original API which will almost certainly not exist after calls are translated to a different API using different underlying OS primitives. The major caveat is older games which are no longer well supported because of changes to Windows system internals since release, these are likely to run as well or better because the assumptions they were optimized for are no longer valid on Windows, but Wine is already designed to compensate for programs written for a very different API.
Sorry for nerding out, but it's a topic I'm actually pretty interested in.
I see that's really interesting. A lot of my impression of Vulkan is that it's a much more modern API.
Though I'd admit that some of these are faulty benchmarks like when some users got better performance on Elden Ring with proton than on native windows (performance metrics varied wildly). It was just nuts to see Linux competing head-to-head with Windows for the first time.
Vulkan is that it's a much more modern API
Absolutely, older APIs tried to smooth development by abstracting more from the hardware, Vulkan tries to give the developer as much control as possible. If you know what you're doing you can write more performant games with Vulkan, but on the flip side development is slower. The matters less and less though, as most game dev these days uses middleware like Unity or Unreal which does all the graphics pipeline management for you. This also ties into modern graphics hardware being more configurable than ever, meaning the more restrictive APIs can waste a lot of the hardware's potential.
I did a bit of research after reading your comment and from what I can see, Elden Ring has some bugs in it's rendering pipeline that can cause cached shaders to be recompiled for no reason, this is what causes all the stuttering on Windows. Proton devs managed to write custom implementations of the DirectX functions that it uses incorrectly, to force it to work the way it was presumably intended to. That's awesome to me and really shows off the potential of Proton. Obviously other games which aren't huge releases aren't going to get that kind of treatment, but I can definitely see dedicated communities fixing issues like this in games.
Super cool, I'm glad you mentioned Elden Ring because I hadn't considered Wine/Proton could be used like that.
except the games released during the 98/XP/Vista/7 period, those still have compatibility shenanigans with windows 10.
That’s fair enough, but I’m mostly playing newer games. Maybe I’ll spin up a Linux install next time I have an old game that doesn’t work well on windows.
Most people have a valid excuse, like their one really important software or favorite hentai game doesn't work under wine. For example, I wanted to buy a specific android tablet, but a small number of cool exclusive features are windows only, which is annoying af. Do I subject myself to full-time popups, nagware, random restarts, fake restarts, etc. of windows, do I dual-boot and have to restart my computer for weird context switching, do I own 2 computers, or shall I forgo that one one cool software/feature?
If you're thinking you'd really like a minimalist, classic desktop experience, like say a windows 98 vibe but also frugal on your GPU/RAM/CPU stuff, I heavily recommend the MATE with brisk-menu installed.
The most beginner friendly version of think is the official https://ubuntu-mate.org/ ISO.
Personally, I prefer debian for servers, and Garuda (arch) for desktops/laptops. Garuda has a lot of desktop environment options, I use the Garuda MATE ISO. Garuda does a lot of hand-holding for you in general, but also has a lot of gamer specific things.
Another thing, I like using my computer to actually do things. I don't think dicking around for hours/days because some random thing (your OS, or drivers, to be specific) doesn't work by default is fun or interesting. It's something most linux evangelists seem to not understand about normal people, and when normal people use windows, the network effect usually forces windows on me somehow. Ubuntu MATE and Garuda MATE have been pretty good about "just working". Your luck on brand new/obscure hardware laptops is going to be tested.
I agree with this, although it's gotten a lot better in recent years but there is still a ways to go before I can install Linux on my grandma's laptop and just hand it back to her without worrying that it will break 6 months down the line. Although, I guess that's what things like Debian are for.
I don't think dicking around for hours/days because some random thing (your OS, or drivers, to be specific) doesn't work by default is fun or interesting. It's something most linux evangelists seem to not understand about normal people
The Windows version of this is forcing updates on you when you want Windows to fuck off. And it has been this way since at least XP. So many people went to sleep with a Win 10 PC and woke up with a Win 11 PC.
This. I have to use the terminal sometimes in Windows and it just pisses me off. I can't imagine using it for everything.
