I could never go back to Windows, after having tasted the freedom of Linux.
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.
Closest thing I use to a professional app is DaVinci Resolve Studio on a distribution that is not officially supported by Blackmagic. Not only does Resolve Studio work perfectly, I am able to use Blackmagic hardware (Intensity Pro 4k, Speed Editor) without having to mess around with settings, config files, permissions, packages, etc.
The caveat here is the initial setup: I use an AMD GPU, and it’s a bit of a pain to get the free and licensed versions of Resolve working with those under Linux. However, once that’s out of the way, it’s completely seamless.
As for CAD…yeah that’s where everything falls over. There are tons of FOSS alternatives out there but I have yet to see any of them in a professional setting. Even Fusion360 is hit or miss under Wine, I spun up a Windows VM just to use that for my 3D printer tinkering.
carefully select hardware
lmao, i've exclusively run linux on franken pcs cobbled together out of mostly second hand parts
The first thing I installed windows on was an discarded office tower that I had to put new memory And hard drives in. Shit was ancient and specifically did not want anything but windows installed on it. Installed Linux anyway. Works great. No specific hardware
That’s much easier grounds then.. checks notes.. a modern laptop straight from the factory.
There's this thing I notice. If windows asks you to learn something or put up with some BS it's seen as the cost of business, reasonable, or simply not even noticed. If Linux requires you to learn something, like read one article about which distro might work best for you, it's seen as an insurmountable difficulty or an absurd ask.
it's sunk cost bias. I have this trying to use windows or macos, after using linux exclusively for half my life - everything feels foreign and frustrating, with an obnoxious amount of UX patterns you're expected to know in order to find anything. ugh, I could rant for hours on how obtuse macos is (mainly because I have to interact with it for work right now - if you force me to use windows, I'll rant about that too)
The nice thing about Linux is you can pick a DE that apes whatever OS you're used to so the transition from Windows or Mac to desktop Linux can be very painless.
dear god if I could just run xmonad and dmenu on windows or mac I'd hate employers that tried to force me to use one or the other so much less.
oh my god another xmonad user. You can get almost close with some paid tiling window managers in mac but you can't recreate the managed layouts of xmonad.
Every time I've been asked to learn about Windows this year has resulted in "Haha fuck you who do you think you are? The owner of this computer? Eat shit pleb you belong to steve balmer now".
You wouldn't believe the amount of bullshit you have to go through to exorcise Edge. Some people told me "This is to protect the user" so i sent them back a picture of system.32 in the recycle bin.
I quit windows after I spent a few hours trying to get permission to delete a file I knew I didn't need but but windows just refused to allow even admin accounts to touch. Had to dig so deep into windows settings.
I had same problem multiple times when I tried Windows. The recommendations I could find on internet were to disable fast startup and boot into live Linux disc.
Ya that's about right. Next step is from that live Linux disc install Linux.
I don't use linux because a linux computer is not usable for me. I use mine for blender(works on Linux), Creo(does not work), DCS(no linux support, people say it's hard to get working with wine/proton game things) and Destiny (anti cheat will ban you if you run it through one of the linux game things). Like it or not, "just learn an entire new os and new software for all the things you want to do" is not an option for most people.
No I'll never deny that. Some things do only work in very specific environments. I'll also never pretend learning is a task with zero effort or that everyone is interested in doing. What bugs me is when people are dishonest about it. Linux is not impossibly difficult to use nor is Windows a sublime user experience with no friction.
Anticheat though ya that's fucked. Hate that. I'll admit I have a Windows partition solely for playing the few games that require it. Though haven't booted it in a year or so.
Also the half life of windows knowledge is a lot lower than linux knowledge. Under windows: when you have this problem, click here, click there, find this button, select this option and then it might help, until the next version changes everything. Under linux you find this config file, change this line to that and the fix will likely survive multiple system upgrades and could even work on different distributions.
Absolutely. Once you spend just a bit of time figuring out how config files work suddenly fixing problems on and maintaining your Linux system is far easier than windows. Not hidden behind layers of bad UI that doesn't work. Just edit the file. Restart the process.
The new CPU requirements for Windows 11 are why I wiped it and am now on Linux Mint. No dual-booting.
I upgraded my Intel system to AMD today. And I didn't have to reinstall a damn thing, because my existing Linux installation Just Worked™. It really is to the point that I could never imagine going back to Windows.
Linux will run on anything
Ps3. Raspberry pi. Phones. All computers ive ever tried to install it on.. and even M-chip macs.
I had a pile of old parts of all sorts of machines sitting in some boxes. Was poking through and thought "hang on"... Bing bang boom threw some bits together and built a new PC to run a jellyfin media server on Mint. Don't even know what most of the parts are...
I was flirting with Linux for 20 years. There was always something that put me off an I went back to Windows. Recently I installed ubuntu with Kde plasma and I'm not going back. It just works and is heaps faster on older hardware. The old driver issues are gone, compatibility is awesome. The only issue is getting used to new software names.
I dual boot fedora with plasma (it has all my laptop drivers without me having to install anything) with Windows and it's pretty great, but I was out of Linux for a long time and there's things I don't remember. So I'm missing stuff and don't have the time to relearn what I knew 20 years ago.
It works well enough for day to day tasks and dev work. Windows works well enough to run some games.
A large majority of games on steam work via proton.
For games outside steam, there's a pretty good community around wine wrappers. I think it's called lutris.
I used to play GTAV, assassins creed, and other AAA titles through it 4 years ago and its only gotten better.
People say that Nvidia just doesn't work right on Linux. I'd never know that except for everyone saying it. My desktop has Nvidia and all Linux distro I've tried on it are like perfectly fine. Yes for gaming also.
Congrats, You've been blessed with good luck.
Doesnt invalidate other people (like me) who have had tons of trouble with trying to get nvidia cards working/nvidia drivers installed over the years. Even with new distros that bake the drivers in, like Pop!, I still had issues and and headaches that ultimately made it not worth the effort.
What card do you run? I went from a 970 to a 3080ti and both drivers just automagically worked. The 970 used to have dkms issues but it randomly stopped at some point.
Won't deny luck is involved. Everytime I turn any piece of technology on im amazed it works at all considering the fact it's all a cobbled together mess.
I've been running Linux for 100% of my productive work since about 1995. Used to compile every kernel release and run it for the hell of it from about 1998 until something like 2002 and work for a company that sold and supported Linux servers as firewalls and file servers etc.
I had used et4000's, S3 968's and trio 64's, the original i740, Matrox g400's with dual CRT monitors and tons of different Nvidia GPU's throughout the years and hadn't had a whole lot of trouble.
The Nvidia Linux driver made me despair for desktop Linux for the last few years. Not enough to actually run anything different, but it did seem like things were on a downward slide.
I had weird flashing of sections of other windows when dragging a window around. Individual screens that would just start flashing sometimes. Chunky slideshow window dragging when playing video on another screen. Screens re-arranging themselves in baffling orientations after the machine came back from the screen being locked. I had crap with the animation rate running at 60hz on three 170hz monitors because I also had a TV connected to display network graphs ( that update once a minute ). I must have reset up the panels on cinnamon, or later on KDE a hundred times because they would move to another monitor, sometimes underneath a different one or just disappeared altogether when I unlocked the screen. My desktop environment at home would sometimes just freeze up if the screen was DPMS blanked for more than a couple of hours requiring me to log in from another machine and restart X. I had two different 6gb 1060's and a 1080ti in different machines that would all have different combinations of these issues.
I fixed maybe half of the issues that I had. Loaded custom EDID on specific monitors to avoid KDE swapping them around, did wacky stuff with environment variables to change the sync behaviour, used a totally different machine ( a little NUC ) to drive the graphs on the TV on the wall.
Because I had got bit pretty hard by the Radeon driver being a piece of trash back in something like 2012, I had the dated opinion that the proprietary Nvidia driver was better than the Radeon driver. It wasn't til I saw multiple other folks adamant that the current amdgpu driver is pretty good that I bought some ex-mining AMD cards to try them out on my desktop machines. I found out that most of the bugs that were driving me nuts were just Nvidia bugs rather than xorg or any other Linux component. KDE also did a bunch of awesome work on multi monitor support which meant I could stop all the hackery with custom EDIDs.
A little after that I built a whole new work desktop PC with an AMD GPU ( and CPU FWIW ) . It has been great. I'm down from about 15 annoying bugs to none that I can think of offhand running KDE. It all feels pretty fluid and tight now without any real work from a fresh install.
My next build as it stands will be AMD. of course who knows what will be good by the time I get to do that.
I think that's probably a bit of misunderstanding. Nvidia doesn't work right in gamescope due to some missing vulkan extensions. Linux gaming is primarily focused around using gamescope as a compositor, specifically with gaming focused distros. You can see where the idea comes from following that trend.
But also, fuck you Nvidia.
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.
That reminds me of a Microsoft-branded USB WiFi adapter that I was making heavy use of back in mid-2000s. The MN-510. You could buy it brand-new circa 2006. It had a $75 launch MSRP, about $114 adjusted for inflation. Come 2009, we find out that Windows 7 wasn't going to support it. And given what we know about OS development cycles, they presumably made that call in '08 or even '07. Looking back on it, I think this was one of the major catalysts for me to reconsider Linux as a drop-in replacement. Because, wouldn't you know, the adapter kept working just fine when I tried it out in Ubuntu. Support was simply there in the kernel. Plug-and-play. I suddenly had this whole other operating system providing an it-just-works network connection, for free. It was amazing. So I used that adapter for several more years until I could afford a network upgrade. And I'm still using Linux the majority of the time today.
And you aren't tired of being unable to find comparable software on Linux?
I'll take Linux hardware support over Microsoft any day of the week.
I'm really undecided on this. It really depends on the type of hardware, for example when dealing with graphics card drivers, especially nvidia I'll take windows over linux any day. On the other hand on Linux I don't have to install drivers for almost anything and things mostly just work unless the device is brand new.
I've been using all of the major OSs and they're all good and they all suck in their own way. Windows does suck a bit more than the others, but I don't think it's as terrible as diehard Linux fanboys make it out to be.
I still use Windows on my home PC because bideo gaems and music production. I'd prefer to use Linux instead but oh well it's not the worst thing.
Gaming on Linux has gotten to the point that if it won't play on linux, I just shrug and play something else. Their are more native games, and games that aren't native usually run under Proton, Proton GE, or Wine. There's not much left that won't play.
The Nvidia thing is less of a problem these days with distros like Nobara, Gardua, and Vanilla installing proprietary Nvidia drivers out of the box. Heck, you can even do it with almost 0 extra effort on plain Fedora.
I can't help you with music production, though. Linux has some good stuff for that, but my understanding is that Mac and Windows are still the best choice.
Anyway, like I said to someone else, everyone's different, and everyone's threshold for horse hockey gets set off by different things. It's all perspective, really.
Unless you care about privacy. That one's more empirical than perceptual.
I have the opposite experience. For 15 years I've been installing windows on laptops and desktops. Never did I had to 'solve' driver issues. They were either easy to find, by clicking 'search in windows update' or were supported directly through windows itself. No need to solve anything...
The opposite was true for my few Linux (Ubuntu and Linux mint) adventures. Every time something would just not work. The most frustrating for me was the broken sleep function. There was no way to get my laptop to sleep properly. It would wake up at random times or just not boot anymore thereafter.
Just saying that these kind of things really depend on what you work with and what you want to get out of a system
I totally get that. The world is a funny place, and no two people will habe the same lived experience.
And FTR, as weird as this may sound to you, the big deal to me was that on Linux (usually Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, or a derivative of those three) there were significantly fewer problems in the first place, never mind whether or not they got solved. I may just have gotten a lucky spin on the Great Hardware Roulette Wheel.
It's just when you have peripherals, you might just not find a driver for Linux at all
For the most part there is practically no difference between 10 and 11 minus changes in UI and higher HW requirements. If someone liked 10, do not see why 11 would be different. Same in theory could be said about 8.1 and 10. Most of the UI changes are better IMO, but there are some annoyances mainly related to taskbar.
I believe the only thing that many could dislike and have impact on daily work, would be the new context menu. It can be swapped to old one, but as of now there is no easy setting / toggle for that.
There's even more telemetry and built in ads with Win11 over Win10. If they're so similar otherwise, why would anyone upgrade to Win11?
- I like newest OS versions. Visually I do like it better as well. Kind of wish I could get back rectangular design though, not a fan of rounded corners, but that is very minor thing. When I say nothing much has changed, I mean the backend, backwards compatibility. Everything you know about Windows since 8.1 still applies + some additional features, improvements.
- Do not have ads. Maybe because I am in Europe or maybe because I have Education (Same as
ProEnterprise) license or because I am using local and not MS account. - Do not care about telemetry. Have disabled most "personalization" things. I am fine with MS collecting random basic telemetry like HW inventory / SW crashes or whatever they collect.
Education edition is the best edition. It does not have ads, which is not true of Pro.
Made a mistake about comparison. Education is comparable to Enterprise and not Pro. Have experience only for these 2 editions so no idea what's the situation with Home and Pro and if there really are ads that cannot be disabled.
Honestly, my Win11 works well enough for my day 2 day use. I don't have to troubleshoot any random issues I may encountered in Linux (I use Nvidia). I turned off all the telemetry settings I could but let's be real, I am still using Google and all the big social media.
Win10 gave me more BSODs too. My only tip for the few Windows user here, do a fresh install instead of upgrade.
Linux desktop just ain't worth it for a gamer; when it works it's great, when it doesn't - I don't want to spend anymore of my limited time to fix or make it work.
Yall miss the point. Im guessing willfully. No average desktop user wants to be forced to use command line to do anything.
Linux will never see mainstream desktop usage.
My mom is in her 70s, never has been techy, and has been using Linux as her daily driver for a solid eight years now. I have to do less troubleshooting for her now that she's on Linux than I ever did when she used Windows. "You have to use the command line" is an extremely outdated criticism of desktop Linux.
Yup. I got relatives started on Mint dual booted with Windows. They don't use Windows as Linux just works.
Not true at all. In my experience just about everything I need to do must be installed via cli on Ubuntu, following sometimes a page long guide of shit to do.
What kind of things do you install? Typically the "page long guide"s are showing every basic step to hold the users hand. If you're installing something in ubuntu, you update your repos, then install the package.
Every time I install something in windows, the endless unique install wizards, weird spyware packaging, restart requirements, etc make me want to rage quit. Not to mention the sketchy sites most Windows freeware comes from, or the windows store that will continually re-install candy crush and minecraft.
With Linux, even the CLI you learn a handful of basic concepts and live your life. To me complaining about typing "apt get install" is akin to complaining you need to learn to read to know when the bus is arriving.
I'll admit there are three extra steps with say, installing chrome. But if you say out loud what you're doing, ie "I need to add the repository so my computer knows where to get chrome" "Now that it knows where chrome is, I'll run apt get update to refresh the packages" "Now that it knows where it is, and its refreshed, let me install it with apt get install chrome".
or if you download a deb package, the ubuntu apt store will automatically open it with a double click then you click "install".
No offense to you, but there seems to be an attitude that when trying something new, you should not be expected to learn the slightest thing about it. Sure your mom or grandpa might not be able to install it, but if you're at the point where you've acknowledged the page long guide, you're certainly smart enough to try something and give it an honest try.
Call me crazy but I'd rather have to learn how to use APT then have to learn each and every creative technique they come up with the make me install the ask toolbar or norton AV or sign me up for a newsletter. Linux has never had that problem.
Anytime I need to install something in windows, it just feels, uncivilized? Like every step of the way is disrespectful to the user. Windows is political, it has business priorities that effect how it's used. Linux feels like a rock, like yeah you can get mad at it when you drop it on your foot but the rock isn't interacting back the same way that windows is constantly changing and questioning your judgement.
I've installed ZorinOS on a non tech savvy friends computer so she could get more life out of her old laptop and she was fine without using any terminal
I've been using various distros for the past 6 months trying to find the right fit for my work. I do remote desktop support of many windows based enterprises.
I use Linux desktop every single day for 8 hours. I also play games of all sorts.
KDE neon was what I had when I started out and it was great. Zero problems. There's no reason you'd ever need CLI in plasma desktop that I can see. Fedora/plasma is a no go. Too complex with selinux and you really do need to know what you're doing. Still quite usable for 90% of day to day
For the past month I've been on mint 21 and have had zero issues and zero CLI time. Been enjoying baldurs gate 3 out of the box, using outlook, teams, various browsers and whatnot. Not going to give a comprehensive list here, but everything works perfectly and almost everything has been installed straight from the software manager.
It wasn't always the case. Windows 3x gui had to be started from a dos prompt. But this anti cli sentiment swings both ways for all OS's.
The bigger issue I have though is a general unwillingness to learn how to do things beyond click icons for apps. Devices now are engineered to be as simple as possible. Which ya, for most people is fine. But these devices in turn are generally way more challenging to fix. So it encourages just buying a new one instead. Creating more ewaste for something that should be easier to fix, all because of software, or physical assembly.
a general unwillingness to learn how to do things beyond click icons for apps
I'd say "a general unwillingness to learn how to do things", period.
that killer app is soon going to be "doesn't have advertising in every menu"
I think an issue is that people tend to think of Linux as meaning "all distributions." So if something is compatible with X distro version yy.zz, the general idea is "it's compatible with Linux." This, in my experience, is one of the things that leads to mandatory command-line usage --- it definitely is possible to get it to work under a different flavor of Linux, but it's not necessarily easy if you're uncomfortable with a command line.
Another is drivers --- if it's mainlined, it will Just Work, but if it's not...well, it may work, but you might have to jump through hoops and get busy with the command line.
In short: if you view your distro the same way you view a particular Windows release, then I really don't think you need the command line for desktop Linux. But you need to accept that some software isn't "compatible," in the above, user-friendly sense of the word.
That command line sure comes in handy when you're trying to help someone do something and you can just send them a one-liner to paste into the terminal rather than have to show a series of screenshots "click this > then this > this this and this> This checkbox >this menu"
Agreed. Also from a Tech support POV, there is no "standard" OS and troubleshooting the vast different environments would be a pain. With Windows, you have a standard layout, with couple different versions - Home / Pro / Enterprise. With linux, you have different syntax, differnt DE's, etc. Still use Linux at home / work but i am interested in it. Got to have that motivation to do so.
Same thing with moving to Lemmy, gotta have that motivation to make the change.
You need better eyesight then, because there are more than 2 in that photo
Active directory and it's integration with services such as DNS and DHCP is pretty great though. I wish Microsoft started focusing less on cloud and improved the user (or rather admin) experience of their server tools, they are quite awful is some cases.
I swear to god most of Windows Server’s tools have barely changed since NT 4.0
And sometimes they make a new tool that's better, kinda. And then they never bother updating it to make it good. Looking at you AD admin center.
GPedit is the most annoying tool ever. Why the hell can't I just edit GPO settings values from the active settings menu, without having to open the entire GPO and navigate the huge mess of settings.
Ah yes... it is easy as long as you do something difficult first.
Reminds me of that comment on Dropbox where some guy said it's going to fail because he can easily build something similar with an ftp server.
Dropbox is even making money....(I am shocked as it sends tech firms rarely do.)
How is Dropbox making money and how is it possible it is still around? It can be easily replaced by an ftp server.
Oh wait, they sell data for money, my fault.
