The moment that shocked me was when printers, network cards, and even motherboard integrated Ethernet didn't work on Windows without driver downloads but Linux was plug and play. Full reversal of the situation.
Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I've used Linux since the mid 00's and, well, I've seen some shit. But nowadays? It's the best desktop OS I've used. I recently had to start using a Mac for work and realized just how far DE's like Gnome and KDE have gotten. It feels like I have to fight MacOS every single day to get it to do the absolute basics, the things that Gnome and KDE does out of the box. And the most ridiculous thing is that the app ecosystem for MacOS is so heavily focused on monetization that if you purchase enough apps to customize the MacOS DE to an acceptable level, you'd likely have spent enough money to buy another laptop. Madness.
TL;DR: Turns out that this year is actually the year of Linux on the desktop!
Yes, if you don't have a computer that literally came out this year, don't have 2 separate graphics cards and don't need HDR, or specific Windows-only software, Linux generally just works.
And sometimes the Windows only software is more "Windows only" and works with Wine
Windows 3D Builder though is firmly in the Windows Only category though. Which is a bummer because in my experience it's the best at repairing 3D models for 3D printing that have errors like holes, redundant geometry, inverted faces, etc.
However, some older programs may actually behave better in Wine than say on Windows 11.
Oh, it also supports ancient 16 bit programs which Windows doesn't anymore.
The dual GPU problem has actually for the most part also been solved; Optimus rarely poses a problem these days
Yup. Fedora on my laptop defaults the internal GPU and you can run any program with the dedicated card with a right click. Pretty nice compared to last year where I had to throw my laptop across the room 😂
Hopefully HDR can get crossed off that list soon
You probably won't be able to run an LTS kernel on a brand new PC that just hit the market. But using the most recent kernel for arch or a derivative like endevorOS should work after like a week maximum.
I did have an issue like this on Ubuntu and its what made me actually start distro hopping since it worked fine on fedora and Arch using the latest kernels.
I experienced this when installing my AMD Radeon RX 7600XT, it was released two weeks prior to me installing it, back then, and Linux Mint and games in it were clearly running off software rendering. Turns out LM uses a more tried and true LTS kernel by default, luckily ot easily allows you to switch or manage kernels through the GUI updater, so I got that fixed easily.
It really has come a long way since the old times.
Yeah, 2 hour kernel recompiles to get a sound card to half work were not fun.
They kinda were for me. But then, I was young with plenty of time to spend.
I agree, installing old linux was a great way of learning unix commands and how computers works, plus you got really good at administering linux computers. But of course, that only works out if you have a vested interest in computers already and quite a bit of free time, so I'm also glad all "normal" folks nowadays can get an awesome linux experience without having to put much effort at all.
Yeah I guess it was kinda fun. Especially for nerds like us. Getting x-forwarding to work over a 14.4 modem was pretty awesome, albeit painfully slow, at the time.
Linux is boring. In a good way. It is so boring that each of my computers use different distros. I have Debian, Fedora, Mint, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and Endeavour OS installed across 4 or 5 computers right now. Some of them still dual-booting Windows 10/11. Now each time I boot into Windows is fun. In a bad way.
We may need a new forum: when Google is RIGHT about a search.
You've given me some interest in Endeavor. My current installation won't hibernate & restore.
HA! True. Remember when Google was always right and always exactly what you were looking for?
Pepperidge Farms remembers.
I 'member
Endeavour is great, I daily it and as a Linux noob it's been very forgiving. My only annoyance is that I've been having some issues with the display where sometimes I'll wake it up and will only get a black screen and no means of doing anything to fix it. My laptop also really doesn't like me using any other DEs besides Budgie.
my experience with hibernate issues is that its either a swap partition issue or there's not a cmos battery, but also idk my current system is like 7 years old so it could be something else broken
Yeah I had an MSI gaming laptop that had a lot of proprietary stuff that was a pain to setup. Everything from display brightness to volume to internet to keyboard lights to headphone jack took special workarounds to setup. This was in 2018 and Ubuntu 18.04. Then 19.04 rolled out, and I didn't have to do the speaker workaround anymore. 19.10 rolled out, and i didn't have to do the keyboard lights workaround. This way, little by little, every Linux kernel upgrade added one or another of the components, and after a couple of years, everything on that laptop worked out of the box. That's when I was truly impressed by Linux.
you shouldn't need to disable tpm
On my surface I still need to :/ fuckin Microsoft
Surface wasn't meant to run linux. Its a struggle to get it working on them.
/owner of 3 defenestrated surface devices.
Defenestrated is the best way to say removed Windows and I'm using that forever, thanks
Funny enough, I also flashed my (probably much older) HP Spectre X360 to endevourOS last week, works good, feels more responsive then PopOS was on it.
I then tried Bazzite on my desktop and the experience went much worse, seemingly because of Nvidia driver support still being pretty bad on linux. Oh well.
NVIDIA will be great OOTB experience in a couple of years, but the official driver will get much better in just couple of months from now.
Why will it be better in just a couple months? Something on the horizon?
Edit: Appreciate the responses!
Long term NVIDIA might be going into either upstreaming their nvidia-gpu-open driver into Linux kernel, or they will help Nouveau+NVK development, which works relatively well with modern NVIDIA cards already (and NVIDIA just hired long time Nouveau maintainer)
Actually already usable solution, but the driver is in beta and you need bleeding edge compositor, like kwin_wayland from Plasma 6.1 that’s also in beta as of now, plus new Mesa, Xwayland, maybe something else. Everything that’s required is in AUR
Why will it be better in just a couple months?
Explicit sync. It'll fix most of the issues with Wayland on Nvidia CPUs. Wayland landed support for it in April, and Nvidia recently released a beta driver that supports it. I think every graphics driver will implement explicit sync eventually, since it's a lot better than implicit sync.
Some great information about why it's important here: https://zamundaaa.github.io/wayland/2024/04/05/explicit-sync.html
on nobara, nvidia drivers have never once been an issue for me.
What about in steam specifically, seemed like a bit of a steam issue as it was very buggy, flicking graphics and such in Steam client and big picture mode was godawful, even tried the render fix mentioned online and it didn't help at all.