Big Linux user here. It's been my daily driver on my personal desktop and laptop for coming up on 20 years (damn). I haven't had any of the dreaded graphics-driver-breaking-during-update or other hardware issues since like 2008. It works great with Zoom, Teams, WebEx, whatever you throw at it. It's fast and stable. My laptop uptime regularly hits 30+ days before I go down for an upgrade.
When my 70+ mom needed a new computer, I put Ubuntu on it and turned on unattended upgrades. I do SSH into it every 6 months and update her Zoom .deb manually (I guess there's a ppa for that?). She uses it every day and has had no problem.
I'm really impressed with the Linux experience. Thanks to all who have contributed!
- The best developer experience with the most hackable toolkit
- A great gaming experience that plays the vast majority of titles on Steam
- A "dumb by default" non-cloud enabled workstation
- IMHO the most well-design, does most things "vanilla" desktop environment with GNOME.
The tradeoff is
- You will need to learn to update your system and learn some new things. Things will seem difficult till you learn how they work.
- There are gaps in third-party applications (primary, video editing is sub par). The smaller apps you pay for now, you'll end up making scripts or small pieces of software to replace. Eventually this will be freeing, but it's a learning curve and you'll initially miss some things (Alfred, Screenshot tools...etc).
- Customization comes with a larger maintenance cost.
- Your phone is not really connected to your PC, and syncing systems is all manual. If it's not web-based, that app you like doesn't probably doesn't work.
I switched 3 or so years ago and it's been a revelation. Although I'd been using computers since the 80s I never really understood how an OS works. While you could argue I never needed to, I find myself much more digitally literate now. After a hump year, I mostly tailor the OS to what I need it to do, and it feels like an extension of me.
> You will need to learn to update your system
> Customization comes with a larger maintenance cost
Depends on what you want to achieve, in general and day to day. In a lot of cases, either of these are dealbreakers on the long term. You can say 1001 bad things about Windows, but you can safely update, and run most your apps from 20+ year ago just fine, including "customizations" (shell scripts, registry entries etc). And handle all the hardware you throw at it. On a Linux Desktop you will have 100% control, but at many orders of magnitude harder learning curve and maintenance.
However bad the path is it goes down currently, Windows is still the best middle way between macos and Linux.
I observed some normal users and they are clueless when it comes to computers. If there is a problem, they ask it to be serviced or buy a new pc.
Even things like logging into google with an already logged in account (click on your face) is not intuitive they press instead the "log in with account" button and retype the credentials.
All of this to say, there might be challenges with Linux. But then the opposite it's also true, windows restarts the computer in your face without caring
For UNIX workloads development, and by offering Windows compatibility layer, so that game developers can keep ignoring GNU/Linux, while having no issues targeting other POSIX like platforms.
> [Hardware on Linux] have mostly become just plug-and-play. That favorite software [and game] of yours probably either works natively on Linux nowadays or there are alternatives/workarounds to make it work.
> But this is not an article about Linux and its current features so far. In fact, what should be pushing you towards Linux should not only be the features it has to offer nowadays. Instead, it should be the grim future with Windows that you should try to escape from.
> Microsoft just announced [...] “Recall” has been added to Windows which takes screenshots of your screen every few seconds so that you can ask the AI model about your previous activities anytime you want.
> This is not to add on some other spyware-like “features” in Windows 11, such as ads being displayed right in your start menu or File Explorer according to your user metrics.
Microsoft won't fix intended, by design, behaviour, it is not broken from their point of view. And even if you disable Recall by whatever name they put to hide it, it could be silently reenabled by "security" updates.
At least if some Linux distro includes something that users consider bad for their privacy, you can choose among several alternatives, including direct forks. That is an actual strength of that approach.
The difference between Linux and Windows is that if you wanted that functionality almost any time in the past 10 years you could have switched to another file navigator that allowed you to do that, such as dolphin. No such options exist in Windows.
A laptop that's fanless? Is that real? Or do they call it fanless because it's very quiet? The wikipedia article for fanless design redirects to quiet which to me suggests some people use the term in this way.
Already confirmed but it’s legit one of the best features of all time: a completely silent portable computer.
Second-best is a mobile-first portable computer, that you don’t have to worry about having it plugged in except for an hour or so every ~day of usage.
These things don’t really show up in any kind of stats but I can say that they change the definition of computing for humans (vs. data centre servers, etc)
A fan is a weird thing to be hung up on. This sounds like a clear example of moving the goal post. For what it's worth, I've heard my FW 13's fan kick on only a couple of times.
Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2024 just came out a week ago. No crapware, no TPM, no Secure Boot etc. Works like a charm. I'm using LTSC versions for a long time and it's the Windows version that should be the default for every home user.
Yes LTSC is not "legal" to use as an ordinary end user but MS doesn't care about piracy at all.
Was thinking of switching my mom's pc to linux because windows 10 is nearing its end and the pc doesn't have tpm chip for Win 11. But thankfully i found that windows 11 Iot LTSC version doesn't require tpm (or uefi secure boot) and doesn't have most of the crapware preinstalled. But the ethics of acquiring it and activating it is a different story (MAS)
My point is roughly there isn't even a remotely comparable bit of software to the stuff built into macOS on Windows or Linux (calendar, contacts, notes, reminders, mail, maps).
Mail has been a cloud service since forever, but since I got my work mailbox that can't just be forwarded to main, I use an app.
Geary seems to be almost exactly what I need UI-wise, but they do not support 2FA.
Funnily enough Microsoft says it will replace Mail with bloated Outlook, so bad decisions are everywhere.
If you read to this point and wanted to say "but on Mac" - that one killed itself for me by disallowing iCloud login in Virtualization Framework-based VMs and by extension any dev tools that require it. It also disrespected me as a user by not bothering to say that outright and wasting a couple hours of my time chasing "Something went wrong" around.
Well there is some variability in that. A lot of the cloud services out there don't work offline at all, suffer from sync issues, have poor quality apps if they even have one or have poor or undocumented privacy architecture.
(I have Apple ADP turned on, so all my keys are on-device only. I also have period of up to 2 weeks where I am completely disconnected from the Internet)
Bloatware? The only thing that matters is the software!
I've run my entire life, business and academic study with this software for over a decade. Works across my computer, ipad and phone. Works offline for days at a time. Never goes wrong.
I was forced to switch this last year. I decided to upgrade my 10 year old motherboard, and Windows refused to boot with the new one despite nothing else changing. I absolutely refuse to pay good money to "upgrade" to a worse version of Windows, so Linux it is.
Mostly it's been a good experience. I can still open all my old documents, and you can't even tell the difference when browsing. There are some Windows only apps that I relied on, including a couple I helped develop - I haven't figured out how to deal with the loss of those yet.
Multi monitor support is working on Ubuntu 24.04 with a 34" 4k monitor and 24" 1080p monitor. 4k is set to 1,5x scaling (scaled 1440p), and everything is being driven by the default intel drivers. Works perfectly.
I'm using Ubuntu Mate on desktop, and multi monitor is wonky. After each reboot I have to pluck out and put in cable for the bigger main screen so it can be detected by system. Then have to re-arrange position of monitors on the desktop. Might be an Nvidia issue tho. Still better than Windows.
Here's your problem. Going for something slightly more offbeat and less supported is going to produce problems. Last time I looked it was still running on X, so it's never going to be a great experience.
Based on the comments, I guess I should clarify. Yes, I can plug my monitors in and log into my system.
However, it is a crap shoot that an application will
1. choose the correct monitor / remember the chosen monitor after reboot
2. render text in the correct resolution for the monitor
3. correctly render in the new resolution when dragged across monitors
4. correctly respect the "primary" monitor setting instead of using the "first device in the list"
My most recent experience is using Linux Mint Cinnamon
I just had to blow away my Linux mint cinnamon install because of display and audio issues with screen detection and my desktop freezing if I changed my volume after my audio devices changed. If I was lucky enough to have it start responding I could fix it until the next time I forgot I unplugged my headphones by restarting cinnamon. If I was unlucky I would need to restart. I was more often unlucky.
I also had to constantly reset my screen layout whenever I would turn on/off my tv.
I’m back on Arch and building my DE from scratch in Hyprland. At least I can tell it in text exactly how to lay monitors out, identify them by name or port, and know that it’s going to follow that layout even if one is disconnected/reconnected
The audio on Mint with an old Dell desktop is bugging me too. Didn't used to be like this.
For years the audio IC's have been very flexible, with the analog I/O pins re-routable by software (expected to be drivers) to any of the 3.5mm jacks that may be scattered on the outside of the PC, along with any aux connections that may be merely an unused internal motherboard socket.
Otherwise you wouldn't be able to use a single socket for either speakers or a microphone, and have the system figure out which one it is when plugged in. And things like that. When they first color-coded the 3.5mm analog I/O's it was the 20th century and it was still a hard-wired approach.
With a modern motherboard the same exact board can be connected to a cabinet having 2 or 3 of the 3.5mm, or 5 or 6 and configuration could be selected (sometimes in advance) by specific factory drivers, accessible settings in a GUI, or both.
Windows isn't perfect any more by any means. Windows 7 or XP still works ideally with the original Dell drivers, but with W10 nothing ever comes out of the green 3.5mm, you have to plug speakers into the black 3.5mm. At least you get stereo then, but could select mono from Windows if you wanted to.
Using the newer Mint, you only get output from the green 3.5mm as expected, but usually only the left speaker gets any signal. Although sometimes you can set it for 5.1 surround and the whole pair of speakers will respond as the center channel. Depending on what you were doing with Windows before you rebooted to Linux, and whether or not you cold-power-up. But there is no provision to set Mint for mono at all which would be the perfect workaround.
That would get us by until the flaws in the audio get corrected. It would be good to have user access to the pin-to-jack hardware configuration too, but the inconsistency could be a sign of deeper defects.
It's kind of funny to me to read your comment, because multiple monitors are working perfectly fine for me (Manjaro, KDE, Wayland, if anyone cares), but I do have some problems with that on my work laptop that runs Windows.
With Windows very often using Microsoft Standard Display driver on lots of hardware it won't even recognize a second monitor.
The same hardware on Linux works most of the time right out of the box from the live distro, the problem I have seen is when you adjust the layout and resolution using the GUI, it can help if you close the settings GUI after each little change to allow the displays to adjust before opeing the GUI again for the next tweak.
Either way, rebooting can be the major factor if you're trying to switch cabling. Even though you can generally plug & unplug VGA or HDMI cables safely while in use, if there is more than one display output on the back of the PC, the ones which have nothing (recognizable) plugged in when you power up can be very likely to be non-functional until you reboot.
I have found Wayland (±sway) handles this really well once configured. Even when I switch my laptop between two different external monitors at two different physical work locations.
The "once configured" is the problem for me. I would rather be working on the task, not the tool. And at this point in my life, my "tinkering" time is done in other areas.
I don't know a lot of users outside specific developers which are not multiplatform and work exclusively with Linux desktops. After an Apple fiasco, I switched the whole office to Manjaro. This lasted several months.
But the offer of long battery, silent and powerful computing device is still in their hands.
Anyway, the reason in the near future will be the AI intrusive implementation on both leading desktop platforms, so Linux will continue to be the choice of privacy conscious.:)
A mate cycled 15km to my house back in 1995 with a stack of floppies a foot high, saying "dude, you need to install this right now. And when it asks for mount point, just put a /, that's the only tricky part".
It was Slackware. I've used all sorts since: redhat, Gentoo, yellow dog, Debian, arch. Never looked back.
A job I had once required windows, and I tried WSL, but it felt ... so limited.
I had a similar start, probably similar era, maybe a '98ish. My mom grabbed me one day and said I had to meet the new neighbors.
So, I went round and they had a front room full of a whole crazy mix of stuff. Some Next machines, Macs, AUX, Sun, BeOS, everything, on all sorts of crazy hardware.
We got chatting, he handed me a Yellow Dog CD and told me to install it and see what it's like. That led to SuSE 6.4 then 7, some BeOS, Gentoo, Ubuntu, etc. Had to purchase the SuSE CDs early on because on 56k couldn't download the ISO and didn't own a CD burner anyway.
"Switch" could be too harsh for some users, how about trying it out for some time first as a secondary option? Either grab an old device, or dual boot it on your current PC, or even use in "live" session. And be sure to share your pain points, be it hardware related, or community related, any feedback helps.
I have used MacOS forever and it has worked well for me.
I would love to use Linux + Framework Laptop (awesome hardware). What I need is some suggestions for a distribution that just works. My workload is development plus lots of web browsing (100+ tabs).
I find that Fedora generally just works, has a lot of very up to date packages and requires a lot less tweaking and setup work than something like Arch.
If you don't need cutting edge software packages and run older hardware, I've been very happy running Debian for a long time.
Can't confirm for the last ~12 years, various laptops from Dell and Lenovo, lower and higher end, various distros ranging from Ubuntu to Fedora to VoidLinux to now Garuda (an Arch deriv), various DEs / WMs (Gnome, KDE, i3).
But then I never multi-monitor. But everything these laptops had, was working without a hitch.
Likewise I can't confirm, in the various laptops I have used since 1999, there was always something broken, between wireless, battery, finger printer reader, 3D, hardware video decoding, webcam.
My experience with a Framework Laptop has been that the one or two things that are relevant were quite well-documented, I'd guess because Framework actually cares about Linux and there's a lot of overlap between "folks who want what Framework offers" and "folks who want what Linux offers"
It’s amazing how far Linux has come, but it feels several years behind in terms of laptop battery life with default settings vs Apple Silicon laptop.
This is purely my impression, I have not run an apples to apples test. I just see sleep and hibernation and so forth as things people still tend to struggle with, especially if they are trying to get good battery life. As with anything on Linux, you can often make some real gains with sufficient research and time.
Basically it seems like Linux will always be several years behind on something and so it’s most likely to gain popularity when Apple and Microsoft stop figuring out how to make new laptops interesting.
As a seasoned Windows (and DOS from the very early days) user for too many years I took a dislike to Windows 10 when 7 came to end of life in 2000. I bought a laptop with Ubuntu preinstalled and never looked back. Yes, some things took a little while to get used to, but really I was at home right away. So glad I did it.
If I could use gnome at work I would totally switch back to Linux full time. I used gnome 3 for years during HS and college but it was too jarring to switch back and forth once I had to start using Windows full time. The window management muscle memory is just painful.
Perhaps Linux distros should now ship with local AIs as well to match what Windows can offer. Purely local, transparent and intuitively configured with high level of detail, on opt-in basis. Essentially do the same thing but better.
Does not sound like a Linux distro problem. Can you name any free software pieces that fit the description? If they exist, they're likely to be in a lot of distros' package repos already.
I think I've tried some TUI chatbot with a small llama LLM recently, just out of curiosity. It was available in Arch repo by default. Can't remember the name though.
Every desktop Linux DE/distro comes with a calculator, a simple text editor, a file manager etc. Perhaps it's time to ship a sensibly-preconfigured AI tool alongside these to win more non-techie desktop/laptop users. I personally don't need anything pre-installed, I can pick Arch or even LFS, install and configure everything I need, also write my own AI tool for my needs. But non-techies (whom we need if we are sad about how little desktop Linux market share is) often can't even apt install anything. Everyone is using AI, Windows PCs are coming with AI, Macs are coming with AI and Linux is not. Many consumers are probably going to view this like an OS without built-in network support soon. At the same time shipping better AI tools with transparent, sensible and privacy-friendly defaults OoTB can attract those who are not happy with Microsft/Apple approach.
This is a conceptual idea however - no, I can't name any specific free software. Perhaps it is yet to be written.
Yeah I've been running Windows and Linux for years (I only use MacOS if my job makes me and pays for the machine), and I just spent the weekend setting up Linux on my former Windows machine. There really isn't much of a reason to run Windows anymore unless you have very specific software needs.
Issues with IT in general and GNU/Linux in particular today are:
- way too much people developing on Docker and co, thinking it's a good idea wasting storage and running binaries made by someone you do not know on internet instead of pushing declarative systems like NixOS or Guix System;
- an immense repo of unfinished apps/webapps designed in Silicon Valley berserk mode without any real idea why;
- more and more commercial parasites in major distros.
So well... As a decades old GNU/Linux user, started from 2.2 in early '00 and back then tried to switch back to FreeBSD, than switched to OpenSolaris, IllumOS and hopeless again with GNU/Linux I think today is a very bad time to switch to GNU/Linux but if the user came from any other OS GNU/Linux is the sole usable option left...
Very slow here as well. Just checked: as suspected, it's Wordpress. I guess they forgot to turn on the option to convert pages to static content on the fly, aka caching, necessary because the system is too bloated to handle a peak in readership otherwise
When my 70+ mom needed a new computer, I put Ubuntu on it and turned on unattended upgrades. I do SSH into it every 6 months and update her Zoom .deb manually (I guess there's a ppa for that?). She uses it every day and has had no problem.
I'm really impressed with the Linux experience. Thanks to all who have contributed!