Comment by mmcnl
4 months ago
This is absolutely false. I run dual-boot Windows and Linux on hardware that has 100% Linux support. Windows just works, the same cannot be said for Linux unless all you do is use a browser and listen to Spotify.
4 months ago
This is absolutely false. I run dual-boot Windows and Linux on hardware that has 100% Linux support. Windows just works, the same cannot be said for Linux unless all you do is use a browser and listen to Spotify.
There are pain points on both. Audio on Linux is still annoying if your system isn't very vanilla, while Windows sucks at bluetooth, configurability, and has a lot of annoying anti-user "features".
Windows does not “just work”. On my work computer my programs randomly rearrange themselves after lunch, windows always has trouble switching between my audio devices, random slowdowns. Windows is pretty shit these days tbh. It’s pretty much like Linux was 10 years ago.
However, I rarely have issues on Linux anymore, mostly because of something is broken on Linux, I can fix it.
Frankly, I hate that I’m forced to use windows as work. I feel like I need to constantly deal with BS windows annoyances. When I go home and work on Linux it like breathing a sigh of relief. My desktop actually feels fast and efficient.
> On my work computer my programs randomly rearrange themselves after lunch, windows always has trouble switching between my audio devices, random slowdowns
> I rarely have issues on Linux anymore, mostly because of something is broken on Linux, I can fix it.
Perhaps your Windows knowledge is not up to the level of your Linux knowledge? It might be that a Windows expert could fix every issue you’ve listed and more.
I'm a long time macOs user at home (pre-X).
I've worked daily in Windows enterprise environment for 15+ year (which mean that when it won't work I usually "just have" to get help from a colleague.
I've been in charge of a debian/postgresql cluster for 10+ year which I managed to keep upgraded on a reasonable schedule.
But Yet, since for some utterly opaque random reasons Windows updates on my home gaming PC stoped working two months ago I feel totally clueless about how to even begin to debug this crap.
There seems to be absolutely no clear working procedure out there to fix that, only people with the same problem shouting out to the void. All them poor souls trying byzantine procedures that have been duplicated ad nauseam from stack overflow to windows help forums through reddit and back.
The consensus seems to reinstall windows from scratch (by choosing amongst a handful of ways for which risks/benefice looks unclear).
That really piss me off and but I guess it's user fault because "my Windows knowledge is not up to the level..."
That’s very possible, but I don’t want to invest time gaining knowledge in a proprietary platform. Microsoft already owns most of the default stack programmers use these days. I don’t want to contribute my energy to entrenching them further.
> It might be that a Windows expert could fix every issue you’ve listed and more.
So in other words, it doesn't "just work."
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Let me take a guess:
You have exclusively used Debian-family distros.
Try a desktop distro like Fedora. Debian-family is a server distro that got famous after Conical/Ubuntu did marketing really hard.
Ubuntu is the Apple of Linux, they are famous from marketing, not quality.
I have used all distributions. They all have their own pain points. Debian-based distributions are actually the most painless in my experience.
> unless all you do is use a browser and listen to Spotify
So what exactly isn't working?
These have been pain points for me. Not saying they're impossible to solve on Linux, but it's nontrivial especially compared to Windows
Change trackpad scrolling speed
Set up suspend-then-hibernate
GPU drivers (I have a box with an AMD APU and no idea how to actually utilize it)
Many games (Proton is amazing and a huge leap forward, but om average it's still more work than gaming on Windows. eg fiddling with different versions of Proton or finding out that a game's anti cheat will ban you for using Linux)
Higher res video streaming (I think this is usually a DRM issue?)
Full disclosure: I'm posting this list because I'm hoping that someone will tell me I'm wrong and that Gnome actually has an easy way to set the trackpad scroll speed
> Change trackpad scrolling speed
If you're on X11, I think you'll have to use xinput to set it manually.
If your on Wayland, in KDE at least this is available in the standard settings application.
> Set up suspend-then-hibernate
On KDE at least that's just one of the options in the power settings ("When sleeping, enter:" has "Standby", "Hybrid Sleep" and "Standby, then hibernate").
> GPU drivers (I have a box with an AMD APU and no idea how to actually utilize it)
Worked OOTB for me, do you have amdgpu drivers installed? What exactly isn't working?
> Many games (Proton is amazing and a huge leap forward, but om average it's still more work than gaming on Windows. eg fiddling with different versions of Proton or finding out that a game's anti cheat will ban you for using Linux)
I find that Proton mostly just works for me, but indeed EAC is a problem that I don't know how to solve (and also don't really care about since I'm not into playing public multiplayer games).
> Higher res video streaming (I think this is usually a DRM issue?)
You should check if HW Acceleration is enabled in your browser, but IIUC Netflix will indeed refuse to provide higher quality streams to Linux (and also Windows depending on your browser), you might be able to resolve it by googling a bit, maybe using a browser with DRM support and switching out your user-agent?
> I'm hoping that someone will tell me I'm wrong and that Gnome actually has an easy way to set the trackpad scroll speed
Gnome is notorious for removing user choices, so I wouldn't be surprised if this was impossible on Gnome/Wayland. Xinput might work on Gnome/X11. Switching to KDE should work on Wayland ;)
2 replies →
Thanks! Turns out, I don't really need those things.
Not OP, but the fact that I have an easily accessible text file on my desktop with the exact commands to run in my terminal to recompile the graphics driver when upgrading packages breaks graphics again should speak volumes. I don't really mind, because running 3 commands in the terminal a few times per year is not particularly difficult for me. I could see it being difficult for non-devs though.
What does get annoying is when such an OS upgrade breaks the wifi drivers and I have to setup a bluetooth hotspot on my phone to access the github repo and fetch the latest driver version for the wifi dongle.